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Updated: May 5, 2025
The time had passed when he could return by daylight to the Bruncknow house. He must make the most of the scant interval which remained before darkness, if he would find a hiding-place where he could camp. He glanced about him to fix the landmarks in his memory, that he might return to this spot on the morrow.
And at the time when Schiefflin was abiding at the Bruncknow house the inmates were letting their mining tools rust, the while they kept their firearms well oiled. For the mine was nothing more nor less than a blind, and the adobe was simply a rendezvous for Mexican smugglers.
They staked the claim, and when they came to fixing on a name Ed Schiefflin remembered once more those words of the old-timer at the Bruncknow house. "We'll call it the Tombstone," he said, and told the story. It was recorded in Tucson as the Tombstone.
So now he came on toward the Bruncknow house, where he could make his camp closer to the hills upon whose exploration his mind was set. There were several men lounging about the adobe when he reached it.
They turned southward up the San Pedro, avoiding the stage station at the crossing of the river lest some other party of prospectors might follow them. They made a circuit around the Mormon settlement at St. Davids and came on to the Bruncknow house, to find two more fresh graves of Apache victims under the adobe walls.
And the luck that guides a man's steps toward good or ill, as the whim seizes it, saw to it that he came into the old camp where the Apaches had enjoyed their morning murder months before. Some one had buried both bodies but whoever had done this possibly it was one of the self-styled miners at the Bruncknow house had not enough interest in minerals to disturb the little heap of specimens.
Only a few days later he left the Bruncknow house for a longer trip than usual. He rode his mule down the San Pedro toward the mouth of the dry wash in which the two prospectors had found that silver ore the day before they died.
Finally it vanished where the flat lands reached away into the south. But Schiefflin was indifferent to these wild goings on. To him the Bruncknow house meant shelter from the Apaches; that was all. He could roll up in his blankets here at night knowing that he would waken in the morning without any likelihood of looking up into the grinning faces of savages who had tracked him to his camp.
The Bronco house, men call it now, but Bruncknow was the man who built it and the new term is a corruption. Its ruins still stand on the side-hill a few miles from the dry wash, a rifle-shot or so from the spot where the two prospectors met their deaths. In those days it was a lonely outpost of the white man in the Apache's land.
They made their daily journeys along its course, returning with evening to the Bruncknow house, whose inmates were away at the time on some expedition of their own. Sometimes they saw the smoke of signal-fires over in the Dragoons; sometimes the slender columns rose from the summit of the Whetstone Mountains in the north.
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