“Go down to the O.K. corral, Doc,” he said to Holliday in the casual voice of one arranging a detail of business routine, “and see if Johnny Montgomery can let us have a spring wagon. I guess I’ll send Johnny Behind-the-Deuce over to Tucson.”
Johnny Behind-the-Deuce was taken in the spring wagon under strong guard to Tucson. Ten heavily armed men on horseback accompanied him as far as Dennis’s ranch but, as no attack developed, turned back to Tombstone. Johnny broke jail at Tucson before his trial, and though Papago Indian trailers were used to track him, he was not recaptured. He disappeared from the Southwest, and whatever became of the murderous little scalawag with the funny pseudonym no one in that country knows to this day.
V
Curly Bill
Curly Bill, most famous outlaw in Arizona’s history, came from Texas, but when or how or why is one of several mysteries in his life, his end being as enigmatic as his beginning. He was a medieval robber baron in the blue flannel shirt and white sombrero of a cowboy. He rode at times with thirty or forty tall fellows at his back, and it was said he could gather a hundred men-at-arms within a day if needful occasion arose. All the outlaws of southeastern Arizona owned some sort of allegiance to him. He lived boldly and jovially. After the dangers and hardships of a cattle-stealing raid or an attack upon a Mexican smuggler train in some mountain defile, he took his ease in his strongholds, with wassail and high revel and his merry men around him.
He was, to the eye, a good-natured, rollicking chap, heavyset, black-eyed, with a shock of curly black hair. But for all his roly-poly look and the dimples that showed in his round, swarthy face when he laughed, he was a powerful fellow and as quick and tricky and dangerous as a panther. Though his career is a tale of romance, he was strictly a business man with no romance in him. He planned shrewdly, and murder was a routine detail in his trade of adventure. Some might tell you that John Ringo was his brains. This is not true. Curly Bill had brains of his own, and sharp, resourceful brains they were, amply sufficient for all the generalship necessary in the life he led. Moreover, Curly Bill had the decisiveness in action that Ringo lacked. Curly Bill led, Ringo followed.
Curly Bill, in his earlier days, was the scourge of the Arizona ranges. He stole cattle from the scattered ranchers. He ran off horses from army posts and frequently had the soldiers on his trail. He soon found a more lucrative field in Mexico. Millions of longhorn cattle pastured half-wild on the vast ranges of Sonora and Chihuahua. Some of the wealthy hacendados of these two states just over the international line owned so many cattle they could not estimate the number within a hundred thousand head. Rich quarry were these countless herds for Curly Bill and his buccaneers who, stealing across the border, rounded up cattle from plains and foothills and brought them back in rushing stampedes, sometimes a thousand head at a single eagle swoop. But these forays were not without danger. The border Mexicans were hardy fellows, seasoned in warfare against Yaqui and Apache, and not infrequently the rustlers had stiff brushes and running fights with rurales or vaqueros and had to battle for their lives before they won to safety on American soil.
Markets for his stolen cattle were plentiful. Curly Bill did a thriving trade, it is said, with contractors who supplied San Carlos and other Indian reservations with beef. Other buyers, equally unscrupulous, shipped the pilfered steers East or sold them to frontier slaughter houses. And, it may be whispered confidentially as a deep, dark secret known only to everybody in Arizona, wealthy stockmen newly established in the country swelled their foundation herds with cattle that Curly Bill had stolen below the line.
So it will be seen Curly Bill was no cheap horse thief, but a robber operating on a scale of wholesale magnificence never known before along the international border. He rose in time to prestige as an international menace, and his depredations became a subject of discussion in Congress and of diplomatic correspondence with Mexico.
Curly Bill’s first recorded exploit in Tombstone’s history was not impressive. Frederick White, Tombstone’s first town marshal, a two-fisted fighting man, kept sleepless vigil over the town and was fearless in his efforts to preserve order. He had taken counsel with Wyatt Earp who, out of the wisdom of Dodge City experience, cautioned the marshal against permitting any shooting off of firearms within the city limits.
“The fellow who finds himself safe in shooting holes in the atmosphere,” said Wyatt Earp, “will, the first thing you know, be shooting holes in citizens.”
So Marshal White issued a ukase that anyone who against the peace and dignity of Tombstone presumed to fire a gun in town would suffer the full penalty of the law, which meant a fine and the calaboose.
Curly Bill, new to Arizona, was just beginning to be heard of as an outlaw. Mere reputation for lawless deeds out in the mesquite jungles was not regarded as just cause for arrest in the silver camp, and Curly Bill came and went at his sweet will, and was a familiar figure in saloons and gambling places. Wherever he got it, he had money in plenty and spent it with a free hand. Saloon loungers were sure of free drinks as long as Curly Bill was in town, and when Curly Bill sat down at a faro table, the dealer dropped his customary air of languorous indifference and straightened up for swift, stiff play.
With some roistering cowboy companions, Curly Bill emerged from a saloon on Allen Street one midnight, and it seemed fitting to the company to wind up the evening’s entertainment with a salvo from their six-shooters, the same being an amusement
