ide them were walled like
ancient castle-yards.

William Buckley of Watertown, New York, headed this party. Bands of
mounted Comanches attacked them on the lonely Staked Plains of western
Texas. Apaches crept upon them in the mountains of southwestern New
Mexico. Of the battles which they fought history contains no record;
but they went on driving the Mexican laborers to their toil under the
hot sun, and the chain of low adobe buildings crept slowly westward.

In those days Mexican outlaws were drifting into Arizona and New
Mexico from Chihuahua and Sonora; and these cutthroats, to whom murder
was a means of livelihood, were almost as great a menace as the
Indians. Three of them got jobs on the station building gang and
awaited an opportunity to make money after their bloody fashion.

At Dragoon Springs they found their chance.

Here, where the Dragoon Mountains come out into the plain like a lofty
granite promontory that faces the sea, the party had completed the
walls of a stone corral, within which enclosure a storehouse and stage
station were partitioned off. The roofing of these two rooms and some
ironwork on the gate remained to be completed. The main portion of the
party moved on to the San Pedro River, leaving Silas St. Johns in
charge of six men to attend to these details. The three Mexican
bandits were members of this little detachment. The other three were
Americans.

The place was right on the road which Apache war-parties took to
Sonora. For this reason a guard was maintained from sunset to sunrise.
St. Johns always awoke at midnight to change the sentries. One
starlight night when he had posted the picket who was to watch until
dawn, St. Johns went back to his bed in the unroofed room that was to
serve as station. He dropped off to sleep for an hour or so and was
roused by a noise among the stock in the corral. The sound of blows
and groans followed.

St. Johns leaped from his blankets just as the three Mexicans rushed
into the room. Two of them were armed with axes and the third with a
sledge.

The fight that followed lasted less than a minute.

St. Johns kicked the foremost murderer in the stomach, and as the man
fell, sprang for a rifle which he kept in the room. The other two
attacked him with their axes. He parried one blow, aimed at his head,
and the blade buried itself in its hip. While the man was tugging to
free the weapon St. Johns felled him with a blow on the jaw. The third
Mexican s