Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  Wyatt didn’t like Huck Buford, and he knew, anyway, why Mattie was making the suggestion. She and Wyatt had kept company, a time or two, on his visits to town. Mattie had taken to granting him her favors gratis, like the Generous Lady namesake of the saloon. She was hoping he’d be around long enough to make her a habit.

  Right now Wyatt was wishing Bat had waited for him. He wanted advice. But Bat had set out that morning to see his own brothers, Jim and Ed, over in Dodge City. Perhaps, Wyatt thought, I might send telegrams to Virgil and James, make an effort to get them into the freighting business.

  Taking care of business didn’t include going upstairs with Mattie Blaylock—for she was not a woman who rushed through a job of that kind, at least not with him—and he was casting about for a polite way to cut her loose. He told himself he had left that life behind; he wanted no more special understandings with Ladies of Easy Virtue. Yet he could not suppose himself morally in the clear, after his time on the gunboat. And he thought of most prostitutes as women of simple practicality: for many an abandoned woman, whoring was the only road out of starvation. His own brother James had married a whore; “white-washing a soiled dove” was not uncommon. Sarah had spurned her chance for another life. She had spurned Wyatt with it …

  He grimaced. He suspected that Mattie had set her cap for him, as Bessie Earp had for James. Keeping company could become keeping hearth and home.

  Home. Shuffling the cards to no purpose, Wyatt remembered all the days Urilla had tossed in the fever of typhus. It was a mercy that Urilla had been delirious during the delivery; that she hadn’t known her child had been born dead.

  Thinking of the dead child, he remembered Prudence’s body floating facedown in the muddy green water, like something washed from the scupper, her hair swirling about her head mingled with leaves and twigs. He should never have trusted Cudgin to see to her …

  “What is it, Wyatt?” Mattie asked, now. “You looked like you expected a peach and bit into a lemon.”

  “So it was too,” Wyatt murmured, sitting up straight. “Two such sour peaches, in fact. I will see you later, Mattie—it’s early yet, and I’ve business to do.” He slid her a double eagle. “For the comfort of a lady’s conversation.”

  Mattie tucked her chin, looking at him closely to see if he were making a game of her, and smiled when she saw no mockery. The gold piece vanished into her bosom, neat as a magic trick.

  “You, John Sterling, are a scabrous rascal and a cheat!” said a low voice that had a tinge of British nestled in its Texas accent: for Ben Thompson and his brother Bill had been born and partly reared in England. “And I believe you are in it with him, Murco! You signaled him when you dealt those cards!”

  Wyatt turned to see Ben Thompson glaring at John Sterling. Thompson had drooping mustaches, and his receding hair emphasized the roundness of his large head.

  “You will withdraw that foul lie, Thompson!” Sterling shouted, standing suddenly enough to knock a whiskey bottle to the floor. The bottle did not break and there was a moment when the three men glared at one another and the only sound was the whiskey gurgling from the overturned bottle.

  Sterling was a plump man with a tinhorn’s checked suit and too many rings on his fingers, but his hand had gone with practiced ease to a gun in his waistband. Murco, a ferret-faced, snaggle-toothed man who seemed to sleep in his disheveled clothes—despite his being a city official—had a hand in the pocket of his long black coat.

  “I am not heeled,” said Thompson. “I have no weapon about me. But if you’ll lay those guns aside my fists will teach you not to cheat a gentleman.”

  “The devil you will,” said Murco, swaying. “Go get your weapon, if you haven’t pawned it, and you can bring that no-account brother of yours too.”

  Wyatt knew Murco for a coward and a back-shooter, and also knew he would not be challenging a known gunman like Thompson—who had been warned by Sheriff Whitney not to carry a pistol in town limits—if he were not drunk.

  Thompson’s voice a cougar’s purr. “Sir, you have declared for your own end.”

  And Thompson stamped out through the doors, seeing to it that they banged loudly behind him.

  Wyatt found he had his own hand on his pistol; he’d instinctively been prepared to defend the unarmed Thompson.

  Now he dropped his hand from his gun, as the drunken gamblers stumbled to the bar and shouted for rye. “We’ll get some of my friends on the police force,” Murco was saying, in a low voice to Sterling, “but you’ll have to pay them for their help. They’ll back us up if Thompson comes looking for a fight.”

  Wyatt told himself it was best to stay out of this affair entirely.

  * * *

  Frontier shooting affrays are not likely to culminate neatly, and the participants, if they lived, invariably thought back on the event with puzzlement and regret. What had they been fighting about? Drink was almost always implicated.

  Billy Thompson had been drinking gin since his noontime breakfast of steak and eggs. Ben had limited himself to a single brandy in his coffee, and on entering Brennan’s saloon he was disgusted to see his younger brother Billy—slender, pale, with scraggly mustaches—swaying at the bar and leering at the barmaid.

  “Billy,” Ben said, striding up, brandishing his Winchester, “I need you sober now. We have business at the Generous Lady.” He had gotten his gun belt with its two six-shooters from his hotel room, and the Winchester for good measure.

  “Ha!” Billy crowed, “Sober! You’ve found me full drunken, and rejoicing in it, by God!” He kicked at a brass cuspidor, sending it spinning with a clatter.

  “Then you’d best stay here,” Ben said flatly.

  But it was then that Billy took full notice of his brother’s Winchester and pistols. He patted Ben’s rifle. “Why you are loaded for bear! What’s the trouble? Who has insulted my family? I will line the buggers up and blow holes in them!” Billy grinned—it made one eye squeeze small when he grinned that way—and pulled back his long, beer-stained suit-coat to show he had a small pistol hidden in a holster on the back of his left hip. He turned and swept up a double-barreled shotgun leaning against the bar. “I was going to go out and hunt jackrabbit, but by God we can hunt sons of bitches just the same …”

  “Billy, wait—”

  But Billy was already striding to the front door and out onto the sidewalk—almost missing the door in his drunkard’s walk—and Ben saw with dismay that he had cocked the shotgun and was glaring around the street. He stalked off across the dusty street toward the Generous Lady, with Ben hurrying to keep up.

  “Billy, now hold on—ease the hammers off that shotgun—” Ben said, joining him on the wooden sidewalk a few steps from the Generous Lady’s front door. “You’re too drunk to have a cocked gun in hand …”

  But Billy spun at a creaking on the sidewalk and the hammer fell, discharging one of the shotgun barrels to blast a splintery hole in the sidewalk at the feet of two startled cavalrymen. “Don’t shoot us, friend!” cried one of soldiers, stumbling back. “We are not armed!”

  “He did not mean it, gentlemen,” Ben said, turning to his chuckling, swaying brother. “Billy, now you see you’ve nearly shot two innocent men … Come on with me, we’ll sober you up a bit, and then perhaps we’ll demand an apology and my one hundred and forty-seven dollars from the crooks who took it at cards … It’s that Murco and Sterling, I should never have played a single hand with them …”

  “A couple of vermin, those two!” Billy declared, cocking the shotgun again “Crikey, they’ll shoot you in the back, Ben—you’ve got to keep a watch on the whole ’orizon for ’em!”

  “Ben Thompson!” shouted Sheriff Whitney, approaching. He was an older man with graying temples and a beard mixing white and stained yellow; one hand was on the butt of his pistol but the other was raised in a gesture of conciliation. “Who are you shooting at here?”

  “Oh, Billy’s gun discharged accidentally, Chauncey,” Ben said. He liked Chauncey
Whitney—the sheriff had always been patient with Billy and amiable with them both. “We’ve got to have words with some card cheats—”

  “You will leave the card cheats to me, Ben!” Whitney reproved him, gently.

  “They are yours already, for one’s a town policeman and the other sometimes a deputy—and crooked as most of the so-called lawmen in this town!” Ben said angrily. Adding in a lower tone, “Present company, sir, excepted.”

  “Tell you what, Ben—you and Billy come with me into Brennan’s, and we’ll have a few drinks and talk it over, and I expect we’ll come to an understanding.”

  “Well Chauncey, if you think you can obtain a fair—”

  “Look out, Ben!” shouted Wyatt Earp, stepping out of the telegraph office two doors down. Drawing his pistol, Earp pointed toward the saloon with his other hand.

  Ben turned to see Murco and Sterling lunging toward him from the Generous Lady, both of them even drunker than he’d left them, their pistols in hand; Murco raising his pistol, firing at the Thompson brothers.

  Two bullets whined past—one of them close enough to the sheriff to make the old lawman bridle in surprise and anger. “What the devil!”

  Ben snapped off a shot with the Winchester, the round neatly drilling through the corner of a wooden post near Sterling’s head, so that the gambler ducked back with an unmanly squeak, and Murco—looking surprised that someone was shooting back at him—turned and ran back into the bar. Acrid gunsmoke hung purple in the air. Seeing the gamblers had retreated, Wyatt holstered his sidearm. But Ben was cocking his gun—

  Sheriff Whitney rushed to push Ben’s gun down. “No, that’s full enough shooting!” And then there came a thunderous discharge. Whitney made an inhuman sound between a grunt and a squeal, and staggered back.

  Ben turned to see blue-black smoke drifting from the muzzle of Billy’s shotgun—as Sheriff Whitney fell, shot where the shoulder meets the neck. Billy had tried to move into a shooting angle to fire at Sterling but in his drunkenness had squeezed the trigger too soon, hitting Whitney instead.

  “You’ve shot me, Billy!” Whitney cried, sinking to his knees, gushing blood.

  Ben stared, amazed. How had it come to this? He saw Whitney pitch over groaning, face down in a growing pool of scarlet. The shot had been at close range, the wound was big, the copious blood suggesting a blasted artery—Whitney was likely to bleed to death.

  Billy was staring down at Whitney in shock. Ben shook his head grimly. “Billy, you’re going to have to leave town, and fast.”

  “What about those two dogs Murco and Sterling! This is their fault!”

  “For God’s sake leave town! You’ve shot our best friend!”

  “I don’t give a damn!” Billy said, though the quaver in his voice testified differently. Then he got some of his bravado back and shouted, “I’d have shot if it’d been Jesus Christ!”

  Ben thrust a small bag of silver dollars into Billy’s hand, “Here’s money and there’s your horse. Get you on it and ride like Hell! I’ll find you somewhere near Abilene! Go!”

  Billy dropped the shotgun and backed away from the sheriff, then turned and ran to his horse, and in seconds was galloping out of town. Dust from his horse’s hooves mixed with gun smoke.

  Wyatt and Deputy John DeLong were hurrying up to the sheriff, and Ben Thompson—glancing at the Generous Lady and seeing no sign of Murco and Sterling—hastened to his hotel as quickly as dignity permitted.

  Ben just didn’t know where else to go—but he knew he had to cover Billy’s exit from town.

  * * *

  “I heard some more gunshots,” remarked Wyatt, emerging from the doctor’s office. “Quite a few.” He was speaking to Town Marshal “Brocky John” Morton who was standing at the corner of the next building, peering from the shadows at the hotel down the street. Morton was a lean, pockmarked man with sallow skin. Wyatt had never been impressed with him. Like the other local constabulary, apart from Whitney, Morton only enforced the law for the highest bidder. Wyatt had heard him deny that the roulette wheels in the gambling halls were rigged. But Mattie had quietly warned Wyatt that they were indeed rigged—and he knew that Morton raked a percentage of the game.

  Morton turned to look Wyatt over. “Why yes, Ben Thompson has been firing at the door of the livery stable—and at every hitching post on the street—to keep a deputation from fetching their horses.”

  “Trying to keep them from going after Billy, I expect,” Wyatt murmured, nodding to himself. He understood, well enough. There was little he would not do for his own brothers, or they for him. The Earps were a curious mix of independent and clannish, and he never went long without seeing family, whatever differences he might have with them. “Where’s Thompson shooting from?”

  “Just inside the hotel door, over there.”

  “What about Sterling and Murco?” Earp asked. “They still shooting at him?”

  Morton shook his head. “Murco’s gone to ground somewhere, and Sterling took the train out of town. Say, how’s Whitney?”

  “The wound is stanched,” said Wyatt. “But he has lost a power of blood. He will be dead within the hour, so the doctor says …”

  Another shot rang out, scoring a hitching post across from the hotel, and making a pinto pony rear and snort. Morton stepped back into the alley. “You see that saloon over there—Brennan’s? Abel Pierce and five of his men are in there. Sheriff Whitney was a good friend of Pierce’s. He wants to hang both the Thompson brothers … And he hates Ben Thompson anyway—he had some kind of bad cattle deal with him. Some of the cattle died and Ben wouldn’t pay up.”

  “That’s Shanghai Pierce?” Wyatt said, thinking of the big man with the fancy boots who liked to cut such a dramatic figure in the Kansas cow towns. “I thought the drovers moved on.”

  “Pierce is still here with some of his men—he’s waiting on payment from a Chicago buyer.”

  “Bat says Pierce thinks he’s emperor of Texas.”

  “He’s emperor, anyhow, of a good many gunhands—and he’ll go after Thompson, soon enough …”

  “This’s got to end, Marshal,” Wyatt said. “Thompson’s going to hit someone with that Winchester, whether he intends to or not … And if it isn’t that, it’ll come to a gunfight with Pierce.”

  “Thompson’ll run out of bullets, in time,” Morton said.

  “Not before he hits someone,” Wyatt insisted.

  Morton turned a glare at Wyatt. “Well then why don’t you go over there—disarm him, shoot him down, whatever you like? Here …”

  He took off his badge and summarily pinned it on Wyatt’s shirt. “Go ahead, ‘Mouthy’ if you’re so full of suggestions. I heard you were a constable, one time … let’s see you constabalize.”

  Another shot—and a window shattered. A woman screamed in fear.

  Morton stuck out his hand. “Or give me the badge back and shut your mouth, boy!”

  Wyatt snorted. He had been about to do just that until Morton sneered at him. And if someone didn’t do something they’d be lynching Ben Thompson before this was over …

  Wyatt shrugged and stepped out into the main street. He began to walk toward the hotel, going diagonally down the road, affecting a serenity he didn’t feel.

  He squinted against the glare of the late afternoon sun. It would have been better to have the sun behind him.

  A bullet kicked up dust at his feet, and he heard its report a split-second later. Thompson firing at him from inside the hotel. His gait only hitched a little at that. But his mouth went dry and metal-tasting. He knew, in the marrow of his bones, that it was important to seem unafraid. It didn’t matter if a man was quaking inside, so long as he could seem like a park statue on the outside. It was his brother Newton who’d told him that. If you got to go at ’em, keep your head—and if you’ve got to fire, aim slow and careful.

  But he hoped he wouldn’t have to use his pistol. He and Thompson knew one another. Ben Thompson wouldn’t shoot him down. At least, he
didn’t think so.

  Another small geyser of dust spat up near his right boot. That one was closer. “Ben Thompson!” Wyatt shouted, reaching the wooden walk on the other side of the street—and the welcome shade of the overhangs and false fronts. “Ben! It’s Wyatt Earp! Don’t shoot me, I’m just here to have a word with you!”

  He strode onward, and reached the hotel, paused at the corner of the building. The downstairs front window shattered, glass flashing outward to tinkle on the sidewalk—whether from bullet or gun-butt, Wyatt wasn’t sure.

  “Ben!” Wyatt shouted again. “Just a word or two!”

  Then he saw Thompson stepping into the doorway of the hotel, smoking Winchester in his hands, the muzzle pointed toward Wyatt. “How’s Chauncey, Earp?”

  “Not good,” Wyatt admitted. “He won’t make it.”

  Thompson sighed and shook his large round head. “I’m sorry for that. But it wasn’t me who shot him.”

  “That’s something the court’ll surely take note of, Ben,” Wyatt said, coming closer. “You probably won’t get in any serious trouble …”

  Thompson raised the Winchester to his shoulder. Wyatt was looking down its muzzle. It was infinitely black, down that muzzle. “Hold it right there!” Thompson barked.

  But Wyatt kept coming, raising his hands up in front of him, walking slowly, locking his eyes on Thompson’s. He kept his voice as amiable as the tension allowed. “Got to come and talk to you Ben. Got to. Shanghai Pierce is pouring whiskey into his men, working them up to rush you.”

  “This affair’ll be his excuse to get me,” Thompson said, shrugging. “That’s all it is, Wyatt.”

  Wyatt suspected, then, that Thompson could be made to sur-render—an angry man who’ll talk without cursing you will usually come to terms, if you’re patient with him. So his father had told him.

  “Don’t give Pierce the excuse, Ben. Listen, I understand what you’re doing for your brother. But he’s long gone by now. They won’t take out after him—they’re all half drunk and ready for their suppers. He’ll get to where he’s going. You can surrender now and not worry about him.”