by Mark Warren
When the coughing would not abate, Doc walked briskly for the far end of the fort, never seeing Wyatt and his horse. The tubercular hacking remained audible as Doc made his way along the parade field to the hospital.
“Time to get out,” Wyatt said softly, much in the same way he had spoken to Morgan on those long nights of brotherly exchange.
The mare’s ears stiffened at the words. She hooked her neck around to better see Wyatt. He took up the cheek strap on the halter and started the mare at a walk for the livery.
CHAPTER 24
Spring 1882: New Mexico Territory, Colorado, San Francisco
They skirted the Peloncillos and stole into New Mexico by way of the old Gila River Road to Silver City. There they sold their horses and took a specially arranged stage to Deming, courtesy of Wells, Fargo. In Deming, Charlie Smith said his goodbyes and outfitted himself for parts unknown.
From there the rail lines ran due north to Albuquerque, where Doc Holliday and Dan Tipton parted ways from the retired posse and declared themselves for Denver, where the gambling was said to be good.
“Well, Wyatt,” Doc said, standing on the loading platform at the train station, “I’d say we made our mark back there in that Godforsaken place so aptly named ‘Tombstone.’ Maybe we even helped civilize it a bit. Do you suppose that’s why fate brought us together in Fort Griffin all those years ago?”
Wyatt looked down at his friend from the small coupling platform on the back of the passenger car. “Don’t know much about those things, Doc.”
Holliday laughed at his own attempt to be philosophical. “Oh, that’s just how some of us mortals pretend we can see some kind of order in the insanity we encounter all around us.”
“What I do know,” Wyatt said in his straightforward manner, “was how you saved my skin . . . and you stuck with me.”
Doc’s smile was so gentle and childlike, Wyatt felt an unexpected tightening in his chest. Looking at his pallid friend, Wyatt found it easy to imagine the peaceful look on Doc’s face when he would one day lie stretched out in a casket.
“Wyatt, men look up to you. Either that or they want to kill you. You’ll always have friends who’ll want to help you, just like you’ll probably always have enemies.”
Doc climbed the two steps to offer his hand. When they gripped and shook, Wyatt was surprised at the strength his ailing friend was able to summon.
“I’m proud the cards fell the way they did,” Doc said, “and put me on your side of things.”
Wyatt averted his eyes and nodded. When Holliday would not slacken his grasp, Wyatt turned back to Doc’s determined face.
“You gave me something I didn’t have before, Wyatt.” Doc cocked his head and mustered a theatrical voice. “Raison d’être,” he said with a rising and then falling attempt at melody. “Do you know what that is?”
“Can’t say as I do, Doc.”
Holliday’s face sobered into patent ingenuousness. “You gave me a reason to live, my friend.”
The whistle howled from the head of the train, and the car made a small lurch that banged the coupling. The line of cars started to move, and Doc backed off to the depot’s loading platform.
“Take care of yourself, Wyatt,” Doc called out over the rumble of the wheels.
“So long, Doc,” Wyatt returned and watched the frail man bend at the waist to cough into his ready handkerchief. Doc was still hacking into the cloth when the train took the gentle curve that put the depot out of sight from where Wyatt stood between the cars.
Sometime in the night the train crossed into Colorado. In Trinidad, McMaster and Creek Johnson departed for the Texas panhandle, until the situation in Arizona could cool down. The Earp brothers and Vermillion pressed on for Gunnison, where the ex-carpenter exhumed his original trade by hiring on with a construction crew to erect a new gambling hall in the business district. Camping outside Gunnison, Wyatt stayed with Warren until he had convalesced enough to maneuver without a walking cane.
When Wyatt finally found himself alone on the train to California, he felt the extended tragedy of the Tombstone venture close up like a book. All his posse men had gone their separate ways, just as they should. They were hardened men all, and harder still for their executioner’s ride across the outlands of Arizona. Brothers who had answered a call. None of Wyatt’s coterie of gunmen had been lost, and for this he was most grateful. But now, until such time as a pardon could be engineered, each and every one of them was wanted by the law.
For the time, at least, he was done with killing. Maybe for all his days to come. If he never killed again, it would take a lifetime—or what was left of it—to wash the blood from his hands. If not that, he would simply have to learn to live with the stain.
As the train rumbled its way from the mountains across Utah and into the Great Basin, Wyatt stared out the window at the vastness of the desolate land. It was another sharp-edged and dry terrain, inhospitable to men, except where their lusty ambitions lured them to chip away at the earth’s surface to steal whatever rich ores might lie below.
During the night, as the track angled northwest through the Sierras, he turned to mark the moon creeping above the great skillet of desert stretching back to Arizona. It rose like a sliver of red flame banished from hell, pausing to shed its specious glow over the legions of men and women who desperately scrambled for their fortunes. Somewhere back there was Tombstone, receiving a piece of that light, as if it were due some illumination on account of the silver that had been chiseled from the land.
Virgil’s lost letter had found him in Gunnison, letting him know of Mattie’s rebellion among the elder Earps and her subsequent return to Arizona. Why she would choose that place was a mystery to Wyatt. He would not see her again, but he would have to live with her ruin. No matter what angle he took to study the situation, he knew he was a part of her dissipation. But, of course, so was she. All he had wanted was to give her a hand up, but there were people who would never take control of their own destiny, and Mattie was one of those. She was a follower. Now, she would have to follow someone else.
The low hanging moon softened to the colors of the earth, and he thought of Valenzuela Cos. Not so much the woman, really, but her claim on that moon . . . and how she had brokered a share of its pale promise to him. To all men who dreamed.
Waiting for her man, McMaster, to return, she lived inside the very adobe walls with which she’d expected to surround herself. She was likely there now, fulfilling that prophecy. He imagined McMaster talking to her in the quiet of a Sonora Desert night. Mud walls and dirt floor notwithstanding, Wyatt estimated they had something more valuable than all the silver that still lay under the land.
The moon was still up when the train pulled into San Francisco. Wearing his new clothes, he stepped onto the landing and was struck with the realization that he was now a man without a horse. Not even a saddlebag. Everything he owned fit into the one valise he carried. At the terminal desk, a clerk looked up the Marcus address for him, scratched directions on the back of his ticket envelope, and then walked him outside to point the way. It was as though the clerk recognized a man who, separated from his horse, was no longer entirely connected to the world.
Within the hour, Wyatt set his bag on the sidewalk and stood soaking up the details of Sadie’s brick apartment building. Even in the dark, it was not charitable to the eye. Located in a transition section of town, the structure seemed to be sliding down from the lower class of white families, if not yet bottomed out in the slums of Chinatown. Bricks, too, were made of mud, he reminded himself. He pushed a quiet laugh through his nose. Still, it was Sadie’s parents’ home—her home—and, for that reason alone, he sought out its charm.
He imagined her moving through the small worn-out lawn, where someone had hung a chair-swing from a stout juniper limb. He pictured her moving through the alleyway leading to the piecemeal marketplace on the street below. He could almost hear her footsteps moving through the open hallway of the building it
self, the soles of her shoes tapping each stair.
He checked his pocketwatch. Four ten in the morning. Picking up his valise, he walked to the swing and stared at it. There was something silly about a man—who had so recently killed—sitting in a swing. Setting down the valise he turned to the building. Moonlight washed over the apartment in a ghostly white, and he thought it the purest glow he had ever witnessed. He eased down into the seat until his body went weightless in the small pendulum arc of the swing.
Each time the chair came to rest, his foot gently pushed the earth to re-establish the rhythm and the crackling stretch of the rope that kept him company. Eventually he favored the stillness of just waiting. And thinking. The moon had descended below the buildings in the west, and soon the dawn would come. And he would emerge from the dark, a man sitting in a swing, willing to start over again.
There was time.
AFTERWORD
Wyatt Earp never killed again. He lived out the rest of his eighty years with Sadie, moving with the tide of enterprise throughout the West, until his death in Los Angeles in 1929. Aside from a few more stints as a lawman, his varied occupations included: managing saloons, mine investing, horse racing, gambling, prospecting, boxing referee, real estate investor, bodyguard, movie consultant, railroad special guard, and protector of his own reputation and that of his brothers by seeking out writers to print his version of the truth about the events of his life.
Remarkably, for a man of his calling and history, not a single bullet had scarred his body. His last words, as reported by his wife at his bedside, were: “Suppose . . . suppose . . .”
Sadie spent the remainder of her life defending the honor of her husband and trying to secure his place in history through the efforts of biographers and the novelty of motion pictures. She died in 1944.
Doc Holliday aged prematurely as his consumption worsened. He met with Wyatt only once again, when the two old comrades crossed paths in a Denver hotel lobby. Doc died in bed, succumbing to his ravaging disease in Colorado in 1887.
Mattie died of an overdose of laudanum in Pinal, Arizona, in 1888.
Bat Masterson became a New York City sports writer and died at his desk in 1921.
In 1900, Warren Earp met a violent death in Arizona as a result of a personal feud with roots that may have reached back to his brothers’ Tombstone difficulties with the Cow-boys.
Virgil died in a pneumonia outbreak in 1905, while he was serving as a deputy sheriff in Nevada.
Allie Earp lived to be ninety-eight. She was the source for the best-known book debunking the Earp legend; however, recent research has revealed that her collaborator had fulfilled a covert anti-Earp agenda by falsifying the facts and publishing an altered manuscript only after Allie’s death in 1947.
Bessie Earp died in San Bernardino, California in 1887.
James Earp, despite his dedicated intake of alcohol, reached the old age of eighty-four. He died in Los Angeles in 1926, while Wyatt was still alive.
Newton Earp became town marshal of Garden City, Kansas, and later lived in Nevada and California. In 1928 at age 91, he died in Sacramento less than a month before Wyatt passed on.
Johnny Behan fell gracelessly from the sheriff’s position but stayed afloat through political connections by securing government jobs. He died from syphilis and arteriosclerosis in 1912. His son, Albert—interestingly—remained a lasting friend to Sadie and Wyatt Earp.
Ike Clanton, wanted by the law for cattle rustling, was shot in the back and killed while fleeing a lawman in Arizona in 1887. He was buried at the site of his death in an unmarked grave.
John Ringo, after a drunken spree alone in the desert, was found dead by a gunshot to the head just months after Wyatt Earp had left Arizona in 1882. The mysterious circumstances surrounding his demise have puzzled historians to this day. Hank Swilling was killed during a robbery at Fronteras in the same year. Phin Clanton and Pete Spence found a new home at the hellhole territorial prison in Yuma. The fate of assassin Bode has escaped history, but he is believed to have fled to Mexico.
The debate about Wyatt Earp’s character and methods of seeking justice are debated to this day, but no one has convincingly cast doubt upon his courage and deliberation. Countless times, his name has been evoked in speeches around the world as a symbol of an unflinching approach to law and order. Many historians have rationalized his failings by calling him a complex man with diverse agendas, which often grated against one another to create, finally, an enigma.
On the contrary, my research has led me to the conclusion that he was, in fact, a simple man, who used the same direct approach for whatever problems or challenges he confronted, no matter how complicated or fraught with political threat. For this reason he had a polarizing effect upon others; most who knew him either admired or despised him.
Much of the negative press on Wyatt’s career as a lawman has come from Arizona old-timers, who soaked up anti-Earp cynicism from Cow-boy descendants, who had either settled the southern Arizona Territory and resented the temporary opportunistic–fortune seekers of a boom town . . . or had once run roughshod over that country, only to come up against the law as dispensed by Wyatt Earp.
Virtually every named character in this book—with the one exception of Valenzuela Cos—is an historical part of the Earp record and is represented in this work in an accurate manner, as far as I now understand his or her personality across this reach of time. Certain secondary characters (bartenders and prostitutes, for instance, without surnames introduced) have been assigned names for the sake of story flow, but, of course, they lived, too (or people very much like them), though their names may have been lost to history.
FURTHER READING
And Die in the West by Paula Mitchell Marks: Simon & Schuster
Bat Masterson, The Man and the Legend by Robert DeArment: University of Oklahoma
The Buffalo Hunters by Charles Robinson: State House
Charleston and Millville: Hell on the San Pedro by John Rose: Self-published
The Clantons of Tombstone by Ben Traywick: Red Marie’s
Cochise County Cowboy War by Roy Young: Young & Sons
Doc Holliday, The Life and the Legend by Gary Roberts: John Wiley & Sons
Dodge City by Frederic Young: Boot Hill Museum
The Earp Brothers of Tombstone by Frank Waters: Bison
The Earp Papers, In a Brother’s Image by Don Chaput: Affiliated Writers of America
The Earps Talk by Al Turner: Creative Publishing
The 1882 Arizona Territorial Census of Cochise County, compiled by Carl Chafin: Cochise Classics
Equivocation at the O.K. Corral by Jeff Morey: Arizona Historical Society files
Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns, 1867–1886 by Miller and Snell: Bison
Helldorado, Bringing the Law to the Mesquite by William Breakenridge: Houghton Mifflin
The Illustrated Life and Times of Wyatt Earp by Bob Boze Bell: Tri-Star Boze
Inventing Wyatt Earp, His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra: Carroll & Graf
It All Happened in Tombstone by John Clum: Northland
John Ringo, The Gunfighter Who Never Was by Jack Burrows: University of Arizona
The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn: Simon & Schuster
The McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona, An O.K. Corral Obituary by Paul Johnson: Univ. of North Texas
Murder in Tombstone by Steven Lubet: Yale
The Story of Texas Jack Vermillion by Peter Brand: self
Tombstone, A.T. by Wm. B. Schillinberg: Arthur H. Clark
Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest by Walter Noble Burns: Garden City
Tombstone’s Early Years by John Myers Myers: Bison
Tombstone’s Epitaph by Douglas Martin: Univ. of Oklahoma
Travesty by S. J. Reidhead: Jinglebob Press
The Truth About Wyatt Earp by Richard Erwin: The O.K. Press
Undercover for Wells Fargo by Stuart/Carolyn Lake: Houghton Mifflin
Virgil Earp, Wes
tern Peace Officer by Don Chaput: Affiliated Writers of America
Wyatt Earp, A Biography of a Western Lawman by Steve Gatto: San Simon
Wyatt Earp, A Biography of the Legend by Lee Silva: Graphic
Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, Stuart Lake: Houghton Mifflin
Wyatt Earp, the Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller: John Wiley & Sons
Wyatt Earp Speaks by John Stevens: Fern Canyon
Wyatt Earp, The Untold Story, 1848–1880 by Ed Bartholomew: Frontier Book
Wyatt Earp, A Vigilante Life by Andrew Isenberg: Hill and Wang
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WITH GRATITUDE
To my friends and fellow researchers who have dug so diligently for the truth:
Peter Brand, (the late) Jack Burrows, Anne Collier, (the late) Paul Cool, (the late) Mark Dworkin, Bill Evans, Tom Gaumer, Paul Andrew Hutton, Billy “B.J.” Johnson, Paul Johnson, Bob McCubbin, (the late) Carol Mitchell, Jeff Morey, Bob Palmquist, Pam Potter, Cindy Reidhead, Gary Roberts, (the late) Lee Silva, Jean and Chuck Smith, Casey Tefertiller, Ben Traywick, Vickie Wilcox, and Roy Young.
To friends who read my manuscripts and critiqued:
(The late) Buddy Baarcke, John Barbour, Herb Barks, Jill Bayor, Doug Berg, Peter Brand, Jack Burrows, Elizabeth Cox, Matt Edelstein, Keith Jacobs, Elaine Martin, Chatty Stover, Marie Warren, Susan Warren, Ward Wight, and Sara Zuk.
Muchas gracias to Marcelino Espelosin and to Julio for getting my Spanish on track. Thanks to Angela Halifax for that rusty-hued moon.
