“Ringo drank like a crazy man the two days he was at my place,” said Mrs. Patterson. “He was blind drunk both nights when he went to bed. Leslie was tapering off. He slyly threw much of his liquor on the floor, and I don’t think he was so drunk as he pretended to be. Late on the last night of their stay, I heard a noise in the kitchen. I found Ringo in his underclothes rummaging through the pantry shelves. ‘Looking for whisky,’ he muttered. ‘Must have whisky.’ He was twitching and shaking and there was a wild look in his eyes. I thought he was on the verge of delirium tremens. After a few drinks next morning, he seemed better and rode off alone, saying he was going to Galeyville.”
Later in the morning, Bill Sanders passed Ringo near a chain of water holes known as the Tanks, or the Last Water. Ringo looked at Sanders out of unseeing eyes and rode on in silence. Three miles west, Sanders met Frank Leslie, also riding alone and, in Sanders’s judgment, showing no signs of intoxication. Claibourne was nowhere in sight. Leslie asked if Sanders had seen Ringo, and when Sanders replied that Ringo was only a few miles ahead, Leslie hurried on as if to overtake him. Sanders wondered at the time why this murderous desperado, whose reputation credited him with being able to kill a man to see him fall, should be following Ringo’s trail.
Where West Turkey Creek Canyon, sometimes known as Morse’s Canyon, opens out into Sulphur Springs Valley, Coyote Smith’s ranch house stood in open timber. On a steep bank twenty feet high that rose from the creek on the opposite side at some distance below the house grew a giant live oak of peculiar formation. From a short, stump-like central stem rose slantingly five trunks, each of the thickness of an ordinary forest tree and green with leaves the year around. Close to the ground and held in position by the five boles, a flat rock formed a seat in the cool, deep shade. Near by ran the freight road between Tombstone and Morse’s sawmill ten miles farther up the canyon in the Chiricahuas. This tree was known to all the lumber haulers on the trail. Beneath it they were accustomed to eat their lunch at the noonday halts.
Between twelve and one o’clock on the day that Bill Sanders met Ringo, Coyote Smith’s wife heard a shot.
“Will must have killed a deer,” Mrs. Smith remarked to her son Henry.
Will Smith, her brother-in-law, working at a coal pit in the hills, had heard a deer blow in the woods the evening before and had taken his rifle with him when he went to his work that morning. But Will Smith had not fired the shot. He came running to the house in alarm.
“Thought it might be Indians,” he said. “Maybe it was one of the Mormon Smith boys shootin’ into that covey of quail that’s been usin’ down the creek.”
That evening at milking time, Henry Smith drove the cows through the bottom land below the big live oak. Whistling a little tune, the youth had no suspicion that, on the bank over his head, the red sunset was shimmering on the face of a dead man.
Jim Morgan, a teamster, passing by on the trail with a load of lumber near noon next day, found John Ringo dead. The outlaw was sitting on the flat rock in the forks of the live oak, his body leaning back against one of the five trunks of the tree, his head sunk on his breast. His six-shooter, held in his right hand, had fallen into his lap and caught in his watch chain. Five chambers of the cylinder were loaded; the hammer rested on the single empty shell. His rifle stood propped against the tree. His white felt hat, stained with blood, was on the ground at his feet. The silver watch in the breast pocket of his blue flannel shirt was still ticking. In his right temple was a bullet hole, and at the top of his head a great shattered wound where the ball had passed out. Brains were scattered over the tree trunks.
Ringo’s coat and boots were missing. Bound about his feet were portions of his undershirt which he had torn into strips. Around his waist were two belts, one for cartridges for his rifle and the other for cartridges for his six-shooter. The latter was buckled on upside down, and all but two shells had fallen out of it. What had become of his horse was not apparent.
All the circumstances seemed to indicate conclusively that, as he so often had threatened, Ringo had ended his troubled life while sunk in the despairing gloom of the nerve-shattered insanity that had followed his debauch. Jim Morgan, Theodore White, and Bill Knott, acting as a coroner’s jury, decided his death was suicide, and a few hours after the body was found, Ringo was buried near the foot of the live oak.
Ringo’s horse, still saddled and with a broken piece of picket rope about its neck, was found a week later at Robert’s Cienega in Sulphur Springs Valley, six miles from the mouth of West Turkey Creek Canyon. Ringo’s coat was tied in a roll at the back of the saddle, and on the pommel the bridle was hanging. Not far from the horse, one of Ringo’s boots was discovered; the other was never found. In the inner breast pocket of the coat was a group photograph of four persons believed to be Ringo’s father, mother, sister, and the sister’s child. Coyote Smith’s widow,
