Here pass those who died boldly in the glaring lands by the Arizona border; a multitude of sunburned men with revolvers swinging low beside their hips and in their hands the deadly Winchesters. One comes among them, rugged of frame, big-featured, red from weather and the fulness of his blood. There is, in the poise of his head and in his eyes, a fierce intolerance. This is Joe Phy. More than forty years have passed since they buried him in the little boot-hill at Florence, Arizona. To-day the town is as conventional as any Eastern village, but it saw a time when men lived up to the rude clean code of our American age of chivalry. During that era Joe Phy met his end with a grimness befitting a son of the Old West.
Florence was the county-seat and Pete Gabriel was sheriff. He was a handsome man with his twisted mustache and Napoleon goatee, free-handed with his money, widely liked. Moreover he was a wonderful shot with his rifle and deadly quick with a single-action revolver. Among the gun-fighters of southern Arizona none was better known than he, and Joe Phy was his deputy.
The county of Pinal extended from the glaring flats below the Gila northward beyond the Superstition Mountains, a savage land where the sun was killing hot in summer-time, where forests of giant cacti stretched for miles like the pine woods that cloaked the higher plateaus. Phy and Gabriel rode together through the country on many a bold errand; they shared their blankets and the hardships of dry camps; they fought beside each other while the bullets of wanted men snarled, ricochetting from the rocks about them.
Then politics brought a rift in their friendship and the day came when the deputy ran for office against his former chief. The campaign was made bitter by accusations. There was, men said, a court-house ring; the big companies were dodging taxes, the small ranchers were getting the worst of it. Election came and the rancor of the reformers grew hotter when the count showed that Gabriel had won. Many openly proclaimed that the court-house crowd had juggled with the ballots, and Phy was among these. When a contest was instituted and the result of the election was carried to the courts, he grew to hate Gabriel. The hatred flamed within him until he could stand it no longer and one night he hunted the town over until he found the sheriff in Keating's saloon.