Bloody Season (24 page)

“Tell him I believe him.”

McMasters translated. The Mexican relaxed a notch, shifting his weight back onto his good leg.

“Ask him how much Spence pays him to do killing.”

McMasters couldn’t remember if matar or meter meant “to kill.” He shortened it. “Cuanto dinero paga Señor Spence a usted?”

The Mexican glanced around at the trees marked with red paint for cutting. “Veinticinco dolares.”

“He said—”

“Twenty-five dollars.” Wyatt fired. A blue hole appeared under the Mexican’s left nipple. He jerked, looked at Wyatt, looked down at himself, let out a loud fart, knelt, and lay over on his right side.

“Jesus.” Turkey Creek Jack took off his hat to fan away the stink.

McMasters said, “I don’t think he was talking about the same thing we were.”

Chapter Seventeen

J
ohn Clum rode into their camp that night outside Charleston. The former Indian agent had on a duster and a stained felt hat, which he removed slowly so that Warren would recognize his bald head in the moonlight. Warren took his Winchester off cock and Clum stepped down and handed him his reins and went over to where the others had their blankets spread. They were keeping a cold camp. Wyatt put down his sardine tin and fork and walked off with him a few yards, where the two stood silhouetted against the kerosene glow from town. A warm dry wind lifted their dusters and swept sand into little ridges against their boots.

“I sent for Fred Dodge,” Wyatt said.

“He is down again with the mountain fever. He asked me to come in his place.”

“Who else knows we’re here?”

“Just the man you sent.”

“What have you heard?”

“Curly Bill is somewhere up on the Babocomari,” Clum said. “You know Johnny has deputized him, also Ike and Phin Clanton and half of Galeyville to look for you.”

“I didn’t know. But Johnny knows no one else to swear. Curly Bill at least will find me.”

“They are saying you murdered a Mexican at Pete Spence’s wood ranch today.”

“I killed Indian Charlie in a fair fight when he owned to helping kill Morgan for twenty-five dollars. I gave him to three to jerk his pistol. He lost count.”

“Johnny has Spence in custody. He turned himself in yesterday.”

Wyatt stroked the stubble on his neck. “The breed said he was in town. I never credited it.”

“You never gave a man to three to do anything when you were holding all the cards. You’re talking to me, not the Epitaph.”

“I stopped answering to both when they killed Morg and crippled Virge.”

“People are weary of this killing stuff,” Clum said. “Riding up to waterholes and gunning anyone who looks like he might know Curly Bill or Spence or Ike Clanton does nothing for your case.”

“If it isn’t Geronimo it is Curly Bill, and if it isn’t Curly Bill it is me. They are quick to fix blame in Tombstone. I am their scalded dog this season.”

“Your old friend Bob Paul is sheriff in Pima County now. He has put in for warrants to arrest you and Doc Holliday for Frank Stilwell’s murder. Johnny will serve them.”

“I truly hope he tries. Where does the Citizens’ Safety Committee stand on this transaction?”

“Our concern is Tombstone. What goes on outside its limits is between you and Johnny and Curly Bill.”

“Cunts, the bunch of you.”

Clum said nothing. His head was a marble carving in the pale light.

“What do you know of Ringo?” Wyatt asked.

“Quit the territory, they say.”

“Ringo is not one to tuck his tail in that way.”

“I am only telling you what’s being said.” Clum realized he was still holding his hat and put it back on. “Governor Gosper has asked President Arthur for authority to organize a territorial police force like the Texans have, to deal with the situation in Cochise County. If he gets it he will shut down Tombstone like the smallpox.”

“By then I will be square with Curly Bill or dead. Have Marsh Williams send someone to meet me at Iron Springs with a thousand dollars. Crawley Dake in Prescott will see Wells Fargo gets it back.”

“Williams is no longer with Wells Fargo.”

“What happened?”

“I heard he was stealing from the company and informing on money shipments.”

“Old Marsh.”

“There are some who think this proves Ike Clanton’s charge that you and Holliday participated in the Benson stage robbery last March. You and Williams were in it together, they say.”

“Poor coin for protecting them from Johnny and his friends. I don’t guess the committee has been doing much talking in our favor.”

Clum’s hat shadowed his eyes and made crow’s-wings of his moustaches. “This was your game from the start, yours and the cowboys’. We backed your play because Fred White was killed and Ben jumped town and it was either your brother Virgil or one of Johnny’s crowd. You gunmen come haring in and shooting each other up and then charge off leaving those of us who were here ahead of you to put out your fires. What value have you? If God reached down and plucked your whole tribe out of this territory tomorrow you would not be mourned nor missed. You create your own need.”

Wyatt fished out his pipe.

“I’m obliged to you for coming in, John. Don’t come back.”

“Am I to take that as a threat?”

“Take it how you will. From now on out we are shooting at anything that draws inside range.”

An eagle hung wings down on a brass sky with a white-coin sun nailed to it and mountains crawling at its base. On a patch of webbed earth surrounded by brown grass a gila squatted with one foot raised, cooling it. For miles around only the small tattered column of men on horseback was moving, beetling across a scabrous plain tufted with mesquite and calcined with chaparral, with lather foaming around their legs and their own sweat beading under their hat brims and burning where leather and coarse cloth met flesh. The backs of their necks stung and their gunmetal was scorching to the touch.

Sherman McMasters suffered more than any of his companions. He had been wearing two cartridge belts crossed around his middle, and although he had finally unbuckled and hung them from his saddle horn, the sores they had worn into his hip-hollows made him suck in his breath every time his chestnut put its foot wrong. He had not known until that day what a tanglefooted mount he had drawn. The flesh inside his thighs had broken out as well and it was no help that even with his stirrups adjusted as high as they would go he was forced to stand in his borrowed saddle like one of these iron-assed cavalry kicks out of Fort Huachuca. Some souvenir-hunting son of a bitch had stolen his good butt-broken McClellan from the West End Corral while they were all resting in the hotel.

He was irritated further by Doc’s constant coughing—the thick air was a strain on his lungs and he left a little trail of pink spots beside his bay’s hoofprints—and by Turkey Creek Jack’s toneless and apparently unconscious humming as he slouched along with his piebald’s reins looped around one wrist. McMasters had barked at him twice to stop it; he had obeyed, only to start up again before they had gone a mile. Warren irritated him by sleeping in his saddle, a trick the older and more trailwise McMasters had yet to acquire, and anyway the sprout slept too easily and deeply to suit him. Wyatt alone rode in silence and without eccentricity, steering Dick Naylor with his knees and arching his back only occasionally to work the knots out from between his shoulders. McMasters found it irritating.

The horses blew out quickly in the heat and they dismounted frequently to lead them until their sides stopped heaving. They whickered hopelessly and whisked their tails without much conviction at the flies glittering around their rumps. Wyatt loosened his cartridge belt as he rode. Ahead of the party, always the same distance away, a patch of green lay like the felt on a billiard table between the low broken-edged Whetstones and the less distinct, more occluded Mustang Mountains in the pool of heat on the horizon to the northwest. It was this patch they were heading toward, called Mescal Springs on some maps but referred to by anyone who had ever tasted its metal-edged water as Iron Springs.

The Babocomari River scratched the desert miles to the west and there was no water between them and the springs. They watered the animals sparingly from their canteens, rubbed them down with handfuls of dead buffalo grass, wet their own tongues, and continued. The green patch was moving closer at last. By late afternoon, with the sun turning copper over the Mustangs, they drew within sight of the wash that separated the springs from the basin created by the Babocomari and the San Pedro River. Willows grew thick as corduroy on the other side. The riders dismounted to lead their horses.

Puffs of gray blossomed in the willows, followed closely by a crackling, as of green sticks bursting in a fire. The air around the five men splintered and something chugged into the earth in front of Wyatt’s right foot, throwing clumps of dirt as high as his knees. By then he was unleathering his shotgun, closest to him in the boot on Dick Naylor’s left side. Lowing gently to calm the horse, which was trying to rear, he turned it in front of him and laid the barrels across the belly of his saddle.

The others had remounted in the fusillade and fallen back, and now men in hats and dusters emerged from the willows, firing and levering rifles and carbines as they advanced through the smoke of their own fire. Wyatt centered the Stevens on the man nearest him and emptied both barrels. The man pitched forward with his middle gone and fell on his face on the mossy ground cover. He hunched his back once as if trying to rise, then subsided.

Wyatt scabbarded the shotgun and reached across the black for the Winchester on the other side. But Dick Naylor was rearing and plunging now and instead he lunged for the saddle horn and started to mount. His loosened cartridge belt slid down his thighs and he released the horn to reach down and pull it up. He was leaning with his face close to the cherry-colored pommel when someone struck a match off the end of his nose and his nostrils filled with the stench of rotten egg.

The horse wheeled. Wyatt had one foot in the stirrup and went with it, the belt pinning his legs together. The air was cracking around him. Every gun in the willows was firing at this easy target. He yanked up the belt finally and got a leg over and made the spurs bite. By this time Doc, Warren, McMasters, and Turkey Creek Jack had reached cover behind a ridge shaggy with mesquite and returned fire. The others fell back, levering and shooting.

“You yellow sons of bitches left me out there twisting.” Wyatt swung down behind the ridge.

Doc said, “Yes, you looked a fair hero out there with your breeches down around your ankles. Where are you hit?”

Wyatt showed white teeth in a face blackened with spent powder and handed him his saddle horn. It had come off in his hand when he dismounted. A ball had shorn through the stem.

Doc examined it gravely. “Next time I will shoot you myself to determine if you bleed.”

“Jesus, Wyatt.” Warren had a corner of his brother’s duster in his hand. The linen looked moth-chewed.

“Johnny never could hit a buffalo if he was inside it,” Doc said.

“Johnny is back in Tombstone where he belongs,” said Wyatt. “That was Curly Bill I just killed.”

“It wasn’t Curly Bill.”

Wyatt sealed one letter with a drop of wax from a white candle stub he carried in his saddlebags, squashed the wax with his thumb, and addressed the letter to John J. Valentine at Wells Fargo headquarters in San Francisco. “Sure it was,” he told Doc. “I saw the mark on his face where the ball came out when he got it in the neck in Galeyville last spring.” He unfolded a fresh sheet from the oilskin pouch.

They were camped four miles north of Tombstone and Wyatt was using his cantle for a writing desk by the light of the first fire they had kindled in days. Doc, wick-thin and feverish and still spitting blood, lay on his back on a bed of mesquite with his blanket up to his chin. He had a dread of pneumonia on chill desert nights and experienced nightmares in which he lay drowning in his own sputum.

“It just seems lucksome that the first and only man killed in that transaction should turn out to be Curly Bill.” He hawked and splatted the ground.

“I don’t know about the only. It looked to me like one or two others was hit when you and the rest got around to figuring out what your guns are for.”

“We took cover like any man would that has brains in his skull instead of a straight load of panther guts. No one invited you to go out and play Custer.” They had been arguing about the retreat all day.

“You were the one had a hard-on to charge in and flush them up afterwards when they were all hunkered in tight as a nun’s—tight as a drum.” He’d forgotten that Doc still wrote letters to a cousin in a convent in Atlanta.

“I say it was Johnny and he’d have turned tail like the rabbit he is until he ran out of desert.”

“It was Curly Bill.”

Sherman McMasters came in from watch, leaned his Winchester against a palo verde, and filled a cup from the coffeepot boiling on a flat rock next to the fire. He grunted when he sat down.

Wyatt said, “You put some axle grease on those fistulas of yours like I advised?”

“I never thought to bring any, there being no axles to grease for forty miles.” He blew steam off the cup and sipped.

“Bottom mud’s better,” said Doc.

“Arizona is a mud patch, all right.”

Wyatt used a bowie knife to whittle a point on his gnawed yellow pencil stub. “Wild Bill told me he cauterized a Cheyenne lance wound once by pouring black powder into it and setting it afire.”

“Just once I hope to meet an Indian fighter who never did that,” McMasters said. “To hear them there was more powder spent on closing wounds than opening them.”

Doc said, “Wild Bill was a lying Yankee. I heard he was going blind from the clap when that swamper capped him in Deadwood.”

Wyatt and Doc had been baiting each other all evening. It was no new game with them, and it never failed to stand McMasters’s scalp on end. He changed subjects. “Who you writing to, Sadie?”

“Her next. This one is for Clum and the Epitaph. Turkey Creek Jack will carry them in when I spell him.”