FullReads

John Ringo’s pony jogged on and on; the fine dust rose from its hoofs, surrounding animal and rider like a moving wraith of fog, settling down upon their sweating skins in a whitish-gray film which stung like fire. Before them the mirage wavered like an enormous, vague tapestry stirring in a breeze.

But of breeze there was none, nor was there any sign of water save that phantom of a lake–dead now for ages–which kept its distance always ahead. And the sun climbed higher; its scourgings grew ever fiercer.

Scourged also by thoughts and memories which he had never revealed to men–save only as he had hinted at them on that other afternoon to Breckenbridge–the bad man drank the lukewarm whisky as he rode. And the liquor did its work until when he had gone two hours from the foot of the pass he realized that it was overcoming him.

He drew rein, dismounted, and sought the shade of a clump of soto-bushes. But before he flung himself upon the baking sands he took off his boots and, tying their tops together, hung them over his saddle-horn. The pony he turned loose with the reins down cow-boy fashion. After which he yielded to the whisky and knew no more.

The sun was still glaring in the cloudless sky when he came back to his senses; and the torture of that thirst which comes after heavy drinking was upon him. He got to his feet. The pony had gone. Afterward the searchers tracked the animal to the Sulphur Springs ranch, where it had come with the boots hanging to the saddle-horn.

John Ringo was alone, a speck in the middle of the shimmering plain, and there was no water for miles. He started walking eastward toward the pass which leads over into the San Simon. The cactus did its work; the alkali sands scalded his bleeding feet; he took off his shirt, tore it into strips and bound them round his ankles for footgear; and when the strips were cut through he used his undershirt, until finally he walked barefooted and the blood-drops showed beside his tracks.

Toward the end the same blindness which comes to thirst-maddened cattle seized upon him. When they found him he was within a stone’s throw of water and the sound of the stream must have been in his ears, for his footprints showed where he had circled and zigzagged, striving to reach the spot whence that limpid murmuring came. Among the cartridges in his belt were two whose lead was deeply dented by his teeth as he chewed upon them in the vain hope of moistening his lips.

He was seated on a boulder between two dwarf live-oaks and his big forty-five revolver lay beside him, with one empty shell. The bullet-hole was fairly between his eyes, all powder-marked.

And so they knew just how he died; and young Billy Breckenbridge, who came over into no-man’s-land a day or two later, was able to piece out the story by backtracking along that trail through the sands; able to read those signs from the foot of the Dragoons on across the valley; and able also–because he had seen that letter–to realize the torture of memories which had come along with the torture of thirst to goad John Ringo on to self-destruction.

In this manner it came about that the outlaws of Cochise County lost their leader; and now that the man of brains was gone it became possible for events to shape up, as they did soon afterward, toward the big Earp-Clanton gun-fight.

The old-timers are unanimous in saying that had John Ringo been alive that battle wherein the leaders of the Earp faction slew several of the biggest desperadoes would never have taken place as it did. The forces would have been differently disposed than they were on that bloody morning when Billy Clanton and the McLowery boys died in Tombstone’s street by the O.K. corral; the chances are the victory would have gone the other way. To this day they tell how Ringo’s passing was the beginning of the end; how Curly Bill vanished soon afterward; how the stage-robbers and rustlers became disorganized and were no longer any match for the law-and-order faction.