Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/97

 There shall be many other opportunities of meeting and conversing with old Jack before the campaigning against the Apaches is half through, so we need not urge him to remain now that he has finished his meal and is ready to sally forth. We return heartily the very cheery greeting tendered by the gentleman who enters the dining-room in his place. It is ex-Marshal Duffield, a very peculiar sort of a man, who stands credited in public opinion with having killed thirteen persons. How much of this is truth and how much is pure gossip, as meaningless as the chatter of the "pechotas" which gather along the walls of the corral every evening the moment the grain of the horses is dealt out to them, I cannot say; but if the reader desire to learn of a unique character in our frontier history he will kindly permit me to tell something of the only man in the Territory of Arizona, and I may say of New Mexico and western Texas as well, who dared wear a plug hat. There was nothing so obnoxious in the sight of people living along the border as the black silk tile. The ordinary man assuming such an addition to his attire would have done so at the risk of his life, but Duffield was no ordinary individual. He wore clothes to suit himself, and woe to the man who might fancy otherwise.

Who Duffield was before coming out to Arizona I never could learn to my own satisfaction. Indeed, I do not remember ever having any but the most languid interest in that part of his career, because he kept us so fully occupied in keeping track of his escapades in Arizona that there was very little time left for investigations into his earlier movements. Yet I do recall the whispered story that he had been one of President Lincoln's discoveries, and that the reason for his appointment lay in the courage Duffield had displayed in the New York riots during the war. It seems—and I tell the tale with many misgivings, as my memory does not retain all the circumstances—that Duffield was passing along one of the streets in which the rioters were having things their own way, and there he saw a poor devil of a colored man fleeing from some drunken pursuers, who were bent on hanging him to the nearest lamp-post. Duffield allowed the black man to pass him, and then, as the mob approached on a hot scent, he levelled his pistol—his constant companion—and blew out the brains of the one in advance, and, as the story goes, hit two others, as fast as he could draw bead on them, for I must