Dance with the Devil

by Victoria Wilcox

  “Not just officer anymore,” Morgan Earp said. “Mayor Kelley’s just promoted Wyatt to Assistant Marshal, right under Charlie Bassett. That means Wyatt’s just about the top dog around here now. Ain’t that right, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt shrugged his answer. “It’ll do for now. Somebody’s got to stand down these Texas boys when they cause trouble in town, show them the business end of a gun.”

  “Wyatt don’t actually shoot ‘em, though,” Morgan said. “Mostly he just buffalo’s ‘em, knocks ‘em over the head with his pistol butt, then drags ‘em off to the cooler while they’re unconscious.”

  “It works,” Wyatt said, as laconic as ever.

  “Mind if we join you for a drink, Doc?” Morgan asked, and without waiting for an answer he pulled up a chair and spun it around, straddling it cowboy style. “Come on and grab a seat, Wyatt, and we’ll have a whiskey to celebrate your big promotion.”

  “I don’t feel like celebrating,” Wyatt said. “You have one for me, Morg. I’ve got police work to do. Jack, you better check that knife at the bar before I run you in for breaking the weapons law.” Then he turned on his bootheel and walked out of the saloon and into the windy prairie night. Jack Johnson, cowed, took himself and his knife to the bar.

  “What’s vexin’ him?” John Henry asked. “I know he’s not one for conversation, but that was just plain impolite.” Though it wasn’t so much Wyatt’s bad manners that bothered him, but his cool indifference.

  “Give him time,” Morgan said. “We just got back to town after hearing about Ed Masterson’s shooting, and Wyatt’s taking it kind of hard. He was friends with the Mastersons from back in their buffalo hunting days. He never did think Ed was the right man for Marshal, too good-natured and all, and I guess he feels like if he’d been here to help, Ed wouldn’t have gotten killed.”

  “But that was just a common saloon-shooting, wasn’t it?” Ned Buntline asked, “a drunk with a loaded firearm that went off too fast? What could he have done to prevent that?”

  “Nothing, probably. But Wyatt’s like that. Thinks everything is his responsibility. He’s serious-minded, always has been. Not like me! I take things easy!”

  “You said the Marshal was named Masterson?” John Henry asked. “Is that the same man who shot Corporal King down in Sweetwater?”

  “Nah, that’s his younger brother, Bat Masterson—he’s our Ford County Sheriff now. It was Ed Masterson who was Town Marshal of Dodge. Wyatt was real close to both of them. That’s why we burned the breeze getting back to Dodge as soon as he heard about Ed’s death. I guess he wanted to do something to make up for it.”

  “You mean revenge, retribution?” Ned Buntline said with a melodramatic flourish and a shaky smile. “Now that would make a cracker-jack story! I can see it in print already: Ned Buntline’s The Deputy’s Revenge,” and he launched into a stream of the kind of overblown prose that had made him famous. “There was a steel-eyed resolve in the lawman’s hooded eyes as he carefully drew his heavy revolver and leveled it manfully at the heartless murderer. Revenge! Retribution! Spent blood atoning for spent blood!’”

  “Hell, no!” Morgan said. “Wyatt’s not that crazy! He’d never take the law into his own hands like that! He just plans on keeping the peace a little better around here, so no more lawmen have to die.”

  “Ah, well!” Ned Buntline said with a sigh. Still, there may be something to it . . .” and he started scribbling on the stack of copy paper he kept beside him, whiskey stained and wrinkled.

  “What about Doc’s story?” Morgan asked. “You said it was a good one.”

  “It was,” Buntline agreed. “I’ll tell you what, Dr. Holliday. I’ll buy your story, pay you the prize money of $50, if you’ll promise to keep in touch with me by letter. I could use some Dodge City color to add to the Deputy’s Revenge. I think this may turn out to be something interesting. Heaven knows my career could use the help!”

  “All right,” John Henry said, “as long as you don’t use my name in your book. Maybe I’ll still get a chance to try out that little gold-brick scheme . . .”

  “Not as long as Wyatt is lawing in Dodge, you won’t run that blazer!” laughed Morgan. “But I sure would like to hear that story again, if you’ve got the time to tell it.”

  “I’ve got all the rest of my life, such as it is.”

  And Morgan let out a laugh at that, slapping John Henry on the shoulder like they were old pals. “Wyatt said you had a sour sense of humor! But I don’t mind. Hell, I don’t mind much of anything! ‘Cept for sitting around a saloon without a drink in my hand. Hey, bar dog! Send over a bottle of lightning, will you? Damn, it’s good to be back in Dodge!”

  When the eastbound Santa Fe out of Pueblo rolled into Dodge City four days later, it drew more than the usual crowd of curious spectators. Rumor had it that the killer Ben Thompson was on board that train, along with Bill Tighlman and Texas Jack Vermillion, and a hundred more of the toughest gunslingers out of Texas. But though it looked like Dodge was in for more trouble than even Marshal Wyatt Earp could handle, the Marshal didn’t seem to be too alarmed.

  The truth was that the Texas boys were just returning to Dodge after doing guard duty on the railroad works at Cañon City, Colorado, where the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad was battling the Denver & Rio Grande for the right-of-way through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River. The Royal Gorge, a three-thousand-foot deep, thirty-foot wide slash through the Rocky Mountains, was the shortest passage to the silver boom camps, and both railroads claimed the right to lay track through it. The dispute was mostly a legal one, with the Colorado courts wrangling over leases and contracts, but it had turned physical when the Denver & Rio Grande sent in three-hundred armed railroad workers to take the Royal Gorge by force. Not to be outdone, the Santa Fe sent to Dodge City for an army of its own, and the cowboys were quick to rally to the cause.

  “Damn, Doc! Would you look at that?” Morgan Earp exclaimed to John Henry, as they stood together on the station platform watching the train come in, along with most of the rest of the citizenry of Dodge. The saloons and gambling halls had all emptied out as soon as the train’s black chimney of smoke had appeared on the western horizon—it wasn’t often that Dodge was descended upon all at once by so many famous and infamous characters. “Did you ever see so many six-guns in your life? Which one of those boys do you think is Bill Tighlman?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Morg. I reckon one bad man looks about like any other. Where’s Wyatt, anyhow? This crowd’s gettin’ feisty.”

  “Checking out the gambling joints, probably, making sure nobody’s robbing the store while the clerk’s away. You know Wyatt, duty first. He’ll be here soon enough, though. Bat’s coming in on the train, and Wyatt’s been wanting to see him.”

  “You mean Masterson? What’s he doin’ riding with these cowboys? I thought he was County Sheriff.”

  “He is. But he does some work for the Santa Fe, too. He recruited these Texas boys for guard duty and went along to make sure they didn’t get out of hand. Well, speak of the Devil, here’s Wyatt now!” Morgan said, pulling off his hat and waving it in the air to catch his brother’s attention. “Hey, Wyatt! Come on over here with me and the Doc!”

  But Wyatt only nodded in Morgan’s direction as he shouldered his way through the crowd to where a fist-fight had broken out among the spectators by the side of the tracks. Without saying a word to the brawlers, Wyatt pulled his six-shooter from the holster at his side and slammed it butt first over the heads of two of the combatants, who just as wordlessly slid to the ground, knocked unconscious by the marshal’s heavy-handed blow.

  “Like I said,” Morgan grinned, “duty first!”

  The buffaloing was startlingly brutal, but it seemed to do the trick as the rest of the crowd momentarily quieted down. Clearly, it wasn’t just Wyatt Earp’s cool presence that kept the peace in Dodge City, but his swift shooting arm as well—even when he used his revolver as a bludgeon.

  “An
d who’s that bandbox?” John Henry asked, turning his attention to where a dandy in a three-piece suit was stepping down from the train, limping as he leaned on a gold-headed walking stick. Surrounded by the denim and corduroy of the cowboys, the man looked amusingly over-dressed, with a derby hat set at a tilt and a fancy leather gunbelt carrying silver-mounted pistols.

  “Why, that’s Sheriff Bat, himself!” Morgan said. “If you think that’s something, you should have seen the getup he wore when he first came to Dodge—red chaps and a fringed bolero, a big black sombrero with silver doo-dads all over it. He looked like a Mexican greaser going to a fiesta. He’s got sophisticated living in Dodge. He used to be a mule-skinner, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at him now.”

  But what John Henry could tell was that Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were fast friends, as the marshal ignored the revival of the fist-fight he’d just broken up and pushed his way through the crowd to the sheriff ’s side, taking his hand in a steady handshake. And as the two lawmen stood together, John Henry could see the shadow of a shared sorrow crossing their handsome faces.

  “First time they’ve seen each other since Ed Masterson got himself killed,” Morgan said. “Guess they’ll have some commiserating to do.” And for a moment, he was uncharacteristically pensive. “I wonder if Ed saw the light at the end.”

  “What light?”

  “The heavenly light. My Ma says that right before you die, you see this light, the light of God reaching down to bring you home. All you have to do is follow the light to find your way to Heaven.”

  “And what happens if you don’t see the light?” John Henry asked, intrigued to find a spiritual side to the otherwise worldly Morgan Earp.

  “Then you end up in hell, I guess. That’s what our Ma says. She says that some folks are so bad, they can’t even see the light when it’s right there shining on them. They go to hell when they could have just opened their eyes and gone to heaven instead. Do you suppose Ed saw the light, Doc? He was too nice a fellow not to get to heaven.”

  “I reckon I don’t know much about heaven. Though I have been to hell and back a couple of times.”

  Morgan’s pensive moment was over, as he laughed out loud and slapped John Henry on the back, setting him off on a coughing jag.

  “You’re a funny one, Doc, always kidding around! Been to hell and back!”

  John Henry grabbed for the linen handkerchief in his vest pocket and quickly covered his mouth. Morgan Earp didn’t know him well enough to realize that he rarely kidded around and meant most everything he said when he wasn’t purposefully telling a lie. He had been to hell and back, as far as he was concerned.

  “So what do you say we take in the show at the Varities?” Morgan said.

  “Don’t you want to give your condolences to the Sheriff? Maybe invite him and Wyatt along?” Much as he enjoyed Morgan’s light-hearted company, it was still Wyatt that John Henry admired and with whom he wanted to strike up a friendship.

  “Hell no! Bat’s as bad as Wyatt is about drinking and such, a real temperance man. Dull as death! Leave ‘em to their lawing, Doc. You and me can do the town plenty fine on our own!”

  The June 14th edition of the Dodge City Times carried a report of the Santa Fe’s hired gunslingers, a story from the Pueblo Chieftain calling Dodge The Wicked City, a report of Wyatt Earp’s appointment as Assistant Marshal, and an advertisement for Dodge City’s first dentist:

  DENTISTRY

  J.H. Holliday, Dentist, very respectfully offers his professional services to the citizens of Dodge City and surrounding country during the summer.

  Office at room No. 24, Dodge House.

  Where satisfaction is not given money will be refunded.

  And with only that one printing of the advertisement, John Henry had more patients than he had time to see. Toothache was the most common complaint; he pulled so many rotten teeth that the whole office began to smell of disease and Kate regularly complained of the awful odor. He got more satisfaction from doing the fine gold work the cattle buyers were ready to pay for and making the porcelain crowns all the ladies in town wanted.

  With the money he was making, he was able to order himself some new dental equipment, including a Pocket Dentist kit like the one Dr. Judd had described back in St. Louis—a little leather-covered box about the size of a daguerreotype case and filled with tiny gold-foil tools that attached to an ivory handle. Then he used the sharpest of the tools to carve his name into the eagle-headed medallion on the brass-hinged lid: J.H. Holliday, 24 D.H., Dodge along with a set of smiling teeth and the letters au, the chemical symbol for gold.

  Kate watched his painstaking work, commenting that his hands wouldn’t be so steady after the evening’s gambling and liquor, and calling him foolish for putting his office address on the kit as if he meant to stay in Dodge City permanently. She was still yearning to be away from the dust and the dirt of the cowtowns and back on the theater stage where she knew she belonged, and Dodge wasn’t her kind of theater. But John Henry was happy in Dodge, doing his professional work by day and his sporting work by night, and feeling himself almost settled again in a town where he had no bad reputation to hide.

  It was his dental practice that brought Wyatt to pay him a visit at the Dodge House, much to Kate’s irritation, though it wasn’t for Wyatt, himself, that the services were needed, but for a hulking cowboy who’d taken the bad end of a brawl with the marshal.

  “He tried to go across the Dead Line with his guns on,” Wyatt explained as he dragged the moaning man into the dental office and dropped him unceremoniously into the wooden arm-chair that John Henry used for examinations. “Town law doesn’t allow firearms north of the railroad tracks. I had to buffalo him to get his attention. He’s been yelping like this ever since. I figure maybe he’s got a bad tooth.”

  But one look at the man, with his face bruised and bloody and his mouth hanging crooked, told John Henry that this was no simple toothache.

  “This man’s got a broken jaw! What the hell did you hit him with, Wyatt? An anvil?”

  “Just this,” Wyatt said as he pulled open his frock coat to show the shiny new pistol at his side. It was the longest Colt’s revolver John Henry had ever seen, ten-inches in the barrel at least, and box fit into its own custom scabbard. “Your friend Buntline sent it to me. Said I needed a bigger gun, and he appreciated the idea for The Deputy’s Revenge, whatever that means. I didn’t want to insult him by returning it.”

  “So you used that—cannon—on this man’s face, just to get his attention?”

  “Better to buffalo him than to shoot him.”

  “Shootin’ him would have hurt less,” John Henry said, as he carefully pried open the cowboy’s disfigured mouth, making him howl in pain. “He’s got some rotten teeth, all right, but they’re the least of the trouble. I’ll have to try splinting him, see if I can stabilize this mess. You did a day’s work here, all right, Marshal Earp.”

  Wyatt pulled off his flat-brimmed hat and smoothed his well-oiled hair into place. “He was breaking the law, Doc.”

  “Well, he won’t be breaking anything for awhile. I’ll have to keep him here until I know he’s on the mend.”

  “Keep him here? You mean you want to take custody of him?”

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said with a bemused smile. “I used to be a wanted man myself, until I met you. Now I’m practically a lawman.”

  “Now hold on, Doc. Leaving him here don’t mean I’m deputizing you. He’s still my responsibility . . .”

  But John Henry shook his head. “The truth is, Wyatt, I reckon he’s a little bit my responsibility, as well.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talkin’ about your weapon of destruction there. That special pistol of yours was a payment for the story of your Dodge City exploits, provided by me.”

  “My exploits?”

  “Buntline asked me to keep him informed of the doin’s here in Dodge, anything colorful that would loo
k good in print. I’ve written him a letter or two telling him how you handle the cowboys so well. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “And why would Buntline be interested in me?”

  “Why, Wyatt,” John Henry drawled, “you’re our hero, don’t you know?” And though there was a sarcastic cut to his voice, he meant every word of it.

  “Me? A hero?” Wyatt said, and his handsome, solemn face broke into the first real laugh that John Henry had ever seen on him. “Hell, I’m no hero! Ask Celia! Ask Morg!”

  “Morg thinks you walk on water.”

  “Morg’s my kid brother, he’s supposed to think like that. Isn’t that how brothers are?”

  But John Henry didn’t answer, pretending to be studying his patient’s injury. It was going to take some doing to bring that dislocated mandible back into place, make the unfortunate cowboy’s teeth match up again the way they should—though it wasn’t just the dental work he was thinking of.

  “I reckon I don’t know much about brothers,” he said at last, “as I never had any.”

  “No brothers?” Wyatt said, as though he could hardly fathom such a misfortune. “That’s too bad, Doc. I’d be real lonely without any brothers. I’ve sure been looking forward to seeing everybody again, soon as they get to Dodge.”

  “As soon as who gets to Dodge?”

  “The rest of the family. My folks are headed off to California again, coming out on the Santa Fe Trail. They’ll be here any day now, I figure. Be quite a wagon train when the Earp outfit pulls into town.”

  And though John Henry should have been glad for Wyatt, he only felt a stab of jealousy. Wyatt had family, and he had no one but Kate.

  “So Marshal,” he said, “where do I send the bill? This is gonna be an expensive repair job.”

  “I guess you better send it to me. Much as this cowboy deserved what he got, I wouldn’t want to get a bad reputation around Dodge.”