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But the episode was not yet finished.

Time went by. Billy Clanton and the two MacLowery boys, who are said to have been parties to the dobie dollar hold-up, died one autumn morning fighting it out against the Earp faction in Tombstone’s street. Curly Bill’s fate remains something of a mystery, but one story has it that Wyatt Earp killed him near Globe two years or so later. John Ringo killed himself up in the San Simon, delirious from thirst. Rattlesnake Bill, who helped to spend the Mexican silver, was shot down by a fellow-rustler in Galeyville. Jake Gauz, another of the participants, was lynched for horse-stealing not far from the head of Turkey Creek canyon.

So they went one after the other, and it is possible that every man who was present at the massacre of the Mexicans died with his boots on.

* * * * *

“Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.” The words come from one who rides near the grim procession’s end; a slim young fellow, beardless, his hair hanging to his shoulders. It is the boy whom men called Billy the Kid. He quoted the passage to Pat Garret when the Lincoln County sheriff and his posse were taking him and his captured companions to Santa Fe.

“Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.” Only a few nights before he spoke, Tom O’Phalliard, one of the last of his band, had fallen from his horse with a bullet through his chest in Fort Sumner to die, cursing the tall silent sheriff, in the room where the posse had carried him. Two mornings afterward at the Arroyo Tivan, Charley Bowdre had staggered into the stone house where the outlaws were hiding, wounded unto death by the rifles of these same pursuers.

“Charley, you’re done for. Go out and see if you can’t get one of them,” Billy the Kid had told the dying man, and through the crack of the door had watched him stumbling over the frozen snow toward the posse, while his numbed fingers fumbled with his revolver butt in a final access of vain effort.

And now this youth, the deadliest of the Southwestern outlaws, spoke from the Scriptures to Pat Garret; perhaps it was all of his Bible that he knew. He said it in December. In July Garret shot him in Pete Maxwell’s room at Fort Sumner. The years went by. One day the former sheriff fell in the sand hills west of Tularosa with an assassin’s bullet in his back.

Thus, throughout the Old West: bad man and frontier officer, Indian fighter, cow-boy, stage-driver, trooper, and faro-dealer, they lived their lives in accordance with bold customs which bridged the gap between savagery and modern civilization. In a strange land they did the best they could; and, bad or good, they came to their ends with a fine unflinching disregard for the supreme adventure.

To-day fat prairie corn-fields stand tasseled in the sunlight, the smoke of lusty young cities rises black against the sky; while automobiles speed upon concrete highways over the forgotten graveyards where their bones lie.