The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  “Leave me alone—go find a whore,” Jessie said.

  “I’ll go, but don’t you be talking to Johnny Ringo,” Wyatt said.

  “He was just a customer—I was showing him how to make a gimlet,” she said. “I work for your brother Warren, remember? He don’t want me sulking behind the bar.”

  “Nobody cares what that fool wants,” Wyatt said, and left.

  It took a while for Jessie’s busted lip to stop bleeding; also her face began to puff up. Tomorrow she would be black and blue.

  Maybe I can tell folks I fell off a wagon, she thought.

  -49-

  Warren Earp was meticulous about the upkeep of his gambling establishment, the Last Kind Words Saloon. It didn’t rain much in Tombstone but when it did rain it poured, which is why Warren and his brother Virgil were up on the roof, patching a few leaks, and thus were the first to see the big dust cloud coming from down Sonora way—or the Clanton way, as you preferred. It probably meant that Old Man Clanton was coming through with a big herd of skinny Mexican cattle.

  “Here he comes with a herd,” the roofers yelled, before scampering down.

  Wyatt and Doc were having breakfast on the porch of the saloon; the prospect of having their eggs covered with a lot of Mexican dust did not please them.

  In fact all over Tombstone citizens were slamming windows shut, ripping laundry off clotheslines, quickly stabling horses, or in general trying to prepare in a few minutes to meet the tower of dust created by nine hundred cattle as they passed through a town that was dusty anyway.

  “Why the old bastard; just when I was enjoying my eggs,” Doc said.

  “That old fool . . . has he still got that big lead steer?” Wyatt asked.

  “Old Monte . . . I believe so,” Doc said, referring to a great red ox that Old Man Clanton had acquired somewhere; Monte had a calming effect on the nervous Mexican cattle that he dealt in.

  “By god he’s coming straight through,” Doc added.

  “We’ll see about that,” Wyatt said. He carefully set his breakfast on the porch, stepped quickly into the saloon and returned with a lariat and a .44 pistol, the latter stuck casually under his belt.

  “Uh-oh, Mr. Earp is swinging into action,” Doc said. “Do I need to borrow a firearm on this bright morning?”

  “Don’t bother,” Wyatt said.

  He stepped into the middle of the street and waited. There were six vaqueros driving the cattle—when they saw Wyatt blocking their way they fell silent and looked around anxiously for whatever support the Clantons intended to give.

  To the south, about a mile away, several cowboys—or riders at least—trotted along on the upwind side of the herd, obviously to avoid the dust, which was thick. They had not noticed Wyatt and didn’t seem to be looking for trouble.

  “What are you up to, Wyatt?” Doc asked. “There is no reason to stir up the Clantons and their damn gunhands.”

  “You wasn’t always so damn timid,” Wyatt said, his eye on the great red ox, which was coming peaceably toward him, watched by half the citizens of Tombstone, from whatever vantage points they could secure.

  “Whoa, Monte,” Wyatt said. He gave the big steer a little tap on his nose with the coiled-up lariat, at which point Monte stopped. And, when Monte stopped, so did the Clanton herd, vaqueros and all.

  Wyatt reached out and stroked Monte’s nose.

  “I guess we’ve got us an impasse,” he said.

  “An impasse and after that a coffin—I doubt the Clantons will think kindly of your impasse.”

  Wyatt just smiled and stepped back onto the porch, and Monte made no move to go on.

  He looked around quizzically and stood where he was, placidly chewing his cud.

  “Monte would make a good pet, though expensive to feed,” Wyatt observed.

  Doc was looking at the riders to the south, one of whom had detached himself from the group and was heading for Tombstone at a high lope. The other riders stayed where they were.

  Jessie stepped out of the saloon, hoping to see what was happening, but Wyatt immediately waved her back in. The two of them were getting along a little better; Jesse didn’t want to stir him up.

  Doc felt more and more nervous.

  “I don’t like this,” he said, and then he said it again.

  “It’s my play, Doc . . . you can leave if you don’t like it,” Wyatt said. “Just sidle on off.”

  “Well, no . . . I guess I wouldn’t miss whatever is going to happen next,” Doc said.

  At that he pulled his pistol, so as to make sure it was loaded.

  -50-

  “I’ve a notion to hang you here and now, Earp,” Old Man Clanton said. Spitting as he spoke.

  “I’m sure you’d enjoy it, but I doubt you’ve got the manpower,” Wyatt said. “And for my part I’d like to find a good bathtub and give you a solid scrubbing. You’re about the dirtiest specimen I’ve seen this year.”

  Indeed, the old man was filthy to an extreme degree. Not only did he dip a lot of snuff; he also seemed to spill most of what he ate on himself.

  “Why’d you stop my ox, you dirty scoundrel?” Old Man Clanton asked.

  “It wasn’t so much Monte,” Wyatt said. “I kind of like Monte. In fact if you get tired of the expense we’d be happy to keep Monte as a pet. What we can’t have is your damn cattle trampling through the main street of Tombstone—it throws up dust and scares the chickens. Cattle herds are illegal in Tombstone now.”

  Doc was startled by the last statement, since trail herds had been passing through pretty regularly since he had come there. Probably Wyatt was just running some kind of bluff, one that would provoke Old Man Clanton—if that was his aim he succeeded.

  “The hell you say,” the old man said, “I’ll drive my damn cattle anywhere I want to take them.”

  “Nope, not anymore you can’t,” Wyatt informed him.

  “Who’s going to stop me?” Clanton asked.

  “Why, me and the boys and maybe Doc here,” Wyatt said. He pointed to the roof, where three of his brothers sat with rifles ready.

  Meanwhile the riders to the south did not seem to be coming any closer.

  “I’ll bring hell down upon you, you smug son of a bitch. I’ll go home and round up forty riders, and I’ll drive my cattle anywhere I please, and one place I please is Tombstone.”

  “Just try it and we’ll see that you’re the first to die,” Wyatt said.

  The filthy old man did seem to be unarmed, but both Wyatt and Doc kept a close eye on him anyway. Their suspicions were justified, because Old Man Clanton rummaged in a saddlebag and came out with a heavy pistol.

  Wyatt leveled his own pistol.

  “Be careful with that hogleg,” he said, calmly.

  “It’s not your time, Earp,” the old man said. “But your time ain’t long from now.”

  He rode over to where Monte was calmly chewing his cud, put his pistol an inch from the oxen’s forehead, and fired three times. Like a great boat sinking, Monte the red ox sank to the ground, dead.

  “Hell, you just killed your own best animal,” Doc said. “Why?”

  His shock was genuine.

  “He worked for me, not you,” Clanton said.

  “I doubt Monte thought of it that way,” Wyatt said.

  Old Man Clanton whistled to his vaqueros and the whole mass of cattle began to move.

  Unsoothed by Monte or any of the horrific vaqueros, the mass of animals began to move, but not through the main street of Tombstone. They stampeded and scattered wildly. By dawn most of the vaqueros had given up. No serious effort to round them up was ever made. Many went east into New Mexico; for years the Animas region swarmed with unclaimed cattle. A popular dime novelist wrote a dime novel called Ghost Herd of the Animas. It sold a million copies. Forty years later tourists thought they saw ghost cattle racing through the sage at dawn. Wyatt and Doc were often mentioned, and yet neither of them had fired a shot.

  -51-

  When Ike Clanton
heard his father’s report on the incident in Tombstone he threw his hat to the ground in disgust and then stomped on it, watched by his father and his popular curly-headed brother Billy Clanton. Billy was the only Clanton to be liked by all.

  Ike was less popular, both within the family and out: to say that he had a temper would be to understate.

  “Monte’s been like a pet to me my whole life,” Ike said.

  “Get a new pet,” Old Man Clanton said. “The damn ox turned aside when he was supposed to keep the herd on the move.”

  The McLaury brothers, Frank and Tom, were watching Ike’s outburst with amusement. They had seen Ike fly off the handle before, and so had Curly Bob Brocius. Johnny Ringo was in the neighborhood but preferred to make his own camp.

  “Now that you’ve ruined a good hat, go hobble the horses,” Old Man Clanton told him.

  “Billy can do that,” Ike protested. He was about to protest further when a look in his father’s eye caused him to back off. When his look got in a shooting mood he was apt to shoot just about anything.

  “Maybe I’ll go kill the whole passel of them Earps, inasmuch as they’re a curse upon the land,” the old man said. “We were supposed to deliver that herd of cattle to the railroad station in Animas in four days’ time, and thanks to the Earps we barely have half a herd.”

  “Okay, I’ll kill Wyatt, it won’t take but a minute,” Ike said.

  His father looked at him scornfully.

  “I’m sorry I bothered to sire a person as dumb as you,” he said.

  Just then a rifle shot rang out and Old Man Clanton pitched forward into the campfire. Curly Bob and a vaquero pulled him out, but the rifle shots kept firing. The horses whinnied—since Ike had not yet hobbled them most of them ran off. Curly Bob felt it expedient to roll under the chuck wagon. The McLaury brothers hid behind some yucca. Billy, no stranger to violence, fired his guns wildly. No one shot him.

  When the shooting stopped four people were dead: Old Man Clanton, two vaqueros, and a cowboy named Bill.

  No pursuit was attempted, and no one was ever charged.

  -52-

  Goodnight received the news of Old Man Clanton’s death by letter while in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he had delivered a sizable herd. Normally when on the trail he slept with the cowboys, but since selling large numbers of livestock usually meant dealing with a banker, he had spent the night in a hotel, just west of the Rio Grande.

  “Nellie Courtright,” he muttered; it was her handwriting on the envelope. There was merely a brief clipping from a newspaper in Albuquerque. It read:

  Newman Haynes Clanton, prominent Arizona rancher, with vast holdings near the border, was killed yesterday by assailant or assailants unknown. It is thought that the killers fled to Mexico, leaving a large herd of cattle mainly dispersed . . .

  There was also a note from Nellie telling him to come see her and bring his lady. Goodnight handed the note to Bose, who had recently learned to read; in Mary Goodnight’s school, no less. Now he could read almost as good as his boss.

  “He was a mean old man,” Bose said.

  “Yes he was,” Goodnight said. “But for luck I might have killed him myself.”

  They were waiting for the bank to open and Goodnight’s impatience was beginning to get the better of him.

  “No more work than you have to do in a day it’s a damn nuisance when you don’t show up to do it,” he told the banker, when the man finally arrived. Bose, who often carried money from one bank to another, found bankers not to be very punctual people, but he himself didn’t care, whereas his boss did. One thing that could be said about Charles Goodnight is that he did not like to waste time.

  -53-

  “I know damn well Wyatt killed that old man—don’t you agree?” Doc said to Jessie, who was making very good money due to the general prosperity Tombstone was enjoying. She was as curious as Doc about Wyatt’s movements during the time of the killing of Old Man Clanton, but she knew Wyatt better than Doc did and could not say positively that Wyatt or somebody hired had killed the old rustler.

  When Wyatt came back into the saloon after four days gone and she asked where he had been he merely frowned at her and didn’t answer. He then spent the next few days in a rival saloon, not the Last Kind Words. It was nearly a week before he kissed her, making it difficult to be a wife to him. Sometimes she didn’t even know why she tried.

  For his part Doc was having trouble getting much out of Wyatt.

  “You ain’t invisible, you know, Wyatt,” Doc said.

  “I never claimed invisibility, though I am sly,” Wyatt said. He knew that Doc and most of the rest of Arizona were still worrying the mystery of who killed Old Man Clanton, a mystery about which Wyatt himself had nothing to say. Predictions of a feud between the Earps and the Clantons were rife. Most of the citizens of Cochise County were loaded down with firearms now—though neither the Clantons nor the Earps had verifiably done anything violent—unless you count Ike Clanton stomping on his hat.

  “If you went all the way into New Mexico to kill that old bastard, then somebody probably saw you,” Doc said.

  “If that’s your opinion, publish it in the damn paper for all I care,” Wyatt countered.

  “I rarely read the paper,” he went on. “Nothing they publish is likely to disturb my sleep.”

  “I do regret Monte, though,” he added. “I liked that damn ox.”

  “Still, it wouldn’t hurt you to tell me where you’ve been for four days,” Doc said.

  “I will point out that four days ain’t long,” Wyatt said. “I could have just been up the street, drinking rye whiskey for four days.”

  “You can be an aggravating cuss,” Doc mentioned. “Of course none of the Clantons except young Billy is exactly popular either,” Doc admitted.

  At least the law locally was in the hands of the two gentler Earps, Virgil and Morgan. They weren’t soft men by any means, but they were’t hard like Wyatt.

  Meanwhile, most days, Doc was spitting blood.

  -54-

  The violent death of Newman Haynes Clanton caused an immediate reshuffling of power in the rustling crowd. The Clantons were determined to hold on to their part of the border: the part where it was easiest to funnel their Mexican cattle through. The McLaurys threw in with the Clantons, at least for a time. Both groups tried to get Johnny Ringo to ride with them, but he declined to participate. Besides cards his main interest was a young whore named Sally, who lived in a hut behind the Last Kind Words Saloon.

  It was said that Newton Earp also loved the little whore, but little was known about Newton Earp, the shiest of the Earp boys, probably.

  The joker in the local deck, so Wyatt believed, was the lanky pistolero who called himself Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, who was said to be the best in the West—or anywhere—at throwing rocks.

  “They say he can knock quails out of the air with a rock—I doubt that, myself,” Doc said.

  Wyatt, who had been gloomy, perked up suddenly at the thought of a rock-throwing competition. He promptly marched right into the saloon and introduced himself to the rock thrower.

  “You don’t have to say my whole name,” Johnny said. “I worked a medecine show once and they gave me this long name and it stuck.”

  “So which part of it are we supposed to use?” Wyatt asked.

  “Just call me Deuce,” the stranger said. “I despise a long-winded name.”

  When asked if he could knock quail out of the air with rocks, the newcomer looked surprised that anyone would care.

  “Where I come from, which is Scotland, it’s a common skill,” he explained.

  “Mister, this ain’t Scotland,” Wyatt said, and proceeded to lay bets on the outcome. Fortunately quail were plentiful in the outskirts of Tombstone. The Mexican cook at the Last Kind Words Saloon kept a pen full for customers who grew tired of beefsteak.

  The stranger who allowed himself to be called Deuce warmed up by knocking over a few bottles Wyatt had sat on a wa
ll. Wyatt was openly scornful of the proceedings. Johnny Deuce, as Doc preferred to call him, asked Wyatt to release the bobwhites one at a time, whereas the pretty Gambrils quail preferred to run between the chaparral bushes.

  To Wyatt’s astonishment, Doc’s, and the the local spectators, the lanky Scot coolly knocked over his first ten quail, six flying and four on the ground.

  “No fair, you didn’t turn them loose high enough,” Wyatt said to Doc, who had been releasing the quail.

  “Wyatt, there ain’t no right way to start up a dang quail,” Doc said.

  “Hell, I never supposed he’d be this good,” Wyatt said.

  “Hell yourself, I never even heard of throwing rocks at quail,” Doc admitted.

  The Scotsman kept throwing and quail kept falling. Wyatt, who was notoriously hard to impress about anything, was openmouthed with astonishment at what he was seeing.

  “Dern, it’s worth losing a hundred dollars to witness skill like that,” he said,

  Johnny Deuce just shrugged.

  “My pa once hit one hundred and two,” he said. “The only reason he had to quit then was because he ran out of rocks.”

  “Well, there’s no danger of that here,” Wyatt said, looking around at the rocky hills. “No danger at all.”

  -55-

  Wyatt and Doc were taking their ease on the porch of the Last Kind Words Saloon when a little procession rode by, trying to look dangerous. There was Ike and Billy Clanton, two McLaurys, several cowboys, and a few vaqueros. It was a quiet day in Tombstone. Johnny Ringo had left town on business, and the rock-throwing Scot had loped off toward Tucson.

  “I thought those Clantons ran a cattle ranch,” Wyatt said. “Why don’t they work a little instead of cluttering the streets and making damn nuisances of themselves.”

  “It’s mainly Ike that’s the nuisance,” Doc said. “The others will probably just get drunk and play cards.”