Far across the San Pedro Valley, the first faint suspicion of blue dawn appeared over the Dragoons. The three men took off their boots, tied them over their shoulders with pieces of twine, and in their socks, set off on the hunt. They slipped through the dark woods as warily and silently as Indians, guarding their steps lest the upsetting of a stone or the snapping of a twig give warning of their approach. Their quarry was not far away. They examined their guns, adjusted their cartridge belts. They were beginning to close in when Alvord showed sign of hanging back. Just a little. This was the young deputy’s first big adventure. Slaughter caught him by the sleeve and swung him forward.
“Stay there in front of me,” whispered the sheriff. “If you run, I’ll kill you.”
Before them on the slope of a hill, they saw through the dim, misty light three forms rolled in blankets and stretched on the ground. Only three. They had expected five. The three sleeping men were Manuel Robles and Neives Deron, robbers, and Guadalupe Robles, wood-hauler guilty of nothing except loyalty to his scapegrace brother. Federico and Geronimo Miranda, the other two uncaptured bandits, had gone elsewhither.
“Hey! Roll out of those blankets and throw up your hands.”
Slaughter’s voice cut through the dewy stillness. Called back, perhaps, from pleasant dreams, the three Mexicans flung aside their blankets, seized their six-shooters which had been lying beside them, and leaped to their feet. Surely a wild awakening. No time to rub the sleep from their eyes. No time for anything but fighting. Unless it was dying. There almost upon them were three grim spectre figures with levelled guns ready to send them to blazing death. Manuel Robles and Neives Deron rose shooting. Guadalupe Robles with his cocked six-shooter in his hand straightened to his full height. Slaughter’s first shot killed him, and the Mexican crumpled down on his blankets and seemed to have gone back to his pleasant dreams. Deron fled up the hill at a stumbling run and dodged behind an outcropping rock. There he turned at bay, only head and shoulders showing. Three times his revolver flamed. A neat, rounded notch in Slaughter’s ear dripped blood. One of Slaughter’s bullets dropped Deron, mortally wounded, behind the boulder. Manuel Robles went bounding down into the canyon. Alvord fired several shots at him, the balls knocking up spouts of dirt beyond him.
“Pull down, Burt,” shouted Slaughter. “You’re overshooting.”
Which might have seemed to indicate remarkably cool and keen observation on the part of the sheriff during the furious flurry of a battle. But Slaughter did not wait for his deputy to obey instructions. He gave a practical demonstration of how the shooting should be done. Turning his six-shooter on Manuel, he sent the Mexican sprawling with the first shot. But Manuel was up in an instant. He ran a short distance when Slaughter’s second bullet knocked him over once more. Again the Mexican scrambled to his feet and went scurrying away. This time he plunged into a thicket and Slaughter’s third bullet missed him just as he passed out of view.
After the battle was over, Slaughter and his men trailed Manuel Robles two miles by his blood. Then his trail suddenly ended and it was believed some Mexican had helped him to escape on horseback. Deron was still alive. The wounded man and the dead man were carried back to Contention in Guadalupe’s wood wagon. While being taken to Nogales to be turned over to the Mexican authorities, Deron died on the train after confessing that he was the robber who had killed the locomotive engineer.
Slaughter’s ruthlessness in dealing with the train robbers who had wandered into his corner of the country caused the survivors of the band to plot vengeance. Learning that Slaughter was to visit San Bernardino ranch, which he now owned but which had not yet become his place of residence, Federico and an accomplice lay in ambush. Possibly Slaughter’s Guardian Angel was on watch. At any rate, the sheriff did not make the trip he had planned. Deputy Sheriff Cesario Lucero went in his stead and rode into the trap that had been laid for Slaughter. The ambushed Mexicans fired upon Lucero who, without a chance to fight for his life, was instantly killed. Federico and his companion escaped into Mexico, where they were captured several months afterward. Manuel Robles, wounded in the fight in the Whetstones, fled to Sonora, where he rejoined Geronimo Miranda, and word came back to Tombstone that the two outlaws finally met death in a battle with rurales somewhere in the Sierra Madre Mountains.
Chacon, a Mexican bandit, had filled all the border country with the fame of his bold exploits. Sallying from his strongholds in the Sierra Madres with a troop of desperadoes at his back, this Fra Diavolo of Sonora sacked towns and haciendas, pillaged the stores of merchants, tortured citizens to make them divulge the places in which their wealth was hidden. He had killed many men and his merciless ferocity had made him the terror of northern Mexico. Against Slaughter, this murderous robber had conceived a violent hatred. Up and down the frontier line he flung his boasts that, if he ever met the sheriff, he would shoot him down like a dog. At these threats, Slaughter smiled grimly. But behind the smile was a purpose as deadly as Chacon’s own. Slaughter, too, bided his time. For a year or more the long-distance feud smouldered, but the trails of the two men did not cross. Then Slaughter received a warning direct from Chacon himself.
“I am coming to Tombstone to kill you,” the message said.
The story of Chacon’s visit to Tombstone was one of Burt Alvord’s reminiscences of the sheriff.
“I was sitting in my office in the courthouse one night,” said Alvord, “when Slaughter came in with two double-barrelled shotguns in his hands.
