"Commence!" he shouted and flung an oath after the word. "Commence!" Pete Gabriel turned, and his revolver flew from its holster spitting fire. Phy's forty-five ejected a thin stream of orange flame. The voices of the weapons mingled in one loud explosion. The two men took a pace toward each other and the smoke grew thicker as they shot again in unison. They came on slowly, pulling the triggers until the room was filled with the black powder fumes. Then Pete Gabriel stood swaying within arm's length of Joe Phy's prostrate form. And as he struggled against the mortal weakness which was now creeping through his lead-riddled body the man on the floor whispered, "I cain't get up. Get down. We'll finish it with knives." "I guess we've both of us got enough," the sheriff muttered, and staggered out through the door, to lie all night in a near-by corral and live for two years afterward with a bullet through his kidneys. Joe Phy died hard on the saloon floor. Those in the room gathered about him, and Johnny Murphy strove to lift his head that they might give him a sip of water. A year before he and two others had slain Joe Levy, a faro-dealer in Tucson, and they had done it foully from behind. Since that time men had avoided him, speaking to him only when it was absolutely necessary, and his hair had turned snow-white. Joe Phy opened his eyes and recognized his would-be helper. "Don't you dare lay a hand on me," he cried, "you murderer," and struck Murphy full in the face. His hand fell limply back. The breath had departed from his body with that blow. The long procession is waning. Now those are coming whose headboards were erected in the early eighties. A company of swarthy black-eyed riders in the flaring trousers and steep-crowned sombreros of Mexico jog along elbow to elbow with hard-eyed horsemen from the valleys of the San Simon and the Animas. Smuggler and cow-thief, there is a story in their passing which centers about a deep gorge near the place where the boundary between New Mexico and Arizona meets the international line. That story goes a long way back. Down in the southwestern corner of the Animas valley the Guadalupe canyon trail approached the gorge from which it got its name. In the days when the American colonists were still contented with Great Britain's rule it was a main thoroughfare between the Pinos Altos mines and old Mexico. Long trains of pack-mules, laden with treasure which the Spaniards had delved from the sun-baked mountains near where Silver City now stands, traveled this route. Apaches and bandits made many an attack on them in the canyon. The Pinos Altos mines were abandoned. The trail fell into disuse. The years passed by. The '49 rush brought new travelers of another breed who beat down the old track again. Passing through the gorge they too found the Apaches lurking among the rocks and more than one old argonaut laid down his eight-square rifle for the last time within the shadow of those arid cliffs.