Bloody Season (8 page)

Wyatt showed his teeth. “Johnny would lose his ass in a washtub unless it had a county ballot tattooed on it.” “You are still chewing over that appointment?”

“He promised me undersheriff and then turned around and gave it to Harry Woods. The difference comes to twenty thousand a year. I guess I am still chewing over it.”

They camped in the Dragoon foothills, where Masterson served Billy Breakenridge a plateful of beans and curled bacon with a hibernating scorpion on top of it and smiled when the deputy squealed and dropped the plate. The others howled, all except a scowling Behan. After supper Morgan shared a bottle with Masterson and Virgil, who offered it to Bob Paul, but it was declined. Wyatt smoked a pipe. Behan took off his sombrero and combed his spidery hair forward over his dome. They banked the fire and slept. Marshall Williams snored loudest.

In the morning the trail bent north and then west past Tres Alamos, following the swollen San Pedro River up the valley. There it mingled with other, older tracks at sundown and Masterson lost it.

“Rancher named Wheaton went bust sometime back,” Wyatt told him, separating a prickly pear from his chaparreras between thumb and forefinger. “His place is a day and a half upriver. If I was planning a holdup in the snow and wanted a place to shelter fresh mounts it would be there.”

“It’s worth looking. That San Pedro crowd has pushed too many stole cattle through this country to track an ammo wagon after them.”

Part of Wheaton’s roof had tipped in, the adobe beaten down to rubble on that side and the windows gaping. The barn, a solider construction, stood swaybacked a hundred yards away with sunlight streaming between leaden gray sideboards not yet carried off by scavengers in a region starved for wood. They rode down on the shack out of a lifting sun, six men unshaven and mortared from crowns to rowels with three days of dust and dried mud and their horses throwing lather. The two county men trailed behind. Dismounting before the door, Morgan Earp fisted his pistol and kicked apart the latch. But there was nothing inside to shoot except a huddled armadillo and he followed the others to the barn. It contained four caked saddle horses with their heads hanging on a floor of ammonia-smelling straw. Masterson let his rifle droop.

“Well, we did not figure to beat them here.”

“Any of them look familiar?” Virgil asked Paul.

He shook his head. “I never saw their mounts.”

Wyatt laid a hand on a shivering cow pony’s hollow flank. “I know this one. I saw Luther King riding it down Allen Street a week ago.”

Masterson said, “It does not look to stand out that much.”

“I’m telling you it’s King’s.”

Virgil found a tick in his clothes and squashed it. “King is tight with Len Redfield, ain’t he?”

“That is scarcely evidence.” Behan had just caught up, with Breakenridge behind. The sheriff’s gelding tried to pry loose a patch of trampled alfalfa from the bare earth with its muzzle.

“I am a deputy U.S. marshal, not a judge.” Virgil mounted.

“Stage robbery is county jurisdiction.”

“Murder in the territory is federal. Hold your water, Johnny. You will get your slab of the glory.”

“Johnny don’t want it,” Morgan said, grinning. “Him and the Redfields are old poker partners.”

Len Redfield was a big man, yoke-shouldered, and balloon-knuckled from fights in the pasture and in town. He wore braces over a red-and-white-checked shirt gone pink from wearing and washing and gray dungarees glazed with dirt at the knees. He closed the door on his wife inside their whitewashed house in the lower valley and stepped off the porch to meet the riders. Wyatt got down without asking leave and the others watched Redfield’s square face darken.

“We are looking for Luther King and the other men who tried to rob the Benson stage,” Wyatt said. “The trail leads here.”

“Like hell it does.”

“You are calling me a liar?”

Redfield said, “You’re trespassing.”

“This here is law business, Len.” Virgil stretched himself on his saddle horn.

“I don’t know nothing about no holdups and I ain’t seen Luther this month.”

Wyatt said, “You’re a liar.”

The rancher’s face congested deeper and his right shoulder dropped. Wyatt turned his head, taking most of the blow along his jawline, scooped his big American out of his trousers, and laid the barrel behind Redfield’s left ear. Redfield went down, shying Virgil’s horse. Landing on his hands and knees, he started to push himself up. Virgil took his boot out of its stirrup and planted it against Redfield’s chest and shoved. The rancher sprawled on his back. Wyatt kicked him in the ribs. The snap was brittle in the clear air. He placed his foot across the fallen man’s throat and rolled back the pistol’s hammer and pointed the muzzle at his face.

“Where is Luther King or I’ll blow your brains clear to China.”

“Wyatt.”

He kept his shooting arm straight and turned his head slightly. Morgan, astride his chestnut, was approaching from the corral. He had a hand wrapped around his Colt’s resting on his thigh and he was herding forward a lumpy-looking man in overalls and a dirty duster, shoving him stumbling ahead with the horse’s shoulder when he hesitated. Finally Morgan turned the horse hard and the man fell on his face with a rattling noise.

“He dumb the far side of the corral when he saw me coming,” Morgan said. “He almost made it.”

“Morning, Luther.” Wyatt elevated the Smith & Wesson’s muzzle and seated the hammer gently. Redfield breathed, catching his breath when his cracked rib pinched him.

Bob Paul spurred his black in a wide loop around the corral, milling the horses around inside, and came back. “There’s two badly used animals in there,” he said.

Belting his pistol, Wyatt left Redfield to place a heel against Luther King’s shoulder and rolled him over. Virgil said, “Look out,” and Wyatt kicked a Colt’s Navy out of the man’s hand. Then he kicked him in the face.

Behan said, “There is no call for that.”

“Luther, you’re putting on weight.” Wyatt took hold of the bib of the stunned man’s overalls and tore it loose from the buttons. Red-and-white cartridge boxes spilled out. He threw the boxes after the Navy, unbuckled two cartridge belts from around King’s waist and added them to the pile, found a short-barreled Colt’s Thunderer in a duster pocket and got rid of that. King looked a lot less lumpy now. “Luther, what if you fell in the San Pedro? I have saved you from drowning.”

“Company.” Marshall Williams, one stovepipe-booted leg resting across his pommel, paused in the midst of building a cigarette to loosen his Winchester in its scabbard.

Behan shielded his eyes and squinted at the rider coming in out of the sun. “It is Len’s brother Hank.”

Wyatt said, “Bat.”

Masterson quirted his mount and cantered out to intercept the rider. The other man drew rein and they conversed across ten feet of ground, gesturing. Finally they rode in. Hank was as tall as his brother but not as wide and wore big sad moustaches under the black pinch hat with a Spanish brim.

Len was sitting on the porch steps now, a hand on his side. His wife had come out and squatted next to him with her skirt in the dust of the yard. She was bareheaded and her skin and dress and tied-back hair were all the same sand color. Her face was long and simian and she had large ears that stuck out.

Virgil stepped down and told Masterson and Williams to search the outbuildings. “We will have a talk with Luther indoors.”

Wyatt twisted a hand inside the collar of King’s duster and heaved him to his feet. He had to clutch his overalls with one hand to keep them from sliding down.

Dismounting, Bob Paul followed the Earps and their prisoner into the house, leaving Behan and Breakenridge to watch the Redfields. Inside the small parlor Wyatt hurled King into a horsehair armchair pinned all over with doilies and antimacassars. An oval-framed picture fell off a wall, cracking the thick glass.

“You are some bad road agent, Luther,” Wyatt said. “You should seek another line of work, the others too.”

“I ain’t no road agent.”

Wyatt backhanded him across the face. The noise was like a pistol shot in the room.

“Why’d you run, Luther?” Virgil lowered himself onto a davenport that sighed under his weight. Troughs of dust curled up around him and settled on the flowered upholstery.

“Fthzlwz.” King’s lip was swelling.

“Talk plain.” Wyatt slapped him again.

“I thought you was outlaws.” He grimaced out each word. “This country is full of them.”

“Marsh Williams and Bat have guns to your friends’ heads,” Wyatt said. “They will shoot the woman first and then it is up to you whether Len or Hank gets it next.”

King said nothing and Wyatt cocked his hand a third time. Virgil interrupted him.

“You don’t want to be in Yuma with summer coming on.” He sat back with his knees spread and his hands on them and the palm-polished handle of his Army Colt’s turning out past his open greatcoat. “They stick you in a tin box in the sun like a sourdough biscuit and don’t let you out until you are baked down to skin and skeleton.”

Bob Paul said, “He won’t see Yuma. When Doc Holliday hears about it he will be lucky to see a rope.”

“Wzdk—” He pinched his torn lip. “What’s Holliday to do with it?”

“Hell, his woman Kate was riding on that stage. All that hare-assed shooting got her killed. Doc is some taken with that Kate.”

Wyatt snatched at it. “Three of you stood by the road, stuck up the stage and killed Philpot and Roerig and Kate Fisher. The other one held the horses in the brush. I don’t know which one he was, but whoever he was he is lucky. Dec will run down the others and cut off their wedding-tackles with that pig-sticker he carries and shove them down their craws and then shoot them for mumbling.”

“Jesus.”

“Doc is mean but fair,” Virgil said. “He will have no truck with whoever held the horses.”

“I held the horses!”

Wyatt, big and lean and sunburned and needing a shave, his jaw purpling where Len Redfield’s knuckles had raked it, looked at his brother. Virgil plucked a fresh tick off his neck and contemplated it before cracking it between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s get the others in here.”

Morgan went out. Minutes later the room was crowded with three Earps, Bob Paul, Marshall Williams, Sheriff Behan, and Deputy Breakenridge. Masterson stayed outside with the Redfields. A sour-sweet mix of sweat and leather and horse and gun oil filled the house.

Luther King spoke, pressing his lip at times to make his words clear and playing with a cigarette Williams had rolled for him. No one had given him a match.

“It was Billy Leonard, Jim Crane, and Harry Head done the shooting. I held the horses like I said. I rid with them to Wheaton’s for fresh mounts and left them at Hank Redfield’s to get cartridges and money from Len. I was fixing to meet up with them when Morg catched me.”

“They changed horses at Hank’s?” Wyatt asked. King nodded. “Where are they camped?”

The prisoner smiled. Blood trickled down his chin. He had a bowl haircut and no hair on his face and the grin made him look like a schoolboy. “You won’t get them. I have talked all I am fixed to.”

Wyatt said, “You will talk a blue streak when Doc commences to sawing on the family jewels.”

King paled a shade but said nothing.

Virgil stood, stretching and cracking some bones. “Doc’s woman was never on that stage, Luther,” he said. “Bob snookered you.”

Before the other could react, Behan cleared his throat loudly. The sheriff’s sombrero was dusty and his neck had broken out in an angry rash under several days’ growth of beard. “King is my prisoner, Earp. I am arresting him for complicity in attempted stage robbery. That’s a county offense, not federal. I am taking him to Tombstone.”

“I will go with you,” said Williams.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“It is a long ride. You and Billy might fall asleep.” The silence was spoiled by Morgan’s singing. “Can you bake a cherry pie, Billy-girl?”

Breakenridge glared.

Chapter Six

W
yatt Earp and his brothers and their women called her Mattie. She had been christened Celia Ann Blaylock, a mannish-looking strawberry blonde with iron-curled hair and deep-set eyes that seemed always in shadow. She did fancy sewing, took in laundry, and had a temper that was slow to blow and then impossible to cap when it did. She had been with Wyatt since 1870, shortly after his first wife Urilla died delivering his stillborn child. Mattie and he had traveled together to Deadwood and Dodge City and all the other places on the circuit, and although like Virgil and Allie they had never taken vows, she had been known as Mattie Earp in all of them.

When word reached Tombstone that the Earps were returning from their manhunt, she peeled hurriedly out of her faded calico and brushed and put on the one good dress she had brought from Dodge, a black velvet brocade with a high ivory-lace collar. She fretted over the trunk creases in the skirt, brushed her hair, pinched color into her cheeks, and put a drop of vanilla extract behind each ear. Wyatt hated scents of any kind and never knew the true source of the fresh natural smell he admired in Mattie, or had admired until recently. Morgan’s woman Lou arrived in time to help her with the buttons in back. Lou was wearing a shift made from leaf-print percale that looked as good as new calico with a close row of bone buttons down the front.

Heavy boots struck the porch boards while Lou was adjusting Mattie’s collar. The three brothers came in carrying their saddlebags and carbines, looking more alike than ever under skins of brown dust with clumps of mescal stuck to their coats and their hats sweat through at the crowns. Morgan kissed Lou and curled an arm around her waist, grinning like a young boy. Virgil said, “I don’t smell nothing cooking.”

“The food is across the street, and is that all you have to say to me after seventeen days?”

He swung around, swept Allie out of the doorway in both arms, and kissed her hard, his whiskers rasping. “Ouch.”

Mattie hugged Wyatt, smearing the front of her dress. He leaned his Winchester in a corner and tossed his saddlebags into his leather easy chair, the best piece of furniture in the little house. Dust rolled off them in a thick cloud. “Where are the papers?”