JOHN SLAUGHTER'S WAY
IT was springtime in southwestern Texas and John Slaughter was gathering a great herd near the mouth of Devil's River for the long drive northward over the Pecos trail. Thousands of cattle were moving slowly in a great mass, obliterating miles of the landscape, trampling out clouds of dust which rose into the blue sky; the constant bellowing came down the wind as a deep, pulsating moan which was audible for miles.
The Man from Bitter Creek reined in his horse and turned in the saddle to look back upon that scene. He was a small man with hard, quick eyes; they grew harder as they rested on that wealth of beeves.
In the wild country farther up the Pecos the Man from Bitter Creek was known by the name of Gallagher. Among the riders who roved over that Land Beyond the Law, taking their toll from the north-going herds as gray wolves take it under cover of the night, he passed as the big “He Wolf,” the leader of the pack. Wyoming's sage-brush hills gave sepulture to eleven of his dead, and since he had fled hither he had added two graves to the boot-hill cemeteries of the Southwest.
Now as he gazed over John Slaughter's cattle, he promised himself that when they came on into the region where he maintained his supremacy, he would seize them and, at the same time, increase his grim list of victims to fourteen.
It was an era in some respects very much like the feudal days of Europe, a time of champions and challenges and deeds of arms, a period when strong men took definite stands for right or wrong and were ready at all times to defend those positions with their lives. The Man from Bitter Creek had received John Slaughter's gage within the hour. He had dismounted from his pony at the cattle-buyer's camp, attracted by the spectacle of that enormous herd destined to pass through the country where he and his companions held sway, and he had hung about the place to see what he could see.
He noted with satisfaction that the cattle were sleek and fat for this time of the year; and the satisfaction grew as he peered through the dust-clouds at the riders who were handling them, for every one of the wiry ponies that passed him carried a swarthy vaquero—and half a dozen of those Mexicans would not be a match for one of the hard-eyed rustlers who were waiting along the upper Pecos in that spring of 1876. Just as he was congratulating himself on such easy pickings the cattle-buyer noticed him.
John Slaughter was in his early thirties but his lips had settled into an unrelaxing line, and his eyes had grown narrow from the habit of the long sun-smitten trails. He was black-bearded, barely of middle stature, a parsimonious man when it came to using words. When he was a boy fighting under the banner of the Lost Cause he sickened, and his colonel sent him home, where he did his recuperating as a lieutenant of the Texas rangers fighting Comanche Indians and border outlaws.
Then he drove cattle into Kansas over the Chisholm and Western trails and got further seasoning in warfare against marauders, both red and white. To maintain his rights and hold his property against armed assault had become part of his every-day life; guardedness was a habit like those narrowed eyes. And when he recognized the Man from Bitter Creek, whose reputation he well knew, he lost no time in confronting him.
So they faced each other, two veteran paladins who had been riding under hostile banners ever since they first bore arms; and John Slaughter delivered his ultimatum in three syllables.
“Hit the trail,” he said, and clamped his lips into a tight line as if he begrudged wasting that many words.
His eyes had become two dark slits.
It was a case of leave or fight and the Man from Bitter Creek had never allowed such a challenge to go unanswered by his gun. But during the moment while he and John Slaughter stood looking into each other's eyes he reflected swiftly, and it occurred to him that it would be wise to postpone this killing until the cattle-buyer had brought the herd on into the upper country where, without their employer, the Mexican vaqueros would be of no more consequence than so many sheep.
That was an inspiration: thousands of cattle for his own, where he had hoped to steal a few hundred at the very outside. He felt that he could well afford to mount his pony and ride away in silence. Now as he settled himself in his saddle after that last look backward, his heart was light with the thought of the wealth which was to come to him within the next two months. He urged the pony forward at a gallop toward the Land Beyond the Law.
The days went by, and late springtime found the Man from Bitter Creek in the upper river country which lies just west of the great Llano Estacado. Among those lonely hills the badness of the whole frontier had crystallized that year. Outlaw and murderer, renegade, rustler, and common horse-thief—all for whom the eastern trails had been growing too hot—had ridden into this haven beyond the range of the boldest sheriff until even the vigilance committee could not function here for the simple reason that there were too many to adorn the ropes and too few to pull them.
The ranchers of Lincoln County were starting in business, and the temptation to increase one's herds by means of rope and running-iron—a temptation which was always strong on the frontier—was augmented among some by a wholesome regard for their own lives and property: better to give shelter to outlaws and buy stolen cows for a dollar or two a head, than to defend your own stock against an overwhelming force of dead shots. There were others—and these included several of the bigger cow-men—who held that this was their territory and, deeming all outsiders interlopers, levied such toll of plunder on them as the old feudal barons levied on travelers by the Rhine in medieval times.
That was the way they reasoned; and the rustlers had easy pickings, stampeding range cattle across the bedding-grounds of the trail herds, gathering unto themselves the strays, disposing of their loot right on the spot. They were taking full advantage of the opportunity, and the Man from Bitter Creek was getting his share of the spoils.
But all of this struck Gallagher as petty business now; he was waiting impatiently for John Slaughter's herd. At Chisum's ranch, where he and a number of his companions had enforced their presence as unbidden guests since the passing of the spring, he proclaimed his plan openly after the manner of his breed; and he even went so far as to exhibit a forged power of attorney by virtue of which he intended selling the beeves in the Northern market, after he had killed their owner and driven off the Mexicans.
“I'll lay for him up Fort Sumner way,” he told his fellow-wolves, nor did he take the trouble to lower his voice because he saw several cow-boys from neighboring outfits among his auditors. It was a tradition among those who lived by the forty-five thus to brag and then—make good. And it was a firmly established habit in Lincoln County to mind your own business; so the project, while it became generally known, created no excitement.
The Man from Bitter Creek went up the river to the neighborhood of Fort Sumner when John Slaughter's herd drew near the Chisum ranch. He made his camp and bided the arrival of the cattle; but that arrival did not materialize. He was beginning to wonder what could have delayed them, for the fords were good and this particular section was one where no drover cared to linger. And while he was wondering a rider came to him with tidings that brought oaths of astonishment to his lips. John Slaughter had taken his herd off the trail and made camp at the Chisum ranch.
Now every one in the country knew that the Man from Bitter Creek was holding down the Chisum place that season, and the action was nothing more nor less than a direct challenge. It did not matter whether sublime ignorance or sublime daring prompted it; it was defiance in either case. There was only one thing for Gallagher to do—get the killing over in quick time. Moreover he must attend to the affair by himself—for just as surely as he took others to help, his prestige was going to be lowered. So he saddled up at once and rode back to Chisum's with a double-barreled shotgun across his lap and two single-action forty-five revolvers at his hips.
He was an old hand at ambush and so he took no chances when he drew near the ranch but reconnoitered a bit from a convenient eminence. The house stood on the summit of a knoll; the land sloped away before it to the river, bare of shrubs or trees. Those of the Mexicans who were not riding herd were down among the cottonwoods by the stream, busy over some washing. In the middle of the open slope, two hundred yards or so from the ranch buildings and a good quarter of a mile from the nearest vaqueros, a solitary figure showed. It was the cattleman. No chance for ambush here. The Man from Bitter Creek spurred his pony to a dead run and came on blithely to shoot his way to wealth.
John Slaughter watched him approaching and waited until he was within easy range. Whereat he picked up a forty-four caliber rifle and shot his horse from under him.
Pony and rider crashed down together in a thick cloud of dust. The Man from Bitter Creek sprang to his feet and the flame of his revolver made a bright orange streak in the gray-white haze. He left his shotgun where it had fallen; the distance was too great for it.
As a matter of fact it was over-long range for a Colt forty-five; and now, as he came on seeking to close in, it occurred to Gallagher that his prospective victim had used excellent judgment in selecting a weapon with reference to this battleground. Evidently he was engaged with one who knew some things about the deadly game himself.
He took good care to keep weaving about from side to side during his advance, in order that the bead of that Winchester might find no resting-place with his body outlined before it. And he kept his revolvers busy throwing lead. One bullet was all it needed to do the work and he was trying hard to put one into the proper place, using all the skill he had attained in long practice under fire, when a shot from John Slaughter's rifle broke his arm. The Texan was firing slowly, lining his sights carefully every time before he pressed the trigger. The Man from Bitter Creek was darting to and fro; his revolver bullets were raising little clouds of dust about the cattleman. He was nearing the area wherein the forty-five revolver was more deadly than the clumsier rifle, when John Slaughter shot him through the body.
But he was made of tough fiber and the extreme shock that would leave some men stunned and prostrate only made him stagger a little. His revolver was spitting an intermittent stream of fire and it continued this after a second slug through his lungs had forced him to his knees. He sank down fighting and got his third fatal wound before the cow-boys carried him up to the ranch-house to die. There, after the manner of many another wicked son of the border, he talked the matter over dispassionately with his slayer and in the final moment when death was creeping over him he alluded lightly to his own misdeeds.
“Anyhow I needed killing twenty years ago,” he said.
No one mourned the passing of the Man from Bitter Creek; the members of the pack who hunt the closest to the big he wolf are always the gladdest to see him fall. Nor was there any sorrowing when John Slaughter departed for the north. On the contrary both outlaws and cow-men watched the dust of his herds melting into the sky with a feeling of relief.
The outlaws continued as the weeks went by to speak his name with the hard-eyed respect due one whose death would bring great glory on his slayer; the cow-men cherished his memory more gratefully because hundreds of cattle bearing his road-brand were grazing on their ranges. All hands were more than willing to regard the incident as closed—all save John Slaughter.
That was not his way. And in the season of the autumn round-up when the ranchmen of Lincoln County were driving their cattle down out of the breaks into the valley, when their herds were making great crawling patches of brown against the gray of the surrounding landscape, the black-bearded Texan came riding back out of the north. He visited every outfit and greeted the owner or the foreman with the same words in every case.
“I've come to cut your herd for my brand.”
That was the law of the cattle-trails; every man had the right to seek out his strays in the country through which he had passed. But it was not the custom along the Pecos. In that Land Beyond the Law the rule of might transcended any rule of action printed in the statute-books. And the new possessors did not fancy giving up the beeves which had been fattening on their ranges during all these weeks. In those lonely hills John Slaughter made a lonely figure, standing on his rights.
But those who gathered around him when he made the declaration always noticed that he had his right hand resting on his pistol-butt and the memory of what had taken place at Chisum's ranch was still fresh in every mind. So they allowed his vaqueros to ride into their herds and in silence they watched them drive out the animals which bore his brand. Sometimes the affair came to an issue at this point.
Chisum, who was an old-timer in the country and had fought Comanches all along the river before others had dared to drive up the trail, produced a bill of sale for sixty rebranded cattle which the Texan's vaqueros had cut out. John Slaughter allowed his tight lips to relax in a grim smile.
“You bought 'em all right—but too cheap,” he said, and ordered his foreman to take them away.
Chisum stormed a bit, but that was as far as it went. And John Slaughter rode off behind his vaqueros without so much as looking back.
At Underwood's there was trouble. The cattle-buyer had recovered 110 steers from a bunch of 160, and when Underwood heard about it that evening he stated, in plain and profane terms, that he would kill John Slaughter unless those beeves were turned back to him. He had a reputation as a dead shot and he took two friends, who were known as good gunmen, along with him. They set forth for the Texan's camp. All three were armed with rifles beside their six-shooters.
But John Slaughter saw them coming, for he was keeping his eyes open for visitors these days, and dismounted on the opposite side of his pony. He received them with his Winchester leveled across his saddle and he answered their hail without lifting his eyes from the sights.
“Where's Underwood?” he demanded.
The cow-man announced his identity; it took more than the muzzle of a rifle to silence him.
“I bought those cattle and I paid for them,” he shouted.
“And I'll pay you,” Slaughter proclaimed across his sights, “just as sure as you try to take them away.”
This was about all there was to the debate. The Texan was never strong when it came to conversation and the other party seemed to realize that further words would merely amount to so much small talk under the circumstances. It was a show-down—shoot or ride away. And the muzzle of that rifle had an unpleasant way of following any one of the trio who made a move in the saddle. They were men of parts, seasoned fighters in a fighting land, but they were men of sense. They rode away.
Some miles farther down the river John Slaughter was biding the arrival of two half-breeds and a pair of rustlers who had announced their intention to get him, when a vaquero whom he had summoned to help him receive the guests showed symptoms of reluctance. While the vaquero was talking the invaders came into view, riding fast.
“Fight or hit the road,” John Slaughter bade his swarthy aide.
The latter announced his choice in Spanish; and the cattle-buyer paid him off with one hand while he pulled his rifle from its sheath with the other. The discharged vaquero did not wait to gather his scanty personal possessions and started down the road as fast as his legs could take him, but before he was out of sight his former employer had fortified himself behind his pony and brought the rustlers to a stand.
A cattleman by the name of Richardson tried swearing out a warrant as a means of recovering the beeves which John Slaughter cut out of his herds, but the deputy returned with the paper unserved.
“He told me to keep it in my pocket,” the officer explained. “Said I couldn't serve it.”
Richardson met the cattle-buyer riding to his ranch the next day, having heard in the meantime some stories of what had taken place farther up the river.
“I've made up my mind to withdraw that complaint,” the ranchman said. “I saw a chance to buy cheap cattle and I guess I got off wrong.”
So John Slaughter rode on southward taking with him such of his cattle as he could find, and men who boasted that they would kill him before nightfall came back to their companions in the evening, glad that they were there to tell the tales of their defeats. Finally he vanished down in Texas with his vaqueros and the salvaged herd.
When he had come up the river that spring one man was seeking his life; now he left behind him a full score who were as eager to slay him as the Man from Bitter Creek had been. But the outlaws of Lincoln County did not see him again for three years.
The next spring he began breaking trail to a new market through a country where others did not dare to drive their herds. The market was southeastern Arizona, on whose ranges the grass grew belly-deep; its stockmen, who were beginning operations in 1877, were in sore need of cattle. But the interval between the Rio Grande and these virgin pastures was a savage land; Victorio's bands of turbaned Apache warriors lurked among its shadowed purple mountains; there were long stretches of blistering desert dotted with the skeletons of men and animals who had died of thirst.
John Slaughter brought his first herd west of the Pecos with the coming of the grass, and his cow-boys lined them out on this forbidding route. They crossed wide reaches of sand-dunes and alkali flats—ninety miles was the length of one of those dry drives—where they never saw a water-hole for days, until the cattle went blind from thirst and sun-glare and wandered aimlessly over the baked earth lolling their tongues, moaning for drink, ignoring the red-eyed riders who spurred their famished ponies through the stifling dust-cloud and sought by shouts and flaming pistols to hold them to the proper course.
The Apaches watched them coming from the heights and crept down to ambush them, but John Slaughter had learned Indian-fighting while he was still in his teens until he knew its tricks as well as the savages themselves; and he led his cow-boys out against them, picking his own ground, swooping down on them from vantage-points, routing them.
The herd came on into the long thin valleys which reach like fingers from northern Mexico to the Gila River. On the San Pedro the cow-boys turned them southward and the outfit made its last camp near where the town of Hereford stands to-day.
Here the Texan established his home ranch, for he had made up his mind to forsake the valley of the Rio Grande for this new country; and hither now, over the trail which he had broken, his men drove other herds; he sold them to the cow-men of southeastern Arizona as fast as they came in. From now on he devoted himself to stocking the ranges of the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Sulphur Springs, and the San Simon, turning a tawny wilderness into a pastoral commonwealth.
For he brought more than Texas cattle into this land which had heretofore been the hunting-ground of Apaches, the wild refuge of white renegades more savage than the Indians. Where he came he took with him the law. It was his way—the way he had taken on the Pecos and he kept it now—to stand for his own rights, to fight for them if need be, until he established them; thus he maintained a rule of action, a rule that accorded with the definition of the old English jurist, “prescribing what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.”
During those days he rode on far journeys, eastward to the Rio Grande, northward to the country where the land breaks toward the gorges of the Colorado; and because a cattle-buyer was always a marked man, carrying large sums of money with him, there were many who sought his life. But these he slew or drove away.
There came a time when the demand for stock was so heavy that he looked about him for a new point of supply and saw Mexico. Troops of bandits rode through the southern republic, gathering tribute where they willed. He loaded down pack-mules with dobie dollars, led his cow-boys down across the boundary, played hide and seek with bands of swarthy murderers in the mountains, and battled with them at the desert water-holes.
His fame spread until forty-five guerrillas came riding up from Sinaloa to gain wealth and glory by murdering his little company. They found John Slaughter and two cow-boys encamped in a hamlet down beyond Moctezuma with the nucleus of a herd which they were gathering. A sharp-eyed scout reported two pack-mules, their aparejos bulging with dobie dollars, in the train. Immediately thereafter the Mexicans whom the drover had employed as vaqueros and guides deserted him; the people of the hamlet closed their houses against the trio of gringos.
The bandits watched their prospective victims going from door to door, seeking four walls to shelter them against attack, and laughed. That was fine sport to their way of thinking; they held off, just as a cat holds off from a cornered mouse; there was plenty of time for the killing, no use of hurrying.
The shadows lengthened between the little adobe buildings; dusk came on. They had a final round of drinks in a mescal groggery, swung into their saddles, and went jingling down the street to enjoy the massacre.
Bad news travels fast. The tidings sped northward like a stray horse running home. One day a rider came to the ranch on the San Pedro with the story: how John Slaughter was last seen alive in the dismal hamlet at the foot of the Sierra Madre, abandoned by his Mexicans, with two cow-boys as his only companions, and half a hundred well-armed bandits on their way to murder him. A grim tale for the ears of a woman who was waiting word from Mexico.
A woman heard it out—John Slaughter's young bride. He had brought her to the ranch-house a few months before and in these first days of her happiness, a happiness made the more poignant by those deep anxieties which the brave-souled women of the frontier had to bear, she listened to the announcement which abiding dread had foreshadowed during many a lonely night. When the rider had departed she ordered a team harnessed to the buckboard and set forth for Mexico within the hour.
It was growing late when she passed the customhouse; they had no confirmation of the rumor for her there, nor contradiction either; the best they could do was to try to hearten her and to advise her to wait. But she shook her head at the advice and drove on southward in the darkness. She was alone. Blackness hid the land before her; save for the drumming of the hoofs and the scrape of the wheels in the rough roadway there was no sound. The wilderness remained silent, invisible, offering no sign of what tragedy it held for her.
The night passed; gray dawn came; the sky flamed above the ragged crests of the Sierra Madre; the sun climbed past the mountain wall; morning grew on toward noon. Far to the south—so tenuous at first that it barely showed against the clear air, now thickening until it was unmistakable at last—a gray-brown dust column was climbing into the cloudless sky. It came on toward her as she urged on the jaded team, the signal of an advancing herd.
She strained her eyes and saw the thin, undulating line beneath it; the sun gleamed on the tossing horns of the cattle, their lowing sounded faint with distance, growing into a deep pulsating moan. She distinguished the dots of horsemen in the van; and now one rode on swiftly before the moving mass. She recognized her husband from afar.
John Slaughter had seized his opportunity while the bandits were drinking to their own good luck and his death in the mescal shop. He and John Roberts, his foreman, had taken the treasure-laden mules up a steep-walled cañon five miles away. When the murderers followed the hot trail they found themselves, with the coming of darkness, in the narrowest part of the defile, so neatly ambushed that they wheeled their horses and rode down the gorge in full flight before the fight had fairly begun.
John Slaughter's wife was a brave woman. She rode beside him now on many an expedition; into the sand-hills of southwestern New Mexico, and down across the border into northern Sonora. She saw the smoking remnants of wagon-trains beside the road, the bodies of Apaches' victims sprawled among the ruins. She looked upon the unutterably lonely crosses which marked the graves of travelers where Victorio's turbaned warriors had traveled before her into Mexico. She slept beside her husband where the desert night wind whispered of lurking enemies; and watched enshadowed soap-weeds beyond the ring of firelight taking on the semblance of creeping savages.
He beheld her drinking deeply from the cup of dread which was the bitter portion of the strong-hearted women of the frontier. And when he journeyed away without her he had for company the constant knowledge of what other men had found on return to their ravaged homes—what might be awaiting him when he came back. And so he enlarged the scope of his warfare, which heretofore had been confined to the defensive; he began a grim campaign to keep the Apaches out of his portion of the San Pedro valley for all time.
He led his own war-parties out to hunt down every roving band who passed through the country. He used their own science of reading trails to track them to their camping-places; and their own wiles to steal upon them while they rested. He improved on their methods by making his raids during the darkness when their superstitions made them afraid to go abroad.
One midnight he was deploying a company of Mexicans about the mesquite-thicket which sheltered a band of warriors. As he was about to give the whispered order to close in, the unknown dangers which awaited them within the blackness became too much for his followers. They balked, then began to fall back. He drew his forty-five.
“First man that shows another sign of hanging back, I'll kill him,” he said in Spanish, and drove them before him to the charge.
Gradually the Apaches began changing their warpaths into Mexico, and as they swung away from his ranges John Slaughter increased the radius of his raids until he and his cow-boys rode clear over the summits of the passes in the Sierra Madre which lead eastward into Chihuahua.
With nine seasoned fighters at his heels he attacked a war-party in the heights of the range on the dawn of a summer morning; and when the Indians fled before the rifle-fire of the attackers—scurrying up into the naked granite pinnacles like frightened quail—they left a baby behind them. The mother had dropped it or missed it in her panic, and the little thing lay whimpering in the bear-grass.
John Slaughter heard it and stopped shooting long enough to pick it up. With the bullets of her people buzzing around his ears he carried the brown atom down the mountain-side and took her home on his saddle to his wife.
That was one of his last expeditions, for his name had become a byword among the tribes, and Geronimo himself gave instructions to his people to leave John Slaughter's herds inviolate, to avoid his range in traveling. With this degree of peace ensured, the cow-man had bought an old Spanish grant not far from where the town of Douglas stands to-day and was settling down in the security for which he had been fighting, when the Tombstone rush brought the bad men from all over the West into the San Pedro and Sulphur Springs valleys; and with them came the outlaws of the Pecos who had been waiting to kill him during these three years.
In the wild cow-town of Charleston where the lights turned pale under the hot flush of every dawn the desperadoes from the Pecos learned how John Slaughter had established himself before them in this new land; how his cow-boys patrolled the range which he still held on the San Pedro and the new range farther to the east, guarding his herds by force of arms; and how the silent Texan had already declared war on the whole incoming tribe of cattle-thieves by driving Ike and Billy Clanton from his old ranch at revolver's point, bidding them never to show their faces there again.
They heard these things in the long adobe dance-halls while rouge-bedizened women went whirling by in the arms of bold-eyed partners wearing revolvers on their hips. From stage-robber, stock-rustler, horse-thief, and the cold-faced two-gun man who sold his deadly talents to the highest bidder, the stories came to them. And then, to the beat of the piano and the cornet's throbbing blare, the bad men of the Pecos told of the passing of the Man from Bitter Creek, and how his slayer came back down the river recovering his stolen cattle in the autumn.
Now another champion had risen among the bad men of the Pecos since the day of Gallagher, a burly, headstrong expert with the forty-five, known by the name of “Curly Bill.” Already he had shot his way to supremacy over the other “He Wolves” who had flocked into the new country; he had slain Tombstone's city marshal and defied the Earps when they came into power in the booming mining camp.
When it came to a question of single combat he was acknowledged champion among those who lived by what toll they could exact at the muzzles of their deadly weapons; when it came to warfare he was the logical leader. And so, when John Slaughter's name was spoken in Charleston's dance-halls, the eyes of his followers were turned on him. He saw those glances and he read the unspoken question which they conveyed; he met it with a laugh.
“I'll go and get that fellow,” he proclaimed. “I'll kill him and I'll fetch his herd in to Charleston myself.”
He started forth to make good his boast, and twenty-five hard-eyed followers went riding at his heels. It was a wild project even in that wild era and Curly Bill deemed it wise to do his massacring down in Mexico, where it was every man for himself and coroner's juries were not known. He took his company across the boundary and lay in wait for John Slaughter on a mesa overlooking a little valley, down which the herd must pass.
Mesquite-thickets gave the outlaws good cover; the slopes below them were bare brush; the valley's floor was open ground. They bided here and watched the country to the south. The dust column showed one cloudless morning and they saw the undulating line of cattle reveal itself beneath the gray-brown haze. The herd came on down the valley, with dust-stained riders speeding back and forth along its flanks, turning back rebellious cows, urging the main body forward. Curly Bill spoke the word of command and the twenty-five bad men rode forth from their hiding-place.
The sun gleamed on their rifle barrels as they spurred their ponies down the open slope. They rode deep in their saddles, for the ground was broken with many little gullies and the horses were going at a headlong pace. They drew away from the shelter of the mesquite and descended toward the valley bed. Some one heard a rifle bullet whining over his head. The man glanced around as the sharp report followed the leaden slug; and now every face was turned to the rear. Twelve cow-boys were following John Slaughter keeping their ponies to a dead run along the heights which Curly Bill and his band had so blithely forsaken.
It was a custom as old as Indian-fighting; this bringing on of the main force over the high ground whence they could guard against surprise and hold the advantage over luring enemies. By its result the ambuscaders were ambushed, riding headlong into a trap.
It was a simple situation, apparent to the dullest mind. Who lingered on the low ground would never steal cattle again. The outlaws wheeled their ponies to a man; and now as they raced back up the hill they saw the cow-boys coming onward at a pace which threatened to cut them off from the shelter of the mesquite. Then panic seized them and it held them until the last cow-thief had spurred his sweating horse into the thickets. By the time Curly Bill had re-gathered his scattered forces the herd was nearly out of sight.
He did not seek renewal of the attack. He let it go at that. And when he came to Charleston he announced that so far as he was concerned the incident was closed; he was going to do his cattle-rustling henceforth over San Simon way where cow-men did not maintain rear-guards and scout out the country ahead of them for enemies. He changed his base of operations to Galeyville within a month and came to Charleston for pleasure only.
The story spread and every man who deemed himself as bad as Curly Bill saw his opportunity to demonstrate his qualifications as a killer by succeeding where the leader had failed. Doc Holliday tried it one night on the Charleston road. Next to Wyatt Earp he ranked as the highest in the faction that was ruling Tombstone. Unquestionably he was an artist with deadly weapons, and the trail of his wanderings through the West was marked by wooden headboards. On the evening in question—it was the evening after the bloody and unsuccessful attempt to rob the Benson stage, and several men were riding hard toward home and help and alibis—he was spurring his sweating horse to Tombstone when he got sight of John Slaughter's double rig ahead of him.
The cattle-buyer had drawn ten thousand dollars from the bank that afternoon and was taking the specie home with him; the fact was known in Charleston where Doc Holliday had stopped within the last hour. The vehicle was rounding a long turn; the horseman cut across country through the mesquite; he reached the farther end of the curve just in time to draw alongside the team.
John Slaughter's wife was beside him on the driver's seat. She saw the rider bursting out of the gloom, and then her eyes fell on the forty-five which he was in the very act of “throwing down.”
“That man has a gun in his hand,” she cried.
Without turning his head her husband answered, “So have I.”
She glanced down at his cocked revolver; its muzzle was moving, to follow the enshadowed figure in the saddle less than ten feet away. She raised her eyes; the horseman had lowered his weapon and was wheeling his pony off into the night.
“Knew his bronco as soon as I saw that blazed face show,” John Slaughter said in explanation of his quick draw.
That same vigilance, which had grown to be second nature with him, combined with an almost uncanny swiftness in putting two and two together, which latter had come to him during the years when guarding his life was a part of his trade, kept the cow-man a step ahead of his enemies on every occasion. These things were instinctive from long habit; he prepared himself to meet a situation just as an expert gunman draws his forty-five—just as a scientific boxer blocks a blow—without wasting an instant in thinking.
It was thus with him when Ed Lyle and Cap Stilwell waylaid him on the road to the Empire ranch over near Port Huachuca. These two, who had endured humiliation under the muzzle of the Texan's pistol on the Pecos trail, brought four others along with them and planned to do the murder in the night. Three took their stations on one side of the wagon track and three on the other, all well armed. They had spotted the victim's buckboard several miles back.
Now when it came on to the spot which they had selected, the two trios galloped up to do the killing—and found John Slaughter leveling a double-barreled shotgun while his wife held the reins. One glimpse of that weapon at the cattle-buyer's shoulder was enough; they did not wait for him to pull the trigger but fled.
John Slaughter was wearying of this sort of thing. Lyle and Stilwell were men of parts; good men of whom to make examples. He sought the former out in Charleston. They met in front of a saloon on the main street. John Slaughter drew and, as he threw down—
“I've got no gun,” Lyle cried.
“If you were armed,” the cow-man said, “I'd kill you now. But if I ever see you in this country again, I'll kill you anyhow.”
Lyle left and Cap Stilwell, receiving his sentence of banishment in the same manner, departed within a week. From that time the bad men let John Slaughter alone; he was too big for them. He took his family to his new San Bernardino ranch and it was beginning to seem as if the days of constant warfare were over. He was settling down to enjoy peace in his home, when a call for help made him forsake the security which had been so hard to earn.
That security was unknown elsewhere in Cochise County. The strong men who had seized the reins in Tombstone, wielding their power for their own selfish ends, were gone; they had ridden away with warrants out against them. The outlaw leaders were dead: John Ringo, Curly Bill, the Clantons, and others who had swaggered where they willed, had met violent ends.
With their passing the courts were trying to administer the statutes, but the courts were impotent. The statutes were mere printed words. For the rank and file of the bad men were raiding and murdering under the guidance of new leaders who furnished them with food and ammunition, notified them of the movements of the officers, procured perjured witnesses to take the stand in their behalf, and bribed jurymen.
Money and influence were taking the place of deadly weapons to uphold a dynasty whose members reigned unseen and under cover, whose henchmen looted express-cars, stole cattle, and murdered men on the highways, until things had come to such a pass that President Arthur had issued a proclamation threatening martial law in Southeastern Arizona.
And now the people of Tombstone, grown sick with blood and much violence, called to John Slaughter to take the office of sheriff and bring the law to them. It meant the abandonment of his herds just as he was getting them well started, the putting aside of plans which he had cherished through the years. But he answered the call and forsook the San Bernardino ranch for the dingy little room beside the court-house entrance. Before he had got fairly acquainted with the new quarters war was on.
Cochise County was being used as a haven by bandits throughout the Southwest. Four train-robbers fled hither from Mexico, where they had looted an express-car and killed the messenger, soon after John Slaughter's term began. He took his chief deputy, Bert Alvord, and two others and followed their trail high into the Whetstone Mountains. In the night-time the posse crawled through the brush and rocks to the place where they had located the camp of the fugitives.
A man must leave many things to chance when it comes to choosing his position in the dark, and it so happened that when dawn came the sheriff and his deputy found themselves right under the nook where the bandits were ensconced; the other members of their party had become separated from them.
They had the enemy nicely cornered, with a cliff to cut off escape to the rear, but they were themselves in the open; two men against four and the four entrenched behind outcroppings of the living rock.
A small space of time was jammed with many large incidents immediately after this discovery. Men attaining supreme exaltation died in the instant of that attainment; pulses that leaped with the joy that comes when sight lines with bead, bead with living target and the trigger-finger begins to move, ceased their beating more abruptly than a machine stops when the power is turned off.
The leaden slugs snarled as thick as angry wasps when the nest has been disturbed; the crackling of the rifles was as a long roll; little geysers of dust spouted among the rocks; the smoke of black powder arose in a thin blue haze.
A bullet clipped away a little portion from John Slaughter's ear. He called to Alvord:
“Bert; you're shooting too high; pull down; I see you raising dust behind 'em every time.”
Alvord, fighting his first battle, clenched his teeth and lowered his front sight. John Slaughter had prefaced his advice by killing one of the bandits; he supplemented it by putting a bullet through a head that bobbed above the rocks. And when the other two members of the posse came to take part in the fight, there was only one train-robber living. They found him breathing his last where he had crept away among the cliffs.
But killing desperadoes would not eradicate the reign of lawlessness unless a man slew the entire pack; and John Slaughter had no intention of instituting a St. Bartholomew's eve in Cochise County. Thus far he had managed to get along with less bloodshed than many a man who had not accomplished nearly as much as he. So now he went on with his task as he had gone about his business always and proceeded to smoke out the men who were responsible for this state of affairs.
It was not so hard to learn their identity as it was to get the proof of what they were doing. That was slow work. But he had hired Bert Alvord as his deputy with just this end in view. For Alvord was hail-fellow-well-met in every bar-room of the county; owner of a multitude of friends, many of whom were shady characters. In later years he gained his own dark fame as an outlaw, but that was long after John Slaughter left the office of sheriff.
At present Alvord was working honestly and hard, getting such information as he could concerning who was who among the desperadoes, gathering data as to their movements. The facts began to accumulate: a word dropped in a gambling-hall, a name spoken before a noisy bar, a whispered confidence from a prisoner who felt his companions had not done all they might in his behalf.
Gradually the evidence took the shape of a long finger pointing toward Juan Soto, who was living in the little town of Contention, as the leader who was handling matters in the San Pedro valley. About this time John Slaughter began riding out of Tombstone under cover of the night. The days went by; the sheriff came back to Tombstone morning after morning, red-eyed with weariness, put up his pony, and went about his business saying nothing as usual.
One day news came to the county seat that two cattle-buyers had been robbed and murdered down near the Mexican line. John Slaughter saddled up and rode over to Charleston that morning, and when Juan Soto came into town he met the sheriff who addressed him over the barrel of a leveled forty-five.
“I'll just take you along with me to-day,” John Slaughter said.
It was a good tight case. Tombstone was startled by the news that Juan Soto had been a member of a bandit band in California. The sheriff was able to give some first-hand testimony concerning the defendant's nocturnal habits. But the community's excitement slumped to sullen anger when the jury brought in its verdict and Juan Soto smiled as he departed from the court-house a free man.
Things had reached a pass where a vigilance committee appeared to be the appropriate climax. But that was not John Slaughter's way; if any one were going to take the power of the high justice he proposed to be the man. He rode over to Contention and camped in front of Juan Soto's house late in the evening. The night passed, and when the bandit leader came riding home from Charleston with the dawn, he saw the sheriff standing before his door.
Both men reached for their revolvers at the same moment, but John Slaughter's hand was quicker. It was his chance to kill; according to the ethics of the gun-play he had that right. But he chose a different course.
“Leave the country,” he said. “If you're here after ten days, I'll kill you on sight.”
Soon after Juan Soto departed on his exile, the town of Wilcox over in Sulphur Springs valley was treated to a sensation, in the banishment of Van Wyck Coster. Every one thought Coster had enough money and influence to keep him immune from legal proceedings, but John Slaughter wasted none of the county's money in arrest or trial.
“I've known what you were doing for a long time now,” he announced, holding his revolver leveled on his auditor while he spoke. There was some debate, but the sheriff clinched his argument by going into details, and when he had finished outlining the prosecution's case he delivered his ultimatum: “Get out or I'll kill you.”
Coster joined Juan Soto in exile. And then it became a simple matter of hunting down outlaws and bringing them in for trial. The arm of the law was limbered and justice functioned in the Tombstone court-house as well as it does in any city of the land; far better than is the case in some more pretentious communities. There was of course plenty of work left. Tombstone is full of stories of John Slaughter's exploits.
A desperado, seeking to kill him, threw down on him as he was entering a saloon. Caught unawares for once, the sheriff flung up his hand and, as he grasped the pistol, thrust his thumb under the descending hammer. Meantime he drew his own weapon and placed the man under arrest. Two train-robbers sought to lure him to Wilcox by a decoy letter stating that his nephew had been killed. The instinct which had saved him from other ambuscades made him investigate; and when he learned that his nephew was living he summoned a friend who made the journey with him. The spectacle of these two old-timers emerging from opposite doors of the day coach, each with a double-barreled shotgun under his arm, drove the conspirators from the station platform. Years afterward one of them confessed the details of the plot.
John Slaughter served two terms as sheriff, and when he retired from office Cochise County was as peaceable as any county in the whole Southwest. The old-timers who witnessed the passing of events during his régime invariably speak of him when they are telling of great gunmen. Yet, from the time when he started up the Pecos with that herd in the spring of 1876 until the day when he went to his San Bernardino ranch to take up life as a peaceful cattleman, he slew fewer men than some whose names are absolutely unknown. What he did he managed to accomplish in most instances without pulling a trigger. That was his way.