Bloody Season (4 page)

Thomas Clark McLaury had been struck by twelve buckshot pellets on the right side discharged at close range, splintering the humerus in the upper right arm, perforating both lungs and the liver and obliterating the gallbladder, stomach, and colon; shredding the large and small intestines, fracturing the pelvis, and lodging in the sartorius and gastrocnemius muscles in the right thigh and calf. All of the wounds sustained in the abdomen and lower thorax were fatal.

“Drive the crowd away!” said Billy, his voice rising. “Oh, drive them away!”

The windows were a smear of flattened faces. Billy tried to sit up, then subsided just as the carpenter stepped forward with his horned hands out to restrain him. He coughed, staining his lips, and his head rolled to one side. His chest rose and fell automatically and stopped.

William Clanton had been shot through the right wrist, the ball entering two inches behind the metacarpus and describing an oblique trajectory, missing the radius but parting the ulna as it exited five inches farther back on the outside of the arm. Another ball had penetrated two inches left of the left nipple and slightly below, puncturing the pectoral muscle and missing the heart but tearing the pericardial sac and collapsing the left lung, flattened against the scapula on that side. Yet a third ball had entered beneath the twelfth rib on the right side, chipped the intercostal artery, passed through both intestines, and lay pressing against the spinal cord. Both were fatal injuries.

Having finished his preliminary examination, Matthews washed his hands in a basin of lukewarm water provided for that purpose, toweled off, drew two cigars from the inside breast pocket of his coat hanging on the back of a chair, gave one to the carpenter, and lit them both with a sulfur match. His fingers smelled of alcohol despite the washing. Clouds of smoke deadened the blood-and excrement stink in the room.

“Should I fetch the undertaker?” The carpenter sounded eager.

“Ritter’s ears are better than yours or mine when it comes to gunfire.” He rotated the cigar between his lips, wetting the end. “You may leave, and thank you.”

Gratefully the other man let himself out the front door. Alone, the coroner contemplated the Frontier model Colt’s he had picked up from the floor near Frank McLaury’s body and placed on the table next to the banknotes. He was a collector and carried a Schofield pistol in his instrument bag for his own protection. The Colt’s was blue-black with a stag handle, a twin of the popular Peacemaker but chambered for the .44-40 centerfire cartridge employed by the Model 1873 Winchester rifle and carbine. The mechanism appealed to his medical mind. When drawn back, the hammer advanced the cylinder to the next chamber, where once the trigger was released the nose of the hammer snapped down on the cartridge, igniting the powder and expelling the ball from the barrel at the approximate speed of eight hundred feet per second. A simple engine, really. He winked.

It was not Wyatt but Morgan, with his shirt off and his coat draped over his shoulders, a patch on each where the ball had gone in from behind and where Goodfellow had cut it out and then wrapped gauze around his chest and over his left shoulder toga-fashion. Morgan’s helpers tracked dirt in through Allie’s door and tipped him into bed beside his brother. He lay facedown, grunting.

Virgil looked up at Goodfellow, who had followed the party inside.

“He has lost some blood,” the doctor said. “I will be in every day.” To Allie: “Change the dressings twice daily and send someone around for me if either of them takes on fever. That will mean infection.”

He handed her a blue bottle of laudanum and left after drilling her in its application. John Clum and Colonel Herring remained. Clum, the slight, slope-shouldered young mayor of Tombstone and founder-publisher of the Daily Epitaph, stood with his hat in his hands and his tan ending where his fringe of dark hair began. His handlebars and naked scalp heaped ten years onto his appearance. Beside him the huge attorney with muttonchops resembled an erect walrus in a charcoal suit and wing collar. Snuff clung to his whiskers and hammocked in the creases of his vest. Both men had pistols stuck in their belts and Herring had a shotgun broken over his right arm in clear violation of the city anti-firearms ordinance.

Virgil said, “John, can we count on the Citizens’ Safety Committee to watch the place and see we are not both murdered in our sleep?”

“We will post guards outside on a rotating system,” said Clum. “But I think you have taken the fight out of Ike for now.”

“It ain’t Ike I’m concerned about.”

“Even a mob respects a show of arms,” Herring said.

Clum was sober. “A coroner’s inquest is setting up now. Wyatt would not be arrested by Behan but there will be warrants issued. I will put the best face I can on the business in the Epitaph.”

“I’d feel easier about that if you had the Nugget’s circulation.”

“It would be simpler if you had not deputized Doc Holliday,” Clum said.

“Doc is like a puppy. Where Wyatt goes he follows.”

“I guess Wyatt will be retaining Tom Fitch,” said Herring. “He is a good man for this kind of thing.”

“It is a hell of a note when a peace officer cannot carry out his sworn duty without getting arrested for it.”

Clum said, “Sworn duty had nothing to do with this business.”

“Don’t forget that guard,” Virgil said.

The two men nodded at Allie and departed, walking stiffly with the long barrels nudging their groins. They pulled the door shut against a flat gust that strained the pegs holding the house together.

“Allie, give me some of that laudanum.” Morgan’s voice was thick in his pillow.

“Suffer some,” Virgil said. “I made it clear going in I never wanted any killing stuff. Wyatt and I have interests to look out for here. Some of us don’t admire to be shotgun messengers our whole lives.”

“Well, you would have had a good view of them from up on the hill.” The nearest hill of consequence was Tombstone’s cemetery. Allie prevented Morgan from adding anything by sliding the spoon into his mouth. A fly lighted on his bandage and she brushed it away with her free hand.

“They never wanted to make a fight in that blind alley. We could have buffaloed them.”

Morgan swallowed, pulled a face. “You would have gone to buffalo Crazy Horse at the Little Big Horn.”

Corking the blue bottle, Allie spotted the sheriff’s sombrero through the window. “It is Johnny come to see how you are getting on,” she said.

Virgil said shit. “Hand me that gun.” He stretched an arm toward his Winchester leaning in a corner.

“I said it was only Johnny Behan.”

“And I said hand me that gun!”

Moving hastily, she leaned the rifle against the bed and picked up Morgan’s big pistol from the table where John Clum had put it and laid it on the chair by the bed inside Morgan’s long reach.

Behan’s rapping jiggled the door in its board frame. Virgil told her not to answer. He had drawn the Winchester across his lap.

The rapping came again. They waited. Wind razored the corner boards outside. After a long moment the sheriff’s footsteps retreated off the little front porch. He passed the window heading back up Fremont without looking in.

“Stack that spare mattress against the window,” Virgil said.

The room was gray with the feather mattress blocking the light. Allie lit a lamp, stood around, then sat down and took the cover off the black-and-silver Singer sewing machine she had fought the Earp brothers to bring with her down the Sante Fe trail from Dodge City. For a moment she sat without moving, then began to work the treadle. She discovered she was still wearing the leather palm designed for hand work and put it aside. The thumping and whirring of the machinery gentled Virgil and Morgan to sleep, interrupted at intervals by one or the other’s snoring and muttered curses when a shift in positions sent fresh pain to torn flesh and muscle. Steam whistles brayed in the Dragoon foothills to the northeast and in the San Pedro Valley to the southwest, a sound not heard that early in the day since the big fire in June; it meant the miners were being called in to help maintain order. Now and again one of John Clum’s vigilantes cried out to another outside the window.

Presently the three were joined by Morgan’s wife, Louisa, a dark, pretty woman in her middle twenties who like Allie had been on the scene following the shooting but had gone from there to be with Mattie Blaylock, alone in the house she shared with Wyatt across from Virgil and Allie’s. Lou touched Morgan’s sleeping forehead, then spelled Allie at the sewing machine. The income from their mending and dressmaking supplemented that from the Earps’ investments and gambling; during the lean time after Wyatt had been let go as a sheriff’s deputy and before their interests began to pay off, it had supported them all. The oil burned down to a coppery glow and then the porch boards whimpered under a man’s weight. Virgil was awake instantly, thumbing the Winchester’s hammer to full cock. “Al, it’s me.”

She recognized Wyatt’s voice and undid the latch. He swept in along with a draft of early-evening cold, took the door from her, and set the latch behind him. He still had on his mackinaw but his vest was unbuttoned and under it his white shirt, sweat through, clung like wet tissue to his chest.

“What are they saying?” Virgil let the hammer down gently.

“Johnny has put in for warrants on all of us,” Wyatt said.

“Shit.”

Morgan said, “He will see us lynched.”

“Or shot resisting,” Wyatt said.

Virgil said, “Well, I mean to resist.”

Allie said, “Johnny Behan?”

“Stay out of it,” snapped Wyatt. “Virge, that was not Fred White’s ghost lobbing shots at us from Fly’s.”

“Johnny seen his chance and bit on it,” Virgil said. “Or Wes Fuller or Billy the Kid. Either way it is the same, for Johnny was there and could have stopped it.”

“Or Billy Allen,” Morgan said. “I seen him in the gallery when Claiborne hauled his freight inside.”

“How are you, Morg?”

“Dandy. I am thinking of leaving the holes open so I have a place to carry my studs.”

Virgil said, “My leg hurts like hell. Thank you kindly for asking.”

Wyatt smiled for the first time that day. “That Billy Clanton had him some sand, all right.”

“The bastard.”

“How’s Doc?” asked Morgan.

“Dealing faro at the Alhambra and doctoring a wounded pistol scabbard. His luck is holding and I would not want to be Johnny and go to arrest him while he is riding the tiger.”

Morgan said, “I hope to hell he tries. I want to be there and see it.”

“You will stay in bed,” said Lou. She was still sitting at the machine with a yard of broadcloth in her hands.

Wyatt looked at Allie for the first time, his thumb on the door latch. He had a smudge of spent powder on his right cheek. “Don’t let anybody in but me or Jim or Doc. I don’t trust Clum’s storekeepers not to fall asleep.”

“Mattie?” she asked.

His ice-blue eyes fogged over, and she knew that he had not thought about his woman until that moment. “Mattie stays inside, same as always.” He left.

Morgan said, “Al.”

She glanced at Lou, then fixed the latch and went over, carrying the laudanum and spoon. But when she proffered the yellow-tinted liquid he jerked his head negatively. One blue eye watched her with his fair hair down in his face.

“If they come, Al, you will know they got Wyatt. Take my six-shooter and kill me and Virge before they get us. We’ll not be strung up like geese.”

Lou helped Allie stack furniture against the door and the remaining windows. They took turns sleeping in chairs and standing guard with Morgan’s pistol between them. Allen Street ran wide open that night with all the miners in town and eyewitnesses reliving the fight in saloons and on street corners for those who would claim to be eyewitnesses later. Whenever glass shattered or a door banged in that direction the two women jumped.

Chapter Three

“P
lease state your name, current place of residence, and occupation at present.” “John Harris Behan. I reside currently in the City of Tombstone, County of Cochise, Arizona Territory. I am sheriff of Cochise County and I own a half-interest in the Dexter Livery and Feed on Allen Street.”

Dr. Harry M. Matthews winked. He had on the salt-and pepper tweed he wore to funerals and inquests, and with his hands folded atop the bench in the adobe courthouse on Fremont he seemed not as bent as he did when he was standing. The witness, in a black morning coat and bow tie, sat with his hands on his knees and sunlight glistening on his advancing forehead. His moustaches were waxed lightly. The room smelled of dried mud and sawdust and of mesquite burning in the parlor stove opposite the gilt-framed portrait of Governor Fremont.

Someone in the jury box coughed, a dry-stick sound in the silence following the sheriff’s formal statement. The ten jurors, Tombstone businessmen all, were wrapped in dark wool and wore softly shining cravats tucked into their vests. The recorder’s pen scratched over foolscap.

“What did you observe when you came upon the Clantons and McLaurys in the vacant lot next to Fly’s photograph gallery?” asked Matthews.

Behan wet his lips and slid his palms up and down his thighs and addressed the portrait of George Washington.

“When I went down to disarm them, I put my hands around Ike Clanton and found he had no arms. He showed me that he had nothing on him. Ike Clanton said that they were just getting ready to go out of town. Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton were armed. Frank McLaury had his horse, holding him down there. I think Billy Clanton had his horse with him. I am not positive.”

“Who started shooting?”

“I cannot say who fired the first shot. It appeared to me that it was fired from a nickel-plated pistol. There was two shots very close together. I know that the nickel-plated pistol was on the side of the Earps. I won’t say which one of the Earp crowd fired it.”

“Did any of the Clanton and McLaury party draw their weapons when the order was given to throw up their hands?”

“The only thing I saw was Tom McLaury throwing open his coat, taking hold of the lapels of his coat and holding it back.” He demonstrated, uncovering the sheriff’s star pinned to his vest.