John Slaughter’s pearl-handled six-shooter shines out in opalescent beauty in Tombstone’s history. But it is remembered not so much for its gleaming handle as for its flaming other end. Slaughter’s four years as sheriff of Cochise County, 1887⁠–⁠1890, was a period of reconstruction and marked the dividing line between lawlessness and law in the Tombstone country. This pearl-handled forty-four was the tool with which Slaughter cemented a permanent fabric of law and order.

John Horton Slaughter was of a family that had been rooted in the soil and traditions of the South since the days of the thirteen colonies. He was born in Louisiana, October 2, 1841, according to an entry in the old family Bible, whose dilapidated, dog-eared pages give evidence of a line of churchgoing forbears. With slaves and household chattels, his parents moved to west Texas while he was a baby. The Texas war of independence, San Jacinto, and the Alamo, were still fresh in the memories of Texas people, and the news of the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma at the beginning of the Mexican War of Polk’s administration gave him his first-remembered thrills as a boy. He grew up on the Texas steppes when buffalo were still plentiful and settlers had to fight for their lives against Kiowas and Comanches. He enlisted as a soldier under the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War, but after brief service was invalided home. Though little fighting against Yankees fell to his experience, he saw hard fighting against Indians and outlaws as a Texas Ranger under the noted Captain Tom. In early manhood, he embarked in the cattle business on his own, married Miss Adeline Harris, and established his ranch in Atacosa County in the Panhandle.

Slaughter shared in the prosperity that came to the Texas cattle industry when the first Western railroads opened to the prairies the rich markets of the East, and the price of steers went at a bound from one dollar to twenty dollars a head. He not only raised cattle but bought them all over west Texas, and he drove his herds to market at Dodge City and the towns and army posts west of the Pecos. In those boom times of the trails, he acted as his own herd boss and took part in all the dangers and hardships of the long drives⁠—fighting Indians, trail-cutters, and desperadoes and becoming proficient, in a day of the strong arm, in protecting his own and holding what was his against every form of rapacity and lawless violence.

While Slaughter was buying cattle in the Devil’s River region of southwestern Texas, Bill Gallagher, bad man and notorious trail-cutter, laid claim to several hundred of Slaughter’s steers. Gallagher had the reputation of having killed thirteen men in Wyoming, where he was known as “the man from Bitter Creek.” For him, as for Buckskin Frank Leslie, thirteen had not proved an unlucky number. It was fourteen that turned out to be the numeral of disaster, as in the case of the Tombstone desperado. Gallagher’s reputation as a killer might have frightened some men, but not Slaughter. All bad men looked alike to this young Texas cow man. His courage was as desperate as theirs and his skill with firearms as finished. No man from Bitter Creek, though he came from the headwaters of that classic stream, could intimidate or bulldoze him. Gallagher’s brain was perhaps not so quick as his trigger finger. He would not have attempted to raid Slaughter’s herd if he had known Slaughter. When Gallagher started to cut out the brands he claimed as his own, Slaughter stopped him.

“Do you see that trail out yonder leading north?” said Slaughter. “That’s your trail. Hit it.”

Slaughter was a small man, and the giant from Bitter Creek bridled at this audacity.

“Do you know who I am?” he blurted ferociously.

“Hit that trail,” said Slaughter, “and hit it quick.”

For a moment Gallagher stared into Slaughter’s hard black eyes. The bad man saw something in those eyes that convinced him that that trail over yonder leading north was, after all, his trail. Without a word, he hit it.

Driving his herd up the Pecos bound for market at Las Vegas, Slaughter went into camp near Fort Sumner at the old Bosque Grande ranch of John Chisum, cattle king of New Mexico. Bent on revenge, Gallagher, who lived in these parts, rode alone to Slaughter’s camp. He was armed with a shotgun loaded with buckshot and two six-shooters. This armament, formidable under ordinary circumstances, again proved Gallagher’s lack of perspicacity. He was plainly a blundering rank-and-file desperado who knew only how to pull a trigger. Slaughter, on the other hand, was a master strategist. He had not fought Comanches and outlaws all these years in the Panhandle for nothing. Gallagher’s prospective fourteenth victim was different from all the other thirteen.

Gallagher saw Slaughter standing alone on an open hillside that sloped from the Pecos and rode toward him at a gallop. His idea was to get to close quarters as quickly as possible, where his double-barrelled shotgun would give him every advantage. None of his murders had ever looked easier. But, to Gallagher’s amazement, Slaughter did not wait quietly to be massacred. With his long-range rifle, Slaughter shot Gallagher’s pony from under him while the bad man was still out of shotgun range. Horse and rider went down in a smother of dust. This was disconcerting. But, having disentangled himself from his pony, Gallagher went charging forward on foot, opening fire with a six-shooter. Still he was badly handicapped. At the distance, his six-shooter was no match for Slaughter’s rifle. One of Slaughter’s bullets broke Gallagher’s right arm. Gallagher drew his second six-shooter and still went forward firing. He staggered under the impact of a second bullet that struck him in the breast. Two more tore through his body and brought him down. Slaughter’s cowboys carried the wounded man to the Bosque Grande ranch house. Slaughter stood at the side of the bed as Gallagher was dying.

“You done right, Slaughter,” said Gallagher. “If you hadn’t got me, I’d ha’ got you. I don’t mind much bein’ killed. It would ha’ served me right if I had been downed twenty years ago. But it kind o’ pains me to be out-generalled that-a-way. Ef I’d had any sense, I’d fetched along a rifle. I didn’t have no business with that shotgun. I’d oughter knowed better.”

That was the whole trouble with Gallagher⁠—lack of generalship. He seems to have had courage. If he had mingled a little brains with it, the “man from Bitter Creek” might be living yet. He “oughter knowed better.”

When he had sold his herd at Las Vegas, Slaughter discovered that he had lost many cattle on the drive up the Pecos. On his way back to Texas, he combed the herds of ranchmen in a hunt for his brand. This was his right under the law. But there was mighty little law on the Pecos in those days, and the effrontery of this stranger in demanding the return of his own property was deeply resented by the cattlemen of that wild country. But Slaughter’s courage was clean strain and, painstakingly and patiently, he saw the dangerous job through to the end. From John Chisum’s range, Slaughter gathered in sixty of his lost steers. Chisum produced a bill of sale to show he had purchased them. Slaughter smiled grimly in the old cattle king’s face.

“And you got ’em at a fine bargain,” Slaughter said as he ordered his cowboys to drive the cattle away.

From the herd of a man named Underwood, Slaughter reclaimed more than a hundred of his cows. Underwood swore he would have the cattle back or kill Slaughter. With two friends, Underwood rode to Slaughter’s camp. When he saw the three heavily armed men approaching, Slaughter dismounted on the opposite side of his horse and levelled his rifle across the saddle.

“I bought and paid for them cattle,” shouted Underwood as Slaughter covered him.

“Try to take them,” answered Slaughter.

But Underwood thought it diplomatic to decline the invitation and, with his two companions, rode home.

Farther down the Pecos, two rustlers and two half-breeds announced their intention of murdering Slaughter. A Mexican vaquero with Slaughter became panic-stricken as he saw the four bravos galloping toward camp.

“Fight or git,” ordered Slaughter.

The Mexican got. Before he went, Slaughter in a jiffy paid him what money was coming to him, and reached for his own rifle at the same moment. By the time Slaughter had drawn the gun from the sheath, the Mexican had faded to a speck in the distance and was still going. Slaughter dropped a few long-distance bullets among the four enemies who were lifting the long yell as they came racing for him. The little leaden greeting surprised them. They halted. Then, as the bullets continued to shower about them, they turned tail and ran.

Guns and threats having failed to stop Slaughter in the work of collecting his lost cattle, John Richardson, whose herd also had come under levy, swore out a warrant. The deputy sheriff reported to Richardson that he had been unable to serve the paper.

“Why not?” flared Richardson.

“Well,” replied the deputy, “Slaughter wouldn’t let me. He drew a gun and told me to light out. Under the circumstances, I thought it best to keep the warrant in my pocket.”

But after the deputy had gone, Slaughter rode for Richardson’s ranch. He proposed to discuss this matter personally. Richardson met him on the road.

“I’ve made up my mind to withdraw that complaint,” said Richardson. “Sorry to have caused you any trouble.”

So, at last, having recovered most of the cattle he had lost, Slaughter drove them home to his ranch in the Panhandle.

When Slaughter first visited Arizona, in 1877, there were not as many cattle in the territory as he himself came to own in later years. The small population was centred in the towns. The railroads had not yet arrived. The land still lay under the menace of Apache raids and ambuscades. But riches were waiting in this country for the cattle man with the courage to brave its dangers and the fortune to survive them. The great valleys that swept north out of Mexico and succeeded one another from east to west like the troughs of mighty waves whose crests were mountain ranges were ideal cattle country without cattle. Winters in this border region were like spring; occasional light snows quickly melted or evaporated. It was cool in the mountains in summer and pleasant in the valleys in winter, and in mountains and valleys were abundant grass and browse the year round. The San Simon, Sulphur Springs, and San Pedro valleys seemed calling aloud for cattle to come and grow fat in the belly-deep gramma of their wild pastures. For two years Slaughter wavered. Then the silver strike in the Tombstone hills with its consequent influx of thousands of people and the sudden rise of a city in the desert brought his determination to a focus. He pulled up stakes in the Panhandle and began the long trek to the San Pedro.

When the grass was turning green in the spring of 1879, Slaughter lined his cattle out on the trail. Guarded by cowboys, the herd wound across the Llano Estacado, down the western escarpments of those treeless plains, across the Pecos and the Peñasco in the neighbourhood of Seven Rivers and on through the Sacramento mountains. At Tularosa, Slaughter ordered a halt. There was need for rest. The journey had been hard, and it would grow harder farther on. Just beyond lay the White Sands, the volcanic desert of the Mal Pais, and the desolate strip known to the early Spaniards as the Jornado del Muerto. But something else besides rest prompted Slaughter to halt just here. At Tularosa, there was a girl. Oho, Mister Slaughter, a little romance, eh? Now the cowboys understood why he had taken this particular route, why he had relaxed a little his old-time iron discipline, how it happened they had caught him every once in a while smiling to himself. If they had had the brains of a yearling steer, they’d have suspected something like this. Well, the boss had been a widower for two years, and his heart was lonely. Now Viola Howell had quietly dropped her rope over his horns. That’s the way such things happened. And Viola Howell was a beauty, if you please, as fresh and wholesome and sweet as an anemone on the spring mountains. So in Tularosa, Viola Howell and John Slaughter were married. The trample of hoofs and the clash of horns were their epithalamium and the cattle, pushing on through deserts and mountain valleys under dust clouds that went up to the skies, blazed a honeymoon trail into Arizona.

Mr. and Mrs. Amazon Howell, the bride’s parents, threw in their herd with Slaughter’s and, accompanied by Stonewall and James Howell, their sons, followed the fortunes of their new son-in-law.

They came at length to the Rio Grande. A week before, the river had been a placid stream whispering about innumerable dry sand banks and so shallow a man could wade it. Now the spring freshet caused by melting snows in the mountains had turned it into a wild torrent swirling and roaring between low mud banks. Driftwood tossed on its foaming yellow surface; occasional trees, undermined and uprooted, shot down the current like battering rams torn loose from their moorings.

Slaughter was confronted with a problem such as sometimes faced the pioneers of an earlier day on the Oregon and Overland trails. Fortunately, he knew the frontier technique of crossing swollen rivers. On cattle drives to the Kansas railroads, he frequently had had to swim his herd and float his wagons across the Red and Cimarron when those streams were on a rampage. He had three wagons loaded with household goods to ferry across the Rio Grande, one drawn by six horses, the other two by four. To both sides of his wagons he attached long logs projecting beyond the ends to float the wagons and steady them. Having repacked his cargoes and lashed everything tight, he was ready for the plunge.

Slaughter and his bride, Mrs. Howell and her son James, took their places in the six-horse wagon. John Baptiste, a Negro known as Old Bat, for years a servant in the Slaughter family, and famous for his teamster skill, was in the driver’s seat. Mr. Howell, the bride’s father, an expert swimmer, grasped the bridle reins of the near-leader and led the team into the water. For a short distance, the horses staggered and slipped as the stream boiled around them. Then they were swept off their feet, sank until only their heads and shoulders showed above the surface, and struck out on the long swim. The wagon washed down stream; Old Bat pointed his horses at an upstream angle.

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 May 10th.

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 come with information that her husband had been ambushed and murdered.

“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 miles away, they went into hiding in a carefully selected position on a ledge high against the wall of a narrow canyon.⁠ ⁠…

Mrs. Slaughter, in her cabin on the San Pedro, heard a pounding of horse’s hoofs. A courier brought news that Slaughter had been murdered. The message she had so long dreaded had come at last. She hitched up her buckboard and set off alone for the Mexican line, her horses at a run. At the Elias ranch, where the customs officials made their headquarters, no one had any information. Slaughter and his men had crossed the border a week before and nothing more had been heard of them. Mrs. Slaughter drove hard for Magdalena. Far ahead, she saw a filmy speck on the horizon. It grew into what seemed smoke. It took on the appearance of a cloud. Then unmistakably it changed into a curtain of dust shaking against the sky. She whipped up her horses. The sun began to flash on the horns of cattle. She made out the herd winding toward her. A little later, she threw herself into her husband’s arms. Roberts and Old Bat drew round her laughing.

When the Mexican bandits had drunk their fill of mescal, they mounted their horses and rode out of Magdalena to Slaughter’s camp. It seemed a simple matter to massacre these three gringos and steal their money. But the camp was deserted. Off to the mountains the bandits galloped on the trail. They dashed into the canyon. As they rode at dusk through a narrow passage where the precipitous cliffs almost came together three rifles blazed from the shadows darkening the gorge. As the bullets whizzed among them, the Mexicans halted for one amazed moment and then fled for their lives.

“And that,” Slaughter used to say, “is the only time I remember ever having been murdered.”

All this while, Slaughter was achieving a reputation as an Indian fighter. Adept in all the wiles and stratagems of the cunning war craft of the Apaches, he outfought them on their own ground and in their own way. The lore of the war trails he had learned from the savages themselves enabled him to avoid their hidden snares and ambuscades and surprise the trappers in the traps they had set for him. No band of Apaches invaded the San Pedro that Slaughter did not take its trail. He fought to protect his own, and in time he made the land safe wherever his cattle grazed. The Apaches came to fear this sleepless man who fought so desperately, and at last old Geronimo himself gave his warriors orders to leave Slaughter and his herds alone. His success as an Indian fighter made Slaughter in demand as a scout with the army, and he saw service under Generals Crook and Miles against Geronimo, Nana, Natchez, Juh, Chatto, Bonito, and Chihuahua. He took part in the last campaign against Geronimo, and was with General Miles when in 1886 the famous old chief surrendered at Skeleton Canyon.

John Slaughter had two singular but firmly rooted convictions. One was that he could not be killed. The other was that he lived under the care of a Guardian Angel that warned him against invisible and unsuspected danger and protected him in every desperate emergency.

When Mr. and Mrs. Slaughter left Charleston one day to drive to Santa Cruz, Ed Lyle, Cap Stilwell, and four other men, all outlaws and Slaughter’s enemies, cut across country to intercept them. Passing through a wild region, Slaughter saw the six men spurring hard for a clump of willows far ahead beside the trail. He believed the outlaws meant to assassinate him from ambush. He gave the reins to his wife and sat with a shotgun across his lap.

“We’ll both be killed at those willows,” cried Mrs. Slaughter in a panic.

“Don’t be afraid,” returned Slaughter. “Neither of us will be killed. Those outlaws won’t kill a woman and they can’t kill me. If they fire on us, I’ll jump out and do my fighting on foot. You wait for me out of range. I’ll rejoin you.”

Mrs. Slaughter lashed her horses. It was a race between her and the outlaws. She won. The six horsemen were still several hundred yards distant when her buggy swept past the clump of trees. The outlaws did not attempt pursuit.

“What did you mean by saying they couldn’t kill you?” asked Mrs. Slaughter.

“Just that,” answered her husband. “No man can kill me. I wasn’t born to be killed. How I know that, I cannot explain. But I know it. When my time comes, I’ll die in bed.”

Slaughter met Lyle a few days later in Herrera’s store in Charleston and drew his six-shooter.

“Lyle,” he said, “that little affair the other day is the last trick you’ll ever play on me.”

“I’m unarmed, Slaughter,” pleaded Lyle. “Don’t kill me.”

“I ought to kill you, but I’ll give you your life,” replied Slaughter. “But you get out of the country. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. If I ever see you around here again, I’ll kill you.”

A horseman galloped out of Charleston on the Benson road early next morning. At Benson he kept on going. This was the well-known desperado, Ed Lyle, obeying orders. And the San Pedro country knew him no more.

Slaughter met Cap Stilwell in a week or so in a Charleston saloon. Both went for their guns and Slaughter got the drop. As he looked into the muzzle of Slaughter’s six-shooter, Stilwell got his twenty-four-hour orders. Next day he followed Lyle.

Mounted on his gray horse that for several years was as familiar to Tombstone as Slaughter himself, Slaughter was riding toward Tubac, the ancient pueblo founded by the pioneer Spaniards south of Tucson. He was bound for Marsh & Driscoll’s ranch to buy a bunch of cattle and had the money to pay for them in his pockets. He was in no hurry; he jogged along at a leisurely gait. The peaceful landscape was bathed in sunshine; no one was in sight in all the circle of the horizon. Suddenly something seemed to whisper into Slaughter’s ear, “You are in danger. Ride fast and ride hard.” He made no attempt to reason away the warning or to argue with his invisible guardian, but, putting spurs to his horse, rode at top speed into Tubac. There he talked a few moments with a storekeeper and rode toward his destination. But now he rode slowly. He no longer felt the urge for speed. Whatever the danger was, he knew it was past. An hour later, three Curly Bill outlaws galloped into Tubac, their horses lathered with sweat. They inquired of the storekeeper if Slaughter had passed that way. When they learned that Slaughter was an hour ahead of them, they cursed their luck and took the back trail. These three outlaws, as it was afterward established, had trailed Slaughter from the San Pedro Valley. The mysterious warning had saved Slaughter’s money and probably his life.

Slaughter’s ranch near Hereford was only a few miles south of that of the Clantons, and Slaughter’s herds suffered from the depredations of these bold rustlers. Several times, Slaughter rode to the Clanton ranch with a band of cowboys at his back and forcibly took back his stolen stock. Once he met Ike Clanton on his land and, drawing his gun, ordered him off, telling him he would kill him if he ever again caught him on his range. This rankled with Ike Clanton. He boasted in Charleston saloons he would even matters with this cattle man who was attempting to lord it in the Clantons’ own domain. Mr. and Mrs. Slaughter, in their buckboard, were driving from Tombstone to their ranch one night. It was a quiet night, and the valley was lighted by a full moon. Abruptly, Slaughter made a remark for which there seemed no reason.

“You drive the team,” he said to his wife. “I want my gun in my hand.”

“Why, what’s the matter?” asked his wife in astonishment. “I see nothing to cause alarm.”

“Neither do I,” replied Slaughter. “But do as I say.”

Mrs. Slaughter took the lines, and her husband drew his six-shooter and held it in his lap. They drove on for several miles. Nothing happened. The drawn revolver seemed so out of keeping with the peaceful night that Mrs. Slaughter began to laugh. Far ahead they suddenly heard the beat of a horse’s hoofs. A horseman rode out of the misty distance. The moonlight glittered on a six-shooter in his hand. It was Ike Clanton. As the moonlight glittered on Slaughter’s six-shooter also, the outlaw went by in silence. Slaughter had had no means of knowing he would encounter an enemy on the road. It was another one of his uncanny warnings.

On another occasion, the clairvoyance of Slaughter’s gray horse seemed superior to that of its master. Riding alone at night on the trail of a criminal and fatigued by a hard day’s journey, Slaughter picketed his horse and threw himself on the ground to sleep. The tired horse would neither rest nor graze. It nudged Slaughter with its nozzle. Sleepy and annoyed, Slaughter pushed it away. But the animal persisted. Still Slaughter refused to pay heed. Finally, the horse pawed Slaughter gently on the head with its forefoot. This was enough. The warning was clear. Slaughter saddled and rode. After going ten miles or so, he again threw himself down for sleep. This time the horse grazed quietly. Slaughter always believed some unseen danger threatened him that night, but he never learned what it was.

So, in the fullness of time, John Slaughter rose to riches and power on the frontier and became a cattle king. Fighting fearlessly and ceaselessly for his life, his home, his property, and the right to live in peace, he developed those qualities of mind and body that fitted him, when the hour came, to rule in Tombstone as sheriff and establish order in a land that had been the most lawless in the Southwest.