Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/513

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TOMBSTONE.
493

to go free of indictment. The cow-boys were flocking into town to await the result, and on a certain quiet Sunday wore an ominous look. It was said that, should justice fail to be done them, the resolute-looking men conferring together darkly at the edges of the sidewalk would take the matter into their own hands. The jury, I have since learned, did not find an indictment, and the remaining parties to the affair, with many others, I believe, have since died with their boots on in the same cause. If anything could reconcile us to the untimely taking-off of these paladins, it would be partly their own contemptuous indifference to it.

It would seem that we ought to have at least half a dozen lives apiece, to account for such an indifference, but to be ready to toss away the only one on any and every pretext or no pretext is not at all so intelligible. It is certainly not the desperation of poverty by which it is occasioned. Many of them are in very good circumstances. The younger McLowry, a boy under twenty, had $3000 in his pocket, the proceeds of a sale of cattle, the day he fell.

The elder Clanton had played cards most of the night before with two of his deadly enemies, both parties keeping a hand on their pistols meanwhile. When "Billy" Clanton, a boy, like McLowry, lay prone on the ground in the fight, dying of his mortal wound, he still managed to get out a pistol, steadied it on a shattered arm, and fired once more at "Doc Holliday," saying,

"I'll get one of you, any way."

"You are a daisy if you do," replied Doc Holliday, continuing to advance as coolly as if at target practice, and emptying another barrel of his own into him. And the last words of Billy Clanton, in the Nibelungen-like—contest which I am quite aware will not be quoted,