by John Shirley
* * *
“Marshal Meagher?”
The U.S. Marshal looked up from the circulars on his desk. “It’s that youngest Earp boy, isn’t it? I thought you moved out of town.”
“I thought so too. I’m not the youngest Earp boy, Marshal—but I’m sure the one here looking for work.”
In a linen “sack suit”, for the coming of summer, and sporting a waxed handlebar mustache, Meagher might’ve seemed jaunty but for his broad, rugged face and his enormous frame—he weighed 275 pounds, Wyatt had heard. Now Meagher scratched his chin and looked Wyatt up and down.
“Marshal Smith says last fall you came in drunk and cold-cocked his deputy. Trying to let that killin’ Canuck go.”
Wyatt answered without hesitation. “Sir, I don’t like to say anything hard about a peace officer. But Marshal Smith is a lying son of a bitch. I wasn’t drunk, I never tried to let Montaigne go, and I had a reason to smack that dunderhead who keeps Smith’s jail.”
Meagher smiled. Then he suppressed the smile and tried to scowl. But after a moment he gave in and laughed aloud. “Damned if I don’t agree with you about Smith and Carmody!” Meager fell to chuckling, straightening papers on his desk and shaking his head. Then he sobered, looking narrowly at Wyatt. “But you’re getting into gunfights up in the Black Hills, Masterson tells me.”
“Johann Burke’s a hired killer, Marshal. He was stalking me, and I ran him off. Happens he killed a friend of mine too. Later on in Deadwood he threatened my life. Marshal Hickok backed my play and sent him packing.”
“J.B. Hickok? I don’t think he was ever a U.S. Marshal, if that’s what you mean. Town Marshaled in Abilene some. Hickok gets into trouble when he drinks. They’re calling him a vagrant in Cheyenne just to get him out of town before he kills someone. But you know—I always liked him. Hell of a fella.” He lit a small cigar and puffed thoughtfully. “Well … Truth is, I don’t mind crossing Smith by hiring you on—he don’t like me none anyhow because he knows I’m going to run against him for the Town Marshal’s job—my federal appointment’s coming to an end, don’t you know. Let’s see now …” He drummed his fingers on the desk, cigar clenched in his teeth, gazing out the window. After a moment he took the cigar out of his mouth, blew smoke at the ceiling, and went on, “Couple of drovers rode off without paying their bill. Took a wagon they didn’t pay for too, this morning. They come from another territory, making it a Federal matter—or so Smith claims. They’re a good distance from town by now. Mr. Moser’s wagon, it was, and he’s asking me why don’t I give chase, but I’ve got to stick around. Now, Moser will pay a bounty of seventy dollars, entire, plus expenses, if you want to bring those boys back—bring them or the money they owe for the wagon and the bills. I’ve got another man, Behrens, willing to go, but he don’t want to go alone—seems he dislikes being outnumbered. What do you say, are you game?”
Wyatt reflected that seventy dollars split between two men wasn’t much for risking his life out on the prairie. But if he completed this job, it could lead to others, and he knew he was under a cloud with the local peace officers. He wanted his good reputation back.
“All right,” he said. “Which way’d they go?”
* * *
Mattie was sitting up in bed, dressed only in her drawers, clipping a piece from the Wichita City Eagle with her sewing scissors when Wyatt came in about midnight, the day after he’d gotten back from chasing the deadbeat drovers.
“Here you are, Wyatt,” she said, passing him the clipping. “They spelled your name wrong but I like it anyhow.”
Wyatt sat on the bedside and read a brief account of the pursuit of the deadbeats by Special Deputy “Wiatt Earp” and Special Deputy John Behrens. They’d gone almost to the Indian Territory just to bring back some minor thieves.
The Higgenbottom outfit, among other games, stuck M.R. Moser for a new wagon, who instead of putting himself in communication by telegraph with the outside world just got two officers, John Behrens and Wiatt Earp, to light out upon the trail. These boys fear nothing and nobody. To make a long and exciting story short, they just leveled a shotgun and six-shooter upon the scalawags as they lay concealed in some brush, and told them to ‘dough over’, which they did, to the amount of $146, one of them remarking he was not going to die for the price of a wagon. It is amusing to hear Moser tell how slick the boys did the work.
Wyatt snorted. “Makes it sound like the work of a minute. I thought we’d never catch them. And all for thirty-five dollars, on my end. We let ’em go, after they paid up, and surrendered that wagon. Didn’t want the work of bringing them back. We’re just debt collectors, is all.”
“I suppose they weren’t big fish,” Mattie said, taking the clipping back and pressing it into her scrapbook. “But Bat said it shows how much sand you’ve got, going that far to do a small job. It sure makes me proud to read about you.”
He shook his head and leaned back against the headboard. “I just wish I was making more money. It’s all kind of piecemeal. But Marshal Meagher says when he’s elected Town Marshal, he’ll re-hire me onto the city police.”
She looked at him, affecting a little-girl shyness that wasn’t particularly natural to her. “Do you think, then, we could get us a house, Wyatt? Just a small one?”
“We could rent one. I don’t want to buy property here—I don’t know how long I’m staying in Wichita.”
She pouted, still playing the little girl. “You’re leaving me again?”
“I meant … how long we’d stay here. I’m thinking of moving on to California, after I’ve worked here a while longer. Or one of the silver towns in Arizona territory, maybe. Get in at the start of something growing.”
There was no good reason to stay in Wichita for long—a job as Deputy Town Marshal was just something to do before he found his real road in life. He should have left town by now, really. Except he kept hoping that some way he’d find out exactly how Dandi had died, and why—and then he might get her some justice. Her—and Sanchez and Montaigne.
But he sometimes worried that maybe he wanted to get to the bottom of the murder just to prove he was right. Maybe it’s my own vanity, he thought. Pride. He remembered a line his mother had liked to quote from Proverbs: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
He wondered if his pride would destroy him; and if he did fall—would he fall alone? Or would he take Bat Masterson and Henry McCarty down with him?
“Arizona …” Mattie said, seeming to try the place on, in her mind, the way she’d try on a hat. “Arizona … You think we could settle some place like that, have our business and maybe …” She glanced at him. “Children?”
“Could be.” He couldn’t bring himself to speak decisively about it. He didn’t want to deceive her, and though he might want to have children, he wasn’t sure he wanted to have them with Mattie.
“I wish I had a business to take care of,” she went on. “A dry goods store, maybe. Or a dress shop. I get so bored. I tried to sit at one of them sewing circles. That Mrs. Donaldson—she’s the wife of that new preacher—she brought me in to sew. But those women wouldn’t hardly speak to me. I expect word got around …”
She fisted her hands in front of her mouth and began chewing a knuckle, staring into space. After a moment she repeated, softly, “Word got around.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The summer shone relentlessly on, August overtaking Wichita hot and sudden as a prairie fire. Henry mended quickly and dogged Wyatt’s footsteps, looking sullen. When they went out on the plains to hunt, Wyatt taught Henry to ride and to shoot from horseback. They never spoke of the harsh words at the stagecoach—Wyatt figured Henry had been in low spirits, feeling testy from his wound.
Now and then Wyatt asked quietly around about the night Dandi was killed in Bessie’s brothel, but found out nothing new. He had still heard nothing from the U.S. Marshal in Louisiana.
Otherwise, Wyatt dealt Faro for his brother James, played some car
ds himself, and he did the occasional Special Deputy’s job. One Saturday night in August an assignment took him to Ida May’s place in the Delany district.
Her sign read:
Ida May’s Emporium of Gambling
~and~
the Delights of Genteel Companionship
Ida May’s was an ambitious if unfinished combination of brothel and gambling hall. It aspired to opulence. She had purchased an old saloon, rebuilt it piecemeal, and the trappings of the new, velvet-draped, gold-trimmed establishment only partly covered up the raw wood and warped floorboards of the old one. The new pool table stood crookedly on the uneven floor, despite attempts to level it with shims, and the imported mahogany bar, carved with bare-bosomed nymphs, didn’t match the unstained green lumber of the bottle shelves behind it.
Wyatt and Bat took all this in as they made their first inspection of the place, at about ten on a warm night.
“You ever notice, those velvet draperies and cushions are all somewhat reminiscent of soft human flesh, and not accidentally,” Bat remarked.
Wyatt raised his eyebrows at this; Bat was given to high-flown observations.
“The flesh is all up those stairs, there,” Wyatt said. “Except for the bar girls. But what we’re here for is that piano …” Wyatt was weary and wanted the job done. They’d been out hunting with Virgil and Morgan and Henry, most of the day. They had gotten this last minute assignment from a merchant who’d cornered them in the café.
Wyatt’s brother Virgil came in, waving his derby at them. He was not as lean as Wyatt and his droopy, sandy-blond mustache had grown, as Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan had observed, “to compete with the mighty walrus of the Far North.” Virgil wore a small diamond-shaped Special Deputy’s badge, pinned on the lapel of his dark suit for the evening, as did Wyatt and Bat.
From across the room, Wyatt pointed at the piano, on the other side of the modest crowd of cowboys, peddlers, shopkeepers, hostlers and gamblers; Virgil nodded and crossed the room to meet them there. Wyatt noted Mannen Clements, a trim, hard-eyed man in a cowboy’s working outfit, and Pierce’s current ramrod, Hoy, playing poker at a table nearby—Hoy was incongruously dressed in a florid suit with checked pants, perhaps trying to be natty for Ida May’s girls.
Clements was a cousin to the gunman John Wesley Hardin; though not the notorious hard-case his cousin was, it was said he could get himself worked up into a fighting mood pretty easily.
Hoy and Clements were a quarter the way through a bottle of George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey and it showed in their unfocused eyes and red cheeks as they glowered at the lawmen passing their table.
“Hoy’s got a snootful,” Wyatt murmured, as he, Bat and Virgil converged at the piano. “You see any more of Pierce’s hands in here, Virgil?”
Virgil mopped his forehead with a red kerchief as big as a cavalry banner. “Seven or eight of Pierce’s boys. They’ve been trickling into town—he’s got a herd a few miles South and some have come ahead. There’s another ‘tribe’ of Texans here from the ‘Circle C’ outfit too.”
Bat gave the piano an experimental push. “This piano’s on wheels but it’s heavy as an opera singer fond of ice cream.”
“Well,” Wyatt said, “let’s get it done. We’ll explain to Ida May as the piano’s going out the door.” He was not looking forward to loading a piano onto a wagon, on this warm, somnolent evening.
But at that moment a would-be ivories tickler sat down at the upright and began to bang away at the keys: a merry, drunken cowboy with his dusty sombrero pushed to the back of his head and an unlit rolled cigarette disintegrating in his yellow-toothed grin.
“I believe the gentleman has decided to put the screws to ‘Buffalo Gals’,” Bat observed dryly.
“Friend,” Virgil said to the pianist, “We’re going to have to take this piano out from under them talented fingers. It seems Miss Ida May has laid out for more than she can pay and, with the utmost regret, we must repossess this instrument.”
“I’m damned if you are!” the cowboy said, the statement making his cigarette butt fall onto the piano keys. But his grin never wavered and he banged away with ever greater alacrity.
Wyatt made to draw his gun, with a mind to buffaloing the drunken pianist, but Bat shook his head at him. “Don’t need to do that, Wyatt. Let’s just push it out of here and if he wants to go with it, let him.”
Wyatt shrugged and the three deputies took up positions around the piano, rolling it toward the door. The piano bench was on wheels too, and the pianist pushed it along sideways with his feet to follow the piano, banging away as it went, stretching his arms out, maintaining at least some of the familiar song.
The cowboys started by laughing at the piano player but soon turned to shouting outrage at the deputies. “Where the hell you going with the lady’s pianer!”
Miss Ida May swished down the stairs, waving a silk kerchief to get their attention. “Whoa, hold on, boys, what are you after!”
She was a dark woman, perhaps part Indian, in a low-cut scarlet gown that could have served as the cover for a velvet sofa; she had wavy black hair, showing some gray, large black eyes, and skin the color of milk with a liberal splash of coffee in it. Her breasts had fallen some, and her makeup failed to conceal crow’s feet at her eyes. She had worked a long time in the cattle towns before saving enough money for her “emporium”.
“Ida May,” Wyatt said, halting the slow roll of the upright, “You owe five hundred dollars on this piano.” She was a petite woman, but emanating dominion as she swept over to them.
“I paid them two hundred fifty dollars already!”
“It’s a seven-hundred and fifty dollar piano.”
“I am over-reached, boys—that imported bar there nearly broke me. Next time the herds come in …”
“We’ve been appointed to repossess it tonight, Ida May—or to collect the five hundred dollars. They’re not going to wait for the next drive.” Adding, with real regret: “I’m sorry.”
“I haven’t got that much cash on hand—I just paid off the rest of the money for the property, this morning.” She took a step closer and looked at the three men meltingly, her voice softening. “But if you boys would like to take it out in trade, I have three ladies upstairs who’re feeling blue for want of company …”
“Well now …” Bat began, musingly.
“No,” Wyatt interrupted, giving Bat a sharp, reproachful look, “No ma’am, we have to have the money or the piano.”
“What do you mean by taking Ida May’s piano?” Clements demanded, throwing down his cards.
“It’s a low thing to do, right enough, Mannen!” Hoy declared, throwing his cards down too.
“It tain’t my fault,” Wyatt declared, struck by an idea. “It’s your fault that piano’s rolling out of here—it’s laid on all of you men in here!”
“What the devil are you on about, Earp?” Clements demanded. “How is it our fault?”
“Here’s a lady in need, she’s wanting a mere five hundred dollars, which all you boys’ll throw away in a card game in an hour or two. If you were to pass the hat, why, she could have this piano back.”
“That’s it, gents!” Bat chimed, in amusing himself by adding: “You can have the tune-box here if you pony up to the tune of five hundred dollars!”
Some of the cowboys laughed but no one reached for their pokes as yet.
Wyatt shook his head dolefully. “You boys are mostly from Texas, aren’t you? Well that explains it. I don’t suppose they’ve got much but skinflints and dirt scratchers in Texas—you talk big but when it’s time to show …”
“Here’s fifty—no, sixty dollars for your pian-y!” said a cowhand as long and thin as a willow.
“And here’s another seventeen, eighteen … nineteen dollars!” shouted the drover on the piano bench, digging the money out of his vest pocket.
Bat took off his hat and circulated through the room, encouraging the Texans to dough over. The scowling Hoy and Cl
ements had little option but to contribute, and in short order the five hundred dollars was handed to the astonished Madame. She ceremoniously passed it over to Virgil.
“Paid in full!” he shouted, waving the money and prompting a cheer from the crowd.
“One free drink for everyone!” Ida May declared—she was judicious in her gratitude.
Most of the assemblage crowded to the bar but Hoy and Clements simply stood by their table, hands dangling near their pistols. Clements snarled, “Earp—what was it you said, about Texans? I didn’t like the sound of it. You goddamn better well apologize!”
Wyatt snorted and looked at him in disbelief. “Apologize to you?”
“To me and every man here, you string bean son of a bitch!”
Wyatt shook his head. “You keep on with me, Clements, you’ll get something into you can’t buy your way out of.”
Bat exchanged grimaces with Virgil at this—at Wyatt pushing out the limits again.
“Something I can’t …?” Clements turned to Virgil in puzzled outrage, demanding, “What the hell does he mean?” Clements demanded of Hoy. He turned back to Wyatt. “What the hell do you …”
But Wyatt turned on his heel, and strode toward the door.
He could feel Clements’ eyes watching him go. He half expected to be shot in the back. But he went out through the swinging doors without incident. The incident came later.
About eleven-thirty, Wyatt and Virgil were heading up Main Street, Wyatt to his hotel room and Virgil to his boarding house, when they heard a staccato crackling of gunshots from the direction of the bridge over the Arkansas.
The two men turned as one, to look back toward the Delano district. “I don’t reckon that’s a call for us,” Virgil said. “We get one job at a time.”
Wyatt nodded. But both he and Virgil stayed where they were, hesitating, thinking they were probably not needed at the ruckus—they weren’t regular town lawmen—yet not quite able to turn their backs on it…
