County did not see him again for three years.

The next spring he began breaking trail to a new market through a
country where others did not dare to drive their herds. The market was
southeastern Arizona, on whose ranges the grass grew belly-deep; its
stockmen, who were beginning operations in 1877, were in sore need of
cattle. But the interval between the Rio Grande and these virgin
pastures was a savage land; Victorio's bands of turbaned Apache
warriors lurked among its shadowed purple mountains; there were long
stretches of blistering desert dotted with the skeletons of men and
animals who had died of thirst.

John Slaughter brought his first herd west of the Pecos with the
coming of the grass, and his cow-boys lined them out on this
forbidding route. They crossed wide reaches of sand-dunes and alkali
flats--ninety miles was the length of one of those dry drives--where
they never saw a water-hole for days, until the cattle went blind from
thirst and sun-glare and wandered aimlessly over the baked earth
lolling their tongues, moaning for drink, ignoring the red-eyed riders
who spurred their famished ponies through the stifling dust-cloud and
sought by shouts and flaming pistols to hold them to the proper
course.

The Apaches watched them coming from the heights and crept down to
ambush them, but John Slaughter had learned Indian-fighting while he
was still in his teens until he knew its tricks as well as the savages
themselves; and he led his cow-boys out against them, picking his own
ground, swooping down on them from vantage-points, routing them.

The herd came on into the long thin valleys which reach like fingers
from northern Mexico to the Gila River. On the San Pedro the cow-boys
turned them southward and the outfit made its last camp near where the
town of Hereford stands to-day.

Here the Texan established his home ranch, for he had made up his mind
to forsake the valley of the Rio Grande for this new country; and
hither now, over the trail which he had broken, his men drove other
herds; he sold them to the cow-men of southeastern Arizona as fast as
they came in. From now on he devoted himself to stocking the ranges of
the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Sulphur Springs, and the San Simon,
turning a tawny wilderness into a pastoral commonwealth.

For he brought more than Texas cattle into this land which had
heretofore been the hunting-ground of Apaches, the wild refuge of
white renegades more savage