Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Marshal, the talk in Barron’s is you’re prodding these boys into a fight.” He was looking up at Virgil, Doc noted, with the quick brown eyes that made nuns and virgins drip.

  Virgil said, “They are the ones making the fight talk. Why don’t you come with us and disarm them. They just went into Benson’s corral.”

  Behan glanced in that direction, touched one of his moustaches to make sure he hadn’t left it on the hardwood floor in Barron’s barbershop and bath, looked across Allen in the direction of the Occidental Hotel. He was proud of his Roman-coin profile. “I won’t do that. If they see any of you Earps they will fight sure.”

  Doc said, “If you like we will cover you while you run home and change drawers.”

  Virgil said quickly, “I mean to disarm them, with or without your help. If it comes to a fight it will be on them to start it.”

  “They won’t fight with me,” Behan said, glaring at Doc, whose gray gaze had no humor in it. “I will go down alone and see if I can disarm them.”

  Virgil stroked his throat with his free hand. “All I want them to do is lay off their arms while they’re in town.”

  The sheriff nodded. During the conversation he and Wyatt had not exchanged so much as a glance.

  Doc and Morgan were standing in the intersection of Fourth and Allen. Behan started around them and stopped in front of a bearded man in miner’s overalls crusted with silver clay, who had come up Allen Street from the direction of the corral. They spoke for a few seconds, then Behan walked away up Fourth toward Fremont. The bearded man mounted the boardwalk and addressed Virgil, who was leaning in Hafford’s doorway with the muzzles of his shotgun resting on the sill.

  “Marshal, these men mean trouble. They are all down there on Fremont Street, all armed, and I think you had better go and disarm them.” His coastal British accent was as thick as a core sample.

  “What a Cornish Jack thinks you could stick up an ant’s ass,” said Wyatt.

  “Who’s there?” Virgil asked.

  “Tom and Frank McLaury and two of the Clantons. That Billy the Kid was there too and another man I don’t know. He’s drunk as a lord.”

  “Ringo?”

  “No, I know Ringo and this was not him.”

  “Wes Fuller, I bet,” said Wyatt.

  “All armed, you say?” Virgil pressed.

  “Well, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury. I can’t say about the rest.”

  Morgan had moved in close to the boardwalk. “They have horses. Hadn’t we better get mounted ourselves in case they want to make a running fight of it?”

  Wyatt said, “No, if they want to make a running fight we can kill their horses.”

  The miner had gone back the way he had come, walking with his knees bent and his toes pointed out. Virgil stretched, bones cracking, and stepped out of the doorway balancing the shotgun. “Well, I guess we had better go do it.”

  Virgil and Wyatt stepped into the street and started along Fourth toward Fremont, trailing the third Earp. Doc fell into step beside Morgan. Wyatt stopped and turned. The wind uncovered the star on his vest engraved SPECIAL POLICE.

  “Doc, this is our fight. There is no call for you to mix in.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing for you to say to me.”

  They stared. Virgil cleared his throat and extended the shotgun to Doc. It was a full-length Stevens ten-gauge with a brass frame. “Hand me that cane and hide this under your coat. Don’t let them see it until we come within range.”

  Doc slid his left arm out of the sleeve of his ankle-length greatcoat, traded Virgil the cane for the shotgun, and snugged the butt under his arm with the muzzles hanging down, pulling the coat closed over it. The procession continued in a column of twos.

  Fremont Street, home of the Epitaph office and the Cochise County courthouse, was much quieter than saloon-lined Allen Street, and nearly deserted at that hour. Clumps of panicum grass twitched down the center. At the corner the party turned west. Someone said, “Here they come,” and Doc was aware of a crowd watching from the doorway of Bauer’s butcher shop. He pursed his lips and whistled a tune he had heard in Fort Griffin. Playing the rubes.

  “Son of a bitch pisses icicles.”

  Nearing Bauer’s they spread out four abreast with ten feet between each man and his neighbor. Morgan and Virgil took the outside while Doc moved to Wyatt’s right. Gusts pulled at the flap of Doc’s coat, exposing the shotgun in teasing glimpses like white thigh on a variety girl. “Let’s try and disarm these jackasses,” Virgil said.

  Morgan caught Doc’s eye. “Let them have it.”

  “All right.”

  They were within sight of the fifteen-foot-wide lot between Fly’s boardinghouse and a private residence belonging to W. A. Harwood, where a group of men stood, two of them holding horses, thirty yards west of the O.K. Corral. Doc spotted John Behan’s sombrero just as the sheriff separated himself from the others and came trotting up Fremont with his palms stretched out in front of him.

  “Earp, for God’s sake don’t go down there,” he told Virgil. “You’ll all be murdered.”

  “I mean to disarm them, Johnny.” He passed Behan, accompanied by the others.

  “I have disarmed them all.”

  Virgil had his big Army thrust inside his trousers on the right side and was holding Doc’s cane in his left hand. Now he rotated the pistol to his left hip and shifted the cane to his right hand. He did these things without breaking stride. The group gathered in the lot had withdrawn inside, out of sight from the street. Entering the lot slowly, the Earps and Doc closed ranks. Out of the corner of his eye Doc glimpsed Wesley Fuller’s lanky coated length weaving into the passage between Fly’s boardinghouse and the skylit photograph gallery behind it. The gallery door swung to with a clatter.

  The newcomers were facing Frank McLaury and Ike Clanton on the outside of a tight group with Billy Clanton and Tom McLaury in the center and the whitewashed wall of the Harwood house at their backs. Billy was standing in front of his blaze-face with his hand on the Frontier Colt’s on his hip. Frank McLaury was armed similarly, his fingers on the stag handle, and his brother Tom stood a little behind Frank’s strawberry roan, resting a hand on the Winchester butt showing above the saddle. Ike’s hands hung empty at his sides. Apart from the group, near the gallery, slouched Billy Claiborne’s insolent young frame with his thumbs hooked inside his cartridge belt.

  At Fourth and Allen Doc had transferred his nickel-plated Colt’s Lightning from its scabbard to his right coat pocket. Now it was in his hand. His left was still holding the shotgun under the gray coat. A sweetish warm stink of fresh manure filled his nostrils from the corral three doors down.

  Wyatt’s knuckles showed yellow around the cedar handle of his big American. He said, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight.”

  Billy Claiborne took his thumbs out of his belt and broke for the gallery. Sheriff Behan, having passed around the other side of the boardinghouse, held the door for him.

  Virgil lifted Doc’s cane high in his right hand, looking like a giant shepherd in town clothes. “Throw up your hands!”

  Doc and Morgan rolled back the hammers on their pistols, the double-crunch dry and loud in the silence.

  “Hold on, I don’t want that!” Virgil said, pushing his free hand behind him. Simultaneously Tom McLaury threw open his vest and said, “I have nothing!” Both exclamations were lost in the broken bark of two pistols discharging at almost the same instant. Frank McLaury staggered, clawing at his belly with blood showing black between his fingers. His Colt’s came out in his other hand. Billy Clanton, a hole in his chest, hunched and threw his pistol above his head, turning to clutch at the edge of Harwood’s window with the hand holding the weapon. He began to slide. His horse reared, wheeled, pawed the air, and bolted for the street.

  Frank McLaury’s horse was plunging and whinnying, its eyes rolling white. Tom, attempting to use the animal for cover, lunged for the bit chain and missed. Ike fled fr
om the raking hooves and found himself heading straight for Wyatt. He stumbled, caught his balance on the run, and grasped Wyatt’s left arm in both hands, trying to turn him. His breath was raw with whiskey.

  Wyatt flung him back. “This fight has commenced. Get to fighting or get away.”

  Behan was motioning from the door to the gallery. Ike wheeled with the momentum of the shove and sprinted through the opening. Doc rapped off two quick shots at his heels, chucking dirt and splintering the doorsill.

  “Why didn’t you cut the son of a bitch down?” Doc shouted.

  “He wouldn’t jerk a pistol.”

  When the firing started Virgil had switched hands on the cane again and drawn his Army. He sent a ball at Billy Clanton, already reeling from the wound in his chest, and shattered his right wrist. Billy border-shifted on his way down and fired wild.

  There was a lull.

  Shots coughed from the direction of the gallery. Wyatt and Doe returned fire through clouds of spent powder. Morgan spun and fell. “I’ve got it!”

  “Get behind me and keep quiet!” Wyatt said.

  The lot was filled with thick gray smoke like soiled batting, hanging on a doldrum between gusts. Doe backed out into the street, his eyes stinging. Inside the lot the screaming roan bucked and plunged through haze, concealing Frank McLaury momentarily as he tried for the Winchester in the boot but exposing his brother Tom, who jerked his head right and left like a deer caught between hunters and made a dash for the street.

  Doe scabbarded his pistol and swung the shotgun level with his hip, palming back the hammers and squeezing both triggers. The muzzles roared. Tom slipped, then recovered himself and swept in a crouch past Doc, who said, “Mother-fucking—” and hurled away the shotgun to redraw his Colt’s. But by then Tom had rounded the corner of Harwood’s house and was lost to sight.

  Billy Clanton was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his back against the wall of the house, steadying his pistol across his broken right arm. His shirt was soaked through with blood. A ball slapped Virgil in the calf and he went down, releasing Doc’s cane at last. He rolled onto his left elbow and, using his right knee to support his Army, shot Billy in the abdomen.

  The rest of the fight had spilled into the street. Frank McLaury’s horse had dragged him out of the lot with one hand grasping the saddle latigo and the other clawing frantically for the carbine in the scabbard. Wyatt threw a shot at him that missed and branded a slash across the horse’s rump. It shrieked, threw its head, and hauled hooves toward Fifth Street, tearing loose its master’s grip. Frank landed running and made for the other side of Fremont, rebel-yelling and spraying pistol lead across his left arm at Morgan Earp, who had regained his feet and was bleeding down the back of his mackinaw from a ball behind his right shoulder. He returned fire. Doc wheeled from the path of Tom McLaury’s retreat to find himself face to face with a wheezing, wild-eyed Frank slicked with blood from belt to boots. “I’ve got you this time!” Frank sobbed.

  “You’re a good one if you have.” Doc turned sideways into target stance, flinging out his right arm at shoulder height with his Colt’s in his hand just as Frank’s pistol barked. Something struck Doc’s right hip like a blow from a willow stick. He winced and fired. Morgan Earp’s pistol exploded at the same instant—all three going bammitybam. A blue hole slapped Frank’s neck under his left ear and another ball knocked more blood out of his belly and he sat down in the street and soiled himself.

  Sobbing now too, Billy Clanton tried to recock his Colt’s, but his thumb kept sliding off the hammer. Just then Camilius Fly’s wiry figure in striped shirtsleeves and black vest emerged from the passage between his two buildings and reached down and took hold of the pistol and pulled it from Billy’s bloody grasp.

  “Give me some more cartridges,” said Billy.

  The sudden silence boxed Doc’s ears. Then the crowd in Bauer’ s doorway boiled out into the street, talking manically and mingling with others come up Fourth and Third. Tom McLaury had collapsed into a pile at the corner of Third with most of the middle of him gone, although he was still flopping. Wyatt bent over a cursing Virgil with his pistol still out and a couple of bystanders were helping support Morgan, whose legs were failing him. Pairs of newcomers got Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton into a cradle-carry and shuffled toward the house on the corner of Third, the wind spreading their coats and exposing white shirts and scarlet braces in gaps between vests and trousers.

  “Murder!” Billy was bellowing and struggling with his attendants. “Them damn Earps have went and murdered us!”

  Belatedly, Doc leathered his Colt’s and pulled aside his own coattails and peeled down his trousers to inspect his hip, where Frank McLaury’s pistol ball had gouged a furrow through his long johns after taking a piece off his pistol scabbard. The graze stung like tanglefoot on a raw morning.

  John Behan came out of the gallery, looking small now under his broad brim. As he approached Wyatt his eyes were like cigarette holes in gray ticking.

  “Earp, I am placing you under arrest for murder.”

  Chapter Two

  Alvira Sullivan, called Allie Earp in Tombstone although no record of a marriage to Virgil Earp existed, ran up Fremont from the house she shared with him on the corner of First, toward the clatter of guns. She was a small, plain woman with short curling auburn hair who looked far older than her thirty-four years in a sunbonnet and old dress with the skirt gathered in both hands. At the start of the noise she had been sewing a patch onto a miner’s canvas coat, and the sailmaker’s palm she had fashioned from one of Virgil’s old tobacco pouches was still on her hand, looped to her thumb and ring finger. Pillows of dust erupted around her feet and blew away in snatches.

  Long before she reached the scene, the last shot had finished echoing in the Huachucas to the southwest. Voices jangled on its heels.

  The block between Third and Fourth was jammed with people. The wind was warm with them and shotgun barrels caught the afternoon sun in bronze stripes. Allie inserted herself in the crowd, got turned around, and for a moment became disoriented among the belt buckles and overall-clad bellies reeking of sweat and clay. Panic rose.

  A gap opened then and she darted inside, then had to retreat while a boy with dust on his coat and trousers and what she thought at first was red clay caked on his shirt was carried through it, shrieking murder and calling for someone to pull his boots off. Dark spots the size of pennies pattered the earth under his hammocked frame.

  The crowd was splintering into sections now, a section to a body. She hurried to the next one. Before she got there she could see that the man being carried was dead, his head swaying with the hair hanging straight down from his scalp, mouth and eyes open, the whites glittering. Her bonnet slipped back from her head as she pushed in fighting for a closer look at his face. Male hands crushed her upper arms, turning her away. She was facing a platinum watch chain strung across a brown pinstriped vest. She struggled, spraining a wrist.

  “My God, Mrs. Earp, get away! There has been an awful fight.”

  Now she looked up into the long yellow face of Harry Jones, lawyer. “I am looking for Virge,” she said. “Take me to him.”

  “He’s all right, Mrs. Earp.”

  But he was pulling her through the crowd by one arm toward Fly’s boardinghouse. She pushed her bonnet back onto her head with one hand.

  Another crowd was gathered inside the narrow lot next to Fly’s. The air there was foul with spent powder. “Make room,” Jones was saying. “This is Mrs. Earp.”

  “Stand back, boys,” bellowed a big man in a dirty sheepskin. “Let his old mother get in.”

  She glared at the man, but he had turned away to open a path.

  She knelt beside Virgil. He was sitting on the ground with his back against Fly’s wall, red in the face and chewing his moustaches and cursing. Dr. George Goodfellow, small and round with a full beard and his cuffs pushed back past his wrists, had slit open Virgil’s trousers leg and was probing insi
de a gory hole with silver forceps. The calf was fishbelly white and without hair above the ankle.

  “Forget it, Doc,” someone said. “The ball went clean through.”

  Goodfellow paused, turned the leg to examine the exit hole on the other side, causing Virgil to take in his breath, said, “Huh,” and returned the forceps to his leather bag after a perfunctory wipe. He poured alcohol into both wounds, releasing a fresh flood of evil language, and bandaged them, rolling the gauze around and around the leg and securing it with a big safety pin. Throughout this operation Virgil held Allie’s hand tightly.

  “Virge, what happened?”

  “Morg lost his head.”

  She had been raised in Nebraska by immigrant Irish parents and met Virgil in Council Bluffs when she was a waitress and he drove a stagecoach. They were not married in the religious or legal sense but behaved as if they were, not an uncommon occurrence on the Great Plains where clergy was rare and spread as thin as prairie dust. She took in sewing, told fortunes with cards, and although she distrusted all of the Earp brothers except Virgil, whom she loved with the considerable energy of an Irishwoman raised in Nebraska, she had been traveling with the clan for seven years, attempting all the while to persuade Virgil to break away. When she met his younger brother Wyatt he was a deacon in the Union Church at Dodge City and an officer on the police force, and she knew that he had used both these positions to make safe the whorehouse he ran there with James, eldest of the five full brothers. She liked Morgan, the third brother, without trusting him, and she seldom thought about the baby, Warren, who was out wandering the territory just now in search of a game or a bar to keep. Daylight work was anathema to the nocturnal Earps, particularly Wyatt, whom she held responsible for most of the clan’s trespasses and despised for the way he treated his woman, Mattie.