The last Thursday in January, 1896, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, accompanied by his eight-year-old son, Henry, left Lincoln, New Mexico, in a buckboard to drive to his home in Las Cruces. He never arrived. Later a pool of blood and a blood-soaked handkerchief pointed to murder. Although indictments were returned, no one was convicted of that murder, one of New Mexico's most talked-about mysteries.

That course of the territory's development had pitted the man of law and order, Fountain, against relentless outlaws, who finally got their man on a lonely stretch of road with the White Sands as a backdrop.

As a special United States district attorney, Fountain had prosecuted the San Marcial ring on land-fraud charges. He had repeatedly opposed young Albert Bacon Fall at law, in politics, and in the territorial legislature. On the eve of his death, he was a key figure in the Lincoln County grand jury investigation into cattle rustling. This account will be no less significant to those with an interest in the Albert B. Fall of the Teapot Dome scandal than to those who wish to know what became of Colonel Fountain.

Arrell M. Gibson was George Lynn Cross Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. His other books include The Chickasaws, The History of Oklahoma, Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries, The Oklahoma Story, and The Kickapoos all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.