When the West Was Young Part 4

"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 gra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sume the functions of a duly organized munic.i.p.ality, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 mult.i.tude of suggestions. Amus.e.m.e.nts 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 a.s.sessment 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 t.i.tles 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 pa.s.sengers 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 ma.s.s 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sumed 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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-gra.s.s 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 Pa.s.s.

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 a.s.sayer 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.