Born to the Badge

by Mark Warren

  “You know, Wyatt, when I first met you in Fort Griffin, you told me your line of work was on the green cloth. Maybe you should follow the boomtowns while they’re still booming. That’s where the money is. There is really not much left in this town but cow shit and contentious whores.”

  Wyatt nodded. “The mining towns show promise. I expect miners, engineers, and investors are easier to live with than these Texas boys, who think it’s their sworn duty to raise hell at the end of a trail.”

  “Ever try to have a civil conversation with one of those cattle pushers, Wyatt?” Doc laughed. “They’re about as enlightened as the Godforsaken animals they drive to the slaughter. They even dress funny.”

  Wyatt kept his face neutral and his eyes on the saloons ahead. “You were just raised different, Doc.”

  Doc conceded the point with a laugh. “Well, old habits and good clothes might be all I have to remind me I’m not a stinking Texas drover . . . now that I’m not a dentist anymore.”

  Without altering his pace, Wyatt turned to look at his friend. “So you’ve given it up for good?”

  Doc made a wry laugh. “I think it would be more accurate to say it gave me up,” he quipped. “The public does not appreciate a consumptive breathing down their throats. It was a star-crossed ambition for me.” This time there was no flippant humor in the confession, nor were the words shored up with self-pity.

  “You plan to gamble your time out, Doc?”

  “It seems as good a way to go out as any. Not here in Dodge though. I might head down to New Mexico. I’ve heard that the gambling is good there, and the dry climate might suit me better.”

  “What about Kate? Will you take her with you?”

  “Kate?” Doc said, surprised at the question. He snorted quietly through his nose. “Who knows? Our relationship seems to be redefined each week. She’s a handful, I admit—a fire-cat out of hell, if truth be told—but there aren’t too many women willing to share a bed with someone in my condition. What about you? Will you pull out alone?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Any time soon?” Doc asked, turning now to see Wyatt’s expression.

  “Soon as I figure out where the hell I’m goin’,” Wyatt replied, his voice edged by the lack of deliberation in his plans.

  Doc slowed, put a hand on Wyatt’s shoulder, and let it slide off as Wyatt kept walking.

  “Well, whenever we do ride out of this piss hole of a town,” Doc called out to his back, “here’s to the good fortunes waiting for us out there.” Wyatt stopped and turned to see Doc raising his silver flask with a flourish. Doc struck a dramatic pose and waxed poetic. “May our wayward paths cross again somewhere, Wyatt.” Then Doc’s voice smoothed out with a hint of tenderness. “I certainly hope they will.”

  Wyatt watched him pull at the whiskey like a man condemned to swallow his own poison. “Good luck, Doc,” Wyatt said, wondering which would kill Doc first—the disease or the alcohol.

  Dawn had fully spilled across the prairie when Wyatt finished his rounds and returned to the Dodge House. He walked the hallway toward his room and, turning the last corner, stopped to let his eyes adjust and assemble the details of a dark figure slumped on the floor.

  “Lillie?” he said, loosening his grip on his holstered gun.

  He walked the length of the hall and came within inches of the visitor before recognizing Mattie. Slowly, she stood and covered her face with her hands, sobbing quietly, the muffled sound reminiscent of that first night they had stayed together on the prairie after she had run off from James’s brothel.

  “Can we talk inside, Wyatt?” she mumbled, her voice blurring inside the cup of her hands.

  The familiar sound of the key in the latch was strangely disturbing to him. With Mattie drying her eyes behind him, he wasn’t sure what he was walking into. The dark room smelled of cigar smoke and gun oil, and the caustic scent reminded him how Mattie had once kept the air sweet with rose petals floating in a bowl of water.

  She remained just inside the doorway as he walked to the table by the bed. There he struck a match and lighted the lamp. He blew out the match, tossed it in the tin can he used as an ash receptacle, and stood looking out the window. When the strain of the quiet drew out, he unbuckled his gun belt, hooked it on the back of the chair, and leaned into the window frame.

  “I’m getting out of this line of work, Mattie,” he said.

  He had not heard his own voice in this room for months, and now his words came back to him off the glass like a third person mocking him for his procrastinations. He turned to look at her, and her face appeared uncommonly resolute. She continued to stand in the doorway with one hand still on the doorknob. When she offered no response, he turned back to the window and looked across the roofs of the saloons and other businesses toward the vastness of the prairie sprawling far to the west.

  “I’m leaving Dodge,” he continued in a rare soliloquy. “Time to do something with more promise to it . . . something with a future.”

  The door closed, and he turned to see if she had left or come inside. A wrinkled shirt lay on the bed, and she picked it up, folded it, and smoothed it against her stomach. Wyatt turned back to the window and peered north, taking in the respectable side of Dodge. He did not know the names of the people who owned some of those homes, but he knew they had something he did not.

  “Wyatt,” Mattie said and stepped quietly to him.

  She turned him by his shoulder and flattened her hands on his chest. When he looked down, she began unbuttoning his shirt. He started to speak, but she quickly pressed two light fingertips to his lips.

  “It’s all right, Wyatt.” She smiled wanly. “Just tonight.”

  He had not seen her act in such a straightforward manner since the night she had stolen James’s horse and struck out across the prairie. Watching the calm certainty in her face, he let her lead him to the bed and push him back so she could pull off his boots.

  Months passed before he saw her again. He had bided his time in Dodge merely to finish out the cattle season, and during this time of fulfilling his last stint as a lawman, he had heard nothing about her. Then, just like before, Mattie was waiting in the hallway, her arms wrapped around her midsection as she pressed her back into the wall. As he approached her, he reminded himself of her long-suffering dependency on him in Wichita. He began putting together the words for a final good-bye . . . words that would leave no doubt as to the separate paths they would take. There were other things that needed saying, too, he supposed, but he would rather say them here in the hallway than in his room. He wasn’t going to repeat the show of weakness and compromise that had marked his last concession to her.

  “Got a letter from my brother Virgil,” Wyatt said, trying to establish an aloof tenor for the conversation—any topic that did not involve Mattie. “Soon as I finish up the season here, we’re plannin’ to throw in together and join the silver strike in the Arizona Territory. James, too.” He’d almost said and their wives.

  She blinked at the floor. “Arizona,” she whispered, as though trying out the sound of a new word. Then she looked up. “I need to talk to you, Wyatt. Can we go inside?”

  He pushed a hand into the pocket of his coat. “That’s not a good idea, Mattie.”

  She was so still, she seemed not to breathe. Wyatt lightly slapped his hat against his leg.

  “Wyatt,” she whispered, and then her eyes went dead. “I’m pregnant.”

  Her words leapt out at him, like the flapping of a bird, a sound that seemed to fill his ears. Then the noise buried itself somewhere deep inside him, like a tough piece of food that he had to chew into something manageable enough to swallow. The hallway grew so quiet, Wyatt could hear a jingling harness and the rattle of a wagon as it moved along the rutted thoroughfare of Front Street.

  Then before he could ask, she added, “I’m carrying your child, Wyatt.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Fall to winter, 1879: Dodge City to Arizona Territory


  It had been a bad season for all the cattle towns. The drought that had dried up the Kansas plains in the summer of ’79 cut the beef business by half in Dodge City. With the season over and the majority of Texans returned to their home state, policing the town had grown so mundane that Wyatt decided to stop waiting for proof of Mattie’s claim of pregnancy. He might as well go ahead and face what had to be faced and get started on this new life in the hinterlands of Arizona. Having Mattie with him altered nothing about the fortune to be gained. The rewards were there for any man bold enough to stake his future on the new silver mines.

  Virgil’s latest letter described rich veins of ore waiting for them beneath the sandy floor of the southeastern Arizona deserts. It was all there for the taking. A place called “Tombstone.” When Wyatt instructed Mattie to be ready to leave by September, she held a stoic expression on her face, but she could not hide the relief and exhilaration that showed like tiny candle flames flickering deep in her dark, homely eyes.

  Wyatt bought a freight wagon with a substantial ash frame that, once he was settled in, he would convert into a stagecoach. It was not as grand an enterprise as he had hoped for, but it was at least a plan that did not involve a badge. That alone seemed to him a promising start.

  On the day Mattie brought her belongings to the Dodge House for packing the new wagon, she seemed touched by a new purpose in her prosaic life. Her mood was hopeful and her hands industrious. As she helped gather up Wyatt’s personal belongings scattered around the room, she picked up a Bible off the dresser and opened the cover.

  “ ‘To Wyatt S. Earp,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘as a slight recognition of his many Christian virtues and steady following in the footsteps of the meek and lowly Jesus.’ ”

  She looked up, as if expecting an explanation from Wyatt. When he held his attention on buckling the straps of the clothing trunk he had packed, Mattie looked back at the cursive inscription inside the book.

  “Who are Sutton and Colborn?” Mattie asked, frowning.

  Wyatt lifted the trunk and carried it just outside the door to leave in the hallway for the porter. When he came back inside, he started consolidating his gun-cleaning kit.

  “Couple o’ lawyers who work for the city and the county,” he finally replied. He shook his head. Then his grim expression barely altered when one side of his mouth curled into a false smile. “Prob’ly their idea of a joke,” he said, “after I told the city council I would need something more than what they were willing to pay me if I was to stay on.”

  “I don’t think it’s a joke, Wyatt,” Mattie said with a rare and convincing tenderness. “You’ve been an excellent officer here. You held your position with honor, and people respect you for it.”

  Wyatt thought of the scores of Texans who had fallen under the sting of his revolver barrel. “You don’t know what all I had to do as a marshal, Mattie. No need to overplay what I did or did not do here in Dodge.”

  She frowned and studied the profile of his face as he wrapped a pistol in muslin and stowed it inside a canvas rucksack. “You didn’t become a killer, Wyatt . . . like so many other lawmen.”

  Now he looked at her, and the expression in his eyes caused her to swallow her words. “I’ve killed, Mattie.”

  Her frown deepened. “You don’t know that, Wyatt. That young Texan who died could have been shot by—”

  “It was my bullet,” he said.

  She pressed her upper teeth into her lower lip and began shaking her head. “Wyatt, you can’t know—”

  “It was my bullet,” he interrupted again, this time in a flat tone of finality. “I know.”

  She looked down at the Bible again, closed it, flattened her hand on the front cover, and stroked it as if she had learned to calm the soul of a book. “Wyatt, people don’t write jokes inside a Bible.”

  Wyatt allowed a look of distaste and hooked the rucksack over a shoulder. “Mike Sutton might hire a juggler and a fire-eater for his own funeral if he thought he could get one last laugh out of it.”

  “Well,” she said, and began folding the book inside a work shirt he had not yet packed, “we’ll want to take good care of this, Wyatt. One day it might mean a lot to you.” To cut off his argument, she quickly placed the package in the valise on the bed. “What will you and your brothers do first in Arizona? Will you be mining the silver? Do you have a plan?”

  Wyatt set the rucksack outside the door and gave the hotel boy instructions on how to pack the wagon out back. When he returned, he propped his hands on his hips and surveyed the room for any item he might have missed.

  “We’re gonna open a stage line. That wagon out by the livery is the first step in building a business. I’ll convert it into a passenger coach once we get there, and we’ll be transporting people to the new boomtown from the railroad and then carting bullion away. That last one . . . that’s a service as important as chipping the ore out of the ground and smelting it down to pure grade.”

  “But it sounds dangerous, Wyatt. Someone will have to guard that silver on the trip, won’t they? You won’t do that, will you?”

  “If necessary, I’ll ride shotgun, if that’s what it takes to get the business off the ground. Later we’ll hire guards.”

  Wyatt shouldered the last of the bags and waited for her.

  “I hope you don’t have to do that, Wyatt,” she said. “We don’t know anything about that place . . . or the people down there.”

  Wyatt picked up the lever-action Winchester by the door. “You ready?”

  Mattie hurriedly closed her last garment bag and hoisted it inside a circle she made with her arms. She walked to him, freed up one hand, and lightly touched his upper arm as though feeling for heat through the fabric of his blouse.

  “I’m ready,” she said and braved a smile for their new beginning. “I’m ready, Wyatt.”

  Without any more words, they walked out of the hotel for the last time and packed the last pieces of their gear in the wagon bed. By the time Wyatt had checked the harnesses and helped Mattie into the driver’s box, James’s wagon rolled into view out on Railroad Avenue and stopped. Bessie sat in the box with James, and her daughter Hattie nestled between them with a pale blue bonnet tied to her head. Wyatt snapped the reins and pulled his wagon out onto the street to flank his brother’s.

  “Damn, son,” James laughed, making a show of examining Wyatt’s belongings, “is that all you got to call your own?”

  Wyatt looked at the furniture, cedar chests, boxes of cookware, and bulging stuff-sacks piled into his brother’s spring wagon. James’s two draft horses appeared sorely lacking for the journey ahead of them. One was the old sorrel mare Mattie had stolen the time she had run away from Bessie’s brothel.

  Wyatt patted his shirt pocket, where he kept the modest roll of cash he had saved from his last season as an officer. “Most o’ what I got is right here. The rest is what I’m sittin’ on.” He nodded to the draft horses and poked a thumb over his shoulder at the string of horses tethered to the tail gate. “And the horses.”

  James eyed the two stout bays standing in the traces of Wyatt’s rig. Then he leaned to admire the two saddle ponies, the high-legged racer, and the four braces of coach haulers.

  “That the Thoroughbred you won in that poker game with the Pierce crowd?”

  Wyatt nodded. “Took him with a full house . . . jacks over nines.” He turned to consider his most valuable possession.

  James couldn’t help but concede Wyatt’s primary assets with a smile and a bow of his head. “You keep drawing cards like that, little brother, and you’ll be set up like a king in the Arizona Territory. Tombstone will pull in sporting men like a cow patty draws flies. And horse racing is gettin’ to be the bull’s balls . . . all over the country. Hell, we might open a high-class gambling room with faro tables as the centerpiece. We can grade a track somewhere outside of town and set up horse races on the side.”

  Wyatt considered the possibilities. He did love gambling. Almost all forms of it
. It was in his blood.

  “Maybe after we get the stage line off to a good start,” he replied.

  James made a point of admiring the Thoroughbred. “What’d you name that purse-stealer?”

  Wyatt made the little sideways shrug with his head that he rarely used. “Already had a name. I didn’ figure on changin’ it.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  Wyatt almost checked Mattie’s face, but instead he rethreaded the reins through his fingers. “Dick Naylor.”

  “That’s right!” James laughed. “One o’ the Mastersons told me.” He smiled at the regal steed standing behind Wyatt’s wagon. “Said that horse is so fast out of the start, looks like the others got their peckers nailed to the gate.”

  Bessie laughed and held her hands over her daughter’s ears. Mattie had not even heard the crude joke. She looked up at the second floor of the Dodge House, as if she were paying a farewell homage to a milepost in her lackluster life.

  Wyatt nodded toward the river where the Santa Fe Trail skirted the south end of town. It was the same well-used wagon route his father had taken to California with the family. He wondered how many parties had struck out on this trail in search of their El Dorados. Now it would deliver Wyatt to the Southwest for his fresh start. At thirty-one years old he felt as though he were pushing all the chips to the center of the table. He was betting everything on this place called “Tombstone.”

  They made the long haul to Prescott, where Virgil and Allie ran a saw mill at the edge of town. Virgil still owned the Studebaker with bows and canvas sheeting—the wagon in which he and Allie had traveled with Old Nick when they had passed through Dodge City two years past. For the Tombstone trip, they had packed more housewares than the other families combined. It was Virgil, it seemed, who had sunk his roots deepest into domesticity, but now all the Earps had joined in the common quest for respectability. James even declared his and Bessie’s intent to stop pimping whores.