to anybody about the premises. What became of him we never satisfactorily ascertained. The road to La Paz he had already traveled too often; that toward Salt Lake was Hualapais; and that to Prescott and Tucson was swarming with Apaches. Had he taken "the road which Ward's ducks went?" We shuddered at the thought, but he may have done so in sheer desperation.
A few days later, the writer and a party of frontiersmen friends paused beside a lowly grave on the road to Skull Valley, over which some wandering Mexicans had erected a cross of stones, in testimony of the supposed fact that there rested the remains of a Christiano. There was an empty bottle by the side of the grave, and on the label the letters "C. B." Did they stand for "Cognac Brandy" or "Concatenation Bill?"
The party were about equally divided on the question of the probabilities; but it is a rule on the frontier never to miss an opportunity out of respect to a mere uncertainty; so from our pocket-flasks we reverently drank to the memory of the illustrious departed, the hero of the "the Great Indian Fight on the Gila;" then rode away into new scenes and dangers new, and thenceforth to all that reckless party, save the writer, poor Concatenation Bill was as dead, and almost as nearly forgotten, as
"The little birds that sang
A hundred years ago."
