by Mark Warren
Wyatt picked up his hat and stopped at the door. “Doc,” he said, half turning and looking down into the crown of the hat as he fingered the sweatband. “I’m obliged . . . we all are . . . for you standing with us.” He looked back at his friend.
Doc reached for his silver flask on the table. “Well, Wyatt,” he said, his voice finding its melodic wit. “If you don’t have something worth standing for, maybe you don’t have much.”
As he drank, Doc stared at Wyatt over the flask, and for a moment his pale and sickly eyes filled with what seemed a childlike devotion. Wyatt nodded and walked into the front room, where Kate stood by the window that overlooked the vacant lot.
“He risk hiss life for you,” she said. Her voice reflected off the cold glass in a harsh whisper meant only for his ears. “Seems like he hass a habit uff dat.” She flashed a whimsical smile as though she were alone in the room. “You t’ink he ever do somet’ing like dat for me?”
Having no answer for that, Wyatt looked around the walls of the room at the picture frames enclosing Fly’s photographic work. When it seemed Kate would say no more, he fitted his hat to his head.
“Let me know if he needs anything, Kate.”
Her head bounced with a soundless laugh, and she turned to show her contempt. “Needt? Only two t’ings Doc needt, and I take care of one. The ot’er is up to Godt.” She faced the window again, and Wyatt looked past her to the shades of twilight beginning to soften the details in the lot where the fight had taken place. He thought of telling her what it meant for friends to stand together, but then he remembered the affidavit that Kate had signed against Doc. She would not understand that kind of loyalty. It’s probably easier to be Doc’s friend, Wyatt thought, than his woman.
“Evenin’, Kate,” he said and left her standing alone in the room.
Back at the house Virgil lay in bed with his exposed leg swathed in fresh bandages. His Colt’s lay on top of the sheets next to him. James sat in a corner of the room with a Winchester balanced over his knees as he kept watch on the street through a crack in the curtain. In the front room, John Vermillion stacked firewood from a pile he had split out back.
Allie, uncharacteristically quiet, moved in and out of the room supplying wet cloths or dishes of food or hot tea—anything within the scope of Virgil’s needs. She seemed to bestow upon Wyatt a new measure of respect, which he took to be a sign of gratitude for standing shoulder to shoulder with Virgil in the street fight. Bessie rattled cookware in the kitchen, from where the aroma of pan-fried bread spread through the house.
“Behan came by after you left,” Virgil said and made a pained look that soon disappeared behind his stoic eyes. “Clum says our sheriff’s been proddin’ the vigilance committee to deal with us with a rope. ’Course Behan denies it. Says he’s my friend, and we done just right out there in the fight.” He forced a low grumbling laugh. “Behan’s a damned fool. Hell, the vigilantes are backin’ us all the way. Said they wish we’d a’ killed Ike, too.”
Wyatt remained standing with his hat in his hand. “It’ll come to more killin’ before it’s over.”
Allie came to the door and stood looking at Virgil, her face anxious with the need to do something. “Go on and eat something, Allie,” Virgil said. “Wyatt and I are havin’ a talk.”
She looked at Wyatt and then at James. “Who’s ready to eat something?”
James narrowed one eye. “You cook it, or Bessie?”
“I made cornbread and greens,” Allie said, raising her chin like a challenge.
James leaned the rifle against the wall. “Then, hell yes, I’ll eat,” he said with a chuckle and followed her into the kitchen. Virgil pushed himself higher on his pillow. Wyatt dropped his hat on the bed and sat in James’s chair.
“Did you know that Frank McLaury told Behan to come to Hafford’s and disarm us?” Virge quipped.
Wyatt nodded absently. It mattered little to him what Frank had or hadn’t said.
“They didn’t find a gun on Tom,” Wyatt said quietly.
“Yeah, well, to hell with that!” Virgil’s eyes flashed with anger. “He shot twice from behind the damned horse. His arm was stretched out right under the horse’s neck. He’s the one that hit Morg.”
Wyatt nodded. “Somebody picked up his gun, hoping it would go hard on us.”
Cursing under his breath, Virgil repositioned his leg. Wyatt leaned forward in the chair, settled his forearms on his knees, and kneaded the knuckles of one hand.
“I went to the undertaker’s. The McLaurys and Billy Clanton are in the front window, dressed up like bankers. Got a sign in the window: ‘Murdered on the streets of Tombstone.’ ”
Virgil grunted. “That’s Ike’s work.”
They were quiet, listening to James dole out his playful banter about Allie’s good cooking. It was a simple sound of family that reminded Wyatt of better times.
“Oh, an’ listen to this this,” Virgil said. “Behan said we misunderstood him. Claims he never told us he had disarmed those boys. Said he’d gone down there for the purpose of disarming them.” He huffed a quiet laugh through his nose. “Reckon the Irish sonovabitch just forgot to mention he was unsuccessful at it.”
Wyatt threaded his fingers together and waited for Virgil’s temper to settle. “Somebody took a shot at us from behind Fly’s.”
Virgil’s eyes pinched as he chewed on that information. “Could’a been Ike,” he said.
Wyatt shook his head. “Ike wasn’t heeled. They found him hiding over on Toughnut in the back of a saloon. I doubt he would’a stopped running long enough to aim at anything.”
“Yellow son of a bitch,” Virgil said. “You should’a shot him when he took hold o’ you.”
Wyatt looked down at his boots. “Virge,” he said in the flat tone he used whenever he had to repeat himself. “He wasn’t heeled.”
Virgil’s mouth curled in disgust. “He needed killing more’n them others.” When Wyatt made no response, Virgil pushed himself higher in the bed. “Go see Morg. He’s got a hell of a pain runnin’ down his arms.”
Wyatt stood and picked up his hat. Softly slapping the brim against his leg, he stared down at his brother’s wound.
“What about Doc?” Virge asked. “I hear he got shot in the ass.”
“You know Doc. He’s drinking his medicine right now.”
“We owe him, don’t we?”
Wyatt raised his hat before him and turned it once as though inspecting the straightness of the brim. “Reckon I’ll always be owing Doc,” he said and left the room to check on Morgan.
The funeral—the largest event in the town’s history—would have convinced a newcomer to Tombstone that the founding fathers had died. Most attendees were there simply to witness the aftermath of the town’s most dramatic fight. Others wanted to see Ike Clanton’s face, to see how grief mixed with humility and cowardice. As for the rancher friends of the Cow-boys, they represented a tribute as much to cheap Mexican beeves as to any sort of friendship with the rustlers.
At the coroner’s inquest, Johnny Behan worked his smooth tenor voice to spin a story touched both by professionalism and personal regret. “The Earps would not heed my order,” Behan swore. “They walked past me into the lot, and Billy Clanton called out, ‘Don’t shoot me!’ and ‘I don’t want to fight!’ He raised both hands above his head. Then Tom threw open his vest to show he was unarmed. I had already checked Tom—and Ike, too—and found no weapons on either of them.”
Ike and “Kid” Claiborne told identical stories: that the Cowboys had thrown up their hands at Virgil’s order . . . that Holliday and Morgan Earp had opened fire on defenseless men. A gambling friend of the McLaurys swore that at Hafford’s he had overheard Virgil say that he would not arrest the Cow-boys but shoot them on sight. With these testimonies flying about town, there were now questions that seemed to have contradictory answers.
In the last days of October, Ike Clanton filed murder charges against the Earps and Holliday. With Vi
rgil and Morgan still convalescing at home, Wyatt and Doc appeared before Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer and had their bail set at ten thousand dollars each, a sum quickly amassed by the businessmen in town. Spicer agreed to a preliminary hearing to decide whether enough evidence warranted a trial by jury.
The hearing began with redundant but damning testimonies by prosecution witnesses, all swearing that Tom McLaury had not carried a gun. And, worse, that Doc Holliday had precipitated the fight by shooting first while the Cow-boys held their hands in the air.
With the sheriff’s contrived testimony printed in the newspapers, the swell of culpability fell back upon the Earps, and public support for them spiraled steadily downward. Even Mayor Clum, in his editorials, began to distance himself from his chief of police’s actions.
Will McLaury, a mourning brother and Texas lawyer, joined the district attorney and milked the town for sympathy while pouring money into the expense account of the county’s investigation into the shootout. He convinced the judge to revoke bail, and Wyatt and Doc were remanded to the county jail, where they would spend the next sixteen nights. At the insistence of pro-Earp townsmen, four men on the vigilance committee stood guard outside day and night.
In the courtroom, each time the defense took its turn, Tom Fitch—the most eloquent and most expensive attorney in the territory—mounted a skillful rebuttal to every false claim made against the Earps and Holliday. But his finest hour came during an unexpected windfall of support from one of the prosecution witnesses. It was as if a surprise witness had surfaced on behalf of the Earps. The turn in momentum was something no one on either side could have predicted. The witness was Ike Clanton.
Ike sneered as he looked at everyone but Wyatt. “Yeah, he offered me a deal, but I declined it.” Ike sat back in the witness chair and cocked his head to one side. “I asked him why he wanted these boys so bad—Leonard, Head, and Crane.” Ike nodded toward Wyatt but still would not meet his eyes. “Said he had some business dealings with these boys and couldn’t afford for them to be taken alive on account o’ they might talk.”
Clanton wiped at a smile with his fingers and kept his gaze angled to the floor. “He told me him and his brother, Morgan, piped off money from the Wells, Fargo shipment to Doc Holliday and Billy Leonard.” Ike looked up quickly at Fitch. “This was the money supposed to be on the Benson stage last March, you see.”
Fitch arched an eyebrow. “But at the coroner’s inquest, Mr. Clanton, you testified that you did have a deal with Wyatt Earp . . . and that was why he wanted to kill you.”
“That ain’t what I meant. I meant he tried to make that deal so he could capture them boys . . . I mean, kill them. That’s what I meant to say. He needed to kill them.”
The lawyer pushed his hands deep into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “So, you say that Wyatt Earp admitted to you that he was stealing Wells, Fargo money.” He held a straight face and stared at Ike.
Clanton frowned sideways at his interrogator as the district attorney objected. Spicer sustained the objection, but now the illogic of it all had been set free inside the courtroom.
“And, Mr. Clanton,” Fitch continued, “if Wyatt Earp, as you say, ‘piped off’ money from the strongbox before the shipment departed—” The lawyer smiled here, taking his time. “Isn’t it curious that there was no money missing from the Kinnear stage once it arrived at Benson?”
Doc leaned close to Wyatt. “I believe Ike just sat right back into his own shit.”
“I’m just telling you what he told me,” Ike huffed. “Doc Holliday told me . . . or rather Billy Leonard told me that it was Holliday killed Bud Philpott. And Virgil Earp told me to get word to those boys they needn’t worry ’bout a posse trackin’ ’em . . . that it was all for show.” Ike flung his hand toward Wyatt and Doc. “See, they wanna kill me ’cause of all this that I know ’bout the Earps.”
“And yet,” said Fitch, “you alone were spared in the fight . . . you, who could have been killed most easily.” He frowned and flung his hands out to his sides, posing like a man thoroughly confused. “By your own testimony, Wyatt Earp called for you to fight or to get away.”
Clanton sat back and sulked. “Well, I didn’t have my damned gun, now, did I?”
The defense attorney waited, still frozen in space with his arms extended. “And he spared you because of that?”
“Well, sure. They can’t shoot an unarmed man, can they? Not right there in town.”
“And, yet, you say they killed an unarmed Tom McLaury . . . ‘right there in town.’ ”
The room was quiet, all the spectators waiting for Ike to smooth out the wrinkles of his story. But the silence drew out. With the thread of Ike’s fabrications so thoroughly unraveled, the lawyer grinned and waited.
“What!” Clanton snapped.
Ignoring Clanton, Fitch let his arms slap against his sides. “No more questions of this extremely reliable witness, your honor.”
On the day following, Wyatt took the stand and read from a prepared written statement that chronicled the animosity between the Earps and the Cow-boys, starting with the theft of the army mules. He worked his way through the threats made by the Clantons, McLaurys, and Ringo concerning the arrests of Stilwell and Spence. When he outlined the terms of the Wells, Fargo deal with Ike, Frank McLaury, and Joe Hill, the Cowboys in the room grew painfully quiet. Throughout the telling, Ike vehemently shook his head to anyone who would look at him.
After describing the street fight, Wyatt ended his testimony by offering two documents: one from the people of Wichita and the other from Dodge City. Each paper was signed by fifty leading citizens attesting to his character. The Dodge petition even referred to him as their marshal, though technically he’d never actually held that post. The people of Dodge City had apparently considered him their chief enforcer. When Wyatt stepped down from the witness box, his back was straight as a fence post.
The defense witnesses who followed completed the disintegration of the case against the Earps. Chief among these was a railroad engineer, who had come into town on the morning of the fight. It was he who had warned Virgil of threats he had overheard near the Dexter Corral. Curious, the railroad man had followed the lawmen to Fremont Street, where he witnessed the fight from start to finish. He corroborated Wyatt’s version of the details in every respect, reasserting that it had been Frank and Billy who pulled and fired on Wyatt first, only Wyatt, quick and cool, still managed to hit his man.
Both an army surgeon and a hotel manager swore to seeing a gun in Tom McLaury’s pant pocket just before the fight. Addie Bourland, a milliner, witnessed the initial confrontation in the vacant lot from the front window of her shop across the street. She testified that no person in the lot had raised his hands to surrender, and that the shooting had started simultaneously from both parties.
It was enough. At the end of November—one month after the hearing had begun—Spicer set the Earps and Holliday free, not to be bound over to a grand jury.
The political battles that manifested in the rival newspapers proved as lively as the fight in the vacant lot. The Earps’ enemies predictably spoke through the Nugget, whose editor was Behan’s undersheriff. The Epitaph strove for a counterbalance, printing articles that championed Wyatt and his brothers. But balance proved to be an impossibility with the coming January elections. Tombstone’s citizens were either pro-or anti-Earp. There was no middle ground.
Threats to the family forced Wyatt to move his clan into the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where he could better protect them from Cow-boy attack. A cadre of friends flocked to him, offering their services as bodyguards, and, of these, Wyatt chose proven gunmen he could depend on: Doc Holliday, McMaster, ex-carpenter John Vermillion, and gambling friend Dan Tipton.
When a fifth man joined their ranks on the night of their second meeting inside Wyatt’s room, McMaster visibly tensed, pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning, and stood with his hand resting on the butt of his gun. As he stared at t
he man, Wyatt stepped beside McMaster.
“Easy, Mac,” Wyatt said. “He’s with us.”
McMaster narrowed his eyes at Creek Johnson, a broad-chested Cow-boy who had ridden at various times with both Ringo and Brocius. Mac’s face wrinkled with questions as he turned to Wyatt.
“He’s the other one been workin’ undercover for you?” Mac whispered.
Wyatt motioned Johnson over, and the big man approached with an open smile, a long turkey wing-feather pinned jauntily into his hat brim.
“How ya doin’, Sherm?” Creek said. He offered his meaty hand to McMaster and allowed a chuckle. “Reckon we’ve been hidin’ in the same shadows for a while.”
Shaking his head, McMaster took Johnson’s hand and cut his eyes from Wyatt back to the ex-Cow-boy. “How the hell’d he rope you in?”
Creek propped his hands on his hips and looked down at the toes of his boots before answering. “Gotta brother in the Yuma pen.” He nodded toward Wyatt. “Wyatt’s workin’ with Wells, Fargo . . . says they’ll help to git ’im out if . . . you know—” His eyes angled down again, and, when they came up to look at McMaster again, all trace of humor had disappeared from Johnson’s face. “That is, if I could see my way to git on the right side o’ things and let slip a little information to Wyatt here from time to time.” Creek raised his chin and pushed it at McMaster. “What about you?”
McMaster snorted a soft, airy laugh through his nose. “I still ain’t sure how he did it, but I’m in for keeps now.”
Creek Johnson laughed outright, his big voice filling the room. “That’s for damned sure.” He arched his eyebrows and leaned forward. “We’ve crossed a line, amigo,” he said quietly, “and it ain’t one we can cross back.” Creek straightened, spewed air through fluttering lips, and shook his head. “Not that I care. I’m sick o’ takin’ my orders from the likes o’ Brocius . . . and that damned moper, Ringo.” Johnson tapped a finger twice to his temple. “Ask me, that sour-faced sulker is better’n half loco. Don’t care who lives or dies . . . includin’ hisself.”
