Ross Sloan’s ranch is a sort of romance preserve. Just below his house is the spot where old Geronimo surrendered. Near it is a spring hidden in the cliffs known as Geronimo’s Seep, where, in summers of drought, when all the streams were dry, the Apaches always found plenty of cold, clear water. Smuggler trains coming up from Mexico by way of San Luis Pass through the Animas range and across the Animas Valley used to thread the gorges of Skeleton with their jingling mule bells on their way to the San Simon. Two murderous encounters between outlaws and smugglers took place in the canyon within a mile of Sloan’s house, one almost in his front yard. Down in a corral beyond the stables still stands the Outlaw’s Oak and the scars of bullets are plain on the live oaks and sycamores under whose shade Skeleton Creek is forever singing its pleasant song. Skeleton Canyon has, too, a tradition of buried outlaw treasure that drips with romance and rivals the wild tales of Cocos Island and the Spanish Main; and all up and down the canyon are the holes dug by treasure-hunters who have come with high hope and gone away empty-handed.
The men murdered in Skeleton Canyon were left unburied. Coyotes and buzzards picked their bones, and the place became a charnel house. For years these grisly relics made the ground white at the places of battle and massacre. Some of the bones were washed away by storm waters in the creek, some were taken as curiosities by travellers, and some of the skulls picked up by cowboys became soap basins in San Simon Valley ranch houses. But fragments and shards of the skeletons remain scattered through the grass in ghastly abundance. If you go to gather the wild flowers that enamel the banks of the stream and the little vega in the park-like space at the Devil’s Kitchen where the steep walls open out, you may find as many bones as blossoms—knuckle-joints, a tibia, the broken arch of a rib; and, likely as not, you may stub your toe against a skull. The canyon that once echoed to cries of battle and death is now a place of brooding stillness that seems almost uncanny, and the deep silence is past understanding.
So it is perfectly clear that, according to all the rules, a wild, lonely spot like this, where so many tragic things have happened, must be haunted; and if you cannot find a ghost in Skeleton Canyon, you had best stick to your office or business back home and go on footing up dollars and cents, making collar buttons or automobiles, clipping coupons or selling groceries.
As you sit at night in Ross Sloan’s comfortable ranch house listening as he spins yarns of Skeleton Canyon’s strange, romantic history, you will hear, perhaps, through the silence and darkness a shriek that will suddenly make your blood run cold. It rises in a shrill, shivery crescendo and dies in an eerie wail. There seems something human in its note of poignant agony. It is like the death cry of some murdered man. It is like the scream of some poor devil who falls in his tracks with a bullet through his heart and leaves his unshriven bones for the wildcat to polish.
“That’s a cougar back in the mountains,” says Ross Sloan easily. “Those varmints holler around every night. They get a calf or a pig once in a while. We call ’em lions out here—mountain lions. They’ve got a funny yell. Yes, it might sound a little ghostly if you happen to be superstitious. There was a lady out here to visit us once, and she went all to pieces when she heard one of those panthers scream like that. ‘I know that’s a spirit,’ she said. ‘A lost spirit that went into the other world without book or bell or holy sacrament. Oh, dear,’ she says, ‘that’s the tortured ghost of one of those men murdered in the canyon by outlaws and doomed for his sins to haunt the spot of his bitter death.’ We had a lot of trouble calming her down. She was going to stay a week, but she packed up and went home next morning, and we never could get her to come back to see us any more.
“They say Skeleton’s haunted. A lot of people think there’s no doubt about it. But I don’t pay much attention to the queer noises around here at night. Sometimes the wind in the trees sounds like voices babbling and sometimes, if you didn’t know it was the windmill, you might think a human being was whimpering just outside the door. The creek that just murmurs along like any other creek in the daytime seems at night trying to tell you something in some strange language you can’t understand. If a fox barks on the hill, it sounds mighty lonesome, and the catamounts have a peculiar wailing cry; there’s a lot of these prowlers around, and you’ve got to keep your chicken-house locked.
“Now and then you’ll see a light up the canyon moving slowly. That may be a will-’o-the-wisp in a marshy spot, or maybe a stray traveller with a lantern cutting across to the Animas. I’ve never seen anything. Once at dusk
