Ghosts? Well, why not? But you don’t believe in them? Then you are unfortunate and may miss some delicious thrills. If you believe in ghosts, Skeleton Canyon is haunted; if you don’t, it’s not. That’s the way Ross Sloan seems to look at it. But, after all, that may be the wrong point of view, and Skeleton Canyon may have its ghosts, faith or no faith. Who knows?

Skeleton Canyon winds through the wildest part of the Peloncillo Mountains from the Animas Valley in New Mexico to the San Simon Valley in Arizona. The Animas Valley in the old days used to be a main place for outlaws. Curly Bill had a ranch there, and Old Man Clanton and Dick Gray and Billy Lang. Down in this farthest angle of the southeastern corner of New Mexico, jam-up against the Mexican border, still stand the old Cloverdale ranch house, the Roofless Dobe, the Double Dobe, and other old weather-beaten places of refuge famous in outlaw tales. Where Skeleton Canyon opens out into the San Simon Valley on the west stands Ross Sloan’s ranch house with high hills of red rock towering above it and back of it, only a few miles, the main range of the Peloncillos. Across the valley loom the Chiricahuas, and you can see from Sloan’s front door the far-off, shadowy mouth of Silver Creek Canyon that leads up to Paradise and Curly Bill’s old haunts around Galeyville.

Ross Sloan’s ranch is a sort of romance preserve. Just below his house is the spot where old Geronimo surrendered. Near it is a spring hidden in the cliffs known as Geronimo’s Seep, where, in summers of drought, when all the streams were dry, the Apaches always found plenty of cold, clear water. Smuggler trains coming up from Mexico by way of San Luis Pass through the Animas range and across the Animas Valley used to thread the gorges of Skeleton with their jingling mule bells on their way to the San Simon. Two murderous encounters between outlaws and smugglers took place in the canyon within a mile of Sloan’s house, one almost in his front yard. Down in a corral beyond the stables still stands the Outlaw’s Oak and the scars of bullets are plain on the live oaks and sycamores under whose shade Skeleton Creek is forever singing its pleasant song. Skeleton Canyon has, too, a tradition of buried outlaw treasure that drips with romance and rivals the wild tales of Cocos Island and the Spanish Main; and all up and down the canyon are the holes dug by treasure-hunters who have come with high hope and gone away empty-handed.

The men murdered in Skeleton Canyon were left unburied. Coyotes and buzzards picked their bones, and the place became a charnel house. For years these grisly relics made the ground white at the places of battle and massacre. Some of the bones were washed away by storm waters in the creek, some were taken as curiosities by travellers, and some of the skulls picked up by cowboys became soap basins in San Simon Valley ranch houses. But fragments and shards of the skeletons remain scattered through the grass in ghastly abundance. If you go to gather the wild flowers that enamel the banks of the stream and the little vega in the park-like space at the Devil’s Kitchen where the steep walls open out, you may find as many bones as blossoms⁠—knuckle-joints, a tibia, the broken arch of a rib; and, likely as not, you may stub your toe against a skull. The canyon that once echoed to cries of battle and death is now a place of brooding stillness that seems almost uncanny, and the deep silence is past understanding.

So it is perfectly clear that, according to all the rules, a wild, lonely spot like this, where so many tragic things have happened, must be haunted; and if you cannot find a ghost in Skeleton Canyon, you had best stick to your office or business back home and go on footing up dollars and cents, making collar buttons or automobiles, clipping coupons or selling groceries.

As you sit at night in Ross Sloan’s comfortable ranch house listening as he spins yarns of Skeleton Canyon’s strange, romantic history, you will hear, perhaps, through the silence and darkness a shriek that will suddenly make your blood run cold. It rises in a shrill, shivery crescendo and dies in an eerie wail. There seems something human in its note of poignant agony. It is like the death cry of some murdered man. It is like the scream of some poor devil who falls in his tracks with a bullet through his heart and leaves his unshriven bones for the wildcat to polish.

“That’s a cougar back in the mountains,” says Ross Sloan easily. “Those varmints holler around every night. They get a calf or a pig once in a while. We call ’em lions out here⁠—mountain lions. They’ve got a funny yell. Yes, it might sound a little ghostly if you happen to be superstitious. There was a lady out here to visit us once, and she went all to pieces when she heard one of those panthers scream like that. ‘I know that’s a spirit,’ she said. ‘A lost spirit that went into the other world without book or bell or holy sacrament. Oh, dear,’ she says, ‘that’s the tortured ghost of one of those men murdered in the canyon by outlaws and doomed for his sins to haunt the spot of his bitter death.’ We had a lot of trouble calming her down. She was going to stay a week, but she packed up and went home next morning, and we never could get her to come back to see us any more.

“They say Skeleton’s haunted. A lot of people think there’s no doubt about it. But I don’t pay much attention to the queer noises around here at night. Sometimes the wind in the trees sounds like voices babbling and sometimes, if you didn’t know it was the windmill, you might think a human being was whimpering just outside the door. The creek that just murmurs along like any other creek in the daytime seems at night trying to tell you something in some strange language you can’t understand. If a fox barks on the hill, it sounds mighty lonesome, and the catamounts have a peculiar wailing cry; there’s a lot of these prowlers around, and you’ve got to keep your chicken-house locked.

“Now and then you’ll see a light up the canyon moving slowly. That may be a will-’o-the-wisp in a marshy spot, or maybe a stray traveller with a lantern cutting across to the Animas. I’ve never seen anything. Once at dusk up at the forks of the canyon I thought I saw a dim figure step out of some bushes and disappear in the Devil’s Kitchen. But I wasn’t sure; it was pretty dark. One night, two cowboys came riding down the canyon hell-bent and swore that, up at the Devil’s Kitchen, they had seen a band of skeletons dancing in a ring and could hear their bones rattle and see the moonlight shining through their ribs. Those two fellows were scared half out of their wits, and their hair was standing on end, but I think maybe they’d had one pull too many at their bottle. I’m not saying Skeleton’s haunted, and I’m not saying it’s not; I’m just a plain cow man and know more about branding irons than ghosts. But I’ll bet a two-year-old steer you can’t find a Mexican in the country with nerve enough to ride through the canyon after dark.”

Don Miguel Garcia was a gallant figure with a touch of the hidalgo as he rode at the head of the long mule train winding down through Skeleton Canyon toward the San Simon Valley. His steeple sombrero was ornamented with silver bangles, his bell-shaped buckskin pantaloons were set with pearl buttons down the seams, and his striped resplendent sarape was swung with loose grace across his shoulders. Except for the six-shooter in a scabbard at his side and the rifle that rested across the pommel of his saddle, he looked just the fellow to stand in some dim, moonlit patio and strum a guitar beneath a lady’s balcony. Doubtless Don Miguel was dreaming of some dusky beauty who had taken his fancy in the last village in which his caravan had stopped among the mountains of old Mexico, for these smugglers were jolly fellows and, like sailors, had a sweetheart in every port.

Behind, in single file, came the mules, small, lithe, clean-limbed, of ancient Andalusian stock, each with a jingling bell at its throat and each half-hidden beneath great rawhide aparejos⁠—pack sacks called by cowboys kyacks, that did not stand out from the animal squarely like panniers, but fitted snugly around the curving sides and were strapped securely beneath the belly. Along the flanks of the train trailed heavily armed outriders, swarthy, hard-faced men, alertly vigilant, their sharp black eyes searching rocks and coverts for sign of lurking danger.

Many a smuggling expedition had Don Miguel led over the international line to trade at Tucson for merchandise upon which customs authorities never levied duty and on which he made fat profits. If the saints to whom he prayed blessed him now with a prosperous journey, Don Miguel, after leaving Skeleton Canyon, would turn north through the San Simon, round the northern end of the Chiricahuas, and passing through Dragoon Gap and across the San Pedro, arrive in Santa Cruz Valley where at trail’s end he would pitch his camp among the desert cholla thickets in the environs of Tucson. Here the merchants, who grew rich on this trade in contraband, would gather to meet him, and Don Miguel’s aparejos would soon be empty of their wealth of silver dobe dollars and packed to bulging fullness with goods and commodities of many kinds. Then at last, the trading over, Don Miguel and his men, before setting out on the long return journey to Mexico, would revel for a while in the Mexican dance halls of the old pueblo and refresh their weary souls with much wine and tequila.

While the smuggler train moved slowly through the canyon, up and down over the rough trail, in and out among trees and giant boulders, around many a corner of towering precipices, a solitary horseman lounged easily in his saddle in the sequestered coolness of the tall cathedral rocks that form the Devil’s Kitchen. He was a burly figure, with bull neck, round swarthy face, and a shock of curly black hair, and from his appearance might have been a wandering cowboy resting for a while in the shade of the deep recess. His hat was pushed back from his brow, and he had a look of carefree good-nature as he gazed with calm indifference across the level grassy floor of the canyon and heard the gurgle of the creek on the far side rippling over sand bars under the green shadows of willow trees. Though one might have wondered at his purpose in this lonely place, one who had ever seen him before would have been in no doubt as to his identity. This was Curly Bill.

From far up the canyon through the golden, sunny stillness came the faint tinkle of a bell.

There was seeming magic in the dim, silvery shiver of sound. Curly Bill was instantly transformed from listlessness into electric animation. He straightened tensely in his saddle. His dark face froze in the rigidity of sculpture. His black eyes gleamed like those of an ambushed panther that suddenly on a slant of wind scents prey. He drew his six-shooters from their holsters and gave them close scrutiny. He carefully adjusted the magazine rifle that hung in its sheath at his side. Then, with a satisfied air of preparedness, he touched his pony lightly with his heel and moved off up the canyon at a walk.

He had gone only a few steps from the Devil’s Kitchen when he shot a swift furtive look from beneath the brim of his sombrero to the broken rocks and tangled chaparral along the rim of the canyon wall. In the fraction of a second occupied by that rapid glance, a man’s hand that seemed as if detached from its body was thrust from a thicket, opened, and closed in a lightning-quick signal, and disappeared. That was all. Except for this strange, sudden apparition, the canyon’s rim seemed as peaceful as the blue sky against which it was outlined.

The jingle of bells was growing rapidly more distinct. It became a loud, confused tintinnabulation. From round a bend the long mule train swung into view. When Don Miguel beheld a horseman riding toward him, a look of surprise came into his face. With commanding uplifted hand, he brought the caravan to a halt. The music of the bells went out in sudden silence.

“Como esta usted, señor?” said Curly Bill with an easy smile, reining in his pony.

Don Miguel’s air was one of guarded aloofness.

“Buenas dias,” he returned with a touch of chill in his voice.

“Fine day.”

Curly Bill threw one leg nonchalantly over the pommel of his saddle and drawing a sack of tobacco and a package of yellow paper from his pocket rolled a cigarette.

Well, yes, Don Miguel agreed, it was a fine day. But just a little hot. So for a moment they exchanged casual courtesies. Curly Bill spoke Spanish with all the inflections and vernacular idioms of a Mexican. Don Miguel began to thaw.

“I thought it possible,” he said apologetically. “Well, never mind. It imports nothing. But, by the Virgin, one cannot be too careful when travelling these wild trails. I have never yet met with misadventure. But I have been warned that sometimes robbers lurk in these lonely mountains.”

Curly Bill threw back his head and laughed.

“Robbers, eh? No, señor. What few people there are over here on this side of the line are all right. Just plain honest people trying to make a living.”

Curly Bill himself, if Don Miguel happened to be curious, was just a cowboy looking for stray cattle. The headquarters ranch of his outfit was way up yonder⁠—he waved his hand⁠—way up yonder to the north. If, possibly, the señor was going in that direction, he might see the ranch buildings with the windmill off to the right. Don Miguel would keep his eye out. He was bound for Tucson.

“Ah, Tucson,” returned Curly Bill with a sly chuckle, “is muy bueno town. You bet. Plenty pretty girls. A baile every night. Good hard liquor. You and these hombres of yours will have one high old time. Eh?”

Don Miguel smiled. This rough-looking stranger after all was a very pleasant fellow. But the caravan was losing time. It must be moving.

“Vaya con Dios.” Don Miguel lifted his sombrero with the courtly politeness of a Spanish gentleman. “Go with God.”

“So long,” said Curly Bill.

As the mule train, with a huge clashing of bells, got under way, Curly Bill again shot a swift furtive glance to the rim of the canyon wall. Nothing stirred. Rocks and chaparral thickets, bathed in peaceful sunshine, were as still and silent as death.

Riding slowly along the length of the caravan, Curly Bill gave genial salutation to the dusky outriders as he passed each one in turn.

“Como le va?” he called jovially to the two Mexicans trailing behind as rear guard.

“Bien y usted?” they shouted back gaily through the dust.

But while their friendly looks still rested on him, Curly Bill’s dimpling geniality vanished with the suddenness of an extinguished candle. His face darkened like thunder. His eyes sputtered fire like twin black devils. With the quickness of a wildcat’s spring, he snapped out his six-shooter. Twice he pulled the trigger. The two shots were so close together they sounded almost as one. With the smile of greeting still on their lips, the two Mexicans slumped from their saddles, thumped upon the ground, and lay still.

As if the report of Curly Bill’s gun had been a signal, a dozen rifles spouted flame from along the rim of the canyon wall. Among the rocks and tangled chaparral, steeped a moment before in wilderness stillness, ambushed outlaws rose against the sky as by devil’s necromancy. Through drifting blue veils of smoke they loomed like phantom demons, pumping lead from their rifles with the steadiness of death machines.

“Get ’em all, boys.”

“Give the greasers hell.”

Death leaped upon the Mexicans in the canyon as a mountain lion springs from a tree upon the back of a deer. Caught in the trap, with no chance for their lives, the smugglers, here, there, yonder, pitched to headlong death from their plunging ponies. Their death cries went up in poignant tumult to the still mountains. The mules, stampeding, swept over the bodies in a whirlwind of terror.⁠ ⁠… Throwing his hands aloft in wild death spasm, a bronzed horseman dived to the ground and rolled over in a somersault.⁠ ⁠… Another, wounded to the death, fought hard to the last against dying; tottering weakly he clenched his saddle pommel; he bent down slowly, his eyes glazing, his face stricken gray, contorted in agony; as he fell, he wrapped his arms blindly around a foreleg of his flying pony and was jerked to the earth, his body sprawling with a thud at full length.⁠ ⁠… One was carried by his maddened horse to the top of a high embankment against the canyon wall; a bright red spot leaped out upon his forehead. “Mother of God,” he screamed as, plunging twenty feet downward, he crashed through the tops of willow trees into the creek.⁠ ⁠… Don Miguel, borne down the canyon in the hurly-burly, was struck by a bullet between the shoulder blades; he was flung to the ground, his rifle whirling in mad parabola. But Don Miguel had knightly courage as well as knightly courtesy. Staggering to his knees, he pointed his six-shooter in a weakly wobbling hand toward the heights of flaming death; his bullet whistled harmlessly. But this was the smuggler chieftain; he must be killed quickly. A concentrated fire was turned upon him; he sank gently to the ground as if composing himself for sleep.⁠ ⁠… A handsome stripling⁠—he was only sixteen⁠—raced in wild flight up the canyon. Curly Bill himself from his place of concealment behind a rock at the edge of the massacre fired a half-dozen shots after him, cutting leaves from the trees about the lad’s head. “José,” shouted the boy at the top of his voice, “Pancho, Manuel.” These were his brothers. But they will not hear his frantic calls to them. They lay crumpled in the bear grass. Darting up a fork of the canyon, the youth lost himself in the far purple shadows. He alone of all the smuggler band escaped.

Down into the pit of death, the outlaws swarmed on their horses, picking their way along the steep declivities. Curly Bill rode out among them, a smile of triumph on his round, dark face. He had never seen a trick turned in handsomer style. Nothing had gone amiss. The thing had come off from beginning to end like clockwork.

“Here’s a greaser still breathing.”

“Well, finish him off.”

There was a shot. Another over there. A third. But there was no time to lose. The buzzards and coyotes would attend to these fellows. Whatever loot in dobe dollars there might be was in the aparejos on the runaway mules. Off down the canyon, Curly Bill and his outlaws clattered in pell-mell pursuit, leaving behind nineteen dead Mexicans on the little vega in front of the Devil’s Kitchen.

The pack mules were overtaken in the San Simon Valley and, having been rounded up, were driven to Al George’s cienega at the mouth of Cave Creek Canyon where $75,000 in Mexican silver rifled from the aparejos was divided in equal shares. For riotous weeks, the outlaws squandered their spoils among the bars of Galeyville and Charleston. What they had left at the end of their debauch was won from them at poker at Roofless Dobe ranch by John Ringo and Joe Hill, reputed the most expert card sharks in the lawless crew.

This murderous foray took place in July, 1881. Those who, it is said, shared with Curly Bill in the sickening glory of it were Old Man Clanton, Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLowery, John Ringo, Joe Hill, Jim Hughes, Rattlesnake Bill, Jake Gauze, Charlie Thomas, and Charlie Snow.