At the same time, Ike’s right hand was drifting toward his loose shirt, unbuttoned at the breast.
Tightly, Wyatt said, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight. Now you can have it.…”
“Hold on!” Virgil said, raising the cane, revealing the other hand empty of any weapon. “I don’t want that.”
Too late: Billy Clanton began to jerk his gun.
Wyatt whipped his long-barreled Colt from the overcoat pocket, but did not take aim at Billy, who was a punk kid and not much of a marksman; the one to get rid of was Frank McLaury, a crack shot and dangerous.
So Wyatt gut-shot Frank, who managed not to fall by holding on to the reins of his nearby horse, while Billy indeed missed, and the gunshots spooked Tom’s horse so bad, its owner couldn’t get a grip on that Winchester. Scrambling behind the nervous horse, Tom got his pistol out and fired over the horse’s back, twice.
One bullet struck Morgan, who yelled, “I’m hit!”
Wyatt said, “Get behind me,” and put a few bullets into Billy, as gray-white gunsmoke drifted like fog in the cramped vacant lot and lent the frenzied fight a dream-like haze.
Shotgun in his hands, Doc moved into the lot, upper lip peeled back in a ghastly smile, and closed in on Tom behind the fishtailing horse and let go both barrels, catching the Cowboy under the right armpit, sending him screaming and staggering but, somehow, Tom had enough left to sway out into the street.
Doc pitched the shotgun and switched to his more familiar nickel-plated revolver, and threw shots at Billy Clanton, who seemed to be everywhere, shooting at everyone, hitting nobody.
Meantime Virgil had shifted the cane to his left hand and yanked his Colt and started shooting, once at Frank, three times at Billy, one catching the kid in the belly, though the boy kept moving, kept shooting. Gut-shot Frank, leading his horse by the reins, stumbled toward the street, firing along the way. Tom’s horse, ever out of control, provided an inadvertent shield for the other Cowboys, and in this moment Ike ran up to Wyatt and clutched his arm, the booze on his breath, the red in his eyes, matched by the terror in his face.
“Don’t kill me!” he sputtered; spittle had frozen on his goatee like little icicles. “Please don’t kill me.…”
Wyatt pushed him away, seeing the man held no weapon, and said, “This fight has commenced, Ike—get a gun, or get away.”
Ike scrambled out of the lot and into Fly’s, leaving behind him the continuing carnage that he’d so recklessly instigated. Claiborne was gone, too, and now so were the horses, taking off down the street, leaving their owners exposed in the lot.
Belly bleeding, Frank followed his horse, or tried to, staggered past Doc, stopping behind him and, on unsteady feet, his smile grotesque, aimed his sixgun across the brace of his arm at Holliday, saying, “I’ve got you now, you bastard.…”
“Blaze away,” Doc said, turning sideways, making a narrow target of himself and taunting in his drawl, “You’re a daisy if you do.…”
Frank got off a shot that creased Doc’s hip but that was all: Morgan, whose wound had sent him to his knees, fired at Frank and caught him under the ear. With that head shot, Frank should have been instantly dead, but he danced around mumbling to himself, although no longer shooting at anybody.
As this happened, Wyatt had whirled to trade shots with somebody in a window at Fly’s, probably that goddamned coward Ike.…
At the same time Virgil, who’d also been hit in the left calf, staggered over to Morgan, and then Wyatt helped them both out into the street, while Doc was screaming at the finally fallen Frank McLaury, “The son of a bitch shot me! I mean to kill him.”
Wyatt went to Doc and said, “Morgan beat you to it, Doc. Let it go.”
Tom McLaury lay dying at the foot of a telegraph pole at Third and Fremont. Billy Clanton, shot to hell, was still alive, after a fashion—slumped against a wall, lamely, gamely trying to reload when Wyatt removed the weapon from his dying fingers, and tossed it to one side, not having the heart to take the kid’s last few minutes from him.
Anyway, the Earps and Holliday were all out of ammunition, too.
The firing had ceased, and a crowd was gathering. The gunfight was over.
But much else had only begun. Behan wanting to arrest Wyatt (“Not today, Johnny”). The inquest, jail time, the hearing, cleared, charged again, the assassination attempt on Virgil, maiming Virge’s arm…
…and one terrible night, several months later, when Clanton’s Cowboy assassins shot Morgan in the back, killed that sweet boy while he and Wyatt played pool.
So many bullets. So much blood.
And yet the Arizona landscape rolled by his window in all its rugged glory, looking like hell and heaven to Wyatt, as if to say, You’ve grown older, I’m unchanged.
When evening came, Wyatt was seated in the steel diner, alone at a table for two, the car a modern marvel of indirect lighting and reflective surfaces, dark polished wood, gleaming metal, with a high, square-arched ceiling. For one dollar, he was served an eight-course meal: grapefruit, olives, salted almonds and radishes; consommé; filet of bass with cucumbers; lamb chops à la Nelson, with broiled fresh mushrooms; roast turkey with cranberry sauce; mashed potatoes and cauliflower; salad; and plum pudding, with cheese and fruit.
And coffee.
The big meal damned near made Wyatt sleepy, but the prospects of the lounge car woke him right up. A dignified dark-wood chamber filled with overstuffed leather easy chairs filled with overstuffed well-off males smoking cigars, pipes and the occasional cigarette, the lounge allowed Wyatt to enjoy a cigar himself as he made the acquaintance of a dentist, a banker, a mortician and a fellow who owned a Ford automobile dealership, in whose private compartment they all assembled for rye whiskey and a friendly game of poker.
Wyatt’s name had been his calling card with these gents, and occasional remarks amid the smoke and liquor and cards would pertain to that.
“Did you really shoot all those badmen in Arizona?” the banker asked, early on.
“My share,” Wyatt admitted.
“What was bad about them?” the mortician asked.
“We were Republicans,” Wyatt said. “They were Democrats.”
And that, in this group, had been enough.
Wyatt, who drank only a small polite glass, came away with one hundred and fifty-two dollars, mostly extracted from the dentist, who was no John H. Holliday, at cards at least.
Wyatt had the lower berth, and rather than dress for bed in its constricting confines (he was too tall for that, and maybe too old), he used the dressing room at the end of the car and walked back in robe and slippers. He found the steady rhythm of train travel soothing, and dropped off immediately, sleeping better and sounder than an innocent man.
Nonetheless, deep in the night, the screech of steel on steel and the whine of the train making a stop, perhaps more sudden than intended, woke him with a start; and he sat up and lifted a corner of shade and saw just another depot looming in darkness and drifting steam.
Perhaps his earlier reflecting on his Arizona days caused it, but immediately he was back there, at the depot in Tucson, on the train escorting Morg’s body.…
Wyatt had no intention of making the whole trip to Colton, California, where his parents and Morg’s widow awaited—he’d already put together a posse of Doc, brother Warren, gunfighters Texas Jack Vermillion, Sherm McMasters and Turkey Creek Johnson, armed to the teeth, to go out after Frank Stilwell, Curly Bill Brocius, Ike Clanton, Johnny Ringo and Indian Charlie, the assassins who tried to kill Virgil and succeeded in murdering Morgan.
But then Wyatt had been warned that Ike and Stilwell and maybe several other Cowboys were watching every train coming through Tucson, going on cars with shotguns and searching for the Earps and any associates. So he and Doc decided to accompany the funeral party on the first leg of the journey.
Dusk draped the station as they pulled in, dark enough already to make the town a shapeless sprawl; blue shadows en
gulfed the desert as it stretched to mountains that were purple silhouettes against a burning, dying sky.
At the station a crowd awaited, as travelers arrived in welcome and departed in farewell and gawkers neither coming nor going got a gander at the Earp party, which the whole territory seemed to know was heading through Tucson that evening. A damned newsboy was hawking papers, shouting, “Hell is coming! Read about it here!”
Wyatt and Doc were guarding the wounded Virgil as he and his wife Allie and brother James and wife Bessie as well as Wyatt’s “wife” Mattie departed the train to eat in the station’s dining room.
On the platform, Doc tugged Wyatt’s sleeve, but Wyatt spoke first: “I see them.”
Frank Stilwell—the man witnesses said had back-shot Morg and narrowly missed Wyatt in the pool hall shooting—stood in a long duster with a shotgun barely hidden beneath, his affable oval face shadowed by a tan sombrero and a smile contradicted by the frown of a droopy dark mustache. Next to him lurked Ike Clanton, similarly attired right down to the shotgun, though Ike was as usual scruffier in appearance than the typical gaudy Cowboy.
“And,” Doc said, as the pair of assassins fell back into the crowd, “they see us.…”
Neither Wyatt nor Doc ate, and when they accompanied the family back to the waiting private car, Wyatt spotted a string of flatcars about twenty feet down on the adjacent track, noting something glinting off the station’s gas lamps.
Something metal.
On the train Wyatt got his brother settled comfortably into a chair, Virgil’s wife next to him with her husband’s holster and sixgun around her waist in absurd support of their dire situation. And the Earps did make tempting targets in the well-lighted windows of the private car.…
Wyatt put a hand on Virgil’s good shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you.”
Virgil’s eyes tightened. “I’ll be seeing you, too—if you take care of yourself.”
Wyatt nodded, gave Doc—in the aisle behind him—a glance that conveyed the need for him to stay with the party and guard them; then, double-barreled shotgun in one hand, Wyatt moved toward the rear of the car and soon was climbing down onto the side of the yards opposite the platform.
At just after seven, darkness had settled onto the station with the gas lamps and illumination of the train making blurry cameos in a stygian trainyard floating with smoke and steam. A cloud-smeared moon added little illumination, but once again he saw the metallic wink off rifle (or shotgun) barrels down on the flatcar, where two men lay prone waiting in ambush.
Wyatt began to run, his boots crunching on cinders, and this alerted the dry-gulchers, who, seeing him and his gun coming, a dark-flapping-coated apparition hurtling toward them, leapt off the flatcar so fast, they left their shotguns behind.
Ike Clanton was in the lead and he disappeared between flatcars, but Stilwell stumbled, and when Wyatt reached him, the oval-faced Cowboy, his sombrero lost in the chase, gazed up and a terror seized him that had nothing to do with the shotgun barrels.
“Morg?” Stilwell asked. “Morg?”
The bastard thought Wyatt was the ghost of the man he’d murdered!
“No,” Wyatt said. “And you won’t be seeing him where you’re headed.”
Stilwell bolted to his feet and his wild-eyed face was inches away when he grabbed Wyatt’s shotgun by its barrels—desperately trying to wrest the weapon away instead of jerking the holstered sixgun at his side…
…and Wyatt let go with both barrels, so close to the Cowboy, the roar was muffled and the man’s shirt caught fire.
Stilwell rose off the ground a little, just a little jump, and tumbled backward into a formless pile, flames around the wound crackling and then dying themselves.
Suddenly Doc was at Wyatt’s side and the gambler’s nickel-plated revolver barked four times, downward, hitting the dead man in selected places.
Wyatt gave his friend a curious look and Doc shrugged. His smile was awful.
“Can’t let you have all the fun,” Doc said. “Much less credit.”
They looked for Ike, but the yellow cur had as usual skedaddled, and soon the train was on its way, Wyatt and Doc walking along either side of the car. Before the train pulled from the station, Wyatt looked up at the mournful face of Virgil in his window and raised a forefinger, and mouthed, “One for Morg.”
More would follow.
The lookout, Indian Charlie, Wyatt gave a fairer chance than Morgan had received—an uno dos tres before sending one two three bullets into the bastard who’d taken twenty-five dollars to make sure Morg’s killer, Stilwell, wasn’t interrupted.
And of course Curly Bill, at the Iron Springs shoot-out, with assorted other Cowboys also cashing in. Finally Johnny Ringo, whom he and Doc had taken out, though few knew how they’d managed it, the law calling it suicide.
Wyatt shut the curtain on the steam-drifting depot and lay back in the berth. Not by nature a reflective man, he could not at first fathom this rush of memories; finally he guessed it was Kate Elder showing up and springing a Doc Holliday, Jr., on him, and the prospect of seeing Bat Masterson, and a ride through Arizona where, like Frank Stilwell in that Tucson trainyard, a man could expect to see a ghost or two.
Then he was asleep again.
The rest of the trip brought occasional memories—such as when the Limited passed Trinidad, New Mexico, where Bat had been sheriff, and Wyatt had to ask him to go fetch Doc in Denver on a phony extradition so the Tombstone murder charges didn’t catch up with him. And also Dodge City, Kansas, which had put Wyatt on the map, and maybe vice versa.
But, mostly, he dozed in his seat between big, wonderful meals, and played poker half the night with men of means who were just delighted to lighten their wallets for the chance to sit down at cards with a real American hero like Wyatt Earp.
Who was he to contradict the sons of bitches?
FOUR
A several-hour stop in Chicago—where he had come into LaSalle Street Station but had to walk over to Dearborn Station to catch the 20th Century—meant Wyatt Earp did not reach New York City till late afternoon Friday.
Alligator valise in hand, he made his way from the platform into the elegant cavernous echoing concourse with polished marble everywhere and afternoon sunlight slanting in like swords in a magician’s box through windows taller than most buildings. Grand Central Terminal had been built only six or seven years ago, on the site of the old one; but this grandiose gateway to New York already felt like it had been here just a little longer than Egypt’s pyramids.
The crowd was considerable, a mix of travelers coming and businesspeople going, with the red hats of colored porters bobbing in the bustle. How odd to be in a station with no smell of smoke, no carbon fumes, the trains themselves hidden away like poor relations. The vast vaulted ceiling was nighttime blue with the expected stars, though slowing to squint up at these indoor constellations, he thought they weren’t quite right. Were they backwards?
Shrugging, he skirted the central circular information booth past ticket booths and up the gentle slope toward the street, past the glass of restaurants, bars, barbershops, drugstores, and more. On his way, he was jostled without apology perhaps half a dozen times, but no one had tried to pick his pocket, which was politeness of a sort.
Frontier reputation aside, Wyatt was no stranger to a big town—he’d lived a good ten years in the City of Angels, and Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis and even Chicago had been his gambler’s stamping grounds. But hitting the sidewalk at the corner of Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue on a cool spring afternoon, he was not fully prepared for this big a town.
With its shifting sea of pedestrians and its bedlam of motor and streetcar traffic—horseless carriages outnumbering horse-drawn by a wide margin—Midtown Manhattan stopped Wyatt Earp in his tracks. He stood as motionless as the Greek statues that surrounded the massive clock surmounting the imposing terminal, frozen heroes who towered over him even as the buff skyscrapers towered over them, like tombstones i
n the graveyard of God’s sky…not that he could make out much sky.
The taxi driver who took Wyatt to the Morning Telegraph at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue provided plenty of local color along the way, including that the newspaper was quartered in what had been an old streetcar stable, back before the cars had been electrified.
“You wouldn’t expect to find a paper this far uptown,” the hackie said, a little hook-nosed feller in a blue plaid cap, about two blocks from their destination. “You heard of Park Row?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s Newspaper Central in this burg. Most of the other dailies are down there. Of course, the Telegraph is not your typical rag.”
“That so.”
“Well, you’re going there. You must know.”
And he did know: the paper his old friend Bat worked for specialized in theatrical, financial and sports news, with horse racing edging out boxing by a nose.
He did not reward the chatty cabbie with anything more than the nickel tip he’d intended, and soon he and his valise were threading through a second-floor city room adrift with blue tobacco haze and alive with typewriter clatter and littered with small cluttered desks at which shirtsleeved scribes toiled and smoked, except for a poker game on the periphery, where copy was being proofed between pots. Passage was made difficult by a variety of humans in the aisles, loud guys with louder clothes sporting derbies or boaters and sucking ciggies or chewing stogies and who belonged either to the gambling or show-business worlds, while bobbed-haired chorus girls sat perched on desks displaying plenty of calf and patiently filing their nails, waiting for reporters banging away at the keys in a hurry to rush through work before coming out to play.
Wyatt didn’t ask directions of anybody, since few of these people worked here. Besides, he could see Bat through the glass in one of a quartet of window-and-woodframe offices at the far end of the city-room chaos. Bat’s back was to him, but the oval skull was unmistakable, as were the broad shoulders on the medium frame. No typewriter for those gunfighter’s hands: Bat was working with pen and ink, scratching away at foolscap.
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