efflin took his two
companions up the dry wash. They found the outcropping undisturbed.
Gird and Al Schiefflin dug away at the dark rock with their
prospector's picks. Less than three feet below the surface the
stringer pinched out. The claim was not worth staking.

Beside the little strip of ore, whose false promises of riches had
lured them into this land of death, they held a conference. The hills
opened to a low swale which led up toward the loftier summits in the
south. They decided to follow that depression in search of another
ledge.

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. One
morning--they had spent the previous night out here in the hills--they
awoke to find a fresh trail in the bear-grass within a hundred yards
of where they had been sleeping, and in the middle of the track Dick
Gird picked up one of the rawhide wristlets which Apaches wore to
protect their arms from the bowstring.

That day Ed Schiefflin discovered a new outcropping. Gird assayed the
specimens in a rude furnace which he had fashioned from the fireplace
at the Bruncknow house. Some of them yielded as high as $2,200 to the
ton. Exploration work showed every evidence of a great ore body. Two
or three of the fragments which they had chipped from it below the
surface assayed $9,000 a ton. They had made their big strike. 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. And when the big rush
came, Ed Schiefflin, then a figure of importance in the new camp,
recited the tale to some of the men who had risked their lives in
traveling to these hills. And so they in turn retold the tale.

That is the way the town got its name.

In after years when men had learned the fulness of that secret which
the Apaches had guarded so well from the world--when Bisbee and
Nacosari and Cananea were yielding their enormous stores of metal and
Tombstone's mines had given forth many millions of dollars in silver,
Ed Schiefflin remained a wealthy man. But the habit of prospecting