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When the West was young

by Frederick R. Bechdolt · English · Gutenberg #29692 · 492,926 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: When the West was young

Author: Frederick R. Bechdolt


        
Release date: August 15, 2009 [eBook #29692]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN THE WEST WAS YOUNG ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





WHEN THE WEST WAS YOUNG




[Illustration: John Slaughter was gathering a great herd]




WHEN THE WEST WAS YOUNG

BY

FREDERICK R. BECHDOLT

D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY

INCORPORATED

NEW YORK--LONDON

1938




Copyright, 1922, by

The Century Co.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced
in any form without permission of the publisher.




To My Father

Dr. A. F. BECHDOLT




ACKNOWLEDGMENT


The writer is indebted for the material in this book to a goodly
number of the old-timers, from whose lips came much of which is
written in the following pages, and to numerous printed works which he
consulted, sometimes to authenticate data and sometimes to get
additional facts.

Among the former to whom he wishes to make acknowledgment are: Former
Sheriff John Ralphs, San Bernardino, California; Captain Harry C.
Wheeler, Douglas, Arizona; A. M. Franklin, Tucson, Arizona; Colonel
William Breckenbridge, Tucson, Arizona; Dr. D. T. MacDougal, Carnegie
Institution; William Lutley, Tombstone, Arizona; Judge Duncan,
Tombstone, Arizona; A. H. Gardner, Tombstone, Arizona; C. M. Cummings,
Tombstone, Arizona; Andy Smith, Tucson, Arizona; Guy C. Welch,
Tombstone, Arizona; Mr. and Mrs. John Slaughter, Douglas, Arizona;
James East, Douglas, Arizona; Horace Stillman, Douglas, Arizona; D. F.
McCarthy, Lipscomb, Texas; and the Arizona Pioneers' Association.

Among the latter are old files of the "Tombstone Epitaph" and other
Arizona newspapers; Manley's "Death Valley in '49"; Upton's "Pioneers
of Eldorado"; Ridge's "Life of Joaquin Murieta"; Dukes' "Famous
Criminal Cases"; Farish's "History of Arizona"; McClintock's "History
of Arizona"; Hittel's "History of California"; Bancroft's Works;
Visscher's "Pony Express"; G. D. Bradley's "Story of the Pony
Express"; "Overland Stage to California," by F. A. Root and W. E.
Connely; Inman's "Santa Fe Trail"; Humphreyville's "Twenty Years Among
Our Hostile Indians"; Richardson's "Beyond the Mississippi"; Bourke's
"On the Border With Crook"; J. Ross Brown's "Adventures in the Apache
Country"; Charles Siringo's "History of Billy the Kid"; Bard's "Life
of Billy Dixon, Scout and Plainsman"; Brown's "History of Texas."




CONTENTS

                                                                  PAGE
 HOW DEATH VALLEY WAS NAMED                                          3
 JOAQUIN MURIETA                                                    25
 TOMBSTONE                                                          54
 TOMBSTONE'S WILD OATS                                              80
 THE SHOW-DOWN                                                     105
 THE PASSING OF JOHN RINGO                                         132
 JOHN SLAUGHTER'S WAY                                              160
 COCHISE                                                           190
 ONE AGAINST MANY                                                  218
 THE OVERLAND MAIL                                                 248
 BOOT-HILL                                                         277




WHEN THE WEST WAS YOUNG




HOW DEATH VALLEY WAS NAMED


There were three of us sitting on a pile of lumber in a sun-baked
little mining town down near the Arizona border. One of my companions
was the sheriff of the county and the other was an old man with snowy
beard and sky-blue eyes whom every one called "Mac." To look at him
was to behold a vision of the past.

As we were whiling away the time with idle talk something was said
which aroused the spirit of reminiscence within this survivor of the
unfenced West. He closed his jack-knife with a snap, threw away a pine
stick from which he had been peeling shavings, and turning his
sky-blue eyes on the sheriff, "I remember--" he began.

After which he told of cheating Death in quicksand fords, of day-long
battles with naked Apaches in the malapi, of fighting off bandits from
the stage while the driver kept the horses on a run up Dragoon Pass,
of grim old ranchmen stalking cattle-thieves by night, of frontier
sheriffs and desperadoes and a wilderness that was more savage than
the wild riders who sought sanctuary within its arid solitudes. He did
not talk for more than forty-five minutes at the most and the words
came slowly from his lips, but when he had done my head was spinning
from more visions of bold men and large deeds than it had held since
the Christmas night when I reeled off to bed after bolting a full half
of the "Boy's Froissart."

And after that old man had sauntered away in the hot-white Arizona
sunshine I thought of other grizzled chroniclers to whom I had
listened in other parts of the West. Some of their tales came back to
me, straightforward simple stories of the days before the farmers,
barbed-wire fences, and branch railroad lines; and I marveled at the
richness of a lore whose plain unvarnished narratives of fact stand
out with values exceeding those of most adventure fiction, more vivid
and colorful than the anecdotes of the Middle Ages which the French
chronicler set down for all the world to read.

Every State between the Mississippi and the Pacific has its own
stories of deeds that took place during an era when even the
lawbreakers attained a certain harsh nobility, and when plain men must
prove themselves heroic if they would survive. The names of many
heroes in these tales have become like household words all over the
United States, and what they did in many places is printed on the maps
of school geographies; but there is a vanished legion of those
old-timers who are remembered only in the immediate neighborhoods
where they lived swiftly and died hard. Emigrant and prospector,
pioneer and Indian chief, cow-boy and cattle-thief, sheriff,
stage-robber, and pony express rider--only the old men can tell their
stories now.

All of those men, whether they be famous or forgotten, owned a common
virtue which still survives among the people who came after them.
That pioneer spirit which makes the average American eager to try what
no one else has done is the common motive in the tales of their
exploits. It stands out strongly in this story which tells how Death
Valley got its name.

One evening early in November, 1849, a party of emigrants was encamped
near Mountain Meadows down in southern Utah close to the Nevada line.
It was a glorious night of the intermountain autumn; the stars burned
large and yellow overhead. In their faint radiance the white tops of
more than one hundred prairie-schooners gleamed at the base of the
hillside which rose into the west. Here and there one of the canvas
covers glowed incandescent from a candlelight within, where some
mother was tucking her children into their beds. Out on the long slope
the feeding oxen moved like shadows through the sage-brush, and beyond
them coyotes shrieked incessantly.

Fairly in the middle of the camp a leaping flame shone on the faces of
a crowd of men. For the world-old question of a short cut had arisen
to divide opinions in this company and they had gathered around a
large fire to try to settle the matter.

They were on their way to California and the placer fields. In Salt
Lake City they had learned that the season was too far advanced to
permit their crossing the Sierras by the northern passes and they had
organized into what they called the Sand Walking Company, with John
Hunt, a bearded Mormon elder, as their captain and their guide. He was
to conduct them by a trail, unmarked as yet by any wagon track, over
which some of his people had traveled to the old Spanish grant
recently acquired by their church at San Bernardino. This route to the
gold-fields followed the Colorado watershed southward taking advantage
of such few streams as flowed into the basin, to turn northward again
at the pueblo of Los Angeles. Thus it described a great loop nearly
parallel with what is now Nevada's southern boundary.

But before the Sand Walking Company left Salt Lake City a man named
Williams drew a map for one of its number showing what he claimed was
a shorter pathway to the Land of Gold. This Williams Short Route, as
it came to be called during many a heated discussion, struck off
straight into the west bearing to the San Bernardino road the relation
of a cord to its arc; until it reached a snow-clad peak. This peak,
according to the map, was visible for many miles, a clear landmark
during-nearly half the journey. Reaching it the trail turned sharply
north to cross the range by an easy pass and traverse a long rich
valley to the gold-fields. There were many legends of good feed and
water-holes on the drawing. The promise of time saved was an important
consideration, for all of the company were getting impatient to reach
the placer diggings lest they be too late.

The trail forked near this place where they were encamped to-night.
John Hunt had halted the party here for two days while scouts crossed
the long divide to the west and looked over the country beyond the
summit to see if wagons could travel that way. And now his pathfinders
were giving their reports. They stood in the open space by the fire,
three lean and sunburned men dressed in semi-Indian costume with
their powder-horns slung from their shoulders and long sheath-knives
in their beaded belts. One after the other they addressed the crowd
and each gave it as his opinion that the short cut was impractical.
The country was too rough, they said.

The murmur of many voices arose among the audience. Most of the men
there were nearing middle age and doubt showed on the bearded faces of
the great majority; doubt and disappointment, for they were eager to
see their journey's end and that Williams map had aroused high hopes.
Here and there a woman stood beside her husband, listening anxiously
to what he said, watching his eyes as he harkened to the talk of those
about.

But there was one portion of the circle which stood out in marked
contrast to the rest. The men here were for the most part in their
early twenties; their faces were serene, their eyes untroubled by any
doubt; and there were no women with them. While the others stood
weighed down by uncertainty, they lounged full length on the ground
basking in the heat of the flames, or sat in groups on near-by
wagon-tongues, laughing and whispering jests among themselves. Several
of them were wearing bits of Indian finery, after the manner of the
guides, and this sprinkling of buckskin shirts, fringed leggings, and
beaded moccasins, together with an occasional crop of thick hair that
reached to a pair of broad young shoulders, gave a dash of savage
picturesqueness to their section of the audience. They were a company
of bachelors from Illinois and called themselves the Jayhawkers. Their
end of the camp had been the scene of wrestling matches and frolic
every night since the train had left Salt Lake City; and, as one
might expect, it was one of their number who had gotten that map of
the Williams Short Route. They were unanimous in advocating it.

Now Ed Doty, their captain, stepped forward into the open space by the
fire. Fixing his bold young eyes on John Hunt, whom he addressed
rather than the audience, "We haven't found the country yet," he said,
"that could stop us and we're not afraid of that over there." He
pointed out into the darkness where the summit of the divide showed
black against the western sky. "We're going to try the Williams Short
Route."

Hunt nodded. "All right," he answered quietly, "and if the rest try
it, I'm going through with you if I have to pass through hell to reach
the other end of the trail. But if one wagon sticks to the San
Bernardino road I'll stay with that wagon, for I passed my word to
take you that way."

It was sometime near midnight when the crowd left the fire, but the
sun was barely up the next morning before the wagons were lined out
along the side hill. Far ahead of them where the trail forked, John
Hunt stood waiting alone.

The white-topped prairie-schooners came on slowly toward him from the
northward through the sage; the heads of the long-horned oxen swinging
low from side to side before their heavy wooden yokes. The first span
reached the solitary figure of the captain and went straight on south;
the wagon rumbled by and Hunt knew by its passing that he must keep to
the San Bernardino trail.

But the second driver halted his team and leaned out from his seat to
take the hand which Hunt extended him. "We'll try the short route," he
said.

"Good-by," the captain bade him; "good luck." The man called to his
lead span; the great yokes creaked and the front wheels whined against
the wagon-box as the animals swung the prairie-schooner to the west.

And now wagon after wagon halted briefly while its occupants exchanged
a brief farewell with the bearded man beside the road; then the outfit
struck out straight westward up the long steep slope; until, when Hunt
turned to rejoin his remnant of a following, three quarters of its
members had forsaken the Sand Walking Company.

The prairie-schooners of the seceders made a slender white line in the
wilderness of sage which reached on before them, up and up. Beyond the
crest which rose gray-brown against the cloudless Indian summer sky,
the desert waited silent as Death itself.

They traveled for three days up that long steep slope and when they
reached the summit to look down upon the other side they discovered
that the Williams map was worthless as a guide. Here, where it
promised easy going, a steep-walled canyon led down from the north
blocking their road. Beyond, a wilderness of sandstone pinnacles and
naked cliffs dropped away and away to depths invisible.

Then most of the drivers turned back their oxen to follow Captain Hunt
and overtake him on the San Bernardino trail by which he led his
company in safety to Los Angeles. But twenty-seven wagons remained
parked among the twisted junipers, their occupants biding the return
of scouts whom they had sent ahead to seek a pass. Although the map
had proved of no value when it came to showing a road, they still
believed in the snow-clad peak which it had promised, somewhere before
them in the hidden west. They were determined to find that landmark
and strike out for it.

The scouts came back on the fourth day and reported a pass far to the
northward around the canyon head. But before the prairie-schooners
lined out on the ridge to make the long detour, the unmarried owners
of outfits banded together in a company, advising those with families
to return to Captain Hunt. They did not care, they said, to be
responsible for the lives of women and children in this unmapped
wilderness. The advice was not taken and the train set forth in two
sections, twenty wagons belonging to the Jayhawkers and their bachelor
companions and seven owned by men who traveled with their wives and
little ones.

The scouts had picked an easy route through rolling hills where
bunch-grass stood in thick clusters among the tall gray sage; the oxen
cropped the rich feed as they went along. Clear streams ran noisily in
most of the ravines. The train passed the canyon head, and one day,
after considerable aimless wandering, it turned westward to cross a
succession of wide tablelands where feed was good and water still
plentiful.

The Indian summer season was at its height now, clear balmy days
and cloudless nights. Their progress was steady for some time,
uninterrupted by ill luck of any kind. When they halted for the midday
meal it was like a great picnic in the soft warm sunshine, and
when evening came the Jayhawkers rollicked around their fires or
gathered where one of their number had tuned up his fiddle. William
Isham was his name, a great bearded fellow who hailed originally
from Rochester, New York; he would sit by the hour on the tongue
of his wagon playing "Oh Susannah" and other lively airs, or strike
up a jig tune while Negro Joe, who had fled from slavery in
Mississippi, did a double shuffle in the firelight. The children
slipped away from their mothers to set peeps at the fun from the
edges of the crowd or play hide and seek in the shadows of the
sage-brush; there were ten of these youngsters in all.

Many of these evenings would find a number of the older men clustered
around the wagon of Asahel Bennett, an Iowa pioneer whose outfit
included a young hunter by the name of William Manley. For Manley went
ahead nearly every day to spy out the country and these men were eager
for tidings of the snow-clad peak which lay before them hidden in the
west.

Now gradually as they went onward the country began to change; the
sage-brush became more stunted, the grass tufts sparser; the streams
ran smaller and smaller. Until there came a day when they traveled
from dawn until long after sunset before they encountered any water;
and this lay lukewarm in hollows of the sandstone, accumulations from
rains of long ago. The earth was hard and dry and there were stretches
where there was no earth at all, only a rubble of sharp rock fragments
radiating heat-waves under the glaring sun.

There was no rollicking about the camp-fires any more. When evening
came the men were weary from hurrying their wagons over rugged ground
or climbing lofty buttes to look ahead for signs of water. Isham the
fiddler left his violin in its case; he never took it from that case
again. The oxen had grown gaunt from lack of feed and drink; they
wandered about the night camps nibbling disdainfully at what growth
there was, low bitter sapless weeds.

The change in the country had come so imperceptibly that they did not
realize the presence of the desert until they were confronted by
an-appalling revelation one afternoon.

All that day and all the day before the drivers had been goading the
failing oxen while they peered with reddened eyes out on the glaring
plain, from which arose a series of isolated cone-shaped buttes. For
the water in the barrels was running very low and they were always
seeking some sign of stream or pool.

Then one of them uttered a loud cry and at that shout the others saw,
two miles or so off to the right where the plain opened out between
the cone-shaped hills, a lake whose waters were bluer than any they
had ever looked upon. A little breeze was stirring its surface, and on
the further bank there were some trees whose branches were moving as
if perhaps the wind were stronger over there.

Now every driver lashed his oxen to a lumbering run, and the women
lifted the canvas tops of the prairie-schooners to show their children
the pretty lake. The whole train turned away from its course and went
rumbling across the plain, one mile, then a second; and another
followed before they found themselves in the midst of a glaring
expanse of snow-white alkali, baked by the sun to rock-like hardness.
The vision of blue waters had vanished with the suddenness of a dream
which ceases on the instant of awakening.

The mothers lowered the canvas wagon-covers and soothed their crying
children, and the drivers turned the oxen back toward the trail which
they had forsaken for the lure of the mirage. There was no word of
grief among the men, no outcry of despair; but the shoulders of some
were sagging when they made their dry camp that night, and there was a
new hardness in the eyes of all of them. For they had looked upon the
desert and they knew it for what it was.

As they were sitting about their little fires a man came staggering
among them out of the darkness. It was Manley, the young hunter of the
Bennett outfit, who had been away for two days on one of his
reconnoitering expeditions. They gathered around him in silence but he
read the question in their eyes and shook his head.

"No water," he answered, "nor sign, of it, but I have seen a snow
mountain straight west of us."

He told them how he had lain out on the summit of a high butte the
night before until dawn came revealing a dead world. Dark ragged
mountains of volcanic rock lay to the north, and to the south a tangle
of naked ridges whose sides were discolored as though by fire. Between
these scorched ranges a plain stretched for a good one hundred miles
into the west, as level as a floor and gleaming white. Beyond that
plain a low chain of mountains rose, as black as ink, and behind this
gloomy range he saw a snow-clad peak that glistened in the morning
sun.

They talked the situation over; all of them were convinced that Manley
had found the peak described by the Williams map, and now they argued
for different routes. Of the four points of the compass there was only
one which lacked an advocate. For, while some urged a northward
circuit and others believed there would be greater safety to the south
and many were determined to push straight on west across the gleaming
plain of alkali, there was not one word said of turning back into the
east.

Survivors tell how some of the women wept under the covers of the
prairie-schooners that night, but none of those mothers raised her
voice in favor of retreat. They were pioneers, these people, and it
seemed as if they did not know how to turn back.

None can ever set the fulness of their story down in words; for the
Amargossa Desert has a wicked beauty which is beyond the telling, and
one must journey out beyond the black escarpments of the Funeral
Mountains and fight for his life in the silent reaches of that broken
wilderness if he would begin to realize what they went through.

They made their last camp together at a brackish water-hole near the
edge of the plain which Manley had described. Beyond it they could see
the snow-clad peak. They repeated to one another the legends on the
Williams map, its promise of a pass close by that summit and of a
fertile valley leading to the gold-fields in the north. If they could
only reach the mountain, they agreed their hardships would be over,
their journey as good as ended.

They separated here to set forth by two different routes. The
Jayhawkers struck straight out across the flat, while the little
company of families kept to a more roundabout course in the south,
hoping to find water in the mountains there. From this time on,
although their trails converged and crossed, the wagons never united
in one train again.

In that silent land where the skeletons of dead mountain ranges lie
strewn among the graves of seas that died in ages past, they held
their eyes on the one sign of life that rose into the clear sky
beyond, the peak whose promise kept them moving on into the west.

Days passed and the smaller party found no water in any of the canyons
which came down to them from the south. They used the last drops from
their casks; and now they could not eat for thirst, they could not
sleep. The children wailed for drink until their voices died away to
dry whisperings, and when the mothers strove to comfort them they
found their arid tongues had lost the power of shaping any words.

At last Mauley, the young hunter with the Bennett wagons, discovered a
warm spring near a canyon head, but the oxen lay down in their traces
on their way up the gorge and the men were obliged to bring water down
to them in buckets before they could get the unhappy brutes to rise.
They filled the barrels with the tepid fluid and goaded the teams on,
seeking some sign of a pass in the low black range which lay between
them and the snow peak. If there were only an opening, it seemed as if
they might win through.

Meantime the Jayhawkers were pressing hard across the gleaming plain.
The surface of that plain was white as snow, as level as a floor. It
was so hard that the wheels left no track on it; no shrub grew from
it, only a low bitter weed that crumbled to a gray powder at the
slightest touch. The oxen plodded along with their heads hung so low
that their muzzles almost swept the ground; they stood about the camp
at night, emaciated beyond belief, swaying from weakness, grating
their teeth as they moved their jaws with a pathetic instinct of
rumination. Five days passed and on the night of the fifth, when these
young fellows knew they could not live another twenty-four hours
without water, a light cloud came between them and the stars. They
felt the cool touch of snowflakes on their faces and they spread their
blankets to gather what they could while the oxen licked the moisture
from the earth. The next morning the sun shone hot again upon the
plain against whose vast expanse the wagons showed, a little line of
dots creeping slowly toward the white-topped mountain in the west.

At Ash Meadows where the bitter waters of the Amargossa River rise
from their hidden depths to flow for a few hundred yards between gray
hills of shifting sand, the trails of the two parties converged. By
the time they reached this dismal oasis they were killing their oxen
for such shreds of meat as they could strip from the bones; but as
every wagon left the place, climbing the divide beyond, the occupants
forgot their sufferings and talked of the desert as something which
they had left behind. For Furnace Creek canyon lay ahead of them, a
rift in the black range which rose between them and the snow-clad
peak.

The Jayhawkers were now in the lead. They went down the gorge whose
black walls seemed to shut out the sky in places, and on Christmas
morning, 1849, they emerged from its mouth to see the great peak just
ahead of them.

But, as they looked up at the mountain toward which they had been
striving for so many weary days, they discovered that its sides were
verdureless, bare of any earth, so steep no man could climb them. And
there was no pass.

They had descended into the pitfall at its lowest depths. Here where
they first saw the place, more than two hundred feet below the level
of the sea, great beds of rock salt covered its floor worn by the wind
into a myriad of pinnacles, as high as a man's waist, sharp as knives
and coated with brown dust. In the center of this weird forest a level
sheet of white salt lay glistening in the sun. Northward the deposit
stretched away to dunes of shifting sand, and in the south long mud
flats lay, covered with traceries of sun cracks as far as the eye
could reach. The eastern mountains came straight down in cliffs as
black as ink. Eight miles away the western mountains rose in a sheer
wall surmounted by Telescope Peak, whose snow-clad crest towered
eleven thousand feet above the heads of the men whom it had lured
here. There was no sound of any life, no track of any animal. No
bird--not even a buzzard--flew overhead. The very air was a desert
like the burning earth.

Now, even as they came down out of Furnace Creek canyon into this trap,
they began their efforts to escape from it.

The Bennett party crossed the sink through the forest of rock-salt
pinnacles and headed southward along a strip of loose sand which lay
between the mud flat and the mountains. They believed the range might
yet show a rift at this end which their wagons could traverse. But the
Jayhawkers turned to the north, seeking some outlet through the
Panamints at that end of the range. One family followed them. J. W
Brier, a minister from a little frontier community in the Middle West,
left the other section with his wife and three children in the hope
that the young men might find a route to safety.

Sometimes to this day the winds, moving the dunes of white sand in the
valley's northern arm--a task which they are always at from year's end
to year's end--uncover the fragments of wagons, and prospectors come
upon a tire or spoke or portion of a sun-dried axle. Then they know
that they are at the place where the Jayhawkers abandoned their
prairie-schooners.

They killed some of their oxen at this point and divided the
meat--there was so little of it that although the men were now very
weak two of them were able to carry the beef from an animal. Then they
started out on foot across the sand dunes toward the Panamints. Most
of them still believed that feed and water lay just beyond those
heights.

And now, while they were straggling along through the loose sand in
single file, one of their number, a man named Fish, was seen to throw
his hands above his head and pitch forward on his face. Those who were
behind came upon him lying with arms outspread, dead.

The next afternoon as they were climbing toward the head of a steep
canyon in the range, several of the foremost ones found a little spring
among the rocks. While they were resting here they saw a man far below
them. He was crawling toward them on his hands and knees. One of the
party filled his canteen and hurried down to meet him; but when he
arrived, the other was gasping his last in the bottom of the sun-baked
gorge. It was Captain Culverwell, a skipper who had forsaken the deep
sea and its ships to make this journey with them in the hope of
finding gold.

That evening the strongest of their number reached the summit of the
Panamints and looked down the western side where they had thought to
find that fertile valley which the Williams map had promised leading
to the north. They saw dead mountain ranges and dried lake floors like
those through which they had been traveling for months. The Mohave
Desert lay in front of them.

When they were crossing those arid reaches William Isham, who had
fiddled so blithely for them every evening in the Utah hills, sank
down beside the trail; and the others passed him with empty canteens,
unable to give him any help. Some of the stragglers buried his body a
few days later on.

During the next day or two a Frenchman, whose name none of the
survivors remember, went insane from thirst and wandered off into the
sand-hills. No one ever saw him afterward.

So one after another of their number lay down and died or went mad and
ran off toward some of the mirages which were perpetually torturing
all of them with visions of cool lakes, until thirteen had perished.
The others struggled on and on into the southwest; for they knew that
Los Angeles lay somewhere in that direction and it offered them their
only hope.

Meantime the Bennett party went southward along the western edge of
the sink where the sands lie as loose and fine as ashes between the
mud flats and the mountains, until they found a little spring with a
few patches of coarse grass among the mesquite thickets which
surrounded it. From this point they tried escape by one route and then
another, only to reach a blind wall in each case and retrace their
steps to the water-hole.

In later years the mule-drivers of the borax company enlarged the well
which Asahel Bennett and J. B. Arcane dug here in the sand. Otherwise
the place remains unchanged, a patch of mesquite in a burning plain
where heat devils dance all day long from year's end to year's end.
The plain reaches on and on between black mountain walls, and even the
mirage which springs from its surface under that hot sun throws off
the guise of a cool lake almost on the moment of its assumption to
become a repellant specter that leaps and twists like a flame. The
Paiute Indians called the spot Tomesha, which means "Ground Afire."

The party held a council when they had retreated here after the last
unsuccessful attempt to escape. It was clear that they could not take
the women and children out of the sink unless some one got food for
the journey and found a route between water-holes. They appointed
Manley, the young hunter, and an ox-driver named John Rogers for the
venture, and the pair set out across the Panamints just north of
Telescope Peak with the beef from an ox in their knapsacks, while the
others sat down to await their return--or death.

There were two wagon outfits of unmarried men among them; they had
forsaken the Jayhawkers at about the time the Brier family joined that
section. When several days had passed these bachelors departed to seek
the trail of their former companions in the valley's north arm. They
said that the chances were ten to one that Manley and Rogers would
never get through alive, and if they did they would be fools to
attempt coming back. The others watched the two prairie-schooners
crawling off into the gray plain until a mirage engulfed them and
lifted them distorted into the blazing sky.

And now the families faced the question which these men had left with
them. Would Manley and Rogers get through? They did not know what
hazards lay beyond those mountains to the west, but none of them had
the Jayhawkers' faith in a fertile valley leading to the north. As it
turned out Mount Whitney was the snow-clad peak to which the faulty
Williams map referred and the valley was the Owens Lake country, many
a weary mile from this sink.

If the pair did survive the desert, would they be men enough to face
it for the second time? The marooned ones could only hope. That hope
had become an abiding faith in Bennett's wife. She had given the two
young fellows a double handful of rice--half her store of grain--on
the morning of their departure, and pointed mutely to her children as
she placed the little bag in Manley's hand. "They will come back," she
told the others many times.

The food was running low; the few remaining oxen could not last them
long. There was a dog with the Bennett wagons; he had followed them
all the way from Iowa; and in this time of dire extremity some talked
of killing him. But even in his starved condition he was able to wag
his tail when the children came near him; sometimes he comforted them
by his presence when their mothers could not. The men had not the
heart to do away with him.

Hope lingered within those people like the breath in an old man who is
dying hard. Rogers and Manley had gone northward on the burning plain
to reach a ridge which mounted toward the Panamints. Now as the days
dragged by to weary weeks, the men and women always gazed into the
north where nothing lived except the hatred for the sun. But no man
came, and when the weeks had grown beyond a month, they knew the time
was here when they must make one last attempt to save themselves. They
yoked up the oxen and set out into the south toward a spot where
Bennett had discovered what looked like a gap in the mountains. Three
days later they returned, half dead from thirst, and unhitched the
staggering animals by the well.

There remained one shadow of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage
which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They
stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make
pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and
following the trail of the Jayhawkers.

At midday they were sitting under the wagons for what shade they gave,
working at this task. They knew it was a futile proceeding; the time
had long since gone when they had enough provisions to last them
through that long northern route. But they were not the sort of people
who can sit down and die. If they must perish it would be while they
were still fighting. No one spoke. The silence of the dead land had
crept over them.

That silence was broken by a shot. Unbelieving, they crept forth and
saw three figures moving toward them from the north. Manley and Rogers
were hurring across the flat leading a laden mule.

While the others ate from the store in the pack-sacks, the two young
fellows told of their journey two hundred and fifty miles across the
Mohave Desert; of the dead of the Jayhawker party whom they had found
beside the trail; of the survivors whom they passed shortly before
reaching a ranch near the head of the San Fernando valley where the
little town of Newhall stands to-day; of great arid mountain ranges
and shimmering floors of dried lakes; and of the long torture between
water-holes. At the Newhall ranch a man named French had given them
the mule and the provisions. With this food supply they believed the
women and children stood a chance of getting through.

They slung the sacks of canvas on the gaunt oxen and placed the
children in them; then they set out on their long climb up the
Panamints.

Before they left the summit of the divide to go downhill into the
west, they halted for one last look back. And as they stood there
among the rocks gazing down into the sink which lay thousands of feet
below them walled in by the mountains on both sides, one of the
mothers lifted her arm in a gesture of farewell.

"Good-bye, Death Valley!" she cried.

That is the way the place was named.

They turned their backs on it and descended the long western slope.
The dog, which they had taken with them all this distance, limped
along behind the little train. The mule went on before. And in Los
Angeles, where they joined the other survivors of the company weeks
later and told the people of the pueblo of their sufferings, they
called the sink Death Valley when they spoke of it.

Later, when they had gone into the north--for all of them pressed on
as soon as they were able to travel again--they separated, seeking
their fortunes in the mines. Years passed and occasionally some of
them met again. At such times, or when they told others of the pitfall
into which they descended striving toward the snow peak, they always
used the name Death Valley. And so it has come down to us to-day.




JOAQUIN MURIETA


In the days of '49 when Murphy's Diggings was as lively a little
placer camp as one could find in a long ride through the red
foot-hills of the Sierras, a young Mexican monte-dealer disappeared.
He was a handsome fellow, lighter of complexion than most of his
countrymen, owned a sunny smile and spoke English fluently, all of
which things made him a favorite among the American customers and
consequently an asset to the house. So when dusk came and the booted
miners began drifting into the long canvas-roofed hall, the proprietor
scanned the crowd for him with some anxiety.

But the proprietor might as well have saved himself the trouble of
that search; the monte-dealer had forsaken his table for a different
sort of job.

Just at this time he was on the hill beyond the upper end of the camp
kneeling beside an open grave; and in his clasped hands, uplifted high
above his head, he held a naked bowie-knife. Some light still lingered
here among the stiff-branched digger-pines, a faint reflection of the
sunset far beyond the flat lands of the San Joaquin valley. It shone
upon his face revealing a multitude of lines, so deeply scored, so
terrible in their proclamation of deadly hate, that the sight of them
would have startled the most case-hardened member of the crowds down
there where the candles were twinkling in the humming camp.

The waning light which sifted through the long plumed tassels of the
digger-pines showed a little group of Mexicans standing at some
distance listening in frightened silence to what he was saying. He
spoke to the dead man in the open grave; and when events that followed
brought the words back to their minds some of these auditors repeated
the vow he made: to color that knife-blade and his hands bright red
with the blood of twenty men of Murphy's Diggings; and after that to
devote his life to killing Americans.

This was the monte-dealer's new job, and in order to understand how he
came to undertake such a piece of work it is necessary to go back a
little.

He was only nineteen, but life had been moving so swiftly with him
that the beginning of these events finds him in that year overseer of
his father's great rancho down in Sonora, a Mexican of the better
class, well educated as education went in those days, a good dancer as
every girl in the section could bear witness, pleasure-loving,
easy-going, and able to play the guitar very prettily. Sometimes--and
more often as the weeks went by--he played and sang at the home of
Reyes Feliz, a packer in his father's employ; and Rosita, the packer's
daughter, liked his music well enough to encourage his visits.

Class counted then, as it does to this day in Mexico, and parents
liked to have a hand in marriages. But Reyes Feliz was away from home
a great deal with his train of mules, the landholder was busy at his
own affairs; the girl was a beauty and the landholder's son had a
winsome way with him. So one night Rosita took the horse which he
brought for her and rode off with him to California.

They made their journey with their mounts and a single pack animal
across the hot plains and arid mountains of the south, then up the
long King's Highway which the padres had beaten down nearly one
hundred years before their time. It was winter and California winter
means Eastern spring; green grass rippling in the soft breezes,
poppy-fields and a rioting of meadow-larks to make their honeymoon
ideal. They rode on northward into the Santa Clara valley where a
gleaming mist of mustard blossoms hung under the great live oaks as
far as the eye could reach; then they struck off eastward across the
Coast Range and the flat lands of the San Joaquin, to climb into the
red foot-hills where the Stanislaus comes out from the Sierras. Here
they settled down and took a mining claim.

The feeling engendered by the Mexican War still rankled in many
neighborhoods; and every mining camp had its lawless element whose
members took full advantage of that prejudice against the conquered
race. The claim proved rich enough to tempt some ne'er-do-wells. They
gathered a crowd of their own breed and the mob came to the young
pair's cabin one evening with the purpose of jumping the property.
When the owner made a show of resistance they bound him hand and foot,
after which they subjected the girl to such abuses as will not bear
the telling. She pleaded with her lover when the crowd had gone and
managed to induce him to leave the place without attempting vengeance.
They went to Columbia and within the month were driven out by another
anti-Mexican mob. Their next move took them to Murphy's Diggings,
where the boy got his job at dealing monte and was doing very
well--until this evening came, and with it, tragedy.

He had been visiting his brother, who had come to California and
settled near Murphy's; and the latter had lent him a horse to ride
home. As he was nearing the upper end of the camp a group of miners
stepped out into the road before him and halted him. The horse had
been stolen from one of their number and they were searching for it at
the time.

They listened to his explanations and went with him to his brother who
told them how he had bought the animal in good faith from a stranger.
Whereat they seized the narrator, bound him, and hanged him to the
nearest live-oak tree; then stripped the monte-dealer to the waist,
tied him to the same tree, and flogged him until the blood ran down
his bare back. After which they departed, satisfied that they had done
their share to bring about law and order in a neighborhood where
thefts were becoming altogether too frequent. But some of them
mentioned in Murphy's Diggings--during the brief space of time while
they had the opportunity--the strange expression which came over their
victim's face while the lash was being applied. Each of these men
spoke of the look as having been directed at himself. Had they been
members of one of the dark-skinned races, to whom the vendetta is
peculiarly an institution, they would have understood the purport of
that look.

But none of them understood and the monte-dealer was left to keep his
promise to his dead brother. He turned his back upon the grave and
went about the fulfilment of that vow as ambitious men go about the
making of careers; and in the days that followed, while his swarthy
company was sweeping through California like fire on a chaparral
hillside when the wind is high, he gained a dark fame, so lasting that
there is hardly an old settled community from Mount Shasta to the
Mexican line which has not some tale of the bandit, Joaquin Murieta.

Sometimes during the weeks after the lynching a miner on his way to
the gambling-houses after supper got a glimpse of Joaquin Murieta in
the outskirts of Murphy's Diggings, as he glided among the tents
cloaked to his eyes in his serape. Occasionally a late reveler,
returning to his cabin in the darkness, was startled by the sight of
his figure beside the road, as black and silent as the night itself;
or was chilled to dead sobriety by the vision of that drawn face
confronting him on a narrow trail. And in the chilly mornings men
going to their work came on the bodies of his victims in the soft red
dust of path or wagon-track, or stumbled over them in the chaparral.

And now fear began to seize the survivors of that lynching party. By
the time its twenty members had dwindled to something like a dozen,
the succession of spectacles afforded by the companions whom they had
been summoned to identify was getting on the stoutest nerves; the
dullest imaginations were working feverishly. Some found friends to
act as body-guards; others moved away to try their fortunes in new
camps; but the body-guards could not be on duty all the time and the
departing ones in most instances made the mistake of confiding their
intentions to acquaintances. All authorities agree that Joaquin
Murieta managed to kill at least fifteen--and possibly two or three
more--of the score whose faces he had so carefully imprinted on his
memory while the lash was biting into his bare back.

When he had finished with the work which the first part of his vow
demanded, he rode away from Murphy's with Rosita and set about the
task of gathering a band that he might be able to carry out the second
half.

There were plenty of cutthroats in California during that spring of
1850, and no lack of Mexicans among them. Several swarthy leaders of
banditti were then operating throughout the State. One of these was
Manuel Garcia, better known as Three-Fingered Jack, who had been
ranging over the Sonoma valley for several years, occasionally varying
the monotony of murder by tying a victim to a tree and flaying him
alive. Joaquin Valenzuela was another, a middle-aged outlaw who had
learned the finer arts of bushwhacking down in Mexico under Padre
Jurata, the famous guerrilla chief. There were also Claudio, a lean
and seasoned robber from the mountains of Sonora, adept in disguises,
skilful as a spy, able to mingle with the crowd in any plaza
unrecognized by men who had known him for years; and Pedro Gonzales, a
specialist at horse-stealing, who had driven off whole bands under the
very noses of armed herders.

Every one of these leaders had his own ugly gang of riders and his
own ill fame long before young Joaquin Murieta ceased dealing
monte; and every one was getting rich pickings from pack trains,
stage-coaches, valley ranches, and miners' cabins. Yet within six
months they all turned over their bands and became lieutenants of the
nineteen-year-old boy. That list of victims at Murphy's Diggings,
his superior breeding, and his finer intelligence gave him high
standing from the beginning, but his greatest asset was the purpose
which had driven him forth among them. They had robbed and killed and
fled with the aimlessness of common murderers, but here was one with
a definite plan, to leave the whole State a smoking shambles. They
submitted their lives and fortunes to the possessor of this appealing
idea.

During the first year, while organization was being perfected, Joaquin
Murieta traveled through northern California with Rosita gathering
recruits, establishing alliances among disaffected Mexicans, and
spying out new fields for plunder. Gradually, as he accomplished these
things, the bands under his different lieutenants began to rob and
plunder more systematically, and the scene of their operations shifted
with bewildering rapidity. To-day a number of travelers were dragged
from their horses by the reatas of swarthy ambuscaders in the Tuolomne
County foot-hills and to-morrow a rancher down in the valley found the
bodies of his murdered herders to mark the beginning of the trail left
by his stolen cattle. As the months went by suspicion that these
different bands were working under one leader grew to certainty among
the longer-headed officers. Then the name of Joaquin Murieta began to
be spoken as that of the mysterious chief. He was quick to confirm the
rumors of his leadership, and before the spring of 1851 was over he
managed by grimly spectacular methods to let more than one community
know that he was responsible for some outrage which had startled its
inhabitants.

That was the case in San Jose. A number of the robbers had swooped
down into the Santa Clara valley and their chief was living with
Rosita in the outskirts of the town, directing their raids, giving
them such information regarding travelers and plunder as he was able
to pick up by mixing with the crowds in the gambling-houses. A deputy
sheriff by the name of Clark captured two of the marauders red-handed,
and Murieta determined to make such an example of him as would put
fear into the hearts of other officers.

In those days the fandango was a popular function in San Jose, which
still retained all the characteristics of a Mexican pueblo, and there
was not a night without the strumming of guitars and the lively
stepping of the dancers in some public hall. Murieta went to one of
these fandangos and, by arrangement with confederates, brought it
about that Clark came to the place searching for a criminal.

The dancing was in full swing when the deputy entered; scores of lithe
dark men and their black-eyed partners were whirling in the fervid
Spanish waltz; but as he crossed the threshold a discordant note
arose: disturbance broke out in a corner of the hall; a woman
screamed; a knife-blade flashed. Clark shoved his way through the
crowd and reached the fight in time to disarm a good-looking young
Mexican who was flourishing the weapon; placed him under arrest and
took him away to the nearest justice of the peace, who passed sentence
of twelve dollars' fine.

"I have not the money on me," the prisoner said, "but if this officer
will go with me to my house I can get it there." It was an easy-going
period and such small matters as pulling a knife were of frequent
occurrence. The deputy consented to the request and the pair went
forth together from the lighted streets to the fringes of the town.
They were talking pleasantly enough when they came to a dark place
where willow thickets lined the road on either side.

Here the prisoner halted abruptly. "I am Joaquin Murieta," he
announced, "and I brought you here to kill you." Upon which he stabbed
Clark to the heart.

All this was told the next day in the streets of San Jose, but where
the information came from no one knew. Murieta's custom of sending out
such tidings through confederates was not so well understood then as
it came to be later.

From San Jose Murieta went northward into the Sacramento valley and
took quarters with Rosita in Sonorian Camp, a Mexican settlement
near Marysville. About twenty cutthroats under Valenzuela and
Three-Fingered Jack began working in the neighborhood. The ambush was
their favorite method--three or four in a party and one of the number
ready with his reata. When this one had cast the noose of rawhide rope
over the neck of some passing traveler and dragged him from the
saddle into the brush the others killed the victim at their leisure.
The number of the murders grew so appalling that Sheriff R. B.
Buchanan devoted all his time to hunting down the criminals.
Finally he got word of the rendezvous in Sonorian Camp and took a
small posse to capture the leaders.

But the news of the sheriff's expedition had preceded him, and when
they had crept upon the tent houses in the dark, as silent as Indians,
the members of the posse found themselves encircled by unseen enemies
whose pistols streaked the gloom with thin bright orange flashes.
While the others were fighting their way out of the ambush Sheriff
Buchanan emptied his own weapon in a duel with one of the robbers, and
collapsed badly wounded in several places. Weeks later, during his
recovery, Joaquin Murieta sent the sheriff word that he was the man
who had shot him down.

Northward the band rode now from Marysville until they reached the
forest wilderness near Mount Shasta, where they spent the most of the
winter stealing horses. Before spring they went south again, traveling
for the most part by night, and drove their stolen stock into the
State of Sonora. Their loot disposed of and a permanent market
established down across the line, Murieta led them back into
California to begin operations on a more ambitious scale. He planned
to steal two thousand horses and plunder the mining camps of enough
gold-dust to equip at least two thousand riders who should sweep the
State in such a raid as the world had not known since the Middle
Ages.

In April--almost two years to a day after the monte-dealer had left
his job at Murphy's Diggings--six Mexicans came riding into the town
of Mokelumne Hill, which lies on a bench-land above the river. A
somewhat dandified sextet in scrapes of the finest broadcloth and with
a wealth of silver on the trappings of their dancing horses, they
passed up the main street into the outskirts where their countrymen
had a neighborhood to themselves.

Here they took quarters in those tent-roofed cottages which were so
common in the old mining camps, and now three of them appeared in
their proper garb, well-gowned young housewives and discreet to a
degree which must have exasperated those of their neighbors inclined
to gossip. For these ladies had nothing to say concerning whence they
had come or the business of their husbands. Two of those husbands were
now spending much of their time in other camps and came home but
seldom to pay brief visits to their wives. The third stayed here in
Mokelumne Hill.

The days went by; the pack-trains jingled down out of the hills; the
processions of heavy wagons lumbered up from the San Joaquin valley
enwrapped in clouds of red dust; an endless stream of men flowed into
the town on its bench-land above the canyon where the river brawled.
Men from all the world, they came and went, and the milling crowds
absorbed those who lingered, nor heeded who they were. Gold was
plentiful, and while the yellow dust was passing from hand to hand
life moved so swiftly that no one had time to think of his neighbor's
business. The good-looking young Mexican was as a drop of water in a
rapid stream.

When dusk crept up out of the canyon and the candles filled the
gambling-houses with floods of mellow radiance he mingled with the
crowds. He drank with those who asked him and talked with those who
cared to pass a word with him; talked about the output of the near-by
gulches, the necessity of armed guards for the wagons and pack-trains,
or the chances of capturing Joaquin Murieta. In spite of his good
looks and expensive clothes he was about as unobtrusive as a Mexican
could be, which is saying a good deal at the period.

One April evening he was sitting at a monte-game. The gambling-hall
was filled with raw-boned packers from the hills, dust-stained
teamsters from the valley towns, miners from the diggings, and a
riffraff of adventurers from no one knew--or cared--where. It was a
booted crowd with a goodly sprinkling of red shirts to give it color,
and weapons in evidence on every side. Here walked one with a brace of
long-barreled muzzle-loading pistols in his belt, and there another
with the handle of a bowie-knife protruding from his boot-top; and
every one of those frock-coated dealers at the tables had a Derringer
or two stowed away on that portion of his person which he deemed most
accessible. The bartender kept a double-barreled shotgun under the
counter across which the drinks were being served.

In the midst of this animated arsenal the dark-eyed young Mexican
dandy sat placing his bets while the dealer turned the cards and luck
came, after luck's fashion, where it pleased. As he played, a group of
miners just behind him began arguing about the bandit whose name was
now famous all the way from Mount Shasta to the Mexican line. One of
them, a strapping fellow with a brace of pistols at his waist, became
impatient at something which another had said concerning the robber's
apparent invulnerability and raised his voice in the heat of his
rejoinder.

"Joaquin Murieta!" he cried. "Say! I'd just like to see that fellow
once and I'd shoot him down as if he was a rattlesnake."

A noise behind him made him turn his head, and now, like all the
others in that room, he stared at the dandified young Mexican-who had
leaped to the top of the monte-table and was standing there among the
litter of cards and gold. His broadcloth serape was thrown back; his
two hands moved swiftly to his belt and came away gripping a pair of
pistols.

"I am Joaquin Murieta," he shouted so loudly that his voice carried
the length of the hall. "Now shoot!"

A moment passed; he stood there with his head thrown back, his dark
eyes sweeping the crowd, but no man on the floor so much as moved a
hand. Then laughing he sprang down and walked slowly among them to the
front door. They fell away before him as he came and he vanished in
the shadows of the narrow street before one of them sought to follow
him.

The others of the sextet were waiting for him when he reached the
Mexican quarter; their horses were saddled; and at a word from him
they mounted. For he and his two lieutenants had finished their work;
they knew all they cared to know about the gold trains and the caches
of the miners, and this was to have been their last evening in camp.
With their gathered information they rode southward to Arroyo
Cantoova, in the foot-hills of the Coast Range at the western edge of
the upper San Joaquin valley. This was the band's new headquarters.

They remained here for some days resting before the next raid. Gold
was plentiful among them; the leaders dressed with the splendor of
noblemen; not one of those leaders--save Three-Fingered Jack--but had
his mistress beside him decked out like a Spanish lady; nor one but
rode a clean-limbed thoroughbred. When the hills were turning brown
with summer's beginning young Murieta led them out across the range
and southward to the country around Los Angeles.

Success had made him so serene that during the journey he sometimes
forgot his grim vow of shedding blood and showed mercy to a victim who
had no great store of gold. More than once Rosita induced him to spare
the lives of prisoners; and if his career had ended at this time his
name would have come down surrounded by legends of magnanimity. But as
he went on now that large plan of bloodshed became more of a power in
his life. And as it grew to master him he saw Rosita less; he sought
more frequently the companionship of Three-Fingered Jack, who killed
for killing's sake alone. During the last two years he had often
slipped away from his followers and stolen into the church of some
near-by town, to recite the dark catalogue of his sins in the
curtained confessional; but no priest heard him tell his misdeeds from
this time on.

In the north end of Los Angeles, where the old plaza church fronts the
little square of green turf and cabbage-palms, you can still find a
few of the one-story adobe buildings which lined the streets on the
July afternoon when Joaquin Murieta whispered into Deputy Sheriff
Wilson's ear.

He was a young man, this deputy, and bold, and he had come all the way
from Santa Barbara to help hunt down the famous bandit whose followers
were burning ranch buildings and murdering travelers from the summits
of the southland's mountains to the yellow beaches by the summer sea.
Unlike many of the pueblo's citizens, who had formed the habit of
talking of such matters in undertones and looking over their
shoulders as they did so, for fear some lurking Mexican might be one
of Murieta's spies, he voiced his opinions loudly enough for all to
hear. "Get good men together," he said, "and smoke these robbers out.
I'm ready to go with a posse any time." He preached that gospel of
action in the drinking-places, in the gambling-halls, and on the
street, until the very vigor of his voice put new heart into the
listeners. It was beginning to look as if young Deputy Sheriff Wilson
had really started things moving.

On a hot July afternoon he was standing on the narrow sidewalk
surrounded by a group whose members his enthusiasm had drawn out of
doors. Few others were abroad; an occasional Mexican woman in her
black skirt and tight-drawn reboso, a peon or two slouching gracefully
by with the inevitable brown cigarette, and a solitary horseman who
was coming down the street.

The men in the group were so intent on what the deputy was saying that
none of them observed the approach of this horseman until he reined in
his animal close to the sidewalk's edge. Then they saw him lean from
the saddle and whisper into Wilson's ear.

What words passed from his lips these others never knew. There was not
time for him to utter more than one or two; perhaps to tell his name.
They saw his white teeth flashing in an unpleasant smile; and Wilson's
hand moved toward his gun. But in the middle of that movement the
young officer pitched forward on his face. The sharp report of a
pistol, the scrape of hoofs, the smell of black powder smoke, and the
vision of the rider through the tenuous wreaths as he whirled his
horse about--these things came to the dazed witnesses in a sort of
blur.

The sound of the shot awakened the drowsing street and many who ran to
their doorways saw the murderer riding away at a swinging gallop. Some
of these claimed to recognize him as Joaquin Murieta, and in the days
that followed their statements were confirmed by captured members of
the band.

Deputy Sheriff Wilson's death aroused more men than his words had, and
when General Joshua Bean began organizing two companies of militia
during the weeks after the murder he found plenty of recruits. The
officers were just getting the new companies into shape for an
expedition against the bandits who were now ravaging most of the
country south of the Tehachapi, when Murieta and Three-Fingered Jack
waylaid General Bean one night near San Gabriel Mission, dropped the
noose of a reata over his head, dragged him from his horse, and
stabbed him through the heart. And the two companies of militia did
nothing more.

Now, while posses were foundering their lathered horses on every
southland road and the flames of blazing ranch buildings were throwing
their red light on the faces of dead men almost every night, a lean
and wind-browned Texan by the name of Captain Harry Love took a hand
in the grim game of man-hunting.

He had gained his title during the Mexican War. As an express-rider
for different American generals he had dodged the reatas of guerrilla
parties who were lurking by water-holes and had outjockeyed swarthy
horsemen in wild races across the flaming deserts of Sonora until he
had come to know the science of their fighting as well as old Padre
Jurata himself. And when he started after Murieta's men he did his
hunting all alone.

One day he ran across the trail of Pedro Gonzales, the horse-thief,
and another lieutenant named Juan, and followed it until he overtook
the pair at the Buena Ventura rancho. Like most of his Southwestern
breed he was a better man at action than at words, and so the story of
the gun-fight which took place when he came upon them has never been
told; but when the smoke of the three pistols cleared away Gonzales
was in custody and Juan was riding hard toward the hills with the
blood running over his face from a bullet's furrow along his scalp.
The fugitive found five others of the band in a sun-baked arroyo that
night, told them the news of the catastrophe, and got a fresh horse to
ride back with them and rescue their companion.

Captain Love was well on his way to Los Angeles with his prisoner when
the sound of drumming hoofs came down the wind. He glanced over his
shoulder and, on a hilltop half a mile behind, saw six horsemen coming
after him at a dead run. If he had any doubt of the nature of that
party he lost it when he turned his head in time to catch Gonzales
waving a handkerchief to them.

The elements of the situation were simple enough,--the Texan's jaded
mount, the fresh horses of the pursuers, the desperation of the
prisoner for whom the gallows was waiting in Los Angeles,--but most
men would have wasted some time in determining on a solution. Love,
who had learned in a hard school the value of seconds in such races as
this, did not choose to part with any more of his handicap than he
had to. So he whipped out his pistol, shot Gonzales through the heart,
and spurred his horse down the dusty road with enough start to
distance the bandits into town.

That was the first noteworthy casualty the band had suffered. It was
followed by the capture of young Reyes Feliz, Rosita's brother, who
was hanged in Los Angeles; and shortly afterward Murieta led his whole
company northward into the oak-dotted hills back of San Luis Obispo
where they lost twenty men--among them Claudio the expert spy--in a
day-long battle with a posse of ranchers whom they had sought to
ambush.

Then Joaquin Murieta rode back with the survivors to Arroyo Cantoova;
and if Rosita, who had been sent with the other women to the
rendezvous early in the summer, felt her heart leap when she saw her
lover coming, she soon felt it sink again, for he spent but few
moments in her company. Horses and gold and his large plan to sweep
like fire through California--these were the only thoughts he had.
Within a week he had divided the band into several parties, two of
which under himself and Three-Fingered Jack went north to plunder the
placer camps.

There is hardly an old town in the whole Bret Harte country that has
not its stories of the raiding during the winter of 1852-53. With the
knowledge which he and his lieutenants had gained at Mokelumne Hill
the chief directed operations, but as the weeks went by the influence
of Three-Fingered Jack grew until his methods were employed in every
robbery. By December the list of wanton murders had grown so great
that the State of California offered a reward of five thousand
dollars for Joaquin Murieta, alive or dead.

The notices announcing this reward were posted in Stockton one Sunday.
The town was then the point of departure for the southern placer
district, a lively place with craft of all kinds coming from San
Francisco to tie up at its levee and an endless procession of wagons
traveling out cross the flat lands of the San Joaquin valley to the
foot-hills. Everything was running wide open and the sidewalks were
crowded with men, most of whom were ready to take a rather long chance
for five thousand dollars.

One of the bills, tacked to the flag-pole in the public square,
attracted more readers than the others, and many a group gathered
about it to discuss what show a bold man might have of earning the
reward. The sidewalk loungers watched these debaters come and go until
the thing was beginning to be an old story; and they were almost ready
to turn their jaded attention elsewhere when a well-dressed Mexican
came riding down the street, turned his fine horse into the square,
and reined up before the flag-pole. The audience watched him leap from
the saddle and write something at the bottom of the bill.

When he had touched his horse with the spurs and ridden away at a slow
Spanish trot, one of the onlookers, more curious--or perhaps he was
less lazy--than his fellows, sauntered over to read what had been
written; and when he read it waved his hand in so wild a gesture that
every one who saw him came running to the flag-pole. At the bottom of
the placard with its offer of five thousand dollars' reward for
Joaquin Murieta, alive or dead, they found this subscription set down
in a good bold hand:

"And I will pay ten thousand dollars more. JOAQUIN MURIETA."

Faith in the State's promise rather than that of the robber sent many
riders out of Stockton that day to scour the willow thickets by the
river and the winding tulle sloughs. The posses were speeding back and
forth all night long and the excitement attending their comings and
goings lasted into Monday. So there were few on hand to watch the
departure of a schooner for San Francisco that morning.

She left the levee with her crew of three and with two passengers,
miners from San Andreas who were taking out about twenty thousand
dollars in gold-dust. The crew let out the sails, the canvas bellied
before the easy breeze, the schooner glided down the reed-lined slough
whose smooth waters held her reflection like a mirror. Flocks of wild
fowl rose before her as she came along.

A rowboat shot out of the tulles just ahead of her. The helmsman took
one look at the five men in the little craft and dropped his tiller to
pick up a double-barreled shotgun. He shouted to the sailors; they
sprang for weapons, and the two miners in the cabin leaped up the
companion stairs, their pistols in their hands. Before the foremost
was half-way up the flight the shooting had begun; he gained the deck
in time to see the body of the helmsman drooping over the swinging
tiller, overhung by a thin white cloud of powder-smoke. The small boat
lay alongside with a dead man huddled between the thwarts. The other
four bandits were swarming over the rail, firing at the sailors on
the forward deck as they came.

It was a short fight and sharp. When it ended every man in the ship's
company was lying dead or mortally wounded and two of the robbers were
killed. Murieta and Three-Fingered Jack lingered aboard long enough to
lower the gold-dust overside into the small boat and set fire to the
schooner; and the pillar of black smoke drew horsemen from Stockton in
time to hear the story which the dying men gasped out.

Up in Sacramento where the State legislature was considering the
extermination of Joaquin Murieta some weeks later the Stockton
incident was used by a lean and wind-browned lobbyist as an argument
for a company of rangers, and this argument by Captain Harry Love had
much to do with the passage of the bill authorizing such a body under
his leadership.

From Stockton the two companies of bandits fled southward up the San
Joaquin valley and brought more than fifty thousand dollars in
gold-dust to Arroyo Cantoova. Then Murieta took seventy men and rode
back to make his final raid on the placer camps. Three-Fingered Jack
went by his side: the only human being whose companionship he shared.
What talks those two men had together one can only guess from the
nature of the deeds that followed. No miner was too small game for the
chief now, he slit the throats of Chinamen for their garnerings from
worked-over tailings, he tortured teamsters to learn where they kept
their wages hidden, and where he passed during the night men found
corpses in the morning, until those of his own countrymen who had
befriended him in other days turned against him and betrayed his
hiding-places to the officers, and the whole foot-hill country from
the Tuolomme to the Feather River was patrolled by riders hunting
him.

In Hornitas he sought out a Mexican who had notified a posse of his
presence in the neighborhood, shot him down at broad noonday on the
main street, and galloped away with the pistol-bullets of his pursuers
raising little spurts of dust about his horse's flying hoofs. A few
weeks later he revisited the town; killed a deputy sheriff who sought
to capture him; and then hanged another of his countrymen, who had
informed the officer of his hiding-place.

One spring day he was riding alone in the foot-hills of Calaveras
County when he came on a party of twenty-five miners at the head of a
box canyon. They were encamped in a sort of amphitheater among the
rocks with steep walls on three sides and only one outlet, a narrow
Digger trail along the cliff a hundred feet above the brawling
stream.

Murieta had ridden up the ravine by that dangerous pathway and now he
was sitting with one leg thrown over his saddle-horn, talking to the
members of the party. They were on their way out from some winter
diggings, they told him, and they had plenty of dust with them. He
spoke of Joaquin Murieta and they pointed to their belts; they were
heavily armed, every man of them. Why should they fear the bandit? He
let his eyes go around the place taking quick appraisal of their
numerous pack and saddle animals, their camp equipment, their plump
buckskin sacks--rich booty if only he had a party of cutthroats at his
heels. But he was alone; the best he could do was to put a good face
on the matter and, in his role of honest traveler, learn what he
could, to store it up for future reference.

He was doing this and getting on very nicely at it, when one of the
party, who had gone down to the stream for water before his arrival,
came climbing up among the rocks with two filled buckets. The man
looked up at hearing a stranger's voice and Murieta glanced down at
the same instant. The eyes of each proclaimed recognition. For the
water-carrier was James Boyce, who had played monte over the table of
the good-looking young dealer many a night in Murphy's Diggings.

Boyce dropped the buckets of water and, drawing his pistol, "Boys!" he
shouted, "That's Murieta. Shoot him!" Then he fired.

But Murieta had wheeled his horse and was already spurring it on a
dead run down the gulch. The miners were lining their sights on him;
and now the canyon walls echoed to the volley they sent after him.

He gained the trail along the cliff. A bullet knocked off his hat and
his long hair streamed behind him as the horse leaped out on the
narrow path. The rocks spurned by its flying hoofs dropped over the
brink into the roaring stream one hundred feet below. The leaden slugs
that sang about the rider's head chipped bits from the sheer wall
beside him. He drew his bowie-knife and brandished it as high as his
arm could reach.

"I am Murieta," he shouted, turning in the saddle to look back at
them. "Kill me if you can."

The cliff on one side was so close that he scraped it with his stirrup
and on the other side the horse's upflung hoofs hung in mid-air
beyond the brink. The weapons flamed behind him at the canyon-head.
Their bullets rained on the rocks about him as he flourished his knife
in a final gesture of defiance and passed round a turn of the trail
beyond sight of his enemies.

But Boyce and his companions were a hardy crowd, and instead of
letting the incident end here they broke camp the next morning to
follow Murieta's trail. They traced him without much trouble down the
canyon, over a ridge and into another steep-walled gulch, where they
came on tracks of fourteen others of the band. From this point the
robbers had struck off toward the high country.

All that day the miners climbed the tall ridges where the sugar-pines
stood like enormous pillars in the vast cathedral of the out of doors,
until night found them in the midst of the forest right under the bare
granite peaks. Here they made camp, and when the cold breath of the
snow-fields came down upon them they kindled a great fire. They
lounged about the flaming logs smoking their pipes and warming their
wearied limbs. Beyond the circle of firelight the enshadowed woods
gave forth no sound to tell them that fifteen men were crawling
through those black aisles among the trees like fifteen swarthy
snakes.

The click of a pistol-hammer coming to full cock brought one of the
lounging miners to his feet. He fell forward in the instant of his
rising, and the woods gave back a hundred crashing echoes to the
volley which the bandits fired. Their aim was so true--for they had
stolen close in and taken good time to settle themselves before
cocking their weapons--that when the echoes died away fifteen men
were lying dead and dying in the red light of that fire.

The others were springing for their pistols, for nearly every one of
the miners had laid aside his belt to ease himself, but before one of
them had pulled a trigger there came the crackling of a second
fusillade and seven fell. Then Boyce and two of his companions leaped
outside that fatal circle of radiance in time to save themselves. As
they were creeping away in the darkness they saw Joaquin Murieta and
Three-Fingered Jack rush into the camp waving their bowie-knives
exultantly above their heads, and for a long time afterward they heard
the band whooping like Apaches while they killed the wounded.

Murieta and his company rode away from this massacre with thirty
thousand dollars in gold-dust and about forty horses as their loot.
But the story which Boyce and the other two survivors told turned the
mining towns into armed camps; and now Sheriff Charles Ellis of
Calaveras County started so fierce a warfare against the bandits that
they had to flee the country.

When Murieta rode back to Arroyo Cantoova that spring, a closely
hunted fugitive, he found that Rosita had deserted him for an American
settler by the name of Baker. Even at this critical period when he was
beginning actual preparations for his enormous raid he took the time
to track her to a cabin among the hills nearly a hundred miles from
the rendezvous. He shot her down and set fire to the place, but
perhaps the very frenzy of his anger blinded him or perhaps he rushed
away in horror of his own deed, for she survived her wounds, the only
one of his victims who lived when he had the time to kill, and showed
the scars to officers years afterward.

The boy who had taken her northward so short a time ago--for his years
were barely a man's years yet--rode back to Arroyo Cantoova and the
one thing he had in life--his plan.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Captain Harry Love and his company of twenty rangers rode down the
King's Highway into the little town of San Juan. In the plaza, where
the California poppies bloom to-day before the cloistered arches of
the mission as they bloomed on that July afternoon in 1853, the dusty
horsemen drew rein outside the old adobe inn. Their captain dismounted
and went inside and while he stayed the others lounged in their deep
stock saddles smoking cigarettes or eased the cinches to rest their
sweaty horses; a sunburned troop and silent as men who know they have
large work ahead of them.

An hour passed and Captain Love came out, to swing into his saddle and
ride off without a word with the twenty behind him. They followed the
King's Highway where it looped upward along the flanks of San Juan
Hill, came down the other side into the Salinas valley--the Salinas
plains, men called it then--and made camp near the river.

That night Captain Love told them what he had learned in the Plaza Inn
at San Juan where Joaquin Murieta had often come to confer with
friendly Spanish Californians in other days. One of these former
friends had betrayed to him the rendezvous at Arroyo Cantoova and
told him how to reach the place by a pass across the Coast Range near
Paso Robles.

The ranger company rode on southward day after day until the
wind-swept plain grew narrower between oak-dotted hills; then turned
eastward to climb among a tangle of grassy mountains scorched by the
sun to the color of a lion's coat. They crossed the divide and
descended into the upper valley of the San Joaquin. And one morning,
when they were following the trail of several horsemen, they saw the
thin smoke of a little camp-fire rising from the ravine-bed ahead of
them. Captain Love deployed his company to close in on the place from
three sides, and sent one man to the rear with orders to hang back
until the others had all ridden in. The man was William Byrnes who had
known Joaquin Murieta well in the days before that lynching at
Murphy's Diggings.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Murieta was washing his thoroughbred mare in the bed of the ravine.
She stood, without halter or tie-rope, as docile as a dog while he
laved her fine limbs with a dampened cloth. His saddle lay about ten
or fifteen yards away with his pistols in the holsters beside the
horn. Four or five bandits were cooking their breakfast over the fire;
and Three-Fingered Jack lay at a little distance, sprawled full-length
in the morning sunshine like a basking rattlesnake. The mare raised
her head; her ears went forward, and Murieta glanced up in time to see
the rangers riding in across the pale saffron ridges from three
sides.

They came at a dead run. Before he could reach his saddle one of the
company had pulled up between him and the weapons. Captain Love was
leaning from his horse questioning Three-Fingered Jack. Murieta took
another step toward his weapons; the ranger stopped him with a
gesture; he halted, glanced at Captain Love, and scowled.

"If you have any questions to ask," he cried, "I am leader of this
party. Talk to me."

"I'll talk to whom I please," Love answered, and just then William
Byrnes came riding into sight.

Murieta took one look at the man whom he had known in the days when he
walked unfeared among his fellows and let his eyes go around the
circle of riders; he saw Three-Fingered Jack watching him narrowly.
His hand stole up along the mare's glossy neck. Her ears moved back
and forth as she stood there biding some word from him.

Then, "Vamos, amigos!" he shouted, and sprang on the mare's back. He
leaned far forward as she leaped down the bed of the ravine.

Three-Fingered Jack took advantage of the moment of confusion that
followed to mount his own horse, and half the rangers followed him
across the grass ridge firing as they went. He fought a running battle
with them for five miles before they shot him down.

Murieta lay along the mare's back like an Indian. The hoofs of the
pursuing company thundered behind him in the ravine-bed; their bullets
spattered on the rocks about him. Before him the land broke in a
twenty-foot precipice. He called into the mare's ear and she headed
bravely for the cliff, leaped out into space, and turned a complete
somersault at the bottom. He rolled among the rocks beside her, lay
for a moment stunned, then rose and found her waiting for him where
she had gained her feet. He sprang to her back again and urged her
on.

Several of the rangers were pressing their horses along the hillside
to gain the bed of the ravine by that roundabout route; one who had
ridden full-tilt over the cliff lay stunned beside his injured animal;
and three or four others had dismounted. These lined their sights on
the fleeing mare, and now her legs went from under her; she crashed
down with the blood gushing from her nostrils.

The rangers rested their rifles for more careful aim as the rider
started to flee on foot. The volley raised rattling echoes in the
hills. He took four or five strides and then, halting, faced about. He
raised one hand.

"No more," he called. "Your work is done."

And as they slowly came toward him, their rifles ready to fly to their
shoulders at the first suspicious movement, Joaquin Murieta swayed
slightly and sank slowly into a heap near the dead mare. The breath
was gone from his body when they reached it.




TOMBSTONE


More than forty years ago a raw young mining camp down in southeastern
Arizona was preparing to assume the functions of a duly organized
municipality, and its population--at that period nearly every one in
the place was a male of voting age--was considering the important
question of a name.

The camp stood out against the sky-line at the crest of a ridge in the
foot-hills of the Mule Mountains, not far from the Mexican boundary.
For the most part it consisted of tents; but there were a few adobe
buildings and some marvelous creations from goods-boxes and tin cans.
Facing one end of its single brief street you looked out upon a dump
of high-grade silver ore, and if you turned the other way you surveyed
a sprouting little graveyard hard by a large corral. From almost any
point you had a good view of the Dragoon mountains across a wide
stretch of mesquite-covered lowlands, and at almost any hour of the
day you were likely to see the smoke of at least one Apache
signal-fire rising from those frowning granite ramparts.

The men in the camp were, nearly all of them, old-timers in the West:
miners from the Comstock lode whose boom was then on the wane,
teamsters who had been freighting all over the blazing deserts of the
Southwest, investors and merchants from Tucson, buffalo-hunters from
western Kansas, Texas, and Colorado, gamblers from Dodge City, El
Paso, and Santa Fe, Indian-fighters, cattle-rustlers, professional
claim-jumpers, and some gentle-voiced desperadoes of the real breed,
equally willing to slay from behind or take a long chance in front,
according to the way the play came up. Few of these men wore coats; a
great many of them carried single-action revolvers in holsters beside
the thigh; the old-fashioned cattleman's boot was the predominant
footgear; and, excepting among the faro-dealers, there was a rather
general carelessness in sartorial matters. Nicknames were even more
common than surnames, and it was bad form--sometimes dangerously
so--to ask a man about his antecedents until he had volunteered some
information on that point.

In such a crowd it is easy to see there would be many ideas on any
given subject, and the question of the new town's name had evoked a
multitude of suggestions. Amusements were still few; the purveyors of
hectic pleasure had thus far succeeded in bringing only one piano and
a half-dozen dance-hall girls--all decidedly the worse for wear--into
the camp; and either faro or whisky has its limitations as a steady
means of relaxation. So it came about that any advocate could usually
find an audience to harken to his arguments for his pet selection.

At intervals when they were not toiling at assessment work in the
shafts which pocked the hillside or dodging Apaches in the outlying
country, the citizens found diversion in discussing the ideas thus
submitted. And the merits of these propositions were debated by groups
in the brief street, by players seated before the tables in the
gambling-halls, by members of the never-absent lines before the bars,
and by dust-mantled travelers within the Concord stages which came
tossing over the weary road from Tucson.

Gradually public opinion began to crystallize. One name was spoken
more often as the days went by. Until it became evident that the great
majority favored it, and it was chosen.

They called the town Tombstone and placed one more tradition on the
Western map.

The old-timers always showed a very fine sense of the fitness of
things when they christened a river, mountain range, or town. If one
were to devote his time to studying the map of our country west of the
Mississippi River and resuscitating the tales whose titles are printed
thereupon, he could produce a large volume of marvelous stories. But
the entire compilation would contain nothing more characteristic of
the days when men carried rifles to protect their lives than the story
of that name--Tombstone.

It deals with a period when southeastern Arizona was Apache-land.
Geronimo, Victorio, and Nachez were constantly leading their
naked warriors into the mountain ranges which rise from those
mesquite-covered plains, to lurk among the rocks watching the lower
country for travelers and when these came to descend upon them for
the sake of loot and the love of murder. A few bold cattlemen,
like John Slaughter and Peter Kitchen, had established ranches in
this region; these held their homes by constant vigilance and force
of arms. Escorts of soldiers frequently guarded the stages on
their way to and from Tucson; and there was hardly a month in the
year when driver, guard, and passengers did not make a running
fight of it somewhere along this portion of the route.

Such were conditions during the summer of 1877 when the tale begins in
the dry wash which comes down from the Tombstone hills into the valley
of the San Pedro, near where the hamlet of Fairbank stands to-day.

Fragments of horn silver lay scattered among the cactus and
dagger-plants in the bed of the dry wash. There was a point where the
stony slope above the bank was strewn with them. A little farther up,
an outcropping of high-grade ore showed plainly in the hard white
sunshine. The flank of the hill was leaking precious metal like a
rotting treasure-chest.

A solitary Apache stood on a mesa ten miles away. He had cut a fresh
trail down in the valley at dawn, and had dogged it reading every
minute sign--a displaced rock, a broken twig, a smudge of disturbed
earth--until he had the fulness of its meaning: two prospectors
leading a pack-mule, both men armed and keeping sharp lookout against
attack. Then he had climbed to this remote vantage-point and caught
sight of them as they turned from the river-bottom up the wash. They
were traveling straight toward that outcropping.

The Apache stood at the edge of the mesa facing the newly risen sun, a
savage vision in a savage land. His narrow turban, shred of
loin-cloth, and knee-high moccasins merely accentuated his nakedness;
they held no more suggestion of clothing than his mass of rusty black
hair and the ugly smears of paint across his cheeks. A tiny fire
beside him sent a tenuous smoke column into the glaring sky.

He kept his malignant little eyes on a notch in the Dragoon Mountains
twenty miles away, scowling against the sun's bright flood. Across the
far-flung interval of glowing mesas and dark mesquite flats the stark
granite ramparts frowned back at him. And now a hair-line of pallid
smoke twined upward from the point he watched.

He sank down, crouching beside his fire. He swept his hand over it
sprinkling bits of powdered resin into the wisp of flame. The smoke
turned black.

He waited for some moments, scanning the rising fumes, then swerved
his lean brown torso toward a mesquite bush. He stripped the leaves
from a twig and scattered them upon the blaze. A white puff climbed
into the sky.

From time to time he moved, now dropping on his belly to blow the
coals, now feeding them with resin, now with leaves. The slender
column crawled on upward taking alternate complexion, white and
black.

Where the bare summits of the Dragoon range broke into a multitude of
ragged pinnacles against the eastern horizon, another swarthy warrior
stood, remote as a roosting eagle on the heights. Beneath his
feet--the drop was so sheer that he could have kicked a pebble to the
bottom without its touching the face of the cliff in its fall--the
shadows of the mountain lay black on the mesquite flat. He gazed
across that wide plain and the mesas climbing heavenward beyond it in
a series of glowing steps. His face assumed a peculiar intentness as
he watched the distant smoke column; it was the intentness of a man
who is reading under difficulties. In dot and dash he spelled it as it
rose--the tidings of those two prospectors who traveled up the wash.

While the last puff was fading away he glided down from pinnacle to
narrow shelf, from shelf to cliff, and made his way toward the rocks
below to tell the news to the rest of his band.

Their camp lay at the head of a steep gorge. Several low wickiups had
been fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing
skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems. Offal and carrion
were strewn all about the place; it swarmed with flies. Nesting
vultures would have built more carefully and been fully as fastidious.
When the warrior reached the spot the rocks became alive with naked
forms; they appeared from all sides as suddenly and silently as
quail.

He told the tidings to the men. An unclean, vermin-ridden group, they
squatted around him while he repeated the smoke message, word for
word. There was no particular show of enthusiasm among them, no
sign of haste. They began to prepare for this business as other
men begin getting ready for a day's work, when they see good wages
ahead of them and the task is very much to their taste. Prospectors
were becoming an old story in that summer of 1877; two of them
meant good pickings--bacon, coffee, sugar, and firearms; and there was
the fun of killing with the chance for torture thrown in.

Some of the band departed leisurely to catch the ponies. The victims
would be busy for a long time in the wash. They would not travel far
to make their camp. And wherever they went they must leave tracks. The
day was far advanced when the party rode forth upon the flat, their
dirty turbans bobbing up and down above the mesquite bushes as they
came along.

Several of them carried lances; there was a sprinkling of bows and
arrows; a number bore rifles across their saddles, wearing the
cartridge-belts athwart their naked bodies. All of them moved their
thin brown legs ceaselessly; their moccasined shanks kept up a
constant drumming against the ponies' sides.

The afternoon was old when they reached the dry wash. They left two or
three of their number behind in charge of the ponies. The others came
on afoot. Two leaders went well in advance, one of them on each bank,
creeping from rock to tufted yucca and from yucca to mesquite clump,
watching the sun-flayed land before them for some sign of their game.
A squad of trackers slipped in and out among the dagger-plants and
boulders in the bottom of the gulch.

One of the trackers held up his hand and moved it swiftly. To the
signal the others gathered about him. He pointed to the outcropping of
high-grade ore. They saw the traces left by a prospector's pick. For
some minutes their voices mingled in low gutturals. Then they
scattered to pick up the trail, found it, and resumed their progress
down the arroyo.

Evening came on them when they reached the river-bottom; and with the
deepening shadows, fear. Night with the Apache was the time of the
dead. They made their camp. But when the sun was coloring the eastern
sky the next morning they were crawling through the bear-grass on the
first low mesa above the stream, silent as snakes about to strike.

The prospectors awoke with the growing light. They crept forth from
their blankets. Two or three rifles cracked. And then the stillness
came again.

The Apaches stripped the clothing from the dead men and left them to
the Arizona sun. They took away with them what loot they found. They
never noticed the little heap of specimens from the outcropping. Or if
they noticed it they thought it of no importance. A few handfuls of
rock fragments meant nothing to them. And so the ore remained there
near the bodies of the prospectors.

The old-timers go on to tell how Jim Shea came riding down the dry
wash one day late in the summer with his rifle across his saddle-horn
and a little troop of grim horsemen about him. Of that incident few
details remain in the verbal chronicle which has come down through
four decades. It is like a picture whose background has been blurred
by age.

Somewhere ahead of these dusty, sunburned riders a band of Apaches
were urging their wearied ponies onward under the hot sun. They herded
a bunch of stolen horses before them as they fled.

The chase had begun with the beginning of the day, at Dragoon Pass.
What bloodshed had preceded it is not known. But Shea and his
companions were following a hot trail, eager for reprisals, cautious
against ambush. As they came on down the wash the leader scanned the
stony bed reading the freshening signs left by the fugitives; while
two who rode on either side of him watched every rock and shrub and
gully which might give cover to lurking enemies.

Now, as they clattered along the arroyo's bed, Shea suddenly drew
rein. Leaning far to one side and low, after the lithe fashion of the
cow-boy, he swept his hand earthward, picked up a little fragment of
dark rock, straightened his body in the saddle once more, and,
glancing sharply at the bit of ore, dropped it into his pocket. He
repeated the movement two or three times in the next hundred yards.

Chasing Apaches--or being chased by them--was almost as much a part of
life's routine in those days as sleeping without sheets. And no one
remembers how this particular affair ended. But Jim Shea kept those
bits of silver ore.

Later he showed them to an assayer somewhere up on the Gila and
learned their richness. Then he determined to go back and locate the
ledge from which the elements had carried them away. But that project
demanded a substantial grubstake, and other matters of moment were
taking his attention at the time. He postponed the expedition until it
was too late.

In Tucson they tell of a prospector by the name of Lewis who wandered
into those foot-hills during that year, found some high-grade float,
and traced it to a larger outcropping than the one down by the dry
wash. But he had hardly made the marvelous discovery when he caught
sight of a turbaned head above a rocky ridge about fifty yards away.
He abandoned his search to seek the nearest cover. By the time he had
gained the shelter a dozen Apaches were firing at him.

He made a good fight of it with his rifle, and the luck which had
caused him to look up before the savages had their sights trained on
him had put a wide space of open ground about his natural fort. No
Apache ever relished taking chances, and Lewis was able to hold the
band off until darkness came. Then he crept forth and wormed his way
through the gullies to the San Pedro Valley. Dawn found him miles from
the spot.

He came back to Tucson with his specimens. Marcus Katz and A. M.
Franklin, who were working for the wholesale firm of L. M. Jacobs &
Co., heard his story, saw the ore, and grubstaked him for another
trip.

But when he reached the foot-hills of the Mule Mountains Lewis found
that the long afternoon of battle and the ensuing night of flight had
left him utterly at sea as to the location of that large ledge. He had
to begin his hunt all over again. He used up his grubstake, got a
second from his backers, and subsequently a third.

And now while Lewis was combing down the gullies between those broken
ridges for the ore body--he slew himself from disappointment later
on--and while Jim Shea was meditating an expedition after the riches
of which he had got trace down in the dry wash, Ed Schiefflin came to
the Bruncknow house to embark on the adventure which was to give the
town of Tombstone its name.

The Bronco house, men call it now, but Bruncknow was the man who built
it and the new term is a corruption. Its ruins still stand on the
side-hill a few miles from the dry wash, a rifle-shot or so from the
spot where the two prospectors met their deaths. In those days it was
a lonely outpost of the white man in the Apache's land. The summer of
1877 was drawing to a close, its showers were already a distant
memory, and all southeastern Arizona was glowing under the white-hot
sun-rays when Schiefflin rode his mule up from the San Pedro to seek
the protection of its thick adobe walls.

The flat lands of the valley stretched away and away behind him to the
foot of the Huachucas in the west. They unfolded their long reaches to
the southward until they melted into the hot sky between spectral
mountain ranges down in Mexico. He came up out of that wide landscape,
a tall wild figure, lonesome as the setting sun.

His long beard and the steady patience in his eyes--the patience which
comes to the prospector during his solitary wanderings in search of
rich ore--gave him the appearance of a man past middle age although he
had not seen his thirtieth year. His curling hair reached his broad
shoulders. Wind and sun had tanned his features so deeply that his
blue eyes stood out in strange contrast to the dark skin. His garments
were sadly torn, and he had patched them in many places with buckskin.
Such men still come and go in the remote places among the mountain
ranges and deserts of the West. They were almost the first to
penetrate the wilderness and they will roam over it so long as any
patch of it remains unfenced.

Schiefflin had left his father's house in Oregon ten years before. He
searched the Coeur d'Alenes for riches, and, finding none, struck out
from Idaho for Nevada. There he remained through two blazing summers
traveling afoot from the sage-brush hills in the north across the
silent deserts east of Death Valley. He wandered on to Colorado, where
he toiled in the new mining camps between prospecting trips into the
great plateaus along the western slope of the Rockies. From Colorado
he went southward into New Mexico; thence westward to Arizona. He
accompanied a troop of cavalry from Prescott down to the foot of the
Huachucas where they established a new post. During the last leg of
that journey he saw these foot-hills of the Mule Mountains in passing,
and in spite of warnings from the soldiers, he was now returning to
prospect the district.

He had spent some days at the Herrick ranch down in the valley, and
the men about the place had strongly advised him against traveling
into the hills. They cited various gruesome examples of the fate which
overtook solitary wanderers in this savage land. They might as well
have saved their breath; Schiefflin had seen some mineral stains on a
rock outcropping when he passed through the country with the cavalry
earlier in the season.

So now he came on toward the Bruncknow house, where he could make his
camp closer to the hills upon whose exploration his mind was set.

There were several men lounging about the adobe when he reached it.
Even in those days, when the most peaceful border-dweller carried his
rifle almost everywhere except to his meals and was as likely as not
to have slain one or two fellow-creatures,--days when the leading
citizens of that isolated region presented a sinister front with their
long-barreled revolvers slung beside their thighs,--the members of
the group showed up hard.

A lean and seasoned crew, dust-stained from many a wild ride,
burned by the border sun, they watched the new-comer with eyes
half-curtained, like the eyes of peering eagles, by straight lids.
They welcomed him with a few terse questions as to where he had
come from and what the troops were doing over at the new post. Of
themselves they said nothing nor offered any information of their
business in this lonely spot.

But when Schiefflin had made his camp close to the shelter of those
thick adobe walls he learned more of his hosts. There was a mine hard
by, at least it went by the name of a mine, and it was a sort of
common understanding that the owners were doing assessment work. The
fragments on the dump, however, were only country rock. In later years
gorgeous tales of rich ore at the bottom of the shallow shaft resulted
in a series of claim-jumpings which in their turn netted no less than
eleven murders, but the slayers only wasted their powder, for the
ground here never yielded anything more interesting than dead men's
bones. And at the time when Schiefflin was abiding at the Bruncknow
house the inmates were letting their mining tools rust, the while they
kept their firearms well oiled.

For the mine was nothing more nor less than a blind, and the adobe was
simply a rendezvous for Mexican smugglers.

In that era, when a man practised pistol-shooting from the hip,--as a
man practises his morning calisthenics in this peaceful age, for the
sake of his body's health,--the written statutes were one thing and
local conceptions of proper conduct another. Here, where the San
Pedro valley came straight northward across the boundary, affording a
good route for pack-trains, smuggling American wares into the southern
republic was nearly a recognized industry. As long as a man could
bring his contraband to market past marauding Apaches and the bands of
renegade whites who had drifted to the border, he was entitled to the
profit he made--and no questions asked.

So the men at the Bruncknow house accepted Schiefflin's presence
without any fear of ill consequences. Had their calling been more
stealthy they would not have worried about him; prospectors went
unquestioned among all sorts of law breakers then, owning something of
the same immunity which simple-minded persons always got from the
Indians. He came in at evening and rolled up in his blankets after
cooking his supper; and in the morning he went forth again into the
hills. No one minded him.

Now and again a cavalcade came out of the flaming desert to the south,
appearing first as a thin dust-cloud down on the flat, as it drew
nearer resolving itself into pack burros and men on mule-back; then
jingling and clattering up the stony slope and into the corral. And
when they had dismounted, the swarthy riders in their serapes and
steep-crowned sombreros trooped into the adobe, their enormous spurs
tinkling in a faint chorus upon the hard earthen floor.

Then the men of the house got out the calicoes and hardware which they
had brought over the hot hills and through the forests of giant cacti
from Tucson. The smugglers spread blankets, unbuckled broad
money-belts from their waists, and stripped out the dobie dollars,
letting them fall in clinking heaps upon the cloth. The bargaining
began.

And when the last wares had been disposed of and the last huge silver
coin had been stowed away by the hard-eyed merchants, the Mexicans
opened little round kegs of mescal, the fiery liquor which is
distilled from the juice of the cactus plant.

They gambled at monte, quien con, and other games of chance. They
drank together. The night came on.

Sometimes pistols flamed under those adobe walls and knives gleamed in
the shadows.

Then, when the hot dawn came on, the burros were packed and the whole
troop filed down the hill; the seraped Mexicans riding along the
flanks of the train, their rifles athwart their saddles. The dust rose
about them, enwrapped them, and hid them from sight. Finally it
vanished where the flat lands reached away into the south.

But Schiefflin was indifferent to these wild goings on. To him the
Bruncknow house meant shelter from the Apaches; that was all. He could
roll up in his blankets here at night knowing that he would waken in
the morning without any likelihood of looking up into the grinning
faces of savages who had tracked him to his camp.

He minded his own business. As a matter of fact his own business was
the only thing he deemed worth minding. It was the one affair of
importance in the whole world. The more he saw of those hills the
surer he became that they contained minerals. Somewhere among them,
he fervently believed, an ore body of great richness lay hidden from
the world. And he had been devoting the years of his manhood to
seeking just such a secret. In those long years of constant search a
longing mightier than the lust for riches had grown within him.
Explorers know that longing and some great scientists; once it owns a
man he becomes oblivious to all else.

Every day Schiefflin set forth on his mule from the adobe house. He
rode out into the hills. All day he hunted through the winding gullies
for some bits of float which would betray the presence of an
outcropping on the higher levels. Once he cut the fresh trail of a
band of Apaches and once he caught sight of two mounted savages riding
along a slope a mile away. Several times he picked up specimens of
rock which bore traces of silver. But he found no ore worth assaying.

The men at the Bruncknow house saw him departing every morning and
shook their heads. They had seen other men ride out alone into the
hills and they had afterward found some of those travelers--what the
Apaches had left of them. It was no affair of theirs--but they fell
into the habit of watching the tawny slopes every afternoon when the
shadows began to lengthen and speculating among themselves whether the
bearded rider was going to return this time. Which was as close to
solicitude as they could come.

One of their number--he had lost two or three small bets by
Schiefflin's appearing safe and sound on various evenings--took it
upon himself to give their visitor a bit of advice.

"What for," he asked, "do yo'-all go a-takin' them pasears that-a-way?"

Schiefflin smiled good-naturedly at the questioner.

"Just looking for stones," he said.

"Well," the other told him, "all I got to say is this. Yo'-all keep on
and yo'll sure find yo'r tombstone out there some day."

He never dreamed that he had named a town.

Nor did Schiefflin think much of it at the moment: he had received
other warnings, just as strong, before. But none of them had been put
as neatly as this. So the words abode in his memory although they did
not affect his comings and goings in the least.

Only a few days later he left the Bruncknow house for a longer trip
than usual. He rode his mule down the San Pedro toward the mouth of
the dry wash in which the two prospectors had found that silver ore
the day before they died.

And the luck that guides a man's steps toward good or ill, as the whim
seizes it, saw to it that he came into the old camp where the Apaches
had enjoyed their morning murder months before.

Some one had buried both bodies but whoever had done this--possibly it
was one of the self-styled miners at the Bruncknow house--had not
enough interest in minerals to disturb the little heap of specimens.
It lay there near the graves, just as the Apaches had left it, just as
its original owners had piled it up before they sought their blankets;
to dream perhaps of their big strike while death waited for the coming
of the dawn, to cheat them out of their discovery.

The story was as plain as printed words on a page: the nameless
graves among the tall clumps of bear-grass proclaimed the penalty for
venturing into this neighborhood. The little handful of dark-colored
stones betrayed the secret of the riches in the hills. The dry wash
came down between the ridges half a mile ahead to show the way to
other float like this.

It was as though, after the years of long and constant search he found
himself faced by a grim challenge, to attain the consummation of his
hopes on pain of death.

When he had examined the bits of rock he mounted his mule and struck
out for the mouth of the dry wash.

After he had ridden for some distance up the stony bed of the arroyo
he dismounted and came on slowly leading the patient animal. He
searched the rocks for fragments of float. At times he left the mule
and crept to the summit of a near-by ridge where he remained for some
minutes looking out over the country for some sign of Indians.

The day wore on and as he went further the hills to the south became
loftier; the banks drew closer in on both sides of him; the boulders
in the arid bed were larger. Cactus and Spanish bayonet harassed him
like malignant creatures; skeleton ocatillas and bristling yuccas
imposed thorny barriers before him. The sun poured its full flood of
white-hot rays upon him. He wound his way in and out among the
obstacles, keeping his intent eyes upon the glaring rocks, save only
when he lifted them to look for lurking savages. The shadows of
noonday lengthened into the shades of afternoon; they crept up the
hillsides until only the higher peaks remained a-shine; evening came.

Schiefflin picked up a sharp fragment of blackish rock.

Horn silver. In those days when the great Comstock lode was lessening
its yield and the metal was at a premium, such ore as this which he
held meant millions--if one could but find the main ledge. He scanned
the specimen closely, looked round for others and then, as his eyes
roved up the hillside the exultation born of that discovery passed
from him.

Dusk was creeping up from the valley. The time had passed when he
could return by daylight to the Bruncknow house. He must make the most
of the scant interval which remained before darkness, if he would find
a hiding-place where he could camp.

He glanced about him to fix the landmarks in his memory, that he might
return to this spot on the morrow. Then he led the mule away into the
hills and picketed it out behind a ridge where it would be out of
sight from passing Apaches.

He found his own hiding-place a mile away from where he had tethered
the animal. Here three huge bare knolls of granite boulders rose
beside the wash. From the summit of any one of these a man could
survey the whole country; between its ragged rocks he would be
invisible to any one below. He chose the highest one and crept to its
crest.

The gray twilight was spreading over the land when he raised his head
above one of the boulders. In that instant he dropped to earth as if
he had been shot. An Indian was riding up to the bottom of the knoll.

The Apache's rifle lay across his lean bare thighs; his gaunt body
bent forward as he scanned the rocks above him. He had been heading
for the hill from this side while Schiefflin was climbing up the
opposite slope. Evidently he was coming to the summit to look over the
country for enemies. There must be others of the band close by.

Schiefflin found a narrow crack between two boulders and peeped out.

Another savage appeared at that moment on the summit of the next
knoll. He was afoot; and now he stood there motionless searching the
wide landscape for any moving form. He was so near that in the waning
light the smear of war-paint across his ugly face was visible.

Schiefflin crooked his thumb over the hammer of his rifle and raised
it slowly to the full cock, pressing the trigger with his finger to
prevent the click.

The first Apache had dismounted and was climbing the hill. As he drew
closer the clink of ponies' hoofs sounded down in the dry wash. A
number of dirty turbans came into sight above the bank. More followed
and still more, until thirty-odd were bobbing up and down to the
movement of the horses.

A moment passed, one of those mighty moments when a man's life appears
before him as a period which he has finished, when a man's thoughts
rove swiftly over what portions of that period they choose. And
Schiefflin's mind went to that talk with the man at the Bruncknow
house.

"Yo'-all keep on and yo'll sure find yo'r tombstone out there some
day."

He could hear the old-timer saying the words now. And, as he listened
to the grim warning again, he felt--as perhaps those two prospectors
felt in the moment of their awakening down by the river--that fate
had sadly swindled him. He was stiffening his trigger-finger for the
pull, peering across the sights at the Indian who had climbed to
within a few yards of the weapon's muzzle, when--the warrior on the
summit of the next knoll waved his hand. The Apache halted at the
gesture and Schiefflin followed his gaze in time to see the lean brown
arm of the sentinel sweep forward. Both of the savages turned and
descended the knolls.

They caught up their ponies and rode on, following the course of the
wash below them. The band down in the arroyo's bed were receding. The
rattle of hoofs grew fainter. Schiefflin lowered the hammer of his
rifle and took his first full breath.

A low outcry down the wash stopped his breathing again. The band had
stopped their ponies; some of them were dismounting. He could see
these gathering about the place where he had led his mule up the
bank.

Two of them were pointing along the course he had taken with the
animal. Several others were creeping up the slope on their bellies
following the fresh trail. The murmur of their voices reached the
white man where he lay watching them.

Then, as he was giving up hope for the second time, a mounted
warrior--evidently he was their chief--called to the trackers. They
rose, looked about and scurried back to their ponies like frightened
quail. The whole band were hammering their heels against the flanks of
their little mounts. The coming of the night had frightened them
away.

The shadows deepened; stillness returned upon the land; the stars
grew larger in the velvet sky. Schiefflin crouched among the boulders
at the summit of the knoll and fought off sleep while the great
constellations wheeled in their long courses. The dawn would come in
its proper time, and it seemed as certain as that fact that they would
return to hunt him out.

He dared not leave the place, for he might stray into some locality
where they would find him without shelter when the day revealed his
trail. So he waited for the sunrise and the beginning of the attack.

At last the color deepened in the east. The rocks below his
hiding-place stood out more clearly. He could see no sign among them
of creeping savages. The sun rose and still nothing moved.

He came forth finally in the full blaze of the hot morning and found
the mule where he had picketed it behind the ridge. When he returned
to the dry wash he saw the tracks where the band had passed the
evening before. For some reason of their own they had found it best to
keep on that course instead of coming back to murder him.

He resumed his search for float where he had left it off. It showed
more frequently as he went on. He followed the bits of ore to a narrow
stringer of blackish rock. He dug into it with his prospector's pick,
chipped off specimens, and carefully covered up the hole. The danger
of Apaches had passed, but a new fear had come to him, the dread that
some rival prospector might happen upon his discovery before he could
establish possession.

For his provisions were running low. He had no money. He needed a
good grubstake--and companions to help him hold down the claim against
jumpers--before he could begin development work.

He hurried back to the Bruncknow house. An attack of chills and fever,
brought on by his night among the rocks, gave him a good excuse to
leave the place. The climate, he said, did not agree with him.

While he was trying to think of one with whom to share his secret, one
whom he could trust to take his full portion of the dangers which
would attend the claim's development, he remembered his brother Al,
who was working at the Signal mine way over in Mohave County, There
was the man. So he made his way across the State of Arizona. He
stopped at times to earn money for food to carry him through and it
was December before he reached his destination.

Al Schiefflin had a friend, Dick Gird, who was an assayer. Gird saw
the specimens, tested them, and was on fire at once. He joined forces
with the brothers, helped them to procure a grubstake, and in January,
1878, the three men set forth from Williams Fork of the Colorado River
in a light wagon drawn by two mules.

Spring was well on its way when they reached Tucson and made their
camp in Bob Leatherwood's corral. The Apaches were raiding throughout
the southeastern part of the territory and the little town of adobes
was getting new reports of murders from that section every day.

They drove their mules on eastward up the long mesas leading to the
San Pedro Divide. At the Pantano stage station they saw the fresh
scars of Apache bullets on the adobe walls. The men had held the
place against a large band of Geronimo's warriors only a few days
before.

Now as they drove on they kept constant lookout and their rifles were
nearly always in their hands. Every morning they rose long before the
dawn, and two of them would climb the ridges near the camp to watch
the country as the light came over it, while the other caught up the
mules and harnessed them.

They turned southward up the San Pedro, avoiding the stage station at
the crossing of the river lest some other party of prospectors might
follow them. They made a circuit around the Mormon settlement at St.
Davids and came on to the Bruncknow house, to find two more fresh
graves of Apache victims under the adobe walls.

They made their permanent camp here, and Schiefflin took his two
companions up the dry wash. They found the outcropping undisturbed.
Gird and Al Schiefflin dug away at the dark rock with their
prospector's picks. Less than three feet below the surface the
stringer pinched out. The claim was not worth staking.

Beside the little strip of ore, whose false promises of riches had
lured them into this land of death, they held a conference. The hills
opened to a low swale which led up toward the loftier summits in the
south. They decided to follow that depression in search of another
ledge.

They made their daily journeys along its course, returning with
evening to the Bruncknow house, whose inmates were away at the time on
some expedition of their own. Sometimes they saw the smoke of
signal-fires over in the Dragoons; sometimes the slender columns rose
from the summit of the Whetstone Mountains in the north. One
morning--they had spent the previous night out here in the hills--they
awoke to find a fresh trail in the bear-grass within a hundred yards
of where they had been sleeping, and in the middle of the track Dick
Gird picked up one of the rawhide wristlets which Apaches wore to
protect their arms from the bowstring.

That day Ed Schiefflin discovered a new outcropping. Gird assayed the
specimens in a rude furnace which he had fashioned from the fireplace
at the Bruncknow house. Some of them yielded as high as $2,200 to the
ton. Exploration work showed every evidence of a great ore body. Two
or three of the fragments which they had chipped from it below the
surface assayed $9,000 a ton. They had made their big strike. They
staked the claim, and when they came to fixing on a name Ed Schiefflin
remembered once more those words of the old-timer at the Bruncknow
house.

"We'll call it the Tombstone," he said, and told the story.

It was recorded in Tucson as the Tombstone. And when the big rush
came, Ed Schiefflin, then a figure of importance in the new camp,
recited the tale to some of the men who had risked their lives in
traveling to these hills. And so they in turn retold the tale.

That is the way the town got its name.

In after years when men had learned the fulness of that secret which
the Apaches had guarded so well from the world--when Bisbee and
Nacosari and Cananea were yielding their enormous stores of metal and
Tombstone's mines had given forth many millions of dollars in silver,
Ed Schiefflin remained a wealthy man. But the habit of prospecting
abided with him and he used to spend long months alone in the
wilderness searching for the pure love of search.

Just before one of these expeditions he was driving out of Tombstone
with Gus Barron, another old-timer and a close friend, and as they
went down the Fairbank road they reached the spot where the three
great boulder knolls rise beside the dry wash. Schiefflin drew rein.

"This," he said to Barron, "is the place where I camped that night
when the Apaches almost got me, the night before I found the stringer
on the hill. And when I die I want to be buried here with my canteen
and my prospector's pick beside me."

So when he died up in canyon City, Oregon, just about twenty years
after he had made that discovery, they brought his body back and
buried it on the summit of the knoll. And they erected a great pyramid
of granite boulders on the spot for his monument.

And within sight of that lonely tomb the town stands out on the
sky-line, commemorating by its name the steadfastness of Ed
Schiefflin, prospector.




TOMBSTONE'S WILD OATS


In the good old days of Indians and bad men the roaring town of
Tombstone had a man for breakfast every morning. And there were
mornings when the number ran as high as half a dozen.

That is the way the old-timers speak of it, and there is a fond pride
in their voices when they allude to the subject; the same sort of
pride one betrays when he tells of the wild oats sowed by a
gray-haired friend during his lusty youth. For Tombstone has settled
down to middle-aged conventionality and is peaceable enough to-day for
any man.

But in the early eighties!

Apaches were raiding; claim-jumpers were battling; road-agents were
robbing stages; bad men were slaying one another in the streets; and,
taking it altogether, life was stepping to a lively tune.

Geronimo's naked warriors were industrious. Now they would steal upon
a pair of miners doing assessment work within sight of town. Now they
would bag a teamster on the road from Tucson, or raid a ranch, or
attack the laborers who were laying the water company's pipe-line to
the Huachucas. Hardly a week passed but a party of hard-eyed horsemen
rode out from Tombstone with their rifles across their saddle-bows,
escorting a wagon which had been sent to bring in the bodies of the
latest victims.

In the two years after the first rush from Tucson to the rich silver
district which Ed Schiefflin had discovered, there was much
claim-jumping. And claim-jumping in those days always meant shooting.
Some properties were taken and retaken several times, each occasion
being accompanied by bloodshed. Surveying parties marched into the
foot-hills of the Mule Mountains under escort of companies of
riflemen; in more than one instance they laid out boundary lines and
established corner monuments after pitched battles, each with its own
formidable casualty list.

What with the murders by the savages and these affrays--together with
such natural hazards of disease and accident as accompany any new
mining camp--the boot-hill graveyard out beyond the north end of the
wide main street was booming like the town. And now there came a more
potent factor in stimulating mortuary statistics.

The bad men took possession of Tombstone.

They came from all over the West. For railroads and telegraph lines
were bringing a new order of things from the Missouri to the Rio
Grande, and those who would live by the forty-five hastened to ride
away from sight of jails and churches, seeking this new haven down by
the border.

One by one they drifted across the flaring Southwestern deserts; from
California, Montana, Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico, with
their grim mouths tight shut against all questions and their big
revolvers dangling beside their thighs. The hair of some of them was
gray from many winters and their faces deeply lined; and some were
boys with down on their smooth cheeks. But once his hand started
moving toward his pistol, every man of them was deadlier than a bull
rattlesnake in rutting time.

No man challenged them on their arrival. The town was too busy to heed
their presence. The one-story buildings which lined the wide streets
were packed to the doors with customers; saloons, dance-halls, and
gambling-houses roared on through day and night; the stores were open
at all hours. The wide sidewalks under the wooden awnings which ran
the length of every block, were crowded from wall to gutter with men
intent on getting wealth or spending it.

The bad men mingled with the sidewalk throngs; they dropped into the
Bird-Cage Opera House, where painted women sang in voices that clanged
like brazen gongs; they took their places before the gambling-tables
of the Crystal Palace, where girls were oftentimes to be found dealing
faro; they joined the long lines before the bars and drank the
stinging whisky which the wagon-trains had brought from Tucson. And
they met one another.

It was like the meeting of strange dogs, who bristle on sight, and
often fly at one another's throats to settle the question of
supremacy. Their big-caliber revolvers spat streams of fire in the
roadways and bellowed in the dance-halls. And gradually among the
ranks of the survivors there came a gradation in their badness.

Several loomed far above the others: John Ringo, Prank Stilwell, Zwing
Hunt, the Clanton brothers, and Billy Grounds. They were "He Wolves."
And there was Curly Bill, the worst of all. He might be said to rule
them.

They settled down to business, which is to say they started to do the
best they could for themselves according to their separate capacities
for doing evil unto others.

They rustled stock. They drove whole herds over the boundary from
Mexico. They pillaged the ranches, which were now coming into the
adjacent country, stealing horses, altering brands, and slaying
whoever interfered with them, all with the boldness of medieval
raiders. They took a hand in the claim-jumping. They robbed the
stage.

Hardly a day passed without a hold-up on the Tucson road--and, when
the railway went through, on the road to Benson. Shotgun guards and
drivers were killed; occasionally a passenger or two got a bullet. And
the bad men spent the money openly over the bars in Tombstone.

Then the Earp brothers came upon the scene. From this time their
figures loom large in the foreground. Whatever else may be said of
them they were bold men and there was something Homeric in their
violence. Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Jim, the first three were active
in the wild events which followed their incumbency to power.
California knew them in their boyhood, and during their manhood years
they wandered over the West, from mining camp to cow-town, until they
came to Tombstone from Dodge City, Kansas.

They brought a record with them. Back in the seventies, in the time of
the trail herds, Dodge was a howling cow-town. There was a period of
its existence when the punchers used to indulge in the pastime of
shooting up the place; but there were a great many of these frolicsome
riders, and too much wanton revolver shooting is sure to breed trouble
if it is combined with hard liquor, gambling, and a tough floating
population. The prominent business men of Dodge watched the hectic
consequences of this lawlessness over their faro layouts with
speculative eyes and came to the conclusion that killings were
becoming altogether too promiscuous. The town, they said, needed a
business administration; and forthwith they selected Bat Masterson as
marshal. He established, and enforced, a rule which amounted to this:

If a man pulled his gun he did it at his own peril. Whoever fired a
shot within the town limits, whether he did it for sport or murder,
faced arrest.

Resistance followed. There were nights when the main street echoed
with the roaring of firearms. But, by the force of his personality and
by his remarkable ability at the quick draw, Bat Masterson subdued the
rebels. It came about that of what killing was done he did his full
share, which greatly diminished the death list.

Wyatt and Virgil Earp succeeded Bat Masterson in this office and
carried on its administration with a boldness which left them famous.
With the coroner behind them they were lords of the high justice, the
middle, and the low; and they sustained their positions by good
straight shooting.

At such times as they were not performing their functions as peace
officers they were dealing faro; and when the imminence of a less
interesting era was made apparent in the dwindling of the trail herds
and the increase of dry farmers, they left the good old cow-town along
with many other professional gamblers.

They arrived in Tombstone in the days when the outlaws were rampant,
and they began dealing faro in Oriental. They found many a friend--and
some enemies--from those years in western Kansas among the more
adventurous element in the new town. Former buffalo-hunters,
teamsters, quiet-spoken gamblers, and two-gun men sat down before
their layouts and talked over bygones with them. There was an election
at about this time. Virgil was chosen town marshal, and Wyatt got the
appointment of deputy United States marshal soon afterward.

Old friends and new rallied around them. Of the former was Doc
Holliday, a tubercular gunman with the irascible disposition which
some invalids own, who had drifted hither from Colorado. Among the
latter were the Clanton brothers and Frank Stilwell, who robbed the
stage and rustled cattle for a living. John Ringo, who was really the
brains of the outlaws, and Curly Bill, who often led them, are listed
by many old-timers among the henchmen in the beginning.

It was a time when the old spoils system was recognized in its
pristine simplicity. If you trained with the victorious political
faction you either wore a star or had some one else who did wear a
star backing you. If you trained with the minority you were rather
sure, sooner or later, to have your name engrossed on a warrant. In
such an era it was as well to vote wisely; else, in the vernacular,
you were "short" in your home town, which meant you could not go back
there.

How much the Earps knew of what their henchmen did is beyond the
telling in this story. An official history of Arizona published under
the auspices of the State legislature and written by Major McClintock,
an old Westerner, states that first and last they were accused of
about 50 per cent. of the robberies which took place in the town. It
is, however, altogether possible that their cognizance of such matters
was no greater than many a city official to-day holds of crimes
committed in his bailiwick. When one comes to analyze police politics
he finds they have not changed much since the time of the Crusades:
desire for power has always blinded reformers to the misdeeds of their
followers. One thing is certain; the Earps did protect their friends,
and some of those friends were using very much the same methods which
the Apaches employed in making a living.

To a certain extent this was necessary. What one might call the highly
respectable element of the town was busy at its own affairs.
Mine-owners and merchants were deeply engrossed in getting rich. And
unless he liked gun-fighting, a man would have to be a good deal of a
busybody to give the town marshal anything more tangible than his best
wishes in the way of support. It was up to that official to look out
for himself. At any time when complications followed his attempt to
arrest a lawbreaker he could depend upon the average citizen--to get
outside the line of fire.

And the gun-fighters were eager to get into the game. They were right
on hand, to make a stand in front of the enemy if need be--but
preferably to murder the foe from behind. Which was ever the way with
the Western bad man.

There were determined men of another breed in Tombstone and the
surrounding country, men who had outfought Apaches and desperadoes on
many an occasion; dead shots who owned high moral courage. Such a man
was John Slaughter, who had established his ranch down on the Mexican
line and had driven the savages away from his neighborhood. But these
old-timers were not enlisted under the Earp banner and the town's new
rulers had only the other element for retainers.

So now Frank Stilwell robbed stages on the Bisbee road until the
drivers got to know his voice quite well; and he swaggered through the
Tombstone dance-halls bestowing the rings which he had stripped from
the fingers of women passengers upon his latest favorite. Ike and
Billy Clanton enlarged their herds with cattle and horses from other
men's ranges, and sold beef with other men's brands to Tombstone
butchers. And taking it altogether, the whole crew, from Doe Holliday
down, did what they could to bring popular disfavor upon the heads of
the new peace officers.

But if their followers were lacking in the quality of moral courage,
that cannot be said of the Earp brothers. And not long after they took
the reins in their strong hands, an occasion arose wherein they proved
their caliber. Wyatt in particular showed that he was made of stern
stuff.

It came about as a result of the reforms under the new regime. After
the manner of their Dodge City administration the brothers ruled in
Tombstone. They forbade the practice of shooting up the town. He who
sought to take possession of a dance-hall according to the old
custom, which consisted of driving out the inmates with drawn
revolvers and extinguishing the lights with forty-five caliber slugs,
was forthwith arrested. To ride a horse into a saloon and order drinks
for all hands meant jail and a heavy fine. To slay a gambler, or make
a gun-play in a gambling-house, when luck was running badly, resulted
in prosecution.

Virgil Earp attended to these matters, and after several incidents
wherein he disarmed ugly men whose friends stood by eager to let
daylight into the new marshal, he owned a certain amount of prestige.
It is only fair to remark in passing that he had a disposition--in
ticklish cases--to shoot first and ask questions afterward; but that
was recognized as an officer's inalienable right in those rude days.

Now this new order of things did not meet universal popular favor in
Tombstone. There were always three or four hundred miners off shift on
the streets, and while a large percentage of them were peaceable men,
there was a boisterous element. This element, and the cow-boys who had
been in the habit of celebrating their town comings after the good old
fashion, felt resentful. An occasional killing of one of their number
with the invariable verdict from a carefully picked coroner's jury,
"met his death while resisting an officer in performance of his duty,"
made the resentment more general. The recalcitrants said that
Tombstone was being run by a gang of murderers in the interest of the
gamblers.

Opposition to the administration began to crystallize. Things reached
the point where in a twentieth century community reformers would be
preparing to circulate recall petitions. But in the early eighties
they did things more directly, and instead of the recall they had the
"show-down." The malcontents eagerly awaited its coming.

It came. And its origin was in Charleston.

Charleston was eleven miles across the hills from Tombstone down by
the San Pedro River. There was a mill there, and the cow-boys from the
country around came in to spend their money. Jim Burnett was justice
of the peace. Early in the town's history he had seceded from the
county of Pima because the supervisors over in Tucson refused to allow
him certain fees. "Hereafter," so he wrote the board, "the justice
court in Charleston will look after itself." Which it did. Once the
court dragged Jack Harker from his horse, when that enthusiastic
stockman was celebrating his arrival by bombarding the town, and fined
the prisoner fifty head of three-year-old steers. And once--it is a
matter of record--a coroner's jury under his instruction rendered the
verdict: "Served the Mexican right for getting in front of the gun."

Things always moved swiftly in Charleston. There is a tale of a
saloon-keeper who buried his wife in the morning, killed a man at high
noon, and took unto himself a new bride before evening. If that story
is not true--and old-timers vouch for it--it is at least indicative of
the trend of life in the town.

And to Charleston came those followers of John Ringo and Curly Bill
who did not get on with the Earps. Several of them became men of
influence down here on the San Pedro. Hither flocked those boisterous
spirits who craved more freedom of action on pay-day than the mining
town afforded.

Guns blazed in Charleston whenever the spirit moved. The young fellow
who was ditch-tender for the company had to give up his lantern when
he made his nightly trip of inspection, because, as surely as that
light showed up on the side hill, there was certain to be some one
down in the street who could not resist taking a shot at it. So while
dissatisfaction was crystallizing among the miners of Tombstone a keen
rancor against the Earps was developing over by the San Pedro.

This was the state of affairs when Johnny Behind the Deuce brought
matters to a crisis by killing an engineer from the mill.

Johnny Behind the Deuce was an undersized, scrawny specimen of the
genus which is popularly known as "tinhorn," a sort of free-lance
gambler, usually to be found sitting in at a poker-game. The engineer
was a big man and abusive.

There was a game in which these two participated; and when he had lost
his wages to Johnny Behind the Deuce, the engineer sought solace first
in vituperation, then in physical maltreatment. Whereat Johnny Behind
the Deuce shot him. Charleston's constable took the slayer into
custody. The rustlers and other exiles from Tombstone knew the
prisoner for a friend of the Earps, and so they decided to lynch him.
They sent one of their number to get a reata for that purpose.

The constable learned what was going on. He commandeered a buckboard
and a team of mules, put Johnny Behind the Deuce aboard, and drove
the animals on the dead run for Tombstone.

When the man who had been sent for the reata returned, the rustlers
set out after the prisoner and found they were five minutes too late.
They saddled up and started in pursuit.

The road wound along the lower levels between the foot-hills of the
Mule Mountains; there were two or three dry washes to cross, some
sharp grades to negotiate, and several fine stretches which were
nearly level,--a rough road, admirably suited for making a wild race
wilder.

And this was a wild race. The constable and the prisoner were just
getting their team nicely warmed up when they heard a fusillade of
revolver-shots behind them. They glanced over their shoulders and saw
more than fifty horsemen coming on at that gait which is so well
described in the vernacular as "burning the wind." From time to time
one of these riders would lean forward and "throw down" his
six-shooter; then the occupants of the buckboard would hear the whine
of a forty-five slug, and a moment later the report of the distant
weapon would reach their ears.

The mules heard these things too. What with the noise of the firearms
and the whoops of the pursuers they were in a frenzy; they threw their
long ears flat back and entered into the spirit of the occasion by
running away. The constable, who was a cool man and a good driver,
centered his energies on guiding them around the turns and let it go
at that.

Now as the miles of tawny landscape flashed behind them the two
fugitives saw that they were being overhauled. And the pursuers found
that they were gaining; their yells came louder down the wind; they
roweled their lathered cow-ponies. And they drew closer to the
buckboard.

The constable negotiated the dry wash near Robbers Rock on two wheels,
and as the light vehicle was reeling along the easy grade beyond, the
prisoner took another look behind. He told his captor that the wild
riders were not much more than four hundred yards away.

They came to a stretch of level road. The mules were doing a little
better now, and they clattered down into the next dry wash with an
abandon which all but ended matters; the outer wheels went over the
high cut bank, but by the grace of good luck and marvelous driving the
buckboard was kept right side up. And now the lynching party, who had
made a short cut, appeared between the rolling hills not more than two
hundred yards behind.

Johnny Behind the Deuce reported the state of affairs. The constable
answered without turning his head.

"Looks like we're up against it, kid," said he, "but we'll play it out
's long as we got chips left."

Three miles outside of Tombstone stood an adobe building wherein
a venturesome saloon-keeper had installed himself, a barrel of
that remarkable whisky known as "Kill Me Quick," and sufficient
arms to maintain possession against road-agents. The sign on this
establishment's front wall said:

                            _LAST CHANCE_

It was a lucky chance for Johnny Behind the Deuce. For Jack McCann,
who owned a fast mare, was exercising her out here this afternoon
preparatory for a race against some cow-ponies over on the San Pedro
next week. He had trotted her down the road and was about to head her
back toward the saloon for her burst of speed when he saw the
buckboard coming over a rise.

The mules were fagged. The constable was lashing them with might and
main. The lynching party were within a hundred yards.

As Jack McCann surveyed this spectacle which was so rapidly
approaching him the constable waved his hand. The situation was too
tight to permit wasting time. McCann ranged his mare alongside the
buckboard as soon as it drew up; and before the breathless driver had
begun to explain, he cried.

"Jump on, kid."

Johnny Behind the Deuce leaped on the mare's back. The constable
pulled off the road as the lynching party came thundering by with a
whoop and halloo. He peered through the dust which the ponies' hoofs
had stirred up and saw the mare fading away in the direction of
Tombstone with her two riders.

                  *       *       *       *       *

It was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon. That hour was the dullest
of the twenty-four in the gambling-houses, for the evening shift was
on its way to work and the day shift had not yet come off. The Earps
were dealing faro in the Oriental.

To the onlooker who does not know its hazards faro is a funereal game.
The dealer slides one card and then a second from the box. The
case-keeper moves a button or two on his rack. The dealer in the
meantime is paying winners and collecting chips from losers, all with
the utmost listlessness. In his high chair above them, all the lookout
leans back with every external sign of world-weary indifference. And
the players settle a little lower on their stools. There was about as
much animation in the Oriental that afternoon as there is in a country
church on a hot Sunday morning; less in fact, for there was no
preacher present.

Into this peaceful quiet came the sound of hoofbeats from the street.
It stopped abruptly. Two men burst through the front door on a run.
The players looked around and the faro-dealers dropped their right
hands toward the open drawers where they kept their loaded pistols.
Jack McCann and Johnny Behind the Deuce had arrived.

But before the prisoner finished his story, to which he did not devote
more than twenty words or so, a man ran into the Oriental with the
tidings that the miners who were coming off shift were arming
themselves as fast as they left the cages. The rustlers had ridden up
the hill and were gathering reinforcements.

Wyatt Earp at once took charge of the affair. He was a medium-sized
man with a drooping sandy mustache.

"We'll close up, boys," he said.

The show-down had come.

Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Jim took counsel. Doc Holliday advised
with them. A handful of their supporters stood by awaiting their
decision. All others left; the neighborhood was no healthy place for
non-combatants.

The Oriental gambling-house stood on Tombstone's main street at the
intersection of a cross street. Because of its size it would be a hard
place to defend against so formidable a mob as this which was now
moving down the hill. Several doors north on the main street and on
the opposite side, there was a bowling-alley. Its narrowness gave that
building a strategic value. They took Johnny Behind the Deuce there
and set guards at both ends.

Wyatt Earp remained alone out in the middle of the main street just
below the corner. He held a double-barreled shotgun over the crook of
his arm.

The ugly sound which rises from a mob came into the deserted
thoroughfare; the swift tramp of many feet, the growl of many voices.
More than three hundred miners, the majority of whom were armed with
rifles from the company's arsenal, and the fifty-odd members of the
Charleston lynching party swept into Toughnut Street, turned the
corner, and rushed down the cross street toward the Oriental.

They reached the intersection of the main street, and as they faced
the closed doors of the Oriental their left flank was toward Wyatt
Earp. They filled the roadway and the front ranks surged upon the
sidewalk toward the portals of the gambling-house.

Then some one who had seen the prisoner taken to the bowling-alley
shouted the tidings. The throng changed front in the instant and faced
the solitary man who stood there a few yards before them.

Wyatt Earp shifted his shotgun into his two hands and held it as a
trap-shooter who is waiting for the clay pigeons to rise.

In the moment of discovery the mob had checked itself, confronting him
as one man confronts another when the two are bitter enemies and the
meeting is entirely unexpected. There followed a brief, sharp surge
forward; it emanated from the rear ranks and moved in a wave toward
the front. There it stopped. And there passed a flash of time during
which the man and the mob eyed each other.

That was no ordinary lynching party such as some communities see in
these days. Its numbers included men who had outfought Apaches,
highwaymen, and posses; men who were accustomed to killing their
fellow beings and inured to facing death. And the hatred of the Earp
brothers, which had been brewing during all these months, was
white-hot now within them.

"Come on," called Wyatt Earp, and added an epithet.

Above the mass of tossing heads the muzzles of rifles were bobbing up
and down. The trampling of feet and the shuffling of packed bodies
made a dull under-note. Shouts arose from many quarters.

"Go on!" "Get him!" "Now, boys!"

Wyatt Earp threw back his head and repeated his challenge.

"Come on!" He flung an oath at them. "Sure you can get me. But"--he
gave them the supreme insult of that wild period's profanity--"the
first one makes a move, I'll get him. Who's the man?"

Those who saw him that afternoon say that his face was white; so white
that his drooping mustache seemed dark in contrast. His eyes gleamed
like ice when the sun is shining on it. He had the look of a man who
has put his life behind him; a man who is waiting for just one thing
before he dies--to select the ones whom he will take with him.

The cries behind redoubled, and the crowding increased in the rear.
Some leaped on the backs of those before them. But the men in the
front ranks--some of them were bold men and deadly--withstood the
pressure. They held their eyes on that grim, white face, or watched
the two muzzles of that shotgun which he swept back and forth across
their gaze with hypnotic effect.

It was a fine, large moment. Any one of them could have got him at the
first shot. There was no chance of missing. And scores yearned to get
him. Undoubtedly he had attained that pitch where he yearned for them
to do it. And being thus to all intents a dead man,--save only that he
retained the faculty of killing,--he was mightier than all of them.

Those in the front ranks were beginning to slip back; and as these
escaped his presence the others, who had become exposed to it,
struggled against the pressure of their fellows who would keep them in
that position. Some of the cooler spirits were stealing away. The
contagion of indifference spread. The mob was melting.

In the meantime one or two members of the Earp faction had procured a
team and wagon. As soon as the lynchers had dispersed they stowed the
prisoner in the vehicle, and set out for Tucson with a heavy guard.
But there was no pursuit. The reaction which follows perfervid
enthusiasm of this sort had settled down upon the miners and cow-boys.
Johnny Behind the Deuce was tried before the district court, and--as
was to be expected--he was acquitted.

Time went on and dissensions came among the followers of the Earp
brothers. Curly Bill and John Ringo were among the first to fall out
with the leaders, and they took the path of previous exiles to
Charleston. But the country by the San Pedro was being settled up, and
not long afterward they emigrated to Galeyville over in the San Simon
valley. Thenceforth this little smelter town became the metropolis of
the outlaws. Ringo spent most of his time here with occasional trips
to Tombstone, where, on more than one occasion, he dared the Earps to
try to take him. They did not accept his challenges. Finally he died
by his own hand and his friend Curly Bill left the country.

In the meantime new secessions were taking place in the Earp
following. The county of Cochise had been established. Tombstone
was made the county seat. Johnny Behan, an old-timer and an
Indian fighter, was the first sheriff. He was hostile to the city
administration from the beginning. Nor was that all. Lawyers came
into the town and henceforth--provided a dead man's friends had
money--killing an opponent no longer settled a dispute. There
remained such complications as indictment, sworn testimony, and the
jury. The good old days were passing.

Sheriff Johnny Behan charged the Earps with participation in robberies
and wilful cognizance of murders.

It was about as far as he did go as a public official. The brothers
issued profane and pointed defiance and went on dealing faro.

About this time Frank Stilwell quarreled with the Earps and hastily
departed from Tombstone And henceforth, until the wind-up of the ugly
affairs that followed, he remained at large, awaiting his opportunity
for revenge.

Sheriff Behan was trying to get some good charge to bring against the
brothers, and various lawyers--some of them widely known throughout
the Southwest--were anxiously awaiting opportunity to appear as
special prosecutors when the Benson stage was held up.

The Benson stage had been robbed often enough before, but this time
the crime brought far-reaching consequences. Bud Philpots was driver
and Bob Paul, afterward United States marshal, was shotgun messenger.
There was a large currency shipment--some eighty thousand dollars--in
the express-box. The stage was full inside and one passenger, a
Mexican, was riding on top. For some reason or other Bob Paul had
taken the reins and Philpots was sitting in his place. As the vehicle
came to the top of a hill the robbers showed themselves.

The old-timers speak of the conduct of the highwaymen with profane
contempt for instead of shooting a horse or two, they opened fire on
Bud Philpots, whom they believed from his position to be the
messenger. They killed him and the Mexican passenger who was seated
behind him. But the team took fright at the noise and ran away and the
eighty thousand dollars went on up the road in a cloud of dust.

Johnny Behan, the sheriff, said that the Earp brothers sent Doc
Holliday out with the Clanton brothers to commit the crime.

Ike Clanton said that he was rustling cattle at the time down in
Mexico, and accused the Earps of sole responsibility.

The Earps in turn stated that the Clanton boys were the bandits.

And that began the Earp-Clanton feud.

It did not last long, but there was much happening while it was going
on.

The Clanton brothers, Ike and Billy, betook themselves to their ranch
and gathered their friends around them. Frank and Tom McLowrey were
prominent among these allies. And now the statement was made in
Tombstone that the members of this faction had promised to shoot the
Earps on sight.

One October evening Ike Clanton came to town with Tom McLowery, and
Virgil Earp arrested the two on the charge of disturbing the peace. He
did it on the main street and disarmed them easily enough. The justice
of the peace, whose name was Spicer, fined the prisoners fifty
dollars.

The next morning these two defendants went to the 0. K. corral on
Fremont Street, where they had put up their horses the night before.
And there they met Bill Clanton and Frank McLowery. All four were
leading their ponies out of the gate when Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan
Earp, together with Doc Holliday, confronted them.

"Hands up!" Wyatt ordered.

The shooting began at once. Holliday killed Tom McLowery, who was
unarmed, at the first volley. Billy Clanton fell mortally wounded but
continued shooting up to his last gasp. Frank McLowery got a bullet
through his pistol hand but shifted his weapon to the other and kept
on firing until Morgan Earp, who had fallen with a ball through his
shoulder, killed him from where he lay. Ike Clanton jumped a high
fence and fled.

Justice of the Peace Spicer held an examination and exonerated the
slayers on the ground that they had done the thing in performance of
their duty as officers, but friends of the Clantons had money. Some
one retained lawyers to assist in prosecuting the Earps. The sheriff
saw his opportunity and became active getting testimony.

And then, while the town was seething with gossip concerning the
coming trial, Frank Stilwell stole into Tombstone with a half-breed
and slew Morgan Earp, who was playing billiards at the time. The
murder accomplished, Stilwell took a fast horse and rode to Tucson.
The half-breed fled to the Dragoon Mountains.

The next day the three surviving Earp brothers and Doc Holliday
started for California with Morgan's body. At dusk that evening the
train reached Tucson. Now Ike Clanton was in the town, out on bail
awaiting trial for a stage-robbery. And Frank Stilwell was there. It
was no more than natural that the Earps should keep a sharp lookout
when the locomotive stopped at the station.

Their vigilance was rewarded. Stilwell came slipping through the
shadows just as the train was pulling out. The passengers in the
Pullman were startled by a crackling of revolver shots from the rear
platform. Directly afterward the Earps came back inside and took their
seats. And Tucson was given something to talk about that evening by
the discovery of Frank Stilwell's body riddled with bullets beside the
track.

The Earp party held council in the Pullman and determined to return to
Tombstone. Leaving Virgil to complete the journey with Morgan's body,
the other two brothers and Doc Holliday left the train at a way
station and flagged a freight which took them back to Benson. Here
they procured horses and rode to the county seat.

Sheriff Johnny Behan received telegraphic advices from Tucson to
arrest them. He found the trio sometime in the afternoon. They had got
their effects together and sent them ahead on a wagon. They were
themselves on horseback, about to set forth for Colorado.

Wyatt glanced down upon the sheriff as the latter came up.

"Listen," he said. "Don't you even look as if you wanted to arrest
us."

And with that the three rode down the main street. They passed the
saloons and gambling-houses, and men came flocking to the doors to see
them go by.

At the running walk the horses came on, three abreast; the faces of
the riders were set; their eyes swept the crowds on the sidewalks.
They went on by. They turned the corner into the road that leads to
the Dragoons. That was the last that Tombstone ever saw of them.

They stopped at Pete Spence's ranch, where the half-breed was working
who had been with Frank Stilwell on the evening of Morgan's murder,
and a cow-boy found the man's body the next morning.

They rode across wide flats and through great dark mountain ranges,
eastward and to the north, until they came into Colorado.

After the departure of these bold men outlawry took on a new lease of
life in southeastern Arizona. Cattle-rustling, stage-robbery, and
murder went on throughout Cochise County. And at last the people found
a strong man, to whom the law stood for something more than a means of
personal power. They chose for sheriff John Slaughter, who had been
waging war for years on his own account against Apaches and bad men.
But the story of how he brought the enforcement of the statutes into
Tombstone is too long to tell here, although it is a stirring tale and
colorful.

Tombstone to-day stands just as it was back in those wild days of the
early eighties; just as it was--the buildings are unchanged. You may
see them all, and see the streets as they looked when pistols flamed
and men died hard out in the roadway.

But other crowds walk those streets now. And sometimes on an evening
you will see automobiles going down the block with family parties on
their way for a spin along the Benson road where the Clanton boys,
Frank Stilwell, John Bingo, and the other bad men used to rob the
stages in daytime.

On such an evening, should you travel down that highway, you may see
the leaping light of a bonfire by which a group of young people are
toasting marshmallows on the summit of the knoll where Ed Schiefflin
hid from the passing Apaches.

Tombstone is peaceable enough to-day for any man; so peaceable that
one finds it hard to believe there was a time when the town had a
man--or more--for breakfast every morning.




THE SHOW-DOWN


In the early days of Tombstone when miners and merchants and cow-men
and faro-dealers and outlaws were drifting into Cochise County from
all over the West, a young fellow by the name of William C.
Breckenbridge came down from Colorado to the new camp. He was, so the
old-timers say, one of those smallish men who can wear a flannel shirt
and broad-brimmed hat so jauntily that, although their breeches be
tucked into their boot-tops, they still look marvelously neat; but
while he could come through a hard day's ride still suggesting a
bandbox, there was nothing of the dandy about him.

His people had staked him to go out West and at their suggestion he
had hunted up an older brother in Colorado. But two years in the wide
reaches of the Platte country, where the monotony of teaming was
varied by occasional brushes with the Indians, failed to satisfy his
spirit. And so he came riding down into the flaring valleys of the
Southwestern border along with the first influx of adventurers.

He was still in his early twenties and the world looked good to him;
one of those quiet youths who preface most remarks with a smile
because, all other things being equal, they like their fellow-men.

He knocked about the camp, trying this thing and that, and was
starting in at mining engineering with an old marine compass as his
only instrument when Johnny Behan, who was newly appointed sheriff by
the governor, gave him a job as a deputy. Then straightaway the eyes
of men were turned upon him, and the query arose:

"How's he going to stack up when it comes to a show-down?"

Those were the days, you understand, when--to indulge in a Scriptural
figure--he who took up the sword must be prepared to perish by the
sword. If you buckled on a gun you must be ready to draw it, and once
you started to draw it, heaven help you if you did not reckon on going
through with the play.

A man could get by, as the saying has it, if he played the part of a
neutral; but if, on the one hand, you started in at stealing cattle or
if, on the other hand, you pinned on a star--why then, sooner or
later, the big issue was going to come to a head; you were going to
find yourself faced by a foe or foes, armed like yourself, and like
yourself prepared to shoot it out. Then when the show-down came you
would comport yourself according to the stuff that you were made
of--the material which was hidden away deep down under your skin--and
according to your conduct the world would judge you.

So naturally enough in those days men asked this question and waited
for events to bring its answer. And those among them who were not
gifted with the faculty of reading character but needed to see a man
for themselves when the guns were blazing--those individuals had to
wait a long time.

As for the others, what they said to themselves as one adventure
followed another now in the career of Billy Breckenbridge you who read
these words can judge, if you be blessed with ordinary perspicacity.
For many things took place and many months went by before he reached
down along his lean right thigh toward the butt of his forty-five
single-action revolver.

It is quite likely that Johnny Behan was among those who wanted the
new deputy to give a demonstration of the stuff he was made of.
Perhaps that was the reason the sheriff sent young Breckenbridge over
into the eastern end of the county to collect the taxes before the
latter had worn his star long enough to get used to it.

In those days the sheriff's office levied assessments and did the
collecting on personal property at the same time. Payments were made
in cash; bank-checks were virtually unknown in Cochise County. And
thus far the country east of the Dragoon Mountains had yielded no
revenues for the simple reason that it looked as if nothing short of a
troop of cavalry could go forth into that region and return again with
the money.

Beyond those rocky peaks which frowned across the mesquite flat at
Tombstone lay other ragged mountain ranges; the Chiracahuas, the Dos
Cabezas, the Swiss-helms, and the Grahams. Between their towering
walls the valleys of the Sulphur Springs and the San Simon stretched
away and away southward across the Mexican border great tawny plains
pulsating under the hot sun.

Upon their level floors the heat-devils danced all the long days like
armies of phantom dervishes gone mad with their interminable leapings
and whirlings. And strange grotesque mirages climbed up into the
glaring heavens. A savage land wherein savage men rode, as packs of
gray wolves range in the wintertime when meat is scarce, searching the
distant sky-line for some sign of life on which to prey.

For this was no-man's-land. Bands of renegade Apaches lurked among its
empurpled peaks. Companies of Mexican smugglers came northward through
its steep-walled border canyons driving their laden burros to lonely
rendezvous where hard-eyed traders awaited them with pack-mules loaded
down with dobie dollars. A few lonely ranch-houses where there was
water in the lowlands; in the mountains a sawmill or two and some
far-flung mines; here the habitations were like arsenals. Honest men
must go armed to work and sleep with arms by their bedsides, and even
then it was advisable for them to ask no questions of those who rode
up to their cabins.

And it was best for them to make no protests at what such guests did
unto their own or the property of others. For since the days when the
first semblances of law had come to Tombstone this region had been the
sanctuary of the bad men.

When you crossed the summits of the Dragoon Mountains you were beyond
the pale. Hither the stage-robber came, riding hard when the list of
his crimes had grown too long. The murderer, the rustler, and the
outlaw spurred their ponies on eastward when the valley of the San
Pedro was too hot for them and took refuge here among their kind. On
occasion the bolder ones among them ventured back to show themselves
on Tombstone's streets or swagger into Charleston's dance-halls; but
never for long and never unless they were traveling in formidable
groups.

And then sooner or later they would slip away again to the wild passes
and the long and lonely valley flats where there was no law excepting
that which a man carried in his pistol-holster. One after another
those who were "short" in other places had drifted before the winds of
public opinion to gather in this eastern end of Cochise County where
two whose qualities of deadliness surpassed those of all the rest were
recognized, because of that superior ability at killing, as the big
"He Wolves." These two were Curly Bill and John Ringo.

When they were not leading their followers in some raid against the
herds of border cattlemen, or lying in wait to ambush one of the armed
bands of smugglers, or standing up the stage, these two were usually
to be found in Galeyville. You will not see Galeyville named nowadays
on the map of Arizona and if you look ever so long through the San
Simon country, combing down the banks of Turkey Creek ever so closely,
you will not discover so much as a fragment of crumbling adobe wall to
show that the town ever existed.

But it did exist during the early eighties and its life was noisy
enough for any man. There came a day when the neighboring mines shut
down and the little smelter which furnished a livelihood for the
honest members of the population went out of business; later the
Apaches erased everything that was combustible from the landscape and
the elements finished the business.

But when John Ringo and Curly Bill held forth in Galeyville there was
a cattle-buyer in the place who did a brisk business because he asked
no embarrassing questions concerning brands. Which brought many a
hard-eyed rustler thither and sent many a dollar spinning over the
battered bars.

Such were the eastern end of Cochise County and its metropolis when
Johnny Behan told young Billy Breckenbridge to cross the Dragoons and
collect taxes throughout that section. If he expected a protest he was
mistaken, for Breckenbridge took the bidding with his usual
good-natured smile. And if the sheriff looked for a request for a
posse he was disappointed. The new deputy saddled up his horse one
morning and rode forth alone, trim and neat as usual and, for all that
any one could see, without a care on his mind.

He rode up the wide main street which bisects Tombstone from end to
end, descended the hill and started his horse across the flatlands
toward the ragged pinnacles of Cochise's stronghold.

Eastward he rode through tall mesquite thickets, over rolling hills
where clumps of bear-grass grew among spiked yuccas and needle-pointed
tufts of Spanish bayonet, and climbed the pass beyond. From its summit
he looked down upon the wide reaches of the Sulphur Springs valley,
level as a floor, as tawny as a lion's skin.

Then he descended from the sky-lined pinnacles of granite to the
plain. Under the blazing heavens pony and rider showed upon that
glowing surface as a tiny dot; a dot that moved slowly on and on until
the yellow-brown carpet of the bunch-grass came to an end and was
replaced by a gleaming sheet of alkali. Before that crawling dot the
mirage wavered and undulated like a weirdly painted back-drop stirring
in the wind.

The dot crept on, took strange new shapes that changed phantasmally,
then vanished behind the curtain of which for a passing moment it had
been a part. Thus young Breckenbridge rode beyond the dominion of the
written law and was swallowed up by no-man's-land.

When he had started forth from Tombstone he merely knew his errand; he
owned no plan. Now as the splendid star-lit nights followed the long,
blazing days he began, to see a course of action and this led him on,
until one day he came down into the San Simon country and rode into
the town of Galeyville.

The enterprising citizen whose cattle-buying business helped to keep
dollars spinning across the bars of this outlaw metropolis was mildly
curious when young Breckenbridge introduced himself that afternoon.
The presence of a sheriff's deputy was enough to set any one to
thinking in those days.

His curiosity gave way to unspoken wonder as the caller unfolded his
mission and stated the name of the man whom he wanted to see. Anyhow,
this meeting promised to be worth while witnessing; the cattle-buyer
said as much.

"Reckon we'll find him up the street right now," he added, and led the
way to a near-by saloon.

There were a number of men in the place when the pair entered; a
quintet playing cards, and as many others scattered about a quiet
pool-game. And one burly fellow was lying on a poker-table, curled up
for all the world like a sleeping dog. Now and then one of the
gamblers would lift his head to take a look at the new-comers, and for
a brief instant young Breckenbridge would find himself gazing into a
pair of hard, steady eyes. Then the eyes would be lowered and the
player would go on with the game.

It was during this uncomfortable interval of general sizing-up that
the proprietor entered, a red-faced man and short of stature. He had
been out to get a bucket of water; he set the pail down by the end of
the bar and filled a tin cup from it.

"Here's how, boys," he said with loud facetiousness, and lifted the
cup.

The burly man, who had apparently been awakened by the words, uncoiled
himself, came to crouch with one arm supporting his body on the
table-top and--all in the same lithe movement--drew his big-caliber
revolver from the holster.

"Don't drink that stuff. It's pizen," he shouted, and with the last
word his weapon flamed.

The tin cup flew from the saloon man's hand. A shout of laughter rose
from the crowd at the two games; then the pool-balls clicked again
and--

"Raise you ten," a poker-player said.

Breckenbridge's guide beckoned to the man who had done the shooting.
He came across the room, shoving his gun back into the holster, a
rather thickly built man but well-knit and there was a soft spring in
his slowest movements which suggested snake-like quickness. He was
dark-eyed, and his hair was a mat of close black curls. The
cattle-buyer nodded, to indicate the introduced one.

"This," he said, "is Mr. Breckenbridge, one of Johnny Behan's
deputies."

And--

"This is Curly Bill."

Young Breckenbridge smiled as usual and stretched forth his right
hand. But the eyes of Curly Bill were narrow and his hand came out
slowly. There was that in his whole manner which said he was on guard,
watching every movement of the deputy.

And for this there was good reason. It was not long since Curly Bill
had stood in very much the same attitude on Tombstone's street facing
Town Marshal White, the only difference being that his right hand on
that occasion had been proffering his pistol, butt foremost, to the
officer. And in the passing of the instant while Marshal White had
touched the weapon with his fingertips the forty-five had swiftly
reversed ends, to spit forth one leaden slug.

The officer had dropped in the dust of the roadway and Curly Bill had
ridden out of town with a thousand dollars on his head. A thousand
dollars was a thousand dollars and there was no telling what a man who
wore a nickel-plated star might have up his sleeve.

"Mr. Breckenbridge," the cattle-buyer said as the two palms met, "is
here on civil business."

The eyes of Curly Bill resumed their normal shape. His fingers
tightened over the deputy's.

"Howdy," he said. "What yo' going to have?"

While the sting of the cow-town whisky was still rankling in their
throats a man entered the front door.

"Oh, Bill," he called across the room, "your hoss is daid."

Deserting the bar to delve into this mystery, they found the outlaw's
pony stretched out beside the hitching-rack near the rear of the
building. The owner cast one glance at the dead animal; then his eyes
went to a shattered window.

"'Twas when I shot that cup from Shorty's hand."

He shrugged his big shoulders and, with a grin--

"Plenty more good ponies in the valley--and the nights are moonlight
now."

When they were back facing the battered bar young Breckenbridge
explained, his business in no-man's-land.

"And this end of the county," he wound up, "is sort of rough. If I'd
ride around alone, packing that money, somebody's liable to get the
best of me when I'm not looking for it. I've got to have a good man
along to help take care of that roll. And I'd admire to have you make
the trip with me."

Curly Bill was a great deal slower at thinking than he was at drawing
his gun and there was much food for thought in that bold proposition.
He gazed at young Breckenbridge for some moments in silence. Gradually
his lips relaxed. Smiling, he turned and addressed the occupants of
the room.

"Boys," he cried, "line up."

And when the line was formed before the bar he waved his hand.

"This here's the deputy sheriff, come to collect the taxes in our end
of the county; and I aim to help him do the job up right."

By what means Curly Bill supplied himself with a new pony this
chronicler does not know. But it is a fact that the outlaw rode forth
from Galeyville the next day along with Johnny Behan's deputy, to
guide the latter through the Sulphur Springs valley and the San
Simon--and to guard the county's funds.

Travel was slow in those days; accommodations were few and far
between. Outlaw and deputy jogged down the long, glaring flats
enshrouded in the dust-fog which rose from their ponies' hoofs; mile
after mile of weary riding under a scorching sun. They climbed by
winding trails through narrow canyons where the heat-waves jigged
endlessly among the naked rocks. They camped by lonely water-holes and
shared each other's blankets under the big yellow stars.

By day they watched the sky-line seeking the slightest sign of moving
forms; by night they kept their weapons within easy reach and slept
lightly, awakening to the smallest sound. They scanned the earth for
tracks and, when they found them, read them with the suspicion born of
knowledge of the country's savagery.

And sometimes other riders came toward them out of the desert to pass
on and to vanish in the hazy distance; men who spoke but few words and
watched the right hands of the two riders as they talked. But none
attacked them or made a show toward hostility. Now and again the pair
stopped at a ranch-house or a mine where Breckenbridge added to the
county's money in his saddle-bags.

And as the days wore on, each with its own share of mutual hardship to
bring these two to closer companionship, they began, as men will under
such circumstances, to unfold their separate natures. Under the long
trail's stern necessity they bared to each other those traits which
would have remained hidden during years of acquaintance among a city's
tight-walled streets.

A carelessly spoken word dropped at hot noontide when the water in the
canteens had given out; a sincere oath, uttered by the fire at
supper-time; a long, drowsy conversation as they lay in their blankets
with the tang of the night breeze in their nostrils, gazing up at the
splendor of the flaming stars; until they knew each other man to
man--and Curly Bill began to feel something like devotion to his
purposeful young companion. Thenceforth he talked freely of his deeds
and misdeeds.

"Only one man that ever got the drop on me," the outlaw said one
evening when they were lying on their blankets, enjoying the long
inhalations from their after-supper cigarettes, "and that was ol' Jim
Burnett over in Charleston, two years ago."

He paused a moment to roll another smoke. A coyote clamored shrilly
beyond the next rise; a horse blew luxuriously feeding in the
bunch-grass. Curly Bill launched into his tale.

"He was justice of the peace and used to hold co't in those days
whenever he'd run on to a man he wanted. Always packed a double-barrel
shotgun and he'd usually managed to throw it down on a fellow while he
tried the case and named the fine.

"Well, me and some of the boys was in town this time and things was
slack. Come a Sunday evenin' and I heard how some married folks had
started up a church. I hadn't been inside of one since I could
remember and we all made up our minds to go and see what it was like.

"Things had opened up when we come into the door and we took our
seats as quiet as we could. But the jingle of our spurs made some
people in the congregation--the' wasn't more'n a dozen of 'em--look
around. And of co'se they knew us right away. So, pretty quick one or
two gets up and leaves, and soon afterward some more, until first
thing we knew our bunch was all the' was stickin' it out.

"Along about that time the preacher decided he'd quit too, and he was
edging off to head for the back door when I got up and told him to
stop. Folks said afterwards that I throwed down my fo'ty-five on him
but that wasn't so. Wasn't any need of a gun-play. I only said that
we'd come to see this deal out and we meant to have it to the turning
of the last card and if he'd go ahead everything would be all right.

"So he did, and give out a hymn and the boys stood up and sang; and he
preached a sermon, taking advantage of the chanc't to light into us
pretty rough. Then it come time for passin' round the hat and I'll bet
the reg'lar congregation never done half so well by the collection as
we did.

"Well, sir, next mo'nin' I was sittin' in front of the hotel in the
shade of those big cottonwoods, sort of dozing, having been up kind of
late after the church-going; and the first thing I knew somebody was
saying--

"'Hanzup.'

"I opened my eyes and here was ol' Jim Burnett with that double-barrel
shotgun throwed down on me, I knew there was no use tryin' to get the
play away from him, either; only a day or two before that he'd stuck
up Johnny Harker and fined him a bunch of three-year-old steers for
shootin' up the town. So I obeyed orders and--

"'Curly Bill,' says he, 'yo' 're tried herewith and found guilty of
disturbin' the peace at the Baptis' Church last evenin'; and the
sentence of this co't is twenty-five dollars' fine.'

"I shelled out then and there and glad to do it, too. Them two muzzles
was lookin' me right between the eyes all the while."

Up in the San Simon country they ran short of grub and after going two
days on scanty rations--

"The' 's a canyon fifteen miles south of here," the outlaw said. "I
reckon some of the boys might be camping there now."

They rode hard that afternoon and reached the place some time before
sundown. The boys of whom Curly Bill had spoken were there all right,
ten of them, and none of the number but was known at the time over in
Tombstone either as a rustler or a stage-robber. His guide introduced
Breckenbridge with the usual terseness of such ceremonies among his
kind.

Whatever of constraint there was at the beginning wore away during the
progress of the evening, and on the next morning before they left the
gorge the young deputy worked his way into the good graces of his
hosts by winning twenty dollars from them shooting at a mark.

By this time they were nearing the end of their tour and it was only a
few days later, when they were crossing the Sulphur Springs valley
toward the frowning Dragoons, that Curly Bill bestowed a final
confidence upon his companion. They were nooning at the time and
somehow or other the usual question of revolver-handling had come up.

"I'm goin' to tell yo'-all something," said Curly Bill, "that mebbe it
will come in handy to remember. Now here."

He drew his forty-five and held it forth butt foremost in his right
hand.

"Don't ever go to take a man's gun that-a-way," he went on, "for when
yo' are figuring that yo' have the drop on him and he is makin' the
play to give it up--Jest reach out now to get it."

Breckenbridge reached forth with his right hand. The outlaw smiled.
His trigger-finger glided inside the guard; there was a sudden wrist
movement and the revolver whirled end for end. Its muzzle was pressing
against the deputy's waist-band.

"Did it slow so's you could see," said Curly Bill. "Now yo'
understand."

And Breckenbridge nodded, knowing now the manner in which Marshal
White had met his death on the day when his companion had fled from
the law.

In no-man's-land they shook hands at parting.

"So-long," said Curly Bill. "See you later."

And the deputy answered with like brevity, then rode on to Tombstone.
Those who had banked on the big issue wherein Breckenbridge would
smell the other man's powder-smoke were disappointed. And there were
some among them who shook their heads when the young fellow's name was
mentioned, saying, as they had said in the beginning:

"Wait till the show-down comes; then we'll see how he stacks up."

But Sheriff Johnny Behan was open in his rejoicings. For the sheriff's
enemies were many and some of them were powerful, and his conduct in
office was being subjected to a great deal of harsh criticism,
oftentimes, it must be admitted, with entire justice. So when the
smiling young deputy returned from a region where Cochise County had
hitherto been unable to gather any taxes, and deposited a sum wherein
every property-owner in that region was properly represented, here was
good news with which to counteract accusations of laxity.

And that was not all. As far as law and order went, the country east
of the Dragoons was a foreign land; and when Breckenbridge had told
the story of his journeyings with Curly Bill, explaining how the
outlaw had been zealous in nosing out those citizens whose property
was assessable, how he had safeguarded the county's money, then the
sheriff saw how he had on his force one whom he could use to good
account.

Other officials were unable to carry the law into no-man's-land; but
he had, thenceforth, at least an envoy. And he knew that there would
be times when diplomatic representation was going to come in very
handy.

From that day on, when anything came up in the Sulphur Springs valley
or in the San Simon, Billy Breckenbridge was despatched to attend to
the matter. Time and again he made the journey until the cow-men in
the lowlands came to know his face well; until the sight of a deputy
sheriff's star was no longer an unwonted spectacle in Galeyville. And
as the months went by he enlarged the list of his acquaintances among
the outlaws.

But his errands were for the most part concerned with civil matters.
Now and again there was a warrant for stock-rustling, but the rustlers
carried on their business in the open at that time and there were few
who dared to testify against them. Bail was always arranged by the
accommodating cattle-buyer at Galeyville, so that such arrests
invariably turned out to be amicable affairs.

Among those who were sitting back and waiting for the big show-down
there was a little stir of anticipation when young Breckenbridge rode
forth armed with a warrant for John Ringo. For Ringo was a bad man of
larger caliber than even Curly Bill. He was the brains of the outlaws,
and the warrant charged highway robbery.

But the thrill died away when the deputy came riding back with his
man; and there was something like disgust among the waiting ones when
it was learned that the prisoner had stayed behind in Galeyville to
arrange some of his affairs and had ridden hard to catch up with his
captor at the Sulphur Springs ranch.

Anticipation flamed again a little later and it looked as if there was
good reason for it. For this time it was a stolen horse and
Breckenbridge had set forth to recover the animal. A rustler might be
willing to go through the formalities of giving bail at the county
court-house, or even to stand trial, but when it came to turning over
stolen property--and doing it without a struggle--that was another
matter. Moreover, this horse, which had been taken from the Contention
Mine, was a thoroughbred, valued high and coveted by many a man.
There was good ground for believing that the fellow who had made off
with him would put up a fight before letting him go again.

Now when he left Tombstone on this mission Johnny Behan's young
diplomatic representative was riding a rented pony, his own mount
being fagged out from a previous journey; and this fact has its
bearing on the story later on. The wild country is always easier
ground in which to trace a fugitive or stolen property than the
crowded places for the simple reason that its few inhabitants are
likely to notice every one who passes; besides which there are few
travelers to obliterate tracks.

And Breckenbridge learned before he had gone very many miles that
the badly wanted horse was headed in the direction of the McLowery
ranch. The McLowery boys were members of the Clanton gang of
rustlers and stage-robbers. It did not need a Sherlock Holmes to
figure out the probabilities of where that horse was being pastured
now. Breckenbridge pressed on to the McLowery place.

Night had fallen when he arrived and the barking of many dogs heralded
his approach to all the surrounding country. Breckenbridge knew the
McLowery boys well, as well as he knew the Clantons and a dozen other
outlaws, which was well enough to call one another by their first
names.

But these were ticklish times. The big Earp-Clanton feud was nearing
its climax. The members of the latter faction--several of whom were
wanted on Federal warrants which charged them with stage-robbery--were
keeping pretty well holed up, as the saying is, and it was not
unlikely that if any of them were in the ranch-house at the time, the
visitor who was not extremely skilful in announcing himself would be
shot first and questioned afterward.

So when Billy Breckenbridge came to the house he did not draw rein but
kept right on as if he were riding past. Fortune had favored him by
interposing in his path an enormous puddle, almost a pond, the
overflow from a broken irrigation ditch. He pulled up at this obstacle
and hallooed loudly.

"Any way through here?" he shouted. "This is Breckenbridge."

A moment's silence, and then a streak of light showed where the front
door had been opened a crack.

"Sit quiet on that there hoss," a gruff voice commanded, "and lemme
see if you _be_ Breckenbridge."

"Hallo, Bill," the deputy sheriff answered. "Yes, it's me all right."

And Curly Bill opened the door wider, revealing his burly form.

"Put up yo'r pony in the corral," he said, "and come in."

When Breckenbridge had complied with the last part of the invitation
he found the bare room filled with men. The McLowery boys were there,
two of them, and the Clantons. Half a dozen other outlaws were
lounging about, and Curly Bill himself was looking none too pleasant
as he nodded to the visitor.

"Cain't tell who might come ridin' in these nights," he growled by way
of explanation for his curt welcome. "Set up and eat a bite now yo'
're here."

The lateness of the meal and the general dishevelment of the room's
occupants made it clear to the guest that every one had been riding
hard that day. It was an awkward moment and the constraint endured
long after the last man had shoved back his chair and rolled his
brown-paper cigarette.

Curly Bill found an opportunity to get young Breckenbridge off to one
side during the evening.

"What's on yore mind?" he asked.

The deputy told him.

"The superintendent owns that horse," he explained, "and he's a good
friend of mine. Not only that, but if I get it back it means a whole
lot to the office; it'll put Behan solid with those people over at
Contention, and that helps me."

The outlaw nodded but made no remark by way of comment. Some time
later he sat up at the oilcloth-covered table talking quietly with
Frank McLowery. And Brenckenridge saw McLowery scowling. Then he felt
reasonably sure who had stolen that blooded animal and who was going
to bring it back to Tombstone in the morning.

Bedding-rolls were being unlashed within the half-hour. McLowery
brought Breckenbridge a pair of blankets.

"Reckon you'll have to make down on the floor same as the rest of the
boys," the outlaw growled and then, as if it were an afterthought,
"That there boss yo' 're looking fer is near the ranch."

And that was all the talk there was on the subject during the evening.
But Breckenbridge spread his blankets and lay down among the rustlers
serene in mind. Evidently the horse was going to be in his possession
the next morning.

McLowery's sullenness seemed to have been contagious and there were no
good-nights said to the guest. He knew every man in the room; some of
them he had known ever since that evening when Curly Bill had taken
him to the rustler's camp is the San Simon. But the best he got from
any of them was an averted look; several were scowling openly. Even
Curly Bill had put aside his usual heavy joviality. It was clear that
the burly leader had strained a point in going as far as he had. Some
men might have felt uneasy in dropping off to sleep under the
circumstances, but Breckenbridge understood his hosts well enough to
be certain that, so long as he was on the ranch, the sacred rites of
hospitality were going to be observed. So he closed his eyes and the
last thing he heard was the snoring of outlaws and murderers.

The next morning he awakened to find that several of the company had
departed. No one made any comment on that fact and there was no
mention of the stolen horse. But when the deputy had downed his last
cup of coffee Frank McLowery took him outside and showed him the
animal tethered to a hitching-rack.

"Much obliged, Frank," said Breckenbridge.

The stage-robber gave him a sour grin.

"Bet yo' never fetch him back to Tombstone," he answered quietly.

The two looked into each other's eyes and smiled. You may have seen a
pair of fighters smiling in that same way when the gong has sounded
and they have put up their hands at the beginning of a finish
contest.

Now under these circumstances and remembering the absence of several
of the best horsemen in the bunch from the ranch-house, many a man
would have put his saddle on the thoroughbred that morning. But
Breckenbridge had managed to assimilate some of the wiles of diplomacy
during these last few months and he reasoned that if there were a
pursuing-party waiting for him to leave the ranch they would be
prepared for that same contingency. Better let them think him unready;
then perhaps they would let him get the lead. And once he got it, luck
would have to help him carry out his plan. He saddled the hired pony
and rode away, leading the recovered animal.

Before he had gone a half-mile beyond the ranch buildings he saw that
he had figured rightly. The floor of the Sulphur Springs valley did
not hold so much as a bush by way of cover; and here, off to the left,
his eyes fell on a group of horsemen. Evidently they had been watching
him ever since he left the corrals and knew the poorness of his mount,
for they were making no effort to overhaul him as yet.

But he realized that the gang must have graver business on hand than
the recovery of the thoroughbred; they were not going to waste any too
much time over this affair and he would not be allowed to travel far
if they could help it. Just then a wagon outfit climbed out of a dry
wash directly ahead of him and he saw how luck had given him his
chance.

He rode on, leisurely closing in upon the train. Off there to the left
the outlaws were keeping pace with him, but as yet they were making no
attempt to lessen the distance between them. He came up with the last
wagon, turned off the road beside it, and had the clumsy covered
vehicle between him and the rustlers. Then he dismounted.

The wagons kept on moving; now and again the teamsters glanced toward
him curiously. He barely heeded them save to see that they made no
sign to the now invisible outlaws. It took all the skill that he owned
to keep both his horses walking while he unsaddled the one and threw
the saddle upon the other. But at last the change was made and he
flung himself upon the thoroughbred's back. Shouting to the nearest
teamster to lead the abandoned pony back to Tombstone, he put spurs to
his fresh mount and came out in the road ahead of the foremost span of
leaders on a dead run.

There were six of the outlaws and they were less than half a mile
away. Breckenbridge had been out of sight behind the wagons just a
little too long to suit them and they were cutting in toward the road
now at top speed.

From the beginning it was a stern chase and they had only one hope of
winning. Nothing less swift than a bullet could ever catch that
thoroughbred. They pulled up at once and began shooting. But although
some of the slugs from their rifles came uncomfortably close none
found its mark and Breckenbridge was fast drawing away from them.
However, they were not the men to give up so long as there was any
chance remaining, and they swung back into their saddles to "burn up
the road" in his wake.

Now all hands settled down to make a long race of it, and it was not
until he was climbing the first slopes toward South Pass in the
Dragoon Mountains that Breckenbridge looked back for the last time
and saw the shapes of those six horsemen diminishing in the distance
as they jogged back toward the McLowery ranch.

So through the good-will of Curly Bill young Breckenbridge recovered
the thoroughbred from the man who had stolen it and brought it to
Tombstone without being obliged to reach for his own gun. And moreover
there were no hard feelings about it when he rode back into
no-man's-land the next time. So far as Frank McLowery and the Clanton
boys were concerned the incident was closed. The deputy had won out
and that was all there was to it.

As a matter of fact only a month or so later a horse-thief from
Lincoln County, New Mexico, came to grief at Galeyville because he did
not understand Breckenbridge's status in the rustlers' metropolis.
This bad man from the Pecos had a pretty sorrel pony and the deputy,
who was in the place on civil business, happened to notice the animal
at the hitching-rack in front of the hotel.

"Say," he said to its possessor, who was standing near by, "that's a
nice horse; where'd you get him?"

The remark was a careless one in a country where ponies often changed
owners overnight, and the man from the Pecos was sensitive enough on
the subject to resent the question from one who wore a star. He
answered it by drawing his gun.

Breckenbridge, who was as dexterous with his left hand as with his
right, reached down as the weapon came forth from its holster and
gripped the stranger's wrist. He gave a sharp wrench and the revolver
clattered down on the sidewalk. And then Curly Bill, who had
witnessed the incident, stepped forward and ordered the visitor out of
Galeyville.

"Yo'-all don't need to think," the desperado added, "that you can come
here and make a gun-play on our deputy. We get along all right with
him and I reckon we ain't going to stand for any cow-thieves from
Lincoln County gettin' brash with him."

Something like two years had passed now since young Billy Breckenbridge
first rode across the Dragoon Mountains into no-man's-land and, as the
old-timers who had been watching him all this time well knew, things
could not go on in this way forever. The show-down was bound to come. It
came one day at the Chandler ranch and the old-timers got the answer
to their question.

There were two young fellows by the name of Zwing Hunt and Billy
Grounds who had been working at Philip Morse's sawmill over in the
Chiracahua Mountains.

Somehow or other they had got mixed up with the stock-rustlers and the
temptation to make easy money proved too strong for them. One evening
they went over to the Contention mill and held up the place, killing
the man in charge.

Johnny Behan was out of town at the time with several deputies after
the Earps who had departed from Tombstone. The under-sheriff detailed
Breckenbridge on the case and drafted a posse of three men to help
him.

"No, sir," the former said when the young deputy remonstrated against
the presence of these aides. "This ain't a case of talking John Ringo
into coming over and putting up a bond. This here's murder and those
lads are going to show fight."

Orders were orders; there was no use arguing further. The erstwhile
diplomat made the best of a bad matter and rode away with his three
companions. It was evening when they left Tombstone and the Chandler
ranch lay several hours distant. Those who saw them leave the camp
spread the news. And now the old-timers settled down, certain that
when Billy Breckenbridge returned they were going to know just what he
was made of.

He came back the next evening, riding alongside a lumber-wagon. In
those days the mining companies maintained a hospital at the edge of
the town. The vehicle made one stop at this institution and unloaded
three of its occupants. It made a second stop before the establishment
of a local undertaker, where two bodies were removed. And then young
Breckenbridge rode on alone to the court-house. Two outlaws and four
men in the deputy sheriff's party makes six altogether. Out of the six
he was the only one left on his feet.

"And the hull thing didn't last five minutes," said "Bull" Le

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