Terror at Hellhole (20 page)

Sheriff Waringer looked down at Print's body lying above the ravine. “There's your escaped prisoner, Ben,” he told Harplee, “but I'm afraid my man is in Mexico by now.” He pointed toward the haze of the purple hills that formed the Mexican border before he added: “And somehow I'm glad. Come, we better pack the body back to Yuma.”

Harplee motioned for the other two guards who had accompanied them to load the dead Negro on one of the sheriff's pack mules. Mounting stiffly on his own horse, Harplee took a long look at the azure hills leading into Mexico. His mind recalled the many trails he had traveled with the Quechan tracker and the dangers they had faced as a team.

He nodded his head slowly and said, “I'm glad this closes the book on Honas Good.”

He turned his horse northward toward Yuma.

Since the beginning of this nation, men have been crafting instruments of death and destruction, but of all their inventions none was as effective in molding early American history as Robert Jordan Gatling's gun. A superb weapon for its time, the rapid-fire gun consisted of multibarrels, revolved by a hand crank to fire each chamber in quick succession.

Gatling was able to patent his weapon in November 1862, but governmental authorities moved slowly and the gun was not used until the last phases of the Civil War. Later, the weapon made its appearance at army outposts along the frontier trails where its capability to scatter death rapidly at moving targets soon terrifIed attacking redskins.

But the weapon really reached its zenith in arousing vibrant fears, when it was issued to prisons where even the most hardened criminals looked askance at the deadly menace. Mounted on light carriage wheels for maneuverability, and with certain other modifications, it became known as a Lowell Battery.

Its presence in the southeast guard tower at Yuma Territorial Prison provided a fearful deterrence to a mass of desperate criminals, hell-bent on escaping from prison.