Bloody Season (2 page)

“You all right?” she asked.

He put on a grin with the shirt and said nothing. Long white fingers slipped the bone buttons through hand-stitched eyelets.

“Doc, Ike Clanton was here looking for you. He had a rifle with him.”

“If God will let me live long enough to get my clothes on, he will see me.” His Georgian drawl often made his words sound gentler than they were. He tucked in the shirt, smoothing it with his palms, and broke a fresh collar out of the box on the bureau.

She watched him slide the braces up over his nearly nonexistent shoulders, a painfully thin man in his late twenties, several inches taller than she but barely half as wide, with his ears turning out. For all her superior bulk Kate was not fat by the standards of that place and time, merely generous, full in the hips and bosom and corseted narrow in the waist under the calicos and ginghams befitting a woman no longer on the line. She was not wearing a bonnet and her short black hair emphasized a large round head and the broad nose that had earned her a nickname to set her apart from all the other Kates on the circuit. A big, not-handsome woman with a pleasant smile stamped indelibly on her pink face.

“What are you fixing to do?”

“Eat breakfast.” He unslung his cartridge belt from the chair and buckled it around his waist so that the Colt’s Lightning in the scabbard swung short of the hem of his gray frock coat when he put it on. The cane barely creaked as he swayed toward the door to the hallway. He weighed scarcely more than a full horse rig.

“Watch out for that Ike.”

“I scraped better dogshit than him off my left boot heel.”

Mrs. Fly was coming in from her husband’s photograph gallery behind the house when he closed the door behind him, his breath whistling. She was small and young with dark hair in braids and the braids pinned on top of her head. “Ike Clanton was looking for you.”

“I heard. They’re singing it in the Bird Cage.”

The dining room was warm, with a barrel stove going in the corner. He sat alone at the big table. It was past noon now and the other boarders were out, eating lunch downtown or inspecting their claims. While he was sipping coffee and grinning at the Daily Epitaph, Kate came out of their room wearing a bonnet as long as a shotgun and left without a word. Mrs. Fly brought his breakfast and he ate part of it, dealt a hand of patience on the oilcloth, went bust his third time through the deck, and returned to the room for his long gray overcoat and gray felt hat.

Outside, the wind shoved at his coattails and lifted his collar. When he turned the corner onto Fourth Street it struck him full force, rocking him. He leaned into it, gripping the crook of the cane tightly, one hand on his hat. The wind carried dust from the street and a metallic smell of early snow off the Dragoons.

Wyatt and Morgan were standing on the corner of Fourth and Allen in front of Hafford’s Saloon. They had on black hats and mackinaws over their black suits and boiled white shirts. Their pistol butts altered the hang of their clothes.

“Ike Clanton was looking for me,” Doc said.

Morgan’s moustaches lifted. “I can’t feature it. You never got around to calling him horseshit last night.”

“I think I must have. The yellow son of a bitch wouldn’t fight.”

Wyatt said, “Well, he wanted to fight today, and has got a busted head to lick because of it.”

“You?”

“Virgil. Ike was on the rut this morning with a Colt’s and a Winchester, squawking how he was fixing to have all our balls for breakfast, and him and Morg just kind of slid up behind him on Fourth and Virge buffaloed him.”

“Dropped him like a turd,” Morgan said, his eyes crinkling. “We took him up to Judge Wallace’s and got him fined.”

Doc glanced from one Earp to the other. They looked enough alike to be twins in spite of the difference in their ages, both of them lean and long and blue-eyed, fair of hair and drooping moustaches. Their linen was always white and their trousers carefully brushed, thanks to Morgan’s woman Lou and Wyatt’s Mattie—or Sadie, whichever one he was being domestic with at the time. Doc depended for his own haberdashery on a Chinawoman who waited tables at the Can Can Chop House; Kate wouldn’t know a washboard from a singletree.

Of the two brothers, Morgan looked less on top of the weather, red-eyed and sallow. He and Doc had drunk most of the sting out of a chill night. Wyatt drank beer only and little enough of that. His eyes were clear, watering some in the wind that rouged his cheeks.

“Where is Virge?” Doc asked.

Wyatt gestured up Allen just as the eldest of the three Earps emerged from the Wells Fargo office, head down and carrying a shotgun with the muzzles pointed at the boardwalk. Built along more stately lines than either of his brothers, he looked as big as a front porch in his mackinaw, his black hatbrim turning up on the left side in the wind, heavy handlebars underscoring his jowls. From time to time a gust exposed the plain deputy U.S. marshal’s star on his vest under the coat. His heels struck pistol shots off the boards.

Wyatt saw Doe eyeing the shotgun and said, “I had a set-to with Tom McLaury this morning. Frank’s in town too, and that Billy the Kid.”

“Bonney’s dead, I heard.”

“Billy Claiborne, then. I buffaloed Tom and called him a damn dirty cow thief and some other things. We had some more words there in front of Spangenberg’s. Him and Frank and Ike and Ike’s brother Billy was looking over the six-shooters inside.”

“Where are they now?”

“Dunbar’s, as of about ten minutes ago.”

“All of them heeled?”

“Enough to disincline me to ask the others.”

“I never knew the place to be so livesome of a morning,” Doc said. “I will have to start getting up earlier.”

Morgan grinned. The expression plainly hurt him and he stopped.

“Billy Clanton and Frank are wearing their irons too high and wide for town,” said Virgil in his phlegmy baritone. “They are looking to make a fight or claim we showed the white feather.”

He stopped talking. Doc and the others followed his gaze across Fourth to the west end of Allen, where five men were coming out of the Dexter Livery & Feed stables owned by John Dunbar and Sheriff John Behan. Doc spotted Ike’s brother Billy first, a full head taller than any of his companions and as wide as Virgil Earp but more oxlike in the chest and shoulders, leading a dun horse with a white blaze. He alone among the party was clean-shaven. Frank McLaury, moving with the cocky swinging stride of a small man, had a hand on a bit chain belonging to a strawberry roan. Long-jawed Billy Claiborne was there, picking his teeth with a pine splinter. He and Frank and Frank’s brother Tom, trailing the pack, wore moustaches and Ike Clanton up front had red chin-whiskers streaked brown with tobacco juice. Doc saw a splash of white bandage showing under Ike’s hat and laughed out loud. Billy Clanton turned his head to glare at the men assembled in front of Hafford’s, then accompanied the others across Allen into Ed Benson and John Montgomery’s O.K. Corral. A pistol scabbard flapped on his right hip. All the men were coated except Tom McLaury, who wore a vest over a dark blue shirt with the tail out. Winchester butts stuck up above both horses’ saddles.

“Maybe they’re leaving,” said Virgil. Morgan snorted.

Wyatt said, “Here comes the law in Cochise County.”

Johnny Behan paused in front of the Alhambra to touch his hat and say something to one of the women from the Bird Cage Theater coming out through the batwings, then continued on to the Earps’s corner. He was trim and looked taller than he was in a flat-brimmed sombrero and light topcoat and dark trousers, a fresh shine on his boots with designs on the toes. His slim moustaches were newly clipped and as he drew near, Doc caught a scent of lavender water and pomade.

“Marshal, the talk in Barron’s is you’re prodding these boys into a fight.” He was looking up at Virgil, Doc noted, with the quick brown eyes that made nuns and virgins drip.

Virgil said, “They are the ones making the fight talk. Why don’t you come with us and disarm them. They just went into Benson’s corral.”

Behan glanced in that direction, touched one of his moustaches to make sure he hadn’t left it on the hardwood floor in Barron’s barbershop and bath, looked across Allen in the direction of the Occidental Hotel. He was proud of his Roman-coin profile. “I won’t do that. If they see any of you Earps they will fight sure.”

Doc said, “If you like we will cover you while you run home and change drawers.”

Virgil said quickly, “I mean to disarm them, with or without your help. If it comes to a fight it will be on them to start it.”

“They won’t fight with me,” Behan said, glaring at Doc, whose gray gaze had no humor in it. “I will go down alone and see if I can disarm them.”

Virgil stroked his throat with his free hand. “All I want them to do is lay off their arms while they’re in town.”

The sheriff nodded. During the conversation he and Wyatt had not exchanged so much as a glance.

Doc and Morgan were standing in the intersection of Fourth and Allen. Behan started around them and stopped in front of a bearded man in miner’s overalls crusted with silver clay, who had come up Allen Street from the direction of the corral. They spoke for a few seconds, then Behan walked away up Fourth toward Fremont. The bearded man mounted the boardwalk and addressed Virgil, who was leaning in Hafford’s doorway with the muzzles of his shotgun resting on the sill.

“Marshal, these men mean trouble. They are all down there on Fremont Street, all armed, and I think you had better go and disarm them.” His coastal British accent was as thick as a core sample.

“What a Cornish Jack thinks you could stick up an ant’s ass,” said Wyatt.

“Who’s there?” Virgil asked.

“Tom and Frank McLaury and two of the Clantons. That Billy the Kid was there too and another man I don’t know. He’s drunk as a lord.”

“Ringo?”

“No, I know Ringo and this was not him.”

“Wes Fuller, I bet,” said Wyatt.

“All armed, you say?” Virgil pressed.

“Well, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury. I can’t say about the rest.”

Morgan had moved in close to the boardwalk. “They have horses. Hadn’t we better get mounted ourselves in case they want to make a running fight of it?”

Wyatt said, “No, if they want to make a running fight we can kill their horses.”

The miner had gone back the way he had come, walking with his knees bent and his toes pointed out. Virgil stretched, bones cracking, and stepped out of the doorway balancing the shotgun. “Well, I guess we had better go do it.”

Virgil and Wyatt stepped into the street and started along Fourth toward Fremont, trailing the third Earp. Doc fell into step beside Morgan. Wyatt stopped and turned. The wind uncovered the star on his vest engraved SPECIAL POLICE.

“Doc, this is our fight. There is no call for you to mix in.”

“That’s a hell of a thing for you to say to me.”

They stared. Virgil cleared his throat and extended the shotgun to Doc. It was a full-length Stevens ten-gauge with a brass frame. “Hand me that cane and hide this under your coat. Don’t let them see it until we come within range.”

Doc slid his left arm out of the sleeve of his ankle-length greatcoat, traded Virgil the cane for the shotgun, and snugged the butt under his arm with the muzzles hanging down, pulling the coat closed over it. The procession continued in a column of twos.

Fremont Street, home of the Epitaph office and the Cochise County courthouse, was much quieter than saloon-lined Allen Street, and nearly deserted at that hour. Clumps of panicum grass twitched down the center. At the corner the party turned west. Someone said, “Here they come,” and Doc was aware of a crowd watching from the doorway of Bauer’s butcher shop. He pursed his lips and whistled a tune he had heard in Fort Griffin. Playing the rubes.

“Son of a bitch pisses icicles.”

Nearing Bauer’s they spread out four abreast with ten feet between each man and his neighbor. Morgan and Virgil took the outside while Doc moved to Wyatt’s right. Gusts pulled at the flap of Doc’s coat, exposing the shotgun in teasing glimpses like white thigh on a variety girl. “Let’s try and disarm these jackasses,” Virgil said.

Morgan caught Doc’s eye. “Let them have it.”

“All right.”

They were within sight of the fifteen-foot-wide lot between Fly’s boardinghouse and a private residence belonging to W. A. Harwood, where a group of men stood, two of them holding horses, thirty yards west of the O.K. Corral. Doc spotted John Behan’s sombrero just as the sheriff separated himself from the others and came trotting up Fremont with his palms stretched out in front of him.

“Earp, for God’s sake don’t go down there,” he told Virgil. “You’ll all be murdered.”

“I mean to disarm them, Johnny.” He passed Behan, accompanied by the others.

“I have disarmed them all.”

Virgil had his big Army thrust inside his trousers on the right side and was holding Doc’s cane in his left hand. Now he rotated the pistol to his left hip and shifted the cane to his right hand. He did these things without breaking stride. The group gathered in the lot had withdrawn inside, out of sight from the street. Entering the lot slowly, the Earps and Doc closed ranks. Out of the corner of his eye Doc glimpsed Wesley Fuller’s lanky coated length weaving into the passage between Fly’s boardinghouse and the skylit photograph gallery behind it. The gallery door swung to with a clatter.

The newcomers were facing Frank McLaury and Ike Clanton on the outside of a tight group with Billy Clanton and Tom McLaury in the center and the whitewashed wall of the Harwood house at their backs. Billy was standing in front of his blaze-face with his hand on the Frontier Colt’s on his hip. Frank McLaury was armed similarly, his fingers on the stag handle, and his brother Tom stood a little behind Frank’s strawberry roan, resting a hand on the Winchester butt showing above the saddle. Ike’s hands hung empty at his sides. Apart from the group, near the gallery, slouched Billy Claiborne’s insolent young frame with his thumbs hooked inside his cartridge belt.

At Fourth and Allen Doc had transferred his nickel-plated Colt’s Lightning from its scabbard to his right coat pocket. Now it was in his hand. His left was still holding the shotgun under the gray coat. A sweetish warm stink of fresh manure filled his nostrils from the corral three doors down.