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And when the rustlers finally routed the stubborn defenders to chase the herders on through the ravine and reassemble the panic-stricken stock, they took back three dead men across their saddles. They buried the bodies at the Cloverdale ranch and so started a lonely little boot-hill whose headboards showed on the edge of the mesa for many years.
And when his aëro-plane came fluttering down out of a driving snowstorm to crash, in a mass of tangled wreckage, on the side of Elk Mountain, Wyoming, Lieutenant E. V. Wales went to his death within a rifle-shot of the road where so many of his predecessors gave up their lives trying even as he was then striving to quicken communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Boot-Hill!
Finally things settled down to jury trials and men let lawyers do most of the fighting with forensics instead of forty-fives. Churches were built and school-houses; a new graveyard was established; brush and weeds hid the old one's leaning headboards. Time passed; a city grew; the boot-hill was forgotten. This is a chronicle of men whose bones lie in those vanished boot-hills.
Among the riders who roved over that Land Beyond the Law, taking their toll from the north-going herds as gray wolves take it under cover of the night, he passed as the big "He Wolf," the leader of the pack. Wyoming's sage-brush hills gave sepulture to eleven of his dead, and since he had fled hither he had added two graves to the boot-hill cemeteries of the Southwest.
More than forty years have passed since they buried him in the little boot-hill at Florence, Arizona. To-day the town is as conventional as any Eastern village, but it saw a time when men lived up to the rude clean code of our American age of chivalry. During that era Joe Phy met his end with a grimness befitting a son of the Old West. Florence was the county-seat and Pete Gabriel was sheriff.
And they followed his lead: "Once in the saddle, I used to go dashing, Once in the saddle, I used to go gay; First took to drinking, and then to card-playing; Got shot in the body, and now here I lay. "Beat the drum slowly, Play the fife lowly, Sound the dead march as you bear me along. Take me to Boot-hill, and throw the sod over me I'm but a poor cow-boy, I know I done wrong."
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. They came from all over the West.
There was a day when every mining camp and cow-town from the Rio Grande to the Yellowstone owned its boot-hill; a day when lone graves marked the trails and solitary headboards rotted slowly in the unpeopled wilderness.
Then they set forth to meet him, and they brought the one survivor of the Canton party to the ranch-house. His bare-feet were bleeding; he was half-clad; and his tongue was swollen with thirst. They got his story and they rode to Guadalupe Cañon where they found the bodies of his companions. They buried them on the little boot-hill overlooking the ranch buildings.
They are long-haired men; and their faces are deeply burned by sun and wind, one hundred and eighty-three of them; and where they died, fighting to the last against four thousand of Santa Ana's soldiers, rose the first boot-hill.
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