Black Hats (6 page)

“Shoot the horses first.”

Doc eyed Wyatt sidewise, amused. “Horse lover like you, Wyatt? This
must
be a serious game….”

The four men turned onto Fremont, and Wyatt slowly scanned the street every which way to Sunday; but the Cowboys could not be seen.

Then the vacant lot west of Fly’s came into view, as did a brace of the rustlers: Ike Clanton and his young brother Billy, Tom and Frank McLaury, Billy the Kid Claiborne…and Sheriff Johnny Behan.

Behan, a dapper little daintily mustached man in a derby, was talking animatedly to the Cowboys, decked out in their standard gaudy attire, oversized sombreros, red silk bandanas and gay sashes, fancy-pattern flannel shirts and tightfitting doeskin britches, tucked into forty-dollar half-boots. Ike and Tom wore short cowhide coats, the others vests.

As the Earps and Holliday approached, Behan noticed them and ran toward his brother lawmen, glancing behind him nervously and throwing his hands up, as if in surrender.

But when Behan reached them, Virgil and Wyatt and Morgan and Doc just kept walking, and the little sheriff had to tag along like a kid.

“For God’s sake, Virgil,” Behan said, “don’t go down there—they’ll murder you!”

Not missing a step, Virgil said, “They’re carrying firearms in town, Johnny. I’m just going down to disarm them.”

“You don’t have to!” Behan had stopped trying to keep up, and, receding behind them, called,

“I’ve disarmed them all!”

Wyatt exchanged glances with Virgil, who moved the pistol in his waistband around to the holster on his left hip and shifted the walking stick to his right hand. This, as Wyatt took it, was meant to show the Cowboys that the marshal was not there to murder them—after all, his gun hand was filled with a harmless cane.

Not approving of this strategy—why was Behan afraid the Cowboys would murder them, if he’d disarmed the group?—Wyatt withdrew his pistol from its holster and stuck it in his overcoat pocket, and kept his hand clamped on the handle, finger on the outer trigger guard.

As the Earps approached, the Cowboys disappeared deeper into the vacant lot. Clearing the corner of Fly’s Photography Shop, Wyatt could only see about half a horse….

But as the lawmen advanced, the Cowboys came into view again—standing in a row but with Ike out front, his baby-faced brother Billy with a hand on his holstered sixgun, Frank McLaury, too, his horse behind him. Tom McLaury stood next to his horse with a hand on the Winchester rifle in its saddle scabbard. Squared-faced, sad-eyed, modestly mustached men, the McLaury brothers, like the Earps, were all but indistinguishable.

The wind spoke first, blowing dust and snow and howling apparent disapproval; then Virgil addressed the Cowboy contingency in a loud, business-like manner.

“Boys, raise up your hands. I want your guns. You know the ordinance.”

Palms still on the butts of their six-shooters, Billy and Frank thumb-cocked the holstered weapons, and even against the wind the
klik! klik
! stood out.

At the same time, Ike’s right hand was drifting toward his loose shirt, unbuttoned at the breast.

Tightly, Wyatt said, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight. Now you can have it….”

“
Hold on
!” Virgil said, raising the cane, revealing the other hand empty of any weapon. “I don’t want that.”

Too late: Billy Clanton began to jerk his gun.

Wyatt whipped his long-barreled Colt from the overcoat pocket, but did not take aim at Billy, who was a punk kid and not much of a marksman; the one to get rid of was Frank McLaury, a crack shot and dangerous.

So Wyatt gut-shot Frank, who managed not to fall by holding on to the reins of his nearby horse, while Billy indeed missed, and the gunshots spooked Tom’s horse so bad, its owner couldn’t get a grip on that Winchester. Scrambling behind the nervous horse, Tom got his pistol out and fired over the horse’s back, twice.

One bullet struck Morgan, who yelled, “I’m hit!”

Wyatt said, “Get behind me,” and put a few bullets into Billy, as gray-white gunsmoke drifted like fog in the cramped vacant lot and lent the frenzied fight a dream-like haze.

Shotgun in his hands, Doc moved into the lot, upper lip peeled back in a ghastly smile, and closed in on Tom behind the fishtailing horse and let go both barrels, catching the Cowboy under the right armpit, sending him screaming and staggering but, somehow, Tom had enough left to sway out into the street.

Doc pitched the shotgun and switched to his more familiar nickel-plated revolver, and threw shots at Billy Clanton, who seemed to be everywhere, shooting at everyone, hitting nobody.

Meantime Virgil had shifted the cane to his left hand and yanked his Colt and started shooting, once at Frank, three times at Billy, one catching the kid in the belly, though the boy kept moving, kept shooting. Gut-shot Frank, leading his horse by the reins, stumbled toward the street, firing along the way. Tom’s horse, ever out of control, provided an inadvertent shield for the other Cowboys, and in this moment Ike ran up to Wyatt and clutched his arm, the booze on his breath, the red in his eyes, matched by the terror in his face.

“Don’t kill me!” he sputtered; spittle had frozen on his goatee like little icicles. “Please don’t kill me….”

Wyatt pushed him away, seeing the man held no weapon, and said, “This fight has commenced, Ike—get a gun, or get away.”

Ike scrambled out of the lot and into Fly’s, leaving behind him the continuing carnage that he’d so recklessly instigated. Claiborne was gone, too, and now so were the horses, taking off down the street, leaving their owners exposed in the lot.

Belly bleeding, Frank followed his horse, or tried to, staggered past Doc, stopping behind him and, on unsteady feet, his smile grotesque, aimed his sixgun across the brace of his arm at Holliday, saying, “I’ve got you now, you bastard….”

“Blaze away,” Doc said, turning sideways, making a narrow target of himself and taunting in his drawl, “You’re a
daisy
if you do….”

Frank got off a shot that creased Doc’s hip but that was all: Morgan, whose wound had sent him to his knees, fired at Frank and caught him under the ear. With that head shot, Frank should have been instantly dead, but he danced around mumbling to himself, although no longer shooting at anybody.

As this happened, Wyatt had whirled to trade shots with somebody in a window at Fly’s, probably that goddamned coward Ike….

At the same time Virgil, who’d also been hit in the left calf, staggered over to Morgan, and then Wyatt helped them both out into the street, while Doc was screaming at the finally fallen Frank McLaury, “The son of a bitch shot me! I mean to kill him.”

Wyatt went to Doc and said, “Morgan beat you to it, Doc. Let it go.”

Tom McLaury lay dying at the foot of a telegraph pole at Third and Fremont. Billy Clanton, shot to hell, was still alive, after a fashion—slumped against a wall, lamely, gamely trying to reload when Wyatt removed the weapon from his dying fingers, and tossed it to one side, not having the heart to take the kid’s last few minutes from him.

Anyway, the Earps and Holliday were all out of ammunition, too.

The firing had ceased, and a crowd was gathering. The gun-fight was over.

But much else had only begun. Behan wanting to arrest Wyatt (“Not today, Johnny”). The inquest, jail time, the hearing, cleared, charged again, the assassination attempt on Virgil, maiming Virge’s arm……and one terrible night, several months later, when Clanton’s Cowboy assassins shot Morgan in the back, killed that sweet boy while he and Wyatt played pool.

So many bullets. So much blood.

And yet the Arizona landscape rolled by his window in all its rugged glory, looking like hell and heaven to Wyatt, as if to say,
You’ve grown older, I’m unchanged
.

When evening came, Wyatt was seated in the steel diner, alone at a table for two, the car a modern marvel of indirect lighting and reflective surfaces, dark polished wood, gleaming metal, with a high, square-arched ceiling. For one dollar, he was served an eight-course meal: grapefruit, olives, salted almonds and radishes; consommé; filet of bass with cucumbers; lamb chops à la Nelson, with broiled fresh mushrooms; roast turkey with cranberry sauce; mashed potatoes and cauliflower; salad; and plum pudding, with cheese and fruit.

And coffee.

The big meal damned near made Wyatt sleepy, but the prospects of the lounge car woke him right up. A dignified dark-wood chamber filled with overstuffed leather easy chairs filled with overstuffed well-off males smoking cigars, pipes and the occasional cigarette, the lounge allowed Wyatt to enjoy a cigar himself as he made the acquaintance of a dentist, a banker, a mortician and a fellow who owned a Ford automobile dealership, in whose private compartment they all assembled for rye whiskey and a friendly game of poker.

Wyatt’s name had been his calling card with these gents, and occasional remarks amid the smoke and liquor and cards would pertain to that.

“Did you really shoot all those badmen in Arizona?” the banker asked, early on.

“My share,” Wyatt admitted.

“What was bad about them?” the mortician asked.

“We were Republicans,” Wyatt said. “They were Democrats.”

And that, in this group, had been enough.

Wyatt, who drank only a small polite glass, came away with one hundred and fifty-two dollars, mostly extracted from the dentist, who was no John H. Holliday, at cards at least.

Wyatt had the lower berth, and rather than dress for bed in its constricting confines (he was too tall for that, and maybe too old), he used the dressing room at the end of the car and walked back in robe and slippers. He found the steady rhythm of train travel soothing, and dropped off immediately, sleeping better and sounder than an innocent man.

Nonetheless, deep in the night, the screech of steel on steel and the whine of the train making a stop, perhaps more sudden than intended, woke him with a start; and he sat up and lifted a corner of shade and saw just another depot looming in darkness and drifting steam.

Perhaps his earlier reflecting on his Arizona days caused it, but immediately he was back there, at the depot in Tucson, on the train escorting Morg’s body….

Wyatt had no intention of making the whole trip to Colton, California, where his parents and Morg’s widow awaited—he’d already put together a posse of Doc, brother Warren, gunfighters Texas Jack Vermillion, Sherm McMasters and Turkey Creek Johnson, armed to the teeth, to go out after Frank Stilwell, Curly Bill Brocius, Ike Clanton, Johnny Ringo and Indian Charlie, the assassins who tried to kill Virgil and succeeded in murdering Morgan.

But then Wyatt had been warned that Ike and Stilwell and maybe several other Cowboys were watching every train coming through Tucson, going on cars with shotguns and searching for the Earps and any associates. So he and Doc decided to accompany the funeral party on the first leg of the journey.

Dusk draped the station as they pulled in, dark enough already to make the town a shapeless sprawl; blue shadows engulfed the desert as it stretched to mountains that were purple silhouettes against a burning, dying sky.

At the station a crowd awaited, as travelers arrived in welcome and departed in farewell and gawkers neither coming nor going got a gander at the Earp party, which the whole territory seemed to know was heading through Tucson that evening. A damned newsboy was hawking papers, shouting, “
Hell is coming! Read about it here
!”

Wyatt and Doc were guarding the wounded Virgil as he and his wife Allie and brother James and wife Bessie as well as Wyatt’s “wife” Mattie departed the train to eat in the station’s dining room.

On the platform, Doc tugged Wyatt’s sleeve, but Wyatt spoke first: “I see them.”

Frank Stilwell—the man witnesses said had back-shot Morg and narrowly missed Wyatt in the poolhall shooting—stood in a long duster with a shotgun barely hidden beneath, his affable oval face shadowed by a tan sombrero and a smile contradicted by the frown of a droopy dark mustache. Next to him lurked Ike Clanton, similarly attired right down to the shotgun, though Ike was as usual scruffier in appearance than the typical gaudy Cowboy.

“And,” Doc said, as the pair of assassins fell back into the crowd, “they see
us
….”

Neither Wyatt nor Doc ate, and when they accompanied the family back to the waiting private car, Wyatt spotted a string of flatcars about twenty feet down on the adjacent track, noting something glinting off the station’s gas lamps.

Something metal.

On the train Wyatt got his brother settled comfortably into a chair, Virgil’s wife next to him with her husband’s holster and sixgun around her waist in absurd support of their dire situation. And the Earps did make tempting targets in the well-lighted windows of the private car….

Wyatt put a hand on Virgil’s good shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Virgil’s eyes tightened. “I’ll be seeing you, too—if you take care of yourself.”

Wyatt nodded, gave Doc—in the aisle behind him—a glance that conveyed the need for him to stay with the party and guard them; then, double-barreled shotgun in one hand, Wyatt moved toward the rear of the car and soon was climbing down onto the side of the yards opposite the platform.

At just after seven, darkness had settled onto the station with the gas lamps and illumination of the train making blurry cameos in a stygian trainyard floating with smoke and steam. A cloud-smeared moon added little illumination, but once again he saw the metallic wink off rifle (or shotgun) barrels down on the flat-car, where two men lay prone waiting in ambush.

Wyatt began to run, his boots crunching on cinders, and this alerted the dry-gulchers, who, seeing him and his gun coming, a dark-flapping-coated apparition hurtling toward them, leapt off the flatcar so fast, they left their shotguns behind.

Ike Clanton was in the lead and he disappeared between flat-cars, but Stilwell stumbled, and when Wyatt reached him, the oval-faced Cowboy, his sombrero lost in the chase, gazed up and a terror seized him that had nothing to do with the shotgun barrels.

“Morg?” Stilwell asked. “Morg?”