Jeff Milton, George Scarborough, and Eugene Thacker had trailed Bronco Bill Waters, Bill Johnson, and Jack Pitkin into the White Mountains in northeastern Arizona and were in camp at McBride’s Crossing on the headwaters of Black River. The three fugitives had robbed a Santa Fe train at Belen, New Mexico, and killed three men of a sheriff’s posse that had gone out from Socorro.
“I was fishing near camp,” said Milton, “and had landed several nice trout when I heard firing. Bronco Bill and his two pals had given us a little surprise. I stuck my fishing pole in the bank and slid my Winchester off my shoulder. I saw Johnson churning his gun behind a juniper two hundred yards away. I clipped him in the hip. The bullet split against the bone, and we buried him next morning. Bronco Bill, who had been fighting from the ground, jumped on his horse. ‘Hold on, Cap,’ I called to him, ‘I’ve got a little business I want to talk over with you.’ But he didn’t stop until I knocked him out of the saddle with a bullet. Pitkin got away. After serving twenty years in the penitentiary, Bronco Bill was pardoned out only a couple of years ago. I met him in Naco. He didn’t look much like the bold, bad train robber I had once nearly killed. He was white-haired and stooped and feeble. Old age,” added Milton philosophically, “seems to treat us all alike. I felt kind o’ sorry for the old devil.”
XXII
Sunshine and Peace
Tombstone, that in its days of glory as the metropolis of Arizona had 15,000 people, had dwindled to a ghost town in , when only 646 inhabitants stood between it and utter extinction. But the old town refused to die. It rallied in its last ditch. It added 500 to its census roll in the next quarter of a century. It now has a population of about 1,200. So, you see, Tombstone is growing.
Tombstone is a pretty live little town. You wouldn’t think so to look at it, but it is. You must be careful to distinguish between the physical town and the people who inhabit it. The buildings are of the dead past; the people of the live present. There is much public spirit. The town has its Commercial Club; the business men get together at a luncheon every week; the welfare and improvement of the town are always uppermost. Tombstone is on a coast-to-coast motor highway. Cars go through by the hundred every day. The historic associations interest these travellers, whose flying trade is of great annual value. Camps have been established; tourists are made welcome. To increase interest in Tombstone, it is planned to turn the old Bird Cage Theatre into a museum to be filled with mementos of the town’s early history. Which would seem an excellent idea. The town’s isolation is an element deterrent to its development as a business or manufacturing centre but the citizens hope in time to build it into a great health resort, for which its situation might seem ideal. Its winters are springlike and, because of its elevation, it is immune from the intense summer heat which prevails in some other sections of Arizona. It has an abundant supply of cold water piped from springs in the Huachucas; its air is pure and dry; its glorious sunshine perennial; and about it is the beauty of deserts and mountains.
The business section of Tombstone is much as it was in early days. The one-story buildings with wooden awnings shading the sidewalk are the same that Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan knew. The old Oriental, where Doc Holliday dealt faro and Buckskin Frank tended bar, is a drug store, and dainty young women gossip over ice-cream sodas where hard-eyed gamblers once bucked the tiger. The Crystal Palace is empty; dust covers the windows through which in old days could be seen the monte tables piled with gold and silver money, the roulette and faro games surrounded by eager throngs, and the long mahogany bar lined with the men of the frontier. The place only recently closed as a moving-picture theatre, but one may be sure none of the dramas flashed on its screen equalled in thrilling interest the dramas of real life that once unfolded within these four walls. Bob Hatch’s old billiard hall is still a billiard hall, and ivory balls click a daily requiem where Morgan Earp was killed. In the old Alhambra, a grocer fills the market baskets of housewives and suavely explains a rise in the price of onions. The post office occupies the site where once stood Martin Costello’s saloon, where St. Louis beer was first sold in Tombstone. Mice play in the empty darkness of the Maison Dorée where Julius Caesar served his delectable dishes. The Can Can, run by a Chinaman, still flourishes as a popular eating house, where ham and eggs are seasoned with history. Johnny Montgomery’s O.K. corral is a garage.
The Bird Cage Theatre is like a building that has died and been embalmed. It looks natural, as they say when they turn down the sheet, but its songs, its dancing, its merry doings, and its tipsy revelry, which were its life, have vanished. The famous old honky-tonk has become in these days of evil fortune a storehouse for odds and ends of old furniture. The stage is deep with dust, and the dingy boxes
