by Mark Warren
“She ain’t the one you need to talk to,” Wyatt said to Keys’s back.
A tall rider in a long white duster walked his horse forward and brought his Henry rifle to bear on Wyatt. “You just let us decide who talks to who. Now git on down like Mr. Keys said.”
Wyatt dismounted and listened to the Shown woman explain how the men named Earp and Kennedy had got her husband drunk and threatened both their lives.
“She’s crazy,” Wyatt told the man guarding him.
With his rifle still centered on Wyatt’s chest, the man leaned from his horse and spat. “You can tell it to the judge.”
Kennedy stepped beside Wyatt and addressed all the riders. “He’s telling you the truth. They’re both crazy. That man Shown there . . . he’s the one rode off and stole these horses.” The tall man stared at them with a shut-down expression.
Keys took the reins of Wyatt’s horses and led them away to one of his men, who in turn walked the horses to the front of the wagon and began the process of switching off the two pair. Keys stood before Wyatt, addressing him as though he were the leader of this ill-matched crew.
“You know as well as I do those are my horses. They’re carrying my brand. I’m taking all of you into Van Buren to the marshal. I want you two to climb up into the back of the wagon. If I have any trouble with you, understand I will shoot you and save the court time and money. Now get on up there!”
“Her story ain’t what happened,” Wyatt said and pointed to Shown. “That man was—”
“He’s the one threatened our lives if we talked!” Anna Shown squawked from the wagon box, her voice now sounding terrified. She thrust a bony finger at Wyatt. “That one . . . Earp!”
Keys ran his tongue across the front of his teeth and stared at the woman. Then he spat and settled a hard look on Wyatt.
Wyatt gritted his teeth. “It ain’t like you’re thinkin’.”
Keys spat again and curled his lip to a scowl. “Git in the wagon, and don’t say nothin’ more. I don’t wanna hear it.”
In three days, Wyatt was sharing a foul-smelling Van Buren jail cell with Kennedy and three drunks. Shown was in the adjoining cell, separated from Wyatt’s by a plank wall. One room away Anna Shown put her mark to an affidavit that heaped the blame of the horse theft on everyone but herself. All three men were arraigned with bail set at five hundred dollars each, a sum which none could meet.
Two days after the arraignment, the marshal brought Wyatt into the office to serve him another summons. Anna Shown sat at a table staring at her hands, her eyes wavering with the same wild desperation he had seen the morning her husband had run off with the horses. The two deputies who gripped Wyatt’s arms pushed him into a chair across from the Shown woman.
“This woman has sworn that you and Kennedy threatened to kill her and her husband if either of them turned state’s evidence,” the marshal began.
Wyatt stared at Anna Shown, as she bent over the papers before her. “She’s lying,” Wyatt said evenly. “She was lying when she said they had nothing to do with it, and she’s lying now. Everything involving those horses was their doin’.”
Anna Shown’s eyes teared up. “You ain’t gonna lay this on me! It was you . . . and the Irish.”
The deputies’ hands tightened on Wyatt’s shoulders. The marshal pointed at Wyatt.
“You’re going to be behind bars a spell, Earp, until we get this settled.”
“What about the bail? I’ll have the money if I can sell my horses.”
The marshal’s face closed down. “Bail was before we knew about this threat.”
All the apathy that had accumulated in him the months since his wife’s death—fogging his clear thinking—burned away with a fury that rose inside him. The two guards pulled him to his feet and widened their stances to hold him in check. The marshal pointed at him again.
“Don’t make it harder than it has to be. Put him back in his cell.”
Anna Shown stood. “Don’t put him in with my husband!” she shrieked. “Earp will kill him!”
Wyatt was led back into his cell and, without returning Kennedy’s stare, he crossed the floor, sat on his bunk, and leaned his forearms on his thighs. Glaring at the floor, he listened to the slam of the door and the trip of the tumbler in the lock. When the deputies left, he stood and walked to the wall separating him from Shown and slammed it with the flat of his hands. The men behind him went still. No sound came from the other cell.
“Did you tell ’em you was a lawman back in Missouri?” Kennedy asked.
Wyatt turned quickly to the Irishman. “Don’t say nothin’ about that, you understand?”
Kennedy made an involuntarily step back and raised both palms. “All right, all right.”
For a month Wyatt and his cellmates lived in the stench of close proximity, eating boardinghouse leftovers stirred into an amorphous mush and drinking water from a common cup and bucket. A rusted chamber pot was pushed into one corner, and this they emptied once a day when the jailor marched them outside under the authority of a lever-action shotgun.
Each night Wyatt heard the whispers of the prisoners in the other cell as they pried at a ceiling board above the dividing wall. When the board finally broke free in the dark of an early morning, Wyatt listened as two men crawled through the gap into the garret space. Their voices were hushed and frantic but ecstatic with the taste of freedom. Wyatt climbed to the window in time to see three men scale the wall behind the yard and drop out of sight.
Behind him Kennedy cracked open his side of the ceiling and helped three men up before he pulled himself up to peer into the crawl space. “That goddamned skinny Shown slithered through there like a snake,” he growled. “Hell, I can’t squeeze through that damned crack.”
Wyatt put a stranglehold on the window bars as he watched the last man claw his way up and over the wall. “Goddamnit,” he hissed. “Shown’s lit out.”
“Go!” Kennedy said. “Hell, I would. There ain’t nothing right about this whole goddamn thing. Sure as hell, we’ll pay for it.”
In the next instant Wyatt was squirming over the rafters in the attic, pushing his coat ahead of him. He dropped to the yard, scrambled over the wall, and made his way to a corral at the end of the alley. No one was in sight. By the faint glow of starlight, Wyatt recognized Rilla’s gelding standing in a paddock. Beside it, the chestnut raised its head and nickered.
From the tack room he stole a bridle, halter, and lead rope. After walking the two horses down an alley, he mounted the chestnut bareback and pulled the gelding along behind him. The dawn found him churning up Arkansas soil for points north, this time a fugitive from federal law, no gun, no provisions. One more white man gone bad in the no-man’s-land of the Cherokee Nations.
CHAPTER 19
* * *
Summer and fall, 1871: Kansas plains to Peoria
Disappearing into the Kansas plains, Wyatt found anonymity in the melting pot of filthy buffalo hunters who wore the rancid scent of their occupation like a creed. It was the rough life again, but he found his need for open land and endless sky reawakened. For a time he hired on with a seasoned outfit as a skinner, as it was the only position available. He stomached the gore of the knife work, staying with the crew primarily for the nightly card games at the base camp.
Most of his gambling earnings were scratched on rough promissory notes to be cashed in when the hides were sold at Buffalo City, the hub of the hunting craze that had swept the midsection of the country. There the hunters carried the bison skins and stacked them into shaggy mountains to be carried off by freight haulers to the nearest railheads, where they were shipped east.
When he had saved enough capital to make new choices, Wyatt decided to put more distance between him and Indian Territory, where his name was sure to be on a wanted list. He rode east to the one place he knew he could disappear in a sea of other nameless faces. Peoria had once seemed to him a wilderness of depravity. Now, as a fugitive, it would be his ally.
The seedy Bunker Hill district appeared unchanged in the three years since Wyatt had seen it. At a little before noon he walked into Vansteel’s saloon one block off the waterfront. He remembered the tall bartender, who twisted a towel inside a shot glass. Seeing Wyatt, the man set the glass on a shelf and lumbered over.
“You’re an Earp,” he said, whipping the towel over a shoulder.
“That’s right. I’m lookin’ for Vansteel.”
The barman glanced briefly at the upper landing, and then gave Wyatt a cryptic slant of his eyes. “He sleeps till about two o’clock,” he said and lowered his voice a notch, “but he ain’t fit to talk to nobody till around four.”
From his vest pocket Wyatt fingered a coin and set it on the bar. “Got any coffee?”
“I need to brew up another pot if you’ve got time.”
“Got plenty of that,” he said. “Is Vansteel hiring right now?”
The man frowned and cocked his head. “Enforcer?” When Wyatt nodded, the barman could not suppress a smug smile. “I thought you were one didn’ wanna have nothin’a do with all that.” When Wyatt made no reply, the man’s smile disappeared. He slipped the towel off his shoulder and began folding it into consecutive halves. “He might could use you.” When he could fold the towel no smaller, he opened it again. “You boys spread-in’ yourselves out on the waterfront?”
“Meaning what?” Wyatt said and watched the man’s expression go cautious.
“Nothin’. Just that your brother is down at Haspel’s.” The bartender looked toward the front door and gestured down the street with a nod of his head.
“Virgil is in Peoria?”
The skin on the barman’s forehead furrowed with two lines. “Morgan,” he said. When Wyatt made no response, the barman leaned an elbow on the bar. “He was workin’ here till about a month ago. I think Haspel offered him more money.” The corners of his mouth turned down, and he shook his head. “Feller we got enforcin’ here now ain’t as reliable. I reckon Vansteel might be glad to put one o’ you boys on the payroll.”
“How do I get to Haspel’s?”
The bartender pointed. “Down the block, this side o’ the rail yards. Red brick two-story.”
Wyatt nodded once. “ ’Preciate the information. Don’t need the coffee.” He pushed a coin across the bar and left.
Jane Haspel’s brothel looked like it might have once been a clerks’ office for one of the shipping companies. The rail tracks behind it ran parallel, six wide through a maze of rust-dappled warehouses all the way to the river. Smoke and cinders of burning coal spewed from the factory chimneys, stinging his throat and casting a dirty veil of black across the sky.
On his third series of knocks, the door cracked a few inches, and a finely etched porcelain face appeared in the opening. After a moment of routine inspection, the girl’s eyes flashed with recognition . . . but only for an instant. Sarah Haspel’s good looks had been hardened by time, and it was clear from her expression that she had left every trace of her youth behind her.
“Wyatt,” she said, straightening as she opened the door. She was taller and more developed, her eyes seeming to gaze out at the world from a more settled place. “Look at you,” she said, her smile less a welcome than a practiced tool of her trade. “Come in.”
“You grew up,” he said, stepping over the threshold.
She gave him a half-lidded glare, as though he had questioned her judgment. “Well, that’s what people do. I’m eighteen,” she said, as if the number carried some primal significance.
She closed the door and then turned at the sound of footsteps. Down the dimly lighted hallway, Wyatt watched a buxom woman wrapped in a robe and long shawl approach in a slow, measured gait, as though she were walking a narrow beam. Her face was dry and crusty, coated with some kind of cosmetic application. She could have been forty or sixty; he could not tell. Her lips and fingernails were painted the shade of dried blood.
“Mother,” Sarah said, moving toward the woman, “this is Morgan’s brother . . . Wyatt.”
The woman stopped out of arm’s reach and crossed the shawl over her chest making an X with her arms. With her powdered face, she looked ready to be laid out in a coffin.
“Jane Haspel,” she intoned, correcting her daughter’s introduction.
Wyatt took off his hat and looked up the stairwell that led to the dark upper story. “I’m lookin’ for my brother.” When he faced her again, she was studying him, her gaze moving boldly over his chest and shoulders much the way a farmer appraised livestock at an auction.
“He’s asleep,” Sarah said, “but I know he’ll want to see you.” She turned and climbed the flight of stairs in a slow, economical glide.
“You’re the one was a policeman in Missouri,” Jane Haspel said in a lifeless tone.
Wyatt nodded. “Constable.”
“Are you here to stay?”
“For a spell, I reckon.”
“You intend to work for the police here?”
“No, ma’am, I got no plans to.”
Jane Haspel stepped forward, letting the shawl hang down to expose her robe and ample breasts. Without preamble she placed her palms flat against Wyatt’s shirt beneath his coat and kneaded the muscles of his chest. Pursing her lips, she then gripped the span of his shoulders and squeezed. His impulse was to back away from her, but he did not want to retreat.
“Are you looking for work?” she said, snapping the proposition like a whip.
Before he could answer, three loud knocks sounded behind Wyatt. He stepped aside while Jane Haspel opened the door. Two stout men stood side by side, both wearing the blue leather-billed caps that marked them as stevedores. The sleeves of their soiled blouses were rolled to their elbows, and their thick forearms were spangled with tattoos.
“Lady, we was here Saturday night, and some money come up missing from my pocket.”
Jane Haspel coughed up a wet sound that might have served as a laugh. “How would I know what money you had on you? I doubt you know yourself. As I remember, you were drunk.” She started to close the door. “Anyway, we’re closed. You want one of the girls, come back at eight.”
The man with the grievance pushed the door open wider, forcing the woman back a step. “I ain’t leaving without my money. That was five dollars shy of a week’s pay.”
“Get your goddamned hand off my door,” she said, her voice turning effortlessly vicious. “There’s no money for you here. I don’t know where you lost it, but I don’t run the kind of place that would keep customers from coming back for fear of being robbed.”
“Well, let me talk to Minnie,” he demanded.
“I told you we’re closed!” She held out both hands limp from the wrists and flicked the backs of her fingers toward him. “Go! Get off my doorstep!”
He stepped across the threshold into the hallway, looked uncertainly at Wyatt, and spread his feet as though he were rooting to the floor. “Minnie!” he yelled roughly to the upper level, his voice filling the hall and stairwell.
His friend followed him in, crossed his arms against his chest, and leaned a shoulder into the wall as he challenged Wyatt with taunting eyes. “You work in this rat’s nest, sport?”
Wyatt let his eyes go flat. “Mister, your business ain’t mine, and mine ain’t yours.”
At the top of the stairs Morgan appeared, his suspenders strapped over the top of his union suit and his bare feet extending from his trousers. “Well, goddamn! If it ain’t my favorite brother.” He had filled out with the long rangy limbs of a brawler, but the effervescent light in his eye still glimmered with mischief. He tapped lightly down the stairs wearing a sly smile that let Wyatt know he was aware of the situation with the two visitors. Ignoring them, he wrapped Wyatt in a bear hug and then stepped back, giving his brother a telling wink, as if to say: Watch this!
“Minnie!” the dockworker called out again, this time in a more insistent tone.
Morgan turned as if he had not noticed the two intruders
. “Excuse me, boys. We’re havin’ a little reunion here. You mind stepping outside?”
The man who had been calling for Minnie turned his head to Morgan and curled his upper lip into a snarl. “You go to hell, you damned pimp!”
Morgan hit the man so fast, his head collided with the wall before his friend could uncross his arms. “Both o’ you outside,” Morgan ordered.
He pushed the dazed man out the doorway ahead of him, and they began to grapple on the sidewalk. The other laborer charged out the door but came to a halt when Wyatt grabbed the back of his collar. The shirt ripped down the length of the man’s broad back. Turning, he lunged at Wyatt and was immediately laid out on the front steps.
Wyatt made a quick assessment of Morgan’s situation, and when he looked back at his opponent, the man was opening a folding knife and rolling to a seated position. Wyatt kicked the toe of his boot into the side of the man’s head. The stevedore dropped to an elbow, and Wyatt came down hard with his boot heel on the hand with the knife, drawing from the man a sharp intake of air through his teeth. Moaning, the laborer curled into a ball and cradled his fingers.
Wyatt picked up the weapon from the sidewalk. When he straightened, an arm draped around his shoulder, and he turned to see Morgan’s boyish smile inches from his face.
“Welcome to Peoria, brother.” Morgan laughed, shooting a look at the Haspel women in the doorway. “Ladies, how ’bout another Earp on the payroll. Gives a helluva job interview, don’t he?”
“Come put your clothes on, Morgan,” Sarah said. “You look ridiculous.”
When mother and daughter went inside, Morgan nodded down to the man Wyatt had bested. “This one’s a big troublemaker. ‘Mick the Mauler’ they call him.” Morgan patted Wyatt’s shoulder. “Only he don’t usually go down against just one man.”
Mick rolled to his side, gently kneaded the bones in his hand, and glared up at Wyatt. “I thought this wasn’t none o’ your business.”
Wyatt folded the knife and tossed it out into the street. “Got to be my business when you tried to up the odds against my brother.”