Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  Doc opened his gray coat and came forward to take the bandanna’s dangling end. Just then Billy Breakenridge stepped off the boardwalk behind Ringo and threw his arms around him, pinning his arms to his sides.

  “You little cunt.” Ringo struggled, but the deputy was wiry and held his grip with laced knuckles gone pale. His hat tumbled off.

  Doc was still grinning. “John, I never guessed it about you and Billy.”

  Wyatt Earp joined them, hatless in his Albert with no overcoat. He had been watching from inside the Cosmopolitan. “Let it go, Doc.”

  “I can take him.”

  “Him maybe. There’s an open window upstairs in the Grand I don’t like.”

  Ringo stopped struggling to get his breath. Moving quickly, Breakenridge released him, jerked Ringo’s pistol, and stepped back pointing it. “I am arresting you for carrying weapons on the street.”

  Doc said, “John, I guess anybody can throw down on you. I almost hurt my good name.”

  “It is like you Earps to hunker behind Billy’s skirts.” Ringo was panting. The air was ripe with half-digested whiskey.

  “I’m not an Earp.”

  “I think of you as a bastard brother and part nigger.”

  “You are a first-class horse thief, John. Bushwhacking is a way under you.”

  They had collected a small crowd of merchants and miners, through which Jim Campbell pried a path with his pistol. He and Breakenridge flanked Ringo and took him toward Fremont. At six feet two he towered over both deputies.

  “Behan will just turn him back out, six-shooter and all,” Wyatt said.

  Doc looked up at the open window on the second floor of the Grand Hotel. “I guess it is too cold to say they are just letting in air.”

  “I’d bet the house it’s to let buckshot out.”

  “I never featured Ringo for a play of that nature. He’s an honest killer.”

  “Will McLaury has a long purse.”

  Wyatt accompanied Doc through the door of the Maison Doree. A wreath woven from green-and-orange sage flapped against it. The gas lamps burned blue in the winter gloom. They took a corner table, where Wyatt ordered steak and eggs for both of them. Doc changed his order to just eggs. He poured a slug from his pocket flask into his coffee. “How about that Billy? You never know what’s in a body until it comes out.”

  “Girls fight too.” Wyatt watched him drink. “I cannot go around bailing you, Doc. Hiring Tom Fitch cost me the best of my mineral rights and I am the only customer I’ve had at my table in two days. I lost,” he added.

  Doc produced a thick fold of currency from an inside pocket and counted three hundred in fifties onto the table.

  “That’s the rest of what I owe you for Kate.” He put away the remaining notes.

  Wyatt didn’t pick them up right away. “You must have pulled every sore tooth in Tombstone.”

  “I sold some carpetbaggers the pistol I used to kill Tom McLaury.”

  “You used a scattergun on Tom.”

  “They wouldn’t hear that.”

  “How many did you sell?”

  “Two old Colt’s and a derringer with a busted firing pin. Spangenberg gouged me twenty for the lot. I got two hundred each.”

  “You notch them?”

  “I did after the first one. They take to pouting when you don’t.”

  “What happens when they meet?”

  “Probably nothing. Carpetbaggers cannot shoot for shit.”

  “It sounds like something Bat would do.” Wyatt put the notes in his wallet.

  “I surely hope not. I don’t like Bat.”

  Doc’s eggs arrived. He pricked the yolks with his fork and watched the yellow run out but didn’t lift it. He leveled off his cup from the flask. Wyatt said, “That bandanna trick is plain crazy. If you are not gutshot you’ll bum to death from the powder flare.”

  “Better that than the cough.”

  “We all agreed not to go anywhere alone until this business finishes blowing off.”

  “You agreed. I sat out that hand.”

  “You dealt yourself in quick enough that day.”

  “The game then was different.”

  “At least move into the hotel,” said Wyatt. “We are holding the room across the hall for you.”

  “I can do that. Fremont is too quiet since you Earps pulled out.”

  “We could do with some quiet.” The waiter brought Wyatt’s steak and he ladled ketchup on it from a china boat. “You heard they tried gunning John Clum aboard the Benson stage Thursday.”

  “If it says it in the Epitaph I guess it is so.” Doc made a face and pushed away his plate with the eggs uneaten.

  “Ringo would be my guess, or more likely Frank Stilwell. If it was Ringo, Clum would not have just got off and strolled away like Sunday in Saint Louis. McLaury has us all marked up like a butcher’s chart.”

  “Cowboys and horse thieves, the lot of them.”

  “There still is no percentage in it. I came to this place looking to make money, not widows. It has all gone to shit, Doc. I’m off to California as soon as I find a buyer for my water and timber rights.”

  “See to yourself.”

  Wyatt chewed. “You know I am moving my game to the Alhambra. The Oriental is an unfriendly place since you tried to shoot off Milt Joyce’s hand.”

  “I wasn’t shooting at his hand.”

  “That rotgut is no good for your aim.”

  Doc poured some more into the cup. There was no longer any coffee in it.

  “I will ride the tiger here for a spell and then see what is doing in Colorado,” he said. “I hear Gunnison is busting loose.”

  “I hear it is good country for bad lungs.”

  “Six to five a ball takes me first,” Doc said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Morgan was the first of the Earps whom Josephine Sarah Marcus had met on her way to Tombstone with the Pauline Markham troupe; and to her he remained the handsomest of the brothers by far.

  She got her first glimpse of him at the Benson station when her stage was about to leave and he strode out to mount to the messenger’s seat, all lanky grace in a buckskin coat and dungarees, carrying a shotgun. His hat was tipped as far back as it would go and his hair and whiskers were burned yellow against the red of his face. In bright sunlight his eyes were porcelain blue. But then she had met and become enamored of Johnny Behan, and when the time came to make a change from him, there was Wyatt with the same eyes and fair coloring and better prospects. But Morgan’s more casual, less aware good looks continued to please her.

  Unlike his brothers he had no investments in Cochise County. The wages he drew from Wells Fargo went into food and rent and gambling and whiskey and an occasional visit to the Bird Cage, where (it was said) he was a favorite of the motherly Mexican whores and the hourglass dancers alike. Around respectable women he exhibited a shy politeness only dimly related to Wyatt’s courtly polish, but in male company he was known to tie clotheslines around dozers’ ankles and introduce mustard seed into unattended tobacco pouches and, when the eruptions occurred, smile in his handlebars while others roared. When his poke grew flat he spelled Wyatt at his cue box in the Alhambra or shoveled slag at the Vizina hoisting works on Toughnut, quitting when he had enough money to renew his credit around town. His financial irresponsibility and general—some thought studied—carelessness of appearance drove the ambitious and meticulous Wyatt into rages, but although no mention was ever made of it, it was no secret that Morgan was his favorite brother. James had been a man grown when the rest of them were boys, and Virgil’s war service had absented him from the Earp household before Wyatt had established any kind of relationship with him. Warren, an infant when Wyatt began his travels, was a stranger. Morgan had been Wyatt’s charge since boyhood, and if in later years he rebelled against his older brother’s outward puritanism, his own refusal to take himself seriously mitigated a family drift toward pomposity. Arguments between the two quickly grew tense with sarca
sm (the Earps were nothing if not acerbic) and invariably ended with Wyatt tousling Morgan’s unruly blond hair.

  For all his closely nurtured lack of direction, Morgan was devoted to Lou, the dark, quiet young woman with whom he lived as man and wife. The two behaved as honeymooners in public and were never overheard shouting at each other in private, as were Virgil and the tiny but formidable Allie—and Wyatt and Sadie’s neighbors had also felt the heat of two powerful wills in friction. Sadie, who had run away from a happy home to join the theater and deserted Johnny Behan for Wyatt, revered fidelity; it was to her an awesome attribute. Although she knew with all the complacency of a child of the Industrial Revolution that Wyatt’s single-tracked determination to acquire property and standing assured him a sounder future, she was jealous of Lou and felt that Morgan’s theatrical good looks were wasted on her. That Lou and Allie had closed ranks around Mattie Earp to freeze Sadie out only fueled this conviction. She did not know Lou, and so decided that Morgan deserved better.

  Life behind the footlights had palled early on Sadie. The theater, which had offered escape from a middle-class Jewish adolescence in San Francisco, soon proved itself a mobile trap. Her identity apart from the eternal chain of rainy-eyed ingenues and cabin boys she played onstage was packed away with a few personal belongings in a single battered portmanteau, and given the thievery on the circuit she was always in danger of losing it. Coupled with a mediocre talent and a broken romance with a choral member of the Pinafore troupe, the life was no more substantial than the painted canvas flats that got to ride in the company’s only spring wagon while the cast jounced over broken roads on ironwood axles. This was spare comfort for a girl drilled since the age of comprehension in the importance of material goods. When brown-eyed Johnny Behan entered her little sphere spinning visions of political advancement and senators’ wives in ball gowns, she had deserted the proscenium without turning her head. Now she only thought of it when the sun went down.

  Backstage, the hour of dusk was the busiest, a frantic scramble for scattered bits of wardrobe and voices rehearsing lines from different scenes all at once and spilled greasepaint making the footing treacherous and locally recruited grips fumbling with the rigging and scenery. She would peep through the curtains at the audience waiting out front and her stomach would flutter. Without all that it was a quiet time and lonely—too dark to read, too bright to light a lamp, and all the husbands were on their way home to wives preparing supper. The quitting whistles at the mines, drawn and deadened by wind and distance, sounded excruciatingly mournful, like widowed geese pining for their lost mates. Sadie dreaded being alone at twilight.

  Morgan therefore was a doubly welcome visitor this day. At his knock she opened the door on him standing on the porch with his hat in front of him, looking sprucer than usual despite an improperly buttoned vest and smelling of Genuine Yankee soap.

  “I never meant to disturb you,” he said, almost mumbling. “I’ll leave.”

  She’d forgotten she was wearing a kerchief around her head. She reached up and tugged it off, releasing a fall of dark hair to her waist. “Don’t, I was just packing some things. Wyatt wants me out of here and in Mrs. Young’s by tomorrow. Where is he?”

  “Out showing some rich limey a timber stand he has up for sale in the Dragoons. He won’t be back before morning and asked me to look in on you.”

  She invited him in for supper and served him something that passed for veal in Bauer’s with biscuits and gravy. They spoke of mutual friends, including Harry and Kitty Jones, who had thawed to each other after the Behan episode and were behaving as newlyweds. Morgan’s table manners like Wyatt’s were impeccable. He buttered his biscuits with scalpel-like precision and used the napkin tucked inside the V of his vest to wipe the corners of his moustaches. His conversation was somewhat less facile, and when he remarked for the third time upon her uncommon skill with an oven she asked him what was on his mind.

  He drained his water glass, offered to refill hers from the pitcher, and topped off his own. He moved carefully; his shoulder wounds were freshly healed.

  “When Wyatt leaves, will you be coming with him?”

  “If he asks.”

  He nodded and drank.

  “Are you worried about Mattie?” she asked.

  “We have got used to her. The women especially.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “Will you be marrying him?”

  She shook out her own napkin and refolded it. “He has not asked.”

  “That is an answer.” He rose.

  “Is that why you are here?”

  He got his hat and coat. “I’d better get out now so people won’t talk, but if you would not mind I’d admire to sit on your porch awhile.”

  She said she wouldn’t mind at all, and thanked him for the compliment. It was a custom on the frontier for cowboys to ride many miles just to sit on the porches of respectable women. She was still considering their conversation and wondered with a disloyal little surge if Morgan and Lou were having trouble. She tried flirting. “It will help my reputation to have a comely man camped out in front of my house.”

  “I am armed.”

  It seemed a strange thing to declare.

  Much later, when she was in bed, a porch board creaked. She pulled on a dressing gown, took from her vanity table an Allen sidehammer that Wyatt had given her for a muff pistol, and pulled aside the window curtain in the gaudy parlor. Morgan was huddled on her porch swing with a heap of snow on his greatcoat shoulders and the crown of his hat.

  “Morgan, you sweet simpleton, get in here this instant.” He started awake at her voice coming from the open doorway and stood up quickly, cascading snow. When he saw who it was he made a little movement and she saw his hand coming away from a pistol in his belt just before he buttoned his coat over it.

  “I went to sleep there,” he said. “I did not start out to.”

  “You will freeze.”

  “Well, if you are going to prod me in that way I guess I had better come.”

  She glanced down at the little revolver still in her hand and put it in the pocket of her dressing gown. When he stepped inside she closed the door and set the latch and fixed a bed for him on the davenport in the parlor with sheets and a quilt. “Am I to know what this is about?” She took his hat and coat.

  “Tombstone is no fit place for a woman alone.”

  In the morning, while Morgan was still sleeping, Johnny Behan passed the kitchen window heading toward the front of the house. Sadie was dressed and walked through the parlor and stepped out onto the porch before he could knock on the door. He had on his sombrero and a black chesterfield that caught him below the knees and made him appear tall, although he was just Sadie’s height. The whites of his eyes were pink and she smelled Sen-Sen, always a sign that he had been drinking.

  “You are as pretty in the morning as you are at night,” he said. “I always said that.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Can’t a man visit his wife of a morning?”

  “I am not your wife.”

  “You were quick enough to use my name at the Papago Cash Store when we were together.”

  “I asked you what you wanted.”

  “You are squatting on a lot belonging to me,” he said. “I have come to dispossess you.”

  “This house is mine.”

  “The lot is in my name.”

  “I put it in your name,” she said.

  He showed straight white teeth behind his moustaches. “That was short sight. I’ll not have you rolling with that murderer on my property. You can move your house or move out.”

  “You are drunk.”

  “You used to prefer me this way. You said it slowed me down so you could catch up.”

  “You are no gentleman.”

  “At least I am not a whore. I have the papers to serve if you care to see them.” He unbuttoned his coat.

  He was reaching inside it when Morgan came through the door and
struck him in the face. Behan fell backward off the porch, arms windmilling, and sat on the ground. He put fingers to his mouth and brought them away to look at the blood. When he started to rise, Morgan stepped off the porch, bent his knee up under Behan’s chin, and struck him low in the stomach. He jackknifed, throwing up. Morgan had him by the collar when Sadie inserted herself between them and pushed at Morgan’s chest. “You will kill him!”

  “That was the plan.” But he lowered his fist, bleeding at the knuckles. Behan tore himself loose from Morgan’s other hand and picked up his sombrero.

  “You are a particular woman,” he said to Sadie. His eyes had glassed over and the lower half of his face was a smear of blood and vomit. “You will only roll with an Earp.”

  Morgan started toward him. He turned hurriedly and crossed Fremont, tripping over his boots.

  “He has been drunk and boasting of his intentions since yesterday,” Morgan said.

  Sadie fingered the brooch at her throat. She wondered how much Morgan had heard of her conversation with Johnny. “If he had waited one more day he could have walked in and taken the house and lot without conversation.”

  “It wasn’t them he was after.”

  “Just like a morality play.” She kissed him. The gesture surprised Morgan, who hadn’t meant that at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “There is little Johnny Behan, the great horse thief of Arizona Territory.” Behan, puffy-lipped and swaying, passed Doc’s table in the Oriental without comment and ordered a whiskey at the bar. Doc called out to Buckskin Frank Leslie behind the bar to give the sheriff plenty of extra ice for his eye in case Morgan Earp stopped in. “Or was it Sadie done that?”

  Glaring back, Leslie said something in a low voice to Behan. The bartender was all fierce handlebars and pale gray eyes and wore a Peacemaker on a special belt rig that left the pistol exposed. Parker, Joyce’s partner, sat on a high stool under Custer’s Last Fight with his bandaged left foot elevated and resting next to the beer pulls. His big toe was still suppurating where Doc had shot the top off the first joint in October.