Jess Fisher had heard a noise at the store. He had stepped out to investigate. Immediately had come the crash of two guns. Whatever was taking place, it was quickly over. Running footsteps faded into the distance. Then silence.
Slaughter and the two women found Fisher lying dead on the little platform in front of the door of the store. His pockets were turned inside out and his watch was gone. Eighty dollars was missing from the cash drawer of the commissary. From the bunkhouse, Manuel Garcia and José Perez, employed on the ranch, had disappeared.
Four Mexicans, it developed, had been concerned in the robbery. Garcia and Perez were caught next day at a neighbouring ranch. Garcia, nineteen years old, had lived on the Slaughter ranch since boyhood. Perez, who had been in Slaughter’s employ only a few days, was said to have served with Pancho Villa’s guerrillas. Arcadio Chavez, taken in Agua Prieta with Fisher’s watch in his possession, made a clean breast and implicated Manuel Rubio as the fourth man. The robbers, Chavez said, had planned to murder the entire family at the ranch and loot the place. He and Rubio had shot Fisher. If Slaughter had come running out, as they expected, they would have killed him. But as the old fighter had been saved from the trap, the fear of his six-shooter, Chavez declared, prevented the carrying out of the plan for wholesale murder.
Garcia and Perez were sent to the penitentiary for life. Rubio was never apprehended. Chavez, it was reported, went through a form of trial at Hermosilla in Mexico and was acquitted. Manuel Garcia, according to Chavez, had planned the robbery. His murderous treachery was a shock to Mrs. Slaughter. He had been her personal chore boy, and she had taken a mother’s interest in his bringing up.
Slaughter’s life was saved that night by his mysterious warning. His murder was to have been the crux of the plot. If he had continued a minute longer to read his newspaper by the window in the brilliantly lighted dining room, he unquestionably would have been killed. His lifelong confident assertion that he could not be killed seemed to have been verified again. Now, near the close of his career, his Guardian Angel was still on watch.
Slaughter’s last years were as serene as the sunlight that bathes the San Bernardino Valley. He lived in peace and contentment. He rode occasionally; he pottered in his kitchen garden; he walked among his flower beds, bringing a fresh rose every morning to lay beside his wife’s plate on the breakfast table. He sat on the pleasant veranda in the long, languorous afternoons and watched the cloud shadows drift across the vegas or let his eyes rest on the shadowy beauty of the blue mountains of Mexico. His eighty years of life, that from first to last had been one long romance of the frontier, ended from apoplexy . He had done his work well and had earned his rest. No more forceful or picturesque character ever made history in pioneer Arizona than this John Slaughter who, carrying law in one hand and a six-shooter in the other, established peace and prosperity in his corner of the wilderness of the Southwest.
XXI
Hands Up!
Bisbee is a city, you might say, of only one dimension—length. It lies like a piece of string along the bottom of a narrow canyon in the Mule Mountains. Its main street in the bed of the winding slit is miles long with handsome business blocks near the middle of the thread and good-looking residences out at the ends. Of course, if one wishes to be precise, there is a little width and a little height to the town, and the height up the canyon walls is about as great as the width across the canyon. The residences hang on the steeps as if glued there. A business man going home to lunch journeys straight up by a series of ladderlike steps that bear street names. If you enjoy mountain climbing, Bisbee will appeal to you as an ideal place of residence. If you happen to be fat, you will fall into a panic at mere sight of the town.
Under the main street is a giant subway to drain off the water when it rains. After a storm, the water roars through the subterranean sluice like an express train and flows out in a spreading flood on the plains at the south end of the canyon. It is surprising what a seething torrent the tiny drops of a light rain will form when they trickle down the mountainsides and merge at the bottom of the canyon. If it were not for this subway, a light shower might wash the town away.
Right in town at the edge of the business centre is the Copper Queen mine. It seems, in a way, to merge with the stores. You pass a soda fountain and a haberdashery shop with windows full of shirts and come to one of the richest copper mines in the world. Crushed in between its mountain walls, this bizarre little city of 22,000 people is the metropolis of southeastern Arizona. Twenty-six miles north is Tombstone. An equal distance south are Douglas and the Mexican border.
Bisbee, with its schools and churches and wealth and culture, has travelled a long road since its boom days as a mining camp in the early ’eighties when copper was struck in the Mules. Then it was a rough town full of boozing kens and brothels and dance halls, and Brewery Gulch was famous as a rendezvous for hard characters from the four corners of the frontier. But it was a busy, moneymaking place, too, and from the first it grew steadily and solidly. It was like a piece of string in that yesterday of long ago, as it is today, and its one-story frame business houses and shanty saloons
