king the ranch buildings.

But the episode was not yet finished.

Time went by. Billy Clanton and the two MacLowery boys, who are said
to have been parties to the dobie dollar hold-up, died one autumn
morning fighting it out against the Earp faction in Tombstone's
street. Curly Bill's fate remains something of a mystery, but one
story has it that Wyatt Earp killed him near Globe two years or so
later. John Ringo killed himself up in the San Simon, delirious from
thirst. Rattlesnake Bill, who helped to spend the Mexican silver, was
shot down by a fellow-rustler in Galeyville. Jake Gauz, another of the
participants, was lynched for horse-stealing not far from the head of
Turkey Creek canyon.

So they went one after the other, and it is possible that every man
who was present at the massacre of the Mexicans died with his boots
on.

* * * * *

"Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword." The words
come from one who rides near the grim procession's end; a slim young
fellow, beardless, his hair hanging to his shoulders. It is the boy
whom men called Billy the Kid. He quoted the passage to Pat Garret
when the Lincoln County sheriff and his posse were taking him and his
captured companions to Santa Fe.

"Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword." Only a few
nights before he spoke, Tom O'Phalliard, one of the last of his band,
had fallen from his horse with a bullet through his chest in Fort
Sumner to die, cursing the tall silent sheriff, in the room where the
posse had carried him. Two mornings afterward at the Arroyo Tivan,
Charley Bowdre had staggered into the stone house where the outlaws
were hiding, wounded unto death by the rifles of these same pursuers.

"Charley, you're done for. Go out and see if you can't get one of
them," Billy the Kid had told the dying man, and through the crack of
the door had watched him stumbling over the frozen snow toward the
posse, while his numbed fingers fumbled with his revolver butt in a
final access of vain effort.

And now this youth, the deadliest of the Southwestern outlaws, spoke
from the Scriptures to Pat Garret; perhaps it was all of his Bible
that he knew. He said it in December. In July Garret shot him in Pete
Maxwell's room at Fort Sumner. The years went by. One day the former
sheriff fell in the sand hills west of Tularosa with an assassin's
bullet in his back.

Thus, throughout the Old West: bad man