John Ringo was drunk. For ten days he had been morosely, broodingly, tragically drunk. As straight as an Indian, he stalked about Tombstone streets, a tall, silent, sombre figure, looking a little more like Hamlet than ever, his hollow black eyes clouded and melancholy. As a toper, he was not hilarious. No antic impulse moved him to shoot out the lights or indulge in whooping cowboy deviltries. The intellectual outlaw took his pleasures quietly. He played a little faro and a little poker and of an evening dropped in at the Bird Cage Opera House. But chiefly he mellowed the acerbity of life by steeping himself in great quantities of pleasant liquors. He was in Tombstone frequently in these piping summer days of 1882. The Earps had been gone for months, and the old town gave him friendly welcome.

Ringo’s boon companions on this ten-day drinking bout were Buckskin Frank Leslie and Billy Claibourne. Buckskin Frank still tended bar at the Oriental. Like Ringo, he went on sprees which sometimes lasted a week or two. Claibourne was himself a fairly stiff tippler, but he had the elasticity of youth in his favour. Ringo was now thirty-eight and Leslie forty. Hard drinking had begun to tell on both. Ringo’s periods of hopeless despondency had grown upon him, and he frequently threatened suicide. Leslie was the same lighthearted desperado he had been in earlier days, but liquor now brought the devil in him close to the surface, and his drunken mood was murderous.

On a blazing hot day in the latter part of July, John Ringo, with two bottles of whisky in his pockets, rode out of Tombstone on a drunken trail to mysterious death. Buckskin Frank Leslie and Billy Claibourne followed him. The three met again at Antelope Springs, nine miles from Tombstone, and continued their spree for three days in the saloon of Jack McCann, who formerly had kept the Last Chance, between Tombstone and Charleston, and had saved Johnny Behind-the-Deuce from the lynchers. Next, the three pottle companions went to Soldier Holes and then to Myers Cienega in Sulphur Springs Valley, where, in the Widow Patterson’s boozing ken, they wound up their long orgy.

“Ringo drank like a crazy man the two days he was at my place,” said Mrs. Patterson. “He was blind drunk both nights when he went to bed. Leslie was tapering off. He slyly threw much of his liquor on the floor, and I don’t think he was so drunk as he pretended to be. Late on the last night of their stay, I heard a noise in the kitchen. I found Ringo in his underclothes rummaging through the pantry shelves. ‘Looking for whisky,’ he muttered. ‘Must have whisky.’ He was twitching and shaking and there was a wild look in his eyes. I thought he was on the verge of delirium tremens. After a few drinks next morning, he seemed better and rode off alone, saying he was going to Galeyville.”

Later in the morning, Bill Sanders passed Ringo near a chain of water holes known as the Tanks, or the Last Water. Ringo looked at Sanders out of unseeing eyes and rode on in silence. Three miles west, Sanders met Frank Leslie, also riding alone and, in Sanders’s judgment, showing no signs of intoxication. Claibourne was nowhere in sight. Leslie asked if Sanders had seen Ringo, and when Sanders replied that Ringo was only a few miles ahead, Leslie hurried on as if to overtake him. Sanders wondered at the time why this murderous desperado, whose reputation credited him with being able to kill a man to see him fall, should be following Ringo’s trail.

Where West Turkey Creek Canyon, sometimes known as Morse’s Canyon, opens out into Sulphur Springs Valley, Coyote Smith’s ranch house stood in open timber. On a steep bank twenty feet high that rose from the creek on the opposite side at some distance below the house grew a giant live oak of peculiar formation. From a short, stump-like central stem rose slantingly five trunks, each of the thickness of an ordinary forest tree and green with leaves the year around. Close to the ground and held in position by the five boles, a flat rock formed a seat in the cool, deep shade. Near by ran the freight road between Tombstone and Morse’s sawmill ten miles farther up the canyon in the Chiricahuas. This tree was known to all the lumber haulers on the trail. Beneath it they were accustomed to eat their lunch at the noonday halts.

Between twelve and one o’clock on the day that Bill Sanders met Ringo, Coyote Smith’s wife heard a shot.

“Will must have killed a deer,” Mrs. Smith remarked to her son Henry.

Will Smith, her brother-in-law, working at a coal pit in the hills, had heard a deer blow in the woods the evening before and had taken his rifle with him when he went to his work that morning. But Will Smith had not fired the shot. He came running to the house in alarm.

“Thought it might be Indians,” he said. “Maybe it was one of the Mormon Smith boys shootin’ into that covey of quail that’s been usin’ down the creek.”

That evening at milking time, Henry Smith drove the cows through the bottom land below the big live oak. Whistling a little tune, the youth had no suspicion that, on the bank over his head, the red sunset was shimmering on the face of a dead man.

Jim Morgan, a teamster, passing by on the trail with a load of lumber near noon next day, found John Ringo dead. The outlaw was sitting on the flat rock in the forks of the live oak, his body leaning back against one of the five trunks of the tree, his head sunk on his breast. His six-shooter, held in his right hand, had fallen into his lap and caught in his watch chain. Five chambers of the cylinder were loaded; the hammer rested on the single empty shell. His rifle stood propped against the tree. His white felt hat, stained with blood, was on the ground at his feet. The silver watch in the breast pocket of his blue flannel shirt was still ticking. In his right temple was a bullet hole, and at the top of his head a great shattered wound where the ball had passed out. Brains were scattered over the tree trunks.

Ringo’s coat and boots were missing. Bound about his feet were portions of his undershirt which he had torn into strips. Around his waist were two belts, one for cartridges for his rifle and the other for cartridges for his six-shooter. The latter was buckled on upside down, and all but two shells had fallen out of it. What had become of his horse was not apparent.

All the circumstances seemed to indicate conclusively that, as he so often had threatened, Ringo had ended his troubled life while sunk in the despairing gloom of the nerve-shattered insanity that had followed his debauch. Jim Morgan, Theodore White, and Bill Knott, acting as a coroner’s jury, decided his death was suicide, and a few hours after the body was found, Ringo was buried near the foot of the live oak.

Ringo’s horse, still saddled and with a broken piece of picket rope about its neck, was found a week later at Robert’s Cienega in Sulphur Springs Valley, six miles from the mouth of West Turkey Creek Canyon. Ringo’s coat was tied in a roll at the back of the saddle, and on the pommel the bridle was hanging. Not far from the horse, one of Ringo’s boots was discovered; the other was never found. In the inner breast pocket of the coat was a group photograph of four persons believed to be Ringo’s father, mother, sister, and the sister’s child. Coyote Smith’s widow, who at the age of eighty-three still lives in the old homestead in the canyon, retains this photograph today. Ringo’s watch and horse were turned over to Sheriff Behan in Tombstone. The watch was sent to Col. Coleman Younger, Ringo’s grandfather, at San José, California. Sheriff Behan learned that the horse had been stolen from a Mexican living in the Dragoons and restored it to its owner. It was reported, several years later, that one of Ringo’s sisters had the body exhumed and shipped to California. This, according to the Coyote Smith family, is untrue. Ringo, they declare, still lies in his grave under the oak tree.

Faith in an old superstition regarding the effects of delirium tremens led the mountain folks to believe Ringo had taken off his boots under the hallucination that there were snakes in them. It seemed more probable that, sick and exhausted, he had removed his boots and tied them to his saddle before stretching out on the ground for a nap. While he slept, his horse doubtless had been frightened, broken its rope, and galloped away. Awaking to find horse and boots gone and forced now to travel on foot, Ringo evidently had used the torn pieces of his undershirt to protect his feet against stones and cactus. The cartridge belt on upside down was evidence of Ringo’s distracted state of mind.

Soon after Ringo’s death, a rumour became rife in Tombstone that Frank Leslie had murdered him. The story may have had its origin merely in Leslie’s reputation as a heartless killer. Or in the fact that Leslie followed Ringo out of town. Or in a statement credited to Billy Claibourne. But it was believed that Leslie had boasted of the deed. Such braggadocio would have been very dangerous; confessed murderers were going over the road to Yuma even in those lawless times. Old-timers can remember no such boasts. If Leslie ever said he killed Ringo, he must have made the statement in whispered confidence only to his closest friends. Leslie had no cause to kill Ringo, as far as anyone knew. No one had ever heard of any quarrel between them. To all appearances, the two men were friends. The manner of Ringo’s death seemed to preclude the possibility of Leslie’s having killed him. It is certain Ringo met death while sitting in the forks of the tree. The spattered brains proved that beyond question. And the single empty chamber in Ringo’s six-shooter seemed to prove that he had killed himself. But the story that Leslie murdered him remained definite and insistent. It passed into tradition, and most people in that country believe it implicitly today.

Despite the evidence of suicide, Henry Smith and his mother, who were the first to see Ringo’s body after Jim Morgan had discovered it, recall two details of the tragedy that are difficult to explain.

“I found no traces of powder burns around the wound in Ringo’s temple, though I looked carefully for them,” said Henry Smith. “If Ringo had shot himself, holding the muzzle of his gun against his head, the flesh around the wound would have been flame-burned and black with powder. Then the pieces of undershirt wrapped about Ringo’s feet were as clean as if he had just removed the shirt from his body. There was no mud⁠—hardly any dirt⁠—on them. There had been a hard early-morning thunderstorm in the canyon on the day we heard the shot that killed Ringo. It had left the ground very muddy. If Ringo had walked any distance to the oak tree, the foot bandages would have been soaked and coated with mud. Bill Knott, my brother-in-law, who was on the coroner’s jury and is still living, also declares the foot wrappings were clean, and there were no powder burns around the wound. He says the verdict of suicide was returned as the easiest and quickest way out of the affair. The jurors didn’t want to lose time in a long coroner’s investigation.”

Mrs. Smith corroborated her son’s story.

“I have never believed Ringo committed suicide,” said the venerable woman.

Bill Sanders’s story seemed to lend colour to the theory that Leslie killed Ringo. The point in the trail where Sanders said he met Leslie riding hard to overtake Ringo was only twelve miles or so from where Ringo was found dead.

However, only by an involved ratiocination can it be figured out how Leslie possibly could have killed Ringo. Leslie might have encountered Ringo just as Ringo had wrapped his feet in the fragments of undershirt. Leslie might have taken Ringo behind him on horseback to the oak tree. So the foot bandages would have remained free from mud or dirt. Once seated in the oak tree, Ringo might have fallen into a drunken stupor. Then Leslie might have killed him with Ringo’s own six-shooter without holding the weapon close enough to leave powder burns.

It seems ridiculous to imagine the tragedy occurred in this way. But before dismissing such a possible explanation as utterly absurd, it may be well to wait a while. Crimes are not always to be solved by logical deduction. Impossibilities have a queer way of changing into facts.

“The Widow Patterson,” said Henry Smith, “was convinced that John Ringo’s ghost haunted her home at Myers Cienega. She got so she wouldn’t go in a dark room alone for fear of seeing Ringo. When she’d drive over to spend the day with my mother, she’d tell how she’d seen Ringo standing in some dark corner and looking at her out of his black eyes so sorrowfully she had to weep. Almost every night she said she heard Ringo rummaging among the shelves of her kitchen pantry, still looking for whisky. When my mother would suggest rats, Widow Patterson would become indignant. ‘Rats nothing,’ she would say. ‘It’s John Ringo’s ghost.’

“For years there have been stories in the canyon that Ringo’s ghost was often seen under the live oak tree where he was killed and where he lies buried. Some people are still afraid to pass the spot at night. Several lumber freighters driving for Morse’s sawmill claimed to have seen Ringo walking up and down under the tree and shining like phosphorus in the dark. One said he had seen the ghost sitting in the forks of the tree in broad daylight. Bill Sanders owns the farm where Ringo is buried, and his home is not more than fifty yards from the grave. If the place were haunted, you’d think some of Sanders’s folks would have seen the ghost, but they never have.

“Once, my father, driving home late at night, saw a white figure moving near the live oak. ‘That’s Ringo, sure,’ he thought to himself, and his hair stood on end. But the ghost turned out to be a teamster called Curly looking for his bell horse that had pulled up its picket pin and run off from camp. Curly was dressed in his white cotton drawers and undershirt.”

Coyote Smith once kept a saloon across West Turkey Creek from his ranch house. Following the trail over the Chiricahuas from Galeyville, Curly Bill and his outlaws used to stop there on their way to Tombstone and Charleston.

“When I was a boy,” said Henry Smith, “I knew Curly Bill and Ringo, Joe Hill, Bill Leonard, Jim Crane, the Clantons, McLowerys, and all the rest. They used to drink and gamble in my father’s place for two or three weeks at a time. I’ve seen Frank Leslie with them more times than I can tell. As jolly a fellow as I ever saw was Buckskin Frank, forever singing songs and keeping everybody laughing with his funny stories. Shooting at flies on the wall to show their marksmanship was a favourite pastime with these fellows, and the lizard that sunned itself on a window sill or the mouse that stuck its nose out of a hole was taking long chances. The walls looked like sieves, they were peppered so full of bullet holes. A rough bunch but good-hearted, and they spent their money free as water. Many a wild carouse John Ringo had within a hundred yards of where he sleeps today.”

John Ringo’s grave is within the circle of the deep noonday shadow of the dark-leafed, giant live oak in whose five-stemmed forks he died. Few travellers ever see it now. Few people beyond a radius of a dozen miles know where it is. The canyon trail, once crowded with wagon trains creaking beneath loads of lumber, is almost obliterated. Morse’s sawmill is gone. Only a chance horseman rides over the mountains from the San Simon on the old road the outlaws used to take from Galeyville. Far across the shimmering, sunny reaches of Sulphur Springs Valley the Dragoons are like a ribbon of amethyst in the west. Against the eastern sky loom the blue and shadowy Chiricahuas. The wide mouth of West Turkey Creek Canyon is like a wooded grass-green park. The air holds the sweetness of juniper and pine. A woodpecker tapping on a dead sycamore by the creek makes a hollow, booming sound in the deep silence. Lonely and still and peaceful is the spot where the outlaw lies.

The flat-topped mound of large, loose rocks that marks Ringo’s grave is twelve feet long, four feet wide, and as high as a man’s thigh. The stones, obtained from the creek that flows with a soft, plashing murmur at the foot of the embankment, are water-worn and smooth and in colour, brown and gray. No earth or cement holds them in place; the least among them is of a weight of four or five pounds, and a huge boulder unmarked by inscription of any sort is built into the head of the mound. Deeply impressive is this crude, lonely tomb without name or epitaph. It suggests, in its immense size, the cairn of some old giant of a lost, heroic age. After all, that may be what he was, this strong man who flung away his life but, through pillage and maraudings and robber adventures, preserved something of the honour of his youth; this outlaw fighter with the courage and chivalry of a knight of old, who here in his sepulchre of iron rocks sleeps forgotten in the morning shadows of the Chiricahuas.

Billy Claibourne was a Texas cowboy who had come to the Tombstone country with John Slaughter when that pioneer cattleman drove his first herd from the Panhandle into the San Pedro Valley. In his early days in Arizona, Billy was a rollicking, good-natured fellow but a steady, hardworking, dependable ranch hand. Unfortunately for him, John Slaughter’s ranch was only a short distance from Charleston, and Billy was soon snared in the whirlpool of that wild town’s fascinations. Every pay day found him drinking and gambling in Charleston saloons. There he fell in with the Clantons and McLowerys, who were John Slaughter’s neighbours, and was soon hobnobbing with Curly Bill and all the outlaws who rode with that redoubtable leader. One of these⁠—it may have been Curly Bill himself⁠—began to call him Billy the Kid. To be known by the name of the famous New Mexican desperado was unction to Billy Claibourne’s soul, and he became ambitious to justify the pseudonym and develop into a full-fledged bad man. When he killed a man in Charleston over a card game, he seemed on the high road to all the sinister glories of a desperado’s career. He had won a reputation as a killer. He was looked upon thereafter as dangerous and quick on the trigger and fraternized on terms of equality with all the bad men of the country. Though, as far as was known, he took no part in Curly Bill’s raids and robberies, he was a familiar figure in all the outlaw haunts. John Ringo early won his admiration and became his particular friend.

After Ringo’s death, Claibourne went to Globe and found work in a smelter.

“While knocking about Globe with some companions,” said William Lutley, now one of Tombstone’s leading citizens, “we ran into Billy Claibourne and asked him what he was doing there.

“ ‘I’m working double-shift in the smelter,’ he answered, ‘to get enough money to go to Tombstone and kill Frank Leslie.’

“We were dumbfounded at this statement. We asked him what Leslie had ever done to him and why he intended killing him.

“ ‘Never done nothin’ to me personal,’ Claibourne responded. ‘But I aim to kill him for murderin’ John Ringo.’

“The story that Leslie had killed Ringo was not news to us. We had all heard it. But we felt a little like laughing at Claibourne’s seriousness. He was a pretty tough young fellow, but the job he had picked out for himself struck us as a pretty big one for him to tackle. As bad men, Claibourne and Leslie were not in the same class. Leslie was a professional, Claibourne an amateur. We knew that, in a fair fight, Claibourne would have no more show against Leslie than a puppy dog pitted against a gray wolf.

“ ‘Look here, Billy,’ one of my companions said, ‘you just quietly forget that little plan and keep on working in the smelter. Leslie’s killed about a dozen men. He’s a sure-enough desperado, a dead shot, and the quickest man with a gun in Tombstone. You leave him alone. If you go fooling around Leslie, you’ll only get yourself killed.’

“But Claibourne wouldn’t listen to us. He was bound he was going to kill Leslie, and that’s all there was to it. He and Leslie had been drunk so often together that I suppose this familiarity had bred in Claibourne a contempt for Leslie. Claibourne evidently thought that, as a killer, Buckskin Frank was overrated.”

Claibourne arrived in Tombstone on his mission of vengeance on November 19, 1882. The first thing he did was to get drunk. Foolish fellow. If ever he needed a clear brain and steady nerves he needed them now. A loaded man is hopeless against a loaded six-shooter. When Nemesis staggers, it is safe to copper vengeance and play the bet to lose.

Frank Leslie was standing on the outside of the bar in the Oriental saloon talking with a group of men when in reeled Billy Claibourne. Fingering their glasses idly, the men at the bar looked at him without interest. They did not know him. But Claibourne shouldered in among them and, with much profanity, began to spout blatant incoherencies. Leslie caught him by the arm and led him aside.

“Here, Billy, this won’t do,” said Leslie in friendly wise. “These people are friends among themselves and are having a quiet drink. You are a stranger to them, and you’ve got no business butting in like this. You go on down the street. You’re drunk.”

Claibourne went out but soon came wandering back.

“You insulted me a while ago, Frank Leslie,” he shouted. “You can’t treat me like that.”

Leslie took him by the coat collar and hustled him into the street. In a little while, Claibourne, armed with a Winchester, was standing at the corner of Fifth and Allen streets, just outside the front door of the Oriental. A little crowd gathered. With drunken, noisy bluster, Claibourne was proclaiming that he would have Frank Leslie’s life.

Leslie had gone on watch as bartender. He was drawing beer and mixing drinks. A friend rushed in excitedly and told him Claibourne was outside threatening to kill him. Leslie went on quietly serving customers. Another friend dashed in with the same information.

“Ho-hum,” said Leslie in a tired sort of way. “Billy and I’ve always been good friends. I guess I’ll have to go out and see what’s the matter with the boy.”

Leslie took a six-shooter from a drawer and stepped into Fifth Street through a side door. Claibourne stood swaying beside Nick Noble’s fruit stand on the corner, his rifle across his arm. Leslie walked to within ten paces of him before Claibourne saw him.

“I don’t want to kill you, Billy,” said Leslie, his gun cocked in his hand.

Claibourne threw his rifle to his shoulder without a word. Both men fired at almost the same instant. Claibourne’s bullet tore a hole in the board sidewalk at Leslie’s feet. Leslie’s struck Claibourne in the breast near the heart.

Leslie cocked his six-shooter again. But he did not fire a second time.

“Don’t shoot any more,” Claibourne called out as he fell across the fruit stand. “I’m killed.”

Leslie went back into the Oriental, tied on his white bartender’s apron, and again took his place behind the bar.

“What’ll be yours?” he asked a customer cheerfully. “A dry Martini?”

He mixed the cocktail deftly, strained it off into a glass, and dropped an olive in.

Claibourne, mortally wounded, was removed to a hospital. Poor Billy Claibourne had made a mess of the tragedy he had so carefully planned, and had blundered stupidly from first to last. If he had had a sense of good theatre, he would have told Leslie why he purposed to kill him. Unless the victim knows why he is about to die, vengeance is robbed of its sweetness. By all rules of the stage, Claibourne should have thundered, “Frank Leslie, you murdered my friend, John Ringo, and I have come to avenge his death in your blood.” Or something like that. But Leslie knew nothing of Claibourne’s true motive afterward, and Tombstone was left to suppose the shooting was merely the result of a drunken row. Certainly, Billy Claibourne had no flair for playacting. As an avenger, he was an unheroic and undramatic fiasco.

Some of his cowboy friends gathered about Claibourne’s hospital cot to watch his last moments. For a half hour he screamed curses on Leslie. Exhausted, finally, he sank back upon the pillow and calmly awaited the end.

“Frank Leslie,” he said quietly with his dying breath, “murdered John Ringo. I helped him carry Ringo in there and seen him do it.”

Those were Claibourne’s last words, according to his cowboy friends, who repeated them to Henry Smith. Their meaning was not entirely clear, but they threw a new light on the mystery of Ringo’s death. When he made the statement, Claibourne, it may be added, fully realized that in the next minute he would be dead.

All the evidence in the Ringo case has now been heard. Physical facts, as the lawyers say, pointing conclusively to suicide. An eleventh-hour witness declaring with his dying breath he saw him murdered. One, of course, may suspect, if one cares to, that Claibourne’s statement was a last desperate, revengeful effort to injure the man he had failed to kill. But one must remember also that men, consciously dying, rarely lie. So the matter awaits the verdict. How did John Ringo die? Suicide or murder⁠—which?

Leslie was acquitted of the Claibourne killing and remained in Tombstone until 1890. Then he went to Yuma, where he lived in retirement⁠—and stripes. The tragedy that ended his Tombstone career occurred at Leslie’s ranch in the Swisshelms. Leslie, Jim Hughes, and Diamond Annie, Leslie’s latest flame, a pretty woman of Tombstone’s red lights, were drinking at the ranch when their supply of whisky ran out. Leaving Hughes and the woman alone, Leslie rode across country to the nearest groggery for more liquor. Upon his return, after nightfall, he flared into a jealous rage and killed Diamond Annie and shot Hughes through the breast. After lying hidden for several hours in deep saccaton grass, Hughes made his way to Bill Reynolds’s ranch two miles distant. Next morning Leslie knocked at Reynolds’s door. It was believed he meant to “kill the evidence” of the murder by killing Hughes. Reynolds told him Hughes was not there. Behind the door at that moment and within three feet of Leslie, Hughes was standing with a double-barrelled shotgun. When Leslie rode into Tombstone, he said Hughes had killed Diamond Annie and escaped. After Hughes had told the true story of the affair, Leslie confessed and was sentenced to twenty-five years in Yuma penitentiary. He was pardoned after serving four years.

J. H. Macia of Tombstone met him in Tucson and, as Leslie was out of funds, Macia shared his room with him.

“The old superstition that thirteen is an unlucky number hasn’t worked out in my case,” Leslie remarked to Macia. “I killed thirteen men and never once saw the inside of a prison. It was my fourteenth that caused all my trouble. But,” he added with a whimsical shrug, “my fourteenth was a woman.”

Tombstone saw Buckskin Frank for the last time when, soon after his release from prison, he passed through town accompanied by Professor Dumble, geologist of the Southern Pacific Railroad, on the way to coal mines being developed by the railroad company in Mexico. A story came back that, while Leslie was employed as wagon boss at the mines, he killed three Mexicans whom he had caught stealing wood. He was next heard of in San Francisco. There, it was reported, he married a woman who had become interested in him while he was in the penitentiary and who was credited with being instrumental in obtaining his pardon. It is known that he was in Alaska during the Klondike gold excitement. Upon Leslie’s return from the North, Jeff Milton of Fairbank met him in San Francisco. Leslie was prosperous then and was living at the Russ House.

The next twenty-five years are a blank in Buckskin Frank’s story. Tombstone had no word of him. What devious roads he travelled, what adventures befell him during this last quarter of a century, remain secrets of the gods.

A little old man, looking as if he might have seen rough experience on the crossties, wrinkled, gray, and threadbare, walked into a billiard hall in Oakland one day in 1924 and asked in a quavering voice for some kind of light employment. His hard gray eyes were bright, his movements were touched with catlike furtiveness, and there was a suggestion of steel-wire toughness in his wizened body. But he was a pathetic figure of old age, hungry, penniless, homeless, and down and out. Out of pity, the proprietor gave him a job dusting off the tables and racking the pool balls and permitted him to sleep at night on a cot in a corner of the place. For several weeks the old codger went about his duties, and a sprightly, queer little elf he seemed to be, as gay and lighthearted as you please, full of wise cracks and drolleries and ready witticisms. Then, one morning, when the house was opened for business, he was gone. Gone, too, was a revolver stolen from a desk in the office, and the proprietor wondered with vague alarm what this ancient person, apparently well past eighty, might possibly have wanted with that gun. The old man, by his own admission, was all that was left of the famous Frank Leslie, once of Tombstone.

This was the last that was ever heard of him. Buckskin Frank, enigmatic man of many murders, had deteriorated into a shabby nobody and faded silently into the misty grayness of nowhere.