Morgan was back on duty by then, and he figured Wyatt would want to know what had gone on while he was in Topeka.
Wyatt brushed the report off and asked instead, “Where’s Bat?”
“He’s not at the Lone Star?” Morg asked after a moment.
Wyatt just looked at him, like he knew Morgan was stalling for time. Which he was.
“Well, it’s pretty quiet tonight,” Morg said then. “Maybe he’s over at the Iowa House?”
“Already checked.” Wyatt glanced away before giving Morgan that hard stare that could feel like a shove. “Where’s his money coming from, Morg?”
Morgan’s eyes dropped. “I ain’t gonna lie to you, Wyatt, but I’d rather you didn’t ask—”
“Morg, are you covering for him?”
“Well, see, we just figured what you didn’t know wouldn’t—”
“Where,” Wyatt said very quietly, “is he?”
Morg lasted about three seconds. “Out past Duck Creek,” he said. “A little north of Howells.”
In late November of 1853, when Catherine Masterson gave birth to her second son, nearly a dozen years had passed since the infamous Lilly-McCoy bare-knuckle boxing match in Hastings, New York. Even so, when her son Bat was a boy, men still spoke of that epic contest the way the Greeks and Trojans once spoke of mighty Achilles and brave Hector, in voices hushed by secondhand awe.
Homer sang of boxing matches. Vergil wrote of them. Pindar called down the blessings of Zeus upon them. In paint and in marble and in bronze, on vases and in murals and with heroic statuary, ancient artisans depicted the boxer’s manly beauty, with its cauliflower ears, its honorable scars and blunt, mashed nose.
For millennia, one man had squared off against another on a point of honor or simply to settle a question, here and now, once and for all. Which of us is stronger? Which more fearless and more fearsome? Which of us is the better man? In all that time, empires had risen and flourished and stumbled and failed. Maps of the world had been drawn and redrawn; globes had been invented. Wars and revolutions and science and industry had changed everything—but not boxing. It took the Lilly-McCoy fight to do that.
As a kid, Bat Masterson studied accounts of the match the way better-educated boys read The Iliad. In Bat’s opinion, the fight should have been stopped in the seventy-seventh round, and he was probably right. Even then, long before it was over, McCoy was in bad shape. All the newspapermen agreed about that, and they’d recorded his condition in lascivious detail. Lips grotesquely swollen. Blackened eyes puffed to slits. Broad chest red and slimy with the blood he vomited in quick, efficient gouts during the half-minute rest between the rounds. The darling of Irish immigrants, Tom McCoy would not concede, and swore he’d die before he’d let a fucking Englishman like Christopher Lilly best him. Cocky to the end, McCoy went 119 rounds, surviving a total of two hours and forty-one minutes until—choking on blood, blinded by it, speechless but head up and still defiant—he staggered into the ring from his corner, toed the scratch mark one last time, and fell down, stone-cold dead.
There were other fights that lasted as long or longer, fought by men as good or better, but the Lilly-McCoy event took on a larger meaning the moment Irish Tom died. Chris Lilly was forced to flee the country, skipping out ahead of a manslaughter charge. Eighteen others involved with the contest were arrested, tried, convicted, fined, and jailed.
Freelance scolds seized on boxing as a new source of indignation to fuel America’s rancorous political debates. People who’d never given boxing a thought—ladies and maiden aunties, for the love of Christ!—developed opinions about the sport. Rather than celebrate the victor’s unflagging sledgehammer power and the loser’s astonishing stamina, reformers attacked Lilly as a savage beast who had transformed McCoy’s face from the image of God into a loathsome ruin. The indomitable McCoy became a pitiable, doomed lamb led to the slaughter, and not the roaring, valorous, dying lion he was, refusing to be vanquished even as he was beaten.
Suddenly boxing was a thing to be loathed and done away with, like slavery and alcohol. Abolitionists rammed legislation through in state after state, until the fights were outlawed almost everywhere. “Goddam do-gooder busybodies,” Bat’s father always muttered whenever the subject came up, and it did so often.
Thomas Masterson was a hardworking, law-abiding man who’d never raised a hand in anger, not even against Bat, who might have benefited from a clout across the ear now and then. What Bat’s father couldn’t stand was reformers telling him what to do and think. Following the fights was a way to poke windbag meddlers in the eye. Tom Masterson did so with a boyish glee that he passed on to his sons, and he was not alone.
Across the country, boxing became more popular every year, for the new laws added the thrill of the illicit to the excitement of the sport. Arrangements were negotiated in secret, and word would go out: “A match tonight!” Sometimes the cops would catch wind and show up before the thing was settled, so fight promoters got craftier. Soon entire passenger trains called “Hell on Wheels” could be hired to transport the pugilists and the referees and spectators and bookies and bartenders and whores to a place nobody knew ahead of time. The train would stop in whatever isolated field took the brakeman’s fancy that evening. A ring would be scraped out into the dirt with a boot heel and boxers would put up and toe the line under the stars. Prize money and crowds soared into the thousands.
Then, in 1861, the whole damn country squared off to settle a point of honor, once and for all. It would be the Lilly-McCoy fight on a continental scale: a contest between inflexible, unyielding opponents—savage, bloody, majestic, and pathetic—but not even war could slake the American thirst for bare-knuckle boxing.
Amid the wholesale slaughter of civil convulsion, there was something almost quaint and strangely decent about retail violence. This was bloodletting and brutality with agreed-upon rules, fought by volunteers, not draftees. This was barbarity, but it was barbarity committed with stylish courage, appreciated by men who might be ordered to march anonymously into annihilating cannon fire the next morning. Soldiers expected to die and be buried in impersonal heaps of maimed and mangled meat, but a man could make a name for himself in a boxing match, and be remembered.
Too young for the war, boys like Bat grew up hearing about boxers as famous as any general. Yankee Sullivan, Tom Hyer, John Morrissey, Harry Paulson, “Bill the Butcher” Poole. Stoking interest and boosting sales by pretending to lament the outlawed sport, the popular press covered boxing as far away as Australia. When John Heenan sailed to England to battle Tom Sayers, the whole of red-blooded America cheered him on.
It was the most vicious congregation of roughs that was ever witnessed in a Christian city, Bat read, wishing fervently that he could have been there, betting, snarling, cheering, grunting with every witnessed blow, his own stomach tight in mirrored defense, his fists knotted and jabbing the air. He could imagine it all as he studied the account. What boiled-down savagery, concentrated in so small a space! What rowdyism! What villainy!
What fun!
Bat himself picked more than a few fights as a kid. “Bat’s like a chunk of steel,” his older brother, Ed, would tell folks. “Somebody’s always striking a spark off him.” Trouble was, Bat grew early but he stopped growing early, too. One by one, every boy he knew started to look down at him, and something about that made him even more eager to mix it up, readier than ever to teach larger, stronger, heavier kids a lesson.
Instead, he himself started learning lessons, and it wasn’t long before young Bat Masterson knew two important things for sure. First off, to box well, you need more than combativeness. You need size and power, stamina and strategy. From the age of twelve, Bat was always fighting out of his class. Unless he wanted to end up like Irish Tom McCoy, dead on his feet in the 119th, he would need a way to even things up.
The second thing he knew for sure was this. Farming is a sucker’s game. You can work like an ox—put everything you’ve got into the land—
but if the weather doesn’t break you, the markets will. You want to gamble with stakes like that? You’re better off playing cards. You can still lose everything, but at least you don’t work so damn hard for the privilege, and you by God dress up nice for the occasion.
Which is why, before he turned fifteen, he was determined to run away from home. “Ed,” he told his older brother, “you can stay here and stare at a mule’s ass end if you like, but me? I ain’t never gonna plow another field as long as I live.”
Within a few weeks of leaving, Bat was carrying a frontier equalizer: the big old Navy Colt he won off a drunk in a card game. Over the next ten years, to the line “plowboy” on his résumé, he added buffalo hunter, army scout, professional gambler, city police officer, county sheriff, and saloon owner. In 1907, when he wrote his autobiography, he would extend the list to include “genius with firearms,” “a born captain of men,” “generous to the last dollar.” He decided to leave out “becomingly modest” and “the soul of Christian humility.” That might have carried the joke too far.
Oddly, he failed to mention the central passion of his life and the one constant among the many ways he made his living: boxing. Or, more precisely, prizefighting, for matches were ever more frequently fought by professionals who had nothing against each another personally and were willing to break the law simply because the money was so good.
Bat himself never boxed as a grown man but throughout the 1880s, he would build a reputation as an expert on the Chambers-Queensberry rules. By the end of the decade, he was widely recognized as an honest and reliable referee, called upon to serve in important matches featuring boxing greats like John P. Clow and John L. Sullivan. That experience would eventually land him the best job of his life: covering sports for the New York Sun, where he would indulge his flair for flamboyant storytelling to his heart’s content and his readers’ delight until he died pen in hand, at his desk, a fat old man who’d had a hell of a good time ever since he left the farm.
Of course, his sporting knowledge and repute did not appear all at once, like Athena springing full-grown from the forehead of that divine boxing enthusiast, mighty Zeus. Bat Masterson’s apprenticeship began in Ford County, Kansas. Out past Duck Creek, a little north of Howells.
Wyatt found what he was looking for with no trouble. On a windless night in open land, the roaring of four hundred men can carry.
Astride Dick Naylor, he drew up and surveyed the scene. The ropes were pitched and respected. It cost a dollar to get in. Inside the perimeter, a crowd stood ten deep around the ring. A couple of farmwives were doing a brisk business in coffee and fried pork sandwiches; their husbands rented standing room on wagons for fifty cents. There was even a bartender selling whiskey straight from a barrel, two bits a swig.
“What’s the line?” Wyatt asked a stranger.
“Nine to one, on Rowan, but I put a dollar on Hamner. He’s got sand.”
Bat was easy to pick out in the center of the ring, his fancy clothes giving him visibility and authority amid skinny boys clad in denim and dust. His frock coat and bowler hat had been removed, but the white of his shirtsleeves glowed in the moonlight, and the flare of torches made the gold threads of his brocade waistcoat glitter as he followed the action, eyes intent, concentration complete.
Wyatt had refereed fights up in Deadwood, and he’d done a little boxing himself. He recognized competence when he saw it. Bat was short and getting stout, but he was light on his feet, his rhythm and movement graceful and deft as the boxers shifted and fell back and came on. He showed no partiality, enforcing his rules consistently, his voice cutting through the spectators’ shouts with brisk authority. His timekeeping was faultless.
The bout itself was more wrestling than boxing. The opponents were a lanky young drover and a local German boy. You could see that neither was going to do much more than bloody the other’s nose. Even so, they went close to fifty rounds. When at last they’d grappled and pummeled each other into exhaustion, Bat raised the wrist of the cowboy, who’d stayed on his feet slightly longer than the farm kid. Then Bat helped the local boy up and praised him lavishly, inviting the crowd to cheer for an honorable effort.
Money changed hands with minimal grumbling. Inside the ring, Bat got both combatants to mumble “Good fight” through thick lips, their fists too cut up and swollen to allow a handshake. The crowd dispersed. The gatekeeper counted out the referee’s rake and handed it over. Bat folded a substantial wad of cash into his pocket and walked toward his horse, stopping in his tracks when he caught sight of Wyatt, waiting.
“You got no jurisdiction out here, Wyatt.”
“Didn’t say I did.”
Silence fell. Eyes on the ground, mouth turned downward in thought, Bat tugged at his vest, smoothing the brocade. “Two idiots go at it in a bar,” he proposed suddenly. “They’re disturbing the peace. What do you do?”
Wyatt didn’t bother answering.
“You bash them,” Bat supplied with a shrug. “You don’t argue. You don’t explain. You don’t hesitate. You bash them both, and jail them.” He paused before asking, “What happens after that?”
Indifferent, Wyatt said, “None of my affair.”
“That’s right,” Bat agreed. “That’s right! It’s none of your affair. You broke up the fight. The peace of the city is restored. Fines are assessed. Justice is served.” Once more he paused. “But nothing is settled.”
Letting Wyatt think that over, Bat pulled his coat off the saddle and turned away from his horse before shaking the wrinkles out.
“You lock those boys up,” Bat continued informatively, “you’re just giving them time to brood on insult and grievance.” He shrugged into the forest green broadcloth, jerking the sleeves of his shirt down so the gold cuff links showed. “Know how many homicides we’ve had in Dodge, Wyatt? Just the past couple years, say.”
Eyes narrow, Wyatt shook his head slightly.
“Forty-five,” Bat told him, “give or take. A few were knifed, but most of them were gunned down. Ambushed in alleys. Killed on their way out of town. Shot in the back, mostly. Maybe seven had any kinda chance at all.”
“You saying that’s my fault?” Wyatt asked, not buying it.
“No, Wyatt, what I’m saying is, there’s no harm done and quite a bit of good comes of telling idiots, ‘You can settle this fair and square, but we have to take it out of town.’ ” Holding up his fingers, Bat began to count. “One: it saves wear and tear on the saloons. Two: I frisk the bastards for weapons before they square off. Three: when the fight’s over, it’s done with. I see to that! Nobody walks away humiliated, nobody wants revenge, nobody gets shot in the back a few hours later.” He waited a moment before he raised a fourth finger. “Everyone goes home in the morning.”
Wyatt blinked, and Bat immediately pressed his advantage.
“Is there money to be made? Hell, yes! A lot of it. And why not? My fights ain’t legal, but they’re by-God honest, and I earn what I get.”
Wyatt looked away.
“How was Topeka?” Bat asked, for that lay between them still.
“They want me to run against you.”
“I figured. You gonna?”
Wyatt lifted his chin toward where the ring had been. “How does it work?” he asked, like he was just curious. “Are these your fights, Bat? Or are you just getting some of the gate? Because I’m guessing that Bob Wright’s the promoter, and you’re bought. If I’m wrong, then this is the only game in Ford County Bob don’t have a piece of.”
There was a time when Bat Masterson had idolized Wyatt Earp. They had slept side by side. They’d worked to exhaustion in sleet and snow and killing cold, hunting buffalo. They’d doctored broken fingers and sewn up gashes, and loaned money and borrowed it, and backed each other up in brawls. But goddam if the man didn’t think he was the gold standard.
Tired of being judged, Bat snapped, “I don’t owe you an accounting, Wyatt. You want to run against me? Run! But there’s a lot you don�
��t know.”
Like: how elections really worked. Like: who was on his side, and who was playing him for a fool, and why. Like: how Wyatt scared folks without even knowing it because he was cold and intolerant and wouldn’t bend.
“You vote for Prohibition?” Bat asked, jerking his head toward Topeka.
“Didn’t pass.”
“Well, thank God for that!” Bat planted meaty fists on hip bones that were already acquiring prosperity’s padding. “You know what I can’t figure? Why in hell would you trust a hypocrite like George Hoover and not me? What makes you think he’s your friend and I’m not?”
For the first time, Wyatt looked surprised. “Friendship’s got nothing to do with it, Bat!” he protested. “All I’m saying is, I never saw liquor do anybody any good, but I’ve seen it ruin a lot of men and—”
“Jesus, Wyatt! You can be so goddam thick! Prostitution’s against the law, too. So—what? Do you think Prohibition’ll stop anybody drinking? You make something against the law, people just want it more! You been to Topeka! Do you have any idea—?”
No. He probably didn’t. Wyatt wouldn’t have looked for a “club” where you had to pay a membership fee for the privilege of buying overpriced rotgut. He had no notion how much money there was in illegal liquor.
Bat took a deep breath, closed his eyes a moment, and held up a hand. “All right,” he said firmly. “Just do yourself this one favor before you go trying to make the whole damn state dry. Go ask your fine new dentist friend something. If Prohibition goes through, how much would Doc Holliday be willing to pay, to get what he needs for his ‘cough’? You ask him, Wyatt, because that drunk’s putting away a couple of quarts a day!”
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