by Matt Braun
Three days on the train, rattling northward, had done nothing to alter his resolve. Some men deserved to die, and Earp, more deserving than most, had been living on borrowed time. He thought it reasonable that he had appointed himself the instrument of Earp’s death. By all rights, he should have ended it long before now.
Spokane, situated on the Washington-Idaho border, was the nearest train terminal to the Coeur d’Alene goldfields. There, at a livery stable, he had hired a horse and ridden toward the Bitterroots. His disguise was complete, and the plan, thoroughly rehearsed in his mind, was worked out to the last detail. Camped that night beside the trail, he slept the sound sleep of a man at peace with himself. He was ready.
Today, as he rode into Eagle City, his thoughts went no farther ahead than the next hour. He steeled himself to end it swiftly, without revealing either his identity or his purpose. The White Elephant, a clapboard building liberally doused with whitewash, was located in the center of town. He dismounted a couple of stores downstreet, and looped the reins around a hitch rack. Dusting himself off, he checked the Colt sixgun, snug against his belly in a crossdraw holster. Then he walked toward the White Elephant.
The layout in the gaming parlor was little different than he’d expected. A long bar fronted one wall. Keno, Chuck-a-luck, faro and roulette were ranked along the opposite wall. Poker tables, with baize-covered tops, were grouped at the rear of the room. The bar was 1 crowded and the games were doing a brisk business. Several miners, dressed in rough garb similar to his own, were collected around the faro layout. He thought it entirely in character that Earp was dealing. He’d planned on it, and he hadn’t been wrong.
Without pause, he moved straight to the faro table. He brusquely elbowed a place between two players standing directly across from Earp. Jostled aside, the miners cursed, on the verge of protesting. His pugnacious scowl seemed to invite trouble, and the men quickly decided to let it drop. He pulled a handful of gold coins from his pocket and looked over at Earp. His appearance was that of a grubby miner, and by pushing in at the table, he gave the impression of a short-tempered bully with an even shorter fuse. He saw no sign of recognition in Earp’s eyes. To complete the ruse, he changed the timbre and inflection of his voice.
“This here game got a limit?”
“Fifty dollars,” Earp replied calmly. “Bet’em any way you choose.”
“Aim to,” Starbuck growled. “Gonna bust your bank, mister! Today’s my day to howl!”
“Get a hunch, bet a bunch.”
Earp indicated the table was open to play. Starbuck leaned across the layout and placed fifty dollars on the ace. When the other players had their bets down Earp dealt two cards, queen and deuce. He called the turn in a sing-song chant.
“The queen lays and the two spot pays.”
“C’mon, deal!” Starbuck grunted testily. “Gimme an ace!”
Earp flashed him a look, but said nothing. The play continued, and Starbuck’s luck, as though ordained, dovetailed perfectly with his plan. Always betting the ace, he lost one hundred fifty dollars within the space of eight turns. He fumed and cursed, one eye cocked askew each time an ace came up loser. On the eighth turn, watching his money disappear across the table, he fixed Earp with a sullen glare.
“You ain’t listenin’, dealer,” he said hotly. “Ace to win, that’s my play! Not the other way around.”
“The cards talk,” Earp said with a trace of irritation. “Place your bets, gents.”
Starbuck slammed the last of his coins down on the ace. “Lemme see it! Gotta show this time!”
Earp dealt the cards. The case ace, the last in the deck, appeared first, a loser. Before the second card could be turned, Starbuck bristled and crashed his fist onto the table, scattering bets.
“Gawddamnit!” he roared. “I caught you!”
Earp’s gaze narrowed. “Caught me what?”
“Caught you red-handed, you buttermouthed pissant! You’re dealin’ from a rigged box!”
“I run an honest game. I’d advise you to button up and back off.”
“Honest, my ass!” Starbuck exploded. “You’re slick, but you ain’t that slick. “I saw you kick out that ace!”
Earp appraised him at a glance. He saw no threat, merely a hotheaded trouble-maker spoiling for a fight. On sudden impulse, he decided to push it to the limit. A sore loser, killed in a fair gunfight, would serve as a warning. A reminder that the White Elephant’s square-deal policy was never to be questioned.
“One last chance,” Earp said coldly. “Walk away or get carried away.”
“You’d like that wouldn’t you? Lemme go for my gun and your boys would backshoot me ’fore I even got started.”
“We’ll keep it private.” Earp signaled the housemen to stay clear, then nodded to Starbuck. “All right, squarehead, just you and me.”
“Wooeee! Let’er rip!”
Starbuck’s hand snaked inside his mackinaw. The miner next to him, at that very instant, ducked and jarred his arm. He saw Earp’s gun clearing the leather and he snapped off a hurried shot. Even as he pulled the trigger, he knew he’d missed the mark.
A splotch of blood blossomed on Earp’s right coat sleeve, and his Colt clattered to the floor. He slammed backwards into the wall, arm hanging limp, his eyes bulging with shock. He stared across the table with a look of ashen terror.
There was a split-second when Earp’s life hung in the balance. Starbuck wanted to kill him, felt some deep visceral need to kill him. But rational thought, not conscience, stayed his finger on the trigger. To kill a wounded man, standing helpless and disarmed, would make him fair game for the mob. Mining camps were infamous for their kangaroo courts and vigilante justice. Kill Earp and he would swing from a tree within the hour. There was no appeal, no court of last resort, in Eagle City.
Starbuck slowly lowered the hammer of his sixgun. He holstered it in a practiced motion, showing empty hands to the housemen. Then he leaned across the table, looking Earp straight in the eye.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I—” Earp shook his head, clutched painfully at his arm. “I don’t know you.”
“Yeah, you do,” Starbuck said in his normal voice. “Think back, and it’ll come to you. Gunnison, a couple of years ago, the train station.”
“Johnson!” Earp croaked, his face a living waxwork. “Jack Johnson.”
Starbuck gave him a strange crooked grin. One side of his mouth curled upward while the other remained set in a grim line. His eyes were cold as stone.
“Keep looking over your shoulder. We’ll meet again.”
Earp fainted. His eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled to the floor like a felled tree. Starbuck uttered a harsh bark of laughter. The housemen stared at him as though he were crazy, and the miners nearest. the table seemed to shrink back in dread fear. A moment passed, then he turned and waded through the crowd. No one spoke and no one made a move to stop him. Halfway through the door, he suddenly wheeled around and fixed the room with a wintry smile.
“When he wakes up, tell him to sell out and take off running. I won’t be far behind.”
His laugh still lingered when the door swung closed. Later, men would say it was the laughter of death itself. The thought gained credence when Wyatt Earp sold the White Elephant to the first bidder. On September 26, only ten days after being shot, he fled Eagle City. His time in the western mining camps ended there.
Outside town, Starbuck gigged his horse into a lope. His smile vanished like a shutter being closed. He’d put on a bold front in the White Elephant, but he felt no elation now. He was wrestling instead with one of life’s great imponderables. A question that had dogged him since his earliest days as a manhunter.
Today’s shootout was no feather in his cap. No one would record that his arm had been jostled, spoiling his aim, and thereby sparing Earp’s life. On the contrary, the incident would be twisted out of proportion, facts interlaced with fiction, until it became scarcely more tha
n a pretzel of reality. Were Earp to live long enough, the line separating truth from myth would slowly diminish, ultimately disappear. That he had been outdrawn and wounded, very nearly killed, would be lost in the shuffle. He would emerge cloaked in an aura of invincibility. A gunfighter who in the end had proved unkillable.
Starbuck knew, from bitter experience, that truth counted for little. His years as a manhunter had taught him that people much preferred a candy-coated fairy tale to the wormwood of cold facts. The public exhibited some bizarre need for legends larger than life, readily accepting the invention of dime novels as the stuff of truth. Outlaws such as Jesse James and the Youngers, portrayed as victims of injustice, were transformed into folk heroes. Three years ago, when he’d witnessed the death of Billy the Kid, he had seen the process snowball with incredible speed. Virtually overnight, a mad dog killer had been canonized with all the attributes of an avenging angel. Once again, folklore and truth had joined hands in a fantasy concocted as a sugar-tit for the public.
Where Earp was concerned, the process assumed an added dimension. Truly great villains, who practiced murder and corruption on a wholesale level, were often remembered with more affection than dime-a-dozen outlaws. A dab of hypocrisy mixed with a dab of self-delusion very neatly whitewashed reality. Evil fascinated people, and they were prone to attach cardboard virtues to a scoundrel who dared greatly. With time, the murders at the OK Corral, the brutal executions of Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz, would be immortalized by penny-a-word hacks grinding out yet another potboiler. Wyatt Earp would emerge from the printed page a man of determination and grit, ever-ready to enter where angels feared to tread. A frontiersman and gunfighter with all the mythical qualities of the breed.
Yet sainthood was rarely conferred on the living. There were exceptions, but more often than not a man was dead and buried long before the legend took form. Always the pragmatist, Starbuck thought the tradeoff was distasteful but nonetheless acceptable. He lived in the present, and events of some distant time were wholly beyond his control. For now, it was enough that Wyatt Earp died. He reaffirmed his vow that it would happen, and soon. He even took ironic amusement from the fact that he would hasten the legend. In his own way, he would earn a niche in the dime novels.
The man who killed Wyatt Earp.
Westward lay the sunset of another day. He rode there, whistling softly to himself. All the yesterdays were behind him, and his thoughts turned toward tomorrow. Time meant nothing to the hunter, for time alone was his unalterable edge over the hunted. He idly wondered where they would next meet.
EPILOGUE
Starbuck and Wyatt Earp never again crossed paths.
Upon departing the Coeur d’Alene goldfields, Earp kept on the move. For the next thirteen years, seemingly always on the run, he roamed the West like a nomadic vagabond. He appeared briefly in Kansas, Texas, and Wyoming, never staying long in any one spot. Off and on, he returned to California, but only for short periods of time.
Then, in 1897, he joined the Alaska gold rush. He opened a saloon in Nome, and remained there for four years. Once more on the move, he spent the next half-decade wandering California and Nevada. Finally, in 1906, he settled in Los Angeles. He was fifty-eight years old, and living from hand to mouth. Police records indicate he was arrested at least once on a charge of vagrancy.
All these years Starbuck served in one capacity or another as a free-lance detective. Usually operating undercover, his assignments took him the length and breadth of the West. Yet chance, or what some men call fate, never brought him in contact with Earp. He kept an eye on the newspapers, and an ear to the grapevine, constantly seeking word as to Earp’s whereabouts. His search was relentless, but in the end to no avail. Several times he narrowly missed his man, arriving in Tonopah or Goldfield, and twice in San Francisco, only days after Earp pulled still another vanishing act. At last, in 1911, he called off the manhunt.
True to form, Earp was arrested in July of that year on a bunco charge. A brief news item related that he and two confederates were charged with conspiracy to fleece a Los Angeles businessman out of $25,000. Starbuck, who was in California at the time, read the account with grim satisfaction. His search, after twenty-seven years, seemed finally to have ended.
Upon investigating, however, Starbuck lost his taste for the kill. Earp was now an old man, pushing sixty-four, and living a precarious existence. Under constant scrutiny by the police, he was out on bail on another charge when arrested for complicity in the bunco swindle. Starbuck felt nothing akin to compassion. Nor had he mellowed after all that time, even though Tombstone lay a quarter-century and more in the past. He simply couldn’t bring himself to kill a toothless old grifter. The act seemed somehow beneath his personal sense of dignity, and he left Los Angeles before the conspiracy trial began. He would, in later years, deeply regret the decision to let it end there.
Wyatt Earp lived to be an octogenarian. He died at age eighty-one on January 3, 1929. To the last, he maintained that he had served law and order as a frontier marshal in Tombstone and the Kansas cow-towns. By the late 1920s, hucksterism was part of the American scene, and there were many people willing to exploit the windy pipe-dreams of a doddering old man. Exactly as Starbuck had foreseen, the myth-makers ultimately convinced the public that Wyatt Earp was a noble lawman, a gunfighter of legendary proportions. Earp went to his grave with the sly satisfaction of a grifter who has played the big con, and won. The public swallowed the fairy tale whole, sinker and all.
Starbuck knew the truth. Yet he was a manhunter, with no great urge to justify himself or leave testament to his work. Thus he never committed his thoughts to paper and spoke no word of those long ago days in Tombstone. He tried instead to kill Wyatt Earp.
The day they laid Earp to rest he still carried the scar of Starbuck’s bullet. He lived out his life thinking the name of the man who shot him was Jack Johnson.
Starbuck always thought it a damn fine joke.
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“A HUNDRED VIRGINS WON’T COME CHEAP.”
“No problem,” Starbuck said equably. “I’m loaded and willing to pay plenty.”
O’Brien eyed him craftily. “What about me? Here in Frisco, a go-between don’t come cheap either.”
Starbuck ventured a smile. “How does five percent strike you?”
There was a moment of weighing and deliberation. O’Brien hadn’t t
he vaguest idea of the asking price for a hundred slave-girl virgins. Whatever the amount, it would be steep …too tempting to resist.
“You’re on.”
Starbuck flashed his gold tooth in a nutcracker grin. Today was only a first step, but his instinct hadn’t played him false.
Denny O’Brien had swallowed the bait whole.
This novel is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents relating to non-historical figures are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of such non-historical figures, places or incidents to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
TOMBSTONE / THE SPOILERS
Tombstone copyright © 1981 by Matthew Braun.
The Spoilers copyright © 1981 by Matthew Braun.
Cover photo © Comstock Images.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
eISBN 9781429997584
First eBook Edition : May 2011
Tombstone Pocket Books edition / April 1981
Tombstone Pinnacle edition / June 1985
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / September 2002
