Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  The first time she left him in Tombstone, Kate had gone to the copper-mining center of Globe and spent the five hundred dollars he had given her on a down payment on a hotel, which became a whorehouse with very little alteration and an arrangement with the girls that pleased everyone. During her reunion with Doc she had left the books in care of her brightest girl. Despite detailed instructions the girl had made a mess of them, wandering outside’s Kate carefully ruled lines and getting the debits mixed up with the credits or just plain neglecting to record transactions, and since her return Kate had been involved in reconstructing the past month’s finances. That the girl had been robbing her blind was a certainty, but she couldn’t concentrate long enough to determine by how much. Her eye was still tender where Doc had hit her this time and her bruised ribs hurt when she moved or drew a deep breath. Worse, she felt guilty for having left him with the investigation into the deaths on Fremont Street still pending. That was why, when the mail came bearing a letter in the familiar flowing hand, she got up so quickly to accept it the pain doubled her.

  November 5, 1881

  Dear Kate,

  Well, they have got me in jail again.

  Chapter Twelve

  John Charles Fremont, arithmetic teacher-cum-Northwest explorer-cum-soldier-cum-senator-cum-gouty and doting governor of Arizona Territory, stepped down, spurs clanking, from that position on October 15, 1881, under relentless encouragement by President Arthur to do so. John J. Gosper was appointed to fill the gap until a permanent successor could be chosen, but as no portrait of Gosper was forthcoming, the framed likeness of a bilious Fremont clutching a sword and a rolled map remained on the wall behind the justice’s bench in the Cochise County courthouse on the street named for its model. As in life the old eagle’s eyes were directed beyond that room and its contents, out past the Whetstones to where glory lay, and with it something more fitting than the custodianship of a rocky desert inhabited by roadrunners and wild Indians.

  Beneath the portrait, looking like an unworthy heir, Justice Wells Spicer scratched his head and left the hair standing. His small eyes followed the scribbled lines on the sheet before him and his voice ground on, inflectionless and soporific, an aural projection of his putty-faced dowdiness in gray collar and lopsided cravat and baggy coat with stains on the lapels. In appearance and manner he gave no indication of the jurist who since June 1880 had stood like an iron post between the grasping Towniot Company and the disputed property fronting on Tombstone’s three principal streets. Paintings lie; so too do personal impressions.

  “Witnesses of credibility testify that each of the deceased, or at least two of them, yielded to a demand to surrender,” droned Spicer, turning to a fresh sheet. “Other witnesses of equal credibility testify that William Clanton and Frank McLaury met the demand for surrender by drawing their pistols, and that the discharge of firearms from both sides was almost simultaneous.”

  Outside, the wind was blowing, rattling hard early snowflakes like dried peas against the windows and fluting around the panes through spaces where the chinking had dropped out, causing the hanging lamps to sway and glow fiercely with each gust. Nevertheless the room was warm, even hot. Deputy Jim Campbell kept the parlor stove charged with mesquite and cottonwood, and spectators jammed the benches, exuding body heat. Rank with wool and sweat, it hung like an invisible cloud over the proceedings.

  “There is a dispute as to whether Thomas McLaury was armed at all, except with a Winchester rifle that was on the horse beside him. I will not consider this question, because it is not of controlling importance. . ."

  Behind the railing, on the same bench occupied by Ike Clanton on the day of the fight, Wyatt Earp sat plank straight with a high collar supporting his round chin and his hands resting on his thighs, cuffs showing. Doc Holliday slouched on his spine next to him, wearing a pale yellow shirt under dark gray flannel, hands in pockets, boots crossed, the indolent younger prince with no hope of ascending. His eyes were moving, counting the house. On Wyatt’s other side, Tom Fitch, the pair’s attorney, sat with his chin on his chest and his feet flat on the floor, staring at the boards between them. His graying handlebars had a sober curve. Underneath them he was smiling ever so faintly.

  “Witnesses for the prosecution state unequivocally that William Clanton fell or was shot at the first fire, and Claiborne says he was shot when the pistol was only about a foot from his belly. Yet it is clear that there were no powder burns nor marks on his clothes. . ."

  Virgil Earp had commandeered the end of a bench in the gallery to enable him to straighten his healing leg in the aisle. He wore his deputy U.S. marshal’s star on his vest—his city position, not his federal appointment, had been taken away—and had a cane hooked over the back of the bench in front of him. James Earp, dour and in evident pain from his war-smashed shoulder in the cold weather, sided him. Morgan and Warren were absent, the former still recovering at home from his back wound, the latter off adventuring somewhere in the territory since before the fight. The women were home awaiting news.

  “Considering all the testimony together, I am of the opinion that the weight of evidence sustains and corroborates the testimony of Wyatt Earp, that their demand for surrender was met by William Clanton and Frank McLaury drawing or making motions to draw their pistols. . ."

  Ike and Phin Clanton sat on the far end of the same bench with half a dozen people between them and James Earp, Ike chewing rapidly and looking around with head sunk between his shoulders, Phin smooth-faced, eyes wondering. He was regarded in some company as the idiot of the family. Other San Pedro residents were present, and some of the vigilantes, including John Clum, taking notes for his newspaper; but for the most part the gallery contained Tombstonians who had been following the hearing in the columns of the Epitaph and Nugget for a month and had come there out of a dim sort of herd-consciousness that some kind of history was going on, and the shops could stay closed and the gate hinges could await replacement until it got through, provided it wasn’t too long about it.

  “The testimony of Isaac Clanton, that this tragedy was the result of a scheme on the part of the Earps to assassinate him and thereby bury in oblivion the confessions the Earps had made to him about ‘piping away’ the shipment of coin by Wells Fargo and Company, falls short of being a sound theory, on account of the great fact, most prominent in this matter, to wit: that Isaac Clanton was not injured at all, and could have been killed first and easiest, if it was the object of the attack to kill him... .”

  The front bench was in the possession of the prosecution team, a dull brown presence with Johnny Behan brightening one end in his morning coat and immaculate collar and a spare man in a black clawhammer and silk vest shoring up the other. Silver gleamed softly in the spare man’s longish brown hair and glittered in his semicircle of dark beard. It mitigated somewhat the fierceness of thatched brows nearly as mobile as Tom Fitch’s, beneath which a pair of brown and, to the Earps and Holliday at least, familiar eyes smoldered. His name was William R. McLaury—Will to his dead brothers, and a Fort Worth attorney of no little note who had swept in on the fifth day of the hearing to galvanize the prosecution. He had begun by harrying the quiet Spicer into jailing Wyatt and Doc for a time, and since then had cut and slashed at the defense’s witnesses with a minimum of oratory and a keen nose for warm blood. In that, he was much like his late younger brother Frank. The killer strain had thus taken separate routes to the same destination. As he listened to Spicer’s decision, his profile might have been punched out of sheet metal for all anyone could read of his reactions; and many tried.

  For the first time the justice’s voice rose. Spectators lulled into a doze by its unchanging tone lifted their heads.

  “In view of the past history of the county and the generally believed existence at this time of desperate, reckless and lawless men in our midst, banded together for mutual support and living by felonious and predatory pursuits, regarding neither life nor property in their career, and at the same time
for men to parade the streets armed with repeating rifles and six-shooters and demand that the chief of police and his assistants should be disarmed is a proposition both monstrous and startling!”

  He was not reading now, but looking directly at Ike Clanton, and a sheet of color had slid down behind the gray of his features. Here at last was the man who had denounced the Towniot conspiracy to the Land Office Commission as “a fraud run by a lot of hoodlums.” The gallery leaned forward. But at that point Spicer returned to his papers and his tone subsided to its normal flat line.

  “The evidence taken before me in this case would not, in my judgment, warrant a conviction of the defendants by trial jury of any offense whatever. I do not believe that any trial jury that could be got together in this territory would, on all the evidence taken before me, with the rule of law applicable thereto given them by the court, find the defendants guilty of any offense.

  “It may be that my judgment is erroneous, and my view of the law incorrect; yet it is my own judgment and my own understanding of the law as I find it laid down, and upon this I must act and decide, and not upon those of any other persons. I have given over four weeks of patient attention to the hearing of evidence in this case, and at least four-fifths of my waking hours have been devoted, at this time, to an earnest study of the evidence before me, and such is the conclusion to which I am forced to arrive.”

  Ike spat, dinging the edge of the cuspidor at the foot of his bench and splattering the floor beyond it. The noise broke a tension in the room, which seemed to resume breathing afterward.

  Spicer laid aside the last sheet and picked up his gavel. “I conclude the performance of this duty imposed upon me by saying in the language of the statute: There being no sufficient cause to believe the within named Wyatt S. Earp and John H. Holliday guilty of the offense mentioned within, I order them to be released.” The gavel cracked.

  A barrier crumbled then and the room, with exceptions, lunged forward to swing open the gate and reach over the railing and shake the defendants’ hands and pound their backs. Doc, who would not be so manhandled, feigned a coughing jag that turned the well-wishers away from him and toward Wyatt. Wells Spicer, his sun set, got up from behind the table and took himself quietly through the side door into his chambers, carrying his notes and gavel. Souvenir hounds were a plague on the frontier.

  Johnny Behan went over to talk with Jim Campbell. Will McLaury hoisted his scuffed brown leather briefcase under his arm and started down the aisle, clear now that most of the crowd had clotted around Earp and Holliday. He encountered Ike Clanton in front of the door.

  “What’s next?” Ike asked.

  “You heard Spicer.”

  “Not all of it. Man talks like he’s got him a mouth full of shit.”

  McLaury regarded him for a space. Wedging the briefcase between his elbow and ribs, he stripped the foil off a cigar. Phin Clanton, hovering by the benches, watched the maneuver, his eyes like a dog’s fascinated by movement. In the heat of the room it was evident that neither of the brothers had bathed in a week.

  “The grand jury is in session,” McLaury said. “With proper witnesses and depositions they will hand down an indictment over Spicer. It is for us to provide that evidence. If I had been in charge of the prosecution from the outset we would have had it before this and Earp and Holliday would be bound for Yuma in chains.”

  “Supposing they don’t hand one down; what?”

  McLaury lit the cigar without ritual. They had been joined by a horsey-smelling group from Charleston in flannel shirts and striped pants, most of them cowboys the attorney didn’t know. But he recognized John Ringo’s jug ears and swooping moustaches under the sombrero he never took off. Despite the fact that Ringo stank as highly as the others, there was about him a personal neatness that put McLaury in mind of Doc Holliday. It was not their only similarity.

  Before McLaury could answer the question, John Clum asked his pardon and slid between him and the group on his way out the door. Ringo’s eyes followed Clum, then returned to McLaury. They were as dull and flat as two pennies on a counter.

  The attorney looked away. “Let’s not board that train until it stops.”

  He excused himself. But Ringo at least had caught him looking after the mayor and Epitaph publisher.

  Ringo and the straggle of less luminous cowboys present for Spicer’s decision were the advance for an army, if not a particularly uniform or disciplined one. After the hearing, ending as it did in the loose time between the fall drives and spring round-up (and in a season when the vaqueros who rode for the grandees below the border were paid eight pesos apiece for the heads of American rustlers), they trickled in from Galeyville and Charleston on town horses and buckboards and pitched camp outside town or checked into the Grand Hotel, whose owners always welcomed them because they paid for their rooms in advance with silver and settled all damages on the spot. The checkroom filled with pistols and rifles with penciled tags attached to the trigger guards identifying their owners, leaving no room for coats or luggage. Which was all right, because the guests carried most of their belongings in blanket rolls stashed in their rooms. Even Curly Bill Brocius, whose square grin and head of coiled locks were more discussed than actually seen since charges against him for the murder of Marshal Fred White had been dropped, was observed standing a roomful of cowboys to drinks in the Occidental one night. It was widely repeated that Curly Bill and Ringo had led a party into Huachita after their friends Leonard and Head were killed there and cut down the Haslett brothers in front of their own store. But killings without witnesses out there and in that time were spectral things, and Ike Haslett had been reported seen ordering a whiskey and branch in a Benson saloon a week after he was supposed to have been shot full of holes and left for the coyotes. Speculation ran heavy that his brother Bill would be discovered operating a tram in San Francisco before the end of the year; and in this way the two were declared soundly dead.

  Fights broke out, and one bloodless shooting over a dancer’s rosette garter in the Bird Cage. Behan deputized two new men and put them on rotating shifts with Breakenridge and the others. It was a time in which even he had cause to ream out the city council for removing Virgil Earp as chief of police. Wyatt meanwhile dealt faro in the Oriental and collected from his concession in the Eagle Brewery, and Virgil helped their brother James tend bar in the Sampling Room. They had moved Morgan, recovering now, and their women from Fremont Street to a suite in the Cosmopolitan Hotel after a scare involving a man dressed as a woman who knocked on Virgil’s door, then when James answered, mumbled an excuse and clomped off into the darkness. Wyatt believed that if any of the Earps who had participated in the fight on Fremont Street had come to the door he would have been murdered, and arranged to settle Sadie into Mrs. Young’s boardinghouse. Allie and Lou had insisted upon inviting Mattie to come with them to the hotel.

  Doc’s customers at his table in the Alhambra tended to be Tombstone newcomers—eager, win or lose, to boast of having crossed cards with the man who had killed two of the three slain at the O.K. Corral (for so the location of the fight was coming to be misidentified, from the several references made to the place during the hearing)—or that brand of local stalwart who had grown up accepting all bets and taking all dares. The rest stayed away, avoiding a target. When challengers sat down Doc would ask them how it felt to play against a marked man, and enjoyed watching them jump whenever he reached into a pocket, only to produce a cigar or his handkerchief. Everything he did during this period—drink, gamble, cough, or excuse himself to step out the alley door and take a piss—was for the benefit of recording eyes. He would write Kate that he was getting to be as famous as Eddy Foy and work out schemes to turn his celebrity into profit. He did manage to sell an A. T. & S. F. fireman a few gold bricks left over from Leadville, but he felt mean about it afterward. Fleecing came too easily to a legend.

  But for the most part he was idle, dealing himself patience inside a ring of empty tables while John
Mellgren and Joe Meagher, the saloon’s owners and Doc’s silent partners in the gambling concession, divided their dwindling split and argued over which of them would ask Doc to take his game elsewhere. Doc drank more when there was less to do. He had increased his intake to three quarts daily, and without Kate around to bully him into eating he made only infrequent appearances at Mrs. Fly’s table and the Can Can. He grew alarmingly skeletal; his trousers bagged on him and when he stood beneath a gas lamp to light a cigar the ghastly glow made empty sockets of his eyes and seemed to shine right through him. But he was never seen to lurch or stagger.

  Johnny Ringo, whose own drinking habits were becoming folklore, encountered him in this condition on Allen Street late one afternoon in December when they were each crossing to the opposite side. Both men had on greatcoats and their breath curled in the frosty air.

  “I hear your whore is taking them on in Globe these days,” Ringo said.

  Doc grinned, stretching the skin tighter over his skull. “Yes, she got out when she heard you were spreading crabs all over town.”

  “Well, what’s a few more to a hatchery?”

  “How are we going to do this?” Doc threw away his cigar.

  Ringo’s posture changed. Slowly, with his left hand, he unbuttoned his ulster and tugged loose the blue bandanna knotted around his neck. He twirled it between both hands and stuck one end between his teeth. Coming down, his right hand slid the flap of the coat behind the yellow ivory handle of a Colt’s in an oil-stained scabbard.