They had reached midstream when the right-hand horse of the two in the middle, known as the swingers, caught its foreleg in the crosstree of the leader ahead. The contretemps threw the animal off its swimming stride. It went under and came up snorting and plunging. Its mad antics confused and terrorized its team mates. Disaster threatened. But Old Bat, with four lives in his keeping, rose to the occasion. That off-swinger had to swim—that’s all there was to it. About the unfortunate beast the old Negro made his blacksnake snap and snarl. His deep bass voice roared threats and objurgations. “I’ll larn you to swim, drat yo’ bay hide. Buckle down thar. Git on ’cross dis ribber.” Mr. Howell, swimming at the downstream side of the near-leader, one hand on the bridle, shouted encouragement to the team to stave off panic. “Whoa, boys!” “Steady, boys!” Mrs. Slaughter suddenly became hysterical. She began to scream wildly at the top of her voice. Her mother attempted to quiet her. No use. Her husband put his arms around her and tried to calm her. Equally vain. She had to scream, and she screamed in spite of hell and high water. With Old Bat roaring, Old Man Howell emitting soothing yells, the bride shrieking, and the off-swinger madly plunging, it was a wild time out there in the middle of the raging Rio Grande. But the leaders struck bottom at last. The other animals found their footing. Out of the eddying flood and up the steep bank they went in mighty lunges.
After the two other wagons had got safely over, the yelling cowboys sent the cattle into the river with a rush. In a moment, the broad stream was crowded with heads, streaking like horned meteors across a yellow sky, bumping into tangled masses, filling the air with mad bawlings and the hollow clashing of horns. Some went under. Calves swimming beside their mothers were crushed and drowned. Down stream dead bodies floated. But one by one the brutes struck the solid ground of the far shore. They shook the water like rain from their glistening hides and fell to grazing.
The herd was lined out upon the trail once more, and the wagons got under way. The big adventure over, everybody laughed—even the bride. From the other side, the Rio Grande had seemed a stream of turgid ugliness. From this side, it had a certain majestic beauty. When it comes to rivers, the bank you stand on sometimes makes all the difference in the world.
“See that range ahead?” Slaughter said to his bride one morning after the drive had left Silver City and Shakespeare behind and had come into the northern reaches of the Animas. “Arizona is on the other side of those mountains.”
Mrs. Slaughter thrilled joyously. It was as if he had echoed the words of old schoolday essays—“Beyond the Alps lies Italy.”
Through the Stein’s Pass Mountains the cattle poured out into the San Simon Valley and, rounding the northern end of the Chiricahuas, passed into Sulphur Springs Valley. Here on the eastern slopes of the Dragoons, beyond which the new town of Tombstone was booming into life, Slaughter pitched camp for the summer. The drive begun in Texas in the latter part of March ended in Arizona .
In this Sulphur Springs Valley camp, Slaughter, standing at the gateway of the Promised Land, was saved from death by Billy Claibourne, one of his cowboys, the same Billy Claibourne afterward killed by Buckskin Frank Leslie. Attacked by an infuriated steer and borne to the ground, Slaughter, in another moment, would have been fatally gored if Claibourne had not galloped up and flung himself from the saddle upon the animal’s horns. In as fine an exhibition of bulldogging as ever drew thunders of applause from crowded stands at rodeos in Cheyenne, Pendleton, and Chicago, Claibourne fought and wrestled the mad brute to the earth, pinioned it down, conquered it, and enabled his employer to scramble from his perilous predicament. Those of today who look upon bulldogging as mere cowboy sport of no possible practical value doubtless would place a more serious estimate upon it if they had witnessed Claibourne’s lifesaving feat.
“I figured,” said Claibourne gallantly, as he laughed over the incident, “that if I had been killed I’d not have been leaving a young widow behind.”
Slaughter, having scouted the country for a ranch location, settled in August a little south of the old Hereford stage station in the San Pedro Valley. Here he built a two-room shack of poles, with dirt roof, dirt floor, and a slab door without a lock, and here, in this crude home at the end of honeymoon trail, he and his bride set up housekeeping.
Prosperity came quickly. Markets were close at hand. Meeting the demand for cattle became the big problem. A second herd Slaughter had left behind in the Panhandle was brought out by John Roberts, his foreman. Slaughter himself returned to Texas the following winter and drove out a third herd. He was awarded contracts for supplying beef to the San Carlos reservation and to the construction camps of the new railroad being built from Benson to Nogales. His growing business necessitated extensive cattle-buying in Mexico, which swarmed with cattle when Arizona had almost none. Carrying cash money to pay for his purchases, he made many trips across the line. Outlaws and Apaches lurked beside his trails. Many times they sought to trap him. Against white and red marauders he was at constant war, and braving death became a part of his daily routine. There was no fear in Slaughter, but his wife, in her lonely cabin, lived in the shadow of fear. Any day, Indians might butcher her and leave her body in the burned ruins of her home. Any day, a messenger might
