Tombstone

and Charles Bartholomew, shotgun messenger, grew suspicious when they saw five men armed with rifles riding ahead off at the side of the trail. At Hereford, Bartholomew added a Winchester to his armament. While the stage was in the hills eight miles from Bisbee in the afternoon, five men in the road ahead opened fire at a distance of seventy-five yards. Two shots hit one of the wheel horses. Driver Waite turned the team around and went galloping away on the back trail. The robbers on horseback pursued the stage for five miles, keeping up a fusillade to which Bartholomew replied with shotgun and Winchester. The wounded horse grew weak, and, as the stage slowed down, two of the nine passengers jumped out. The driver stopped to pick them up. This halt gave the robbers their chance. They circled the stage out of gunshot range and blocked the road ahead. Then they sent a note to Driver Waite by a Mexican wood-hauler saying that all aboard the stage would be killed unless the money box was tossed out. Waite and Bartholomew deemed it advisable to comply, and the box, containing $6,500 of Copper Queen payroll money, was thrown to the ground. Three of the robbers with handkerchiefs over their faces rode up and took possession of the treasure box. One of the bandits liked the looks of one of the lead horses and unhooked the animal and took it with him. The highwaymen ordered the stage to turn round again and head for Bisbee. But when Waite said he couldn’t make the mountain grade with only two horses, they allowed him to drive back to Hereford.

“I suspect Ike Clanton of that job,” said Wyatt Earp. “When I made the proposition to him to betray Leonard, Head, and Crane, he said he would lure them into a trap by inviting them to help in the robbery of a Copper Queen payroll.”

“If he did it,” added Virgil, “I’d be willing to bet Frank Stilwell and Pete Spence were in with him.”

“Stilwell and Spence are not playing Tombstone very hard these days,” interposed Holliday. “But I hear they’ve been making threats against us.”

“Yes,” replied Wyatt, “I’ve heard they are planning to murder us. They’re bad fellows. They may bushwhack us or shoot us in the back. But they’ll never make a fight in the open. And, by the way, John Ringo, who used to make a habit of parading up and down Allen Street looking for trouble with us, hasn’t been in town since the big fight.”

“Ringo knows when to play safe, just like all the rest of these bold, bad outlaws,” sneered Holliday.

“Ringo sent me a message the other day by Briggs Goodrich,” went on Wyatt. “Goodrich met him in Charleston. ‘Tell Wyatt Earp,’ said Ringo, ‘that, if any more fighting comes up, I’ll have nothing to do with it. I’m looking out only for myself from now on.’ Sounded as if Ringo wasn’t as anxious for our game as he used to be. Maybe he’s acquired the idea we’re a little harder than he thought we were.”

Virgil Earp arose.

“What time is it, Wyatt?” he asked.

“Lacks fifteen minutes till midnight,” replied Wyatt, looking at his watch.

“Guess I’ll take a look around town and see what’s doing,” said the marshal.

The front door of the saloon had hardly closed upon Virgil when Wyatt Earp and Holliday heard a roar of guns outside. They rushed out and found Virgil lying bleeding and unconscious in the middle of Fifth Street between the Oriental and the Crystal Palace. He had been fired upon with shotguns loaded with buckshot by five men in ambush in an unfinished building at the southwest corner of Fifth and Allen streets where the Tourist Hotel stands today. The would-be assassins escaped across a deep ravine at the edge of town and disappeared in the darkness through the hills in the direction of Charleston. They were never apprehended, it may be added, and their identity was never learned.

Virgil Earp had been wounded in two places. One bullet had entered his back above the left hip and passed through his body. Another had fractured the upper bone of the left arm and surgeons removed a section of the bone. It was thought at first his injuries would prove fatal. News went out from Tombstone that the marshal had been killed. He lingered between life and death for several weeks. Then he began to mend. But his arm remained helpless, and he suffered from the wound in his back to the end of his life. He was a cripple on crutches when the lurking enemies of the Earps, secretly plotting vengeance, struck a second time from the dark.

Mrs. Marietta Spence and Mrs. Francisco Castro, her mother, sat on the porch of their cottage in the outskirts of Tombstone in quiet enjoyment of an evening in early spring.

“That star hanging over the Dragoons,” remarked Mrs. Spence, “looks like a diamond as big as an orange.”

Three men slinking through the street with furtive, noiseless tread materialized out of the night like ghosts.

“Why, hello, Pete,” said Mrs. Spence. “I didn’t hear you coming. You startled me.”

“Cook us some supper,” ordered Pete Spence brusquely, as he and his companions hurried inside.

Pete Spence was not one of the world’s great lovers. This was his greeting to his Mexican wife after a month’s absence from home.

The two men with Spence were Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz, an Indian-Mexican half-breed otherwise known as Indian Charlie. After eating their meal in silence, they retired into a locked room and talked in low tones until long past midnight. Stilwell and Cruz slept at the Spence home. At noon next day, which was Saturday, Spence and Indian Charlie went up town. Stilwell remained hidden in the house.

Spence and Indian Charlie ensconced themselves inside the door of an Allen Street saloon. For an hour they watched the passersby on the sidewalk. No word was exchanged between them. Spence appeared nervous. The half-breed stood motionless, with stolid,