Eye Witness

WAS driving up to the store when I saw the fellow run out of the door. He wasn't a bum or anything like that. He was a big man fairly well dressed. He leaped from the door across the porch -he was in a hurry all right. As he reached the first of the three wooden steps that led down to the road he half turned-he might have been going to draw a gun but whether he meant to or not nobody would ever know. He was still half turned on the top step when a shot came from inside the store and he spun right around two or three times coming down a step at a time till he got to the road where he fell flat on his face. I was driving a buggy. I hardly knew just what to do. Nobody came out of the store to see if the fellow was dead or not. There was nobody much around it being in the heat of midsummer. The door was open. There wasn't screens in those daysnot in Wickenburg in the 60's any-

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

Anyway. There the fellow lay in the road, bleeding a little but the bleeding had stopped by the time I hitch ed the horse to a post a little way from the store and walked over. I didn't want to tie up too close, there was no telling when another shot might come out of the door an' the store's hitching post was right in front of the door an' right in the line of fire so to speak. If it hadn't been so hot, the flies would have been settling on the dead man by the time I got there but it was too hot for the flies. He was dead all right. Shot through the chest on one side the bullet must have entered his heart. He had been shot exactly as he left the shade of the porch an' entered the sunlight. He had made a good target, I guess. His face was down an' I didn't care to turn him over. Besides it was none of my business.

You couldn't see into the store, it was so dark in there compared to the blinding sunlight outside. I'd just as soon been somewhere else at that minute but my wife had run out of sugar so I walked up the steps and went in.

The store had a long front and there was a long counter stretched from one end wall to the other. Behind the counter were shelves of goods. Above the counter hung all sorts of truck. The counter was an old saloon fixture, I think, any way the store seemed all the world like a bar. There was a smallish man back of the counter. He was figuring up some accounts in a book. Right in front of him a bit to the right of him lay a revolver on the counter, its barrel pointing at the door. There wasn't anyone else in the store only this man. He looked up from the account he was figuring when I walked into the store. He was Henry Wickenburg.

Henry Wickenburg owned the store. He was the man who located the Vulture Mine in 1863, which proved the richest of the finds made for hundreds of miles around. He hadbeen a member of the original Weaver party. You've heard it said about some folks that "he was a character." Well Henry Wickenburg was a character. He was a character so plainly defined that he'd stand out in a crowd a mile away. I mean compared to present day folks. He sat there back of the counter as I walked into the place an' there was nobody else in the store. Henry Wickenburg had killed that man-and yet-maybe I shouldn't say so for his descendants might bring a libel suit against me. How can I prove Henry killed the fellow? I can't. Henry didn't tell me he did! He didn't tell me he didn't. He just said nothing about it and I said nothing about it. He didn't touch the gun while I was there and he didn't seem flustered or upset about anything. He just asked me in a normal tone what Iwanted. I told him I needed about ten pounds of sugar. He got up and scooped it out of a barrel-they didn't have ready sewn sacks in those days-sugar came in sacks of a hundred pounds. And Henry would empty a couple of these sacks into a barrel where it could be scooped out easy. He asked me if I had brought a container and I said I had but I'd left it in the buggy. I had for gotten all about the container when I saw that fellow run out and get shot.

Sketches for ARIZONA HIGHWAYS by Ross Santee

When I went out to the buggy the fellow was lying in the road wherehe fell and no one had come to see what it was all about yet. As I returned to the store one man did walk out of a side road and look down towards the store. He wrinkled his forehead and stared at the body. Then he walked off in the other direction. Whether the body being outside of Henry Wickenburg's store had anything to do with his lack of interest I don't know.

When I took my container into the store Henry put ten pounds of sugar in it. His hand didn't shake as he used the scoop. I said something about the weather and he allowed we should have a thunderstorm about this time of year. Then I went out and unhitched the horse. As I went down the road I leaned out of the buggy and looked back. The man's body still lay in the white dust of the road outside the store.

It was all mighty queer in a way and yet natural enough Henry Wickenburg had shot a fellow and presently he'd fix it for some one to take the body away. Or maybe he'd tell the sheriff. Then maybe again he wouldn't. I don't know if he ever did or what ever became of the body. I had to go into Wickenburg again a few days later. The body wasn't there and nobody said anything about the shooting. The fellow must have done something that angered Henry in some way or he wouldn't have shot him. The only way I figured it out to my own satisfaction was that Henry waited till the fellow got outside for he was afraid the man might bleed on the floor. Henry was like that. With his German careful thoroughness Henry's floor was always clean and well swept. He just let the fellow get outside so his rush would carry him on into the road where there wouldn't be any mess to clean up. I never did find out who the man was Henry shot. I never did ask anybody. I figgered it wasn't none of my business.