Guns and threats having failed to stop Slaughter in the work of collecting his lost cattle, John Richardson, whose herd also had come under levy, swore out a warrant. The deputy sheriff reported to Richardson that he had been unable to serve the paper.
“Why not?” flared Richardson.
“Well,” replied the deputy, “Slaughter wouldn’t let me. He drew a gun and told me to light out. Under the circumstances, I thought it best to keep the warrant in my pocket.”
But after the deputy had gone, Slaughter rode for Richardson’s ranch. He proposed to discuss this matter personally. Richardson met him on the road.
“I’ve made up my mind to withdraw that complaint,” said Richardson. “Sorry to have caused you any trouble.”
So, at last, having recovered most of the cattle he had lost, Slaughter drove them home to his ranch in the Panhandle.
When Slaughter first visited Arizona, in , there were not as many cattle in the territory as he himself came to own in later years. The small population was centred in the towns. The railroads had not yet arrived. The land still lay under the menace of Apache raids and ambuscades. But riches were waiting in this country for the cattle man with the courage to brave its dangers and the fortune to survive them. The great valleys that swept north out of Mexico and succeeded one another from east to west like the troughs of mighty waves whose crests were mountain ranges were ideal cattle country without cattle. Winters in this border region were like spring; occasional light snows quickly melted or evaporated. It was cool in the mountains in summer and pleasant in the valleys in winter, and in mountains and valleys were abundant grass and browse the year round. The San Simon, Sulphur Springs, and San Pedro valleys seemed calling aloud for cattle to come and grow fat in the belly-deep gramma of their wild pastures. For two years Slaughter wavered. Then the silver strike in the Tombstone hills with its consequent influx of thousands of people and the sudden rise of a city in the desert brought his determination to a focus. He pulled up stakes in the Panhandle and began the long trek to the San Pedro.
When the grass was turning green in the spring of , Slaughter lined his cattle out on the trail. Guarded by cowboys, the herd wound across the Llano Estacado, down the western escarpments of those treeless plains, across the Pecos and the Peñasco in the neighbourhood of Seven Rivers and on through the Sacramento mountains. At Tularosa, Slaughter ordered a halt. There was need for rest. The journey had been hard, and it would grow harder farther on. Just beyond lay the White Sands, the volcanic desert of the Mal Pais, and the desolate strip known to the early Spaniards as the Jornado del Muerto. But something else besides rest prompted Slaughter to halt just here. At Tularosa, there was a girl. Oho, Mister Slaughter, a little romance, eh? Now the cowboys understood why he had taken this particular route, why he had relaxed a little his old-time iron discipline, how it happened they had caught him every once in a while smiling to himself. If they had had the brains of a yearling steer, they’d have suspected something like this. Well, the boss had been a widower for two years, and his heart was lonely. Now Viola Howell had quietly dropped her rope over his horns. That’s the way such things happened. And Viola Howell was a beauty, if you please, as fresh and wholesome and sweet as an anemone on the spring mountains. So in Tularosa, Viola Howell and John Slaughter were married. The trample of hoofs and the clash of horns were their epithalamium and the cattle, pushing on through deserts and mountain valleys under dust clouds that went up to the skies, blazed a honeymoon trail into Arizona.
Mr. and Mrs. Amazon Howell, the bride’s parents, threw in their herd with Slaughter’s and, accompanied by Stonewall and James Howell, their sons, followed the fortunes of their new son-in-law.
They came at length to the Rio Grande. A week before, the river had been a placid stream whispering about innumerable dry sand banks and so shallow a man could wade it. Now the spring freshet caused by melting snows in the mountains had turned it into a wild torrent swirling and roaring between low mud banks. Driftwood tossed on its foaming yellow surface; occasional trees, undermined and uprooted, shot down the current like battering rams torn loose from their moorings.
Slaughter was confronted with a problem such as sometimes faced the pioneers of an earlier day on the Oregon and Overland trails. Fortunately, he knew the frontier technique of crossing swollen rivers. On cattle drives to the Kansas railroads, he frequently had had to swim his herd and float his wagons across the Red and Cimarron when those streams were on a rampage. He had three wagons loaded with household goods to ferry across the Rio Grande, one drawn by six horses, the other two by four. To both sides of his wagons he attached long logs projecting beyond the ends to float the wagons and steady them. Having repacked his cargoes and lashed everything tight, he was ready for the plunge.
Slaughter and his bride, Mrs. Howell and her son James, took their places in the six-horse wagon. John Baptiste, a Negro known as Old Bat, for years a servant in the Slaughter family, and famous for his teamster skill, was in the driver’s seat. Mr. Howell, the bride’s father, an expert swimmer, grasped the bridle reins of the near-leader and led the team into the water. For a short distance, the horses staggered and slipped as the stream boiled around them. Then they were swept off their feet, sank
