In the quiet of the canyon, he missed the next excitement that came to town when the Barlow and Sanderson stage was robbed again and another payroll stolen. But this time, Josh Webb was near enough to follow the clues. The robbers—Frank Cady, Slap Jack Bill, and Bull-Shit Jack—had colorful names but not very bright minds, as they went straight from the sight of the robbery to the nearest bar to start celebrating their success. By the time they returned to Las Vegas, they were happily inebriated and telling everyone who would listen that they had robbed the Barlow and Sanderson and got to keep all the money minus the portion paid to the men who had set-up the scheme.
Josh didn’t have to do much to bring them in, only buy them a few drinks and listen admiringly to the story. Then without so much as pulling his pistol, he genially escorted the boys out of Close and Patterson’s Dance Hall and up Main Street to where there was another big party, so he told them—the location of the party being the county jail, where the sheriff was equally happy to entertain them and hear their tale.
As for the planners behind the robbery, catching them wouldn’t be so easy. According to the robbers’ drunken story, the masterminds were Mysterious Dave Rudabaugh and Joe Carson, the town marshal of Las Vegas.
Josh had crossed paths with Rudabaugh before, but he doubted the outlaw’s involvement in the Las Vegas hold-up as Dave was known to be back in Kansas at the time and far from the meadows of New Mexico. As for Marshal Joe Carson, that was business Josh didn’t want to get mixed into. The express company had promised to pay him for arresting robbers, not cleaning up the law in Las Vegas, and he had already made good on that deal. Leave it to the citizens of the town to clean up their own corruption; he was headed back to Dodge City to see after his Lady Gay Saloon.
Josh had said that Dodge City was clearing out and heading down to Las Vegas, and that seemed to be true, with most of the refugees coming by way of Pueblo and Trinidad on the newly completed southbound rails of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. They were the sporting men who traveled light and took up temporary residence in the hotels and brothels around the railroad depot of New Town and swelled the crowds in the Centre Street saloons. The family groups mostly took a different route, moving by wagon train with all their homely belongings and traveling slow along the old Santa Fe Trail. Where the trail ended at the Plaza in Old Town, they made a campground, ringing the square with the white canopies of the prairie schooners and drawing water from the well below the hangman’s gallows. And so the divergent populations of Old Town and New Town grew with their separate citizenry: family folk in their campground around the Plaza; sporting men and dance halls girls in the boomtown down around the depot, and neither mixing much with the other. So it was an unusual evening when one of the denizens of Old Town took a walk down the hill and over the Gallinas River bridge to pay a social visit on one of the denizens of New Town.
He was a long lean fellow, so tall that he had to bend his head to get through the door of the Senorita Saloon, though he didn’t try to accommodate the space by taking off his hat. To the contrary, he kept his hat on his head as if needing to shade his face from the fading rays of the sun. Or needing to hide himself somehow, John Henry thought, as he watched the man step into the saloon. But it was impossible to hide such height or such natural swagger, though the man didn’t mean to make a show of himself. He was, indeed, the least showy man John Henry had ever known, a quiet self-deprecating soul who somehow kept bringing fame to himself. And John Henry knew in a moment, just by the way the fellow shed a tall shadow, that Wyatt Earp had come to town.
Wyatt was his usual laconic self, as short of words as he was long of body, and John Henry had to work to get any kind of conversation out of him.
“So you packed up and brought the whole family along with you?” he asked, and Wyatt nodded under the shadow of his hat brim.
“All that was left in Dodge: just Jim and Bessie and their kids and me and Celia. Virgil’s already moved out, gone to Arizona to try his hand there. Owns a sawmill up above Prescott.”
“And Morgan?” John Henry asked. “Any word since he went off to get married?”
Wyatt shrugged, which said more than any words would have. Wyatt had never cottoned to the idea of his brother’s union with Miss Louisa Houston, considering her more ornamental than useful in a wifely way. Wyatt’s own taste ran to the sturdy independent type of woman, and Louisa was more southern belle than prairie flower. But his opinion hadn’t quelled Morgan’s infatuation with the pretty Louisa, which was something of a stumbling block between the brothers. Wyatt was accustomed to being trailed by Morgan like an eager puppy following a hunting dog, but in this thing, Morgan had taken another lead.
“So what are your plans from here?” John Henry asked, ambling away from the undiscussed subject.
Wyatt touched a hand to his hat, settling it back a bit on his head, signaling his willingness to entertain the topic. It was an unthinking action, John Henry suspected, but it was always the same: Wyatt with hat down low over his face closed himself off from the world; Wyatt with hat pushed back allowed the world in. Funny how you could grow to know a man just by the way he wore his hat.
“We’re traveling, going to Arizona Territory to pick up Virgil and Allie. Then we’re headed down to the silver country.”
“Why, Wyatt, I never figured you for a miner!” John Henry said with a laugh. “Since when did you get interested in silver?”
“Since Ed Shieffelin staked his claim down on the border. The Tombstone mines are the richest in the whole United States, or so says Virg. He’s been keeping an eye on the boom since he got to the Arizona Territory, and he figures we can follow the mines to some good business opportunities.”
“Such as?”
“Milling, for one thing. That’s what Virg’s been doing in Prescott. A new town’s got to have fresh lumber milled. Plus transportation for the wood and whatever else needs transporting. Which is why I’ve been thinking of turning our prairie schooner to transport use, after we get there. A wagon’s a big investment to just retire when the traveling’s done, and I know something about the shipping business. Used to drive freight out of California, when I was boy.”
“The Earp Brothers Express,” John Henry said, trying out the idea. “Has a ring to it. Though I never figured you for a freighter, either.”
“It’s not the freight I’m interested in,” Wyatt countered, “just the business. There’s money in it, and that’s my aim. I’ve been looking for a money-making business, and I think this may be it.”
“You’ll need a good guard, if the roads there are anything like the roads around here. You heard Josh Webb was hired by the Adam’s Express to chase stage robbers?”
“I heard something of it. But the way I see it, the Earp Brothers have something the Adam’s doesn’t.”
“And what’s that?” John Henry asked, though he already knew the answer.
“The Earp Brothers,” Wyatt replied with something like a smile, the most humor he ever showed. “Between me and Virg and Morg, we’ve got three of the best guns around. That ought to do.”
“If you can get Morgan out of Montana,” John Henry said, pointing out the most obvious difficulty in the endeavor.
Wyatt nodded. “Which is why I came to see you, Doc. I was hoping you might help me write a letter to Morg, convincing him to join us. You’re good with words and writing and all. I was thinking that if you wrote Morgan, you might convince him to leave Sam Houston’s party and join back up with us again.”
“So you want me to play Cyrano, read poetry from balconies on your behalf?” John Henry said, considering.
“There’s no need for poetry,” Wyatt replied, his literal mind missing the literary allusion. “I figured you could paint a pretty picture of the silver country, make it seem appealing to him.”
“I reckon I could, if I’d seen the place myself. But the closest I’ve been to Tombstone is a summer south of the Texas border, and there wasn’t any silver there that I co
uld see. I’d just be makin’ up stories: ‘The streets of Tomb-stone, paved like Heaven in bricks of precious ore,’ perhaps, or ‘the undulating hills where the silver shimmers like veins straining at a whore’s breast. . .’”
He’d meant the fanciful lines as an example of the foolishness of the plan, but Wyatt nodded in seeming appreciation.
“Stories will do, if they get Morgan back with the family. ‘Course, if he heard you were coming along, he’d have that much more reason. He always was partial to you.”
“Why, Wyatt, are you invitin’ me to join your caravan?”
The sarcastic tone was meant to cover his surprise. Having Wyatt ask for his help in writing a letter was one thing; having him extend an invitation to go along with the family was quite another. He was flattered by the first and flustered by the second, and hardly knew how to answer. But one thing he did know: he couldn’t leave Las Vegas and the hot springs up Gallinas Canyon. After returning from dusty Dodge City with a relapse of his cough, he’d spent every free day soaking in the springs and drinking the mineral water, taking the cure. He couldn’t take a chance of having another relapse that might not be so quickly overcome.
But he couldn’t say all that to Wyatt, admitting how fragile he sometimes felt. Wyatt wouldn’t understand something as unmanly as that.
“I’m asking you to come along, if you’re interested,” Wyatt went on. “If Tombstone turns out to be what Virgil says it is, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to go around.”
“Well, I do appreciate your thinkin’ of me,” John Henry replied with a calculatedly casual tone, “but I’m already knee-deep in opportunities here. Las Vegas is boomin’ and just right for a man of my many talents. Besides, Kate would hate the desert. She likes to be close to the dressmakers in case she needs new ruffles and such.”
He threw in the words about Kate as an afterthought, to lighten the conversation, and wished as soon as he’d spoken that he hadn’t.
“So you’re still with Kate? I never took you for a saint, Doc.”
“No saint, just payin’ up on a debt,” he said, for hellion or not, she had saved his life. “Besides,” he added by way of explaining, “she’s good with the saloon clientele, keeps the sporting men occupied while I take their money.” Although the Senorita Saloon wasn’t much of a theater, Kate could make an audience out of any crowd. And thinking of the way she had saved him and traded away her acting career for a boomtown saloon, he had a sudden surge of compassion for her. It wasn’t love, not in the way he had feelings for Mattie, but there was something special in his feelings for Kate.
“Well, suit yourself,” Wyatt said, downing the last of his drink and pushing his hat back down low on his head. “I’ll be back along tomorrow or the day after that, if you’re still willing to help me write that letter. May even take in a poker game, if there’s some rollers in the crowd.”
“Why, Marshal Earp, I’d be happy to have you lose your money in my saloon. It would be a real honor.”
“And what makes you think I’m going to lose?” Wyatt asked, eyes squinted against the thought.
“’Cause I’ll be the first to ante in,” John Henry replied with a smile.
September brought another visitor to Las Vegas, this one even more unexpected than Wyatt. For the last person John Henry figured on seeing was someone from his own far-off past and his days as a respectable Atlanta dentist. Though, if he had to have a former friend see him in his current sporting life, Lee Smith was the right one to see him.
Lee had been the owner of the Maison de Ville Saloon during John Henry’s Atlanta days, and had been interested in Western investments even then: railroads, banks, iron and coal. Now he was traveling the west looking for interesting new opportunities, which was what brought him to Las Vegas that fall on a scouting trip down from Colorado and into the silver southwest. But it was a newspaper article about his upcoming adventure, published in the Atlanta Constitution, that had brought him to Doc Holliday’s Saloon in Las Vegas.
When the Holliday family of Atlanta had read of Lee Smith’s intended itinerary, they’d sent him a note asking him to visit their cousin in New Mexico should his travels take him that direction—or more precisely, it was Miss Mattie Holliday who had made the request. She knew of Lee Smith by reputation only, never having ventured into his Maison de Ville, but she knew the family was acquainted with him and used that social connection as reason to send him a politely worded request—
“As you may have heard, my Uncle Henry Holliday’s son, our cousin John Henry, has been on an extended tour of Texas and the west. He is currently a resident of the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory where he practices his profession of Dentistry . . .”
That was the way Lee Smith remembered her words, anyhow, when he told them to John Henry upon his arrival in New Town—where he was more than a little surprised to find Dr. Holliday not only practicing dentistry, but keeping bank at a Faro table in his own saloon, as well. In fact, his surprise had started when he first got off the southbound Santa Fe at the depot in New Town and checked into the Mackley House Hotel where he asked if the clerk could direct him to the dental office of Dr. John H. Holliday.
The clerk looked mystified at first, then laughed as if the traveler had made a clever joke. “You mean Doc Holliday’s place? Well, Sir, I can direct you to his treatment room, if it’s pain relief you’re after.” Then he said that Dr. Holliday could no doubt be found at a place called The Senorita, a block or so up Centre Street. It wasn’t until Lee found the saloon by that name with young Dr. Holliday running the games that he got the joke.
It was a reunion so amusing to Lee Smith that he told the tale again and again to every sporting man and at every game he happened into: how young Dr. Holliday, heir of the esteemed Holliday and McKey families of Georgia and an expensively educated professional man, should have chosen the same career as he himself had chosen who had no fine family or professional education to stand behind him.
John Henry didn’t mind so much Lee’s recitations to the only somewhat interested gamblers of Las Vegas. What concerned him was the possibility that Lee would return to Atlanta and share the same story with the newspapers there—or worse, with Mattie. Lee found John Henry’s double vocation of dentistry and saloon dealing merely amusing—Mattie would not be so favorably inclined. But as it turned out, he should have worried less about Mattie and more about Las Vegas.
The little lean-to dental office he had built next to the saloon kept him interestingly occupied when he wasn’t busy banking Faro or joining in a poker game. As always, he found his dental practice to be pleasurable in a way he couldn’t have made anyone else understand, and though some might say that it was a sadistic streak that made him enjoy causing pain to his patients, he didn’t see it that way at all. In fact, he more often put them out of pain than caused them the same by removing a damaged or decayed tooth and replacing it with something more serviceable.
But it was for himself, mostly, that he enjoyed practicing. He liked the craft of his profession, being able to do something with his hands and know he was doing it well. It was just too bad that there was no one around who could really appreciate his work—not that he was the only dentist in Las Vegas, of course. He was just the only one working out of a saloon in New Town, which gave him a somewhat limited professional association. And that was a shame, when he was doing such fine work as he was just now, crafting a gleaming porcelain and gold bridge for a railroader who’d lost his two front teeth in a saloon fight. The railroader, a big Irishman with more brawn than brain, had chosen to use only his fists, while his opponent had pulled a pistol and shoved the butt end of it into his mouth. The Irishman lost his teeth, but the other man lost the fight, going down in a heap of bruises and groans. It was the luck of the Irish, the man said, that the loser had a wad of greenbacks in his pockets which he took as winnings—and which he was happy to give to Doc Holliday to make him look presentable again.
John Henry was happy to take
the hard-won money, and happier to take on the dental case, which was far more challenging than the usual fillings and extractions that occupied his occasional work hours. And so it was that he found himself engrossed in carving and excavating and making plaster impressions, and ignoring what was going on in his saloon on the other side of the doorway until a boisterous voice drew his attention. Most days, the hubbub of the Senorita’s bar and gaming tables was just a pleasant background sound to the louder whir of his dental drill, but on this late September afternoon, even the drill couldn’t drown out the sound of a man’s laughter as he told an old story to anyone who would listen.
The man was Lee Smith, of course, holding court somewhere in the saloon like he used to hold court in his Maison de Ville in Atlanta. His voice, from long years of speaking across the noise of his own saloon, had learned a resonance that carried it to every corner of a room. He might have made a name for himself on the theater stage, John Henry mused, the way his voice carried through the thin walls of the saloon like it was carrying across the footlights, though the tale he was telling would never make for good drama. He was recounting, in what John Henry heard as dully accurate detail, the history of the Holliday family in Georgia and how he came to be associated with them all.
“Yessir,” said Lee, “I was pleased to see John Henry here following in the family footsteps, goin’ into the liquor business. A stable sort of livin’, I’ve always found it to be. No matter the economic turn of things, there’s always call for a good saloon. In fact, the worst times is oft the best of times for a saloonkeeper, as bad times make a man needful of a good drink. Then the good times come and what’s a man gonna spend his money on but another drink? Yessir,” he said again, as though proving a point, although no one could be heard disputing him, “there’s no business better suited to a stable and satisfying lifestyle than sellin’ drinks across the bar. ‘Course the Hollidays have known that from way back. As I recall it, there was a Holliday saloon in Georgia in the frontier days when the roads cut through the Indian nation to get from one white town to another. Though, in those days, they weren’t called saloons, a fancy sort of name that came later. They were taverns back then, part hotel and part drinkin’ room, and welcome wherever they were established. That was the first business of John Henry’s Grandpa Bob Holliday, and they say a finer tavern keeper you never did meet: friendly, fast on the pour, full of talk. Like me! So the way I see it, John Henry comes by the saloon business naturally. What’s that you say?”
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