They had waited a long time in the lofty mountains south of the boundary, watching the malapi flats for a party of Americans; and at last these had come. They had dogged their trail through the long hot afternoon, keeping well back lest they should be discovered. Now they were closing in. The air grew cooler and the hour of dawn approached. They slipped, black shadows a little deeper than the night which enfolded them. The light climbed up the eastern sky and leaked down between the cliffs; the cold gray dusk which comes before the dawn. The shadows melted slowly; the heavens began to blush. Down here a man could line the notch of his hindsight with the bead. A pebble tinkled in the arid watercourse. One of the sleepers stirred in his blankets. He caught the sound, opened his eyes, and saw the crown of a sombrero rising behind a rock. He leaped from his bed and flung himself among a clump of boulders just as the rifles began to talk. Two or three cow-boys were lounging about the Cloverdale ranch-house on a blazing summer afternoon when a queer figure came into sight upon the palpitating plain. The spectacle of a man on foot was so uncommon in those days that they had a hard time making themselves believe that this form, which at times took distorted shapes in the wavering overheated air, was that of a human being. Then they set forth to meet him, and they brought the one survivor of the Canton party to the ranch-house. His bare-feet were bleeding; he was half-clad; and his tongue was swollen with thirst. They got his story and they rode to Guadalupe canyon where they found the bodies of his companions. They buried them on the little boot-hill overlooking 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.