With those sharp black eyes of his, Slaughter was able to see distant objects sometimes invisible to those of ordinary vision. Riding one day with his niece and another young woman, he pointed to a crack on a mountain wall.
“Do either of you girls see anything up there?” he asked.
Both scrutinized the cliff long and carefully. No, they saw nothing.
“But wait a moment, Uncle John,” cried his niece. “Don’t show us. We’ll find it yet.”
Again they scanned the bluff with meticulous glances.
“There’s absolutely nothing there,” they declared.
“Let’s see,” answered Slaughter.
He drew his six-shooter and, apparently without taking aim, fired. Something fell from the crack in the mountain wall. The astonished young ladies hurried to see what it might be. It was a buff-coloured owl of the exact shade of the rock against which it had been perched.
No one ever saw Slaughter that his pearl-handled six-shooter was not hanging at his side. He wore it in his home. It used to be suspected that he slept with it on. He doubtless would have felt undressed without it. Moreover, he could do some remarkably fine shooting with it. He was rated, in unprecise phrase, as a dead shot. Certainly he was a crack shot. Whenever he shot, something usually dropped. His gleaming gun handle might have borne a number of notches if he had cared to file them there. How many is still a matter of conjecture. Modern Tombstone’s answer to inquiries on this subject is vague. “Slaughter killed plenty,” is the usual reply. Estimates run from six to eight or twenty. And all estimates are guesses. Slaughter never told how many men he had killed, and he alone knew. He cared nothing for fame as a man with a gun-handle record. The record itself was enough. He remained silent on his record to the end of his life. But hidden in his silence were many tragedies.
For his job as sheriff, all the experience of Slaughter’s life had equipped him, all his past had been preparation. He was not an office sheriff. He did not sit at a mahogany desk and give orders to deputies. He was a hard-riding sheriff, forever in the saddle. Whatever hard or dangerous work there was to do, he did it himself or took an active part in it. Nor was it his wont to ride with a posse at his back. In pursuit of a criminal, he usually rode alone. He was a frontiersman who knew his frontier. He could follow a trail invisible to eyes less keen with the uncanny ability of an Apache. Deserts and mountains were like a printed page to him. A broken stalk of grass, a bent weed, an upturned pebble, guided him. He did not dash off at random to some town to which it might be logical to assume a fugitive would flee. It was his custom to track a man step by step, and sign by sign. And usually, at the end of the trails he followed, a man threw up his hands or died.
Slaughter was not troubled with hairline distinctions, and in dealing with criminals he sometimes lost sight of the fact that he was only an officer of the law and became the law itself. He had little confidence in courts and juries but implicit faith in the justice of John Slaughter. Instead of arresting a man, he sometimes ordered him out of the country. There was, of course, no law in the statute books to sanction such a czarlike ukase. But, for the nonce, these orders became the law, and very effective law at that. Invariably, the man upon whom fell the edict of banishment folded his tents and disappeared. What is more, he never came back. He knew Slaughter would kill him if he did not go, and would kill him if he ventured to return. To him, the fierce little tiger man guarding the peace of Tombstone loomed like a heroic statue of certain death.
Horse stealing was not punishable by death under Arizona law, but under Slaughter’s personal code it was a capital offense. If a horse were stolen from a Tombstone stable, as not infrequently was the case, the citizens could always count upon seeing shortly Slaughter’s strapping gray standing saddled at the hitching rack in front of the courthouse. Then down the steps the sheriff would come marching, mount, and ride out of town. He would say goodbye to no one. No one, not even his chief deputy, would know where he was going. For a week, perhaps, nothing would be heard of him. Then, some fine day, he would come riding back, the stolen horse jogging behind on a lead rope. No questions would be asked. Slaughter would vouchsafe no information. What had become of the horse thief remained Slaughter’s secret.
“I was inspector of customs located at Tombstone for two years while Slaughter was sheriff,” said Jeff Milton of Fairbank, a fighter himself. “He and I were good friends. He rode by my house one day going out after a horse thief.
“ ‘I’ll saddle up and go along and help you, John,’ I said.
“ ‘Never mind,’ Slaughter answered. ‘It’s only one Mexican. I’ll get him.’
“I guess he got him. Slaughter rode back with the stolen horse. Every time he went out after a stolen horse, he always brought it back. But I don’t remember ever seeing him bring back the horse thief.
“Slaughter would never allow any man to get behind him—not even a friend. I used to try it, just for fun. While I talked with him, I’d edge around a
