Promised Land

by Mark Warren

  “He needs to be in on this,” Wyatt said. “He’s spent more time with Morg than any of us.”

  The silence between them drew out, until Allie entered the room through the rear door. Her hair was freshly groomed, but her eyes remained raw and teary. The two brothers watched Warren lower his revolver back to the table linen. Virgil began fussing with the hang of his sling.

  “What about Mattie?” he said. “Once she gets to us in California?”

  Wyatt folded the coroner’s report and stuffed it into his coat pocket. “See can they get her off that damned opium to start with.”

  Virgil’s face broke into a map of creases. “Who the hell is ‘they’?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe Louisa? She liked Mattie. Mattie needs to be able to get along on her own.” Wyatt’s eyes went dead. “I’m done with her, Virge.”

  Virgil watched Allie squint at a menu. “Well, Mattie’s been done with us for a long time,” he said as gently as he could. “God help ’er.” He looked back at Wyatt. “She’ll need it.”

  “She will,” Wyatt agreed. “When I get out there with you, maybe I can steer her toward something with some promise. Something that don’t involve me.”

  It was overcast and dark when they left the restaurant, and little was said as Virgil and Allie boarded the train bound for San Bernardino. The Earp gunmen spread out on the loading platform, turning in slow circles, eyes vigilant, their artillery throwing off glints of reflections in the depot’s lamplight. Inside the car, Allie shook Wyatt’s hand, and he sensed from her expression that she never expected to see him again.

  “You might as well kill as many of them heathens as you can find, Wyatt,” she said. “Do it for Morgan.” She turned her head and nodded toward Virgil, who was struggling again with his coat. “An’ what’s left of your big brother.”

  Seated at the rear of the car, Virgil motioned for Wyatt to come closer. “We’ll be waitin’ for you in San Berdoo. You take care of yourself, you hear me?” Allie sat next to Virge and locked onto his good arm. “Wyatt,” Virge said, taking Wyatt’s wrist, “don’t be thinkin’ ’bout Mattie. We all make our own choices. Mattie made hers. Do what you gotta do, and then get out of Arizona Territory.”

  When the two brothers shook hands, Allie’s moist eyes reflected the lamplight like the sheen off two new silver coins. “Wyatt,” she said and cut her teary gaze away, embarrassed. “God bless you, Wyatt,” she managed before her throat tightened.

  For the departure, Wyatt had his men spread out over the rail yard, while he, himself, stood in shadows on the coupling platform just outside the door. When the whistle blew, the train jolted into motion, and he stepped down to follow Virgil’s car, his shotgun in hand. Then, unexpectedly, the train banged to a stop.

  Forty yards away in the dark of a side track, two shadows darted onto a stationary flatcar coupled to a string of boxcars. Wyatt squatted to backlight the figures against the faint glow spreading from the engine’s headlamp. Not seeing anyone drop off the other side, he circled around the idle cars. Virgil’s train continued to hiss steam and bang its coupling joints, masking the sound of his boots as he moved down the far side of the track. Stopping ten feet from the corner of the first boxcar, Wyatt raised his shotgun to his shoulder and inched forward. Right away, the shotgun clanked one clear note, metal on metal, and he stood stock-still. In the inky dark, he hadn’t seen the iron ladder bolted to the car.

  Ahead of him in the flatcar two prostrate figures rose up and scrambled off the far side. Jumping through the coupling, Wyatt gave chase and closed on a man carrying a shotgun. The ambusher’s coat flapped wildly, seeming a great hindrance to his escape. Over the crunch of gravel made by their boots, Wyatt could hear the man gasping for breath.

  Breaking into the stark light of the engine’s headlamp, the runner unexpectedly stopped, whirled around, threw his weapon to the ground, and raised both hands. With the light carving him out of the black desert night, Frank Stilwell stared into the train’s glaring light, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and bright. Wyatt walked toward him past the loud grumbling of the engine, and the whistle shrieked again, causing Stilwell to lower one hand to press against his groin. He spread his coat and looked down at himself, where his trousers had darkened with urine.

  The train lurched for another start, and the long chain of passenger cars rumbled and banged and grated as the pull of the engine passed down the line. In the bright light, Stilwell’s face was as white as chalk. Squinting, he tried to shadow his eyes with one hand.

  “Who is it!” he called out, his words clipped and desperate. “What do you want with me!”

  Wyatt walked closer, his shadow stretching far down the tracks like a messenger moving ahead of him, a dark wraith carrying the prophecy of death. He walked slowly until he pressed the shotgun into the cavity below the Cow-boy’s sternum. Stilwell’s face contorted with the horrible revelation he found in Wyatt’s eyes, and then his hands flattened out before him, as though he might reverse his fate by a simple deflection off his palms.

  “Don’t!” he begged, his voice quavering with the certain futility of his words. “Please!”

  “For Morgan,” Wyatt said in a low growl, the words piercing Stilwell with such finality that terror burst from his eyes in rivulets. Frozen in the beam of light, the tears clung to his whiskered face like beads of clear glass. Then he panicked and grabbed the barrels of Wyatt’s shotgun. So violent was his shaking that he could gain no advantage over Wyatt’s grip on the gun.

  “Morg!” Stilwell cried in a hoarse scream. “Morg!” he repeated louder.

  The blast from both barrels lifted him off the ground for an instant before delivering him back into the long shadow of his body, a pool of black that gathered beneath him even as he fell. There he lay motionless on the loose gravel, a gaping wet hole opened in his chest.

  Doc Holliday and McMaster came at a run along one side of the train, as Warren and Creek Johnson materialized from the other side. Each man looked silently at the body, and then at Wyatt.

  Doc stepped forward, and the ring of men opened a step as he leveled his pistol at Stilwell’s corpse. He fired once, stepped back, and looked to McMaster, who levered a round into his carbine, aimed from under his arm, and fired.

  “Is he one of the men who killed Morg?” Warren yelled over the hiss of steam from the train.

  Wyatt nodded once. “Stilwell, Behan’s deputy.”

  Warren sidestepped to straddle one of the dead man’s legs. Bending, he jerked Stilwell’s pocketwatch away, breaking the chain.

  “You won’t need this in hell,” Warren said in a seething, flat tone. He flung the watch aside into the rail yard, and then he drew his revolver. “You goddamned back-shooter!”

  Warren’s gun roared four times. After holstering his gun he spat on the corpse and stepped away. Then Creek Johnson added his signature to the body—one bullet fired casually from the hip. The five men stood unmoving as the engine began to steam past them, building a sluggish exit from the yard.

  Matching its crawl along the track, Wyatt walked to the car nearest the caboose. There were no lights showing inside. He tapped lightly on the glass with the barrel of his shotgun. The shade rose, and Allie’s face appeared. Holding Virgil’s gun in both hands, she turned and spoke to someone. Then the shade on the neighboring window opened, and Virgil leaned toward the glass. Wyatt held up one finger as he walked beside the moving train.

  “One for Morg,” he called out over the metallic grinding of the wheels.

  Allie’s face tightened with approval, and she nodded once with a quick jerk of her head. Virgil’s somber expression remained unchanged, but the message telegraphed by his eyes was clear: Keep it up.

  Wyatt stopped and watched the train slide out into the vast darkness stretching to California. Now the avenging had begun. The federal badge he wore on his vest was little more than a false front on a building, giving him the image of something other than what he was. But
he would use it without qualms, without mercy. There were more men upon whom he would dispense such swift justice, and he knew he probably had limited time in which to do it.

  In Tombstone on the day following, Wyatt and Doc walked out of the Cosmopolitan Hotel into the cool of the evening. Behind them followed Warren, Vermillion, Johnson, McMaster, and Dan Tipton. Each man carried saddlebags over a shoulder, a cartridge belt and two revolvers strapped to their hips, a Winchester repeater in one hand, and a double-barreled shotgun in the other.

  As they turned west for the stables at the O.K. Corral, Sheriff Johnny Behan crossed the street toward them. Just behind him were his deputy, Breakenridge, and the new town marshal, Dave Neagle. Neagle cradled a shotgun across one forearm; the other two lawmen carried holstered revolvers. Behan stopped in the middle of the street, raised a paper above his head, and shook it with a smart snap.

  “Wyatt!” he called out. “I want to see you!”

  Coming to a stop on the boardwalk, Wyatt’s posse turned dispassionate eyes toward the emboldened bureaucrat. A dozen townspeople gathered along the boardwalk to watch from a distance. Behan tried to hold Wyatt’s stare but could not keep from surveying the abundance of weaponry displayed by the small army he faced.

  “You’re going to see me once too often,” Wyatt said, his voice deliberate and final.

  Inside the bubble of silence that gathered around them, the sheriff looked down at the telegram in his hand as though searching for instructions. When it was clear that Behan could think of nothing more to say, Wyatt turned and continued down the street. His posse followed, none of them so much as glancing back at the three officers left standing in the street.

  CHAPTER 20

  March 23, 1882: Dragoon and Whetstone Mountains

  By early afternoon Wyatt and his posse breached the South Pass of the Dragoons and rode up on Pete Spence’s wood camp from the east. Two Mexicans looked up from repairing a wagon axle in the main yard. Beside them, smoke raced off at an angle on the wind from a pit fire. Wyatt reined up before a crude open shelter canopied with torn canvas. An old man sat up on a cot and swung his bare feet to the dirt. Wyatt sat his horse as the man pinched the sleep from his eyes.

  “Who are you?” Wyatt said.

  The man looked surprised at the directness of the question. “Judah . . . Theodore Judah.”

  “Where’s Spence?” Wyatt continued.

  “We ain’t seen ’im for a few days.” The old man’s voice trailed off with the recognition of the man before him. His head pivoted to take in the full array of armed riders looking back at him. Slowly he straightened his spine and spread his hands on the canvas bedding.

  “If I find ’im here,” Wyatt informed the man, “I’ll kill you. You stayin’ with that story?”

  The man swallowed. “He ain’t here, Marshal. I’m tellin’ the truth. He told me he was turning himself in to the sheriff.”

  “ ‘Turning himself in’?” Wyatt repeated, a trace of anger putting a rough edge to his words.

  Judah swallowed and averted his eyes. “For protection,” he explained and dared to meet Wyatt’s eyes again. “That’s what he said anyway.”

  “Mac!” Wyatt called over his shoulder. “Ask the two at the wagon.”

  McMaster rode to them and broke into a quiet cascade of Spanish. In front of Wyatt, the man named Judah remained motionless on the cot.

  “What about a man named Swilling . . . or Bode . . . or Indian Charlie?” Wyatt said. He watched the man’s eyes flick to the Mexican workers and back.

  “Florentino, the half-breed,” the old man admitted, “he goes by ‘Charlie.’ ” He raised his chin and thrust it to the west. “He’s roundin’ up some mules over that hill yonder.”

  Wyatt kept his eyes on the frightened man as he called behind him, “Warren!” When the youngest Earp reined up beside him, Wyatt spoke in a quiet tone that brooked no argument. “You and Tipton see that these men stay here in camp.”

  He took four men over the rise at a brisk canter before seeing a lean, bronze-skinned man some fifty yards off walking through a copse of palo verde, herding three mules ahead of him with a long limber switch with a swatch of white cloth tied to its end. When Florentino Cruz spotted the posse, he spun so fast his pale straw hat sailed off his head, his long, black hair flashing in the sun like a crow’s wing. Dropping the stick, he bolted diagonally up the far hill toward a scattering of boulders, his boots clawing for purchase in the loose scree.

  “Mac, stop ’im before he makes it to the rocks,” Wyatt ordered. “Don’t kill him.”

  McMaster levered a round into his carbine, took careful aim, and fired once from the saddle. Cruz went down, one leg flying out from under him as though it had been yanked by a rope. The riders fanned out as they climbed the hill, but the wounded man made no effort to escape. When they reached him, his face was stretched with pain, his left leg losing blood from the back of the thigh. Wyatt dismounted and stepped into the man’s line of sight.

  “I look familiar to you?”

  Cruz’s moist eyes burned with white rings of pain and terror. “¡No se de que me hablas!”

  “You helped kill a man who looked like me two nights ago.”

  Cruz shook his head stiffly. “I no keel!” he insisted. “Only keep watch!” Frantic, he searched the horsemen for sympathetic eyes but found none. “Spence . . . he my boss,” he whined, as though that had been reason enough to take part in an assassination.

  “Who else besides Spence did the shootin’?” Wyatt demanded.

  Cruz shook his head again, vehemently. “We use hees house to make plan, but Spence too scared to shoot. Steel-well, Curly Beel, Sweelling, and two more, I theenk. They shoot. I only watch from street. Spence, he say I have to watch.”

  “Ringo?” Wyatt pressed.

  “Si,” he said, nodding. “He shoot.” Then the half-breed seemed to forget the pain in his leg for a moment, his eyes turning eager. “But Steel-well, he brag he the one keel your brother.”

  “He won’t be bragging anymore,” Doc quipped.

  As Cruz stared at Holliday, the question on the half-breed’s face gave way to understanding. He looked quickly at Wyatt, his bloodless face begging for mercy.

  “I work for Spence,” he sniveled. “He pay me. I juss do what he say.”

  Wyatt kept his voice calm, steady. “How much for bein’ lookout?”

  Realizing that the question of money had opened up a darker subject, Cruz searched for an answer in the long, sloping walls of the Dragoons. “What he always pay.” His tongue flicked across his lips. “Twee-ny-five dollar,” he volunteered. “Thees man they keel . . . el muy importante.” Cruz nodded encouragingly.

  As the wretch tried to curry favor, Wyatt felt a tingling on the back of his neck. “Twenty-five dollars,” he repeated in a cold monotone.

  “Si, thees man muy importante.”

  Wyatt’s face turned to stone. “Say the name of the man you killed.”

  Cruz shook his head more emphatically now. “I no keel.”

  “Say his name!” Wyatt commanded, the change in his voice causing Cruz to recoil.

  “Earp,” he finally said, pushing out the word as gently as a prayer.

  “Say his first name!”

  Unsure of Wyatt’s intent, Cruz looked at the others, but they only stared silently, their eyes vacant, distant. With nowhere else to turn, he faced Wyatt again.

  “Mor-can?” he whispered.

  Some of the tension fell away from the cowering man, as if in remembering the name he believed he might have attained absolution. But when Wyatt pulled his Colt’s from its holster, the riders tugged gently on their reins, widening the circle.

  “You’re gonna die here,” Wyatt said simply.

  As if to steady himself, Cruz dug his fingers into the sand. His head turned frantically toward the wood camp, as though there might be help for him there. As Wyatt’s gun cocked, the wretched man began to wail.

  “¡Por el amor de diós
, no me mates!”

  The gunshot cracked and bloomed inside the circle of men and horses, and Cruz dropped back into the sand. As he lay limp, the gun’s report tapered away to nothing in a sky too vast to contain it. Wyatt stood looking at the silenced assassin through a skein of gray smoke, until Warren and Tipton rode up at a gallop. Warren looked from face to face to see what he had missed.

  “Is he one of ’em?”

  Wyatt’s face was answer enough. Expressionless, each man sat his horse, their collective stillness like the permanence of the mountains themselves. Without another word, Warren jumped down from his horse and fired three times into the lifeless body. Still fuming, he kicked at the ground in front of the dead man’s face, and flecks of stone and sand peppered the still-wet mouth. Each posse member had drawn a pistol to fire a shot into the body in a somber procession of solidarity, but after Warren’s vent of rage, each gunman holstered his weapon and in his turn took his horse at a walk down the slope to follow Wyatt.

  After sending Tipton into Tombstone to collect the funds that had been promised by the federal marshal, Wyatt led his posse down the San Pedro Valley through the scrub of a trail-less tract of desert. In the late hours of the afternoon, after leaving Warren to guard their pack horses at the foot of the Whetstones, Wyatt and his men wended their way up the wash toward Iron Springs, where they expected to rendezvous with Tip and the expense money.

  Wyatt rode well ahead of the others through the dry stream bed, his horse’s legs slithering through the tall, shimmering grasses with a dry, whispery sound. The wind pushed at his back but did little to offset the heat of the day. As he rode, he unbuttoned his vest and loosened his cartridge belts. He could only hope that the spring was not dry. If it was dry, there was little likelihood that any of the Whetstone watering holes could provide their mounts with enough hydration to last the night.

  Climbing to the open mesa before the spring, Wyatt dismounted lest his horse spook at the sudden appearance of someone waiting. With his feet on the ground, he listened and felt his senses sharpen to a fine edge. It was just a feeling, but it was strong enough that he eased the leather thong off his saddle horn and gripped the sawed-off shotgun in both hands. When Vermillion and Holliday came into view forty yards behind him, Wyatt led his horse toward the edge of the grassy flat that would put him in sight of the spring.