All the evidence in the Ringo case has now been heard. Physical facts, as the lawyers say, pointing conclusively to suicide. An eleventh-hour witness declaring with his dying breath he saw him murdered. One, of course, may suspect, if one cares to, that Claibourne’s statement was a last desperate, revengeful effort to injure the man he had failed to kill. But one must remember also that men, consciously dying, rarely lie. So the matter awaits the verdict. How did John Ringo die? Suicide or murder—which?
Leslie was acquitted of the Claibourne killing and remained in Tombstone until . Then he went to Yuma, where he lived in retirement—and stripes. The tragedy that ended his Tombstone career occurred at Leslie’s ranch in the Swisshelms. Leslie, Jim Hughes, and Diamond Annie, Leslie’s latest flame, a pretty woman of Tombstone’s red lights, were drinking at the ranch when their supply of whisky ran out. Leaving Hughes and the woman alone, Leslie rode across country to the nearest groggery for more liquor. Upon his return, after nightfall, he flared into a jealous rage and killed Diamond Annie and shot Hughes through the breast. After lying hidden for several hours in deep saccaton grass, Hughes made his way to Bill Reynolds’s ranch two miles distant. Next morning Leslie knocked at Reynolds’s door. It was believed he meant to “kill the evidence” of the murder by killing Hughes. Reynolds told him Hughes was not there. Behind the door at that moment and within three feet of Leslie, Hughes was standing with a double-barrelled shotgun. When Leslie rode into Tombstone, he said Hughes had killed Diamond Annie and escaped. After Hughes had told the true story of the affair, Leslie confessed and was sentenced to twenty-five years in Yuma penitentiary. He was pardoned after serving four years.
J. H. Macia of Tombstone met him in Tucson and, as Leslie was out of funds, Macia shared his room with him.
“The old superstition that thirteen is an unlucky number hasn’t worked out in my case,” Leslie remarked to Macia. “I killed thirteen men and never once saw the inside of a prison. It was my fourteenth that caused all my trouble. But,” he added with a whimsical shrug, “my fourteenth was a woman.”
Tombstone saw Buckskin Frank for the last time when, soon after his release from prison, he passed through town accompanied by Professor Dumble, geologist of the Southern Pacific Railroad, on the way to coal mines being developed by the railroad company in Mexico. A story came back that, while Leslie was employed as wagon boss at the mines, he killed three Mexicans whom he had caught stealing wood. He was next heard of in San Francisco. There, it was reported, he married a woman who had become interested in him while he was in the penitentiary and who was credited with being instrumental in obtaining his pardon. It is known that he was in Alaska during the Klondike gold excitement. Upon Leslie’s return from the North, Jeff Milton of Fairbank met him in San Francisco. Leslie was prosperous then and was living at the Russ House.
The next twenty-five years are a blank in Buckskin Frank’s story. Tombstone had no word of him. What devious roads he travelled, what adventures befell him during this last quarter of a century, remain secrets of the gods.
A little old man, looking as if he might have seen rough experience on the crossties, wrinkled, gray, and threadbare, walked into a billiard hall in Oakland one day in and asked in a quavering voice for some kind of light employment. His hard gray eyes were bright, his movements were touched with catlike furtiveness, and there was a suggestion of steel-wire toughness in his wizened body. But he was a pathetic figure of old age, hungry, penniless, homeless, and down and out. Out of pity, the proprietor gave him a job dusting off the tables and racking the pool balls and permitted him to sleep at night on a cot in a corner of the place. For several weeks the old codger went about his duties, and a sprightly, queer little elf he seemed to be, as gay and lighthearted as you please, full of wise cracks and drolleries and ready witticisms. Then, one morning, when the house was opened for business, he was gone. Gone, too, was a revolver stolen from a desk in the office, and the proprietor wondered with vague alarm what this ancient person, apparently well past eighty, might possibly have wanted with that gun. The old man, by his own admission, was all that was left of the famous Frank Leslie, once of Tombstone.
This was the last that was ever heard of him. Buckskin Frank, enigmatic man of many murders, had deteriorated into a shabby nobody and faded silently into the misty grayness of nowhere.
XVII
Buried Treasure
Ho, for buried treasure! Throw the saddles on the ponies. Slap the blanket rolls and the grub and the old camp kit on the pack mule. Be sure of plenty of bacon and frijoles. And don’t forget the picks and shovels. There before you runs the trail. Out yonder across the desert a fortune of three million dollars is waiting for you. All you have to do is find it.
Get your directions right and keep them dark. Don’t confide them to your best friend. The danger is that your friend may smile in your face with great show of incredulity and then hurry off and dig up the treasure before you get there. That is sometimes the way with friends.
A dying outlaw who helped bury the treasure wrote out in detail the directions for finding it. That should mean smooth sailing for you. He certainly should have known all about it. He also drew a map, now faded and yellow with age. But
