Territory (3 page)

“Well?” Ike stuck out his chin. “I’ll wager you can’t prove that’s your horse.”

Fox’s voice was so soft Doc had to hold his breath to hear it. “I don’t feel like taking your money.”

Stand aside, Ike,
Doc thought happily.
Stand aside or prepare to throw down.
The room was thick with the feeling before the lightning. But Fox’s gun was behind the bar. Had he forgotten he wasn’t heeled?

Fox drew his spectacles a little way down his nose. That was all: just slid them down and studied Ike over them like someone’s maiden auntie might.

Fox’s eyes were a penetrating light brown. The lamplight caught in the nearest one, like a glass of good bourbon with a flame shining through it.

In that suspended moment, Doc was gripped by a feeling he couldn’t name. It wasn’t fear. He feared only one thing, and no man could bring that down on him. But it was enough like fear to make him heedless of the weight in his lungs.

Ike stepped aside, his mouth pressed shut under his moustache. Fox pushed the spectacles up. The lightning had struck and gone, and left cold empty air behind it.

Fox walked outside. Ike, Milt, and Billy followed him, unconscious as ducklings. Doc pushed away from the bar and followed, too, as far as the doorway, where he leaned.

There was a buckskin horse of exceptional quality tied to the rail. It raised its head, nostrils flaring, as Fox reached the edge of the boardwalk.

“That’s a handsome fellow,” Doc said.

Fox glanced back and smiled. Then he untied the horse, laid the reins loose over the saddle, and walked away into the street.

Halfway across he stopped and whistled, three carrying notes.

The horse’s ears swiveled at the sound. It lurched away from the rail and covered the ground between it and Fox in a few brisk steps. Fox looked over his shoulder at the men standing outside the Oriental and nodded. Then he turned back up Fifth Street with the horse behind him like a dog at heel.

“You forgot your iron,” Doc called after him.

Fox stopped and looked back. The round green lenses flashed in the dawn.

“It’ll wait for me,” he replied. He, and the horse that was unquestionably his, went on up Fifth and passed out of sight.

Doc laughed.

“That son of a bitch is looking for trouble,” Ike grumbled.

“I doubt it,” Doc replied. “But if he is, you’re not the man to bring it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Not a thing, Ike. You do as you please.” Doc smiled up at the morning sky. He felt pleasantly tired, sleepy even. Now he could go back to Fly’s and maybe catch a few winks before he set off after the posse.

 2 

Mildred Benjamin regularly stepped out her front door braced for whatever practical joke Nature had prepared. This morning she found the best one of all: perfection.

She stood squinting and wondering like a creature let out of the Ark. The air was cool, and fragrant with sage from the foothills. Some freak breeze had laid the dust and smoke from the mines, and the Dragoon Mountains looked as close as the other end of town. The sky was blue and wide in a way she could never describe in letters to her sisters in Philadelphia. The closest she’d managed was that, out here, you understood the true circumference of the Earth, because you could see it reaching past you on every side.

Mildred thought of her riding habit in the clothespress, and the sorrel mare for hire at Crabtree’s Livery. Between Tombstone and the San Pedro River lay miles of open land.

But she could almost hear Harry Woods saying, “News waits for no one,” as if that were one of its chief virtues. One did not let the news down. She checked the anchorage of her hat, flicked the pleated hem of her skirt aside, and closed her front door.

“Good morning, Mrs. Benjamin!”

Mildred turned to find Lucy Austerberg coming down the street, skirts clutched up out of the dust, face shaded by a gypsy hat and a parasol. Mildred’s mother had probably prayed her daughters would have skin like Lucy Austerberg’s. If so, God had been busy with other things that day.

“Good morning, Mrs. Austerberg. Lovely morning.” Sacrilege, to describe it as merely lovely.

“You haven’t heard?” Lucy said, and pursed her little pink mouth in lieu of a frown.

“I must not have,” Mildred said.

“Someone robbed the stage last night.”

Mildred felt herself stiffen like a pointer dog at a bird. “Which stage? Where did it happen?”

“My goodness, I don’t know. My Frederick went out with the posse, but that’s as much as I’ve heard. Now I have to do the accounts and the ordering that he’d have done, so if I forget something, he can just blame the robbers for it, that’s all. What a quick walker you are, Mrs. Benjamin!”

“Sorry, Mrs. Austerberg. I’d best get on to the office. You’ll forgive me?”

“Of course, Mrs. B.” As Mildred set off at an unladylike pace, Lucy called, “You let me know if you hear anything, won’t you?”

Which was a polite way of saying, “Pass along anything the
Nugget
doesn’t see fit to print.” Mildred gave her a wave that could mean yes or no, and headed for Fourth Street.

For no reason she could name, she thought of her grandmother. Bubbe would have said that good and bad always arrive on the same horse. She would have looked out Mildred’s front door that morning and commented on some omen that only she seemed to have heard of, a black bird on a white fence, or an eddy of dust, or a broken bootlace three days before.

Mildred had come west to outrun predestination, supernatural or otherwise. She wondered if Bubbe had done the same in her time.

Mildred pushed through the door of the
Nugget
office, making the bell clash. The smell wrapped around her: ink, machine oil, newsprint, and cigars. It was as far from the air of the open country as she could imagine; it was the smell of human concerns and human pride. But she felt it settle her nerves and sharpen her mind as it always did. Here rumors were sorted into facts or lies. Here the world extended beyond the reach of any one man, to San Francisco, New York, London, Vienna, Cairo, St. Petersburg, Peking. Here the random course of life could be shaped by words until it became news.

Harry Woods looked up from his typewriter and the mess on his desk, peering through his magnifying spectacles and not quite focusing on her.

“You’re late, Millie.”

“I’m early.” She yanked the pin out of her hat and tossed it on a peg. “Just because you sleep under the press and start work at dawn doesn’t mean the rest of us will.”

“News doesn’t wait for sunup.”

“So I heard. A stage holdup?”

“Attempted holdup. Bud Philpot’s dead.”

It stopped her in mid-breath. Not a roughneck, not a rounder, not a rustler, but a man everyone spoke well of, who was only doing his work. “I’ll set up the page. Do they know who it was?”

“If you’ll quit talking and let me think, you’ll get the whole story off the copy.”

She took her big drill apron from the peg beside her hat and wrapped it around her. With half her mind, she thought,
Bud brought me my package of books just last week, so I wouldn’t have to go to the Wells Fargo office.
The other half was thinking about the size of type for the headline announcing his death. No, “Driver killed” would be the subhead.

She caught herself and snapped, “This is no place for a lady of delicate sensibilities.”

“Then thank God you’re not one. Be a waste of your ability to spell.” Harry yanked a sheet out of the machine, added it to a sheaf of others, and handed it to her.

“And to read your typewriting.” The pages were salted with crossed-out sentences, scrambled words, and flying letters.

It was the Kinnear stage north to Benson. Bud Philpot had been driving, with Bob Paul up as guard. Somewhere between Tombstone and Contention, Philpot had gotten stomach cramps and turned the reins over to Paul. So when the stage was stopped near Drew’s Station, Philpot was the one in the guard’s seat. The one who drew the robbers’ fire.

Paul had grabbed the dying Philpot as the horses bolted, and got the stage into Benson with the Wells Fargo strongbox untouched. An outside passenger named Roerig had been wounded, and died at Benson. Sheriff Behan, Deputy Breakenridge, and a posse of Tombstone citizens had left town in the small hours, and at last report had crossed the robbers’ trail and were in pursuit.

“Doesn’t tell me much,” Mildred said.

“Tells you more than you knew when you walked in. If the posse finds anything, we’ll know; I asked Break to tell anyone he sent back to stop here first.”

“News before peacekeeping? Shame, Harry, and you the undersheriff.”

“Then it’s not news before peacekeeping if I hear first, is it? John Clum’s only the mayor.”

“If he’s riding with the posse, that’s the end of your exclusive.”

“Read on, Mrs. Benjamin, read on.”

She did. John Clum, Tombstone mayor and editor of the
Epitaph,
in company with Messrs. Parsons and Abbot, declined to join the posse, instead remaining in town to keep an eye on several persons they identified as suspicious characters.

“Oh, Lord. Oh, Harry—”

“You laugh now, you should have seen those three skulking around as if they were in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Thank God they didn’t have guns on ’em.”

“I know if I’d robbed a stage on the other side of Contention, I’d ride straight back to Tombstone and linger about looking suspicious until I was sure the news had got to town.”

Harry Woods grinned. “Now, you see? You keep up that kind of rational thinking and you could be mayor someday.”

“I count on the
Nugget’
s endorsement.” Mildred pinned the copy to her table. “Any idea how much was aboard?”

Harry smiled. “Twenty-five thousand dollars in silver.”

Her hands froze over the type case. “Good God. You think they knew?”

“I think if I were robbing stages, I’d want a little more than luck and a fast horse. Say, a friend in the right place?”

Mildred turned to Harry’s copy and read the last paragraph, the one she’d only skimmed. “Well, there’s no libel suit here.”

“Don’t worry, there isn’t going to be. But I’m looking forward to hearing what the posse finds.”

Mildred looked out the window at her perfect day, and thought,
This is nothing. It’ll dry up like water at noon, the way most things do.

After all, when Curly Bill Brocius shot Fred White, it had turned the town into an anthill of vigilante committees that threatened never to settle. But it had. And Fred had been city marshal. Poor Bud Philpot was no one in comparison.

Here in this room, death was just another fact entered into the record. News didn’t grieve. It took note, moved on. Mildred filled the composing stick with the first line of the body copy.

She was peripherally aware of reporters ducking in to deliver copy or get assignments. She heard the voice of Richard Rule, the city editor, and looked up. He and Harry were absorbed in speculation about the robbery. Reporters had time to gossip; typesetters had work to do. She smiled to think how Harry and Rule would take that.

The light from the window was bright enough to set type by. Nearly the equinox, she realized as she laid in the leading strips on the fourth paragraph. Which meant she’d been in Tombstone … a year? She and David had arrived in early March, and the high desert was daubed with color after a wet winter. She’d stared, awestruck, at the ocotillo: cockades of bloom so red they hurt her eyes sprouting above the inch-long spines. Like a peacock with fangs, David had suggested, laughing.

David had been dead for eight months, one and a half weeks. Their life together had taught her she was stronger even than she’d thought. His dying had been her last lesson.

Mildred squinted down at the copy and found a fearsome garble of typewriting and pencil. “Harry?” she called. “What in heaven’s name did you mean by S-M-O-L-I-N?”

No answer. She looked up—into the face of a stranger.

The window light haloed the man who stood on the other side of the waist-high railing. Had she missed the bell over the door? Or had it rung at all?

She gazed a little wildly around the office. She was alone.