with the sudden flare of recklessness which invariably came
to him sooner or later, he in his turn flung away the silver over the
unpainted bars. So the incident passed and was forgotten--by the
rustlers.

The Mexicans did not forget.

Old Man Clanton started with a Tombstone butcher and three others on
a journey for the Animas valley a few weeks later. They were going to
buy beef cattle and they took the Guadalupe canyon route. One night
they made camp near the middle of the gorge. And while they slept a
dozen swarthy men, who wore the steep-crowned sombreros and the
trousers with leathern facings which were a part of every Mexican
smuggler's costume, came creeping in and out among the boulders like
the Apaches whose ways they had studied in years of border warfare.

They had waited a long time in the lofty mountains south of the
boundary, watching the malapi flats for a party of Americans; and at
last these had come. They had dogged their trail through the long hot
afternoon, keeping well back lest they should be discovered. Now they
were closing in. The air grew cooler and the hour of dawn approached.
They slipped, black shadows a little deeper than the night which
enfolded them. The light climbed up the eastern sky and leaked down
between the cliffs; the cold gray dusk which comes before the dawn.
The shadows melted slowly; the heavens began to blush. Down here a man
could line the notch of his hindsight with the bead. A pebble tinkled
in the arid watercourse. One of the sleepers stirred in his blankets.
He caught the sound, opened his eyes, and saw the crown of a sombrero
rising behind a rock. He leaped from his bed and flung himself among a
clump of boulders just as the rifles began to talk.

Two or three cow-boys were lounging about the Cloverdale ranch-house
on a blazing summer afternoon when a queer figure came into sight upon
the palpitating plain. The spectacle of a man on foot was so uncommon
in those days that they had a hard time making themselves believe that
this form, which at times took distorted shapes in the wavering
overheated air, was that of a human being. Then they set forth to meet
him, and they brought the one survivor of the Canton party to the
ranch-house. His bare-feet were bleeding; he was half-clad; and his
tongue was swollen with thirst. They got his story and they rode to
Guadalupe canyon where they found the bodies of his companions. They
buried them on the little boot-hill overloo