by Mark Warren
As the ferryman untied the ropes and pushed away, Wyatt gathered the newcomers at the door. “You boys, listen up,” he said, getting down to business. “Three things . . . inside, you pay the owner up front for every drink and for every girl. You’ve got thirty minutes in the crib that’s assigned to you. And last, you don’t get rough with the girls.” He nodded once to show he had concluded his obligations. “Abide by the rules, and we’ll all have a good evening.”
Wyatt followed the customers inside, taking his seat just inside the door. The banjo player struck up a rhythm of tinny notes, and then the fiddler sawed an upbeat melody that rode atop the lively, plucked tempo. One of the dock workers snatched up a reluctant partner and twirled her on the dance floor. At the bar, Walton laughed at a joke as he kept one arm draped over the small metal box that served as his till. Wyatt sized up each man for a poker game, in case someone finished his business early.
All but one couple had retired to a crib when a heavy bump on the upstream side of the boat brought up Wyatt’s head from his game of solitaire. Walton stared at Wyatt for two seconds, before shrugging and returning to his tally of the night’s income.
“Prob’ly a log,” Walton mumbled, and continued recording numbers in his ledger.
Wyatt listened for a time, hearing only the grunts of the customers and the steady lap of the current as it carved around the hull. He checked the few windows, but the sparsely lighted room had transformed the glass into mirrors. As soon as he had returned to his cards, a shrill, whistle pierced the night outside, and instantly the doors burst open. Uniformed policemen streamed in, spread out through the cabin, and stood like a showroom of mannequins, all of them displaying the same attire. Every officer wielded the same regulation skull-cracker in a tight-fisted grip, and each wore a revolver holstered high on a polished leather belt. The music stopped, and the two dancers stared wide-eyed at the intruders.
Some of the men in the cribs sensed a foil to their evening plans and could be heard mumbling obscenities and scrambling for their clothes. Others, oblivious to the disturbance, continued to slake their passions, contributing damning testimony to the occasion.
A stout officer wearing a captain’s insignia strolled past his men and walked the perimeter of the cabin, trying doors until he found one unlocked. He leaned inside and then faced the room.
“All right, everybody listen up!” he announced. “I’m Captain Gill with the city police. Everyone on this vessel is under arrest.”
Walton stepped from behind the bar and approached the captain. “Is this about the taxes?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” Gill interrupted. “Who are you?”
“John Walton, owner of this boat . . . a boat, by the way, which is not within—”
Walton closed his mouth when the police captain rapped his baton on the nearest crib.
“You’re running whores on this tub,” Gill bellowed. He turned from Walton and came face to face with Wyatt. “Earp, isn’t it? You’re getting to be a regular at this, aren’t you?”
Wyatt said nothing. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and began buttoning the cuffs.
“I don’t want any trouble with you, Earp, you understand?”
Wyatt shook his head and spoke evenly. “No trouble.”
Holding his grim expression on Wyatt, Gill called out to his men. “O’Connor! Go out on deck and signal our pilot to come alongside. The rest of you men collect all weapons and prepare these people for boarding.” He leaned to look Wyatt over. “Where’s your weapon?”
Wyatt parted the front of his unbuttoned vest. “Not carryin’.”
As the officers went into motion, Wyatt casually walked to the bar and opened the metal cash box. Walton started to speak but closed his mouth when Wyatt looked at him.
“I’m taking what’s owed me, John,” he said, stuffing the money into his trouser pocket. He picked up his coat and hat from behind the bar. When he stepped abreast of Walton, he spoke quietly. “It’s for the court fine. I ain’t spending ten nights in that rat’s nest of a jail again.”
Properly dressed, Sarah reappeared from her crib and walked directly to Wyatt, where she slipped her arm into his. “This is my husband,” she said to the room at large.
“Congratulations,” Gill said flatly. “You can line up with him now, but you girls will have your own cell once we get to the station.”
At Monday’s arraignment, the judge heard each plea with his chin propped in a hand. Two of the brothel’s patrons denied knowing the barge was an enterprise of prostitution. But finally, when the gavel went down, everyone paid a fine. Wyatt’s penalty was levied at forty-three dollars, fifteen cents.
“Mr. Earp,” the judge intoned in a weary voice, “you’re a young, able-bodied man with your whole life ahead of you. Don’t you think—especially for the sake of your wife’s well-being—that you two might consider pursuing some other line of work?”
Wyatt spoke up before Sarah Haspel had a chance to say something he might regret. “Yes, sir. That’s just what I aim to do.”
CHAPTER 22
* * *
Fall, 1872: Peoria to the south Kansas plains
The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad had run its rails to Buffalo City, and the camp had renamed itself Dodge City. Dodge was still the hunter’s Mecca, where a man outfitted, disembarked for his chosen destination, and returned to the middlemen hide brokers to trade his hard-earned goods for cash. Furthering the town’s economic prosperity, ranchers from Texas were rounding up the old Spaniards’ longhorn cattle that had multiplied during the war years, and they were driving them up the eastern branch of the Chisholm Trail to the new railhead.
When these cattle companies reached Dodge, the town imploded with the vent of young drovers who had slept on the trail for two months. The bawling of cattle, the stench of the holding pens, and the celebratory roar of six-guns became symbols of profit for Dodge City. With the resulting cash flow, the town had become a thriving venue for merchants, a gambler’s paradise, and a hotbed of mayhem and wickedness. Dodge was “wide open”—plenty wide enough to hide a wanted man among the nameless plainsmen who moved in and out of its town limits.
On his second night in the boom town, Wyatt sat in on a poker game at the Alhambra Saloon with a rotund German named Deger, two Masterson brothers, a jobless drifter named Jim Elder, and a stocky, round-faced sharp known only as “Prairie Dog Dave.” The Mastersons appeared to be untested in the murky waters of gambling and fell prey to the questionable tactics of Dave. The older Masterson, Ed, knowing he was new to the game, seemed to take his losses in stride. Bat was another story. He was a pot about to boil over. Dave was so busy fleecing them, he paid little attention to Wyatt’s unassuming presence at the table.
After two hours of play, the younger Masterson was so hell-bent on breaking Dave’s run on their money that he parlayed an unlikely bluff, upping the stakes by forty dollars. Deger and Elder folded. The betting went around twice more before Bat called and laid down a trio of eights. Dave’s steely eyes showed nothing as he fanned three tens on the table. Wyatt’s full house stole everyone’s thunder, and as he raked in the pot, Dave gathered what chips remained before him, took his coat and hat from the rack, and left with a mumbled “adios.”
“You boys want to go another?” Wyatt said.
“Hell, yes,” Bat replied. He slapped his forearms to the table and clasped his fingers together. His pale-blue eyes were piercing as they fixed on Wyatt’s hands gathering the deck.
Ed Masterson dug a hand into his trouser pocket and combined a smile and a sigh. “Better not, young’un. Let’s stop while we can still buy breakfast.”
The obese German laughed. “Hell, I buy you breakfast if you boys’ll stay in and let me win the rest o’ what you not give to Prairie Dog.”
Bat’s face darkened as he glared at Deger. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
When Deger chuckled and busied himself counting his chips, Wyatt tapped the edges
of the cards and set down the deck. “What he’s saying is that Dave was working you boys.”
The skin on Bat’s forehead tightened. “You mean the squinty-eyed sonovabitch was cheatin’ us?”
Deger’s laugh wheezed from deep in his chest. “Not cheat unless get caught.”
Ed folded his arms on the table and leaned forward, looking squarely at Wyatt. “Well, mister, if you don’t mind educating us . . . exactly how’d he do it?”
Wyatt hesitated, weighing the Masterson brothers’ inexperience against the accepted protocol of taboo subjects at the gaming tables. “Can I give you a pointer?” he said.
The younger brother stood and leaned with his knuckles pressing into the tabletop. “Prob’ly easy to give advice when you’re holding our money. I reckon we can figure it out for ourselves.”
Jim Elder lifted his coat off the back of his chair and squirmed into the sleeves. “I’m out,” he announced quietly. “I’m goin’ while I still got money enough for a whore.” When he stood, Wyatt sized him up with work in mind. Elder was small-boned and reserved, but seemed to pour himself into the task at hand. He might be a tolerable companion.
“Can I have a word outside?” Wyatt said. “I might have a proposition for you.”
Elder’s lackluster eyes quickly sparked with interest. He nodded and, with a lively step, marched out the door. Wyatt swept his chips into his hat, eased back his chair, and stood. As he faced the hotheaded Masterson, Wyatt one-handedly buttoned the front of his coat.
“No offense intended,” he said, but Masterson was too proud to look at Wyatt. Bat dropped back into the chair and busied his hands with the cards. Wyatt stepped to the bar and turned in his chips. After collecting his money, he slid two coins across the counter to the bartender. “Give a couple a beers to the boys at the table with Deger. My compliments.”
The saloon man looked at the coins. “Deger, too?”
Wyatt turned and studied the three remaining at the table. Deger and Ed were deep in conversation. Bat practiced his deal, making the cards flash in a steady rhythm. Wyatt turned back to the bartender, nodded, and pushed another coin across the bar.
The bartender leaned in and muttered, “My mother’ll be out here huntin’ buffalo next.”
Wyatt looked back at the Mastersons. “Everybody starts somewhere,” he said. “They’ll do fine.”
With Jim Elder as his skinner, Wyatt hunted the territory around the Salt Fork of the Arkansas.
Elder went about his work with an uncomplaining demeanor. He was a typical range hand, who preferred wages to being in charge, but he grew to like Wyatt’s ethic of a semi-partnership. Wyatt did the shooting and then helped with the skinning by looping a line over the pommel of his saddle to supply the pull, while Elder sliced with his knife. They staked the hides as a team, but from there it was Elder’s job to scrape off the gore and to powder the skin with arsenic to keep off the flies. Together they processed far fewer hides than the bigger outfits, but there was adequate profit when divided between two, rather than half a dozen men.
The buffalo herds could not last forever, Wyatt knew, and once the slaughter was complete, his options would be limited. If US marshals carried papers on him, he could undertake no enterprise that might draw attention to himself. How long that would be, he did not know, but one thing was clear to him now: by running from the Van Buren jail, he had traded one prison for another.
One moonless night over the campfire, he told Elder the whole story about the Showns and Kennedy. It was not a cathartic exercise but a pragmatic one. Elder was loyal, and Wyatt needed the man’s eyes and ears to pick up information whenever he went into a town for supplies. If Wyatt’s likeness was posted in a courtroom, police station, or post office in a town on the plains, he needed to know.
“Well,” Elder replied, “you keep growin’ that moustache, and I’ll always be the one to go in for supplies. It’s a big country, Wyatt. A man can stay lost in it, if need be.” Elder poked at the fire with a stick and wrinkled his brow. “Whyn’t you just change your name, Wyatt?”
The cartilage in Wyatt’s jaw flexed. “Won’t be doin’ that,” he said. Wyatt’s eyes hardened and reflected the flames, and Elder never raised the subject again.
Three days later when the little skinner was overdue for his return with supplies, Wyatt rode out for Medicine Lodge to check on his partner’s welfare. A mile from town he met Elder with the packhorse loaded. Elder’s usually somber face beamed as he stopped abreast of Wyatt.
“Got some news,” he said. “Met a big Irish tub named Kennedy looking to sign on with a buff’ler crew. Said he was cleared of charges for horse theft in Fort Smith. I poked at it a little. Said the whole affair was dropped for him and the other two men with him.”
“What about the jailbreak?”
“I thought about that, so I went to the federal marshal’s office to say I might’a seen a man named Shown down near the Otoe agency and wanted to know if there was a reward. He never heard of ’im. So I asked about anybody named Earp. Same reply.”
As Wyatt listened to Jim Elder, the last year in Peoria and on the buffalo fields flashed through his mind like a deck of cards flipped so fast that the numbers were of no value. He looked down the trail toward the town and imagined the gates of humanity opened for him.
“I been wantin’ my picture took,” Elder announced. “Might like one with my business partner to send back to my sister. Will the camp hold for a spell?”
Wyatt considered the leap of faith and wondered how wide those gates of freedom really were. “I left the wagon and horses with Tom Nixon’s outfit. They’ll keep another day.”
Elder’s face softened to a child’s wonderment. “I say we dig into some boardin’ house cookin’,” he said. “Somethin’ besides buff’ler hump. And then a piece o’ sour cherry pie. Then maybe a bath and a woman, if I can find one who’ll bed a stinkin’ skinner.”
With a new bounce in the saddle, Elder led the way. He talked more than he had the entire season—about his sister, the sod home he had built in Kansas, and the other outfits for which he had skinned. Wyatt barely listened as he sorted through the information about Kennedy and the warrants, letting the news sink into him like a slow baptism of waters washing him clean.
They visited the photographer’s studio first and then walked the main street to take in the business establishments. Elder followed as Wyatt stepped from the harsh summer sun into the twilight of the Nations Saloon—a single room of spare adornment with a short bar tucked against the west wall. It was busy for early afternoon. In the rear of the room, six men sat around a table shrouded in a haze of cigar smoke, each man concentrating on a hand of cards cupped before his chest. Spectators stood around the table, and two whores lounged in a corner.
Bellied up to the countertop, Elder drank for both of them as Wyatt stood with his back to the bar, watching the poker players, reading the game by their facial expressions. One of the gamblers was young Masterson, now aged some, the youthful color of his cheeks replaced by the burn of sun and wind. Seasoned inside as well as out, his gray-blue eyes were settled and alert.
When Elder had fortified himself sufficiently to proposition a whore, he straightened from the bar and neatened the tuck of his blouse into his trousers. “I ain’t so sure these women here would have me. Think I’ll go down the street a ways. How do I look?”
Wyatt gave him a one-eyed squint. “It ain’t me you got to look good for. I reckon if you got the money and the right equipment, you’ll do all right.”
With his head cocked to one side, Elder marched out of the Nations—a man on a mission—and Wyatt joined the onlookers circled around the table, where he stood behind Masterson. A whore with flaming red hair and freckles dusted across her cheeks attached herself to Wyatt’s arm and watched the game with him. After a few minutes, she pressed her bosom into his upper arm.
“You’re a tall one, aren’t you? You wanna buy me a drink and see what that leads to?”
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sp; Wyatt looked down into her face. “Might wanna skip that drink and get to the other.” He nodded toward the table. “Let me watch this hand play out.”
Masterson flattened his cards against his chest, turned, and looked Wyatt squarely in the eyes. “You mind?”
It was a standard request with an obligatory response. Wyatt nodded and pushed away from the wall. The game resumed without issue, as the whore pulled Wyatt toward a back doorway.
“Looks like he don’t want you breathin’ down his back,” she said and gave him a crooked grin. “But you can breathe down mine, honey.”
In an hour Wyatt was out front checking the tie-downs on the packhorse as he waited for Jim Elder for the trip back to their camp. Counting a handful of coins, young Masterson pushed out through the doors into the broil of the sun and leaned against the awning post. When he looked up and saw Wyatt, he pocketed the money.
“No offense in there, mister. I don’t know who’s working with who in that crowd.”
Wyatt nodded. “Better to be smart with your money than courteous with some shill.”
Elder came up the boardwalk at a fast walk, all his attention on the photographer’s images he held in his hands. “Hey, Wyatt . . . look’a here.” He handed over a tintype. Wyatt studied the portrait only briefly and tried to hand the plate back. “That’n is yours,” Elder said. “Hey . . . how ’bout I join up with you tomorrow back at camp?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction from which he had come. “It appears this little yeller-haired girl back there ain’t done with me.” He smiled, spat in his hand, and tried to flatten the wave of hair that rose atop his head.
Wyatt swung into the saddle and watched Elder hurry down the street as he ran his fingers through his long locks. Wyatt crossed his wrists over the pommel and looked at Masterson.
“Name’s Earp. We met in Dodge when I tried to give you a speech about playin’ poker.”