Bloody Season (12 page)

At dark the flames flickered in scattered bits like shreds of bright cloth. Nearing midnight they began to die out singly, then in clusters, and by the time the horsemen appeared on Allen there was not a spark in sight. The jumpers were dead asleep in their tents.

The first lasso whirled twice around with a low whistle, shot out straight, and landed with a plop around a tentpole on the corner of Sixth. Instantly the noose closed and the horse on the other end snorted at the bite of a rowel and galloped west bearing its rider. The tent fluttered off, exposing to starlight its occupant wrestling with his blanket. The pale light whitened further a sleepy frightened face surrounded by tousled hair.

“Lot jumper, you git!”

The sepulchral shout, coming from the darkness above him, tore the man to his feet and he bounded into the night, stumbling over the blanket tangled around his legs.

“Lot jumper, you git!”

It was a warm night and the second victim was clad only in long johns. He snatched up his boots and clothing and hobbled for cover, cursing shrilly when he stepped in the hot ashes of his own campfire. One of the riders laughed, a high-pitched bray.

“Lot jumper, you git!”

The third man tripped over a foundation stone and fell skidding into a pile of fresh horse-apples. He scrambled up smeared and ran, narrowly avoiding collision as another rider galloped past towing another collapsed tent. The man in the saddle cut loose with a rebel yell.

“Git!”

The operation swept north, placing the Milky Way at the marauders’ backs and giving aroused sleepers glimpses of men in big hats and bandanna masks mounted on tall horses loaded down with iron. But few took the trouble to pause in their flight and look.

“Git, lot jumper!”

By Fremont Street, surprise was forfeit. The horsemen fired their pistols into the air and at uninhabited ruins, shattering panes not burst by the fire and letting water out of the troughs. Their lassos snatched away empty tents. They reared and wheeled and punched holes in the clouds and called upon God to bless the Union and upon God-fearing men to vote for Wyatt Earp for sheriff. The tents were flung into a pile on Allen and doused with coal oil and set to the match in a towering pyre. When the sun rose it found no canvas between Fremont and Toughnut and only the deed holders in possession of the burned lots.

That day’s number of the Epitaph contained an editorial by John Clum denouncing this lawless method of foiling lawbreakers by undisciplined nightriders and commending the efforts of Police Chief Virgil Earp and his deputies to restore order.

On July 2, President James Abram Garfield was shot in the back while standing on the platform at the Baltimore & Potomac Station in Washington, D.C., waiting for a train to New England. His assailant was the Reverend Charles J. Guiteau, a failed office hopeful who claimed that God had commanded him to kill the President. Garfield was taken from the heat and malaria of Washington in summer to Elberon, New Jersey, where doctors were confident of his recovery.

While readers of the Epitaph, Nugget, and Prospector followed wire information on the President’s condition, rumors reached Tombstone of a massacre in Skeleton Canyon in the Guadalupes near the Mexican border involving the Apaches and a party of Mexican muleskinners. Nineteen skinners had been slaughtered and seventy-five thousand dollars in silver bullion spirited away.

“Geronimo, you figure?” Doc Holliday, seated at his favorite drinking table in the Alhambra, drained the quart bottle into his glass and ordered another and a second beer for Wyatt. The place smelled of char from the fire damage to the gaming room and sawdust from the repairs. Hammers rattled and saws wheezed day and night as the town rebuilt itself like a cirrhosed liver.

Wyatt shook his head. “A mad dog like him has no need for bullion. He would have cut the packs off and taken the mules. Mule meat is worth more than silver to an Apache, Clum says.”

“Who if not him?”

“Your friend Billy Leonard needs a stake.”

“It requires more hands than he is comfortable using.”

“Stilwell, then,” Wyatt said. “Or Curly Bill.”

“Stilwell is in town playing deputy. When you say Curly Bill you are also saying Ike Clanton, and Ike is a cow thief.”

“Mexican cows. Dry-gulching greasers is not the same as killing white men. I have not seen Ike since before the fire.”

Doc thumbed the cork out of the fresh bottle. “He has not got the brains nor the sand. It was the old man if it was anyone in that clan.”

“The old man is too old and stiff for that work. His boys done it for him.”

“I have not seen Ringo or Rattlesnake Bill Johnson in a month of Sundays.” Doc sucked whiskey off his moustaches.

“One bad chip is pretty much like all the rest in the stack.”

“If it was Ike we will know it soon enough. He will try to buy every pot on Allen and bed every whore betwixt here and Benson. Before Tombstone came along I bet there wasn’t a knothole in the territory he didn’t bugger.”

Wyatt said, “It is no worry of ours either way.”

“Worrying isn’t in my nature.”

“No, you crap rabbit ice.”

Doc topped off his glass. “The poor dumb fornicating greasers. If the President is not safe they don’t none of them stand a snowball’s chance on an alkali flat.”

“We are living in a hard time.”

“It has been all hard times since Honest Abe got inaugurated.”

“You seceshes will keep on fighting that war.” Wyatt finished his beer and hauled out his watch.

“Set a spell,” Doc said.

“I promised Sadie I would go riding with her in the morning.”

“She’ll keep.”

Wyatt closed the face. “Kate isn’t home?”

“She got a straw up her ass over something and is selling it down Toughnut again.”

“Christ, Doc.”

“She will be back. No one else will put up with her.”

“I don’t know why you do.”

“She is the only one who will put up with the cough. If she has not caught it by now she never will. Most like.” He got out his handkerchief, spat in it, looked at it, folded it, and put it away. He drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice and he set down the glass empty.

“Colorado is the country for you,” Wyatt said.

“My luck is here.”

Kate wasn’t on Toughnut, but in the Arcade Saloon a block up Allen with her chins resting on her arms on a table in one of the curtained rooms in back that had not been touched by the fire. Her shoulders were bare above a lavender dress she had just bought from Glover’s because

Doc had burned all the others except her ginghams and she sat with her feet hooked under the rung of her chair and the toes turned inward. She was making a chain across the tabletop with rings from her glass.

“That goddamn foxy con man has cast a wicked spell over Doc that’s been his ruin.” She mumbled and sucked spittle out of the way of her tongue. “Not that Doc’s bound for heaven in a brass buggy. But he’s a sick man drinking to stay alive and can’t help himself. Wyatt drove him to this like he drove him to the doings at Dodge and every place else since Fort Griffin.”

“Drove him to what?”

She focused on the dapper small man seated across from her wearing a sombrero. She’d forgotten she was sharing the table with Sheriff Behan. She smiled crookedly and waggled a finger above the smeared glass.

“You’re just sore mad at Wyatt on account of he stole that stuck-up little tart Sadie Marcus right off your little cock. I bet it is little like the rest of you. Little Johnny Behan with his big hat and his little cock. I bet you have to take off the hat when you piss or it gets lost in the shadow.”

Milt Joyce, the Cochise County supervisor, grinned. A narrow man with a black mariner’s beard and round-nailed clerk’s hands, he stood near the curtained entrance twirling an elk’s tooth on the end of his watch chain.

“Bring us another bottle,” Behan rapped.

When the cork was pulled Kate brightened, extending her glass for refilling. A purple-blue welt showed along the line of her right cheekbone. Behan said, “Swine beat women.”

She touched the welt. “He don’t mean to, it is just the whiskey. When the cough gets to sawing at his insides he has to drink to make them numb. It is like when you have a tooth pulled.” Her face twisted into a comic mask of pity. “He was an honest dentist before the cough and before he took up with that Earp crowd.”

“It is painful to see a fine man brought so low,” Joyce offered.

Behan wrapped a hand around his glass and pretended to drink. “I heard he shot a nigger in a swimming hole and that’s why he had to leave Georgia.”

“You heard a lie. Doc never killed anyone in his life.” She took a long swallow.

“Maybe it was Leonard killed Philpot and that passenger.”

She almost choked for laughing and Joyce had to come forward and clap her on the back. She sat with her bosom heaving and drank again. A nipple peeped above the ruffled top of her dress.

“Are you all right?” asked Joyce.

Behan told him to shut up. He was staring hard at Kate. “Billy Leonard could not get out of his own way with a rifle,” she said. “Doc can shoot rings around him sober.”

“Did he shoot Philpot?”

She looked at him again and smiled, breathing through her mouth. “Little Johnny. You got any hair left at all under that big hat?”

“Sloppy-titted whore.” He slumped back in his seat and took a drink in earnest.

Joyce topped off her glass. “Tombstone is no place for the gentlefolk,” he said. “They make one mistake and then they must keep on making them until they stretch a rope.”

“A woman does not count for horseshit here. If she did I would have left that goddamn whiskey-soaked tooth-pulling shotgun killer years ago.”

“You said he never killed anyone.”

She wasn’t listening. “A woman does not count for horseshit. Ask Mattie Earp, scrubbing Wyatt’s drawers just so Sadie can pull them down.”

“Rum old twat,” said Behan.

Joyce said, “What Doc needs is time behind bars to think about his past life and how he has treated you.”

“He was behind bars in Fort Griffin,” she said. “I set fire to the livery and got him out when everyone was off fighting the fire. He has forgotten that, I bet.”

“He needs reminding.”

“We had like a honeymoon after that in Dodge. We was Dr. and Mrs. Holliday there.”

“Have another snort.”

Behan took the deposition out of his inside breast pocket and spread it out on the table facing her.

“I can’t read them words,” she said.

“It is a statement saying you were present when Holliday confessed to the attempted robbery of the Benson stage and the killing of Bud Philpot,” said Joyce. He pulled the stopper out of a bottle of India ink and dipped a horsehair pen inside. “He cannot ignore you once he has seen this.”

“He will kill me.”

“Sheriff Behan will see he does not.” He shook off the extra drops and held out the pen.

She took it, swaying. “Johnny has lost his woman and his hair. It’s no comfort.”

“Well, if you would prefer going back to Doc.”

She shrugged and signed her name all over the bottom of the sheet.

Chapter Nine

“T
hey are all dead,” said Morgan. “Who is?”

“Leonard, Crane, and Head. Old Man Clanton too.”

Wyatt resumed blacking his boot. He had one shirt-sleeved arm inside it to the shoulder and a horsehair brush in his other hand. “You see them?”

“Seen their graves. Leonard and Head’s, anyway. Jim Crane and the old man are buried clear out in Guadalupe Canyon where the greasers left them.” Morgan had on a filthy duster and his pinch hat had lost all shape. His boots were caked with mud and red clay; it was the rainy season out on the desert. His stubble had grown out red.

“Tell it.”

“It is like Joe Hill said. Crane and the old man and some others got bushwhacked by friends of them Mexican muleskinners they killed for bullion and Bill and Ike Haslett gunned Leonard and Head when they tried sticking up the Hasletts’s store in Huachita.”

“Hill said it was horse thieves killed Leonard and Head.”

“It was his only lie.”

“They die instant?”

“Leonard hung on for a spell, they told me.”

“Say anything?”

“Nothing we can use.”

For a time the whisking of Wyatt’s brush was the only sound. They had been conversing in murmurs because Sadie was in the next room dressing for dinner and a play at Schieffelin Hall. Wyatt had moved his things out of the house on Fremont into the building Sadie had shared with Johnny Behan when they were living as man and wife. Of late she had begun signing for parcels as Mrs. Wyatt Earp. This was a source of no small embarrassment when Mattie’s parcels started showing up at Sadie’s door.

“The Hasletts?” Wyatt asked.

Morgan moved a shoulder. “Curly Bill has swore to get them. He will be taking over as head of that San Pedro outfit now that the old man is gone. Ike Clanton is as dumb as a fence post.”

“If Curly Bill says he will get them they are as good as in the ground. He will take Ringo and half of Galeyville and Charleston with him.”

“That is how Bill generally does things,” Morgan said. He stood stock-still on the carpet, afraid of shedding dust on Sadie’s fine things from San Francisco. The room was crammed with tables and shawls and tassled pillows and fat vases and lamps with fringed shades and a portable pump organ and a phonograph with a big daisy horn and conch shells holding down stacks of song sheets on every available surface. Wyatt was sitting on a floral mohair davenport with an apron around the legs and doilies pinned to the arms. A man couldn’t turn around or fart without knocking over something he couldn’t afford to replace.

“Leonard squawked like a caponed rooster.” Wyatt pulled on the gleaming boot and stood up, supporting himself with a hand on Morgan’s shoulder while he stamped his heel home. A cut-crystal lamp wobbled on a pedestal table with a base smaller than its top. “Named Luther King and Jim Crane and Harry Head as his only associates in the holdup. Old Curly Bill will do us a kindness yet by gunning the only two who could contradict it.”

“It won’t get Doc off. I heard about the paper Kate put her name to.”