Dragon Teeth

by Michael Crichton

  “But the cavalry’s a half day ahead of me now,” Johnson said. “I can never catch up with them.”

  “True,” the judge said. “I’m real sorry for the inconvenience, son. I guess you’ll be staying with us in Deadwood a while longer, after all.”

  The story of Johnson’s incriminating photograph, and how he had come to miss leaving with the cavalry, went through the town. It had serious consequences.

  The first was to worsen relations between Johnson and Black Dick Curry, the Miner’s Friend. All the Curry brothers now were openly hostile to him, especially as Judge Harlan seemed uninterested in setting another inquest into the death of Texas Tom. When they were in town, which was whenever there was no stage leaving Deadwood for a day or so, they stayed at the Grand Central Hotel. And when they ate, which was seldom, they took their meals there.

  Johnson irritated Dick, who announced that Johnson behaved superior to everybody else, with what he called “his Phil-a-del-phia ways. ‘Pass the butter, would you please?’ Faugh! Can’t bear his fairy-airy ways.”

  As the days passed, Dick took to bullying Johnson, to the amusement of his brothers. Johnson bore it quietly; there was nothing he could do since Dick was only too ready to take an argument out into the street and settle it with pistols. He was a steady shot, even when drunk, and killed a man every few days.

  No one in town who knew Dick would go up against him, and certainly Johnson did not intend to. But it got so bad that he would leave the dining room before finishing his meal if Dick entered.

  And then there was the business of Miss Emily.

  Emily

  Women in Deadwood were few, and no better than they needed to be. Most of them lived in a house called the Cricket, down at the end of the south bend, where they plied their trade under the cold watchful eye of Mrs. Marshall, who smoked opium and owned the house. Others were independent, like Calamity Jane, who in recent weeks had made a great show of mourning the death of Bill Hickok, much to the disgust of Hickok’s friends. Calamity Jane was so masculine she often wore a soldier’s uniform and traveled undetected with the boys in blue, giving them service in the field; she had gone with Custer’s 7th Cavalry on more than one occasion. But she was so male that she often boasted that “give me a dildo in the dark, and no woman can tell me from a true man.” As one observer noted, this left Jane’s appeal somewhat obscure.

  A few Deadwood miners had brought their wives and families, but they did not often show in town. Colonel Ramsay had a fat squaw wife named Sen-a-lise; Mr. Samuels had a wife, too, but she was consumptive and always stayed indoors. So for the most part, the feminine element was provided by the Cricket women, and the girls who worked in the saloons. In the words of one Deadwood visitor, they were “pleasant women of a certain age, but in appearance as hard and mean as the rest of the landscape of that wretched mining town. The ones that ran tables in the saloons smoked and swore with the best of the men, and were so full of tricks that seasoned gamblers avoided them, and preferred men as dealers.”

  Into this hard-bitten world, Miss Emily Charlotte Williams appeared as a floating vision of loveliness.

  She arrived one noon on a miner’s buckboard, dressed entirely in white, her blond hair tied back fetchingly. She was young—though perhaps a few years older than Johnson; she was immaculate; she was delicate and fresh and sweet, and possessed some notable curvatures. When she took a room at the Grand Central Hotel, she became the most interesting new arrival since young Foggy had showed up with a wagonload of mysterious crates and two dead men covered in snow.

  News of Miss Emily, her lovely appearance and her tender story, raced around the town. Perkins’s dining room, never before full, was packed that night as everyone came to get a look at the creature.

  She was an orphan, the daughter of a preacher, the Reverend Williams, who had been killed in the nearby town of Gayville while building a church. At first it was said that he had been shot by a devilish desperado, but it later turned out he had fallen from the roof under construction and broken his neck.

  In her grief, it was also said, Miss Emily had collected her few belongings, and set out to find her brother Tom Williams, whom she knew to be prospecting somewhere in the Black Hills. She had already been to Montana City and Crook City, and had not succeeded in finding him. Now she was in Deadwood, where she planned to stay three or four days, perhaps more.

  The men in the Grand Central Hotel that night had bathed, and were wearing the cleanest clothes they owned; Johnson recorded in his journal that “it was amusing, to see these hard men preen and puff up their chests while they tried to eat their soup without slurping.”

  But there was a good deal of tension in the room as well, which was increased when Black Dick went over to Miss Emily’s table (the object of all eyes was dining alone) and introduced himself. He offered to escort her around the town that evening; with admirable poise she thanked him but said she would be retiring early. He offered to assist her in finding her brother; she thanked him but said that she had already had many offers of assistance.

  Dick was being watched by all the others, and knew it. He sweated; his face turned red and he glowered.

  “Seems I can’t be of help to you, then, is that it?”

  “I appreciate your courteous offer, I surely do,” she said softly.

  Dick appeared somewhat mollified as he stomped back to his table and huddled, commiserating, with his brothers.

  And there the matter might have rested, had not Miss Emily turned to Johnson, and said in her sweetest voice, “Oh, are you the young photographer I have heard so much about?”

  Johnson said he was.

  “I should appreciate seeing your gallery of pictures,” she said. “Perhaps my brother is among them.”

  “I will be happy to show them to you in the morning,” Johnson answered, and she responded with a graceful smile.

  Black Dick looked fit to kill—Johnson, in particular.

  “There is no greater pleasure than to win what everyone desires,” Johnson noted in his pages; he went to bed a happy man. He had become accustomed to sleeping in the room next to the stacked crates, accustomed not only to the fine powder that fell from them and dusted the floor, but also to the tomb-like darkness of the room itself and a strange sense of intimacy to be sleeping with the bones of the great creatures themselves. And of course the immense teeth, the teeth of actual dragons that once walked the earth. He found their presence oddly comforting.

  And tomorrow would bring his appointment with Emily.

  But his happiness was short-lived. Emily was disappointed by his pictures, not finding her dear brother among them.

  “Perhaps you could look again,” he suggested. She had gone through them very quickly.

  “No, no, I know he is not to be found in these.” She prowled his shop restlessly, looking around. “Have you shown me all you have?”

  “All I have taken in Deadwood, yes.”

  She pointed to a corner shelf. “You haven’t shown me those.”

  “Those are from my time in the badlands. Your brother is not among those plates, I assure you.”

  “But I am interested to see. Bring them here, and come sit beside me, and tell me about the badlands.”

  She was so charming he could not possibly refuse her. He brought down the plates and showed her his pictures, which seemed now to belong to another lifetime.

  “Who is this man with the tiny pick?”

  “That’s Professor Cope, with his geological hammer.”

  “And that beside him?”

  “That’s a skull of a saber-tooth tiger.”

  “And this man?”

  “That’s Cookie. Our teamster and cook.”

  “And this? Is he standing with an Indian?”

  “That’s Charlie Sternberg and Little Wind. He was a Snake scout. He died.”

  “Oh dear. And this is the badlands? It looks like the desert.”

  “Yes, you can see how eroded it is.”
>
  “How long did you spend there?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “And why would you go to such a place?”

  “Well, where there is erosion, the bones stick out and are easier to uncover.”

  “You went there for bones?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “How very odd,” she said. “Did bones pay you a lot?”

  “No, I paid my own way.”

  “You paid your own way?” She pointed to the desolate picture. “To go there?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “You see, I made a bet at Yale and then I had to go.”

  But he could tell she was not listening anymore. She thumbed through the glass plates, holding each to the light, glancing quickly, going on to the next.

  “What do you hope to find?” he asked, watching her.

  “It is all so strange to me,” she said. “I was merely curious about you. Here, put them back.”

  As he replaced them on the shelf, she said, “And did you find bones?”

  “Oh yes, lots of them.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Half were taken down the Missouri River by steamer. I have the other half.”

  “You have them? Where?”

  “In the hotel.”

  “Can I see these bones?”

  Something about her manner made him suspicious. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I am just curious to see them, now that you have mentioned them.”

  “Everyone in the town is curious to see them.”

  “Of course, if it is too much trouble—”

  “Oh no,” Johnson said. “It’s no trouble.”

  In his room, he opened one crate for her to see. Some gritty dirt fell to the floor.

  “That’s just old rocks!” she said, peering at the pieces of black shale.

  “No, no, this is a fossil. Look here,” he said, and he traced the shape of a dinosaur leg. It was a perfect specimen.

  “But I thought you had found old bones, not rock.”

  “Fossil bones are rock.”

  “There’s no need to snip.”

  “I’m sorry, Emily. But you see, these things have no value at all in Deadwood. They are bones which have lain in the earth for millions of years and which belonged to creatures long gone. This bone is from the leg of an animal with a horn on its nose, like a rhinoceros, but much larger.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “That seems wonderful, Bill,” she said, having decided to call him by that name. Her gentle enthusiasm touched him. She was the first sympathetic person he had come across in a long time.

  “I know,” he said, “but no one believes me. The more I explain them, the more they disbelieve. And eventually they will break in and smash them all, if I don’t get out of Deadwood first.”

  And despite himself, tears rolled down one cheek, and he turned away, so that she would not see him cry.

  “Why, Bill, what’s the matter?” she said, sitting down close to him on the bed.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, wiping his face and turning back. “It is just that—I never asked for this job, I just came west and now I am stuck with these bones and they are my responsibility, and I want to keep them safe so the professor can study them, and people never believe me.”

  “I believe you,” she said.

  “Then you are the only one in Deadwood who does.”

  “Shall I tell you a secret of my own?” she said. “I am not really an orphan.”

  He paused, waiting.

  “I am from Whitewood, where I have lived since the summer.”

  He still said nothing.

  She bit her lip. “Dick put me up to it.”

  “Put you up to what?” he asked, wondering how she knew Dick.

  “He thought you would confide in a lady, and tell me what the crates really contained.”

  “So you said you would ask me?” he said, feeling hurt.

  She looked down, as if ashamed. “I was curious myself, too.”

  “They really contain bones.”

  “I see that, now.”

  “I don’t want them—I don’t want anything to do with them—but they are my responsibility.”

  “I believe you.” She frowned. “Now I must convince Dick. He is a hard man, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But I will talk to him,” she said. “I will see you at dinner.”

  That night in the Grand Central dining room there were two new visitors. At first glance, they seemed to be twins, so similar was their appearance: they were both tall, lean, wiry men in their twenties, with identical broad mustaches, and identical clean white shirts. They were quiet, self-contained men who emanated a forceful calmness.

  “Know who those two are?” Perkins whispered to Johnson, over coffee.

  “No.”

  “That’s Wyatt Earp and his brother Morgan Earp. Wyatt’s taller.”

  At the mention of their names, the two men looked over at Johnson’s table and nodded politely.

  “This here’s Foggy Johnson, he’s a photographer from Yale College,” Perkins said.

  “Howdy,” the Earp brothers said, and went back to their dinner.

  Johnson didn’t recognize the names, but Perkins’s manner suggested that they were important and famous men. Johnson whispered, “Who are they?”

  “They’re from Kansas,” Perkins said. “Abilene and Dodge City?”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “They’re famous gunfighters,” Perkins whispered. “Both of ’em.”

  Johnson still had no notion of their importance, but any new visitor to Deadwood was fair game for a photograph, and after dinner he suggested it. In his journal, Johnson recorded his first conversation with the famous Earp brothers. It was not exactly a dramatic high point.

  “How would you gents like a photograph?” Johnson asked.

  “A photograph? Could be,” Wyatt Earp said. Seen close, he was boyish and slender. He had a steady manner, a steady gaze, an almost sleepy calmness. “What’ll it cost?”

  “Four bucks,” Johnson said.

  The Earp brothers exchanged a silent glance.

  “No thanks,” Wyatt Earp said.

  Emily’s News

  “It’s no good,” she whispered to him outside on the porch of the hotel before dinner. “The Curry boys are rattled by the Earp brothers arriving. It makes them jumpy. So they’re coming for your bones tonight. They boasted about it.”

  “They’re not going to get them,” Johnson said.

  “I believe they’re in the habit of getting whatever they want.”

  “Not this time.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’ll stand guard over them,” Johnson said, reaching for his gun.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Best thing is step aside, let them have ’em.”

  “I can’t do that, Emily.”

  “They’re hard men.”

  “I know that. But I must guard the bones.”

  “They’re just bones.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  He saw her eyes light up. “They’re valuable, then?”

  “They’re priceless. I told you.”

  “Tell me really. What are they, really?”

  “Emily, they really are bones. Like I told you.”

  She looked disgusted. “If it was me, I wouldn’t risk my life for a bunch of old bones.”

  “It’s not you, and these bones are important. They are historical bones and important to science.”

  “The Curry boys don’t care a hoot for science, and they’d be happy to kill you in the bargain.”

  “I know it. But I got to keep the bones.”

  “Then you better get help, Bill.”

  He found the famous gunfighter Wyatt Earp in the Melodeon Saloon, playing blackjack. Johnson drew him aside.

  “Mr. Earp,
could I hire your services for the night?”

  “I imagine so,” Earp said. “In what capacity?”

  “As a guard,” Johnson said, and explained about his fossil bones, the room, and the Curry brothers.

  “That’s fine,” Earp said when he had heard it all. “I will want five dollars.”

  Johnson agreed.

  “In advance.”

  Johnson paid him, right there in the saloon. “But I can count on you?”

  “You surely can,” Wyatt Earp said. “I will meet you in your room at ten o’clock tonight. Bring ammunition and plenty of whiskey, and don’t worry any further. You have Wyatt Earp on your side now. Your problems are over.”

  He had dinner with Emily, in the hotel dining room.

  “I wish you would give this up,” she said.

  They were exactly his sentiments. But he said, “I can’t, Emily.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  “Then good luck, Bill. I hope I see you tomorrow.”

  “Rest assured,” he said, and smiled bravely for her.

  She went up to her room. He went to his room and locked himself in.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening.

  Ten o’clock passed, and ten thirty. He shook his pocket watch, wondering if it was running right. Finally, he unlocked the room, and went down into the hotel lobby.

  A pimply boy was behind the desk as night clerk. “Howdy, Mr. Johnson.”

  “Howdy, Edwin. You seen Mr. Earp?”

  “Not tonight, I haven’t. But I know of his whereabouts.”

  “What do you know?”

  “He’s at the Melodeon, playing blackjack.”

  “He was at the Melodeon this afternoon.”

  “Well, he’s still there.”

  Johnson looked at the wall clock. It, too, said ten thirty. “He was supposed to meet me here.”

  “Probably forgot,” Edwin said.

  “We had an arrangement.”

  “Probably drinking,” Edwin said.

  “Can you go over there and get him for me?”

  “I wish I could. But I have to stay here. Don’t worry, Mr. Earp is a responsible sort. If he says he’ll come, I’m sure he’ll be along shortly.”