Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  PART FOUR

  THE PALLBEARERS

  It is often said that every nation has the government it deserves. What is much more certain is that every nation has the newspapers it deserves.

  —Matthew Arnold,

  Civilization in the United States, 1883

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Stilwell and Ike Clanton are here.” Sherman McMasters wiped coffee from his red whiskers. He had managed to sleep aboard the train and his thoughts were always slow to turn over when he had slept during the day. “Well, hell, they are standing trial for that Bisbee stage holdup. Are we fixing to blast our way into the Tucson courthouse?”

  Wyatt rested a hand on the table and leaned closer. His breath smelled of stale tobacco. “I mean here at the station. Warren saw them.”

  Morgan Earp had boarded the westbound train at Contention in an unlined white pine box with the lid nailed shut and Colton, Calif. scribbled on the foot in thick carpenter’s pencil in the head porter’s round hand. The others had left the buckboard and buggy and horses at the livery and ridden in a coach to Tucson, where there was a supper stop. Lou wore a black dress and veil and the men had on black armbands and guns under ankle-length dusters. Mattie and Allie wore capes and broad hats tied with scarves under their chins to protect them from cinders. James and Nellie and her daughter Hattie had taken an earlier train.

  “How do you want to handle it?” McMasters asked.

  “First let’s get Virge and Allie back on board.”

  The couple were eating alone at a table in the dining room of Porter’s Hotel near the depot. McMasters occupied a corner table with a view of both entrances and his Winchester leaning against it. Wyatt carried a sawed-off Stevens ten-gauge shotgun mounted on a brass frame. When Virgil and Allie were finished they walked ahead across the platform with Wyatt and McMasters following. They were not hiding their weapons under their dusters now, but carrying them in both hands out in the open. Virgil leaned a little on his wife as they walked. His left arm hung in a black sling.

  Warren, getting rawboned now like his brothers, no longer just lanky, and sporting proper moustaches, was standing by the passenger coaches with a Winchester. Wyatt caught his eye and Warren pointed across the track with his chin. It was dark out and steam from the oily black boiler curled white in the lights of the station.

  Doc climbed down from another car as Allie was helping Virgil up the steps. Doc had his coat wrapped around his right arm with a shotgun inside it. “Stilwell’s on the other side,” he told Wyatt. “He’s heeled.”

  “Rifle or pistol?”

  “Pistol.”

  “What about Clanton?”

  “I never saw him.”

  Wyatt reached up and touched his brother’s good arm.

  “Turkey Creek Jack is to stay with you and Allie until the train starts moving. Remind him.”

  “I guess I am not so crippled I cannot protect my own wife.”

  “Morg was not crippled at all.”

  Virgil nodded. His face had grown fat, pigging his eyes, which had lost some of their blue directness.

  “So long, Virge. I’ll be seeing you soon.” Wyatt stuck out his free hand.

  Virgil took it. “Take care of yourself, Wyatt.”

  “I intend to.”

  The whistle brayed, summoning passengers. Wyatt and the others started up the track toward the engine. They spread out as far as the platform would let them. Mcasters’s shortness spoiled the formation a little. Steam churned around their legs.

  “There!” Doc raised his shotgun.

  The acetylene lamp mounted on the front of the towering engine made a stick figure of the man running through it, throwing his shadow thirty yards. The shadows received him on their side of the tracks.

  Wyatt gestured with his shotgun and the men turned left toward a line of coaches standing on a siding. The westbound was pulling out now, its wheels scraping for traction on the greasy rails. A jet of steam reflected light off a face in the shadow of the stationary cars. McMasters and Warren Earp fired their Winchesters. The reports rattled with the levers working between them. Doc’s shotgun boomed.

  The train was picking up speed, shaking the ground and fluttering yellow light from its chain of windows into the narrow alley between the platform and the siding. Frank Stilwell, hatless in a store suit, lay on the cinder bed supporting himself on his right elbow. His left leg was sprawled at an unnatural angle and he had a hand on his right thigh, darkening between the fingers. His left sleeve and both trousers legs glistened. His pistol was in his right trousers pocket, trapped under his own weight.

  Wyatt’s shadow crossed his face. Without the trademark cigar it was a boy’s face, white and contorted. “Morg!” Trying to rise, he grasped at the only lever that presented itself, the barrels of Wyatt’s shotgun. “Morg!”

  The whistle brayed.

  Special to the Epitaph

  Tucson, March 21—This morning at daylight the track man from the Southern Pacific Railroad found the body of Frank Stilwell, about one hundred yards north of Porter’s Hotel at the side of the track, riddled with bullets. . . . Just as the train was leaving six shots were heard in the locality of the assassination, but attracted no particular attention and nothing was known of the tragedy until this morning when the body was discovered. Six shots went into his body—four rifle balls and two loads of buckshot. Both legs were shot through and a charge of buckshot in his left thigh and a charge through his breast, which must have been delivered close, as the coat was powderburnt, and six buckshot holes within a radius of three inches.

  Turkey Creek Jack Johnson—sometimes called Mysterious Jack after his hero, Mysterious Dave Mather, but only by himself—was six feet of backward-leaning male panther with a set of pointed whiskers like Louis Napoleon’s and a slight limp from a twisted ankle suffered when he leaped off the westbound train. He caught up with the Earps and McMasters and Doc on their way across the rail yard after the shooting and spent the next two hours with them pumping frightened desk clerks for descriptions of their guests and searching faces in saloons. But the town was fresh out of Ike Clanton, and the group returned to the station and shared an empty boxcar on the eastbound freight. It was steel cold inside and hoboes had urinated in the corners. Warren slept. McMasters tried to, gave up and lit a cigar. The pungent smoke deadened the ammonia stench from the corners. Turkey Creek Jack and Doc played blackjack with Doc’s deck, Holliday doing most of the winning, until the moon moved behind a cloud and stayed there. Wyatt rode in silence near the open door with his knees up and his arms folded on top of them supporting his chin. His strong jowls were last to fade into shadow.

  At Contention they claimed their horses and the buckboard and buggy and rode back to Tombstone, five men scratchy-bearded and nodding in clothes they had been wearing for thirty-six hours. The Epitaph had carried the wire story of Stilwell’s killing; a crowd clotted around the entrance to the West End Corral while they were inside and followed them on foot up Allen to the Cosmopolitan. The five formed a flying wedge on the boardwalk with weapons exposed, ignoring questions and jerking their buttstocks at anyone who came close. When they entered the hotel the crowd remained outside.

  McMasters and Turkey Creek Jack shared Virgil and Allie’s old room. Doc took his, and Wyatt and Warren bunked together. At three o’clock in the afternoon Tom Fitch tapped on Wyatt’s door and when Wyatt answered with his shotgun at belt-buckle level the attorney told him that Johnny Behan and City Marshal Dave Neagle were waiting in the lobby to arrest him.

  He lowered the gun. “How many others?”

  “Six or eight out front,” Fitch said. “They are all armed.”

  “I never featured them to come any other way.” Wyatt let him in.

  Doc Holiday entered close behind him in outdoor gear and cradling a shotgun, and Fitch knew then that he had been watching from the room across the hail. He looked fitter than Fitch had seen him in months. Warren, barefooted and in long johns patched at the k
nees, was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hair in snarls and a .44 American like Wyatt’s in his right hand. When he saw Fitch he let down the hammer gently and laid the pistol atop the walnut bureau. He reached for his trousers slung over the back of a chair.

  “Tom, maybe you’d better wait up here until this blows off.” Wyatt shrugged into his horsehair coat and duster and put on his hat.

  “Not for a dollar. I will see this.”

  “It’s your hide.” He picked up his shotgun. “I’ll take point. Warren, you’re behind me. Sherm and Jack will back you and Doc will slam the back door.”

  “I am always riding drag,” Doc said.

  “You just spray the room if we go down. Be sure and get Johnny.”

  “If I get only one, Johnny will be the one I get.”

  The door to the others’ room sprang open as soon as Doc rapped on it. McMasters and Turkey Creek Jack were dressed and carrying their Winchesters. They filed into the hole waiting for them and the group started down.

  “I’m fond of parades,” said Jack.

  Neagle, a square brown man in a felt hat and canvas coat with a star pinned to it, was standing with Behan on the floral carpet in the lobby. The sheriff’s face was shadowed under his broad flat brim and he had a Cooper pistol in glistening leather on his hip. They watched the party descend the narrow staircase behind rifles and shotguns. Doc stopped as soon as he cleared the arch and stood with one foot on a higher step and his ten-gauge in both hands at hip height. Fitch watched from the landing.

  Wyatt paused on the lowest step. His shotgun rested in the crook of his right arm. The grandfather clock next to the staircase chimed late with a grinding of gears thirsty for oil. Behan jumped a little on the first gong.

  When it was finished, Neagle said, “This is none of my affair. Johnny thinks if I talk with you we can save some trouble.”

  The newel post on the staircase banister supported a brass knob the size of a croquet ball. Wyatt shifted the shotgun to his left arm and rested his right hand on top of the knob, spreading the fingers.

  “Dave, you tell that chickenshit sheriff that I will let him cut off any finger on that hand if he will only try to arrest me.” He was looking at Behan, who had raised his face out of shadow.

  “I will see you alone,” Behan said.

  Wyatt came down off the step and brought his open right palm up swiftly. The sheriff’s hat spun off, exposing his balding pate. He started and touched the handle of his Cooper. Doc palmed back both hammers on his shotgun with a double click. Behan dropped his hand.

  Wyatt said, “Johnny, if you’re not careful you will see me once too often.”

  Behan looked small without the hat. He picked it up, swept dust off the crown, squared it over his eyebrows, and went out. Warren laughed shortly.

  Wyatt told him to shut up. “Dave?”

  Neagle turned his palms out at his sides. “My jurisdiction does not include shootings in Tucson.”

  The others came down into the small lobby. Fitch descended last. “Johnny will find his balls out there in the street with the others,” he told Wyatt.

  “He hasn’t warrants or he’d have served them. If he admires to open fire on a deputy U.S. marshal and his sworn posse he will answer to Prescott.”

  “He will do his explaining in hell,” Doc said.

  Wyatt shook hands with Fitch and went out, trailing the others in the same formation they had assumed on the stairs. Allen Street was busy and Behan and his deputies stood next to the boardwalk out of traffic, their shotgun muzzles resting on the edge of the walk. As the Earp party turned west, Warren blew a kiss to Billy Breakenridge, who flushed to his hat. They stopped at the Papago Cash Store for supplies, McMasters and Turkey Creek Jack standing watch outside, then saddled fresh mounts in the corral. Wyatt threw his pouches over Dick Naylor, a round-muscled black he had brought with him to Tombstone from Dodge City. They rode single file out Fremont Street with their linen dusters eared back behind the handles of their pistols and their long guns across their saddle throats and cartridge belts slung from the horns. They passed the narrow empty lot next to Fly’s boardinghouse where the fight had started and the house on the corner of Third where Billy Clanton died and where the McLaurys were laid out and didn’t look at them.

  At the top of a bayonet-studded rise overlooking the sprawl of frame and adobe buildings that made up Tombstone, Wyatt dragged the last out of a cigar and snapped the stub at a horned toad, which darted into a mescal clump an instant before it struck. Then he swung Dick Naylor’s head northeast. The others followed.

  They never went back.

  The Dragoons reared straight up out of a flatiron plain littered with chaparral and mesquite, a broken wall ocean-blue against a bright metal sky and fluted like a hornpipe. Cochise had hidden there and then Geronimo, burying their naked braves facedown in the sand for a mile around the foothills, to come erupting up out of the ground like the Coichian dead and fall upon small parties of whites with clubs and Springfields, yelping like coyotes. Sudden country.

  “That’s Pete Spence’s timber stand there to the south,” said Turkey Creek Jack. He had dismounted to let his piebald nuzzle water out of his cupped palm. The animal lipped the last of it off his fingers and he swigged from his canteen.

  Doc spat, got some pink on the toe of his boot in the stirrup, and rubbed it against his gray’s barrel side. “How do we know he’s there?”

  Wyatt said, “He was not in Tucson and he is wanted in Tombstone. Charleston will not have him and I do not covet riding into Galeyville without Wyatt Berry Stapp and the federal cavalry.”

  The timber was scrub and cottonwoods and a number of the tall straight pines the Indians called lodgepole, standing around a spring-fed watering hole on the western slope of the Dragoons, blue-green and cool, a cathedral of shade in a desert cracking under a summering sun. As the party drew within earshot a hammering noise like gunshots reverberated in the mountains. It was followed by an agonized crackling and a rush of falling foliage, a tree surrendering to the blows of an axe.

  The riders circled east to come in from high ground. Long before they would have been seen, the horses smelled water and a high whinny escaped Doc’s bay before he could clamp a hand over its nostrils. They broke into gallop then, and Sherman McMasters lifted his rifle when a small brown man standing near the water hurled down his axe and ran away up the rocky incline.

  “Slow him down!” Wyatt shouted. “Don’t kill him.”

  McMasters swung off at the base of the slope and dropped to one knee on the marshy ground with his cheek against the buttstock and his elbow braced on his raised thigh. He drew a bead on the half-naked figure spread-eagled on the rocks above and stroked the trigger. The man shouted and slapped his leg. The echo of the report wobbled among the broken peaks and died rustling.

  McMasters levered another cartridge into the chamber. “Come down.”

  The man was crouched holding his left thigh with both hands. He stood up awkwardly and picked his way down the steep grade, dangling the leg. At the base he raised both hands and stood with most of his weight on his right foot. He was a narrow Mexican, shirtless, with clumps of muscle in his upper arms and an incipient pot with a knob for a navel. He had long black hair, slick like his body, and triangles of black stubble on a long upper lip like a monkey’s. He wore broken boots laced to his knees and dirty white cotton trousers belted with a rope and stained red down the left leg. McMasters lowered his Winchester and got up.

  “Hardly drew blood.” He sounded disgusted.

  “Wind was against you,” said Doc, dismounting. He coughed and spat.

  Wyatt stepped down in front of the Mexican. “Who are you?”

  The Mexican said nothing. He was breathing heavily from his climb but his face was a plank with knotholes for eyes.

  Wyatt backhanded him. The Mexican caught his balance on the injured leg and took in his breath. “I said who are you.”

  Turkey Creek Jack was watching f
rom the saddle. “I don’t think he savvies American.”

  “Doc.”

  “If it hasn’t to do with raising stakes or pulling teeth my Spanish is no good.”

  “Que es su nombre?” McMasters asked.

  The Mexican’s face became animated: light came into the knothole eyes and the monkey lip lifted away from amber teeth and black gums. “Me liamo Florentino.”

  “Is that his first name or his last?” asked Wyatt.

  “Que es su nombre otro?”

  “Tengo no otro, señor.”

  Wyatt slapped him again. “Only a bastard hasn’t a second name. Ask him is he a bastard.”

  McMasters didn’t know the word for bastard. He asked him if he had a father.

  “Si; naturalmente.” He looked puzzled.

  “Tell him he’s a liar.”

  The Mexican shook his head hard, spraying sweat. “No, por la vera cruz.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I think he said it’s Cruz.”

  “That is progress. Ask Florentino Cruz why he ran.”

  “Por qué corra usted?”

  The Mexican answered in a torrent of Spanish and Yaqui.

  “He says it’s his practice to run when gringos with guns are chasing him.”

  Warren was watering his blaze-face at the spring. “He looks like a half-breed to me. What’s the name of that breed was seen with Stilwell the night Morg got it?”

  “Indian Charlie,” Wyatt said. “This one’s no breed.”

  “Around the eyes, a little,” said Doc.

  Turkey Creek Jack said, “You can go either way with a greaser.”

  “Se llama Indian Charlie?” McMasters asked.

  “Forget that. Ask him where’s Spence.”

  “Tombstone, señor.”

  Wyatt slapped him, putting his weight behind it. The Mexican sat down on the ground.

  “Tell him to get up.”

  McMasters kicked him in the ribs. “Arriba.”

  The Mexican rose with difficulty. All the flatness was gone from his expression now.

  “Ask him again.”