“I don’t. Except for Morg and Virge’s arm I wouldn’t trade a square inch of it for a hundred acres in Missouri. A man can make something of himself out here if he has the sand for it. Back home we would all be farmers and poor ones at that.”
“Morg would be alive back home.”
“He wouldn’t want to be.”
Doc said, “No one has brought up Ringo.”
Wyatt resumed writing. “Ringo has quit the territory.”
“You don’t credit that.”
McMasters said, “I never saw a man as dead as Ringo still up and walking.”
“I have,” said Doc.
They started turning in after that. Wyatt finished the letter and relit the candle stub from his pipe and sealed it and put it with the others in the oilskin to give to Turkey Creek Jack. Then he knocked out the pipe and set it on the ground to cool and pulled his blanket around him. Miles away a coyote called to the moon, a joyful sound carried and warped by the wind into a dirge. It was hard to tell when it stopped and became the wind itself.
“It was Curly Bill,” Wyatt said.
Doc lay on his back with his eyes gleaming under a spray of stars. “What makes it Curly Bill?”
“It was just him.” Wyatt turned over.
Chapter Eighteen
I never saw a man as dead as Ringo still up and walking. He was christened John Peter Ringgold in Missouri, and the inevitable shortening was done by classmates when he attended William Jewell College in Liberty, studying Homer and Euclid while others his age were burning in the Wilderness and learning to get along with the stumps of limbs piled up for burial behind the church at Shiloh. In the late summer of 1864 he rode home from classes on one of his father’s mules to find three badly used quarter horses in the stable and his cousin Jim Younger guarding them with a Spencer rifle. Jim had a new black beard and his officer’s gray greatcoat was ragged at the hem and showing two mismatched bone buttons among the brass. His hat was Union issue without band or insignia, and some attempt had been made to block it so that the brim swept up on one side like Jeb Stuart’s.
He took some time recognizing John, for they had not seen each other in four years, and even then he braced him and patted him down for weapons before taking him inside to the kitchen, where a braided length of jug-eared farmer with big hands and a turkey neck and a smear of chestnut beard around his mouth was eating a slice of John’s mother’s cherry pie with his fingers. He was in dirty underwear, no shirt, and shoddy trousers held up with pink braces like a dandy’s and stuffed into new cavalry boots that must have been too small for him by the way he stood pigeon-toed. When the door opened he grasped the amber handle of a Navy Colt’s stuck in the front of his trousers, but he let his hand fall when Jim came in behind John carrying the Spencer.
Jim introduced the farmer as Buck James and the farmer wiped his fingers on his underwear top and took John’s hand in a crusty grip and told him his father was in the parlor and that his mother had left to bring back the doctor. John asked if his father was hurt. The farmer got a look from Jim that said he hadn’t told John anything and the fanner said to take him on in.
His father was standing in the parlor smoking his pipe, a thing he never did in that room, at the request of John’s mother. On the davenport, his thin shoulders propped up on pillows, lay a boy not older than seventeen, narrow-faced with a great dome of smooth forehead like a baby’s. He was naked to the waist with a patchwork quilt drawn up over his chest and a yellow-stained bandage slanting over his left shoulder toga-fashion. When the three entered he followed their progress without turning his head. He had a habit of blinking both eyes rapidly like an owl.
“Jess, this here is Jim and Cole’s cousin Johnny Ringgold,” said Buck James. To John: “He taken a ball at Crooked Crick. Soon’s he can ride we are fixing to throw them Yanks a shivaree they will talk about in Washington City.”
John would remember little worth telling a historian of that first and only meeting with Frank James and his baby brother Jesse, which ended abruptly when John’s mother came back alone to report that the doctor had refused to aid a guerrilla. Fearing betrayal to the Federals, Jim and Buck bundled the boy into a litter lashed together from willow branches and dragged him into Carroll County where the Jameses knew a doctor with Confederate sympathies. John never heard from any of them again, but learned of Jesse’s complete recovery when he was identified among the nightriders who stopped a Union train in Centralia a month later and lined up and shot down the disarmed soldiers in cold blood.
That, and a subsequent engagement in which that same band under Bloody Bill Anderson wheeled and ran down the pursuing regulars, finished John at college. Concentrating on Thermopylae and the conquest of Gaul became increasingly difficult when the roll of cannons to the south was making ripples in his inkwell. But the war ended before he could enlist, and a young man drilled in the hopelessness of history’s lost causes from Ilium to Waterloo was poor clay for the bands of border raiders who traded skirmishes in the woods for bank assaults and train robberies after
Appomattox. Like hundreds of others whose roots had been blasted by mortars and grapeshot and a victory-bloated Union’s tyrannical Order No. 11, Johnny Ringo went to Texas.
It was the place to be when you were young and strong and had few skills not drawn from a book. The cattle industry was in the process of being invented, and any man who could keep a horse under him and hold his water in the face of angry fire was welcome to join the raiding parties dipping across the Rio Grande for Mexican beef and a cut of the market yield in Chicago. Like any good Missouri boy, John had hunted his share of meat on the hoof, but the rangy, hook-horned descendants of Cortez’s cattle were the test of a man; after a few hundred spills and a dozen near-tramplings he grew hard as jerky and developed a leather hide stretched over six feet and two inches of wolf muscle. During drives north he traded fire with vaqueros and rurales and bandits, sometimes all three in one mounted bunch, and his natural abilities with rifle and pistol preceded him. He worked with and for more ex-Confederate senators and colonels than he figured the South could have held on its best day. If his fellow hands were concerned by his soft-spoken good manners and occasional absences from dugout poker matches to burrow in a corner with one of the books he carried in his blanket roll, they extinguished their doubts in the prodigious quantifies of alcohol he consumed when he had cash in his poke. Once he pulled a cork out of a bottle he threw it away. At such times his company was avoided, for the man who when sober would ignore a deadly insult would lash out with his long arms when drinking and beat a man half to death for smiling wrong. In this way he drifted from camp to camp, his welcome lasting only as long as the time between bottles.
Cattle work, once the trade was established and confrontations with the grandees became unnecessary, was not for him. He was too big for the normal cow pony to carry over a long drive and few men trusted him when nothing was happening to keep his mind off drinking. He did some rustling for the small outfits, and when range disagreements like the Mason County Hoodoo War broke out he hired on with the bigger ranches as a regulator. How many men he might have killed during this period, if he killed any, would probably never be known, for no witnesses ever came forward to connect him to any of the deaths.
Legends grew up around him, as they did around quiet men with euphonious names and no apparent past, like vines climbing a condemned corral. It was said that he had ridden with Quantrill in Missouri and Kansas; that he had studied for the seminary in Virginia and learned six languages before he fled to escape a murder charge; that he was born in Texas and had given up a promising career in law with his family firm when his intended bride left him standing at the altar. It was a time of women’s novels and campfire ballads that would not let a man choose life on the scout without some evil romantic quirk of fate to trigger the choice. Somehow the story started circulating, and it would outlast most of the others, that from time to time he received letters addressed to him in a femini
ne hand that would leave him morose and dangerous to be around for days. Since no one claimed ever to have actually seen the letters, it followed him everywhere and would not die.
He never talked about his people or his past, nor told lies about them that someone could track down and prove false and in the proving uncover a truth. His very silence was taken as evidence that one or the other or both were dark, for in the long and frequent stillnesses west of St. Louis, asking questions and providing entertaining answers came second only to theater and funerals. It would not occur to any of them that the reality might not be worth mentioning. In truth he had loved no woman since his teacher in third grade, although he had bedded several and picked up a dose of clap in El Paso; and he could never kill as many men as had been charged to him.
Gun work was not steady. Ranchers couldn’t stand paying a hand to do nothing when no shooting was going on. Between jobs he robbed an occasional stage. They were easy. But money meant whiskey, and the gangs were continually breaking up to reform somewhere else without Ringo to have to walk around on eggshells. Texas itself began to get too various for him when the Comanches surrendered after Adobe Walls and the Rangers turned their attention to the outlaw element beginning with his friend Wes Hardin. They followed Hardin to Florida, took him off the train in Pensacola, and sent him back to Huntsville for twenty-five years and Ringo rolled his books and Winchester into his blanket and struck out for Arizona Territory.
Ed Schieffelin had gone looking for his own tombstone among the diamondbacks and Apaches in the Dragoons, found a vein of silver as thick as his wrist, and almost before he got back to the San Pedro the city of Tombstone had begun to blister up out of the flats. Johnny Ringo was one of dozens of predatory animals who smelled blood and money and began drifting in that direction in 1879. On the way he stopped in the adobe hamlet of Safford to cut the dust. In a saloon with a plank bar and an earthen floor he sat in on a few hands of poker, couldn’t find his luck, and threw in to drink at the bar. He was joined moments later by a cowboy named Lou Hancock, whose own luck had gone sour after Ringo left. Ringo signaled the bartender to slide another shot glass down the plank. Hancock thanked him but said he was drinking beer. Ringo had two more drinks, began to stew over the answer, then produced one of his ivory-handled Colt’s and shot Hancock. The cowboy’s luck had turned, for Ringo’s aim drunk wasn’t good. Hancock lost a piece off his neck and his assailant finished his bottle and rode out. No one pursued him. There had been no deaths, and on the frontier when one man invited another to drink with him and the other man refused, the matter was out of the law’s hands.
Tombstone was mostly adobe when he got to it, but some frames were going up on Fremont and Allen streets. Lumber was packed in from the Huachucas and was as valuable as silver in an area where a man made his own shade. No prospector or woodcutter, Ringo got in quickly with the local cattlemen who drank tanglefoot in the saloons, and laid bets on how soon the silver would play out or Geronimo would tire of white men crawling like ants over his mountains and burn the place to the ground. He took an instant liking to a fellow named Curly Bill Brocius, a big, buffalo-headed cowboy with a square grin and the endearing habit of turning his poke wrongside out on the bar and calling for everyone to drink until the last coin was gone; but he was more drawn toward a surly half-breed called Pony Deal, who wore a couple of hideout pistols under his canvas coat and a bowie knife that had sliced through the stitches in the leather scabbard on his hip. He could match Ringo swallow for swallow, and unlike Ringo he was as dangerous sober as he was drunk. A couple of ugly incidents took place in Ringo’s presence between Deal and others that would have come back on them all had Tombstone been the county seat at the time and under public scrutiny. Ringo, who apologized to women for keeping his hat on at poker for luck, had no use at all for Pete Spence, whom he had once seen beating a Mexican whore with his fists in a corner for biting him.
Most of them deferred to a bandy-legged old crank with a brown bald head and a broom-thatch of white whiskers fanned out and cut square across his cravat, or where his cravat would have been had he worn one and not a preacher’s black coat buttoned to the throat even in the hottest weather. His name was Clanton. If he had a Christian name Ringo never learned it, because everyone called him Old Man Clanton to separate him from his three sons: Ike, the eldest, bearish and goat-whiskered with a tobacco lump taken root under his right ear; Phin, cow-eyed, with his father’s Quaker brow and not enough sense to move his foot when he was pissing on it; and Billy, the youngest, a bull-shouldered oaf of eighteen or nineteen and a school-yard bully. It was months before Ringo saw their sister Mary, a colorless young woman who hardly ever left the house where she cooked and cleaned for her father and brothers. Ringo enjoyed Ike in spite of his big mouth but didn’t trust him, didn’t think about Phin at all, and was irritated by Billy, although he didn’t show it. For all his swagger Billy was no bluff like Ike, and he always had a pistol on him. Ringo had lived too long to pick fights with men who might be as ready to defend themselves as he.
The first time Ringo addressed the old man, he demanded to know if Ringo was from Missouri. When he answered that he was, the old man snapped, “Reb or Yank?”
Ringo, adept at turning aside questions about his past, replied that Cole and Jim Younger were his cousins. It was the right thing to say to another man from Missouri. Before the week was out he was riding with the Clantons and Curly Bill below the border after grandee beef, a new vocation there. This was home stuff to him, and he showed them some things about boxing strays in gullies under a rustler’s moon and used his Winchester to send three vaqueros galloping home to light a candle to the Holy Virgin. The drive north was uneventful.
Tombstone was no-man’s-land, a place to rest and drink and gamble and gather news. The cowboys’ headquarters were in Charleston to the west and, in summer heat, Galeyville, forty-five miles east in the Chmcahua foothills. There he made the acquaintance of the McLaurys: Tom, a man nearly as courtly as himself and a range banker who advanced loans out of a money belt and depended upon his brother to collect them, and Frank, a few years older but much shorter, with a short man’s short fuse and an image of himself as big as Billy Clanton. He had a reputation as a gunman, although he had never killed anyone so far as rumor knew, and Ringo himself, who changed horses occasionally with the others at the McLaury ranch in Sulphur Springs Valley near the border, had seen what looked like an acre of brass cartridge shells catching fire in the sun where Frank stood to practice. Ringo was polite with both of them.
He enjoyed the company of Frank Stilwell, a fixture in Charleston who liked to show off his collection of stolen Wells Fargo weapons, with which he was building himself a fair name as a highwayman. In his middle twenties and beardless, he strode around in store clothes sucking on a big cigar like a newspaper cartoon of a boy imitating Pierpont Morgan—a double caricature. His stories of youthful daring entertained Ringo without convincing him, and Ringo was relieved to see when they held up their first stage together that when Stilwell drew a bandanna up over his face the bravado stopped. He was as professional a thief as Ringo had known.
After Cochise County was formed and Tombstone made the seat, the cowboys gathered often in the house Johnny Behan shared with his common-law wife Josephine Sarah Marcus in Tombstone. Behan was part owner of the Dexter Livery & Feed and had been appointed sheriff by Governor Fremont. As the county’s tax administrator, he often depended on Curly Bill and others to help his deputies convince area ranchers of the importance of public revenue. Ringo played poker at his house often but stood back from his political glad handing and amplified Irish charm; it was the sort of welcome that blew away with the first change of wind. Ringo was far more impressed with the sheriff’s trim, dark-eyed woman, who walked through every room as if she were crossing a stage, and whose waist-length hair smelled of fresh herbs when she bent over the table to empty ashtrays. But he never jumped another man’s claim and so remained only polite.
With Mexico a short jump away and the nearest law with teeth in it as far off as Prescott, Tombstone was a bandits’ gift from God. They owned the sheriff and the local Wells Fargo agent and made their beds between fat Mexican cattle and stagecoaches so heavy with bullion their wheels cut ruts in rockface. In the days when they were riding highest Ringo’s cousins, rotting now in prison, and their friends Frank and Jesse, hiding out somewhere in Missouri, never knew times like these. Ringo alone of all his partners knew that they were running out.
Others had come into the region, among them the Earp brothers, blond giants who operated together like parts of the same animal to knock an apple off every tree in the county from prostitution and gambling to timber stands and mineral rights, and had got themselves badges to license their weapons to protect the harvest. Close behind them came Doc Holliday. In Holliday Ringo saw something familiar, a man of some culture and learning whom drink made dangerous, and who drank a great deal to stun the thing that was eating out his insides. He was everything in Ringo that Ringo avoided or else made his peace with and so stayed alive. Yet he did neither, and in fact sought Holliday’s company for a drink or a few hands of faro every time the two were in town—drawn to him as a man who fears heights is drawn to a steep cliff to look down dizzy at the treetops far below. And like that man he wrestled with the almost overpowering urge to step off. The sheer heady rush of it made him drink more in Holliday’s presence, and the more he drank the greater grew the danger and the headier the rush. The stepping-off would have to come. Meanwhile he bet more than he could afford and smiled in his moustaches when Doc told about the Cornish Jack who got drunk and lopped off his own phizzle with a shovel because he thought it was a bald-headed mouse.
The Earps posed a more insidious threat to the good thing the cowboys had in Cochise County. Ringo recognized in them the same single-tracked ruthlessness that ran beneath Curly Bill’s outward good humor, the same need to seize and wring the last ounce of silver from the region without swinging a pick. It was rich, but not rich enough to support two rival bands of like determination, and from the outset Ringo knew that they could not work together, although they might try.
Bloody Season Page 20