“When Mr. Slaughter started for Texas to bring out the third herd,” said Mrs. Slaughter in recalling their pioneer experiences, “his young daughter Addie and I accompanied him. He sent his cowboys ahead with orders to meet him in Deming. He and I and the little girl took the train at Benson over the Southern Pacific Railroad that had just been built. Deming, the future metropolis of western New Mexico, consisted then of several tents and two box cars. One of the box cars was a grocery store and the other the residence of a locomotive engineer and his wife. Our cowboys had failed to meet us; we had no place to sleep; it was the dead of winter and terribly cold. Mr. Slaughter asked the engineer’s wife to allow Addie and me to pass the night in the box car but her husband was away on his run, and the poor woman, alone in that wild country, was afraid to take us in. Late that night, while we huddled about a camp fire, the train came in and the hospitable engineer, apologizing for his wife’s conduct, took us to his strange little dwelling. As I sat warm and snug by the stove, I realized what a wonderful home a box car can be.
“Next night our cowboys had still not arrived. Again Mr. Slaughter asked the engineer’s wife to take us in, and again, being alone, she refused. Once more, when the train rolled in, the engineer came for us. But Mr. Slaughter this time declined the invitation; he had had enough of that woman’s foolishness, and we shivered by our camp fire till morning. Then we learned our cowboys, having misunderstood orders, were in camp twenty miles east. Mr. Slaughter paid a man with a team of horses twenty dollars to drive us there—a dollar a mile. When we found our cowboys, we felt a little bitter over the unnecessary hardships we had endured when, with better luck, we might have been enjoying the good cheer of a comfortable camp.
“On the trip back from Texas with the herd, we had a number of Indian scares. Victorio and his Apaches had been plundering and murdering through all that part of New Mexico for months, and every little while we would hear of the massacre of some ranchman and his family. The herd had been bucking snowdrifts for three days almost without a bite of food when in a blinding blizzard of wind and snow we went into camp ten miles from Fort Bayard. There was a foot of snow on the ground and still the snow came down in sheets that slanted sharply on the whistling, icy gale. And we could find no wood for a fire. A teamster passed with three logs on his wagon. Mr. Slaughter offered him ten dollars for a log. But, refusing money, the man gave us one. Soon we had a fire roaring. Darkness was falling when a stagecoach bound for Fort Bayard came along. The driver begged Addie and me to go with him to the fort. The officers would welcome us and make us comfortable, he said, and the next morning he would bring us back to camp on his return trip. But I could not think of leaving my husband. At the outset of the trip, I had made up my mind to share all dangers and hardships with him, and on this night of storm, I felt my place was by his side. There was no sleep for anyone. Addie and I froze by our fire; Mr. Slaughter and his men, numb with cold and white from head to foot with frozen snow, rode herd all night and had all they could do to prevent a stampede. We heard fifty miles farther along the trail that, the very next day after we had met the kindhearted stage-driver, he was murdered by Apaches at the spot where we had camped.”
Slaughter kissed his wife goodbye at the door of his San Pedro Valley ranch, and rode off for Mexico to buy cattle. With him were John Roberts and Old Bat, and $12,000 in Mexican silver jingled in the aparejo of his pack mule. Having gathered together a small herd, he made camp near Magdalena in Sonora. A troop of forty-five heavily armed Mexicans coming up from the south rode into the village.
“Quienes son estos?” Slaughter asked of one of half a dozen vaqueros he had hired.
“Estos,” replied the vaquero in a frightened whisper, “son bandidos.”
All the country south of the line was then infested with these roving robber bands that pillaged and murdered with a free hand. As they drank in the cantina, the bandits had word of the gringo cattle buyer and his sack of money. By all the saints, they swore over their mescal, before next sunrise that treasure should be theirs.
One by one, Slaughter’s Mexican vaqueros came to him and, with apologies and profound regrets, gave notice that they could no longer continue in his service.
“Be on your guard tonight, señor,” said one, “but as for me, my mother has just died, and I must hasten home.”
“It will be well, caballero,” said another, “if you and your men sleep with your eyes open, but my brother lies at the point of death, and I must hurry to his bedside.”
So they departed, and Slaughter, Roberts, and Old Bat were left to fight it out alone, three against forty-five. Knowing it would be death to sleep in camp, Slaughter went from house to house in the little town seeking shelter for the night—the shelter of bulletproof adobe walls. But the town people shook their heads. They could not afford to be hospitable. Fear of the bandits closed their doors. While the bandits still sat at their toddies, Slaughter and his two companions stole out of the village with their treasure-laden mule. In the mountains five
