e who picked a black kernel was lined up with
his luckless friends before the nearest wall and shot within an hour.
Thus the Mexican commander intended to reduce by one-half the
number of his prisoners, and at the same time afford his troops a
little entertainment in witnessing the drama of the bean-picking.

There was in Big Foot Wallace's company a young fellow with a wife and
children waiting for him back in Texas, and as the tattered group
crowded around the jar to thrust their hands within and draw forth
their different fates this soldier broke down. The thought of the
woman and the babies was too much for him.

Big Foot Wallace had just plunged in his hand when the man began to
sob. He glanced down at the white bean which his fingers clutched and
turned to the stricken youth.

"Here," he whispered with an oath thrown in to show his indifference
to the heroics, "take this, I'm feeling lucky to-day."

With which he turned over his precious bean and--proceeded to draw
another white one.

The tale is told to this day by white-bearded men who maintain that it
came to them from the lips of Big Foot Wallace. It has been used as
the basis for at least one bit of fine fiction, but in its original
form it illuminates for us of a later generation the characters of
those extraordinary men who won the great Southwest away from the
Apaches. They were, whenever occasion came, perfectly willing to take
a long chance against ugly death. That willingness made every one of
the old-timers a host in himself.

During the decades between the end of the Mexican War and the coming
of the railroads these men drifted westward from the Rio Grande and
the Pecos. A lean and sunburned crew, they came by saddle-horse and
wagon, by thorough-brace Concord stage-coach and by bull team,
dribbling into the long, thin valleys which reach northward from the
Mexican border to the Gila River.

They found such spots as suited them; there they built their cabins,
gouged their prospect-holes from the rocky hillsides, and dug the
irrigation-ditches for their ranches. There were few settlements
and these remote from one another; the military posts were so
insufficiently garrisoned that the troopers had all they could do to
look out for themselves; and the Apaches roamed unhindered whither the
lust for plunder led them.

These savages had owned the valleys and the ragged mountain ranges
between them. They saw the white men drifting in, in twos and th