Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  That must have become apparent to Curly Bill as early as the summer of 1880, when a tinhorn who called himself Johnny-behind-the-Deuce killed a smelting engineer named Schneider in Charleston. Curly Bill and Ringo were in Tombstone when he was brought in, found that they both owed Johnny-behind-the-Deuce money, decided after knocking back a few that the dead man was a dear friend, and elected to square all their debts with one rope. But before they could organize a mob, the prisoner was on his way to trial in Tucson in the company of Wyatt Earp, then serving as deputy sheriff, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and temporary officers Doc Holliday, Sherman McMasters, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, Shotgun Collins, Jack Salmon, and Fred Dodge. When he learned of it, Curly Bill stood in the middle of Allen looking like a man who had soiled himself waiting his turn in a whorehouse. No one laughed.

  In November of that year Curly Bill got drunk and shot City Marshal Fred White in the belly, so close the powder-flash set White’s trousers afire. Curly Bill was arrested, then released on White’s deathbed testimony that he had shot himself accidentally with Curly Bill’s pistol while attempting to disarm him. Back in Charleston, Curly Bill boasted that he had tricked White with the border roll, and Ringo, who knew the hazards of exaggeration, grew sad, because he knew too that if there had ever been a chance of striking up a relationship with the Earps it was gone now, because they had been close to the dead man and the claim was bound to get back to them. Curly Bill knew it too, and avoided Tombstone for a long time after that.

  Sometime Charlestonians Billy Leonard, Harry Head, and Jim Crane mucked up an assault on the Benson stage the following March, killing driver Bud Philpot and a passenger named Roerig but failing to secure the bullion. Thanks to Marshall Williams, who sent a revealing telegram to San Francisco for Wyatt, Ringo and most of the cowboys on the San Pedro knew of the transaction involving Ike Clanton, Frank McLaury, Joe Hill, and Wyatt Earp as soon as they made it, to deliver the three robbers to Earp in return for the reward. Curly Bill was at this time recovering from an altercation in Galeyville in which a friend had fired a ball into his neck that came out his face, and Old Man Clanton had himself wound up to drag through the cactus any man who accused his son of treachery, so it fell to Ringo and Pete Spence to devise a fitting punishment.

  It waited for other business. In June, a party made up of Pete Spence, Pony Deal, Frank Stilwell, Ike, Phin, and Billy Clanton, and led by Ringo, crouched sweating in the broken shale atop Skeleton Canyon in the Guadalupes and waited for a column of Mexicans in sombreros and bandoliers to lead their mules out of the shadows into the sunlight below. When they were all clear, Pony Deal screeched like a hawk and the men above emptied their Winchesters and Henrys into the column. The reports clattered off the canyon walls and lead twanged against stone and the mules brayed and plunged and the Mexicans tried to jerk their rifles from the packs and gave up and ran or drew pistols and sent hopeless balls toward unseen targets well out of range and shot the mules to make breastworks and spun and staggered and doubled over and fell and clawed at the cliffs and died or lay whistling through punctured lungs with their jaws shot away waiting for the gringos to come down and walk through and put balls in their heads. Nineteen Mexicans perished there for seventy-five thousand dollars in silver bullion smuggled from the gringo mines up north. Some of those who found the black and bloated bodies days later blamed the attack on Apaches. Others wondered loudly what use Indians had for silver.

  Among the latter were the vaqueros who trailed Old Man Clanton and five others driving a herd of stolen cattle through Guadalupe Canyon in July. Imitating the Skeleton raid, the Mexicans poured lead into them from the rocks above, killing all but one, including the old man and Jim Crane, one of the men who had tried to hold up the Benson stage. Curly Bill and Ringo were engaged in treeing Sonora with the McLaurys and the younger Clantons to celebrate Curly Bill’s recovery and got the story from a Yaqui mescal peddler. About that time, Crane’s partners Leonard and Head tried to stick up the Haslett brothers’ store in Huachita and the brothers shot them to pieces. When that news reached Curly Bill, busy with the others burying the putrefying corpses in the canyon, he cut out a bunch of hard riders including Ringo and Pony Deal and galloped to Huachita to clean the Hasletts’s plow. After the party rode out of town shooting out windows and riddling signs, locals counted seventeen bullet holes in Ike Haslett’s broken body and twenty-two in his brother Bill’s.

  If Ike Clanton and Frank McLaury were more aggrieved than the others by the deaths of the stagecoach raiders, they didn’t show it, possibly because they’d been questioning the wisdom of their understanding with Wyatt Earp and were relieved. Phin blubbered over the loss of the old man, but Ike seemed glad enough to be free of his querulous ways, and although Billy had to be restrained from going after the bushwhackers and slaughtering any odd Mexican that crossed his trail, he had always been embarrassed by his father and made no show of sorrow. Curly Bill naturally assumed leadership of the San Pedro cowboys after that.

  Pete Spence surprised everyone with his imagination when he suggested Ike and Frank’s proper accounting for having conspired to betray Leonard, Head, and Crane. Cornering the pair, Spence and Ringo and Curly Bill encouraged them to draw the Earps into a face-off in Tombstone, at which time the rest of the cowboys would back them up and clear out the only opposition worth mentioning in Tombstone. Ike and Frank demurred at first, but they had already begun to suspect that their transaction was known, and eventually agreed in the face of some heavy hints on Curly Bill’s part. Joe Hill was in Mexico and so was left out of the arrangement. When the face-off came, of course, the two would find themselves alone against the Earps, and either way it went was bound to show profit for the rest. Johnny Behan, whose woman Josephine had been stolen from him by Wyatt, now a deputy marshal working under his brother Virgil, could be counted on not to interfere with any genuine conviction.

  Nobody expected things to go as smoothly as that. When the smoke cleared and Ike was still running, the cowboys celebrated having rid themselves of both McLaurys and Billy Clanton and figured Behan and the county would see to the Earps and Holliday. They didn’t, but when Frank and Tom’s moneybags brother Will came out of the wainscoting waving a bounty for the Earps and their friends, Ringo got drunk and challenged Holiday to a Texas bandanna fight, only Billy Breakenridge and Jim Campbell broke it up and Wyatt tumbled to the rifles at Ringo’s back and called Holliday off. Ringo paid a ten-dollar fine for carrying firearms in town.

  Some of it was just plain hoorawing, like sticking up the Benson stage with John Clum aboard and punching a few holes in the clouds and Frank Stilwell laughing fit to fall down when the bald-headed little mayor ran off flapping his arms like a rooster with pepper up its ass. That sort of play drew off steam and kept the Earps teetering and inclined to take chances to show their steel.

  After Christmas, Ringo crouched inside the damp adobe of the Huachuca Water Company building with Stilwell and Hank Swilling and a couple of others and waited until Virgil Earp had crossed Fifth Street and stood silhouetted against the lighted windows of the Eagle Brewery before cutting loose with five ten-gauge shotguns. But the distance was too great and they only crippled him. They just had time to leave behind a hat tying Ike Clanton to the attack before fleeing the building. Ike had become a running joke, the man everyone stuck with the bill after a big meal because he was in no position to object.

  Ringo hid out in Mexico for a time after that drinking tequila and mescal on Will McLaury’s money and spreading clap among the senoritas there, and so did not take part in the killing of Morgan Earp in Hatch’s billiard hall. He suspected Pete Spence, and when he finally made his way back among the cowboys he learned that a breed named Indian Charlie had had an oar in, but couldn’t feature him among the Mexicans and digger Indians who drifted around the cowboys’ spurs like blown leaves.

  By then Stilwell had been killed in the Tucson rail yard, and someone who may or may not have been Indian Charlie at Spence’s w
ood ranch in the Dragoons. When word came in that Wyatt and Holliday were claiming Curly Bill in the Whetstones, Ringo volunteered to ride in Behan’s posse along with Ike and Phin Clanton and Pony Deal and others, but the only satisfaction he got from that was watching that candy-ass Billy Breakenridge slink off to sulk in his tent because the sheriff gave Ringo Billy’s favorite horse. A couple of times they drew within looking range of the Earp party, but Behan was reluctant to start things and Ringo suspected the posse was just barking at their heels until they quit the territory, which they did, crossing the Chiricahuas into New Mexico at the end of a week. Behan turned back after that.

  Tombstone was as dead as Frank Stilwell. Pete Spence was in custody, Curly Bill was dead or in hiding, Ike and Phin were keeping their profiles flat on their ranch, and a lot of the others had lit out when Wyatt and his friends started burning the brush for Curly Bill. A second big fire had swept down Allen, following the same course as the June 1881 blaze. In a tent pitched on the ruins of the Oriental, Ringo and Pony Deal played poker with Billy Claiborne and Frank Leslie, but those two didn’t get along and when Ringo filled his glass a third time they threw in. He had acquired a bad reputation after a Charleston game in which he had gotten drunk and stuck up his fellow players for what was on the table. Although he had returned the money when he sobered up, the story had made it hard for him to find a game.

  Pony Deal won the last few hands and they split up. Ringo rode to Charleston, found none of the old faces there, and struck east toward Galeyville. It was July, back-of-the neck hot but with the first iron smell of rain coming down from the mountains.

  His luck was souring in Arizona. John J. Gosper had finished out his temporary term as governor and given ground to F. A. Tritle, a hard-line supporter of President Arthur, who had granted permission to establish a territorial police force to suppress outlawry. The good times were done in Cochise County, as they had been in Texas when the Rangers stopped fighting Indians and started rounding up bandits. Ringo thought that after Galeyville he would head on up to Colorado and see how the grass grew in gold country. He made camp in Turkey Creek Canyon and went to sleep in a green oak grove with his Colt’s in his right hand and his Winchester leaning against a scrub close by, Colorado his last thought.

  He never had another.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Globe was going bluenose on Kate, as all towns did eventually. The city council started by drafting ordinances regulating advertising and signs belonging to establishments such as hers, then prohibited her girls from appearing on the town’s north side during the hours of daylight under penalty of fines, and finally went to nickel-and-diming her to death with health codes requiring monthly physical examinations for the girls by a city-accredited physician. Kate had no objections to the checkups, for she had seen too many young women knocked down to drooling idiots by filth carried by swaggering cowboys and buffalo runners who thought it the measure of a man, and indeed the precautions she took to protect the hygiene of her girls had become a legend on the circuit during the brief time she had been in management; but when it came to not being allowed to choose her own doctor, and to having to kick in to the city treasury for the services of the prig they sent, she saw the fine white hands of the councilmen’s wives in the transaction. Time alone separated Globe from a direct ban on pleasure houses inside the city limits. It had happened in just about every place she had been in since Atlanta except Tombstone, and if rumors could be counted and the bottom was getting set to drop out from under the price of silver, it was coming there too. People got mean about where other people’s money was going when there wasn’t much of it around.

  When it happened here, she could go on as before, by paying the local law to keep from closing her down beyond the customary election-day raid, or she could pull up stakes and set them down outside the limits. The first plan was at least as expensive as reimbursing the council for letting its-man poke instruments up the girls’ business ends, and there was no guarantee that the law wouldn’t just take the money the first time she offered it and bust up the place anyway, or keep hiking the price, or cut themselves into a full partnership the way James Earp had done in Dodge when his brother Wyatt was a police officer there and their friends Ed and Bat Masterson ran the county. The second alternative meant giving up the building in Globe and going back to a mildewed tent like in Fort Griffin.

  Neither choice appealed to her, so she turned the place into a boardinghouse. People had to eat and sleep, basic human needs she understood at least as well as her specialty. It had been a good year. She had enough cash on hand to stake some of the girls out of town—not including the one who had helped herself to the profits while she was away; that one had married one of Kate’s best customers, a miner, and the two were currently working a claim up in the Apaches—and to pay two of the older women to stay on as cook and housekeeper. She recommended old customers to former rivals, who in turn talked up her place to satiated clients looking for a roof and a hot meal. Clean sheets and simple good food did the rest. Had she run the business like a real boardinghouse she might have made almost as much money as before, without the overhead of having to keep her girls in clothes, paint, and medical attention. But she didn’t.

  In the early days, when Kate employed a big Negro to keep order in the house, she would have had him throw out anyone who accused her of keeping a soft heart. Whores with that kind of baggage were strictly for dime novels, expected to oblige the reader’s civilized instincts by taking a fatal bullet meant for the hero in the last chapter. On the circuit, such angels had that horseshit tromped out of them by some smelly wolfer who wore his spurs to bed, or else had it let out along with their guts by some half-breed Mexican whore with a bowie knife; and indeed the odd cowhand who came to Kate with an empty poke and a sad story got nothing free but her broad back. But for other women who had found the West something less than the Eldorado they had had described to them back East she had a weak spot as wide as a dry wash.

  Women on the frontier fell into three piles. Some were hollow-eyed farm wives who skinned and cooked jackrabbits and swept the bugs out of soddies in the middle of three hundred miles of flat gray prairie. Others wore ruffled pastel dresses stained coppery under the arms and unbuttoned the flies of horsey strangers for money in cribs and hotel bedrooms. Still others were imitation men, swearing and spitting and striping mules’ rumps with whips for men’s wages and not being recognized as women until they got shot or died of frostbite or bad whiskey and the coroner stripped them. Actresses didn’t count because they were transients theater-hopping between New York City and San Francisco, and anyway they were the same as whores. All of these women were used up at thirty and few would live to see fifty. Most of those who made their way eventually to Kate’s door had been in one of the three piles, and a fair lot had been in all three. The distinctions were not sharp in a region where a man raised his hat as quickly for a whore as for a wife, and where the term wife referred to a woman who was keeping company with one man under his roof, with or without the blessing of clergy. They came to Kate, widowed or deserted and thousands of miles from home, offering to help around the house in return for bed and board. And she took them in, even after all the jobs worth having done were taken and nonpaying guests outnumbered her legitimate boarders. When a woman was used up for whoring Kate would not turn her away toward what was left.

  Kate was no Nellie Cashman, content to minister to her guests’ suffering and walk around town with her chin high enough to hang a hat on. She balanced the books and argued with the butcher and fed the chickens she kept behind the house and chopped off their heads when they quit laying and weren’t too scrawny to eat and read about Doc’s case in the Arizona Star. He had been arrested in Denver in May and was being held pending extradition back to Tombstone to stand trial for the murder of Frank Stilwell. But Bat Masterson, lately marshal of Trinidad, Colorado, had persuaded the city marshal of Pueblo, where Doc had parted company with the Earps after leaving Ar
izona, to file a charge against Doc for operating a confidence game in that city. The Star, a longtime gleeful observer of the troubles in Cochise County, explained to its readers that the claim would forestall extradition and certain lynching in Tombstone and applauded it as a brilliant maneuver on the part of Doc’s lawyer. Kate, however, sensed the light touch of another con man and wondered where Wyatt Earp whose father had wanted him to study law—was keeping himself.

  When Doc was finally remanded over to the custody of the Pueblo authorities in late June, Kate knew he would be headed for gold-rich Gunnison as soon as he was cut loose from the nonexistent charge, and thought of joining him. The prospect of a vacation from the cloying broken women living in her house of charity was a temptation. But she was afraid that the local wives, who took the presence of so many slatterns as evidence that she was still whoring, would burn her out in her absence, leaving her free boarders to addle in the summer heat without shade; and she feared Doc’s mood. From his description in the newspaper he appeared to be experiencing a bout of stable health, and those times he was most dangerous. She hated to admit even to herself that he attracted her most when he was sick and required care.

  So she stayed where she was, inventing work for the women to do so they would not feel useless and suicidal, fighting with the council, and following in the Tucson press the battle between the Nugget and the Epitaph over who belonged to the body buried at Iron Springs, Curly Bill Brocius or some nameless drifter; but most of the other names that were beginning to appear in connection with Tombstone were unfamiliar to her, and even the Epitaph had changed hands in May and was no longer the mouthpiece of John Clum and the Citizens’ Safety Committee. The departures of Frank and Tom McLaury, their brother Will, Billy Clanton, Bill Leonard, Harry Head, Jim Crane, Old Man Clanton, Pete Spence, Joe Hill, Hank Swilling, Frank Stilwell, Curly Bill, all five Earps and their women, and Doc left gaping holes in the place she remembered. She had the feeling that if she went back now she would know nobody. The town itself had gone up in flames again in late May, when a fire destroyed most of the buildings put back up after the 1881 disaster, as well as the O.K. Corral, a landmark now that everyone was talking about the fight that didn’t take place there, and Fly’s boardinghouse, where it really had taken place and where Kate had lived with Doc. That saddened her, not because she had enjoyed anything about the place—she had been miserable almost her whole time there—but because it made her feel old at thirty-one.