The sloping canyon walls, which went darkly up to the leaden skies, sparkled on the instant with leaping flames, and the detonations of ambushed rifles drowned the swishing whisper of the rain. Old Man Clanton plunged over the side of the wagon in a staggering fall and crashed upon his face in the mud. Gray gave a death shriek that echoed up and down the canyon as he fell. Crane measured his length across the camp fire and extinguished it. Bud Snow, aroused by the hubbub, lifted himself for a quick moment at arm’s length on his blankets and sank back into them lifeless—asleep, awake, and dead in a twinkling. Billy Lang sprang from his bed and rushed upward among the giant rocks along the canyon wall. Sheltered behind a boulder, he began to churn his rifle. Bullets crashed about him as thick as raindrops. His foes remained hidden, but he fired at the flashes of their guns. But several of his enemies circled across the canyon and worked in above and behind him. Kneeling, he fired his last shot, toppled over, and lay still.
Ernshaw, at the first volley, had taken to his heels. Through the canyon he fled in the wake of the cattle that stampeded in headlong flight, his pony racing away in the midst of the herd. Half a mile from the camp, Ernshaw plunged into thick brush on a hill. Here he remained hidden. When the firing ceased, a dozen Mexicans rode past his place of concealment, talking excitedly in Spanish. Among them was a slight, youthful figure, looking hardly more than a child. This was the boy. He rode in silence, a glow of happiness on his face. Vengeance at last was his. He had paid his debt to his three dead brothers in gringo blood.
Next day, cowboys at the Cloverdale ranch saw through the mists of mirage over Animas Valley a solitary pedestrian approaching from where the blue Guadalupes shut in the horizon to the south. Haggard, exhausted, his clothes ragged from cactus and briars, Ernshaw staggered up to the ranch house with news of the tragedy.
“The Cloverdale boys rounded up a gang of thirty to bring out the bodies,” said Rube Hadden. “I went with a bunch of nine fellows from Gillespie. John Ringo and Charlie Green were at Roofless Dobe ranch, and they went along. We found the five dead men where they fell. There were a dozen empty rifle shells around Lang’s body. He had been shot in the back by the Mexicans who had worked around behind him. The hammer of his rifle was down on a cartridge that had been fired. We didn’t look for the cattle. The Mexicans had rounded them up and taken them on down into Mexico.
“We brought the dead men out across our saddles to a little mesa in Animas Valley midway between the ranches of Lang and Old Man Clanton and about ten miles east of Cloverdale. There we buried ’em in a row and heaped stones over the graves. I heard that the Clanton boys later took Old Man Clanton’s body to Tombstone and buried it in the cemetery there.”
The five graves on the little mesa in the Animas Valley represented the sum total of Mexican vengeance for the Skeleton Canyon tragedy. Thirty-three to five—that was the final score. But the murder of their father in Guadalupe Canyon inflamed the Clanton boys with hatred for the entire race of Mexicans. Within the next month or two, five dead Mexicans riddled with bullets were found from time to time in the San Pedro Valley near the Clanton ranch south of Charleston. No one ever knew who killed them. But it was generally believed in Tombstone that they gave their lives in vicarious atonement for Old Man Clanton’s death.
IX
Ringo
John Ringo stalks through the stories of old Tombstone days like a Hamlet among outlaws, an introspective, tragic figure, darkly handsome, splendidly brave, a man born for better things, who, having thrown his life recklessly away, drowned his memories in cards and drink and drifted without definite purpose or destination.
As Curly Bill’s right-hand man, he took part in the raids of his outlaw associates, drank and gambled with them, was one of them in crime and dissipation, but he remained a man apart. Tall, of sculpturesque physique and lean, saturnine face, he was a silent man of mystery who, in moods of bitter melancholy, sometimes spoke of suicide. He was held in fear by the outlaws and by everyone who knew him, and there was no doubt about his desperate courage. His recklessness, perhaps, was due to the small value he placed upon his life; if someone else killed him, he would be saved the trouble of killing himself.
His sombre eyes seemed brooding upon a fate that had changed a life of bright promise into a career of sinister futilities. He was plainly a man of some breeding and inherent refinement. The primitive speech of the frontier was not his language; he spoke literate English, and many believed, though it is improbable, that he had been educated at college. The other outlaws caroused to satisfy an animal lust for riotous pleasures. Ringo apparently drank to forget, and the stinging tanglefoot whisky of the wild country was the only convenient nepenthe. He evidently had fallen far, but even in the tragic ruin of his life he retained something of the dignity and commanding qualities of his former estate.
He was, if ever there was such a thing in the world, an honourable outlaw. His word once given was kept inviolately. Those to whom he made a promise could be sure he would fulfill it to the last letter, or die trying. Old-timers still tell of his quixotic ideals regarding women. Womanhood to him was an icon before which
