e rifle-fire of the attackers--scurrying up into
the naked granite pinnacles like frightened quail--they left a baby
behind them. The mother had dropped it or missed it in her panic, and
the little thing lay whimpering in the bear-grass.

John Slaughter heard it and stopped shooting long enough to pick it
up. With the bullets of her people buzzing around his ears he carried
the brown atom down the mountain-side and took her home on his saddle
to his wife.

That was one of his last expeditions, for his name had become a byword
among the tribes, and Geronimo himself gave instructions to his people
to leave John Slaughter's herds inviolate, to avoid his range in
traveling. With this degree of peace ensured, the cow-man had bought
an old Spanish grant not far from where the town of Douglas stands
to-day and was settling down in the security for which he had been
fighting, when the Tombstone rush brought the bad men from all over
the West into the San Pedro and Sulphur Springs valleys; and with them
came the outlaws of the Pecos who had been waiting to kill him during
these three years.

In the wild cow-town of Charleston where the lights turned pale under
the hot flush of every dawn the desperadoes from the Pecos learned how
John Slaughter had established himself before them in this new land;
how his cow-boys patrolled the range which he still held on the San
Pedro and the new range farther to the east, guarding his herds by
force of arms; and how the silent Texan had already declared war on
the whole incoming tribe of cattle-thieves by driving Ike and Billy
Clanton from his old ranch at revolver's point, bidding them never to
show their faces there again.

They heard these things in the long adobe dance-halls while
rouge-bedizened women went whirling by in the arms of bold-eyed
partners wearing revolvers on their hips. From stage-robber,
stock-rustler, horse-thief, and the cold-faced two-gun man who sold
his deadly talents to the highest bidder, the stories came to them.
And then, to the beat of the piano and the cornet's throbbing blare,
the bad men of the Pecos told of the passing of the Man from Bitter
Creek, and how his slayer came back down the river recovering his
stolen cattle in the autumn.

Now another champion had risen among the bad men of the Pecos since
the day of Gallagher, a burly, headstrong expert with the forty-five,
known by the name of "Curly Bill." Already he had shot his way to
supremacy over t