Wyatt made no response.
“That is not advice, mind.”
“I don’t take it to be.”
Stillwell released the warrants. Wyatt put on his hat and folded the sheaf lengthwise and put it inside his horsehair trail coat. His spurs clanked and rattled on his way out.
PROCLAMATION
To the Citizens of the City of Tombstone:
I am informed by his Honor, William H. Stillwell, Judge of the District Court of the First Judicial District, that Wyatt Earp, who left this city yesterday with a posse, was instructed with warrants for the arrest of divers persons charged with criminal offenses. I request the public to abstain from any interference with the execution of said warrants.
John Carr, Mayor
Copies of the handbill, printed in the Epitaph office in black serifs on ivory stock, were nailed up on vertical surfaces throughout Tombstone on January 24; and by noon most of them had disappeared, to resurface again years later, yellowed and cracking apart between the pages of family Bibles and in stacks of letters bound with faded ribbon.
Wyatt’s posse consisted of Morgan and Warren Earp, the latter newly returned after a long absence; Doc Holliday, Sherman McMasters, and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, as efficient a man with a horse and a pistol as Wyatt had known. At the West End Corral they selected big chesty mounts built to carry a lot of iron and rode south with Winchesters and shotguns and saddle pistols in scabbards and revolvers under their coats—six grim men with moustaches in wide hats and big coats, who looked like pallbearers.
While they were gone, Ike Clanton, Frank Stilwell, and Hank Swilling walked into Johnny Behan’s office and surrendered their weapons. The charge of attempted murder was dropped for lack of positive witnesses. Clanton and Stilwell posted bail on the robbery charge and were released.
The news reached the Earp party a week later when they stopped at Lewis Springs to water their horses and fill their canteens, but they didn’t turn back. Curly Bill and Pony Deal had been named among the men who had robbed another stage at Contention a few days after the Bisbee holdup and they were laying down a hot trail to old Mexico without pausing to cover their tracks.
“Curly Bill is the nigger in the woodbox.” Wyatt wriggled thawed fingers back into his glove and used a stick from the campfire to light his pipe.
“Bill has no truck with you,” Doc said.
“He has been moving in my direction ever since he and Ringo adjusted the Hasletts’s case in Huachita.”
“That is just guesswork.”
“It is no less fact for that.”
They were camped on the western face of the Mules and the snow was piled in neat heaps against rocks and snarled bushes; everywhere else the ground was bare. Doc’s high cheeks were windburned and a week’s growth of sand-colored beard had filled out the hollows. He was loath to own to it, but the clear cold air agreed with him. Warren and Morgan were asleep in their rolls, or pretending to be, and Sherman McMasters had his Centennial Winchester knocked down and laid out in flickering pieces on his spread blanket while he wiped oil off the barrel with an old blue bandanna. McMasters, a Wells Fargo shotgun messenger like Morgan and Wyatt before him, preferred the carbine to the Stevens ten-gauge issued by the company. Doc suspected that if the ruddy, chin-whiskered man could find a hole in the gun big enough he would fuck it. Turkey Creek Jack was standing watch farther up the grade.
Doc said, “I thought Ike was our man.”
Wyatt shook his head, sucking life into the pipe. “Ringo and the others have got him licking their boots over that Leonardhead and Crane transaction. They planted that hat to get us on him so they would not have to waste the powder. The business has Curly Bill all over it. The Nugget has us and Ike down as stage robbers falling out, and if we kill Ike or he kills us we will prove it right.”
“It is too various for me.”
“Curly Bill is a devil. He got Fred White to shoot himself with the border roll and this is the same thing only it is our finger on the trigger.”
“What about the rest?”
“If Swilling was in that adobe he was paid. Stilwell and Ringo need killing.”
“I have said that right along. I hope you remember where you heard it.” Doc unstopped a canteen half-full of whiskey and tilted it. “McLaury?”
Wyatt ground his teeth on his pipe stem. “Curly Bill first.”
But the signs grew scarce near the border, as they always did in that rocky country, and with Bat Masterson gone marshaling in Colorado they hadn’t a tracker with the skill to pick them out and returned lathered and blowing to Tombstone. There they read in the Epitaph that Johnny Behan and Ike Clanton had sworn out warrants in Contention charging Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doe Holliday once again with the murders of William Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury on Fremont Street on October 26, 1881.
Chapter Fifteen
That night in March he dreamed of Urilla. He hadn’t thought about her in months, or dreamed of her in years; and on those most recent occasions when he had thought of her, she was like someone else’s memory, something belonging to the tall yellow-haired boy who had graded track for the U.P. with his older brother in Wyoming and barked his knuckles on stubbled chins behind the saloon tents in Cheyenne and Laramie and fled a horse-stealing charge in the Nations. Those times he saw a girl with a round face and straight hair that smelled of brown soap, plain really, in a loose print dress tied under her bosom to disguise her condition. It was always day in the memory and dusty sunlight leaned in through the windows.
But in his dream it was night. A lamp shed a greasy globe of light that barely reached the walls in a tight room thick with Missouri in October, with crickets stitching outside the open window and not enough fresh air coming in to jiggle the flame in the glass chimney. Urilla’s face was bloated and glistening, white against the ticking. She was shrieking—silently in the dream, her mouth a twisted hole with nothing coming out of it, but Wyatt’s ears rang and the midwife barked at him to hold the lamp still—and her nightgown was nicked to her waist and plastered transparent to her swollen breasts and her legs were spread obscenely and the blood—dear Lord, it was black—was dumping out between them, over the midwife’s raw hands trying to stop it with kerosene-soaked rags. The midwife in the dream was Mattie. That made no sense, because he hadn’t met her until weeks later.
The boy had emerged feet first. Urilla was small down there and when Mattie had summoned Wyatt into the room he had seen the tiny naked body flailing for freedom like a toad being devoured slowly by a massasauga and he heard the crackling of bones. His first thought was that they were the boy’s and he tore Mattie away, shouting that she was murdering his son. She slapped him hard (in the dream, but observing it too, he saw the bloody handprint appear on his cheek even as he felt the sting) and spat at him that the boy was murdering his mother. After that Wyatt did as she told him. She strangled the infant pulling him out, had to; but by then the blood had a good start, thick and black and stinking of heated iron. Urilla shrieked silently.
Wyatt knew when it was over. Mattie’s hands slowed, she stopped bunching and pressing the rags and started using them gently, as sponges to control the mess. Urilla’s mouth slackened and she lay panting. At length her breathing grew more even. She smiled weakly. The pain had ended. She was looking at him, and he saw in her eyes that she knew he was there. He smiled back and held her hand. It was warm and sticky. He was still holding it when the bleeding stopped—stopped because the heart was no longer pumping—and Mattie and someone else pried his hand loose and led him from the room. In the dream the someone else looked like Wyatt’s half-brother Newton. But Newton and his family had been living outside Missouri and were nowhere near that shack at the time.
The room the pair led Wyatt into was the same one they had just left. A lamp shed a greasy globe of light that barely reached the walls and Urilla was shrieking silently....
He jolted awake with a tongueless shout. He gaped around, and for a moment th
e bed was stained with Urilla’s blood. Then it faded and the cool air in the hotel room chilled the slippery flesh under his soaked nightshirt. It was March 1882, not October 1870; and he was in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, not Lamar, Missouri.
A bar of moonlight lay across the clock on the mantel. Twenty past ten. He had been asleep for less than ten minutes, although it seemed much longer. He had turned in early after a long day spent quartering the town with Morgan in search of Frank Stilwell, Hank Swilling, Pete Spence, and Johnny Ringo, all of whom had been seen earlier. All but Swilling, who had been found not guilty of the murder attempt on Virgil, were still wanted on Judge Stillwell’s warrants. But there was no sign of them, and in the evening Wyatt and Morgan and their women had gone to Schieffelin Hall to watch the Lingard Opera Company performing Stolen Kisses. They had bought the tickets to celebrate their release after the court in Contention had remanded the Clanton-McLaury murder case back to Tombstone. Wyatt hadn’t liked the opera; the music was forgettable and the actors trumpeted their lines, and anyway he preferred Shakespeare. Sadie and Lou had enjoyed themselves, however. Lou had even unbent so far as to wish Sadie good night when they dropped her at Mrs. Young’s boardinghouse. Wyatt had wanted to invite Sadie back to the Cosmopolitan, but Mattie was staying with Virge and Allie and the day had been frustrating enough without a scene in the hallway. Morgan had then kissed Lou and went off to Bob Hatch’s billiard hall for a game with the owner. The dream was too real. Rather than pick it up where he left it, Wyatt swung his feet to the floor and dressed in the same white shirt and black suit he had worn to Schieffelin Hall. He checked the load in the big American and pocketed it with the handle turned out.
The cherry wood bar in Hatch’s saloon separated the billiard parlor from the rest of the establishment. Wyatt paid for a beer and carried the glass around the end of the bar and took a chair against the wall. Morgan, bent over a rear table in his vest, glanced across the felt at his brother. The Chesterfield lamp suspended over the table caverned his eyes under a carapace of white brow.
“It’s too early to go to bed,” Wyatt said.
Morgan nodded and shot. The six ball glanced off a cushion and came to rest against the four ball with an apologetic click. He grunted.
Hatch, all wrists and Adam’s apple without collar or cuffs and only the lower half of his ecclesiastical face visible inside the cone of light, stepped away from his spot in front of the alley door to take his turn. He had on his hat with the brim turned up all around. Morgan circled behind him and chalked his cue. He winked gravely at Sherman McMasters, watching with a drummer named Berry by the stove next to the bar.
The room was stark, sawdust-floored and all naked yellow plaster above the wainscoting with an embossed tin ceiling and a pronghorn head staring agate-eyed from the east wall, Morgan’s hat hung on one antler. An iron cuspidor stood under it on a stained rubber mat. The upper half of the door to the alley was paneled in glass, the only window in the room. The two lower panes were painted over.
Icicles of glass tipped out of the upper frames, shivering down as silently as Urilla’s nightmare screams under the bang. The butt of Morgan’s cue skidded on the floor and he fell forward. Berry shouted and glass tinkled in a pause, and then a second report swelled the room. Plaster pounded out of the wall above Wyatt’s head, powdering his hat and shoulders.
Blue smoke turned in the air. Morgan lay on his face in the sawdust and glass splinters. Berry sprawled on his side next to the stove, the ball that had passed through Morgan lodged in one thigh and his weak heart stopped by the shock. He had come west in search of his health. Wyatt, moving the instant the second ball slapped the wall above him, hurled himself behind a table and tore his pocket freeing the American. He cocked, shattered a door panel, cocked, misfired, cocked, collapsed one of the painted panes—triangles of milk-glass tumbling—cocked, misfired, cocked, misfired, said, “Shit!” and crab-ran to his brother while McMasters and Hatch and another man who had come in from the saloon clawed at the bolted door and swung out into the alley. They returned after a moment dragging their pistols and put them away to help lift the wounded man.
“Don’t, I can’t stand it.”
“His back’s broken,” Wyatt said.
Goodfellow and Matthews arrived minutes later. The surgeon pulled back Berry’s lids and felt his neck and turned away toward Morgan as they tried lifting him again. This time they got him up—Morgan cursed—and Hatch held open the door to the card room, which contained a davenport. They set Morgan down on it. The mohair quickly turned dark.
“Put my legs straight.”
“They are straight, Morg,” said Wyatt.
“They’re my legs, damn it.”
Wyatt adjusted them.
“Is Bob here?”
Hatch spoke up.
Morgan smiled. “This is the last game of pool I’ll ever play in here.”
“Damn it, Morg,” said Wyatt.
“Tell Ma and Pa. I don’t want them getting it in the papers.”
“They won’t.”
Matthews was unbuttoning Morgan’s shirt. He motioned him away with a feeble gesture. “Wyatt.”
Wyatt bent over him.
“You were right, Wyatt,” he said. “I can’t see a thing.”
The latch split on the second blow and the door whacked the wall on the other side, throwing crooked a framed Stephensgraph of the Blessed Mother and sucking dust balls out of corners in the current. The nickel-plated Colt’s Lightning hurtled into the room towing Doc behind it. He towered there in his tall-crowned hat, the tails of his greatcoat spreading behind him like buzzard’s wings.
“Where is he?”
The woman was looking, not at the weapon, but at the skull face of the gringo who was holding it, his eyes molten in their sockets. She thought it was Señor Muerte come to claim her children and she pulled them closer. They wriggled, unable to breathe. She was reciting the Rosary in rapid Spanish, staring up at the skull face and not aware that she was saying anything. He was taller than the doorway; from the floor where she crouched with her dusty skirt drawn down over her knees and her arms around the boy and girl, he seemed to stretch to the sky, big in the boots and shiny pistol bending his wrist under its weight and narrowing up to the terrible skull. His teeth were bared in a rictus.
There was another man standing behind him. An ordinary one this, not as tall, and one of the flesh; but of course Señor Muerte always had a mortal helper to ferry the soul into the Afterlife. This was the reason one weighted down the eyelids of the dead with new centavos, to give to the ferryman for the ride so he did not push off and leave the soul standing on the shore between worlds. She would have crossed herself, but she was afraid to let go of the muchachas.
Turkey Creek Jack Johnson looked past Doc at the plump young Mexican woman cowering on the plank floor with her arms encircling a barefooted boy and girl in dirty cut-down clothes. The girl was light-haired, probably half American. He lowered his shotgun.
“Squatters,” he said. “I tell you, McLaury’s hauled freight out of here.”
“Donde esta Señor McLaury?”
The woman went on reciting. Doc rolled back the hammer and repeated the question.
She stopped. “No sabe.”
He pointed the pistol at the light-haired girl. “Donde?”
“Por favor, señor!” And then her Spanish got too fast for Turkey Creek Jack to follow. Some kind of heathen chant.
“She don’t savvy Will McLaury from a buck nigger. Let’s go, Doc.”
“No, she knows.”
“She’s just a dumb puta.” He was studying the woman’s face and was satisfied when there was no reaction that he had calculated her right.
“Maybe if I shoot the girl.”
“Shoot the boy if you have to shoot one of them,” Turkey Creek Jack said. “He is all Mex.”
“Does the girl look a little like Ringo to you?”
“He has not been in the territory long enough.”
<
br /> “Quien es el padre de la muchacha?”
The woman went on chanting. She was rocking on her heels now with her eyes shut tight. The children stared with black-olive eyes at the two strange Americans with fine clothes and shiny guns.
“No, I guess she doesn’t.” Doc seated the hammer.
They withdrew, leaving the door standing open. Turkey Creek Jack could hear the rhythmic Spanish all the way down the block. All of these greasers were half Indian.
Doc kicked open several more doors on Fremont, terrifying Pete Spence’s wife Marietta, who said she hadn’t seen her husband in days, finding several houses empty, and interrupting Harry Jones—whose wife Kitty was in Tucson—with a girl from the Bird Cage. When Doc came out of one of the vacant houses trailing Turkey Creek Jack, Wyatt Earp was standing out front. Wyatt hadn’t changed clothes and his brother’s blood had dried in a brown crust on his white shirt. The sky was bleeding out behind him.
“Stand away.” Doc said.
Wyatt said, “Having off like this is a sound way to get yourself killed.”
“I have been looking for just such a way for years.”
“I need you alive.”
“You place too much store in keeping folks alive. You let Ike run and he ran straight to Johnny Behan. You let Ringo go off with Billy Blab and he shot Virge and killed Morg. Your high morals come too dear for me.”
“Stilwell killed Morg. He was seen running with Pete Spence and some others.”
“Ringo was in it.”
“Virge and Jim are taking Morg’s body home to California on tomorrow’s train,” Wyatt said. “I am seeing them as far as Tucson. Warren is coming and so is Sherm McMasters. I want you along if you will come. You too, Jack.”
“To carry the coffin?”
“To fill some others.”
The sun broke behind Wyatt, an open wound on the flats south of the Whetstones with their shadows clawing the valley. Doc scabbarded his pistol and stepped down off the porch.
Bloody Season Page 17
