Part 17 (1/2)

”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 circ.u.mstances. 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 ma.s.sacre.

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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.pe 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.