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The night passed; gray dawn came; the sky flamed above the ragged crests of the Sierra Madre; the sun climbed past the mountain wall; morning grew on toward noon. Far to the south–so tenuous at first that it barely showed against the clear air, now thickening until it was unmistakable at last–a gray-brown dust column was climbing into the cloudless sky. It came on toward her as she urged on the jaded team, the signal of an advancing herd.

She strained her eyes and saw the thin, undulating line beneath it; the sun gleamed on the tossing horns of the cattle, their lowing sounded faint with distance, growing into a deep pulsating moan. She distinguished the dots of horsemen in the van; and now one rode on swiftly before the moving mass. She recognized her husband from afar.

John Slaughter had seized his opportunity while the bandits were drinking to their own good luck and his death in the mescal shop. He and John Roberts, his foreman, had taken the treasure-laden mules up a steep-walled canyon five miles away. When the murderers followed the hot trail they found themselves, with the coming of darkness, in the narrowest part of the defile, so neatly ambushed that they wheeled their horses and rode down the gorge in full flight before the fight had fairly begun.

John Slaughter’s wife was a brave woman. She rode beside him now on many an expedition; into the sand-hills of southwestern New Mexico, and down across the border into northern Sonora. She saw the smoking remnants of wagon-trains beside the road, the bodies of Apaches’ victims sprawled among the ruins. She looked upon the unutterably lonely crosses which marked the graves of travelers where Victorio’s turbaned warriors had traveled before her into Mexico. She slept beside her husband where the desert night wind whispered of lurking enemies; and watched enshadowed soap-weeds beyond the ring of firelight taking on the semblance of creeping savages.

He beheld her drinking deeply from the cup of dread which was the bitter portion of the strong-hearted women of the frontier. And when he journeyed away without her he had for company the constant knowledge of what other men had found on return to their ravaged homes–what might be awaiting him when he came back. And so he enlarged the scope of his warfare, which heretofore had been confined to the defensive; he began a grim campaign to keep the Apaches out of his portion of the San Pedro valley for all time.

He led his own war-parties out to hunt down every roving band who passed through the country. He used their own science of reading trails to track them to their camping-places; and their own wiles to steal upon them while they rested. He improved on their methods by making his raids during the darkness when their superstitions made them afraid to go abroad.

One midnight he was deploying a company of Mexicans about the mesquite-thicket which sheltered a band of warriors. As he was about to give the whispered order to close in, the unknown dangers which awaited them within the blackness became too much for his followers. They balked, then began to fall back. He drew his forty-five.

“First man that shows another sign of hanging back, I’ll kill him,” he said in Spanish, and drove them before him to the charge.

Gradually the Apaches began changing their warpaths into Mexico, and as they swung away from his ranges John Slaughter increased the radius of his raids until he and his cow-boys rode clear over the summits of the passes in the Sierra Madre which lead eastward into Chihuahua.

With nine seasoned fighters at his heels he attacked a war-party in the heights of the range on the dawn of a summer morning; and when the Indians fled before the rifle-fire of the attackers–scurrying up into the naked granite pinnacles like frightened quail–they left a baby behind them. The mother had dropped it or missed it in her panic, and the little thing lay whimpering in the bear-grass.