Return of Little Big Man (30 page)

Which Ike proceeded hastily to do, though at the door he turned and said, “I’ll thank you not to shoot me in the back.” And then he run out, followed by Doc’s and Morgan’s renewed curses and strong suggestions he arm himself for their next meeting.

I had lost my appetite for food but badly needed a drink, and headed for the next-door Alhambra saloon, which you could enter off the Occidental. But first thing I saw up front inside the Alhambra when I got there was Kate’s high-piled hair and hat on top of that, so I quick reverse-marched and went out through the lunchroom, on the sidewalk in front of which Wyatt and Morgan and Doc had been joined by Virgil, who was friendly enough to me on account of Allie.

So now when Virge bids hello to me in a genial fashion and steps away from the group, I says, thinking I might hear from him more about this feud between his family and the Clanton bunch, “We’re heading the same way, Marshal.”

“Oh, I’m not going home yet,” Virgil says. “I’m going to play some poker.” The only complaint I ever heard Allie make about him had to do with these all-night card games. “Say, Jack,” he goes on, “you want to play? So far there’s only Tom McLaury, Johnny Behan, and me.”

The full significance of that table never hit me till afterwards, but even at the time I thought I’m damned if I ever understand what makes the Earps tick: they considered the McLaurys their bitter enemies and despised Sheriff Behan, yet Virge would stay up all night playing cards with the same people.

Thinking back, I have sometimes regretted not playing a fourth hand that night, just for historical purposes, but I never did, not wanting to lose any of the nest egg I was building up again, and besides I had been superstitious about poker games ever since seeing Wild Bill get shot in the back while in one.

Sol begged off, telling Virge I was all-in after a long day at the bar, and went along Allen Street in the direction of home and was just across the street from the Grand Hotel when out of it come Ike Clanton, a pistol in his hand.

He glares over at me, and remember it’s night and easy to misidentify a person, so though I don’t know him personally, I quick crossed the street, hands away from my body, and come closer so he can see I’m unarmed.

He don’t shoot me, but he ain’t too friendly either. “You seen Doc Holliday? I aim to kill him.”

“I expect he went to bed,” says I. “You might want to sleep on it yourself.”

“I can’t sleep till I kill at least one of them sons of bitches,” Ike tells me. “They all ganged up on me while I was trying to eat my supper, and I wasn’t heeled.” He pushes past me and goes down the street with a stride that is both determined and none too steady, not the best condition in which to head towards trouble.

But in fact what Ike Clanton ended up doing that night was, if you can believe it, making a fourth in the poker game with Tom McLaury, Johnny Behan, and Virgil Earp!

Well, there wasn’t nothing I could do about it except to steer clear of all who was armed with blood in their eye: one of my bedrock principles and maybe the best reason why I have lived as long as I have. So when Ike started off down the street in one direction, I continued hastily in the other, with only that worry that Kate Elder might find my shack again. But she didn’t.

That trouble at the lunchroom was worked to Pard’s advantage: due to the interruption, a large hunk of the steak remained, and I brung it home for him.

I had now lived in the world of saloons and gambling halls so long it seemed normal to stay up most of the night and sleep through the morning, so next day I got up not far before noon, by which time Pard, who kept his usual normal hours, had gone about his business, such as it was, hours earlier, and I went downtown to get me a bath and a shave, and would you believe it the first person I run into, on Fourth Street, was Ike Clanton, and he had a wilder look in his eye than ever, and now had added a rifle to the revolver he carried previously.

I never knowed then he had played poker all night in that game with Virgil Earp, but he looked like he hadn’t gotten no sleep, with his squinty red eyes and drawn pale face.

He glares at me. “You seen Doc Holliday?”

“No, I have not,” I says.

“Well, I aim to kill that son of a bitch,” says he, brandishing his Winchester.

Now who should come around the corner right then and start towards us but Virgil and Morgan Earp, but Ike’s back is turned that way and he don’t detect them. I didn’t see no personal advantage in telling him. I just looked for a route of exit. Anyway, he goes on about how he has took his last insult from the Earps and their friends and how he ain’t scared of them bastards, bring ’em on one at a time or all together, and he is so deaf to anything but his own bluster that the brothers are able to walk right up unnoticed behind him, where Virge slams a Colt’s against his head, knocking Ike to the ground, and the Earps take his weapons away, arrest him for carrying them without a permit, and pulling him up, drag him into the recorder’s court, situated conveniently nearby.

Now there was at least two versions of what went on inside the court, according to what side you favored, and I wasn’t there so have had to figure out what was likely, and I believe Ike and Wyatt exchanged more threats of mayhem. But Virgil was town marshal and Ike broke the law, so the judge fined him and the marshal carried Ike’s rifle and pistol over to the Grand Hotel and put them into the custody of the barkeep. It was illegal for Ike to have firearms on his person in public without a permit, but they remained his possessions and he had a right to reclaim them when leaving town, which he was urged to do now.

I went on to the barber’s, and when I left there after my bath and shave, I should mention I wasn’t alone on the street that famous day. Plenty of other people seen what happened too.

Anyway, I turn the corner onto Fourth Street and just after exchanging good-days with Bauer, that butcher, who had stopped to talk with another fellow, I spot Wyatt Earp crossing the street on a diagonal from one side to meet Tom McLaury coming from the other, and no sooner do they meet than right away Wyatt punches young Tom in the face with his left hand and with his right draws the Colt’s and; does what he done so often to so many, including me, that it ought to be called not buffaloing but rather Wyattizing: hits him over the head with the barrel.

Tom falls in the dust in the middle of the street, and Wyatt continues on to the sidewalk, right near me. He still has got his pistol out, holding it down against his leg, and he gives me a cold, grim stare like maybe if I wanted to object it wouldn’t be wise.

One thing about buffaloing, it didn’t kill nobody. After a little while, probably waiting for Wyatt to get out of sight, Tom McLaury got up from the street, found his hat where it had rolled, dusted himself off, and begun to walk in a pretty groggy fashion, in the other direction to Wyatt’s. He had not been carrying any visible armament. I assure you from experience, him and Ike had bad headaches, which in Ike’s case lasted all day. Tom never had that long left to live.

Now, not having ate at all well the evening before, I decided to splurge and get me a good feed at one of the finer restaurants in Tombstone, the Can Can, regardless of expense, so I did so and got the whole business from soup to nuts, which was literal and included amongst its many courses fricassee of chicken, luxurious eating in them days, and custard pie, costing me fifty cents all told.

When I left the Can Can after the meal, there’s Sheriff Behan talking with Marshal Earp, standing on the opposite corner, out front of Hafford’s saloon, Virgil holding a short-barreled shotgun, and alongside him is his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, as well as Doc Holliday, on whose skinny frame hung a long heavy gray overcoat, which nobody but him would of worn in Tombstone at midday. Doc was also carrying a cane, which I never seen him do before, but somebody later said he was feeling weak from the consumption. If so, shooting people would buck him up, as would shortly be seen.

I never paid no attention to this bunch, nor them to me, and being inside the Can Can I had no way of knowing that Wyatt had not long before had another run-in with the Clantons and McLaurys outside George Spangenberg’s gun shop, a couple doors down the street, and Johnny Behan, who generally took the cowboy’s side in any difference of opinion, was likely doing so now.

As usual I had some leftovers from my meal wrapped in a bandanna as a treat for Pard, who by the way was eating so good he had filled out real nice since showing up all tattered skin and bones in Dodge. The only thing I worried about was if he wandered into Hop Town, the Chinese section of Tombstone between Second and Third streets, where, operating hand laundries, they was the hardest-working folks I ever seen. The white saloons might never close, but the people employed there got time off, whereas every Chinaman I ever saw in a laundry seemed to work all twenty-four hours, at least there he was, with his pigtail, amidst clouds of steam every time you passed, night and day, and they done all of this on an occasional bowl of rice—and maybe cooked dog, according to what them drinkers at the Oriental bar said, which ordinarily I took with a grain of salt, but having ate that dish myself while amongst the Cheyenne, I admit to having some concern.

Well, I was going along Allen Street in the homewards direction, and when I was passing the O.K. Corral I seen, directly across the street at the Dexter stables, a group of fellows including the Clanton brothers, Frank and Tom McLaury, and that Billy Claiborne I mentioned a while back for being one of the many who liked to be called Billy the Kid. This bunch was conferring together in a way that reminded me of the Earps and Behan, back on Hafford’s Corner, but I didn’t have no reason to connect the two groups, especially insofar as these boys seemed to be collecting their horses, ready to leave town for their ranches.

Seeing the open yard of the O.K. Corral, I decided to cut through there over to Fremont, in the alley between the Papago Cash Store and Bauer’s butcher shop, on account of I preferred the shops there as opposed to the stables of Allen. The only hazard was in passing Fly’s boardinghouse should Kate Elder be in residence, but the time being only early afternoon, she was probably still sleeping it off from last night, and in peace if Doc was where I last seen him.

Well, I was wrong and here’s what happened. I got past Fly’s all right, but between that house and Harwood’s was the vacant lot, and who’s in it now is not only Kate Elder, but she’s bending down to talk to—Pard!

If you recall the times she was at my place, Pard left and stayed away till she was gone, but she was paying a lot of attention to him now and using that kind of lingo dogs seem to like when it comes from women, maybe it’s the maternal touch, them animals having a childish streak all their lives.

Anyway, there’s old Pard, head cocked to the side, listening with every evidence of pleasure to her say stuff like “Oo, ain’t um a real nice doggy.” In fact he was so taken with this that he never paid no attention to me at all for a few seconds, and I was torn between what I admit was jealousy and a temptation to keep going before Kate noticed me. But Pard couldn’t afford to long neglect his main mission in life, to eat as much as possible, for what was only a novelty, so that black nose of his twitched on picking up the aroma of the pieces of chicken I was carrying in the bandanna, and he leaves his new friend and runs to the old one.

“Say there,” Kate says when she sees me emptying the contents of that bandanna on the ground, “that ain’t chicken, is it? Don’t you know them bones will get stuck in a dog’s throat?”

I couldn’t as yet tell if she had been drinking or not. I said without looking up, “That rule don’t apply with this here animal, who’s a cross between an Indian dog and a coyote. He’ll kill and eat a prairie chicken every part but the feathers.”

“I been thinkin’ of getting a nice pooch for my own self,” says she, smiling real sweet, and she adds, “For when I’m lonely, which is an awful lot.” She comes closer when I straightened up, and her smile has got warmer. She wasn’t drunk, so she didn’t remember she ever seen me before.

Pard of course had swallowed the food immediately and, seeing I never had no more, turned and loped off in that stride which could of been mistaken for a coyote by someone not too careful about what he shot, yet that dog had survived in a world full of menaces.

“Yes, ma’am,” says I, “and now I got to get me to work.”

“I expect you own one of the richer mines,” Kate tells me, moving near enough so I can smell her scent, though I should say as I had been smelling it since I was twenty foot away, it was now like my nose was in a perfume bottle. “A man important as you makes his own time.”

At this point along Fremont comes the Clanton boys, Ike and Billy, Billy leading his horse, and they stop in front of the lot where me and Kate was standing. Ike is talking to his brother, all worked up, and don’t pay us no attention, but Billy Claiborne, who had followed along behind, grins at Kate real familiar. I don’t know if he knowed her or not, but Allie Earp had told me he was always after every female he seen.

Kate sniffed and tossed her head. “Come on,” she says, “let’s move away from these cowboy trash.”

So her and me step out to the sidewalk, passing Ike and his brother, who walk into the lot, along with the horse. They still don’t pay us no heed. Ike’s doing the talking, and at this minute he mentions Doc Holliday, with obvious hatred.

Kate hears him too, and self-centered as she was, she interprets his use of the name as referring to herself, and with credit, and she grabs my arm and says confidentially, “It is true that Dr. Holliday is crazy about me, but I claim the right to make my own friends.”

She’s bigger than me and has a grip on my upper arm that is all but lifting my foot off the ground on that side, and right about the time I’m wondering that if to get free I’m going to have to stamp on her foot or something drastic, she gasps and says, “Oh, my God! Here he comes.”

And as I’m being pulled into the door of Fly’s house, I look down Fremont and see, a block away, coming in our direction, that bunch of tall Earps last seen at Hafford’s Corner, and alongside them is the slightly shorter figure of Doc Holliday.