He was a sly, crafty, subterranean man, with many deep secrets. His comings and goings were enigmatic. He was soon on terms of intimacy with Curly Bill’s outlaws, especially with John Ringo, and indulged in many drinking bouts with them at Antelope Springs, Soldier Holes, Myers Cienega, Charleston, and Galeyville. Though he tended bar at the Oriental in which Wyatt Earp acquired an interest, he never threw in with the Earps. He remained always a lone wolf who played his own dark, mysterious game. A very dangerous person was this Buckskin Frank Leslie and for all his joviality, a fine fellow to let alone if one wished to live in peace or even to live at all. He was to add several more notches to his gun-handle before Tombstone saw the last of him.
After their marriage, Buckskin Frank and the Widow Galeen set up housekeeping in a cottage and lived quite happily for a time. But Buckskin Frank found domesticity dull, and sought to vary the drab monotony with piquant novelties. As he sat in the mellow glow of the family hearth of an evening, he would surprise his pretty bride by shooting a rose out of her hair or a cup of coffee out of her hand as she brought it in for supper. Or he would stand her against the parlour wall and, with the neatness of a pencil drawing, outline her figure with bullets fired from across the room.
With the air of an artist at an easel in his atelier, he would stand off and measure his subject—and the distance—with his eye and then, having rounded off the lady’s head with bullets placed an inch apart, he would work downward to skirt hem, matching rapid pistol fire the while with rapid fire of comment and criticism.
“Stand perfectly still, my dear,” he would say. “I am now doing your left ear. … Now for the other. … Ears are more or less difficult. … Three bullets on each side will do nicely for your throat. … Smile, darling. … You are prettiest when you smile. … My only regret is that I can’t get the smile in my picture. … Your pose is charming this evening. Hold it one moment while I reload. … I am now at your waist line. I must not fail to bring out the fine curves. … The skirt is easy. Draperies offer no difficulty to a real artist. …”
The outline of the figure completed—a portrait of this kind usually required several boxes of cartridges—Mrs. Leslie was at liberty to step out of her bullet silhouette. Then, as finishing detail, the Michelangelo of the six-shooter would touch in eyes, nose, and mouth with a few final shots.
“Ah, magnificent,” he would say, cocking his head at his masterpiece with immense satisfaction. “Your friends will admire this portrait. It looks exactly like you.”
All Tombstone, in fact, marvelled at the artistry of these mural portraits, which remained on the parlour walls for years and were shown with great pride by the citizens to visitors to town, the Leslie cottage serving in lieu of a municipal art gallery. But Mrs. Leslie, being of a purely domestic turn, showed her utter lack of artistic appreciation by getting a divorce. She married Alex Derwood, a mechanic with no ambition to be a portrait painter, and moved to Banning, California, where at last accounts she is still living.
Nigger Jim, as black as the ace of spades, would say with great seriousness: “Yes, suh, me and Sime White wuz the fust white men ever in this camp.” Nigger Jim didn’t date quite that far back, but he was among the early arrivals. His name was Jim Young but he was never anything but Nigger Jim in Tombstone chronicles. He had been a slave, a soldier in the regular army, and a prize fighter. He was more than six feet tall, straight and powerful, and looked as proud and dignified as a Zulu chief at the head of a war impi. He worked in the Contention mine on the hill, and he staked himself a claim near it. When one morning he discovered Frank Leslie had jumped his claim, Jim armed himself with a shotgun.
“Bad man or no bad man,” he said, “he ain’t goin’ jump no claim o’ mine.”
“This claim’s mine,” said Nigger Jim, striding up to Buckskin Frank. “You-all ain’t got no business foolin’ round heah, and you better go on back to town mighty quick.”
So it wasn’t so easy to jump a lone nigger’s claim, after all. Buckskin Frank smiled it off.
“I heard some fellers were about to jump your claim, Jim,” he said, “and I came out here to help you stand ’em off.”
Nigger Jim didn’t argue over the explanation and Leslie went away. When the story went the rounds that Nigger Jim had bluffed one of the worst of Tombstone’s bad men, Jim’s prestige rose and Buckskin Frank’s went off a point or two. But the showdown rankled with the desperado. When he met Jim unarmed in a store and the Negro’s back was turned, Leslie slipped his gun out of its holster. But the woman who owned the place screamed and sprang between them. Again Buckskin Frank smiled it off. He was, he said, merely examining his six-shooter to see that the cylinder was in good working order.
With his ready wit and suave tongue, Buckskin Frank, it was said, could talk himself out of any situation. When his six-shooter was inconvenient, he always
