The point is that John Ringo saddled up that very night and journeyed to Tombstone, where he sought out young Billy Breckenbridge.
“Heard there was some trouble about my being turned loose,” he announced when he had roused the deputy from his slumbers, “and I didn’t know but what maybe you’d lose your job if Johnny Behan got turned out of office.”
Wherefore it came about that when court convened in the morning and the matter of John Ringo’s bail was brought up the prisoner was produced to the utter astonishment of all concerned––except himself and the man who had allowed him to recover his confiscated revolvers.
Within the hour John Ringo walked out of the court-house under bond to insure his appearance at the trial. And no one expected the case to come to anything. In short, the situation was unchanged, and the head men of the reform movement settled down to bide their opportunity of killing off the bigger desperadoes, which was apparently the only way of settling the issue.
So John Ringo went his way, a marked man, and many a trigger-finger itched when he appeared in Tombstone; many a bold spirit longed to take a shot at him. But the knowledge of his deadliness kept him from being made a target.
He went his way, and it was a bad way. Dark deeds piled up to fill the debit pages of his life’s ledger.
If he was influenced by those letters, which came regularly to remind him of gentle womanhood disgraced by his wild career, it was only to make him drink harder. And the more he drank the blacker his mood became. Those who rode with him have said so. A bad man, there is no doubt about it; and big in his badness, which made it all the worse.
There came a blazing day in the late summer, one of those days when the Arizona sun flays the wide, arid valleys without surcease, when the naked rock on the mountain heights is cloaked in trembling heat-waves and the rattlesnakes seek the darkest crevices among the cliffs. Deputy Sheriff Breckenbridge on his way back to Tombstone from some errand in the eastern end of the county was riding through Middle Pass in the Dragoons.
As he came forth against the flaring sky-line at the summit he saw a rider coming toward him from the west. He turned to one side where the lay of the land gave him a vantage-point, loosened his revolver in its holster, and awaited the traveler’s closer approach.