When the West Was Young Part 6

The gray twilight was spreading over the land when he raised his head above one of the boulders. In that instant he dropped to earth as if he had been shot. An Indian was riding up to the bottom of the knoll.

The Apache's rifle lay across his lean bare thighs; his gaunt body bent forward as he scanned the rocks above him. He had been heading for the hill from this side while Schiefflin was climbing up the opposite slope. Evidently he was coming to the summit to look over the country for enemies. There must be others of the band close by.

Schiefflin found a narrow crack between two boulders and peeped out.

Another savage appeared at that moment on the summit of the next knoll. He was afoot; and now he stood there motionless searching the wide landscape for any moving form. He was so near that in the waning light the smear of war-paint across his ugly face was visible.

Schiefflin crooked his thumb over the hammer of his rifle and raised it slowly to the full c.o.c.k, pressing the trigger with his finger to prevent the click.

The first Apache had dismounted and was climbing the hill. As he drew closer the clink of ponies' hoofs sounded down in the dry wash. A number of dirty turbans came into sight above the bank. More followed and still more, until thirty-odd were bobbing up and down to the movement of the horses.

A moment pa.s.sed, one of those mighty moments when a man's life appears before him as a period which he has finished, when a man's thoughts rove swiftly over what portions of that period they choose. And Schiefflin's mind went to that talk with the man at the Bruncknow house.

"Yo'-all keep on and yo'll sure find yo'r tombstone out there some day."

He could hear the old-timer saying the words now. And, as he listened to the grim warning again, he felt--as perhaps those two prospectors felt in the moment of their awakening down by the river--that fate had sadly swindled him. He was stiffening his trigger-finger for the pull, peering across the sights at the Indian who had climbed to within a few yards of the weapon's muzzle, when--the warrior on the summit of the next knoll waved his hand. The Apache halted at the gesture and Schiefflin followed his gaze in time to see the lean brown arm of the sentinel sweep forward. Both of the savages turned and descended the knolls.

They caught up their ponies and rode on, following the course of the wash below them. The band down in the arroyo's bed were receding. The rattle of hoofs grew fainter. Schiefflin lowered the hammer of his rifle and took his first full breath.

A low outcry down the wash stopped his breathing again. The band had stopped their ponies; some of them were dismounting. He could see these gathering about the place where he had led his mule up the bank.

Two of them were pointing along the course he had taken with the animal. Several others were creeping up the slope on their bellies following the fresh trail. The murmur of their voices reached the white man where he lay watching them.

Then, as he was giving up hope for the second time, a mounted warrior--evidently he was their chief--called to the trackers. They rose, looked about and scurried back to their ponies like frightened quail. The whole band were hammering their heels against the flanks of their little mounts. The coming of the night had frightened them away.

The shadows deepened; stillness returned upon the land; the stars grew larger in the velvet sky. Schiefflin crouched among the boulders at the summit of the knoll and fought off sleep while the great constellations wheeled in their long courses. The dawn would come in its proper time, and it seemed as certain as that fact that they would return to hunt him out.

He dared not leave the place, for he might stray into some locality where they would find him without shelter when the day revealed his trail. So he waited for the sunrise and the beginning of the attack.

At last the color deepened in the east. The rocks below his hiding-place stood out more clearly. He could see no sign among them of creeping savages. The sun rose and still nothing moved.

He came forth finally in the full blaze of the hot morning and found the mule where he had picketed it behind the ridge. When he returned to the dry wash he saw the tracks where the band had pa.s.sed the evening before. For some reason of their own they had found it best to keep on that course instead of coming back to murder him.

He resumed his search for float where he had left it off. It showed more frequently as he went on. He followed the bits of ore to a narrow stringer of blackish rock. He dug into it with his prospector's pick, chipped off specimens, and carefully covered up the hole. The danger of Apaches had pa.s.sed, but a new fear had come to him, the dread that some rival prospector might happen upon his discovery before he could establish possession.

For his provisions were running low. He had no money. He needed a good grubstake--and companions to help him hold down the claim against jumpers--before he could begin development work.

He hurried back to the Bruncknow house. An attack of chills and fever, brought on by his night among the rocks, gave him a good excuse to leave the place. The climate, he said, did not agree with him.

While he was trying to think of one with whom to share his secret, one whom he could trust to take his full portion of the dangers which would attend the claim's development, he remembered his brother Al, who was working at the Signal mine way over in Mohave County, There was the man. So he made his way across the State of Arizona. He stopped at times to earn money for food to carry him through and it was December before he reached his destination.

Al Schiefflin had a friend, d.i.c.k Gird, who was an a.s.sayer. Gird saw the specimens, tested them, and was on fire at once. He joined forces with the brothers, helped them to procure a grubstake, and in January, 1878, the three men set forth from Williams Fork of the Colorado River in a light wagon drawn by two mules.

Spring was well on its way when they reached Tucson and made their camp in Bob Leatherwood's corral. The Apaches were raiding throughout the southeastern part of the territory and the little town of adobes was getting new reports of murders from that section every day.

They drove their mules on eastward up the long mesas leading to the San Pedro Divide. At the Pantano stage station they saw the fresh scars of Apache bullets on the adobe walls. The men had held the place against a large band of Geronimo's warriors only a few days before.

Now as they drove on they kept constant lookout and their rifles were nearly always in their hands. Every morning they rose long before the dawn, and two of them would climb the ridges near the camp to watch the country as the light came over it, while the other caught up the mules and harnessed them.

They turned southward up the San Pedro, avoiding the stage station at the crossing of the river lest some other party of prospectors might follow them. They made a circuit around the Mormon settlement at St.

Davids and came on to the Bruncknow house, to find two more fresh graves of Apache victims under the adobe walls.

They made their permanent camp here, and Schiefflin took his two companions up the dry wash. They found the outcropping undisturbed.

Gird and Al Schiefflin dug away at the dark rock with their prospector's picks. Less than three feet below the surface the stringer pinched out. The claim was not worth staking.

Beside the little strip of ore, whose false promises of riches had lured them into this land of death, they held a conference. The hills opened to a low swale which led up toward the loftier summits in the south. They decided to follow that depression in search of another ledge.

They made their daily journeys along its course, returning with evening to the Bruncknow house, whose inmates were away at the time on some expedition of their own. Sometimes they saw the smoke of signal-fires over in the Dragoons; sometimes the slender columns rose from the summit of the Whetstone Mountains in the north. One morning--they had spent the previous night out here in the hills--they awoke to find a fresh trail in the bear-gra.s.s within a hundred yards of where they had been sleeping, and in the middle of the track d.i.c.k Gird picked up one of the rawhide wristlets which Apaches wore to protect their arms from the bowstring.

That day Ed Schiefflin discovered a new outcropping. Gird a.s.sayed the specimens in a rude furnace which he had fas.h.i.+oned from the fireplace at the Bruncknow house. Some of them yielded as high as $2,200 to the ton. Exploration work showed every evidence of a great ore body. Two or three of the fragments which they had chipped from it below the surface a.s.sayed $9,000 a ton. They had made their big strike. They staked the claim, and when they came to fixing on a name Ed Schiefflin remembered once more those words of the old-timer at the Bruncknow house.

"We'll call it the Tombstone," he said, and told the story.

It was recorded in Tucson as the Tombstone. And when the big rush came, Ed Schiefflin, then a figure of importance in the new camp, recited the tale to some of the men who had risked their lives in traveling to these hills. And so they in turn retold the tale.

That is the way the town got its name.

In after years when men had learned the fulness of that secret which the Apaches had guarded so well from the world--when Bisbee and Nacosari and Cananea were yielding their enormous stores of metal and Tombstone's mines had given forth many millions of dollars in silver, Ed Schiefflin remained a wealthy man. But the habit of prospecting abided with him and he used to spend long months alone in the wilderness searching for the pure love of search.

Just before one of these expeditions he was driving out of Tombstone with Gus Barron, another old-timer and a close friend, and as they went down the Fairbank road they reached the spot where the three great boulder knolls rise beside the dry wash. Schiefflin drew rein.

"This," he said to Barron, "is the place where I camped that night when the Apaches almost got me, the night before I found the stringer on the hill. And when I die I want to be buried here with my canteen and my prospector's pick beside me."

So when he died up in Canon City, Oregon, just about twenty years after he had made that discovery, they brought his body back and buried it on the summit of the knoll. And they erected a great pyramid of granite boulders on the spot for his monument.

And within sight of that lonely tomb the town stands out on the sky-line, commemorating by its name the steadfastness of Ed Schiefflin, prospector.

TOMBSTONE'S WILD OATS

In the good old days of Indians and bad men the roaring town of Tombstone had a man for breakfast every morning. And there were mornings when the number ran as high as half a dozen.

That is the way the old-timers speak of it, and there is a fond pride in their voices when they allude to the subject; the same sort of pride one betrays when he tells of the wild oats sowed by a gray-haired friend during his l.u.s.ty youth. For Tombstone has settled down to middle-aged conventionality and is peaceable enough to-day for any man.

But in the early eighties!

Apaches were raiding; claim-jumpers were battling; road-agents were robbing stages; bad men were slaying one another in the streets; and, taking it altogether, life was stepping to a lively tune.

Geronimo's naked warriors were industrious. Now they would steal upon a pair of miners doing a.s.sessment work within sight of town. Now they would bag a teamster on the road from Tucson, or raid a ranch, or attack the laborers who were laying the water company's pipe-line to the Huachucas. Hardly a week pa.s.sed but a party of hard-eyed hors.e.m.e.n rode out from Tombstone with their rifles across their saddle-bows, escorting a wagon which had been sent to bring in the bodies of the latest victims.

In the two years after the first rush from Tucson to the rich silver district which Ed Schiefflin had discovered, there was much claim-jumping. And claim-jumping in those days always meant shooting.

Some properties were taken and retaken several times, each occasion being accompanied by bloodshed. Surveying parties marched into the foot-hills of the Mule Mountains under escort of companies of riflemen; in more than one instance they laid out boundary lines and established corner monuments after pitched battles, each with its own formidable casualty list.

What with the murders by the savages and these affrays--together with such natural hazards of disease and accident as accompany any new mining camp--the boot-hill graveyard out beyond the north end of the wide main street was booming like the town. And now there came a more potent factor in stimulating mortuary statistics.

The bad men took possession of Tombstone.