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"Ringo!" he managed to gasp. "Why, he's gone. I thought " Perfervid language followed. Johnny Behan had been a cow-boy in his time, and the court had in his unofficial capacity a rather large vocabulary of his own. In the end certain facts began to outline themselves through the sulphuric haze: the district attorney had offered objections to the proffered bail.
But the team took fright at the noise and ran away and the eighty thousand dollars went on up the road in a cloud of dust. Johnny Behan, the sheriff, said that the Earp brothers sent Doc Holliday out with the Clanton brothers to commit the crime. Ike Clanton said that he was rustling cattle at the time down in Mexico, and accused the Earps of sole responsibility.
Not only that, but if I get it back it means a whole lot to the office; it'll put Behan solid with those people over at Contention, and that helps me." The outlaw nodded but made no remark by way of comment. Some time later he sat up at the oilcloth-covered table talking quietly with Frank McLowery. And Brenckenridge saw McLowery scowling.
The little fellow dropped him with a bullet from his forty-five before he'd come more 'n a half a dozen jumps." But Breckenbridge was a long way from being jubilant when Johnny Behan and the under-sheriff congratulated him on his behavior. "If you hadn't wished those three fellows on me I'd have brought both these boys back without firing a shot," he told the under-sheriff.
Leaving Virgil to complete the journey with Morgan's body, the other two brothers and Doc Holliday left the train at a way station and flagged a freight which took them back to Benson. Here they procured horses and rode to the county seat. Sheriff Johnny Behan received telegraphic advices from Tucson to arrest them. He found the trio sometime in the afternoon.
"What's up?" the youthful officer demanded, and John Ringo recited his version of the affair. "Well," the other told him when he had finished, "the sheriff wants to see you." The desperado shrugged his shoulders, but went along quietly enough; bail was easy to arrange in those days, and this was not a serious matter. In his office Johnny Behan heard the tale and frowned.
He did not know and if he had he would not have cared one way or the other that the new law-and-order party had grown to a point where it wanted to get action in the courts; that its members were looking for an opportunity to swear out a warrant against some of the bigger outlaws in order to "show up" Johnny Behan, who so men said was unwilling to arrest any of the cow-boy faction.
Finally he died by his own hand and his friend Curly Bill left the country. In the meantime new secessions were taking place in the Earp following. The county of Cochise had been established. Tombstone was made the county seat. Johnny Behan, an old-timer and an Indian fighter, was the first sheriff. He was hostile to the city administration from the beginning. Nor was that all.
There were times when his cow-boy constituents became a source of embarrassment to him; this was one of them. "Guess you'll have to turn over those guns of yours," he bade the prisoner. Ringo handed the revolvers to him, and he put them into a desk drawer. There followed several moments of awkward silence. At length Johnny Behan arose and started to leave the room. "Going to lock me up?"
He knocked about the camp, trying this thing and that, and was starting in at mining engineering with an old marine compass as his only instrument when Johnny Behan, who was newly appointed sheriff by the governor, gave him a job as a deputy. Then straightaway the eyes of men were turned upon him, and the query arose: "How's he going to stack up when it comes to a show-down?"
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