r work is done."

And as they slowly came toward him, their rifles ready to fly to their
shoulders at the first suspicious movement, Joaquin Murieta swayed
slightly and sank slowly into a heap near the dead mare. The breath
was gone from his body when they reached it.

TOMBSTONE

More than forty years ago a raw young mining camp down in southeastern
Arizona was preparing to assume the functions of a duly organized
municipality, and its population--at that period nearly every one in
the place was a male of voting age--was considering the important
question of a name.

The camp stood out against the sky-line at the crest of a ridge in the
foot-hills of the Mule Mountains, not far from the Mexican boundary.
For the most part it consisted of tents; but there were a few adobe
buildings and some marvelous creations from goods-boxes and tin cans.
Facing one end of its single brief street you looked out upon a dump
of high-grade silver ore, and if you turned the other way you surveyed
a sprouting little graveyard hard by a large corral. From almost any
point you had a good view of the Dragoon mountains across a wide
stretch of mesquite-covered lowlands, and at almost any hour of the
day you were likely to see the smoke of at least one Apache
signal-fire rising from those frowning granite ramparts.

The men in the camp were, nearly all of them, old-timers in the West:
miners from the Comstock lode whose boom was then on the wane,
teamsters who had been freighting all over the blazing deserts of the
Southwest, investors and merchants from Tucson, buffalo-hunters from
western Kansas, Texas, and Colorado, gamblers from Dodge City, El
Paso, and Santa Fe, Indian-fighters, cattle-rustlers, professional
claim-jumpers, and some gentle-voiced desperadoes of the real breed,
equally willing to slay from behind or take a long chance in front,
according to the way the play came up. Few of these men wore coats; a
great many of them carried single-action revolvers in holsters beside
the thigh; the old-fashioned cattleman's boot was the predominant
footgear; and, excepting among the faro-dealers, there was a rather
general carelessness in sartorial matters. Nicknames were even more
common than surnames, and it was bad form--sometimes dangerously
so--to ask a man about his antecedents until he had volunteered some
information on that point.

In such a crowd it is easy to see there would be many ideas on any
given subject, and the