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Updated: June 27, 2025
A few mounds, stones, snow and bleak winds forever blowing. Here we read a headboard, upon which was the name and age of good old Dr. Bingham of New England, who died here years ago, and whose wife planted wild roses upon the grave. I wonder if we will see them in bloom next summer, or will we be under the snow ourselves like these others.
Charley Vanderhuyn said "The Dickens!" and though his meaning was indefinite, he really meant it, whatever it might be. He looked up at the ornamental figure carved on the rich headboard of his bed as if he suspected that the headboard of English walnut had spoken in Irish.
As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected.
In the dead ashes of the Judge's pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower's bunk still were the memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record of the Right Bower's old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of their old extravagant devotion all a mute protest to the change.
No emotion moved him as he rode toward it, but when he came upon the grave he experienced a savage satisfaction because it had been sadly neglected. There was no headboard to mark the spot, no familiar mound of earth; only a sunken stretch, a pitiful little patch of sand, with a few weeds thrusting up out of it, nodding to the slight breeze and casting grotesque shadows in the somber twilight.
Its breadth is equal to the length of a Texan when he lies down in the bunk built into it, the headboard and footboard of which are the walls of the building itself.
A dim light, which seemed to come from the rear, brought out the menacing figure plainly. One arm was half raised as if to strike. It was evident that the assassin was in doubt, since the headboard shaded the bed, as to whether the eldest brother or the little girl was stretched before him.
In this desolate resting-place, in a wind-swept and forgotten graveyard, rests all the remaining fame of certain bad men who in their time were bandit kings, who ruled by terror over half a Western territory. Even the headboard which once stood at the Kid's grave and which was once riddled with bullets by cowards who would not have dared to shoot that close to him had he been alive was gone.
For about ten minutes I heard no further disturbance, and was concluding myself to be in some undefined manner the victim of my own imagination, when there suddenly fell upon the headboard of my bed a blow so distinct and loud that I involuntarily sprang at the sound of it. It wakened Alison, and I had the satisfaction of hearing her sleepily inquire if I had caught that rat yet?
All of Rowlett's friendliness and loyalty had been only an alibi! It had been Rowlett who had led him, unsuspecting, into ambush! Maggard's coat and pistol-holster hung at the headboard of his bed. Now with a cat-soft tread upon the creaking puncheons of the floor Rowlett approached them.
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