Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  “Wyatt!”

  It was Dave Leahy, trotting his mustang up the street toward them. He reined in and leaned on his pommel. The mustang, barely broken, stirred restlessly, eyeing them fiercely. “There you are, Wyatt! Smith’s out of town, and Meagher asked me to get you—there’s a few deputies on the bridge already but I don’t think they’re going to be able to hold those boys.”

  “Anybody shot?” Wyatt asked. “I heard gunfire.”

  “Firing into the air, so far. Seems it was some remarks from you that started it and Meagher thinks if you set the fire you ought to put it out.” Virgil grunted. “You see there, Wyatt? Sometimes you push it a button too far.”

  “Could be you’re right,” Wyatt admitted. “I’m coming, Dave. Virgil, you don’t have to mix in.”

  “No, I sure as Hell don’t,” Virgil said, but he set off at Wyatt’s side toward the bridge over the Arkansas River.

  Bat was already there, with Behrens and Cairns and two other deputies, facing off a milling mob of Texas cowboys gathered in the middle of the bridge—under a mob of blazing stars. Several of the Texans carried lanterns—all of them flourished guns, glinting silver and blue-steel in the angry starlight.

  A horseman trotted onto the bridge from the Delano side, and the crowd parted for him—he rode into the overlapping circles of lantern light, and Wyatt saw that it was Mannen Clements, a Dragoon pistol in hand

  “We should have brought a shotgun,” Virgil murmured.

  “Here’s one I’ll gladly give up to you,” Behrens said nervously.

  “I’ll take it,” Wyatt said, and, shotgun in hand, he took two long strides up onto the bridge, ahead of the other deputies. He figured Meagher was right: this was his fire to put out.

  Finger on the trigger, Wyatt held the shotgun firmly in his hands—pointed at no one, as yet, but clearly ready to pop to his shoulder. Held in that way it was a message understood by every man there: Push any harder and the shotgun swings your way.

  “Mannen!” Wyatt shouted—his tone rang with authority, but he also gave it a kind of respect for the man he was addressing. “Hold that stud up, right there!”

  Mannen Clements looked at the shotgun, and the men blocking the bridge—and reined in his horse.

  “What’s all this about, Mannen?” Wyatt asked. For a moment he thought his heart was beating so loud the men could hear it. But his face was the one he used for poker—with just a glint of warning in his eyes. He couldn’t let these men know how scared he was.

  Clements’ horse, sensing the tension, was almost dancing in place as the cowboy held the reins with one hand, the pistol tilted up in the other. He glowered balefully down at Wyatt Earp. “‘Scared to show’, you said, Earp. You’re just a damned day-labor deputy but you have insulted every man in the territory of Texas. All the Texans I was able to locate in Wichita are here to ask for satisfaction.”

  There was a cheer from the Texans, at that.

  “Quiet down and let them talk!” Virgil bellowed. He’d drawn his pistol and he held it in the air like a baton, to draw their eyes—and as an unspoken warning of his own.

  “Maybe now you’d like to apologize, Earp!” Hoy suggested. He was standing beside Clements’ horse, his own weapon drawn but so far pointed at the boards of the bridge.

  Wyatt was faced with a kind of dilemma. If he apologized, he’d be backing down in front of these men—and his sway over them, come a hard situation, would evaporate. He expected to work for Meagher, when Mike was elected Town Marshal. He’d need that authority.

  On the other hand if he told Clements and Hoy to go to Hell, there could be a bloodbath. Men had been killed for less in a mob situation. These men were drunk and angry and, most of all, each had something to prove to the others.

  The only way to stop this, he calculated, was to stop their leader—and that seemed to be Clements. But killing him wasn’t the way to do it, unless there was no other choice.

  “Most of you men work for Mr. Pierce, or the Circle C,” he said at last. “Do you think your bosses want you to get shot up, or locked in the city jail? You’d best ask yourself what they want you to do!”

  “They’d want us to make you answer straight!” Clements burst out, drawing his other pistol. “Do you apologize or not? And that means putting down your gun and … I think he ought to pay a fine, don’t you, boys? Maybe we’ll have his boots and guns too!” The cowboys cheered at that.

  Wyatt said, “Can’t apologize when I didn’t make the insult. You didn’t understand me, is all. I can say I’m sorry I didn’t make myself understood. I’ve ridden with many a Texan and I’ve plenty of respect for them.”

  “There!” Bat put in. “That shows Wyatt’s heart’s in the right place, boys! Let’s have some peace and quiet so you boys can get your business done! There’s ladies at Ida May’s sighing for you right now!”

  There was a smattering of laughter at that; a little easing of tension.

  “You’ve all got to go on back, now!” Wyatt said. He made eye contact with Mannen Clements, and hardened his face.

  And very slowly and deliberately, he cocked the hammers back on the shotgun.

  “Mind me now, Mannen!” Wyatt whispered, in a voice only loud enough for Clements and Hoy to hear—but his tone was insistent. “Put up those guns and go on home!”

  Clements looked at the cocked-back hammers of the shotgun. Then he shrugged expansively, holstered his gun, and said loudly, “I accept your goddamn apology!”

  And he turned his horse, riding at an easy trot through the crowd, back to Delano. Talking and laughing and grumbling, the others trailed after him.

  “That was as close to a local war as I ever want to see,” Virgil said.

  “It’s not over yet,” said Bat. “Pierce, Burke, and the rest of that bunch will be in town in two days.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Bat found Wyatt playing poker in James Earp’s gambling hall, about five in the afternoon in late August. Seeing his friend waving a folded newspaper at him, Wyatt threw in his cards, gathered up his slim winnings, and went to join him at the bar.

  “What’s rustlin’, Bat?”

  “I just thought you’d like to know—as you had some acquaintance with the man. My brother Ed brought this from Deadwood …”

  He handed Wyatt the front page of a newspaper.

  It was a recent copy of Deadwood’s Black Hills Pioneer. Wyatt read:

  ASSASSINATION OF WILD BILL

  HE WAS SHOT THROUGH THE HEAD BY JOHN McCALL

  WHILE UNAWARE OF DANGER

  ARREST, TRIAL, & DISCHARGE OF THE ASSASSIN

  WHO CLAIMS TO HAVE AVENGED

  A BROTHER’S DEATH IN KILLING WILD BILL …

  On Wednesday about 3 o’clock the report stated that J.B. Hickok (Wild Bill) was killed. On repairing to the hall of Nuttall and Mann, it was ascertained that the report was too true. We found the remains of Wild Bill lying on the floor. The murderer, Jack McCall, was captured after a lively chase by many of the citizens, and taken to a building at the lower end of the city, and a guard placed over him. As soon as this was accomplished, a coroner’s jury was summoned, with C.H. Sheldon as foreman, who after hearing all the evidence, which was the effect that, while Wild Bill and others were at a table playing cards, Jack McCall walked in and around directly back of his victim, and when within three feet of him raised his revolver, and exclaiming, “damn you, take that,” fired; the ball entering at the back of the head, and coming out at the centre of the right check causing instant death, reached a verdict in accordance with the above facts …

  Wyatt felt his heart sinking within him. “Shot from behind! Hickok always tried to sit with his back to the wall. I told him not to let that drunken lunatic stay in Deadwood. But he didn’t want to show himself afraid of such a man. And McCall was too low for Hickok to call out.” He pored over the article again, and shook his head. “I don’t believe it—they let the murdering bastard go!”

  Bat nodded sadly. “Yes t
hey did, Wyatt. It seems that Wild Bill had enemies in Deadwood. One of them was a man named Johnny Varnes—he had a run-in with Hickok in Colorado. It seems McCall worked up a grudge for Hickok but put it aside after you clobbered him. Then this Varnes got McCall fired up again and fanned the flame with cash. Offered him two hundred dollars to backshoot Hickok. Ed thinks Varnes and his friends got McCall released. They paid off some of the jury and tried to make Hickok look like a red-handed murderer, with that phony story about his brother—from what I hear, McCall has no brother.”

  “He won’t get far,” Wyatt mused aloud. “Charlie Utter or California Joe or Jane Cannary will kill him if no one else does … And if I come across him …”

  “You won’t have to. Ed says there’s determined talk of re-trying him in another town. Agnes Hickok has hired a man to pursue him. McCall will swing if he’s not shot down first.”

  Wyatt had scarcely known Hickok, but he felt sorrow for the loss of a man he’d admired from boyhood—Wild Bill had been a legendary Civil War spy, and a plains scout, before getting a reputation as a gun hand.

  It was a bitter thing. You might give up lawing, but some noaccount would pop up from the underbrush of the past and shoot you in the back.

  “I’m going riding,” Wyatt said. “I need to think …”

  Bat nodded, and turned to order a drink, as Wyatt walked out of the gambling hall and went to find his horse.

  Henry was in the livery, rubbing the horse down for him. “You going riding, Wyatt? Can I go?”

  Wyatt wanted to go alone, but he had gotten a telegram about Henry, and decided that now was as good a time as any to tell him. “You can borrow that roan I bought for Mattie—Lord knows she almost never rides her, and that horse needs exercise. There’s things we need to talk about.”

  * * *

  They rode along beside the Arkansas River, where they could get relief from the sun in the shade of an occasional cottonwood.

  “We goin’ any place in particular?” Henry asked, at length.

  Gazing out across the plains, Wyatt just shook his head. The sky and the prairie vied for endlessness. The vast vault of blue was broken by the occasional perfectly white, cottony cloud, moving along at a good clip in the welcome breeze. Wyatt watched the shadows of the clouds ripple over the rolling plain. Men came and went that way—like the shadows of clouds. Some men went quicker than others …

  At last, Wyatt said, “Henry, I wired some money to the Pinkertons—their man found your step-daddy for me.”

  Henry’s mouth dropped open like a confused child, showing his buck teeth, once more seeming a much younger boy than he was. He took a deep breath. “Well. So you’re sending me away.”

  “I’m sending you to someplace you’ll be safer. We’re expecting Burke back here in town. He thinks you know too much—although you saw and heard little enough that night. But I think Pierce paid him to kill you. And until he does, he doesn’t collect the money.”

  “We could shoot him down. You almost got him last time.”

  “This isn’t the Black Hills, Henry. And it’s not just Burke. I just feel you need to grow up somewheres safer—where you’ve got family.”

  “That man Antrim ain’t my family.” Henry swallowed, hard, looking away. Wyatt knew the boy was hiding tears. “Shit, I don’t need to hang around with you. I’m staying here—without your help.”

  “Mr. Antrim is expecting you. He’s telegraphed me about it …”

  “He wants a slave, like that Indian did. That’s what he wants me for. A worker he don’t have to pay.”

  “If that’s the case, contact me, and I’ll look into it.”

  “I don’t need to be his slave,” Henry said, as if he hadn’t heard. “I don’t need that kind of life no more. I can find other ways to make a living. One way or the other.”

  Wyatt frowned. Was this another hint that the boy was thinking of turning outlaw? Once at camp, in the Black Hills, Henry had asked him about the outlaws he’d known, and his interest seemed to have a glow of admiration about it—for the outlaws. And he’d talked that way about Dunc Blackburn, at the stagecoach station.

  “Henry, you’re not thinking that outlawry is the way to go, are you? Most of ’em do it because they’re too damn stupid to do anything else. They all get caught.”

  “Cole Younger ain’t stupid and he ain’t been caught.”

  “He’ll be caught or killed. His time’ll come.”

  “At least they make their own way in the world, and be damned to needing anyone else!” the boy said angrily. He climbed down off the roan, and started walking determinedly back along the river-bank toward Wichita.

  “Where the Hell you think you’re going, boy?”

  “Wichita. I don’t need your help—or your whore’s horse, either.”

  A ripple of fury went through Wyatt, and he rode up to the boy, slid off his horse, and grabbed Henry by the collar. “What’d you call my woman, Henry? What’d you say?”

  “Well ain’t she? And you should know about whores!”

  Wyatt kept a grip on the boy’s collar with his left hand, raised his right to slap him. And then in his mind’s eye he seemed to see himself, standing there, about to smack someone half his weight and a foot shorter. He lowered his hand, and let Henry go. He walked back to his mount, shaking his head. “Just get on the damn horse, Henry, it’s too far to walk back to town.”

  But Henry turned and trudged toward Wichita.

  Wyatt took the reins of Henry’s mount, climbed onto his own horse, turned it with a nudge of his knees toward Wichita. He led the roan behind him as he walked his horse alongside the boy.

  “You want to ride shank’s mare that’s your decision,” Wyatt said.

  They made their way slowly toward town. A couple of long, hot, dusty, fly-tormented miles crawled by, and at last Henry said, “Oh I don’t give a damn.”

  He climbed up on the roan and, silently, they rode back to Wichita.

  * * *

  “Burke,” Abel Pierce was saying, as they sat together in Ida May’s place, one evening in early September, “I want you to forget about Wyatt Earp. And the other matter. I have settled my mind about it and it’s done.”

  Burke shook his head. “It’s gone too far for that, Mr. Pierce—for me anyway. Far as I’m concerned, it’s a matter of pride and reputation. I can’t do for Hickok, with him dead by another’s hand—”

  Pierce snorted. It was his opinion that, even if it was true that Hickok’s eyesight had been fading, Wild Bill would’ve shot Burke dead; he’d have nailed him with a single shot out of pure, unerring killer instinct. When they asked Jack McCall why he shot Hickok in the back, instead of facing him, McCall said, “Because I didn’t want to commit suicide.”

  “—but I can do for Earp, right enough,” Burke was saying.

  “I’m paying you well, Johann, and I’ve decided I don’t want unnecessary trouble here. I’ve got business to do. Now if Earp makes me wrathy, I’ll give you the go-ahead. But he’s just a Special Deputy, he can’t do a damn thing.”

  “Can’t he? Suppose he starts pushing on that girl’s dying?”

  “Burke—shut up about that.”

  “Well, sir—just suppose?”

  Pierce poured himself a shot of Kentucky bourbon, and drank it off. He looked up at the upper landing of the stairs sweeping to the second floor, where a freckled chestnut-haired girl caught his eye and waved to him; she was wearing a blouse cut down to her nipples and a dark blue dress hitched up in her fingers to show a length of pale thigh.

  He winked at her and then shook his head, looking away. He had difficulty looking at them at all, now. He judged he’d get over it, some day. But it was strange to think about—regardless of what he’d told Earp on the street that day—these girls having families, somewhere. Mothers and fathers. Even children of their own …

  Chewing his lip, he poured himself another bourbon. “I made up my mind. Don’t push it, Burke.”

  “What abou
t the boy?”

  “Will you keep your voice down? If they were going to use that boy’s testimony against us in court, they would’ve by now. He don’t seem to have seen much.”

  “But he’ll talk, sooner or later. Maybe there won’t be any court case—but you’ll be tried and found guilty another way, Mr. Pierce. You don’t seem like a man who wants to be gossiped about. You talked about running for governor of Texas someday. If the tongues are wagging, well …”

  “I drink with the boys who run this town, Burke. My money’s in their pockets. No one’s going to talk me down.”

  “You think you can do what you like here, Mr. Pierce? How about a little test?” Burke lowered his voice and leaned closer. “How’d it be if we hurrahed the town tonight. Shoot up the place, ride into some saloons like old times, bust a few windows—just to show that you can. And if Earp just happens to get in the way of a bullet …”

  “He’s not a city policeman, right now—he won’t be called to deal with a ‘hurrahing’.”

  “Earp will be there.” He signaled a man at the bar. Overdressed and pompous, the man sauntered over and tipped his hat at Pierce. “Mr. Pierce,” Burke said, “Let me introduce J. Mundale Swinnington …”

  * * *

  Wyatt was playing poker in James’s place, about half an hour before midnight. He was distantly aware that the noise in the gambling hall had grown over the last half hour to a crescendo of argument, laughter, the chatter of chips and the clinking of bottles; it was filled out by shouted betting, demands for drinks, drunken declarations of love and dutiful giggles from the saloon girls. The musicians had to blow and thump and squeal even louder to be heard, adding to the din. This climax of noise was as normal for a Kansas gambling hall late on a Friday night as the rising tide was to the sea. In about an hour, those who’d lost money steadily all evening or who simply had no more funds for drinking would make their way regretfully out the doors; those too drunk to stand would sag into a chair, only to have the bouncer nudge them into leaving. None but the hard-core gaming element would remain. The place would ease down to serious, quiet gambling, and Wyatt was looking forward to it.