Deputy Sheriff Daniels traced Dan Dowd into Chihuahua. The two men met one day on the street of Corralitos, a little mining town in the Sierra Madre Mountains.
“Hello, Dan,” said Daniels.
“Hello, Bill,” said Dowd.
But Daniels spoke over the barrel of a forty-four and Dowd returned the greeting with his hands in the air. Extraditing a criminal from Mexico was slow work in those days. So Daniels smuggled his prisoner across the line, and Dowd was soon in a cell in Tombstone. Delaney was arrested in Minas Prietas in Sonora by a Mexican officer. Without extradition papers, Daniels brought the prisoner over the border in a box car. Kelly was arrested in Deming in a barber’s chair while his face was covered with lather. The barber had identified him by a photograph.
Red Sample and Tex Howard arrived in Clifton with plenty of money and cut a splurge in underworld resorts. Howard, in princely fashion, bestowed a gold watch upon a woman. Vain of the gift, the siren exhibited it to an admirer who examined it with eyes green with jealousy but not too green to identify the timepiece, by description sent broadcast, as having been part of the loot of the Bisbee massacre. So the enamoured Howard did not bask long in beauty’s smiles. The jealous lover betrayed him, and Howard and Red Sample, shackled hand and foot, took the trail for Tombstone.
Dowd, Sample, Howard, Kelly, and Delaney were tried together before Judge D. H. Pinney in Tombstone and sentenced to hang. Their execution was set for March 28th. Heath, tried separately, was convicted of murder in the second degree, and on February 21st, sentenced to life imprisonment. Bisbee had viewed the hanging verdict for the five robbers with deep-seated satisfaction, but it burst into a storm of rage when it learned that Heath had escaped the gallows. A mass meeting was held. Citizens thundered indignation. Resolutions were passed. And next morning, while the dawn of Washington’s Birthday was red over the Mule summits, a committee of fifty Bisbee men, mounted and armed, rode over the divide on the road to Tombstone.
Tombstone had hardly rubbed the sleep out of its eyes when the Bisbee horsemen rode into town. The streets were empty. Only a few stores had opened. A few housewives cooking breakfast caught a glimpse of the cavalcade. A few drowsy citizens drawing on their trousers stared out the windows wonderingly as it passed. The Bisbee men dismounted at the courthouse. A knock sounded on the iron portal of the jail. Swinging open the door, Sheriff Ward looked into the barrels of several six-shooters.
“Well,” he gasped in astonishment, “I thought it was the Chinaman bringing breakfast for the prisoners.”
Sheriff Ward surrendered the keys, expecting a wholesale lynching. But Heath alone was taken from his cell. The five robbers under sentence of death were in adjoining cells. They were relieved when the committee paid no attention to them. They were justly doomed. These men of Bisbee had come to do justice in the single case in which they were convinced the Court had erred. Heath, in their opinion, was as guilty as the others. He, too, deserved to die.
Heath was led to a telegraph pole north of the courthouse in Tough Nut Street. He stood there in the early morning sunlight as cool and unperturbed as if being lynched were habitual before-breakfast routine, like lemon in hot water or orange juice.
“Got anything to say before you go, Heath?”
“I wish,” replied Heath, “you’d promise not to shoot my body full of holes after you swing me up.”
“All right. We’ll promise you that.”
Heath drew a red bandanna from his pocket and bound it around his head so that it hid his face. A hanging had certain punctilios of etiquette to be observed. It was the correct thing for men who went into the other world at a rope’s end to depart with their faces covered. His handkerchief took the place of the official black mask. When the noose had been slipped about his neck, he sensed a certain ineptness. He was fastidious in this matter of dying.
“Shove the knot around under my left ear,” he said through his handkerchief.
“Thank you,” he acknowledged politely when his request had been complied with.
The Bisbee horsemen rode out of town as quietly as they had come. Perhaps not fifty people in Tombstone knew that anything unusual had taken place. Citizens going to their work saw with surprise a dead man hanging twenty feet in air against the telegraph pole in Tough Nut Street. They noticed curiously a placard fastened just below his feet. It read:
John Heath
Was hanged to this Pole
By the
Citizens of Cochise County
For Participation as a Known Accessory in the Bisbee Massacre
At
Washington’s Birthday
The Heath lynching resulted in a famous coroner’s verdict. The jury was confronted with a delicate problem. The usual verdict of “death at the hands of parties unknown” was impracticable. All the lynchers were known. But the jury had no intention of naming the parties at whose hands death had occurred; Tombstone heartily approved the hanging bee. Dr. George Goodfellow in his testimony hinted at a way out of the dilemma. He declared death had been caused by emphysema. The jurors had not the slightest idea what emphysema meant, but they caught at the learned word as drowning men at a straw. Dr. Goodfellow explained that emphysema was swelling caused by air in the cellular tissues and was sometimes due to strangulation and sometimes to the effects of high altitude. What more could any honest jury want? The verdict read:
We, the jury of inquest impanelled and sworn by the coroner of Cochise County, after viewing the body and hearing the testimony, find that the name of the deceased was John Heath, 32 years old, a native of Texas, and that he came to his death from emphysema of the
