by John Shirley
Black turned back to Wyatt in time to encounter Wyatt’s right fist, which sank deep into gut just under the sternum, making him bend over gasping, only to meet Wyatt’s knee, snapped up to catch the hotelier’s chin. Wheezing, Black fell on his keister, groaning.
“You had enough yet?” Wyatt asked. He was implying he could go on all night but he sorely hoped Black was done, as his own jaw ached, his fist throbbed and he knew that if the bigger man got him in a bear hug he’d crack his bones.
Black nodded, making an angry, dismissive gesture, unable to speak as yet. A small crowd of late-night drinkers and strollers had gathered, and now they applauded as Wyatt stepped off the porch.
Wyatt found Bat standing over the boy, wiping blood from his face with a kerchief. The boy grinned crookedly at Wyatt—the right side of his mouth was swollen—and said, “You whupped that son of a bitch good!”
Bat laughed aloud at that but Wyatt frowned at the boy. “Don’t use language like that, boy. You sound like a guttersnipe.”
“I’ve heard it said more’n once that’s what I am, so I es’peculate I should talk like one.”
“Talking like one’ll keep you one,” Wyatt said. “What’s your name? And how old are you? I’m … darned if I can tell.”
“My name, it’s Henry, sir,” said the boy. “Henry McCarty. And I’m thirteen. I think.”
“Thirteen!” Bat burst out. “Here’s proof of what the professors say, that a boy undernourished doesn’t fully grow. I’d have thought him eleven at the most.”
“Can you still eat through that swollen mouth, Henry?” Wyatt asked. “He pasted you a good one.”
“Why sir, I can eat out of the other side of my mouth if that one’s no good!”
“Come along, then, we’ll detour over to the … to my brother’s cocktail emporium. He’ll fix you up with a sandwich.”
“Could he make it two, or three, do you think, mister?”
“My name’s Earp, Wyatt Earp. Now just you come along.”
CHAPTER FOUR
In fact Henry McCarty ate two sandwiches and a bowl of beans with jalapeños, complaining of the spice but eating them all the same.
Wishing for sleep and wondering what he was going to do with this urchin, Wyatt sat at the oak table with him, in the storeroom, between stacks of liquor crates. James had fetched him a cool bottle of champagne, from the chiller tub in the basement; Wyatt held the bottle, unopened, against his aching jaw.
Maybe Bessie or her maid would look after this Henry. The boy didn’t seem like one who’d turn up his nose at an association with a cat-house Madame. There was no local parson to turn to—so far they had only traveling preachers, with their Sunday tents—and at present no Benevolent Society in Wichita. Wyatt would feel a mere hypocrite to throw the lad back to the streets. Henry might be coming up on being a man but he had the stature of a much younger boy and he didn’t seem big enough to take on a man’s work as yet.
“You say your mother died—where’s your father, boy?” Wyatt asked.
“My own father, he died back in New York,” the boy said, with never a quaver. “I got a step-daddy, Mr. William Antrim, but when Mama died of the consumption Mr. Antrim took to trying to whip sense into me, that’s what he called it, and making me work like his slave, and I run off and come back here from down to New Mexico. This here’s the second time I lived in Wichita. I like a lively town. And that’s where the freight train was going …”
Wyatt smiled. I like a lively town.
Bessie came in then, a handsome, full-figured woman with golden-brown hair, lustrous matching eyes and a sardonic way about her. Henry’s eyes got wide, taking her in, for she was dressed in the finery of a successful Madame, a flouncy, flowing yellow and gold floor-length gown, with a white bow on its bustle and a plunging bosom trimmed in lace. “Who’s this rascal, Wyatt?”
“This is my associate, Mr. Henry McCarty,” Wyatt said solemnly. “He backed me up in a fight, not long ago, and I need to do right by him.”
Struck by Wyatt’s description of him as his ‘associate’, Henry blinked at Wyatt, and there was just a faint trembling of his lips. Wyatt hoped he would not cry—he disliked gushes of sentiment.
“You both look like you needed a few more ‘associates’ to back you up,” Bessie said. “You’re as kicked about as a drunk in a mule stall. Can I get you some lineament, Wyatt?”
“I think we’ll live. Say you still got that colored maid, over at your place?”
“Agnes Sanders? Sure, she’s living there now, in the sleeping shack, out back. Those no-goods from Texas killed her man, and she’s got no place else to go. What a scandal it was. That Bill Smith just stood by and scratched his head. Poor Agnes.”
Wyatt knew the story. A Negro hod carrier, Charley Sanders, had come home to find two Texas cowboys manhandling his wife, offering to pay her a nickel a throw. Charley knocked their heads together, then cracked some ribs and broke a nose, and threw them out on their ears. Enraged by being punished by a man black as midnight, the Texans had conferred with their compadres. A man named Shorty Ramsey had volunteered to avenge the honor of the white race. Ramsey rode up to the unarmed Sanders, shot him in the back, and rode off war-whooping. Wyatt had heard from his brother James how witnesses had gone to Town Marshal Bill Smith and found he was already with Ramsey—in fact, having a drink with him and three of his cowboy pards. “What can I do, when these boys have the drop on me?” Smith told the witnesses. “Hell he was only a nigra …” Shorty Ramsey was allowed to ride back to Texas and hadn’t been heard from since.
“My brothers didn’t fight in Abe Lincoln’s war to come home and hear ‘he was only a nigra’, when a man’s shot in the back,” Wyatt said, wincing at the discomfort of talking with a swollen jaw.
“Then you’ll be interested to know that the very same Marshal Smith is out there on the floor asking after you,” Bessie said. “I was going to ask if you wanted to be found.”
“I’ll see the marshal,” Wyatt said, shrugging. He took two golden eagles from his coat pocket, slid them toward Bessie. “One of these ought to buy some shoes and a set of clothes for a fellow as scrawny as this,” Wyatt said.
“I’m not so scrawny!” Henry protested.
“And the other one ought to feed our Henry here for a day or two. And here’s a third one—if you’ll give this to Agnes for looking after him, Bessie, I’d be obliged. I’ll calculate what to do with him …”
Bessie looked at Henry with an expression that was as close as she could come to maternal affection: it looked like cynical amusement. “I see Mr. McCarty yawning fit for a Sunday sermon and I think a bed is the first thing. The bath comes in the morning …”
Wyatt nodded, stood up—and reached out a hand to Henry. The boy looked at the hand a moment, then realized Wyatt was asking him to shake, the way two men do. Henry McCarty grinned through his puffy lips and shook Wyatt’s hand.
* * *
“Marshal Smith? My name’s Earp.”
Smith turned from the bar, to assess Wyatt, who returned the appraisal. The Town Marshal was a smartly dressed man with a gold-edged and silver badge prominent on his lapel. Mutton chops edged his narrow face; one eye seemed to have a permanent squint. “That’d be Wyatt Earp, brother of James and Virgil?” On Wyatt’s nod, Smith continued, his voice nasal and a tad pompous. “I believe there are at least two more Earp boys somewheres, besides those three. I cannot keep track of such abundance in Earps but I pray God the others are more peaceable than the one to hand. You cannot go about drubbing hotel keepers, sir, it does not go in Wichita.”
“He was beating a boy to a busted husk, Marshal. I believe he’d have killed him had I not interfered. I might have saved Black from jail.”
“That’s one way to look at it. Cognac?”
“No thank you.”
“You’ll forgive me … Here’s how!” Smith turned and knocked back his drink, cleared his throat, leaned on the bar to look Wyatt up and down with a differ
ent kind of appraisal. “Are you also the Earp who arrested Ben Thompson over in Ellsworth? And the same Earp who put a twist in Abel Pierce’s tail?”
“I am,” Wyatt admitted.
“And here you stand, with no bullet holes in you, tall and only slightly bruised. Doc Black has thrashed some men in his time. You did pretty well with him—and you showed some pluck in Ellsworth. And while I cannot approve of interference in every small detail of shop keeping, such as the beating of a toss-pot boy, it seems to me that you’d make a good deputy. We have a need for several more. It pays pretty well, and you can take a share in the fines—it’s all understood. Speaking of fines, I have to fine you ten dollars, and escort you to jail, for beating Doc.”
“Doesn’t a judge do the fining in Wichita?” asked Wyatt, remembering Morton collecting a “fine” in Ellsworth. Wyatt’s own father was a justice of the peace, as well as a farmer.
“The judge approves certain fines after the fact,” Smith sniffed. “That too is understood. Now if we take you to the jail, some of Black’s friends, who are oiling up their shooters outside even now, will suppose I’m going to lock you up, and the appeasement is made. But give it an hour or so and you can go on home, once things are quiet. And if you’re agreeable, and not too eager to flash a gun, why, you can work for me, tomorrow. What do you say?”
Wyatt considered. He didn’t like Smith, and he had his freighting company to think of. But the company was so far a pipe dream. And it occurred to him that if he’d been deputized the day that Sanders had been killed, he’d have escorted Shorty Ramsey to the lock-up, with his cowboy friends watching or not. It seemed to him that Smith’s presence on the force only meant that another kind of man was needed to balance things out. And he’d noted that Bat had not seemed too enthusiastic about partnering with him on the freighting business. Maybe Bat would like being a deputy better …
“Can I bring on one or two fellas I know to be good hands?” Wyatt asked.
“Sure, after I have a look at them.”
“Then let’s go to the jail. I’m bone weary, and if you leave the cell door open, I’ll just sleep the night there, long as your bed has no bugs in it.”
“We boil the sheets twice a week. Let me have another drink, then we’ll go and tuck you in. But there’s one thing I should mention—Shanghai Pierce’s outfit will be in town and soon, he’s meeting one of his herds. He says he will no longer do business in Ellsworth—you might’ve been much the reason. You should keep that in mind, if you’re going to wear a badge in Wichita. Mr. Pierce is well regarded by the local merchants … Indeed, Shanghai Pierce is Aces High here …”
* * *
“Wyatt, can you give me a hand?”
It was Wyatt’s brother James, early the next evening, tapping his younger brother on the shoulder as Wyatt collected his money from the pay window at the gambling hall. “If you’ll only tell me how, James …”
“It appears there’s a crazed son of a bitch at Bessie’s place, and he’s been known to wave a knife around so I thought I’d take someone with me. My boys here are all busy, and the deputies will likely demand a fee … And as you are to be a deputy anyhow …”
Wyatt nodded and gestured for his brother to lead the way. They wended through the gambling house, out into the cool night air, heading for Delano. Dust devils swirled in the street. A buggy rattled by. Spits of rain drove the dust back down, but it kept rising up again.
“Weather’s cooling,” James remarked.
“You know, I might be able to get my badge now and bring it along …” Wyatt felt some reluctance to take a hand in a whorehouse, again; it was too much like what happened on the Illinois River. He had hoped to distance himself from Bessie’s establishment.
“Oh, there’s no time for that,” James said. “Come on, if you’re coming …” He waved to a gangly young man in shirt sleeves and the beginnings of a beard, delivering whiskey barrels to Delano. “Hello there, Harl Buscomb! How about a ride over the bridge! We’ve got some urgent business!”
“Sure, come on, James, but hold on tight, I’m late!”
“Suits us! Come on, climb up, Wyatt!”
With Wyatt and James aboard, the wagon rumbled down the street, over the bridge, and carried them all the way to Bessie’s establishment. The business was done in shanties out back, set aside for “the ancient industry”—as the Wichita newspaper liked to call it.
James didn’t keep “upstairs girls” at his gambling hall—he would pay regular fines, so-called, to city officials if he did so. If he kept them here, on the dark side of town, they were genteelly overlooked.
They approached the small, ramshackle but newly painted white and red house carefully, Wyatt with a hand on his six gun, James with a palmed two-shot derringer.
They could hear incoherent shouting from inside. Seemed the troublemaker was still there.
“You know who it is?” Wyatt asked.
James shook his head. “I got a message from that boy Henry that someone was raising hell …”
Without having to arrange it ahead of time, they flattened to either side of the door, close to the wall; James knocked. “Bessie!”
“James, get this horse’s ass out of here!” she yelled through the door.
The door banged opened and a man glowered out. He was bristling with hair like a brown bush around a feather-festooned, dented bowler hat, his gray-streaked hair merging into a spade-shaped beard. Wyatt knew him slightly: Plug Johnson, always with a plug of tobacco in his cheek. He wore the hat with its sagging eagle feathers twenty-four hours around. He had Indian beadwork on his shirt and Indian bracelets, and knee-high rawhide boots. His game was craps, mostly played out behind the halls so he didn’t have to give the house its share of the winnings. He was widely suspected of using loaded dice.
“Who the hell are you and what the hell you want?” he said, squinting at Wyatt. “You that Earp kid?”
“Come out here and I’ll tell you what I want,” Wyatt said. “I understand you’re raising hell here.”
“I won’t come out! One of these girls has done picked my pocket, is what, and I want my goddamned money back and I ain’t leavin’ till I get it! I demand to see the owner of this re-stablishment!”
He thrust his head out the door to make this declaration and James pressed the barrel of his derringer against the side of Plug’s head, just behind the ear. “That’s the owner’s derringer you’re feeling there, you shit-heel! Shall I pull the trigger?”
A red flicker in Plug’s beard. He was licking his lips as he thought about it, afraid to move. “I’d re-preciate it if you didn’t do that, mister. But I ain’t lying. Twenty dollars she took—and I was already paid up!”
Wyatt spotted Plug’s knife, a big bowie affair, and he plucked it from the man’s belt with his right hand as his left grabbed the back of Plug’s neck and shoved him out onto the street. Plug staggered, but kept his feet. “Plug, if we tell you to leave somewhere, you leave. You don’t hold hostages.”
“I ain’t leavin’ without my twenty dollars—and that knife was given me by the chief of the Kiowa!”
“I wonder whose body he took it off,” James remarked, looking at the knife in Wyatt’s hand. Not the sort of thing you saw on Indians much. “Maybe more like ‘chief’ of the buffalo hunters.”
Bessie appeared in the doorway. “I don’t know if the girl took the money or not. She says not. But she’s gotten kind of low.”
“Who is it?” James asked.
“She goes by Sallie.”
“This high-smelling rat of the plains touch you, Bessie?” James went on. “Hurt anyone?”
“No—but he brandished that goddamn knife, shouting he wouldn’t leave till he got his money back … So I sent that Henry to tell you …”
“Search that freckly whore!” Plug shouted. “She got muh money!”
James shrugged. “If we search her and find twenty dollars, well, the money could’ve come from anywhere. I’ll pay twenty dollars
for a little peace and quiet.” He fished in his vest, found a twenty dollar gold piece, and flipped it to Plug who caught it in the air. Wyatt threw the knife—it stuck in the ground at Plug’s feet. Plug scooped it up, hurried off down the street toward the saloons.
“That’s no way to settle things, waving a knife!” Bessie yelled after him. “You don’t come back here, you feather-head son of a bitch!”
“I wouldn’t come back there no-how!” Plug shouted, turning around. He caught the look in Wyatt’s eyes and turned away, scurried down the street through dust-devils, holding onto his hat with one hand.
“Well come on in a minute, in case he decides to hie hisself back here,” Bessie said.
James and Wyatt followed Bessie inside. The sitting room was decorated with a cloth-covered chair, a silk settee, framed daguerreotypes on the wall—of full-bodied ladies in ankle-length negli-gees—and a candelabra on a lace-covered table, all but one of the candles lit. The room had the false look of a mask.
“I don’t know if she done it,” Bessie said. “I’ve got a bottle of wine open in the kitchen if you boys want. We sure thank you, Wyatt …”
“I’ll have a glass of wine,” James said. Wyatt had never seen him turn down a drink.
Two girls looked out from the beaded curtains that led to the back corridor—and one of them locked eyes with Wyatt.
Sarah Haspel.
The other girl, young and diminutive and scared, he didn’t know.
Wyatt’s heart sank. “How are you, Sarah?”
“That how you know her, Sarah?” Bessie said. “She goes by Sallie …”
Sarah swallowed. “Wyatt …” She glanced nervously at Bessie.
“Go ahead on back if you want to catch up,” Bessie said.
Wyatt nodded, started toward the back room as Sarah disappeared from the beaded curtains. Bessie stopped him with a touch on his arm, whispering, “See if you can figure did she steal the money …”