Nigger Jim, past ninety, still lives in Tombstone. His memories of old days have faded to a misty blur, but he is still proud and dignified and as straight as an assegai, and still looks as if he might be capable of leading an impi out on a war-trail.
XI
On the Benson Road
Bud Philpot gathered up his lines. “Come on, boys,” he said to his four horses. The leaders pranced and curvetted, the wheelers leaned soberly in their collars. The Benson stage went at an easy trot out Allen Street. Bob Paul, shotgun messenger, was in his seat beside the driver. Three passengers sat on top. Six others filled the seats inside.
The sidewalk crowds paid no attention. This was merely the regular Benson stage starting on schedule time. They would have taken only slightly more interest if they had known that in the boot was $80,000. It was an unusual shipment, but treasure was going out on the stages every day or two. And Bob Paul was a brave, dependable fellow as shotgun messenger. So the stage rumbled out of Tombstone almost unnoticed and disappeared over a hill, leaving a little cloud of dust hanging against the sky.
But the departure of this lumbering old coach, , was, in its long train of tragic consequences, one of the momentous events in Tombstone’s history. While the stage jogged peacefully out of the town, fate was waiting grimly on the Benson road.
At Contention, ten miles from Tombstone, Paul and Philpot changed seats. This change may have been a whim of Paul’s. He would see what kind of stage-driver he was, just for fun. Philpot was willing; he could take it easy for a time. When the stage swung briskly out of Contention, Philpot was in the customary seat of the shotgun messenger, and Paul was doing the driving, his shotgun leaning between his legs.
Beyond Drew’s ranch, six miles out of Contention, the stage crossed a dry wash. The wash was broad and deep, and on the far side, the road angled at a sharp grade up a hill. Up this incline the horses went at a walk. It was growing late; the sun was dipping toward the Huachucas; long, cool shadows lay across the landscape.
Halt!
Three masked highwaymen stepped out of the mesquite with levelled rifles. Dropping the reins, Paul seized his shotgun. As he threw the gun to his shoulder, the robber on his side of the road fired. The bullet crashed into the seat. Paul emptied both barrels of his shotgun without apparent effect. At the same instant, the robber on the other side of the road sent a bullet squarely through Philpot’s heart. Philpot half rose and pitched headlong beneath the heels of the wheelers. The terrified horses leaped into a run and went rearing and plunging up the grade. The bandits fired twenty shots after the coach. Peter Roerig, a resident of Tombstone, sitting on top at the rear, was killed and tumbled to the ground. With bullets whistling about it, the stage thundered over the crest of the hill out of range.
With the lines dragging on the ground, the horses left the road and went tearing through the mesquite, the coach careening over rocks and threatening every moment to upset. Clambering down on the tongue, Paul, at risk of his life, retrieved the lines. The horses ran away for a mile before he quieted them down and got them back into the highway. With the $80,000 safe in the boot, Paul brought the bullet-riddled coach into Benson. Searching parties went out after nightfall and took the two dead men into Tombstone.
Sheriff Behan and a posse took the trail at daybreak the morning after the murderous fiasco. In the posse were Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, Bob Paul, and Marshall Williams, agent of the Wells-Fargo Company in Tombstone. They found at the scene seventeen empty rifle shells and three strange-looking masks made of cloth to fit over the head like a wig and with an attached band to hide the lower face, wig and band covered with dangling strands of untwisted rope to simulate hair and beard. The trail of the robbers was followed east to the Dragoons. Woodchoppers at the base of the mountains said three riders had passed their camp and turned northwest.
The fugitives were tracked to Tres Alamos, sixty miles north of the scene of the crime, where they had crossed the San Pedro. They had taken advantage of a twelve hours’ start to play every trick known to plainsmen to confuse their trail. They had travelled Indian file. They had doubled back on their tracks and then switched off at right angles on stony ground that left no imprints. They had kept to long outcropping reefs of rock. Once they had rounded up a bunch of horses and, driving them before them, had hidden their own tracks in the swarming hoof prints. Again they had ridden for a mile through the San Pedro River, emerging in thick brush, and a little farther on had taken to the stream once more.
The scent grew warmer at Wheaton’s abandoned ranch. Here a horse was found so badly tuckered out it could hardly stagger, its back covered with saddle sores. A few miles farther down the river, at the ranch of H. T. Redfield, father of Leonard Redfield, who for thirty years has been postmaster at Benson, the posse saw a man in a field loaded with warlike armament and milking a peaceful cow. This remarkable milkmaid scurried for the brush as the posse galloped toward him. Wyatt and Morgan Earp headed him off and took him prisoner. He proved to be Luther King. Besides a rifle strapped across his shoulders, two six-shooters, and two belts full of cartridges, King had a dozen
