The battle opened in the wide-flung jaws of San Luis Pass. With the cattle streaming through the canyon at a run, urged on by three or four vaqueros, the other Mexicans deployed as a rear guard. Without slacking pace, Curly Bill out in front, the rustlers rushed upon them. Out of the padding thunder of hoofs rang a few scattering rifle shots as prelude to the blaze and crackle of gunfire across the canyon’s mouth. Mexicans began to tumble from their ponies. Under the whirlwind attack, the Mexicans were seized with panic. They turned tail and set out in wild flight after the cattle. Hard upon their heels pressed the outlaws, pumping lead among them. The Mexicans left the canyon and took to the hills, and many were killed as their ponies floundered among the gulches. For six or eight miles the running battle continued. When the last Mexican had disappeared over the ridges, the outlaws got the cattle under control and headed them back for the Animas Valley ranges. Fourteen Mexican saddles had been emptied. All the wounded were ruthlessly killed when Curly Bill took the back trail. The casualties on the side of the outlaws were three men slightly injured.
“I had the story of this fight from Milt Hicks and several others of Curly Bill’s men when I met them in Gillespie a few days afterward,” said Rube Hadden of Paradise. “All the accounts agreed that fourteen Mexicans were left dead in the pass. Besides the six men who had been on the raid into Sonora after the cattle, Curly Bill had with him John Ringo, Joe Hill, Jim Hughes, John and Charlie Green, Charlie Thomas, and Tall Bell, and one or two more whose names I have forgotten. The two hundred cattle stolen by the Mexicans from the Double Dobe ranch were returned there and the three hundred brought out of Mexico on the raid by Milt Hicks and his bunch were bought by Old Man Clanton at fifteen dollars a head.”
Fifteen dollars a head was not all these cattle were to cost Old Man Clanton. These three hundred stolen beeves stampede in wild border story from one red romance to another, costing nineteen human lives before they attain their final phase as sirloins and roasts on comfortable home tables somewhere in the world.
Though the Mexicans were eager to avenge the Skeleton Canyon tragedy, fortune so far had been against them. The game of death stood thirty-three to nothing. Nineteen of their people had been left dead in Skeleton Canyon and fourteen in San Luis Pass and not a single gringo ghost had been sent to the nether shades in blood atonement. The boy who had escaped from the Skeleton Canyon massacre had apparently preached his gospel of vengeance in vain. But wraithlike he still haunted the frontier line. Border men told of seeing a horseman watching in lone vigil on the hilltops and melting into thin air at any attempt to approach or follow him. When Old Man Clanton decided to drive the three hundred cattle to market at Tombstone, his plan was known across the line in Mexico almost as quickly as among his own rancher neighbours. The Old Man with a Beard—Bewhiskered Old Devil Face of Skeleton Canyon—was to take the road. For this the boy had been waiting these long days. Here was his opportunity at last. The voices of his three dead brothers might now be answered. He laid his plans swiftly and cunningly. He would make the trail to Tombstone for Old Man Clanton the trail to death.
With Old Man Clanton when he set out on the drive were Dick Gray and Billy Lang, his neighbours, Bud Snow, Harry Ernshaw, and Jim Crane—the Jim Crane who with Bill Leonard and Harry Head made the murderous attack on the stage on the Benson road. Their route, as planned, was to pass from Animas Valley through Guadalupe Canyon across Guadalupe Mountains out into San Bernardino Valley, and then northward through Sulphur Springs Valley past the southernmost buttresses of the Dragoons to Tombstone. They made their first camp six miles within Guadalupe Canyon and a half mile below the line in Mexico.
Harry Ernshaw was on night herd when next dawn came gray and dim in a drizzle of rain. The cattle were bedded down; Ernshaw was standing on guard in the shelter of a bluff; his pony was grazing a short distance from him. Suddenly, the cattle got to their feet in an excited scramble and, facing toward camp a quarter of a mile away, began to sniff the air and give throat to low moaning bellows. Ernshaw saw nothing and heard nothing. He fancied the herd scented a coyote or a bear.
He walked back toward camp to see if he might discover the cause of this strange panic. The camp was astir. Through the rain which made a gray mist in the faint half-light of daybreak, he saw Dick Gray and Jim Crane kindling a fire for breakfast. A little blaze began to flicker up among the wet faggots. Old Man Clanton, who had made his bed in the bottom of the chuck wagon, rose from his blankets and stood upright, a shadowy figure that in the
