Jim Cook, in command of a party of scouts, rode back with Hugh to the scene of the fight. They found a dead man at the camp, not mutilated in the customary Apache way, and buried the body in a grave at the foot of a juniper tree and on the tree they cut with a knife Zwing Hunt’s name and the date of his death. The juniper tree still stands, the knife-carved epitaph still decipherable, and the canyon has been known ever since as Hunt’s Canyon.
Jim Cook and his scouts followed the trail of the Indians, and in Half-Moon Valley in the Pedragosa hills to the south they found the Indian Zwing Hunt was said to have killed. The Apaches had carried their dead comrade off and had covered the body with a mound of stones.
Hugh Hunt’s story of his brother’s death seemed plausible and was apparently corroborated by all the evidence. But a rumour spread that Zwing Hunt had not been killed but arrived safely in time at his old home in Texas. There was a story that the man buried at the foot of the juniper tree had been killed by Zwing Hunt himself, and another story that the body had been obtained from an undertaker in Tombstone. These rumours became so insistent that Sheriff Behan felt called on to make an investigation, and, under his orders, Deputy Sheriffs Billy Breakenridge and Phil Montague dug up the body in Hunt’s Canyon. Both these deputies had known Zwing Hunt, and both identified the body as his.
This, it might seem, should have settled the matter, but it did not, and years later, members of Hunt’s family declared that Zwing Hunt survived the alleged Indian attack and died in bed at his Texas home of the old wound Deputy Breakenridge had given him in the fight at the Stockton ranch. And on his deathbed, according to this story, Hunt drew a map showing the location of a cache in which he and Billy Grounds had hidden the rich loot of their robberies, and this map became the origin and inspiration of one of the most interesting buried-treasure hunts in the history of the Southwest.
VIII
The Old Man with a Beard
Since the red day in Skeleton Canyon when Curly Bill and his outlaws had sent to death all the Mexicans of a smuggler train except one stripling youth, the cry for vengeance had run along the border.
“Death to the gringo robbers!”
Sound cause for deep and bitter hatred had the dusky little people below the line. They had been treated like dumb beasts by the desperadoes who had come riding gaily across the border to plunder and murder at free will and gone riding gaily back again. Stealing Mexican cattle had been as simple as rifling a bird’s nest in a garden. It was so nowadays among these murderous bandits that to kill a Mexican was no more than to kill a yellow coyote in the hills; it was not a crime to be punished by any law; it lay lightly on the gringo conscience; it was even too contemptible a thing to count in the notched gun-handle records of bad men.
The Skeleton Canyon atrocity had fired the Mexicans with new determination and courage. They would submit tamely no longer to the cutthroat depredations. They themselves had some skill in war-trail strategy, death traps, and ambuscades. Their watch fires hereafter would burn on the mountains. Their gathering signals would fly among the valleys. They would fight to the last man. Woe to the gringo spoilers who in the future should come raiding across the border, unprepared for desperate battle.
The sixteen-year-old boy who had escaped from the Skeleton Canyon hecatomb leaving three brothers murdered upon the field burned from that day of death with a white-hot fire of hatred and became an apostle of vengeance among his people. His brothers, foully slain, cried out to him from the ground. He heard their voices in the mountain streams, in the winds that talked among the pines. They called him to a vengeance of life for life and blood for blood, which, according to the mystic sybils of the border, is the law of the dead.
Looking back as he fled from the massacre, this boy had seen along the top of Skeleton Canyon’s wall a line of fierce, demon countenances glaring death among flashes of rifle fire and snakelike wisps of smoke. But the quick vision was a blurred nightmare in his mind. Only one devil face remained in his memory with distinctness. That was the bearded face of an old man—a full beard as white as snow, hard wrinkled cheeks tanned as yellow as saddle leather by the winds and suns of years, blue eyes blazing fiercely. The boy did not know who this old man was, but some of the boy’s kinsmen knew at once by the description. The gorgon head of fear and death that haunted the boy’s dreams was that of Old Man Clanton.
Old Man Clanton was a fiery, lawless, ruthless old wolf of the frontier. He was a Texan and, it is said, made the ox-team trek to California in the gold-rush days of ’Forty-nine. He failed to wash a fortune from the sands of Feather River, drifted back eastward into Arizona in the early ’seventies, and took up a ranch near Fort Thomas.
“Old Man Clanton’s wife was dead in when I first knew the family,” said Melvin Jones of Tucson. “He had four children—Phineas, known as Finn, Ike, Billy, and Mary. The girl married Jack Slinkard and went to live on the Little Colorado River. My father bought Old Man Clanton’s ranch, and the Clantons moved to the
