Ike shifted his plug. “Joe will carry the message. Folks trust Joe.”
“It is my eyes.” Grinning, Hill returned the flimsy to Wyatt.
He folded it twice and poked it into his vest pocket. “Let me know when you arrive at a date. I will have a posse on hand at Rabbit Springs on the Bisbee road. Naturally the reward will be less expenses for outfitting and horse hire.”
“Hold on, we never said that.”
“Ike, you still owe for that horse your brother Billy stole from me.”
“You got that horse back!”
Hill said, “Let it go. How much can it come to?”
“Cross us up on this and next time it won’t be just your horse,” McLaury rapped.
Ike shrugged into his coat, flipping down the lapels. “Pleasure doing business with you, Marshal.”
“I am a city police officer.”
“Soon it will be sheriff.”
Joe Hill unsnapped his fob and ran the chain through the buttonhole in his coat. “Who can I leave my watch and chain with before I ride out?” he asked Wyatt. “This town is full of thieves.”
Wyatt took them, and didn’t see the three again until after Tombstone burned to the ground.
Chapter Eight
The fire began with a barrel of whiskey and ended under several thousand gallons of water; and when it was over, the four blocks bounded to the north and south by Fremont and Toughnut streets and to the west and east by Fourth and Sixth streets had ceased to exist.
Talk had it that a number of customer complaints had caused a saloon keeper on Allen Street to take a barrel of Thistle Dew out of service. While measuring the amount he was returning to the distributor he lost his notched stick through the bunghole and called for his bartender to help fish it out. The bartender came over, forgetting about the lighted stump of cigar clamped in his teeth.
The sheet of flame singed both men’s moustaches, scaled a brown muslin curtain, and spread across the pitch-smeared ceiling with a whump. From there it battered out a window to leap the alley to the hardware next door. Most of the buildings on Allen were board and batten, with common walls, and the fire rolled in an orange ball across the rooftops in front of a dry wind, limning windows until the panes tipped out and blistering the paint on suspended signs pushed horizontal by the heat. A case of cartridges went off in a gun shop with a crackle and a twang of bouncing lead and a stack of powder kegs exploded, lifting the roof and splaying the sideboards like a barrel bursting. But even that roar was lost in the rumble of the firestorm cartwheeling through the heart of town. A column of smoke as black and thick as a muckslide poured into the sky, leaving a stain visible from as far away as Tucson and Prescott. The bell in the firehouse clanged, steam whistles bellowed in the silver mountains, and Tombstone twisted and blackened like a scorpion in a skillet.
The town’s pride was brought around, a fourth-class Jeffers Jigsaw steam fire engine, thirty-five hundred pounds of polished brass mounted on circus-wagon wheels with blurring flywheel and a seven-and-a-half-inch piston stroke that sounded like a cow pulling its feet out of a river bottom. But while the horses in the four-hitch team were broken to the racket, no one had thought or else known how to train them to behave around a conflagration, and four men in miners’ helmets and dampened slickers were required to hold the plunging leaders while their companions socketed the pump to the main. The gauges measured, the pump began drawing, and then the limp canvas hose grew erect and ejaculated a blue-white geyser in a high spreading arch over the wall of fire.
The miracle was flawed. The pipeline from the Chiricahua springs was too long and poorly graduated, and the little pump was unequal to the pressure required. The geyser towered and fell and squirted and spluttered and the flames marched on. Men formed brigades, filling from the horse troughs and passing and offering bucketfuls to the blaze. Women sluiced down blankets and plunged smoldering brooms into the troughs and slapped the flames off awning posts and out of one another’s skirts when they got too close. Eye-whites glittered in faces carved from soot and masked with bandannas from the noses down. Riderless horses set free from the corrals galloped up and down Allen whinnying and blowing.
By nightfall the devastated blocks formed right triangles of charred and fallen framework against a smudged sky, glowing in jointed sections like snakeweed. The homeless slept under friends’ roofs and on the floor of Nellie Cash-man’s Russ House and crews stood watch outside in two-hour shifts for gusts and smoldering straw. In lighted kitchens firefighters applied axle grease to blistered hands and faces. No one had died, and when the sun rose over a gutted settlement the next day, the survivors would pluck that knowledge smoking from the ashes and polish it with self-congratulation until it gleamed.
At first light the Mexicans who followed that trade were pouring and baking adobe bricks at five times the usual speed and the first wagons departed for the Huachucas with axes and bucksaws for the materials required to raise Tombstone from its ashes. Saloon keepers sifted the remains of their establishments for undamaged fixtures, and men armed with pinch bars and sledgehammers knocked apart foundations and chimneys weakened by the flames and carted away charred beams and furniture in wheelbarrows.
Other individuals just as enterprising were at work.
Virgil Earp jangled shut the door of the Epitaph office on Fremont and crossed the sun-patched floor to take the hands of John Clum, standing behind his desk, and bank cashier Milton Clapp, who struggled up out of the depths of a horsehair armchair to put his feet on the floor and look up at the newcomer. Clapp was short and scarecrow-lean, all elbows and angles under his black suit, and wore large gold-rimmed spectacles whose thick lenses made his eyes appear swollen. Virgil nodded at Colonel William Herring, a man as large as himself but considerably broader across the middle, who kept his seat. The three men led the Citizens Safety Committee.
“Marshal, I am happy to see you are not a casualty.” Clum retook his high-backed swivel and indicated an empty chair between the other two visitors with a hand swathed in bandages.
Virgil accepted the seat, sweeping his coat-frock behind the handle of his Army. “I took firebreak duty on Fourth. I got a blister off the axe handle.” He showed his palm.
“George Parsons appears to have sustained the only injury worth noting,” Clum said. “A balcony collapsed under him and he smashed his nose. I find it amazing that no one was hurt more seriously or killed. The Apaches would say that the sun and moon were smiling on us all yesterday.”
“Except George,” Virgil said.
“Except George.” Clum frowned as the conversation turned away from one of his favorite subjects, his three years as agent in charge of the San Carlos Apache reservation. “In any case we are presented with the opportunity to rebuild Tombstone along the lines of a proper city instead of a ramshackle arrangement of canvas and clapboard. To do that we must first smoke out the vermin.”
“Lot jumpers,” Virgil said.
“You are aware of them.”
“You can’t not be. Some of them have been squatting on what’s left of the better saloons and sporting houses since before sunup. They are commencing to put up tents.”
“It is a shabby business. The consensus, Clapp’s and Colonel Herring’s and mine, is that the man who was in possession of the lot when the fire broke out is the lot’s legal owner, and that the courts will establish that in time. However, the process could take months.”
“Meanwhile the lot jumpers are free to throw up their buildings as they please and the devil take aesthetics and the rights of the owner,” Herring said.
Virgil stood. “Give me twenty-four hours.”
Clum said, “Don’t go off half-cocked.”
“I am always at full cock.”
“Propriety must be observed. This committee has only local sanction and we cannot afford to have Governor Fremont and the United States Army come haring in here on the pretense of establishing order. Cochise County is scarcely five months old and already
they are blathering about us on the floor of Congress. A body count at this stage would undo all our fine intentions.”
“Blame it on the fire.”
“Some of these jumpers are supposed to be gun men,” Clapp pointed out.
“Some of them are sure enough gun men,” Virgil said. “I cannot tell my boys to leave their arms at home. A fine intention like that would make for a dandy body count and all of it on our side.”
Clum ran a hand back over his bald head. His hair had begun to fall out before he was twenty and his political enemies considered the statesmanlike dearth responsible for his victory in the last election. “Concentrate upon putting the fear of God into them short of killing.”
“That is night work.”
“So long as it is done soon we don’t care what time you do it,” said Colonel Herring.
“Give me twenty-four hours.”
By sunset the charred rubble on Fremont and Toughnut and at the upper end of Allen had produced a heavy crop of tents made from sticks and wagon sheeting in rounded heaps like mushrooms. In front of them the claimants prepared dinner in pots over fires built from the unburned debris, turning the air greasy with beans and bacon and prairie onions, the long barrels of horse pistols hugging their thighs. They tossed one another tobacco pouches and plugs and exchanged Cornish Jack jokes that grew steadily more coarse with the loss of light.
At dark the flames flickered in scattered bits like shreds of bright cloth. Nearing midnight they began to die out singly, then in clusters, and by the time the horsemen appeared on Allen there was not a spark in sight. The jumpers were dead asleep in their tents.
The first lasso whirled twice around with a low whistle, shot out straight, and landed with a plop around a tentpole on the corner of Sixth. Instantly the noose closed and the horse on the other end snorted at the bite of a rowel and galloped west bearing its rider. The tent fluttered off, exposing to starlight its occupant wrestling with his blanket. The pale light whitened further a sleepy frightened face surrounded by tousled hair.
“Lot jumper, you git!”
The sepulchral shout, coming from the darkness above him, tore the man to his feet and he bounded into the night, stumbling over the blanket tangled around his legs.
“Lot jumper, you git!”
It was a warm night and the second victim was clad only in long johns. He snatched up his boots and clothing and hobbled for cover, cursing shrilly when he stepped in the hot ashes of his own campfire. One of the riders laughed, a high-pitched bray.
“Lot jumper, you git!”
The third man tripped over a foundation stone and fell skidding into a pile of fresh horse-apples. He scrambled up smeared and ran, narrowly avoiding collision as another rider galloped past towing another collapsed tent. The man in the saddle cut loose with a rebel yell.
“Git!”
The operation swept north, placing the Milky Way at the marauders’ backs and giving aroused sleepers glimpses of men in big hats and bandanna masks mounted on tall horses loaded down with iron. But few took the trouble to pause in their flight and look.
“Git, lot jumper!”
By Fremont Street, surprise was forfeit. The horsemen fired their pistols into the air and at uninhabited ruins, shattering panes not burst by the fire and letting water out of the troughs. Their lassos snatched away empty tents. They reared and wheeled and punched holes in the clouds and called upon God to bless the Union and upon God-fearing men to vote for Wyatt Earp for sheriff. The tents were flung into a pile on Allen and doused with coal oil and set to the match in a towering pyre. When the sun rose it found no canvas between Fremont and Toughnut and only the deed holders in possession of the burned lots.
That day’s number of the Epitaph contained an editorial by John Clum denouncing this lawless method of foiling lawbreakers by undisciplined nightriders and commending the efforts of Police Chief Virgil Earp and his deputies to restore order.
On July 2, President James Abram Garfield was shot in the back while standing on the platform at the Baltimore & Potomac Station in Washington, D.C., waiting for a train to New England. His assailant was the Reverend Charles J. Guiteau, a failed office hopeful who claimed that God had commanded him to kill the President. Garfield was taken from the heat and malaria of Washington in summer to Elberon, New Jersey, where doctors were confident of his recovery.
While readers of the Epitaph, Nugget, and Prospector followed wire information on the President’s condition, rumors reached Tombstone of a massacre in Skeleton Canyon in the Guadalupes near the Mexican border involving the Apaches and a party of Mexican muleskinners. Nineteen skinners had been slaughtered and seventy-five thousand dollars in silver bullion spirited away.
“Geronimo, you figure?” Doc Holliday, seated at his favorite drinking table in the Alhambra, drained the quart bottle into his glass and ordered another and a second beer for Wyatt. The place smelled of char from the fire damage to the gaming room and sawdust from the repairs. Hammers rattled and saws wheezed day and night as the town rebuilt itself like a cirrhosed liver.
Wyatt shook his head. “A mad dog like him has no need for bullion. He would have cut the packs off and taken the mules. Mule meat is worth more than silver to an Apache, Clum says.”
“Who if not him?”
“Your friend Billy Leonard needs a stake.”
“It requires more hands than he is comfortable using.”
“Stilwell, then,” Wyatt said. “Or Curly Bill.”
“Stilwell is in town playing deputy. When you say Curly Bill you are also saying Ike Clanton, and Ike is a cow thief.”
“Mexican cows. Dry-gulching greasers is not the same as killing white men. I have not seen Ike since before the fire.”
Doc thumbed the cork out of the fresh bottle. “He has not got the brains nor the sand. It was the old man if it was anyone in that clan.”
“The old man is too old and stiff for that work. His boys done it for him.”
“I have not seen Ringo or Rattlesnake Bill Johnson in a month of Sundays.” Doc sucked whiskey off his moustaches.
“One bad chip is pretty much like all the rest in the stack.”
“If it was Ike we will know it soon enough. He will try to buy every pot on Allen and bed every whore betwixt here and Benson. Before Tombstone came along I bet there wasn’t a knothole in the territory he didn’t bugger.”
Wyatt said, “It is no worry of ours either way.”
“Worrying isn’t in my nature.”
“No, you crap rabbit ice.”
Doc topped off his glass. “The poor dumb fornicating greasers. If the President is not safe they don’t none of them stand a snowball’s chance on an alkali flat.”
“We are living in a hard time.”
“It has been all hard times since Honest Abe got inaugurated.”
“You seceshes will keep on fighting that war.” Wyatt finished his beer and hauled out his watch.
“Set a spell,” Doc said.
“I promised Sadie I would go riding with her in the morning.”
“She’ll keep.”
Wyatt closed the face. “Kate isn’t home?”
“She got a straw up her ass over something and is selling it down Toughnut again.”
“Christ, Doc.”
“She will be back. No one else will put up with her.”
“I don’t know why you do.”
“She is the only one who will put up with the cough. If she has not caught it by now she never will. Most like.” He got out his handkerchief, spat in it, looked at it, folded it, and put it away. He drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice and he set down the glass empty.
“Colorado is the country for you,” Wyatt said.
“My luck is here.”
Kate wasn’t on Toughnut, but in the Arcade Saloon a block up Allen with her chins resting on her arms on a table in one of the curtained rooms in back that had not been touched by the fire. Her shoulders were bare above a lavender dress she had just b
ought from Glover’s because
Doc had burned all the others except her ginghams and she sat with her feet hooked under the rung of her chair and the toes turned inward. She was making a chain across the tabletop with rings from her glass.
“That goddamn foxy con man has cast a wicked spell over Doc that’s been his ruin.” She mumbled and sucked spittle out of the way of her tongue. “Not that Doc’s bound for heaven in a brass buggy. But he’s a sick man drinking to stay alive and can’t help himself. Wyatt drove him to this like he drove him to the doings at Dodge and every place else since Fort Griffin.”
“Drove him to what?”
She focused on the dapper small man seated across from her wearing a sombrero. She’d forgotten she was sharing the table with Sheriff Behan. She smiled crookedly and waggled a finger above the smeared glass.
“You’re just sore mad at Wyatt on account of he stole that stuck-up little tart Sadie Marcus right off your little cock. I bet it is little like the rest of you. Little Johnny Behan with his big hat and his little cock. I bet you have to take off the hat when you piss or it gets lost in the shadow.”
Milt Joyce, the Cochise County supervisor, grinned. A narrow man with a black mariner’s beard and round-nailed clerk’s hands, he stood near the curtained entrance twirling an elk’s tooth on the end of his watch chain.
“Bring us another bottle,” Behan rapped.
When the cork was pulled Kate brightened, extending her glass for refilling. A purple-blue welt showed along the line of her right cheekbone. Behan said, “Swine beat women.”
She touched the welt. “He don’t mean to, it is just the whiskey. When the cough gets to sawing at his insides he has to drink to make them numb. It is like when you have a tooth pulled.” Her face twisted into a comic mask of pity. “He was an honest dentist before the cough and before he took up with that Earp crowd.”
“It is painful to see a fine man brought so low,” Joyce offered.
Behan wrapped a hand around his glass and pretended to drink. “I heard he shot a nigger in a swimming hole and that’s why he had to leave Georgia.”
Bloody Season Page 9
