Bloody Season (11 page)

Ike put his hat back on. “What good are them three to you without the reward?”

“I am running for sheriff.”

“Arrest Doc Holliday then. He killed Philpot.”

Wyatt got out his watch and popped open the face. “I guess I should be talking to Frank or Tom.”

“I never said I wasn’t thinking on it.”

Wyatt nodded and put away the watch.

Ike spat, baptizing the base of an awning post. “Billy Leonard and me are claiming the same ranch,” he said. “It would be a ripe one on him if he got put out of the way of it and I get paid besides.”

“He will laugh right up until they stretch his neck.”

“I will need Frank’s help.”

“Cut any deal that suits you. My terms are the same for one or a hundred.”

“His spread is in Sulphur Springs Valley. I can go talk with him and be back here Monday.”

Wyatt nodded again and walked away smoking.

On Monday, June 6, they met again in the lot behind the Oriental. The puckered yard smelled sharply of sour mash mixed with leather and sizing from Mover & Company Clothiers and the shoe store next to it. Ike was in the company of two men. One was a ruddy bantam in his early thirties with brown hair and tufted chin-whiskers. The second was blade-thin and of middle height and had light merry eyes set in a face the color of shale. All three were dressed in faded flannel shirts and bandannas and leather chaparreras worn shiny in the knees.

“Earp, this here is Frank McLaury.”

“We met.” McLaury’s twang was pure pioneer hard-scrabble, short and nasty. He looked at Wyatt, then away. The two had squared off over a string of stolen army mules some months earlier when Wyatt was a deputy sheriff and hard words had fallen.

“Joe Hill,” said the thin man, grasping Wyatt’s hand. A white grin gashed the dark face.

Ike said, “Joe was there when I put it to Frank, so I brung him in.”

“Split it up as you please,” said Wyatt. “It is still thirty-six hundred for the three or twelve hundred for each.”

“I’m concerned about the strings on it,” Hill said.

“You need not be. All I require from it is Leonardhead and Crane. As sheriff my first year’s salary will be ten times the reward.”

Ike grinned around a fresh plug. “Hell, we might could turn them in our own selves and run for office. I guess I can wear a tailcoat.”

Wyatt knocked out his pipe against his heel and made no response.

“What’s to stop this rooster from arresting us all for knowing where to find them?”

Wyatt didn’t look at McLaury. “Honest Johnny Behan would just lay all your guns and cartridge belts and truck on his desk and walk out of the room leaving the door open. I would trip over my spurs some night soon after and shoot myself in the back.”

“If the rest of the crowd ever learns who turned up those fellows we would do the same.” McLaury said.

“They will not learn of it from me.”

McLaury snapped his tongue off his teeth and looked away.

Wyatt went on. “You move Leonardhead and Crane where I can drop the lariat around them and then I will collect the reward and hand it over to you in cash. You need not appear in the transaction.”

Ike said, “I know Billy Leonard. You won’t take them in kicking. Does that money go dead or alive?”

“It would be my guess.”

“Guesses and promises,” McLaury said. “That is how you Earps work.”

Ike took aim at a dung-beetle and missed. The tobacco juice left a stain on the ground. He wiped his mouth. “Well, I will put no man’s head in the noose for free gratis. You find out if that bounty goes both ways.”

“I will have Marsh Williams wire Wells Fargo and ask.”

SAN FRANCISCO CALIF JUNE 7, 1881

MARSHALL WILLIAMS

TOMBSTONE ARIZONA

YES WE WILL PAY REWARDS FOR THEM DEAD OR ALIVE

L. F. ROWELL

“Who the hell is L. F. Rowell?” Ike handed the yellow flimsy to Frank McLaury.

“Assistant to John J. Valentine,” Wyatt said, “president of Wells Fargo.”

The four shared the shade under the awning in front of Dave Cohen’s cigar store on Allen along with a four-foot wooden chief scarred all over with match-tracks. The day was dry and hot and the cattlemen, in town clothes now, had all shed their coats. Wyatt was sweating slightly under his Prince Albert. Across the street, James Earp’s Sampling Room saloon and the office of the Nugget seemed to shimmer in the heat. A row of horses hung their heads at the hitching rail.

McLaury moved his lips as he read and gave the telegram to Joe Hill. “You did not give us up to Williams and this fellow Rowell?”

“I said I would not.”

Ike said, “They are hid across the New Mexico line in Yreka. We can get them to come as far as Frank and Tom’s ranch. We would take it as a kindness if you would jump them before they get there so it will look more proper. Soldier’s Holes would be a place.”

“What story will you tell them?”

“Frank come up with it.”

“We will say a paymaster is on his way from Tombstone to Bisbee by that route to pay off the miners,” McLaury said. “The devil will have them by the balls when they hear of it. They need the stake.”

Ike shifted his plug. “Joe will carry the message. Folks trust Joe.”

“It is my eyes.” Grinning, Hill returned the flimsy to Wyatt.

He folded it twice and poked it into his vest pocket. “Let me know when you arrive at a date. I will have a posse on hand at Rabbit Springs on the Bisbee road. Naturally the reward will be less expenses for outfitting and horse hire.”

“Hold on, we never said that.”

“Ike, you still owe for that horse your brother Billy stole from me.”

“You got that horse back!”

Hill said, “Let it go. How much can it come to?”

“Cross us up on this and next time it won’t be just your horse,” McLaury rapped.

Ike shrugged into his coat, flipping down the lapels. “Pleasure doing business with you, Marshal.”

“I am a city police officer.”

“Soon it will be sheriff.”

Joe Hill unsnapped his fob and ran the chain through the buttonhole in his coat. “Who can I leave my watch and chain with before I ride out?” he asked Wyatt. “This town is full of thieves.”

Wyatt took them, and didn’t see the three again until after Tombstone burned to the ground.

Chapter Eight

T
he fire began with a barrel of whiskey and ended under several thousand gallons of water; and when it was over, the four blocks bounded to the north and south by Fremont and Toughnut streets and to the west and east by Fourth and Sixth streets had ceased to exist.

Talk had it that a number of customer complaints had caused a saloon keeper on Allen Street to take a barrel of Thistle Dew out of service. While measuring the amount he was returning to the distributor he lost his notched stick through the bunghole and called for his bartender to help fish it out. The bartender came over, forgetting about the lighted stump of cigar clamped in his teeth.

The sheet of flame singed both men’s moustaches, scaled a brown muslin curtain, and spread across the pitch-smeared ceiling with a whump. From there it battered out a window to leap the alley to the hardware next door. Most of the buildings on Allen were board and batten, with common walls, and the fire rolled in an orange ball across the rooftops in front of a dry wind, limning windows until the panes tipped out and blistering the paint on suspended signs pushed horizontal by the heat. A case of cartridges went off in a gun shop with a crackle and a twang of bouncing lead and a stack of powder kegs exploded, lifting the roof and splaying the sideboards like a barrel bursting. But even that roar was lost in the rumble of the firestorm cartwheeling through the heart of town. A column of smoke as black and thick as a muckslide poured into the sky, leaving a stain visible from as far away as Tucson and Prescott. The bell in the firehouse clanged, steam whistles bellowed in the silver mountains, and Tombstone twisted and blackened like a scorpion in a skillet.

The town’s pride was brought around, a fourth-class Jeffers Jigsaw steam fire engine, thirty-five hundred pounds of polished brass mounted on circus-wagon wheels with blurring flywheel and a seven-and-a-half-inch piston stroke that sounded like a cow pulling its feet out of a river bottom. But while the horses in the four-hitch team were broken to the racket, no one had thought or else known how to train them to behave around a conflagration, and four men in miners’ helmets and dampened slickers were required to hold the plunging leaders while their companions socketed the pump to the main. The gauges measured, the pump began drawing, and then the limp canvas hose grew erect and ejaculated a blue-white geyser in a high spreading arch over the wall of fire.

The miracle was flawed. The pipeline from the Chiricahua springs was too long and poorly graduated, and the little pump was unequal to the pressure required. The geyser towered and fell and squirted and spluttered and the flames marched on. Men formed brigades, filling from the horse troughs and passing and offering bucketfuls to the blaze. Women sluiced down blankets and plunged smoldering brooms into the troughs and slapped the flames off awning posts and out of one another’s skirts when they got too close. Eye-whites glittered in faces carved from soot and masked with bandannas from the noses down. Riderless horses set free from the corrals galloped up and down Allen whinnying and blowing.

By nightfall the devastated blocks formed right triangles of charred and fallen framework against a smudged sky, glowing in jointed sections like snakeweed. The homeless slept under friends’ roofs and on the floor of Nellie Cash-man’s Russ House and crews stood watch outside in two-hour shifts for gusts and smoldering straw. In lighted kitchens firefighters applied axle grease to blistered hands and faces. No one had died, and when the sun rose over a gutted settlement the next day, the survivors would pluck that knowledge smoking from the ashes and polish it with self-congratulation until it gleamed.

At first light the Mexicans who followed that trade were pouring and baking adobe bricks at five times the usual speed and the first wagons departed for the Huachucas with axes and bucksaws for the materials required to raise Tombstone from its ashes. Saloon keepers sifted the remains of their establishments for undamaged fixtures, and men armed with pinch bars and sledgehammers knocked apart foundations and chimneys weakened by the flames and carted away charred beams and furniture in wheelbarrows.

Other individuals just as enterprising were at work.

Virgil Earp jangled shut the door of the Epitaph office on Fremont and crossed the sun-patched floor to take the hands of John Clum, standing behind his desk, and bank cashier Milton Clapp, who struggled up out of the depths of a horsehair armchair to put his feet on the floor and look up at the newcomer. Clapp was short and scarecrow-lean, all elbows and angles under his black suit, and wore large gold-rimmed spectacles whose thick lenses made his eyes appear swollen. Virgil nodded at Colonel William Herring, a man as large as himself but considerably broader across the middle, who kept his seat. The three men led the Citizens Safety Committee.

“Marshal, I am happy to see you are not a casualty.” Clum retook his high-backed swivel and indicated an empty chair between the other two visitors with a hand swathed in bandages.

Virgil accepted the seat, sweeping his coat-frock behind the handle of his Army. “I took firebreak duty on Fourth. I got a blister off the axe handle.” He showed his palm.

“George Parsons appears to have sustained the only injury worth noting,” Clum said. “A balcony collapsed under him and he smashed his nose. I find it amazing that no one was hurt more seriously or killed. The Apaches would say that the sun and moon were smiling on us all yesterday.”

“Except George,” Virgil said.

“Except George.” Clum frowned as the conversation turned away from one of his favorite subjects, his three years as agent in charge of the San Carlos Apache reservation. “In any case we are presented with the opportunity to rebuild Tombstone along the lines of a proper city instead of a ramshackle arrangement of canvas and clapboard. To do that we must first smoke out the vermin.”

“Lot jumpers,” Virgil said.

“You are aware of them.”

“You can’t not be. Some of them have been squatting on what’s left of the better saloons and sporting houses since before sunup. They are commencing to put up tents.”

“It is a shabby business. The consensus, Clapp’s and Colonel Herring’s and mine, is that the man who was in possession of the lot when the fire broke out is the lot’s legal owner, and that the courts will establish that in time. However, the process could take months.”

“Meanwhile the lot jumpers are free to throw up their buildings as they please and the devil take aesthetics and the rights of the owner,” Herring said.

Virgil stood. “Give me twenty-four hours.”

Clum said, “Don’t go off half-cocked.”

“I am always at full cock.”

“Propriety must be observed. This committee has only local sanction and we cannot afford to have Governor Fremont and the United States Army come haring in here on the pretense of establishing order. Cochise County is scarcely five months old and already they are blathering about us on the floor of Congress. A body count at this stage would undo all our fine intentions.”

“Blame it on the fire.”

“Some of these jumpers are supposed to be gun men,” Clapp pointed out.

“Some of them are sure enough gun men,” Virgil said. “I cannot tell my boys to leave their arms at home. A fine intention like that would make for a dandy body count and all of it on our side.”

Clum ran a hand back over his bald head. His hair had begun to fall out before he was twenty and his political enemies considered the statesmanlike dearth responsible for his victory in the last election. “Concentrate upon putting the fear of God into them short of killing.”

“That is night work.”

“So long as it is done soon we don’t care what time you do it,” said Colonel Herring.

“Give me twenty-four hours.”

By sunset the charred rubble on Fremont and Toughnut and at the upper end of Allen had produced a heavy crop of tents made from sticks and wagon sheeting in rounded heaps like mushrooms. In front of them the claimants prepared dinner in pots over fires built from the unburned debris, turning the air greasy with beans and bacon and prairie onions, the long barrels of horse pistols hugging their thighs. They tossed one another tobacco pouches and plugs and exchanged Cornish Jack jokes that grew steadily more coarse with the loss of light.