Dance with the Devil

by Victoria Wilcox

  “Congratulations,” John Henry said cheerfully, as though Josh had just won a spelling bee. “Now all you have to do is bring him in and your job is done.”

  “But it’s not him I gotta arrest this time,” Josh said, looking even more uncomfortable, “even though I know he’s the one behind it. But he says different, naming names and making accusations.”

  “Naming his own men?” John Henry commented in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like his style.”

  “It ain’t his own men he’s naming, Doc. It’s you.”

  “Me?” John Henry said with a laugh, “a train robber? And when would I have had time to do this dastardly deed, between runnin’ my saloon and doin’ my dentistry? Ask Kate where I’ve been, if you’re brave enough to wake her. She’s a mean woman when she hasn’t had her night’s rest.”

  “It’s not me you gotta convince, Doc. I don’t think you’d bother robbing a train when you got easier means of making money. But what I think don’t much matter. It’s what a jury’s gonna think, if Hoodoo makes a charge. And from what I hear, he’s getting ready to make one.”

  And then, John Henry realized what was happening. Hyram Neil, having lost out on his winnings once in St. Louis and again in Las Vegas, was going to take his vengeance at last. In a town full of people who already considered John Henry a killer, it wouldn’t be too hard to find a jury that would consider him a train robber, as well. And once Hoodoo had made the train robbery charge stick, he could easily invent evidence that the killing of Mike Gordon was really a murder after all, and hang him for both crimes.

  “So what do I do, Josh?” he asked, all the warmth of sleepiness gone in a sudden shiver of cold fear.

  “I’d get out of town, if I was you, and soon. But I wouldn’t make any big show of it, more like sneak out, I’d say. If he knows you’re going, he’ll have his road agents stop you, or worse.”

  He didn’t have to ask Josh what his imaginary mind was thinking up this time. It seemed his good luck at the poker table had been hoodoo again, and this time it was deadly.

  He knew what he needed to do, and hoped it wasn’t too late to do it. Wyatt had invited him to join the Earps on the journey into the Arizona Territory, and he had laughed off the invitation when it was made. The last thing he’d wanted to do was make a long trip across the open desert, riding for weeks alongside a plodding wagon train. His health seemed to take a turn for the worse just imagining such an effort. But the last thing he wanted now seemed like the one thing he needed: a way out of Las Vegas without drawing attention to his leaving. There were hundreds of wagon trains traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, passing through Las Vegas on their way to wherever else they were headed. No one much noticed their coming or going, other than to make a quick profit off the provisions they bought to supply their outfits. No one would notice John Henry joining in with one of those wagon trains headed west into the desert—at least that was his hope.

  It didn’t take him long to find the Earp caravan, their wagons still camped at the Plaza in Old Town, though by the looks of things they’d be pulling out soon.

  “The weather’s cooling,” Wyatt explained when John Henry found him and inquired after their impending departure, “better climate for desert traveling.”

  “I reckon,” John Henry replied. “So how long do you figure on drivin’ before you have to stop to provision again?” Wyatt’s wagons, he noted, were already neatly filled with barrels and boxes and odd household belongings. There was even a rocking chair, positioned so as to take in a nice view of the landscape they were leaving behind.

  “Virgil says we can make it to Prescott all right, if the weather holds. We’re hoping to get there before the snow starts, it being up toward the mountains and all.”

  “Any word yet from Morgan?” John Henry asked, trying to keep the conversation seemingly light. If Wyatt had been surprised to receive his visit to Old Town, he didn’t show it. But then, Wyatt didn’t show much of any kind of emotion anyway, surprised or not.

  “No word, yet,” he said with a shrug as his hefted a bag of sugar into the wagon bed. “Not sure he even got that letter yet, up there in Deadwood. If he’s still in Deadwood. That was his last known whereabouts, or Sam Houston Junior’s, anyhow.”

  Wyatt didn’t mention any thanks for John Henry’s hand in writing that letter, which he, himself, considered a small masterpiece of creativity. But he hadn’t come to discuss literature.

  “I’ve been thinkin’ about your offer, Wyatt,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I’ve been thinkin’ maybe I’d like to try my hand in Arizona after all, give another locale the pleasure of my presence.”

  Wyatt glanced at him a moment, then nodded. “We leave at dawn. You planning to ride along or bring your own wagon?”

  He hadn’t actually thought that far into the matter in his haste to find Wyatt and his relief at locating him still in Las Vegas.

  “I reckon I’ll just ride,” he said, and started figuring the cost of buying a horse for the trail. A horse and saddle would set him back a bit, along with a bed roll and whatever saddle provisions he could carry for himself. As for his dental equipment, he’d have to arrange to have that sent along to him later, once he got himself settled somewhere, an arrangement that seemed to be turning into a routine. Then there was the matter of the management of his saloon. He couldn’t very well just walk away and leave his business to tend to itself, and wondered if maybe Josh Webb would be interested in buying in or buying him out altogether. Josh had been considering making Las Vegas his permanent location now that Dodge City had dried up and his own Lady Gay Saloon wasn’t bringing in the money that it used to.

  “And how about Kate?” Wyatt asked, interrupting his plans. “Will she be coming along, as well?”

  He’d given even less thought to Kate than he had to the horse he’d ride out of town.

  “Not this time,” he said easily, certain that Kate would have no interest in a long wagon train crossing the desert, especially one led by Wyatt Earp. This time, it would be just himself he was having to please.

  Kate, however, had other ideas when he arrived back at their boarding house room and began packing up his belongings.

  “I can travel as well as you,” she said in an angry voice that didn’t do much to cover her hurt. “Though, I’d rather you’d have bought tickets on the train to Santa Fe, instead. We could travel on from there to anywhere, even San Francisco.”

  “And why would I want to go to San Francisco?” he asked, irritated at being corralled into such a conversation when he had more important things on his mind. If he didn’t get himself out of Las Vegas, fast and quiet, it wouldn’t much matter where else he went. Hyram Neil had let him slip away once before; he wasn’t likely to lose him again.

  “So I can act on the stage there,” she said petulantly, “like you said the other night. I know we’ve talked about going back to St. Louis, or even to New York, but San Francisco would be fine by me. San Francisco would be like heaven compared to anywhere else we’ve been . . .”

  “San Francisco will be like hell, if Hoodoo follows us there. For me, at least, though you might find the show entertainin’. As I have tried to explain to you before, he isn’t one to lose gracefully. But I don’t intend to hang for his greediness.”

  “But why do you have to go with Wyatt?” she said, with something more than anger or hurt mounting in her voice. “Why can’t we just go off alone?”

  “I’m safer travelin’ with a group, if trouble comes along. Wyatt’s a handy man with a gun, as you may have noticed. Why, he tried to hold off a whole gang of cowboys by himself, back in Dodge City, until I happened along to help him. I believe he’d do the same for me, if it came to that.”

  “So you’re trusting your life to him, when it’s me who’s already saved you?”

  There was a surprise of something like tears in her voice, and he stopped his packing for a moment to console her.

  “I know what you did for me, Kate, an
d for that I thank you. I know I could have died back there in Trinidad if you hadn’t brought me down here to the hot springs. It’s a miracle, the doctors keep tellin’ me, the way I’ve healed so well. And there wouldn’t have been a miracle at all if you hadn’t arranged for it. But I don’t think you can help me out of this trouble. This time, I need Wyatt.”

  It was hard admitting that he needed anyone, especially to Kate, and harder to admit that it was Wyatt whom she seemed to hate out of pure jealousy. But he didn’t have time to worry about Kate’s extravagant emotions if he planned to stay alive. After all those nightmare dreams of alligators and dark water, he felt like he was about to go under at last.

  “Then let me come with you!” she said fervidly, as he turned his attention back to folding shirts into his valise. “I know I’ve caused you trouble where Wyatt is concerned. But you know how I feel about you; you know how I love you . . .”

  She was always saying it, so much that the words hardly meant a thing to him anymore. But this time, there was something like desperation in her voice, like she was holding on and sliding away at the same time.

  “Please let me go along, please . . .” she said, and this time the tears filled her eyes and spilled over onto her red-rouged cheeks.

  He could stand up to her stubbornness, answer her anger with his own, even hit her when she slapped at him in a fury. But he couldn’t take her tears.

  “All right,” he said with a sigh, “all right. Though I don’t know where we’ll put all your gowns and shoes and such. Hell never did see a hellion better dressed than I’ve made you. Pick out what’s best in all that,” he said, gesturing toward her overflowing dresser and the trunks that held the rest, “and pack it up as fast as you can. I’m off to buy some horses. I suppose you’ll be wantin’ another white-blazed thoroughbred you can name Wonder.”

  She looked up at him in surprise. “You remembered the name of my horse?” she said, her tears drying up as fast as they had come.

  “I remember everything about you, Kate. Even the parts I wish I could forget.”

  He might as well have said that he loved her, the way she smiled at him in triumph.

  They left Las Vegas the next morning, pulling out with Wyatt’s wagon train in the dark hour before dawn. There were seven of them in that outfit: Jim Earp and his wife and daughter, Wyatt Earp and his common-law wife Celia, and Dr. J.H. Holliday and the former actress who called herself Mrs. Holliday. And if anyone in the still sleeping town had roused at the sound of their wagons and animals passing by long enough to take a look at them, there would have been nothing unusual to notice at all, just another wagon train headed on down the Santa Fe Trail.

  But there was something unusual about it, at least to John Henry’s way of thinking—something ironic even. For while he had first gone west as a wanted man, running from the law and hoping to lose himself somehow, now he was running from the robbers and riding with the law instead, and feeling like maybe he’d finally found himself. He might not be every bit the gentleman anymore, not like he’d been in Georgia, but he wasn’t an outlaw anymore either, and his friendship with Wyatt Earp was proof enough of that.

  Author’s Note

  Dance with the Devil is the story of a quest, as young Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives in Texas looking for a new start while dealing with old demons: his love for a woman he can’t have, his troubled relationship with his father, his double addiction to gambling and alcohol, and his death sentence of consumption. Although Western legend paints Doc Holliday as a cynic who didn’t care if he lived or died, I had a hard time believing that a 23 year-old young man just starting into professional life would be so world-weary already. Instead, I imagined him as a young Aids victim who gets a fatal diagnosis at the prime of his life and goes through all the stages of grief before realizing that he isn’t dying just yet, but living until he dies. And the facts of Holliday’s life support that theme, as he starts what seems to be promising new career in Dallas before spiraling out of control into a life of liquor and legal trouble as he wandered the Western frontier. It wasn’t until he left Texas behind and followed Wyatt Earp to Dodge City that he regained something of his old life, practicing dentistry in the Cattle Capital and, according to Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson, staying out of trouble.

  It was Bat Masterson’s recollections of Doc Holliday, combined with the memoirs of Doc’s mistress Kate Elder, that shaped this book, telling a much different story than the later inventions of novelists and screen-writers. Bat had known Doc in Dodge City and Denver and Tombstone and wrote about him as part of a series of articles for Human Life Magazine in 1907. Bat’s version of Doc’s history was reprinted in newspapers across the country at a time when other people who’d known Holliday were still alive and could have disputed the facts—but no one ever did. Neither Wyatt Earp nor Kate Elder, nor any of Doc’s other associates countered Bat’s stories, and so they stand as his first authoritative biography. And according to Bat, it wasn’t sickness, but a shooting that made Doc leave Georgia and head west.

  As Bat tells it, near to the South Georgia village where Holliday was raised there was a little river where a swimming hole had been cleared, and where he one day came across some black boys swimming where he thought they shouldn’t be. He ordered them out of the water and when they refused, he took a shotgun to them and “caused a massacre.” His family thought it best that he leave the area, and so he moved to Dallas, Texas. Although the story of a massacre isn’t likely, there are some interesting points to Bat’s account: Holliday did, in fact, live in a village in South Georgia, the town of Valdosta, near where there is a little river called the Withlacoochee, along which his family owned some land and a swimming hole. Where would Bat have gotten such details, if not from Holliday himself? And when the family was later asked about the episode by a reporter, they said that Holliday had fired over the boys’ heads, not at them—but they did not deny the shooting. Having a perfect opportunity to deny the event and protect the family name, they did not. As for the story of Doc leaving Georgia for his health, that tale was first told nearly fifty years after he died in a novelized account of the life of Wyatt Earp called Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall. Although none of Doc’s contemporaries ever said that he left Georgia for his health, the fiction has been repeated so many times that it’s become part of his legend.

  Following the facts instead of the legend lead me to an important discovery in Dallas: the legal case around Doc’s New Year’s Day shooting scrape, a story that appeared in the Dallas Herald of January 2, 1875:

  “Dr. Holliday and Mr. Austin, a saloon-keeper, relieved the monotony of the noise of fire-crackers by taking a couple of shots at each other yesterday afternoon. The cheerful note of the peaceful six-shooter is heard once more among us. Both shooters were arrested.”

  Because of the light tone of the news article, other writers had assumed that the incident was treated lightly by the law and that Holliday was laughed out of town. But before I was a novelist I was a trained paralegal and knew that where there was an arrest, there was also a legal paper trail. So I started my search for the paperwork of the New Year’s Day shooting in the Dallas County Court records stored in a series of boxes in the Dallas Public Library. With the assistance of my friend and fellow paralegal VelDean Fincher, we found the original charge listed in the Minutes book of the Court: Case #2643, Assault to Murder, which carried a penalty of 20 years in the State Penitentiary. Clearly, this was no laughing matter. But how was the case resolved? Although several legal aides in Texas told me that those court papers no longer existed, I knew in my bones that they did and kept searching, and found the records in another set of boxes in the State Archives in Austin:

  January 25, 1875

  2643

  State of Texas vs J.H. Holliday

  Assault to Murder

  On this day came J.G. Colin, District Attorney pro tem for the State and the Deft. J.H. Holliday in his own proper person, and by his Attorney and this cause
coming now for trial the parties announced themselves ready and the Deft for the plea says he is not guilty and thereupon came a jury with J.H Daniels and eleven others who being duly empanelled and sworn after hearing the evidence and argument of Council and receiving the charge of the Court retired to consider their verdict and came and returned into court the following Verdict: We the jury find the Deft not guilty. It is therefore ordered adjudged and decreed by the Court that the Deft J.H. Holliday g o hence without day and of this cause stand fully acquitted.

  In this serious case Doc Holliday was not only taken seriously but found not guilty—and he was not laughed out of town. And when he did leave Dallas and later return, his only legal charges were for gambling in a house of spirituous liquors, for although the movies show things differently, betting on cards in a saloon was generally against the law in the Wild West.

  The facts of his day-to-day life in Texas were drawn from city directories and newspaper articles, along with an interview he gave to a newspaper in Colorado, where we first learned that he had attended the Dallas Methodist Church and joined the local Temperance Union and spent some time in the North Texas town of Denison. What he didn’t talk about in that interview was his fight in Breckenridge, which was reported in the Dallas papers, or his shooting of a soldier in Fort Griffin. That was another story from Bat Masterson, though Bat gives the location as the military post town of Jacksboro. But as there was no soldier killed in Jacksboro during Doc’s Texas years, Bat may have just gotten the location wrong. There was a soldier killed in the post town of Fort Griffin while Doc was there and shortly before he left Texas for Denver, where he lived under the alias Tom McKey—running from a killing would certainly explain his taking an alias until things cooled down. The fact that the man killed in Fort Griffin, Private Jake Smith, was a black Buffalo Soldier seems to support the story of the shooting on the Withlacoochee, showing a pattern of racial violence not unusual in the Reconstruction South.