Bloody Season (21 page)

“He bought it in Dodge City just before we left. We had an argument about whether he would have need for it in Arizona.” She was looking at Virgil’s face in repose. He was pale and looked very young.

“It seems we are always fighting,” she said. “One time I sent him to buy a calico bonnet and he came back with a lace one because he didn’t know what calico was. We had an awful fight over it. I guess people listening to us would think we don’t get on.” She scraped the heel of a hand up one cheek.

Goodfellow looked away. “We will worry about infection later. I will be back at sunup to change the dressing. Someone should stay with him meanwhile.”

Lou volunteered to sit up with her, but Allie told her to go back to her room and sleep. “You have a husband of your own to stay awake for.” Allie placed a chair beside the bed where Virgil lay snoring quietly now and held his right hand. Twice as big as hers, it felt soft despite the calluses and slightly clammy, looking knuckleless like a baby’s in the glow of the lamp. She heard dripping throughout the night. When the sun came red through the window its rays reflected off a puddle beneath the bed.

She was sure then that he would die, but she felt neither fear nor sorrow, only a numbness, and beneath it the sensation of having lived through it before.

A midnight search by Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday of the unoccupied Huachuca Water Company building had yielded a harvest of paper shotgun shells and a trail-polished sombrero with J. I. CLANTON burned in big moronic capitals into the leather sweatband. While John Clum was busy counting pellet holes by matchlight in the awning posts outside the Eagle Brewery in the interest of editorial accuracy, an Irish watchman in an icehouse on Toughnut Street reported seeing a party running past with shotguns shortly after the blasts. He identified Frank Stilwell and Hank Swilling, a San Pedro cowboy, and recalled that they had been in the company of a third man who may or may not have been Ike Clanton—depending upon how much credit one assigned to testimony delivered with Doc’s Colt’s Lightning thrust under the chin. At the Vizina hoisting works farther up Toughnut, a miner wearing a mask of caked dust said he saw the same three scrambling down into the gulch south of Toughnut, but he didn’t think the third man looked anything like Ike Clanton. Several people had seen two men with shotguns running along Allen, but only a railroad man boarding at the Palace lodging house was able to describe one of them as a tall man in an ulster.

“That snakeshit Ringo,” Doc said. “You should have let me take him before.”

“I was remiss,” said Wyatt.

From there the two Earps and Doc reported to Behan’s office, where the sheriff refused to gather a posse.

“With a city election coming up next week I am disinclined to commit county funds to any personal quarrels you Earps may have,” he said.

Morgan cursed, and Wyatt stepped in front of Doc. Deputies Breakenridge and Flynn were both present and armed. But Doc was steady. He said, “A rich sheriff that cannot hold a woman in a town like Tombstone may as well hitch his outfit to Billy there.”

Breakenndge colored. Behan, small behind his big yellow desk with a bottle and glass on the blotter, kept his eyes on Wyatt. “You are not an officer now. If I hear of you Earps cutting out after honest citizens I will swear out that posse, and you will be the men we track down.”

“Be sure and bring Frank Stilwell,” Wyatt said.

At the Wells Fargo office the three woke up the night man and Wyatt sent a wire to United States Marshal Crawley P. Dake in Prescott. Hours later Dake wired Wyatt back an appointment as deputy U.S. marshal to replace Virgil.

John Clum was not running for reelection as mayor of Tombstone. In his place, the Citizens’ Safety Committee put up John Carr and endorsed Dave Neagle, a former deputy sheriff who had fallen out with Behan and who had ridden with the September posse that had captured Frank Stilwell and Pete Spence, for chief of police. The candidates bellowed about law and order through megaphones from platforms strung with torches and bunting to crowds pounding their shoulders and stamping their feet in the cold. On election day—Tuesday, January 3, 1882—Behan deputized cowboys from the lower San Pedro Valley to maintain the polls, and throughout the day they patrolled between Fremont and Toughnut streets carrying Winchesters and Henrys with pistols stuck in their pockets. The committee in answer dispatched two armed men to walk behind each of the cowboys. Clum, a man of rare humor who struggled with great success to keep it out of his columns, remarked privately that it was like paying a reporter to edit his own editor. Carr and Neagle were elected and Behan billed the county two thousand dollars to pay his temporary deputies.

Three days later, five men in bandanna masks stopped the Bisbee stage in the Mules and rode off with eighty-five hundred dollars earmarked for laborers at the Copper Queen Mine. During the robbery Frank Stilwell’s mask slipped, after which Curly Bill and Pony Deal, the Galeyville half-breed, obligingly lowered theirs. The shotgun messenger identified the remaining two robbers as Ike Clanton and Pete Spence.

District Court Judge William H. Stillwell—no relation to Frank Stilwell—was a long narrow tobacco-smelling man with a graying pompadour, fat sidewhiskers that his political enemies accused him of touching up with lampblack, and that general air of judgeship that jurists were required to have in the territories if they had nothing else. Wyatt stood in front of the judge’s carved desk alternately pushing out and denting the crown of his hat while Stillwell signed his name to a stack of closely typewritten sheets, rocked a blotter over each signature, and looked at them again.

“I am not convinced about this Clanton sighting,” he said. “The man kept his mask and Clanton has no history of holding up stagecoaches.”

“One is all it takes.”

“I am of the opinion that Clanton’s former friends from Charleston left that hat in the Huachuca building. They would not be likely to bring him along on a robbery with his reputation for duplicity.”

Wyatt creased the crown of his hat. “I know Bartholomew, the messenger. He has a good eye.”

“It would have to be exceptional to see through a bandanna at night.”

“Make it a John Doe if you are doubtful.”

“I dislike authorizing them. Some men take them as open hunting licenses.” He reread the language. “How is your brother?”

“Goodfellow says he should make it.”

“A sighting is a sighting.” Stillwell shuffled the warrants and thrust them out. Wyatt reached for them, but the judge held on. His eyes were like brown marbles. “If I were serving these warrants I might be tempted to leave my prisoners in the mesquite where alibis count for nothing.”

Wyatt made no response.

“That is not advice, mind.”

“I don’t take it to be.”

Stillwell released the warrants. Wyatt put on his hat and folded the sheaf lengthwise and put it inside his horsehair trail coat. His spurs clanked and rattled on his way out.

PROCLAMATION

To the Citizens of the City of Tombstone:

I am informed by his Honor, William H. Stillwell, Judge of the District Court of the First Judicial District, that Wyatt Earp, who left this city yesterday with a posse, was instructed with warrants for the arrest of divers persons charged with criminal offenses. I request the public to abstain from any interference with the execution of said warrants.

John Carr, Mayor

Copies of the handbill, printed in the Epitaph office in black serifs on ivory stock, were nailed up on vertical surfaces throughout Tombstone on January 24; and by noon most of them had disappeared, to resurface again years later, yellowed and cracking apart between the pages of family Bibles and in stacks of letters bound with faded ribbon.

Wyatt’s posse consisted of Morgan and Warren Earp, the latter newly returned after a long absence; Doc Holliday, Sherman McMasters, and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, as efficient a man with a horse and a pistol as Wyatt had known. At the West End Corral they selected big chesty mounts built to carry a lot of iron and rode south with Winchesters and shotguns and saddle pistols in scabbards and revolvers under their coats—six grim men with moustaches in wide hats and big coats, who looked like pallbearers.

While they were gone, Ike Clanton, Frank Stilwell, and Hank Swilling walked into Johnny Behan’s office and surrendered their weapons. The charge of attempted murder was dropped for lack of positive witnesses. Clanton and Stilwell posted bail on the robbery charge and were released.

The news reached the Earp party a week later when they stopped at Lewis Springs to water their horses and fill their canteens, but they didn’t turn back. Curly Bill and Pony Deal had been named among the men who had robbed another stage at Contention a few days after the Bisbee holdup and they were laying down a hot trail to old Mexico without pausing to cover their tracks.

“Curly Bill is the nigger in the woodbox.” Wyatt wriggled thawed fingers back into his glove and used a stick from the campfire to light his pipe.

“Bill has no truck with you,” Doc said.

“He has been moving in my direction ever since he and Ringo adjusted the Hasletts’s case in Huachita.”

“That is just guesswork.”

“It is no less fact for that.”

They were camped on the western face of the Mules and the snow was piled in neat heaps against rocks and snarled bushes; everywhere else the ground was bare. Doc’s high cheeks were windburned and a week’s growth of sand-colored beard had filled out the hollows. He was loath to own to it, but the clear cold air agreed with him. Warren and Morgan were asleep in their rolls, or pretending to be, and Sherman McMasters had his Centennial Winchester knocked down and laid out in flickering pieces on his spread blanket while he wiped oil off the barrel with an old blue bandanna. McMasters, a Wells Fargo shotgun messenger like Morgan and Wyatt before him, preferred the carbine to the Stevens ten-gauge issued by the company. Doc suspected that if the ruddy, chin-whiskered man could find a hole in the gun big enough he would fuck it. Turkey Creek Jack was standing watch farther up the grade.

Doc said, “I thought Ike was our man.”

Wyatt shook his head, sucking life into the pipe. “Ringo and the others have got him licking their boots over that Leonardhead and Crane transaction. They planted that hat to get us on him so they would not have to waste the powder. The business has Curly Bill all over it. The Nugget has us and Ike down as stage robbers falling out, and if we kill Ike or he kills us we will prove it right.”

“It is too various for me.”

“Curly Bill is a devil. He got Fred White to shoot himself with the border roll and this is the same thing only it is our finger on the trigger.”

“What about the rest?”

“If Swilling was in that adobe he was paid. Stilwell and Ringo need killing.”

“I have said that right along. I hope you remember where you heard it.” Doc unstopped a canteen half-full of whiskey and tilted it. “McLaury?”

Wyatt ground his teeth on his pipe stem. “Curly Bill first.”

But the signs grew scarce near the border, as they always did in that rocky country, and with Bat Masterson gone marshaling in Colorado they hadn’t a tracker with the skill to pick them out and returned lathered and blowing to Tombstone. There they read in the Epitaph that Johnny Behan and Ike Clanton had sworn out warrants in Contention charging Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doe Holliday once again with the murders of William Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury on Fremont Street on October 26, 1881.

Chapter Fifteen

T
hat night in March he dreamed of Urilla. He hadn’t thought about her in months, or dreamed of her in years; and on those most recent occasions when he had thought of her, she was like someone else’s memory, something belonging to the tall yellow-haired boy who had graded track for the U.P. with his older brother in Wyoming and barked his knuckles on stubbled chins behind the saloon tents in Cheyenne and Laramie and fled a horse-stealing charge in the Nations. Those times he saw a girl with a round face and straight hair that smelled of brown soap, plain really, in a loose print dress tied under her bosom to disguise her condition. It was always day in the memory and dusty sunlight leaned in through the windows.

But in his dream it was night. A lamp shed a greasy globe of light that barely reached the walls in a tight room thick with Missouri in October, with crickets stitching outside the open window and not enough fresh air coming in to jiggle the flame in the glass chimney. Urilla’s face was bloated and glistening, white against the ticking. She was shrieking—silently in the dream, her mouth a twisted hole with nothing coming out of it, but Wyatt’s ears rang and the midwife barked at him to hold the lamp still—and her nightgown was nicked to her waist and plastered transparent to her swollen breasts and her legs were spread obscenely and the blood—dear Lord, it was black—was dumping out between them, over the midwife’s raw hands trying to stop it with kerosene-soaked rags. The midwife in the dream was Mattie. That made no sense, because he hadn’t met her until weeks later.

The boy had emerged feet first. Urilla was small down there and when Mattie had summoned Wyatt into the room he had seen the tiny naked body flailing for freedom like a toad being devoured slowly by a massasauga and he heard the crackling of bones. His first thought was that they were the boy’s and he tore Mattie away, shouting that she was murdering his son. She slapped him hard (in the dream, but observing it too, he saw the bloody handprint appear on his cheek even as he felt the sting) and spat at him that the boy was murdering his mother. After that Wyatt did as she told him. She strangled the infant pulling him out, had to; but by then the blood had a good start, thick and black and stinking of heated iron. Urilla shrieked silently.

Wyatt knew when it was over. Mattie’s hands slowed, she stopped bunching and pressing the rags and started using them gently, as sponges to control the mess. Urilla’s mouth slackened and she lay panting. At length her breathing grew more even. She smiled weakly. The pain had ended. She was looking at him, and he saw in her eyes that she knew he was there. He smiled back and held her hand. It was warm and sticky. He was still holding it when the bleeding stopped—stopped because the heart was no longer pumping—and Mattie and someone else pried his hand loose and led him from the room. In the dream the someone else looked like Wyatt’s half-brother Newton. But Newton and his family had been living outside Missouri and were nowhere near that shack at the time.