Kate knew his tricks. Doc would stop to have her roll him a cigarette, or pause to comment on a brawl spilling onto the street, or decide he wanted to study the clouds for signs of rain. Getting back to the house from Delmonico’s took most of an hour. You don’t fool me none, she wanted to tell him, but a presumption of strength was the only thing John Henry Holliday asked of her and that, by God, is what she gave him.
Six months of overwork had undermined him. A simple cold had damn near killed him. The chest pain was so bad, he needed laudanum to dull it. Even so, she couldn’t get him into bed. Hunched in his chair, elbows on his knees, staring at the cheap floral carpet, Doc didn’t even lift his head to mumble, “Kate. Please. Jus’ do as I ask.”
“But why? Is it your father’s money? Doc, you don’t even like your father!”
He shook his head slightly.
“Then why bother? Grier ain’t worth your time!”
“Don’ care.”
“You ain’t making sense,” she informed him, folding her arms. “And anyways, what good is it to beat him? His credit’s no good.”
“Doesn’ matter.”
This is fever, she decided. Hoping he’d lose interest if she delayed the game, she threw up her hands. “All right! Whatever you say, but I need time to set it up.”
“Get Bob Wright, too.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You ain’t serious,” she scoffed.
Slate blue eyes rose, humorless and unblinking.
“Doc,” she said cautiously, “Bob Wright’s good. You can’t play him! Hell, you shouldn’t play at all, not like this …”
As his rebuttal he held out a handkerchief streaked with bright arterial red. When he spoke, his voice was soft and empty of drama. “ ’S now or never, darlin’.”
The argument went on, but nothing Kate said made a difference, for Doc’s logic was impeccable if unspoken. It was his dispassionate clinical judgment that he would not live to see his twenty-seventh Christmas. Why hold back? What was left to him but one last grand gesture?
On the fifth of September 1878, it came down to this. Kate had made him a promise. He held her to it.
Later she would rage at him, at his stupidity and arrogance and pride. She would swear that if she’d known what he intended, she never would have agreed to help. “Too late now” was all he’d say, but he would say it to her back, as she left him.
“I’m putting a game together,” Kate told Elijah Garrett Grier in mid-September. “Stud poker. Twenty-dollar ante. No limit. You in?”
Naturally, he hesitated, for he simply didn’t trust her. Twice that summer, Eli had complained to Bessie Earp about the Hungarian hooker, but Bessie only shrugged and looked at her husband.
“Katie runs her own business,” James told the captain. “The house just takes a cut for laundry and the room.” Kate came and went whenever she pleased, James explained, and did what she liked with whoever caught her eye. “My opinion?” James offered. “That’s what customers like about her.”
Maybe so, for she wasn’t that pretty, and she sure as hell didn’t flatter a man. Whatever the reason, Eli Grier wanted her, but the bitch just toyed with him. Once, back in July, when he thought the deal was made, she fixed him with that flat-eyed stare of hers. Breasts half-exposed by negligent lace, she leaned toward him with a feral grin, letting him breathe in her perfume and her musk, daring him to touch her. He reached out and as his fingers grazed that creamy flesh, he felt the barrel of a Deringer .36 press against the ribs above his heart.
Her voice was husky, foreign, amused. “Let’s see your cash,” she whispered. “For you? I cost a grand.”
Then, laughing, she swirled away, silk rustling, making him watch, infuriated, as she picked another man. “For you?” she cried breezily. “Five bucks!” And off she went, not even glancing over her soft, white shoulder as she led the dazzled Texan up quiet, carpeted stairs.
“What’s the matter?” she taunted Eli now. “Game too rich for you?”
It was, and he suspected that she knew it. Which is exactly why Elijah Grier said, “How about a side bet? I double my money, you’re mine for a night.”
“And what do I get if you lose?” she asked, delighted.
He’d left himself no path of retreat. “A grand,” he said.
No woman was worth so much, but night after night, he had imagined it. What would you get from her for a thousand dollars? What could you do to her, for a thousand dollars?
“Double that,” she dared.
“You’re on,” he said with the careless bravado that had earned him three combat commendations and two field promotions before he was twenty-three.
Kate sat back, sprawled on Bessie’s upholstery. Arms flung over the crest of a settee, breasts loose and lifted, she actually seemed impressed for a moment. Then, leaning toward him, she reached over to pat his thigh sympathetically and ran her hand slowly upward.
“Tell you what,” she offered, voice low. “I’ll go home with the winner. If that’s you?” She shrugged. “But if it’s not?” She tightened her grip on him until he stopped breathing. “You’ll owe me two grand.”
Getting Grier was easy. So was finding a couple of cattlemen to fill out the table. The invitation to Bob Wright required something different.
“Doc wants to play you,” Kate told him. “Five-card stud. No limit. Interested?”
Unbuttoning his shirt, Bob gave her one of his Aw, shucks looks. “Oh, I’m not much of a card player.”
She laughed appreciatively, and her knowing skepticism was rewarded by his sly smile when she came over to pull the shirt down off his shoulders.
“Anyways,” he said, “from what I hear, Doc Holliday’s too good for me.”
“Don’t be so sure!” She sounded sincere because she was. “Doc don’t get much real competition. It’s all drunks and fools. He’s tired of being sick, and he’s bored. He wants a real game. That army captain with the fancy horse? He’s in. Doc’s got some kinda beef with him.”
Bob frowned. “Eli Grier? He’s courting my daughter.”
Kate blinked, then smiled briefly. Later, Bob would remember that smile and the faint indulgent pity it signified.
“That’s the one,” she said. “I lined up a couple of other players, but Doc asked for you, special.”
Most men looked better dressed; Bob was the exception, better built than you’d guess when you saw him on the street. Sure of himself in bed, and with good reason. First time around, he tried to jew her fee down. Kate told him to go to hell. “Awright,” he offered, “double or nothing—if I can’t make you come.” To her surprise, he won the bet. He’d been one of her regulars ever since. He paid more often than not, but either way, Kate found it satisfying to see that mask of tame, inoffensive harmlessness drop like a magician’s silk scarf once the bedroom door was closed.
Doc had been too damn sick to be much use to her lately; tonight, Kate found it easy to let Bob get past the professional distance she normally maintained. Which is why, laughing and out of breath, she meant it when she told him, “Your wife is a lucky woman.” She almost regretted slipping the knife in, but Doc had insisted. “First you,” she said. “Now Grier …”
God, he’s good, she thought, watching. Silence was the only tell.
Eyes wide in merry astonishment, she purred, “Oh, Bob! You don’t really think Grier’s interested in your little girl, do you?”
He got up, keeping his back to her. Funny how men thought it was modest to stand that way. She admired the view while he dressed. Good shoulders, broad back. Power in the ass and thighs. Prosperous men generally got fat. Big George Hoover already had. Bat Masterson was getting there. Bob Wright could buy and sell them both, but he still had the body of a young freight driver. Bob had other hungers to feed.
When he’d finished with his string tie, he turned to display the perfect poker face. Mild. Amiable. No threat to anyone.
“Tell me more,” he suggested, “about that poker game.”
God’s honest truth: Elijah Garrett Grier never meant to cuckold Bob Wright. For one thing, Eli Grier truly liked and admired Bob. And you might not think it, but they had a lot in common, though one man was a storekeeper and the other a soldier.
In long, enjoyable conversations, they had come to believe that combat and commerce presented similar challenges and drew on similar talents; the tactical brilliance Elijah Grier displayed in battle had made Bob Wright an astonishingly successful entrepreneur. Others saw risk and danger; they saw openings and opportunities. Others stood stunned in the face of shifting complexity; they cut through to solutions that seemed to arise without thought or effort. Neither was drawn to frontal assaults. Both inclined toward flanking maneuvers. With every story they exchanged, it became clearer that they were a match, each man’s achievements shining a favorable light on the other’s.
Bob was only three years the older, but he understood where Eli’s troubles lay. “The army’s running out of wars, son,” he told the captain. “It’s time to resign that commission! Business is in your blood, and there’s money for the taking out here. You’d do well in politics, too. West Kansas will go Republican someday. A war record like yours’ll be a real asset.”
You have to back tactics with strategy, you see, and Bob always kept the long game in mind. One day he’d be voted out of the legislature, and it would be handy to have a son-in-law there in his stead.
When Bob Wright invited Eli to dinner that first Sunday, they both expected that the captain would be courting Bob’s daughter. Who better to marry Belle than a man with Bob’s best qualities and none of his unsightliness? Eli had seen Isabelle Wright at the store, of course. Pretty, if sulky, and sometimes obnoxious. Still … there were a lot of advantages to marrying the Belle of Dodge, principal among them a rich father-in-law who was already talking about taking Eli on as a partner. Bob wanted to open a new store down in Texas, at the Great Western trailhead. It would make outfitting cattle companies more efficient at both ends of the season, reducing costs and attracting business.
“You put in a couple of grand yourself, we’ll call it fifty-fifty,” Bob told Eli, and it was a generous offer.
What Elijah Garrett Grier lacked, besides two grand to invest, was the ability to keep his eyes on the prize. Traits that made him masterly in combat—his total concentration on what lay right in front of him; the quickness with which he adjusted to changing circumstances—those were the very traits that sapped his ability to stick with a job if it took much more than an hour.
He got distracted, that was the problem. He never seemed to finish anything. And he wasn’t lazy, either! If anything, he was too ambitious. He’d start something, and then somebody would ask a question, or need his help with some task he knew he could handle easily. He’d say yes to each new demand, thinking he’d get it done in a few minutes and then go back to what he’d been doing before, except three or four other things would come up, and by the end of the day, he’d have nothing to show for all his effort and no idea what had happened to the time. It was a failing as mysterious to Eli himself as it was disappointing to his family.
Despite Old Man Grier’s frustration with his youngest son’s shortcomings, he was furious when Elijah up and joined the army right after the attack on Fort Sumter. Mrs. Grier wept. The older Grier boys sneered and called the decision harebrained. Neighbors shrugged and shook their heads, but the laborers at the carriage factory nudged one another and speculated leeringly about why a rich kid like Eli Grier had done such a thing.
Truth was, Eli didn’t have one single reason, not really. Like so many young men before and after him, he craved adventure and distinction in equal measure. He desired to be tested in some fundamental way and to be found true. But enlisting was also a way for the youngest Grier to circumvent two looming difficulties: a girl who needed marrying within the month and a gambling debt he might not have to repay if he joined the army and died gloriously in battle.
What surprised everyone, Eli included, was the sheer perfection of his temperament for war.
Cunning in combat, he would go still in the saddle, eyes on the field, effortlessly commanding the attention of armed and mounted men. They would watch him, waiting breathlessly for the moment when his eyes lit up and he would grin, his face shining as he revealed with terse words and small gestures exactly how they would turn disadvantage into victory. Men followed that slim, spoiled, scatterbrained boy with the ancient, angry joy that warriors have felt since divine Ares lifted the first spear and made it fly. Medals and commendations accumulated. Even Old Man Grier admitted that Elijah had found his calling.
By rights, Eli should have been a colonel or even a general by now. Indeed, he had been promoted to major twice, but as decisive and effective as he was in sudden skirmishes, peace paralyzed him. Wars ended, that was the problem. Tedium set in, and that’s when things went wrong.
Major Grier had been busted back to captain twice—both times for ignoring trivialities that defeated his capacity to give a good goddam. Some sonofabitch by-the-book commander would get a wild hair about inventory or payroll records. Money would be missing. Eli’s careless accounting would be blamed. Last year, there’d even been suspicion that Eli had taken cash after a catastrophic card game. Only the fact that his family was rich made the accusation too absurd to pursue.
Which was fortunate, because he did occasionally borrow from the strongbox.
Well, more than occasionally, truth be told. The first time, it was only overnight. A jack-high straight flush, and the money was returned—no one the wiser, including Eli himself. The risk of being caught added welcome piquancy to the games, for every time he sat down at a poker table, he faced annihilation. Exposure and disgrace would be far worse than an honorable death in combat, but with the South whipped and with the last of the Indians penned up on reservations, only gambling offered him that perfect balance of deliverance or doom.
Until he met Bob Wright’s pretty little wife, Alice.
At dinner that first Sunday, Elijah Garrett Grier made no decision to turn his back on Belle, and the trailhead store in Texas, and his own promising future. Rather, they disappeared from his mind as though they had never existed. In their stead was the mystery and challenge of Alice.
She was oblivious to his attention at first, then mystified, then skeptical. Slowly he made her believe in his interest and his admiration. At last there came a day when she turned her face to him as a rosebud to late-spring sunlight: soaking up warmth, releasing stored energy, unfolding. Coming alive again, after a dark and deadening winter.
Laughing, she would run like a girl, flop down next to him on a blanket warmed by summer heat, and show him what she’d carried back in her apron. Propped on an elbow, she would feed him wild blueberries and recall how she used to gather plums and grapes for jams and conserves and jellies that would bring color and sweetness to meals eaten on gray winter days. A bride so young she grew two inches after the wedding, she had faced frontier life with industry and resolve and no word of complaint about Bob’s long absences. She’d birthed babies and raised children alone, and buried three all by herself. She sewed and mended and knit and washed and ironed. She baked bread and pies, and salted meat, and put up crocks of pickles. She always had a kitchen garden, and grew peas and beans, onions and pumpkins and okra, sweet corn and tomatoes and yellow squash …
“I was never idle when I was young,” she said, her sad eyes wistful.
“You’re still young,” he told her, touching her cheek, but he had seen his own lost purpose in the guarded blue eyes of Alice Wright and understood her melancholy. It was not youth she missed but intensity and meaning. Bred in the Missouri backcountry to pioneer self-reliance, she had become nothing more than the principal ornament in the Honorable Robert C. Wright’s grand new house: proof of his prosperity, as pointless as the dusty rosewood piano, silent in the parlor.
Now when Eli Grier sat at her table—with the children around them and not three feet from her husband—they both felt the exhilaration that comes of gambling with your very life. Behind every ordinary word exchanged, with each passing minute that sustained the pretense, hidden within all the bland courtesies, there was a shining silver wire stretched between them, vibrating with the constant delicious terror of discovery and damnation.
A whispered word. A phrase written on paper and slipped into a waiting hand. A place chosen, the time agreed upon. Excuses found, reasons given. Illicit hours stolen from duties and obligations.
She was afraid, at first. Eli’s horse was familiar. Alice’s movements were noted. After a time, however, it seemed plain to them that Bob must have known.
“He knows, and he doesn’t care,” Alice said.
There was in her voice both bitterness and elation.
“You’re going to need law,” Bat Masterson insisted. “First off, there’s going to be enough money at that table to buy a small railway. No sense tempting thieves. Second, Holliday is dangerous as hell, but I can handle him.”
Third, Eli Grier thought, the house rakes off a percentage and if the game’s in the Lone Star, Sheriff Masterson is half the house.
As the date for the game drew closer, Reasons First and Second receded in significance, leaving Reason Third in high relief. There would be no cash at the table: chips only, for this was to be a gentleman’s game, with all players presumed good for their losses the next day. That was lucky, since it eliminated Eli’s need to acquire money for his stake. Yes, there were rumors about the dentist—
Jesus, what was his name again? Eli was awful with names. He had to be introduced three or four times before a name got a grip—yet another failing that had annoyed Eli’s old man, who always bragged he never forgot a face or a name.
Anyway, the dentist was a gentleman from Atlanta, so Eli wasn’t worried by Sheriff Masterson’s warnings. The Grier and Cook Carriage Company had done business with Georgia’s upper crust for decades. Eli himself had spent nearly two years in Atlanta after the war, serving as liaison between the army’s general staff and that smoldering city’s impoverished aristocrats. He was familiar with the breed, and rather fond of it.
Most of Sherman’s army had truly hated Georgians—not just for the savage cruelty of slavery and for their antebellum arrogance but for the stubborn defense the state militia persisted in presenting long past the point when there was a snowball’s chance in hell that they wouldn’t be crushed. Every time Joe Johnston pulled back, dug in, and made yet another attempt to delay the inevitable, Sherman’s men felt as though they were being forced to murder ragged skinny veterans, and gray-haired old men, and thin-faced fourteen-year-old cadets from some goddam military school. “What in hell’s it gonna take to make them bastards quit?” That was the question on every Yankee tongue, and the answer was this. Nothing short of the cold, deliberate destruction of everything that stood or grew or moved between Chattanooga and Savannah.
If anything, the victors’ hatred intensified after the war, for if Georgians had resisted every step toward their defeat and lost everything they’d fought for, if they starved and struggled and scratched for a living with bare white hands in scorched red earth in the years that followed their surrender, there remained to them one possession that could not be stolen, destroyed, or set alight: an unyielding and unassailable pride that had not just survived but deepened in the aftermath of conquest.
It was infuriating, the insolent malevolence in eyes that stared coldly above slight smiles. Go ahead, those smiles said. Take everything of value. Burn the rest. I am still the better man.
Unlike his brother officers, Eli understood the cool, correct courtesy and appreciated the grave, impenetrable mockery. Once, he’d thanked an Atlantan for some small deference and had been informed, with exquisite politesse, “A gentleman is judged by the way he treats his inferiors, sir.”
The remark was, he thought, the most perfect expression of Southern hauteur he’d ever encountered. It aroused his admiration as did a well-bred horse or a fine oil painting, though most men wouldn’t have gotten the joke and the rest would have been insulted.
For all his ferocity in battle, Eli Grier never took offense. Hell, nothing said to him during two years in Atlanta came close to what he used to hear at any given breakfast with his father. Southern tempers could flare to killing heights in an instant, but the anger burned out just as quickly. There was something almost sexual about that explosive release of male violence, and you did well to be aware of murderous rage lurking beneath polished gentility. In Eli’s experience, however, if you were circumspect and capable of apology, you’d get along with Southerners just fine.
Sitting down at the table in the Lone Star Dance Hall and Saloon that night in late September, Elijah Garrett Grier was actually looking forward to sharing an evening with such a gentleman. At first the dentist did not disappoint. Knife-thin and pasty-pale, he had Georgia’s familiar blurred and lazy accent and its casual, careless courtesy, though it was immediately apparent that he was consumptive and in considerable misery, given the way he dosed himself from a bottle delivered, without his asking, to his elbow.
“I offered Sheriff Masterson all my custom if only he and his partner were to rename the Lone Star,” the dentist said with a charming, crooked grin. “I should dearly like to write home and tell my kin that I only drink in Moderation.”
Eli smiled. He felt sorry for the man but certainly did not fear him. They chatted amiably, waiting for the others to arrive. It came as something of a surprise to Eli that they had met earlier that year. Eli begged pardon and confessed his debility, and was assured that no offense had been taken. It was merely a brief encounter at the Green Front back in May, the dentist told him between bouts of coughing. They had exchanged a few remarks about Roxana. No reason to recall the conversation now.
The time passed pleasantly until Bob Wright showed up. It was Bob, businesslike, who made introductions all around when the two cattlemen arrived. With self-deprecating humor, Eli told the newcomers that the odds were twenty to one that he’d be able to remember their names, admitting that he was a special kind of idiot about such things. For some reason, however, John Holliday’s name finally stuck. Maybe it was the irony of a man so sick being called Doc.
The game began around midnight amid noisy conversation and raucous laughter. Bat’s prophecy of trouble had attracted a number of spectators to the Lone Star that evening, and they drank in gleeful anticipation of the local outbreak of hell rumored to be imminent. Unfortunately for the Lone Star’s profit, the first hours of play were disappointingly quiet. Despite the stakes, most folks drifted away to seek their entertainment elsewhere. Interest in the table was confined to the men sitting around it and to the Hungarian whore who watched the action with unwavering attention—not surprising, given the side bet she and Eli Grier had.
When Eli realized that Kate was Holliday’s woman, there was a moment of unease before he lost all respect for a man who probably pimped her and certainly shared her. By that point in the game, it was apparent that Doc Holliday was neither a card sharp nor the ferocious exemplar of Southern spleen that Bat Masterson had promised. The Georgian was a decent player, but he’d been drunk when he sat down and he continued to drink as the evening progressed. Eli took pride in gambling sober and considered that the real threat was one of the cattlemen. Johnson. Or was it Johansen? Jensen, maybe. Dammit, something with a J …
And soon it didn’t matter, for the cards loved Elijah Garrett Grier that night. Early on, he drew two, and filled a ten-high straight that would pay off two outstanding loans. Half an hour later, he held a pair of queens, drew three, and was astonished to find himself holding a very timely full house.
“Ladies over nines,” he announced, and another bill was paid.
A while later, those three sweet nines showed up again—two dealt, one drawn. The hooker was pacing now, smoking one cigarette after another, glaring at Holliday, who was down by $1,500 and looked awful.
An hour or so later, Johnson or Johansen or Jensen, or whatever the hell his name was, slapped his final hand onto the table and stood.
“That’s it for me,” he declared. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure.”
“The pleasure is all Captain Grier’s,” Holliday remarked affably, though Bob Wright had also taken a fair percentage of the cattleman’s losses.
The Texan snorted, tossing back a drink before bidding good-bye to his opponents and three grand. Doc Holliday gathered the cards and began to shuffle, surveying the chips in front of the remaining players.
“Ovid tells us that Fortune and Venus befriend the bold,” he said, “but they are fickle gods, Captain Grier. You might consider quittin’ while you’re ahead, sir.”
“Goddammit, Doc!” Kate cried. “What are you—?”
“Roll me a cigarette, will you, darlin’?” Doc said mildly. “ ’Pears you have lost your bet with the captain. Perhaps you should retire an’ prepare for the consequences.”
Eli grinned, expecting Hungarian fireworks, but Kate had stopped pacing. For a few moments she watched the dentist’s hands as he shuffled the cards. Divvy, tumble, riffle … Riffle, arch, release … A corner of her upper lip lifted slightly—contempt? Without another word, she pulled a small silk pouch from the carpetbag she always carried and measured tobacco from it onto a thin, fine square of paper.
“Looks like you’ve got more’n enough now to buy into that store we’ve been discussing,” Bob Wright observed, staring at Eli. “About time you thought about marrying, wouldn’t you say? Wonderful institution, marriage. A wife, children … Why, they make life worth living.”
Kate choked and gave a startled laugh, shaking her head. Doc laid the deck down, slumped back in his chair, and struck a match.
“Wha’s so funny, darlin’?” he asked, his words now more slurred than blurred.
Mumuring something in French, she leaned over the table to accept the light, twisting her neck to smile with luxurious satisfaction as her breasts came within inches of Eli’s face. Before she straightened, she looked the other way and kissed Bob Wright on the mouth. Then she moved behind Doc Holliday and bent to kiss his neck, before reaching around to place the lit cigarette between his lips.
“Why, thank you, darlin’,” Doc said, blind as Homer to her wantonness.
He picked up the deck again, but for the third time that night, drawing in the first smoke set off a coughing fit so violent, he was nearly shaken from his chair. Bent almost double, he turned from the table, unable to go on. It was appalling, and the rest of them just sat there, not knowing what to do.
“Jesus, Doc,” Kate whispered, pouring him a drink. Still coughing, he shook his head, watering eyes aimed at the floor. Then, to everyone’s horror, he hawked bloody phlegm into the brass spittoon at his feet.
Revolted, and having lost better than $4,700 to Eli and Bob, the second cattleman took that opportunity to gather his remaining chips and stand. “I’m afraid I’ve had enough,” he said.
“Not me,” Doc gasped, still game. Wiping his mouth, he turned back to the table, white-faced and blue-lipped. “Evenin’s hardly begun …”
Kate poured him another drink. Doc drained the glass she offered. Somewhat recovered, the dentist dealt. Two down, two up.
“Another three for Mr. Wright. Not much to look at, but sometimes a pair of threes is all you need. Well, now!” he cried breathlessly when a second ace appeared in front of Eli. “Fortune continues to smile on Captain Grier! You are a lucky man, sir. And … a queen,” he said, staring. “No help for the dealer’s nine.”
Another round of bets. The last down cards distributed. Eli peeled up a corner of his and sat back in his chair. “Your grand. Fifteen hundred more,” he told Bob Wright.
Doc folded, his face neutral when he remarked, “Too rich for me.” Almost half of what he’d brought in was gone, with a little over two grand left.
“All in,” Bob Wright said, pushing his chips to the center of the table. “Let’s see what you have, Eli.”
What Eli had should’ve been enough.
All night long he’d won and won and won. For crissakes, Bob was only showing a pair of threes. My God, who wouldn’t have gone all in with aces full of kings?
“Four of a kind,” Bob said, laying out a second pair of threes with a jack.
“Peach of a hand,” Doc murmured, while Kate laughed and laughed and laughed.
Bob Wright rose and looked down at Elijah Garrett Grier. “That’s eighty-two hundred and change you owe me, Grier. Call it eight even,” he said, his voice hard, his eyes harder. “I want the cash by noon, you contemptible sonofabitch.”
“And what was our little side bet?” Kate asked Grier airily. “Oh! I remember now! I spend a night with the winner, and you?” Taking Bob’s arm, Kate purred, “You owe me two grand.”
“Kate, darlin’, you go on along with Bob and celebrate, now,” Doc urged, his voice thready. “I have a little business to do with the captain.”
Drunk, sick, and nearly as stunned as Eli Grier, John Henry Holliday watched the couple leave. After a time, he cleared his throat and remarked, “Well, now. That was unexpected.” Eyes unfocused, it took him a while to work it out. “Only three of us,” he said to no one in particular.
Maybe Bob didn’t know before, Eli was thinking, but he sure as hell knows now. Jesus, I’m in trouble … He looked at Holliday. “I—I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
“Three players. Pattern changed.” Holliday poured himself another shot and tossed it back. “Ten grand,” he said then, staring at Eli with something like sympathy. “Lotta money. Haven’t got it, have you.”
It was not a question. Eli didn’t bother to reply.
“If you will be so kind as to help me to my feet,” Doc said softly, “perhaps we can both salvage some of our night’s work, sir. You have a horse that I would like … to buy.”
The days were noticeably shorter now. This one would be agreeably warm and windless. Half past six, and the pale early-autumn sun began its rise toward a clear, high sky that few in Dodge City were in a position to appreciate; the drovers had passed out a couple of hours ago and the citizens were still home, getting dressed and eating breakfast.
Their long shadows snaking westward along Front Street, two men walked toward the resurrected Elephant Barn, its unweathered lumber still the color of fresh-cut corn bread in the morning light. They had said little since leaving the Lone Star.
Eli named a price.
Holliday countered.
“She’s in foal,” Eli objected.
“You’re in trouble,” Doc replied. “Twenty-one sixty, firm.”
It was a strange number. Probably all the dentist had left, and no more than Roxana was worth. Given the sudden shift in his circumstances, Eli was already thinking about other things. How to phrase a vague telegram to his sister, for example, and how much she might be willing to wire him for an “emergency,” and where he could get the rest. He had no intention of paying off the hooker, but even minus that two grand …
No matter how he figured it, he’d never scrape the money up by noon.
Balancing an angry cuckold’s wrath against the U.S. Army’s dim view of desertion, Eli began to consider Mexico. Word was, Porfirio Díaz was staffing an army … Yes, it was probably time to take Bob Wright’s advice and resign his commission, in a manner of speaking. Past time, really. Alice was becoming tiresome and, frankly, Bob was welcome to her. She wanted so much! Attention, acknowledgment, affection. The constant demands and expectations were—
The dentist stumbled slightly, crossing the tracks. Eli caught him by the elbow and held on.
“Very kind of you, sir,” Holliday said, the movement of his chest shallow and quick. “A little light-headed, I fear.”
Pathetic, Eli thought, the way drunks will fool themselves.
They moved on toward the barn. Eli began to think the game through with calm detachment. After years of anticipating a bad beat, it was almost a relief to lose that big. Law of averages, he thought. Keep playing, and something like this is bound to happen. Never thought it would be Bob Wright who did the job, though. Funny how he’d thought Holliday might be the one, just on reputation alone, but the man didn’t play that well, really. In fact, every time he dealt—
Eli stopped, astonished, and looked back at the dentist. “You were feeding me cards!”
“Occasionally.”
“How did you do it?” Eli asked as they turned down Bridge. “I’m just curious.”
“Oh … I am not quite so sick as I make out,” Doc said carelessly, but when they got to the corral, he reached for the top rail and leaned over to spit blood. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Oh, Christ.”
Snapping his fingers, Eli pointed at him and said, “You switched decks while you were coughing!”
“Now and then.”
“So … you wanted me to win until the end of the game? Yes! Let me collect the money from the table, so you could clean up! Except … you lost.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan.” The dentist straightened, wincing when he pulled his shoulders back. His lips in the sunlight were nearly the color of his eyes. “Stupid mistake,” he said vaguely. “Only three of us …”
“But you wanted Roxana? You thought I’d bet her?”
“Yes,” Holliday said. “An’ I was hopin’ to leave some sort of legacy … Take care of Kate and Sophie.”
Who in hell was Sophie? Eli wondered. Some other hooker, he guessed. “I had a cousin who died of consumption,” he told the dentist. “Dolph used to say it felt like the inside of his chest was being scrubbed with a wire brush. Must make it hard to concentrate.”
“Yes.” With a visible act of will, John Henry Holliday’s voice became stronger, his diction more precise, his eyes more focused. “Where is that horse of yours?”
She was in a stall about halfway down the aisle. Restless. Annoyed with him. Tossing her head and snorting when he approached. So beautiful! She took Eli’s breath away, even now. Compact, high-tailed, with large, dark eyes and a broad jaw behind a small, velvety muzzle. She looked like she was made of china, but she was as tough as any mustang. Keen on patrol, Roxana had stood up well to the bitter cold and withering heat of Kansas. She could outlast every other mount at the fort, but she was hot and nervy, too, and often made life difficult in the stable.
“I’m going to miss her,” Eli admitted, opening the stall door for Holliday.
The dentist approached, speaking calmly, hands low. What in hell is he going to do with a horse? Eli wondered. He’ll be dead by Sunday, from the looks of him.
It came to him then that nobody knew they’d made this deal, and maybe Eli could reclaim the horse, the way he had after—
Without warning, Holliday gagged twice and twisted away, a short, sharp cough doubling him over. Startled, Roxana reared, and Eli shoved the dentist out of range before stepping in from the side to get a grip on her halter, murmuring, “Easy, easy, easy …” Eyes on Roxana, he warned, “You have to be careful until she knows you. She’s skittish, and she’s stronger than she looks—”
“Is this the way it happened?” Holliday asked softly.
Eli turned, and jerked his forehead away from a short-barreled, nickel-plated revolver. Roxana shied at the motion, moving back in the stall.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve sold that mare to cover a gamblin’ debt. Is it.”
“What are you—?”
“Lie to me,” the Georgian suggested with gentle, smiling malice. “I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You needed money. Johnnie Sanders knew that. He did the books for half the businesses in Dodge. He offered two grand for the horse. You agreed. He went to the safe at Bob Wright’s store and met you at the barn with the cash.”
“Yes, but—”
“You accepted the money and then you brained that boy, you spineless, gutless, heartless bastard.”
“No!”
“You set fire to the barn, and raised the alarm, and walked away with the cash and the horse, both. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“But—No, it wasn’t that way at all! He—Yes! I sold the horse to him,” Eli admitted, “but I didn’t kill him—”
“You broke his skull and left him to die.”
“No! Listen to me: I took the money and I went back to the saloon to pay off. When I came out, I swear, the barn was already on fire! I ran back—”
“Into a burnin’ building,” Holliday said, voice flat. “How courageous.”
“There were men sleeping in there!”
“So you raised the alarm.”
“Yes, of course!”
“You went back to Roxana’s stall, and you led her out.”
“I had to! She wouldn’t go past the flames! I got Roxana out and helped clear the barn, and when it was all over, I took her back to the fort—just overnight! I couldn’t leave her out on the street, could I? I figured I could come back in the morning and find the kid and sort it all out—”
“So you didn’t see Johnnie?”
“I figured he left. I had no idea he was still in the barn—”
Holliday pulled the hammer back. Eli flinched at the quiet click.
Speaking quickly now and quietly, he said, “I swear I didn’t hurt that boy. I ran back to the barn, and he was already on the ground. Roxana must have—You’ve seen it yourself! Look at her!” Eli cried, for the horse was showing white around her eyes. “She doesn’t trust strangers and she’s liable to go light on her front feet. I don’t think that kid knew the first thing about horses! He probably went into the stall and she came down on him.”
There was a curve to the fracture. It might have been the size of a hoof, but … “Doesn’t matter,” Doc insisted. “You turned his body over. You must have seen that he was still alive.”
“Maybe! Yes! I don’t know! I didn’t look that hard! It was dark, for crissakes! The roof was caving in and—”
“So you paid your debt, you got your horse and saved the cowboys. And you left John Horse Sanders to lie there and burn.”
Mouth dry, Eli tensed slightly, thinking he could—
“By all means,” Holliday urged courteously. “Try it.”
He’s going to kill me, Eli thought. This is how I’m going to die.
“Four years of war,” the Georgian said softly, “to teach them rebs a lesson and set their darkies free! But when it came down to your horse or that boy … Well, hell, he was just a colored kid, and kin to no one.” For an endless moment, John Henry Holliday just stood there, trembling. “God a’mighty,” he said quietly. “To think we lost to trash like you.”
As much as anything, it was the weight of the pistol that saved Elijah Garrett Grier’s life that morning. Suddenly and utterly exhausted, Doc lowered his gun, letting it dangle at his side.
“Bob Wright knows everything,” he said. “I recommend you run.”
Eli nodded his entire agreement but pointed out, “I’ll need a mount.”
Doc glanced toward the corral. “Pick one.”
“They hang horse thieves,” Grier objected.
“Only if you’re caught. Best hurry.”
“I—The money? For Roxana?”
Slate blue eyes went wide.
“Toujours l’audace!” Doc said with specious admiration. “The price was twenty-one sixty. Two grand will go to Miss Kate, to clear your debt to her. I will wire the remaining one hundred and sixty to my father. Grier and Cook Carriage Company owes him the money. That leaves me with thirty-eight dollars and change. Forgive me if I am not inclined to share that with a lyin’, low-life Yankee skunk. God as my witness: I should rid the world of you.”
His face reduced to bone, eyes fever-bright, the not-yet-infamous Doc Holliday summoned all the strength he had left, but could not raise the gun again.
“Get out of my sight,” he muttered, despairing. “Get out of Dodge. And don’t come back, you soulless cur.”
The oldest of John Riney’s four boys generally showed up at the Elephant Barn a little before seven. Young John—Junior, everybody called him—got the job right after they moved into town, when he was eleven, and he could do the work while half asleep. You drew water for the horses in the stalls, and fed them, and mucked out the straw, and spread new, and then went on to the horses in the corral, who got less attention because the customers paid less.
Whenever Captain Grier was in town, he left Roxana at the barn, and he paid extra, which is to say he put extra on his tab. Even so, Junior always took his time getting around to Roxana because she was a bitch of a horse and he was scared of her. She seemed kind of worked up this morning, too, so truth was, he might’ve drug his feet a little, hoping she’d settle down. It was almost nine when he finally got to her end of the barn and saw what was bothering the animal.
If it’d been any other drunk sitting on the floor in the corner of Roxana’s stall, Junior would have just shoveled the shit out from around him, but his mother was one of Doc Holliday’s patients, and Junior did not consider sitting in horse stalls to be among that gentleman’s habits.
“Are you all right, Doc?” he asked, glancing at Roxana. The dentist’s eyes were open but there was no answer, so Junior bent over and shook the man’s shoulder some. “Dr. Holliday? You all right?”
The dentist seemed to come back from somewhere far away. His voice was weak and kind of wavery, and Junior had to lean in to hear him say, “I am fine, thank you. Very kind of you to ask.”
“You don’t look too good,” Junior told him. “You want me to get somebody?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Junior waited, but the dentist sort of drifted off again. “Who, Doc?”
Junior was a little nervous about asking that because he expected Doc would send him for Kate. If he did, Junior planned to find his littlest brother and send Charlie to get her. Mabel Riney would wear Junior out if he went near a bad woman like Kate, but she doted on Charlie and wouldn’t belt him as bad.
“Doc? Who do you want me to get?”
“Morgan,” the dentist decided, after a time.
Relieved, Junior asked, “Mr. Morgan over by the saddle shop, or Morgan Earp?”
“Morgan Earp. If you would be so kind.”
“You bet, Doc. I’ll get him.” Junior looked up at the horse. “I don’t think you better sit in here. That mare’s dangerous.”
“Yes,” Doc whispered. “So I hear.”
Junior leaned the shovel in the corner, and helped the dentist onto his feet, and got him out into the aisle, and kicked the stall door closed, and found a stool for Doc to sit on, and double-checked the latch on Roxana’s stall, because if a horse that valuable got loose, there’d be hell to pay. Then he went off to look for Morgan Earp and found the deputy at home. Morg’s girl, Lou, said that Morgan was sleeping. Junior explained about how he’d found Doc Holliday sitting like Job on a dung heap, so she got Morg up, and he dressed and came over to the barn with Junior.
Doc was still on the stool when they got back to the barn, and Mr. Earp hunkered down next to him. Junior had more work to do, but naturally he wanted to find out what was going on, so he decided to sweep up the aisle. He was real quiet about it, too, though he still didn’t hear much of anything because Doc Holliday’s voice was always so soft. Then Junior saw out of the corner of his eye that Doc’s face was wet. That surprised him so much he stopped sweeping, and he heard Doc say, “I couldn’t do it, Morg. I just couldn’t do it.”
Mr. Earp’s face got soft. “Don’t worry, Doc. I won’t tell nobody.” The deputy stood up and looked away. “Sonofabitch probably had it coming, but you’d’ve hanged.”
Doc kind of laughed and said something else.
Mr. Earp frowned and said, “Don’t talk like that.” The deputy looked thoughtful. “No point going after him. His word against yours. We wouldn’t be able to prove a damn thing.”
Doc lifted a hand toward Roxana and asked a question.
Mr. Earp glanced over his shoulder at the horse and said, “Not a chance, Doc. You know Wyatt.”
Doc sounded stronger and more awake when he said, “Not well, but well enough. Help me up.”
Leaning on his broom, Junior watched the two men as they left the barn. Doc Holliday was unsteady on his feet, and Mr. Earp was helping him quite a bit, but they were talking, heads down, all the way out to the tracks. They had just turned toward their little houses north of Front Street when Junior saw Mr. Earp stop short. Doc turned back to look at him, and the dentist was smiling now. Then Morgan gave a great shout of a laugh and put his arm around Doc Holliday’s bony shoulders, and damn near lifted the dentist right off his feet.
“Now, what do you suppose that was about?” Junior asked Roxana, but she was eating and paid no mind.
The next few days were pretty lively in Dodge. On top of the usual drunk-and-disorderlies, Dora Hand got killed. People felt bad about that. She was a whore, but she sang real nice. Then Nick Klaine reported that Dull Knife and Little Wolf were headed toward Kansas with a bunch of starving Cheyenne, hoping to steal some livestock. That got everybody worked up for a while and sold a lot of newspapers, but nothing came of the scare. Then a badger burrowed under China Joe’s laundry and collapsed one side of the shack, which burned down, although the new fire brigade got over there pretty quick and stopped the blaze from spreading. Eddie Foy made a funny story out of that and added it to his act. Jau Dong-Sing considered the fire good luck. He would build a new bathhouse and a better laundry, and add a cookshop. He had stoves going all the time to heat water anyway. Might as well get a big pot to boil noodles, too, and sell them the way Doc Holliday suggested.
Even with all that to talk about, the main topic of conversation in Dodge City at the end of September was how Captain Eli Grier and a good bay gelding had gone missing and how, right after that, Alice Wright took her two youngest kids and boarded the train for St. Louis, and how Bob Wright was making out like it was a pure coincidence and nothing was wrong.
His daughter Isabelle was doing her best to take over the household, though anybody could see the girl was still feeling washed out and sickly from that damn cold. Soon the Belle of Dodge became Poor Little Belle. As much as she hated the pity, Belle herself was glad to see the end of September. It had been a hell of a month, made worse when her father started looking at her like he’d never seen her before. Once he even muttered, “No wonder you’re so pretty. You’re probably not mine.” He was drunk when he said it, but still.
Wyatt Earp didn’t participate in the gossip about Alice and Eli. He wasn’t exactly living a blameless life himself these days, so there wasn’t a whole lot of room to look down on Eli Grier or the Wrights. Which isn’t to say that Wyatt didn’t take a certain amount of secret pleasure from the notion that Bob Wright had gotten his comeuppance. Maybe ole Bob would pay attention to his own troubles now, instead of going around hiring ignorant kids like George Hoyt to shoot at men who were just trying to do their jobs.
Of course, it had not escaped Wyatt’s notice that Roxana was still over at the Elephant Barn. She didn’t belong to the post, Wyatt knew that much for sure. The fort commandant said she was Grier’s personal mount, not government-issue. Somebody was paying her keep at the barn, but when Wyatt asked Hamilton Bell who it was, Ham said he didn’t know. That seemed kind of odd, but it wasn’t really any of Wyatt’s business, so he didn’t push it.
Like Belle Wright, Doc Holliday hadn’t really gotten over that cold either and he was back in bed, trying to kick it. Wyatt noticed that Kate was splashing some cash around and seemed to be in a better mood for some reason. So it was pretty quiet next door, though Doc’s cough sounded worse than ever.
Then one morning Morgan told Wyatt he was going over to see how Doc was doing, which was ordinary enough. Except Morg looked like he used to when he was a little kid and had some big secret, like he caught a toad or something and planned to scare the girls with it, but didn’t dare tell Wyatt because he knew Wyatt would stop him.
Which is why Wyatt decided to sit out on the front porch for a spell before going to bed, to see what was going on.
Doc must have been feeling better because after a few minutes, he and Morgan came outside. Morg got Doc settled into the wicker rocker on the porch and pulled a shawl around the dentist’s shoulders before setting off toward Front Street, grinning like an idiot.
Wyatt decided maybe he’d just go on over to Doc’s and ask what in hell that was about. All Doc said was “I’m sure I haven’t the slightest idea, Wyatt,” but he was grinning, too, and then just sat there, rocking and looking pleased with himself, until Morg came walking back up the street.
With Roxana. Saddled.
Confused, Wyatt stood, one hand on the porch post. From behind him, he heard Doc say, “She’s yours, Wyatt. A gift.”
Stunned, Wyatt looked back at Doc, whose eyes were shining above a shy, sweet, crooked smile and—Well, hell. Wyatt supposed it wasn’t the worst moment in his life. Seeing the light leave Urilla’s eyes was the worst, but this came pretty close. It took him a few seconds because he hated to do it, but he said what he had to.
“I’m sorry, Doc. I can’t accept anything like that.”
It pained him to see Doc’s reaction. The dentist looked like he’d been slapped.
“Why, you stubborn, stiff-necked, self-righteous—! I can’t believe it!” Doc cried. “And I thought you were a friend—the more fool me!”
“I told you, Doc!” Morgan tied the horse to the post by the front gate and scuffed along the walk toward the porch. “I knew he wouldn’t take her.”
“Doc,” Wyatt pleaded, “try to understand! It was a real nice idea, but I’m sorry, it’s just not right!”
Doc was almost sputtering, he was so mad. “Are you—are you actually goin’ to stand there and accuse me of tryin’ to bribe you? I won the damn animal in a card game! What in hell am I going to do with a horse like that? I can’t afford to have her standin’ around in the Elephant Barn, eatin’ me out of house and home! I ask you for one damn favor and this is the—”
Wyatt said, “Calm down, Doc! You’re gonna make yourself sick—”
Sure enough, the dentist was looking for his handkerchief now.
“All I’m askin’ is that you take her off my hands! That is the rock-bottom least that any sort of friend would do for a sick man, but no! You are too goddam—”
“Hey, Doc! Maybe you could sell her,” Morgan suggested helpfully. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out some money. “How does two dollars and fifteen cents sound?”
Doc didn’t even pretend to think about it before holding out his hand for the coins. “Morgan, that sounds just about right,” he said. “Help me up.”
Morg offered him an arm for leverage. For a while, the two of them just stood together, side by side, watching Wyatt work out exactly which ethical issues would be rendered moot if Morgan owned the horse.
Doc said, “Listen close, Morg. I believe you can hear the gears grindin’.”
It sounded like he was making fun, but Doc had that look on his face again: pleasure and satisfaction and affection, all mixed. And Morgan himself felt just about as fine as he had ever felt in a lifetime of feeling pretty good about things. He was proud of his older brother’s earnest, boneheaded, mulish honesty; tickled that he and Doc had surprised Wyatt so completely; grateful to Doc for seeing to it that Wyatt got his dream back, even after his money had gone to build a library full of books Wyatt couldn’t read if he gave each one a whole damn year.
Suddenly jubilant, Morgan couldn’t keep still any longer. Giggling like a six-year-old, he did a little dance, and threw an arm around John Holliday’s shoulders, and pulled him close. “Hot damn! We got him good, Doc! Look at that, will you? He’s … Yes! Here it comes! A smile! Wyatt Earp is smiling!”
“Nice teeth,” Doc remarked.
Wyatt laughed. “Should be,” he said. “They cost enough.”
“Somebody get Nick Klaine!” Morg yelled out at the empty street. “Stop the press! Wyatt Earp is laughing!”
Wyatt murmured, “Doc, I don’t know what to say.”
“Sure you do, Wyatt,” Doc said softly. “Mississippi. Fifty-five. Go on, now. Take a ride on your brother’s fine new horse.”
Wyatt walked out to Roxana, who pranced some and shifted away, but settled as he stood talking to her quietly, letting her get to know him a little. When the time was right, he swung up and wheeled her a turn or two, until she was ready to pay attention.
He leaned forward. She gathered herself beneath him. They took off, headed north through the short grass toward a ripening wheat field, gold and copper and ocher in the mellow autumn light.
“Now, that is a sight to see,” Morgan said, for it appeared that his brother was flying, as though Roxana had no legs at all but just swept along, weightless as a bird skimming the prairie. “You did good, Doc. That was a real nice thing to do.”
“Yes,” Doc said, sounding content. “She’ll be something to remember me by.”
Morgan turned and looked at him hard, but Doc’s eyes were on Kate, who was walking up the street now with some groceries.
“Morgan,” Doc said warily, “if Miss Kate were to ask you about Roxana? Remember: I cut the cards for the horse with Grier the other night, just after she and Bob Wright left.”
For Morgan, autumn had always been a special joy. Of all the Earp kids, he was the one who liked it best when the family lived close enough to a town for him to go to a regular schoolhouse in the fall. Back when the Earps lived in Iowa and Illinois, he liked how the air got crisp as an apple, and how the leaves smelled when they piled up in heaps against buildings. He liked how his mother’s eyes warmed when he brought in as big an armload of wood as he could lug for the stove. Most of all, Morg liked climbing up to the attic after supper and getting into bed with a book.
He always claimed the space closest to a western window. It was colder there, but he’d pull a knitted cap down over his ears and burrow into the quilts and stick the book up to catch the dying light, reading until his hands were frozen and his eyelids were too heavy to stay open for another word. Now, of course, working nights the way he did, he didn’t go to bed in the dying light, but his and Lou’s bedroom window faced east. When the bright morning sun came in and hit his eyes and helped them close, he got that same feeling as he read himself to sleep.
This fall, he was working on a book called Black Beauty that he’d borrowed from Belle Wright. It was kind of strange because you were supposed to believe a horse was telling you the story, but it was good, too, and said a lot of true things about horses and made you think different about what you saw every day. Morgan thought Wyatt would enjoy the story if he could get past the silliness of animals talking to each other, so Morg was planning to read it aloud to Wyatt this winter when the weather closed in.
Unless him and Wyatt and James wound up moving to the Arizona Territory, that is. Morg would have to give the book back to Belle before the Earps left Dodge.
“There’s no end of silver down by Bisbee and Tombstone.” That’s what Virgil’s last letter said. The veins were so rich, the metal was right out on the surface, the way gold was in California back in ’49. So Wyatt and James were talking about how if they all went down to Arizona right now, the Earps could get in on the ground floor of something big, instead of showing up a year late, when the big money was done.
Bessie wasn’t real happy about the notion. And Morg hadn’t actually agreed to the plan yet, either. Lou wanted to go up to Utah to see her family again and find out if her folks had softened any about her and Morg getting married. So Morgan was caught in the middle, because he didn’t want to say no to Lou but James was ready to pack, and Wyatt was edgy and restless and not inclined to what Doc called “rational argument.”
For Wyatt, autumn meant the end of the cattle season, and that meant he’d be laid off again. The injustice of it ate at him, and his temper shortened with the days. Dodge was down to half a dozen herds a week, and the city had already let John Stauber and Jack Brown go. Wyatt had a big argument with Mayor Kelley over that. Sure, the number of cowboys was down, but so was the quality. These were men nobody wanted to hire, peak season, and they joined idlers who’d been fired or quit work the minute they hit town: drunks and shirkers and troublemakers who couldn’t be bothered to ride back to Texas. It was no time to cut police staff, but that’s what the city council wanted, so that’s what happened. And then Chalkie Beeson and the other saloon owners grumbled that Wyatt was bashing extra cowboys and hauling them in on the smallest pretext so he could rack up arrest fees before the winter, but all the deputies shared that money, so it wasn’t like Wyatt was making anything extra in October. He just didn’t have any patience with idiots this time of year. About the only thing that cheered Wyatt up was going to the Elephant Barn to spend time with Dick and Roxana, working them in a circle corral or taking one of them out for exercise.
Every time Morgan thought about what Doc had done, he could feel himself getting a big, dumb smile on his face. Good thing, too, because it made him more tolerant when Doc got himself into trouble.
The little German kid who pumped the foot drill for Doc—Wil Eberhardt, his name was—he’d taken to keeping an eye on the dentist when Doc was gambling, even if it meant staying up all night, or sleeping in a corner of a saloon. When a bartender noticed things getting out of hand, he’d send the boy to find Morgan, and Morg would have to stop whatever he was doing and go on over and settle everyone down some. That was happening a lot lately, so Morg knew what it meant when Wil came running over around two in the morning, calling, “Mr. Earp! Come quick! There’s trouble at the Lady Gay!”
Didn’t take long to get to the bar. Front Street wasn’t near as crowded as it had been even a couple of weeks ago, but the mood was worse. Spring carousing was celebratory and pretty good-natured; at the end of the season, knots of drunks stood around outside, passing bottles and glaring. There was more sullen defiance about the city ordinances and a greater willingness to pick fights just for the hell of it. The crib girls hated October. It was a lot more dangerous and they were more likely to get cheated, so they stole more. Usually they were too plastered to do that without getting caught and they got smacked around for it. Even at James and Bessie’s, there was trouble almost every night.
So Morg figured that Doc was probably getting roughed up, but when he got to the saloon, it was quiet except for some young drover who was noodling around on the piano, trying to pick out a tune that might have been “Lorena” or maybe “Bonnie Blue Flag.” Or “Buffalo Gals.” Hard to tell.
Doc was just sitting at a table, playing poker. True enough, the other fellas looked pretty unhappy. Well, that’s what makes it gambling, Morg thought. Not everybody gets to win.
Brows up, Morg turned back toward Wilfred, who was peeking underneath the swing doors, afraid to come inside. “Ask him,” Wil mouthed, and pointed toward Kevin Ballard, who was wiping up beer slops but watching Doc and the cowboys.
“Hey, Kev,” Morg said quietly. “What’s the trouble?”
“Morg,” the barkeep whispered, “God knows I’ve seen men drink, but Jesus … And he keeps winning! They’re going to take it out of his hide, the way he’s been mouthing off at them.”
Morgan approached the table, but leaned against the wall to watch the action for a while. He didn’t have to listen to the muttering for long. Kevin and the Eberhardt kid were right. Doc was riding for a fall.
Pushing away from the planks, Morg scuffed over and stood across the table from Doc. “Cut your losses, boys,” he told the Texans. “Go have some fun with what you got left.”
Doc leaned back in his chair and stared at Morgan while the cowboys gathered up the remains of their wages. They indulged in a certain amount of unpleasant commentary about Dodge in general and about Doc in particular, but they went quietly, happy enough to quit the game while they still had money for another go at the girls.
It was a cool evening, but Doc was sweating.
“Doc, are you all right?” Morg asked. “You don’t look so good.” He meant it kindly, but the moment he said it, he knew Doc was going to take it wrong.
“Why, thank you, sir,” Doc said, cold-eyed. “How charmin’ of you to point that out. You, of course, are the very picture of rude health, which evidently entitles you to interfere with the livelihood of others, you arrogant, meddlin’ sonofabitch.”
Morg had heard plenty of that kind of thing come out of Doc’s mouth, but this was the first time he’d been the target himself, and it was a shock to be spoken to like that. Virgil took no guff and would have cracked Doc for it. Wyatt was tolerant of back talk as long as it stayed talk; he’d have shrugged it off and walked away.
Morg sat down and glanced at the bottle on the table. It was three-quarters empty. “Hitting it pretty hard tonight,” he observed.
“And precisely how is that any business of yours? Was there an election I missed?” Doc asked. “Has temperance come to west Kansas? I have not created a disturbance. Am I in violation of some new city ordinance?”
“No, Doc, but we’re friends—”
“Well, get off me, then!”
Doc reached for the bottle. Morg got to it first. That alone was a sign of how much Doc had put away. Morg meant to move the bottle just out of reach, but a hand clamped over his wrist.
“Leave it,” Doc warned.
Morg let loose, a little startled by how strong Doc’s grip was.
Doc refilled his water glass and damn near drained it.
“Damn,” Morg whispered. “Jesus … What’s wrong, Doc?”
Certain that if he were to move at all—even slightly, even to speak—everything human in him would be lost to blind, bestial, ungovernable rage, John Henry Holliday sat silently while in the coldest, most analytical part of him, he thought, If I go mad one day, it will be at a moment like this. I will put a bullet through the lung of some healthy young idiot just to watch him suffocate. There you are, I’ll tell him. That’s what it’s like to know your last deep breath is in your past. You won’t ever get enough air again. From this moment until you die, it will only get worse and worse. Bet you could use a good stiff drink now, eh, jackass?
So he let Morgan Earp wait for his answer, just as he himself waited—patiently, helplessly—until he could be sure that the liquor had taken hold, and he could feel himself inch back from the edge of the abyss. And when at last he spoke, his voice was soft and musical. “Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am,” he told Morgan, “an unhappy man—”
The coughing hit again, and though he was shamed by the whine that escaped him, he kept his eyes on Morg’s until the fit passed. “Tuberculosis toys with its victims. It hides, and it waits, and just when we are sufficiently deluded to believe in a cure—”
“But I—I thought … It’s just that cold, Doc. And the laudanum’s helping—”
“Oh, Christ, Morg! This is not a cold! As for laudanum—God knows how Mattie can stand that poison! Usin’ it is like bein’ dead already.”
“But you were better this summer,” Morg insisted. “I thought—”
“Well, you were wrong! We both were …”
He had spent his entire adult life dying, trying all the while to make sense of a dozen contradictory theories about what caused his disease and how to treat it, when his own continued existence could be used to support any of them. Or all of them, or none. Because of what he’d done, or not done, or for no reason at all, the disease sometimes went into retreat, but only as a tide retreats—
He tried to think of a way to explain all that—maybe telling Morg to think of the difference between a pardon and a reprieve—but the taste of iron and salt rose again in his pharynx, and it took all he had not to gag and vomit when he swallowed the blood.
“The disease is active again,” he said finally. “It is gnawing on my left lung, as a rat gnaws on cheese. Except: a rat sleeps. This never, ever lets up. Every goddam breath I take hurts, Morg. I need that much liquor so I can quit cryin’ and leave my bed because—” he turned away and coughed, again and again, shredding adhesions, his chest aching with the effort to keep on pulling in air—“because like every other damned soul in this godforsaken hell, I still have to make a livin’.”
His voice broke and he looked away, blinking, and for a terrible moment, Morgan thought that Doc might weep.
“I was buildin’ a practice,” the dentist whispered. “People were bringin’ their children to me … I had to turn away three utterly wretched patients this week! Who will care for them now? This mornin’ I had a denture like Wyatt’s nearly finished for Mabel Riney. I coughed while I was adjustin’ the mount. Broke it in half. Hours of work shot to hell, and nothin’ to give that poor woman but her twenty-three dollars back. That’ll just about clean me out. I can’t make the month’s rent on the office! I will have to give it up …”
“Where’s Kate?” Morg asked softly. “She usually finds you better games—”
“She left,” Doc snapped. “This morning. She found out that I am broke, and then she found greener pastures. Of course, one can hardly complain when a whore goes where the money is.”
“But, Doc, all the money you paid for Roxana went to Kate!”
“I swear, Morgan: you tell her that, and I’ll—”
Threat dying on his lips, Doc closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and sat trembling, left hand holding the sodden handkerchief, the right pressing hard against his chest for what felt like forever.
When at last he spoke again, it was with a bitter, quiet, hard-won precision. “When I am like this, dentistry is beyond me. So I play cards. I play cards with the most ignorant, fatuous, misbegotten clay eaters the benighted state of Texas has to offer. I cannot do that sober, Morgan! I have tried. The task is more than I can—”
Suddenly he was on his feet, winging his glass at the piano where the cowboy was trying to pick out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and kept getting a note wrong.
“A-flat!” Doc shouted. “It’s A-flat!”
“A flat what?” the cowboy shouted back.
“God as my witness,” Doc swore, pointing at the piano, “I shall be driven to slaughter—”
The coughing hit again. Morgan said, “C’mon, Doc. Sit down. I’m sorry. Look, I have some money saved up, and—”
“I don’t need charity! All I need is to be left alone to earn my way as best I can! And now I must go buck the tiger—which is a fool’s errand—because you just busted up a poker game that I was winnin’, God damn you, and this time of night, faro is the only game in town that will be open to me. In future, I will take it as a personal favor if you would kindly refrain from interferin’ in my affairs. Good evenin’ to you, sir.”
Everyone in the place watched as he left.
For a long time, Morgan sat openmouthed, trying to think of some way to help. Nothing came to mind.
The bartender brought a whisk broom and dustpan over to the piano, and knelt to sweep up the broken glass.
Shoulda seen it coming. That’s what Wyatt thought, though he heard it in his father’s voice. Walked right into it, you stupid pile of shit.
Seven of them, waiting for him in the saloon. Bartender, gone. Off in the corner, just one man playing faro. Nobody else in the place.
He’d been warned. Twice. Dog first, then Bat. So Wyatt had started wearing a sidearm pretty regularly, and went as far as loading heavy-gauge into the shotguns behind the bars in every saloon in town. But the weeks passed. Nobody else came at him and … He let his guard down. He got sloppy. His shift was almost over, and he was distracted.
They had his gun before he took two steps past the door.
He’d been thinking about Mattie Blaylock, confused because it didn’t start out so complicated between them. Mattie did her job and Wyatt did his, but somewhere along the line, he went off the tracks, and he was damned if he saw where. Like in Topeka, he noticed she was looking at a necklace in a store window. He went back the next morning to buy it for her, and it wasn’t cheap, either, but instead of being happy, she asked, “What’s this for?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I thought you’d like it.”
She wore it once, and it looked pretty on her, too, but after that she put it away.
Then, last night, before he left for work, he told Mattie that Big George Hoover had invited them over for dinner on Sunday. He thought Mattie would like to wear one of the dresses Doc Holliday had helped her pick out, and maybe that necklace from Topeka, but she acted like Wyatt was asking her to do something unreasonable. She looked at him like he was some kind of idiot even to think about going to dinner at the Hoovers’.
Wyatt asked if it was because Margaret Hoover used to be—well, Maggie Carnahan, and maybe that brought back bad memories or something. Mattie just shook her head like he was so stupid, it wasn’t worth trying to explain it to him. Hell, he thought. I might not be the smartest man in Kansas, but I ain’t that dumb.
Course, it turned out that was exactly how dumb he was, but at the time he was thinking that any effort to be good to Mattie seemed to ricochet back at him. She’d look suspicious and annoyed. “Why are you acting so nice?” she’d ask, like she knew he was faking. And it had just occurred to him—right when he was walking into that saloon—if you think niceness is a fraud, then maybe you think only meanness is real. So maybe Mattie would be happier if he belted her and called her a low, shameless harlot because she’d believe that, except the idea of hitting a woman—
He never finished the thought, suddenly aware that he’d just been surrounded, disarmed, and was about to be killed with his own pistol by a heavyset, middle-aged man with eyes like stones.
“I guess things’re different when you’re not up against a kid half your age and half your size, eh, Earp?”
I’m dead, Wyatt thought, weirdly calm, but certain this was no bluff.
“He don’t look so tough now, do he, boys?” the man was saying.
There was a murmur of grinning agreement, and one of the cowboys said, “He sure don’t, Mr. Driskill!”
“Are you Jesse Driskill, sir?” Wyatt asked.
There was a chorus of hoots.
“Oh, it’s sir now! Ain’t that sweet, boys? Ain’t that nice and polite? No, you sonofabitch, I ain’t Jesse. I’m his brother. I’m Tobias Driskill, and that was my boy you bashed, peckerhead.”
A few paces behind him, a wooden chair scraped against the floor. Everyone backed off a little and left Wyatt standing alone.
Hell, he thought. Shot in the back, like Bill Hickok, and dime novelists will have the good of it.
“Think you’ve got enough friends to stand with you here, Tobie?” asked a honeyed Georgia voice. “Or is Achilles—alone—too many?”
“Doc? Doc Holliday?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“This ain’t your fight, Doc,” Driskill told him.
“I beg to differ, Tobie. Deputy Earp is a patient of mine. He still owes me four dollars.”
“He’s worth a lot more to me dead! Hell, I’ll pay you the four bucks—”
Nobody even noticed that Doc had a gun in his hand until he fired both barrels of a two-shot Deringer into the floor.
Wyatt got over the shock soonest. It was three steps to the bar. An instant later he had the shotgun in his hands.
Doc murmured, “Well, now, there’s a surprise …”
And everyone thought he meant that he’d made them all jump, or that Wyatt Earp had just evened up the odds some, pulling a scattergun out. In point of fact, John Henry Holliday was discovering that excitement could temporarily inhibit the need to cough and make his chest pain simply … disappear. And in that astounding adrenaline-fueled state of grace, he spoke again, softly but fluently, his voice musical and gentle and clear.
“That is a very generous offer, Tobie, and frankly, I could use the money, but I think you’ll find that Mr. Earp will decline your kindness. He is unusually scrupulous in such matters … Now, as it happens, I was a witness to your boy’s arrest, Tobe. The youngster was in his cups, and rowdy, and in that condition he did considerable damage not only to a theater but to a German fiddler widely held to be a tolerable musician. Such persons are rare in Kansas and tend to be valued beyond what a Texan might reckon. Deputy Earp subdued your son with only as much force as was necessary to book him for assault. The young man was fined by a judge and released before midnight—”
By that time they could hear boots pounding toward them as city policemen converged on the saloon from bars all over town.
“Ah! Morgan!” Doc cried genially. “And Sheriff Masterson! Evenin’, Chuck. I was just explainin’ the fine points of Dodge City law enforcement to Mr. Tobias Driskill here, after he tried to jump Wyatt with this contemptible collection of illiterate, bean-eating white trash—”
With a brilliant smile, Bat stepped between Doc and the Driskill men.
“Don’t mind him! He’s just drunk,” Bat said smoothly. “How ’bout you boys hang up your guns right over there and have a drink on me? Wyatt, I think I can straighten this out for you. Mr. Driskill, may I have a word?”
In years to come, after the gunfight in Tombstone, when the myths and lies began to accumulate, the story of that evening in Dodge would be repeated with Shakespearean advantages.
Several bars were confidently put forward as the location of the confrontation, and at least three bartenders claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the event. The man who was actually working that night never talked about it, being in no hurry to tell anyone that Tobias Driskill shoved a gun in his nose and told him to go take a piss. Which he did.
Several men later claimed to be the faro dealer Doc bucked, but only one of them admitted that he was too scared to move when the Driskill gang ordered everybody to get out. “They might be trouble,” Doc told the dealer quietly, “but I will shoot you if you shut this game down while I’m ahead.” And don’t think Doc didn’t pocket his winnings before he stepped up on Wyatt’s behalf.
Eventually Tobias Driskill had not six cowhands with him but twenty-five Texas desperadoes, all taunting Wyatt Earp with guns drawn and about to mow him down in a hail of lead when—at the last possible moment—the ferocious killer Doc Holliday jumped up, a chromed Colt in each hand, cursing the Texans for white-livered cowards, intimidating them just long enough for Wyatt to draw his entirely legendary Ned Buntline Special. Routinely promoted to full marshal in these tales, Wyatt pistol-whipped Driskill and commanded the other Texans to “shed their hardware.” A foolish cowboy raised his piece. Doc Holliday instantly shot him dead. Terrified despite overwhelming odds in their favor, the remaining two dozen Texans complied with the order to drop their weapons. Fifty revolvers were said to have been picked up from the street after Wyatt and Doc had arrested the entire gang and marched them off to the Dodge City hoosegow.
Nothing remotely like that was reported in either the Dodge City Times or the Ford County Globe, nor is there any court record of such a large number of cowboys being arrested and booked all at once—before, during, or after 1878. And yet, for the next fifty years, whenever anyone asked why he stuck with Doc Holliday long after the dentist was far more trouble than he was worth, Wyatt Earp would always give the same unadorned answer. “Doc saved my life in Dodge.”
At the time, however, the whole thing was over so quickly that Wyatt only came to understand its significance during the long hours of silence he would soon spend waiting for the dentist to die, listening to a clock tick Doc’s life away.
I shoulda thanked him, Wyatt would think.
Too late, too late, too late …
For instead of expressing gratitude as soon as he and Morg and Doc left the saloon, Wyatt asked, “Where’d you get that gun, Doc?”
The eastern sky was beginning to lighten. The day was going to be gray and rainy, but between the approaching dawn and the lamplight from the saloon, Morgan could see that Doc was trembling. “Come on, Wyatt. Let it go!”
“Where’d you get that gun, Doc?” Wyatt repeated.
“Morgan, you may correct me if I am wrong,” Doc said, his eyes on Wyatt’s, “but I believe I just saved your brother’s miserable Republican hide, and he is about to arrest me for it. You have anything to say about that?”
Wyatt was right, and Morgan backed him. “It’s illegal to carry firearms in town, Doc.”
The dentist’s hand was shaking when he offered the Deringer. “I told you before, Wyatt: I am never entirely unarmed. And a damn good thing, tonight.”
Wyatt took the little pistol Doc held in the palm of his hand. “I’m sorry, Doc, but you’re under—”
Before he could finish, the dentist busted out laughing—
And shouted, “Oh!” and doubled over, and staggered backward with both hands to his chest, where … something had just broken loose inside him, and he could feel a sharp clear focus of pain and pressure … but he honestly didn’t care. He was still flying: still feeling the magical effects of that moment when seven men had backed away in fear. And it wasn’t Wyatt Earp they’d feared. It was little ole John Henry Holliday, a sick, skinny dentist from Griffin by-God Georgia!
For those few enchanted minutes, he had felt strong and unafraid. And now this! This was the capper!
Straightening, throwing an arm around Wyatt, he declared, “Nemo supra leges! That’s what I love about you, Wyatt! One law for everyone!”
“You’re drunk, Doc,” Wyatt said shortly, for he was embarrassed by the gesture, and Doc was starting to cough again. The sound of that right in your ear was kind of disgusting. Doc seemed to understand and moved away some, but he looked kind of strange.
“An accurate observation,” he agreed, beginning to choke, “though not—not germane to our discussion—”
Just then, James showed up, wanting to know what in hell had happened. Morg started to tell him, “That Driskill kid’s family showed up, but Doc …”
Morgan’s voice trailed off.
Wyatt was staring past him toward Wright’s General Outfitting, across the street. Morg turned to follow his gaze. Why is Bob Wright up so early? he wondered. Then it hit him.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Wyatt … no.”
There was already a crowd. Not the hundreds of high season, but thirty or forty men drawn by Doc’s gunshots, and by the abrupt departure of city deputies from saloons all over town. At first they thought maybe the Earps had some kind of beef with Doc Holliday, but then the word started to get around that a bunch of Texans had tried to kill Wyatt, and that was interesting enough to make it worthwhile to stand in the rain that was starting up, especially when Wyatt yelled, “Bob Wright! You want me dead, you rich sonofabitch? I’m right here!”
The merchant was at the edge of the crowd talking to somebody and kind of smirking. Bob turned at the sound of his name and stared at the deputy advancing on him. “I got no quarrel with you, Wyatt,” Bob called, but there was something in his eyes …
“No, you’d rather pay people to do your dirty work,” Wyatt said, unbuckling his gun belt, jerking the badge off his shirt, dropping them both onto the dampening dirt. “Come for me yourself, you sonofabitch!”
“All right, goddammit!” Bob agreed, pulling his own jacket off. “You’re on!”
“Wyatt,” Doc called, bent over, one arm braced against a hitching rail. “For the love of God! Your teeth!”
Morg started forward, meaning to get between Bob and Wyatt, but Bat was on the street now, too, and gripped Morgan’s arm to stop him.
“Let them settle it,” Bat advised. “This has been coming since the Fourth of July.”
But Morg wasn’t the only one who’d seen Wyatt this angry before. James knew what could happen, too, and he was already at Wyatt’s side, trying to talk sense to him.
“Give this to Doc,” Wyatt said, pulling the denture out and handing it to James.
Bob took that opportunity to throw a sucker punch. It was a solid hit, but poor judgment.
“You dirty dog!” James cried, backing away. “Go ahead, Wyatt. Kill the bastard!”
All of this made for a good show and the gathering mob grew noisier as the sky lightened to a dull pewter. At first, the money was mostly on Wyatt. He was eight years younger, fifteen pounds heavier, and ablaze, his face transfigured by rage heaped up, night after night, during years of fruitless, thankless, dangerous work, protecting the lives and wealth of storekeepers and lawyers and politicians who set the price of killing a peace officer at no more than a $12 fine. But Bob Wright had advantages, too. More physical strength than anyone suspected. A slightly longer reach. A deep, cold well of resentful envy and the sudden ferocious desire to take for himself everything priceless that Wyatt Earp had. The regard of other men. Respect. Loyalty, if not love.
The odds pulled even.
The rain got heavier.
The noise of the crowd dropped off.
When he figured they’d spent enough fury to be controllable, Bat stepped toward the pair, hoping he could make this into a genuine boxing match, with rounds and rests, but there was no talking to them. So he backed off.
Mud sucking at their feet, both men were staggering after half an hour, and Bob’s age had begun to tell. He continued to punch at Wyatt’s mouth, but every time he took a shot, he opened his own ribs, and there’s a limit to how much punishment those bones can take. When Bob finally went down, he was almost too exhausted to cry out when Wyatt planted one foot and hauled off with the other, kicking with everything he had left.
“For Christ’s sake, Bat, stop the fight!” Eddie Foy cried. “Sure: he’s going to kill the man!”
Nobody moved. Not Bat, or Morgan, or his crippled brother James, all of them mesmerized by the stunning realization that Wyatt Earp, who never lost his temper, intended to beat Bob Wright to death before their very eyes.
Finally Doc Holliday pushed through the crowd, lowered a bloody rag from his mouth, and gripped Wyatt’s shoulder so hard his knuckles went white in the gray morning light.
“Wyatt,” he said, “stop now.”
Backhanded for his trouble, Holliday reeled and fell, bleeding from the mouth, but got back on his feet.
“Wyatt,” he said again, with that whipcrack emphasis he could sometimes produce. “Stop now, or it will be murder, and you will hang.”
The rain, by then, had turned the street into a soup of horse manure, trash, and gory mud. Mouth agape, the red haze beginning to clear, Wyatt stumbled back from Bob’s body and fell, sitting down hard in the slop.
“What should I do?” Morg was yelling. “Doc! Tell me what to do!”
On all fours, hands gripping the ground, John Henry Holliday was struggling to pull air in, but every breath meant fighting a tide of bright red blood going the other way.
“Get McCarty,” he gasped. “Keep my right side … higher than the left … or I’ll drown.”
“Somebody go get Doc McCarty!” Morgan hollered, and Chuck Trask took off running.
Prone in the mud, Bob Wright rolled over slowly. One limb at a time, he worked himself onto throbbing, bleeding hands and rubbery knees, and paused in that position to spit blood and gather himself. With a grunt, he got one foot underneath him and then the other, and lurched upright, a forearm pressing against the fractured rib. For a while he just stood there swaying, face to the sky, letting the rain sluice over him, diluting the blood and mud and sweat. His eyes were almost closed by bruising, but he peered out through the slits of his eyelids, and spit a gob of blood, and saw Doc Holliday do the same. His vision blurred again. Wiping at his face with a shirtsleeve he managed to clear one eye long enough to take satisfaction in the damage he’d done to Wyatt Earp, who was sitting slack-jawed in the mud, watching the dentist retch up red froth.
“My God,” Wyatt said. “Did I do that?”
By that time, Chuck had sprinted back with the town doctor at his heels, carrying his medical bag. Ignoring the two panting, filthy brawlers, Tom McCarty knelt in the mire at his patient’s side and put his ear near, trying to make out what John Holliday was saying.
“Cavitation,” the dentist gasped, after coughing out another gout of foamy blood. “Left lung … Hit an artery.”
“All right, get him up!” Tom McCarty ordered. “Get him home, out of this rain!”
Morgan and Bat each took an arm and a leg, Morgan careful to take the ones on the right because he was taller and that would keep his side higher than Bat’s.
As Doc Holliday was carried away, everyone seemed to wake up to the wet. Soon the street was all but empty, nobody left but Eddie Foy, James and Wyatt Earp, and Bob Wright.
“Yeah, Wyatt,” Bob told him through pulpy lips, “you did that to Doc Holliday. Tha’s what you’re good at: breaking faces, cracking skulls. Dumb ox. ’S a wonder you got brains enough t’ chew your food. ’S not me wants you dead, Wyatt. Who wins the nex’ election if you’re killed? Not me! Not saloon men, Wyatt. The reformers win, you dumb bastard. George Hoover wins, you stupid sonofabitch!”
Slowly, painfully, Bob walked back to his house. Eddie took off for Doc’s place, hurrying to catch up with Morg and Bat. Wyatt followed James back to the bordello.
Bessie ordered him a bath. The hot water arrived quickly, though China Joe didn’t leave before giving Wyatt a look of open disdain that took a lot of nerve from a Chink. Beyond thought, Wyatt soaked the mud and blood off. James came in about half an hour later with a pile of clean clothes for him to borrow.
“Here’s your teeth,” James said, voice neutral. “Morg’s staying with Doc. Mattie Blaylock’s there, too. I’m going out to find Katie. McCarty won’t say it, but Morg’s pretty sure Doc’s dying. Kate’ll want to know.”
The rest of the day passed in a steady gray downpour.
Around six in the evening, Eddie Foy took Verelda and a bottle of whiskey over to Bessie’s. James led them to the kitchen, where Wyatt was sitting at the table, battered and remote. The room was small, so Verelda stayed in the doorway, curious but unwilling to go all the way in. She didn’t mind Morgan and she liked James, but Wyatt had always scared her.
“Our boy’s still alive,” Eddie reported, getting glasses down off a shelf. “Drink this,” he said, pouring a shot for Wyatt. “Good for what ails you.”
Wyatt stared at the glass for a few moments. Then he drank, grimacing at the burn.
“Well done,” said Eddie. “I believe I’ll join you. James?”
James nodded, and the three of them had a second shot before Eddie sat back in his chair.
“A man walks into a bar,” he proposed, like he was onstage. “He’s got a mountain lion on a leash. Man says, Bartender, do you serve politicians in this place? Why, sure, the barkeep says. There’s George Hoover right over there! Man says, All right then, I’ll have a whiskey, and my friend here will have George Hoover.”
Wyatt looked at him and spoke for the first time since the fight. “If tha’s a joke,” he mumbled, thick-lipped, “I’m too dumb t’ get it.”
“Wyatt, I’m from Chicago,” Eddie told him. “Let me explain politics to you.”
He poured them all a third and leaned across the table.
“The trick of it,” said Eddie, “is that you always ask, Who gains? Cui bono? That’s how the old Romans said it. Who gets the good of it? Ed Masterson dead, killed by a drunk. Damn bad luck for poor Ed, and the citizens are outraged! A city marshal, gunned down dead on Front Street, and everyone’s after asking, What’s it going to take to get a little law and order around here? Then Johnnie Sanders is carried off in that fire, and sure: wasn’t it Big George at the wake, buttonholing everyone in sight, noising it around that it was Demon Rum did the poor boy in? Drunks killing lawmen. Drunks setting fires. So, now, ask yourself: cui bono if another lawman gets killed this season? Who gains, when Dog Kelley only won by three votes last time, and the next election balanced on a pinhead, so it is! Another fine upstanding officer dead, and him a teetotal Methodist, honest as the day is long! About time somebody got tough on the saloons, don’t you know … Vote Reform, son. Vote Reform!”
Still in the doorway, listening, Verelda finally worked up the nerve to speak to Wyatt. “I don’t think it was George put the price on your head,” she told him. “It’s just a guess, but me? I bet it was Maggie.”
The men all looked at her curiously.
Emboldened, Verelda stepped closer, poured herself a drink, and slugged back the shot.
“Maggie was a bitch even before she found Jesus and swore off booze. Now she wants to be the governor’s wife: Mrs. Governor George Hoover!” Verelda sang with fruity ersatz propriety, waving an imperious hand in the air. “Presiding over Dry Kansas, like the goddam queen of Sheba.”
He should have slept. The fight, and then the liquor. He hadn’t had a drink in years, and it should have hit him hard, but in a stand-up contest, remorse and self-loathing can battle whiskey to a draw.
It was long past dark when Bat Masterson showed up at the kitchen door. James let him in. Bessie poured him a drink. Nobody said anything when he dumped Wyatt’s gun belt and star on the table. Wyatt himself barely glanced at them.
Bat shook the rain off his hat and shrugged out of his slicker. “Took a while, but I convinced Driskill his kid had it coming,” Bat reported. “And I told Bob Wright I’m off his payroll. He can get somebody else to ref his goddam fights. He still swears it wasn’t him put the price on your head, but now he’s claiming he ‘heard from somebody’ the offer was only good while you were wearing a badge—”
“Horseshit,” James snorted. “You could see it in his eyes, Wyatt. He wanted you dead! Why else was he out on the street at five in the morning? He wanted to make sure Driskill got you!”
“A look in somebody’s eyes ain’t gonna stand up in court,” Bessie pointed out.
Bat leaned over and tapped Wyatt’s star. “You put that on, I’ll back you,” he told Wyatt, choosing sides at last. “But if you need work? We can use a faro dealer at the Lone Star. Full-time. Soon as your hands heal up.”
Wyatt stared at the badge for a while. Finally, stiff and sore and silent, he got up and went to the window, where he watched the rain slide down the glass.
What the Irishman said about politics made sense. Big George Hoover would have campaigned waving Wyatt’s bloody shirt and he probably would have won. Maggie might well have tried to make that possible. Still … Tobie Driskill had a grudge, too. His brother Jesse had more than enough money to offer a bounty. They might have known George Hoyt down in Texas—
Except Bat had just admitted that he thought it was Bob.
And James was right, too. The sons of Nicholas Earp knew what scorn looked like. Wyatt had seen contempt in Bob Wright’s eyes, and felt an unleashed, vindictive malevolence in every blow that landed. He was sure of this much. If Tobie Driskill had killed him last night, Bob Wright would’ve danced on his grave.
But that could all be true, and it still might have been somebody else entirely who offered the bounty—someone who hated Wyatt’s guts for reasons Wyatt himself would never know. There were a lot of men in that category. He might never find out who put the price on his head in Dodge that year.
Doesn’t matter, he thought.
Humiliated, ashamed, certain Doc Holliday was dying, he was sick of it all. Sick of politics. Sick of being hated. Sick of Dodge. Sick of himself.
“Hell,” he said, thick-lipped. “I quit. They’re gonna fire me anyways.”
James slumped in relief and shouted, “Thank God!” Then he stood up straight and declared, “To hell with ’em! This town’s played out! Let’s all go down to Tombstone!”
“James!” Bessie cried. “I ain’t movin’ to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin’ there but gravel and scorpions—”
“And silver and miners and money, honey!”
The two of them were still arguing when Wyatt heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and across the porch toward the kitchen door. “That’s Morgan,” he said, for Morg had grown up wearing Wyatt’s hand-me-down shoes, and he still kind of shuffled when he walked.
Waiting for the door to open, everybody got quiet.
This is it, they were thinking. Doc’s gone.
“Wyatt?” Morg said, standing just outside so as not to drip all over Bessie’s floor. “He’s asking for you. Best hurry.”