Territory (54 page)

“You’d know best what took you into the company of outlaws.”

“What took me was a grudge against Jim Crane. I meant to kill him. But unlike you, I meant to do it face-to-face. And unlike you, I wasn’t prepared to murder four innocent men to see it done.”

Earp closed his eyes. Such a small thing … but it was like stone splitting away from a cliff face. “But that’s just what you did.”

“Is that what you’ll tell yourself, when you wake up from a sound sleep in the dark of night? That I spoiled your aim? You can try that.”

I missed something,
Mildred thought.
Something big.
Earp blamed Jesse for the massacre. Jesse was blaming Earp—but Earp hadn’t been there.

Earp stepped closer. His face, no longer controlled, was twisted with rage. “You no-account drifter. This ain’t a thing that ever crossed your mind, but it’s what I live by: I will protect my family any way I have to. If I die with a few souls on my conscience, that’s how it is. You cow-boy leeches, living off other men and caring for nobody, maybe that ain’t the way you think. But I am prepared to do what I’ve done and more, to see my family right.”

Jesse lifted his chin, looked past Earp’s shoulder. “Shall we ask Dr. Holliday about those who live off other men?”

Holliday flushed. “I suggest you have your quarrel without my help.” He turned to go.

“Stay.” Earp’s voice was like a slap. “I want Mr. Fox to hear this in front of witnesses.” He smiled. “You might want to hunt out less crowded parts, Mr. Fox. Tell your cow-boy friends to do the same. I don’t doubt you’ve got sand; but we fight bigger dogs ’round here.”

“And use the smaller ones to hunt the rats?” Jesse cocked his head inquiringly at Earp. “Do you know, a lot of blood soaked into the earth in Guadalupe Canyon. Five men’s life blood, spilled where they died.” A faint cold smile touched his face. “I left a good deal of my own there, too.”

Earp went pale.

“That gave me … a say in the matter, you might call it.” Jesse raised his eyebrows and waited. Earp didn’t speak. “So I did what I felt you’d given me the right to do.”

Earp shook his head. Sweat trickled into his trimmed moustache, his shining white collar.

“I’m glad we have witnesses.” Jesse turned his head a little, toward Holliday, toward Mildred. “If you forget what I’m about to say, they can remind you. But I doubt you will.”

Something changed; the air was cold and moist and smelled like the exhalation of an abandoned mine. Mildred shivered and clutched her arms, even as she thought,
He knew all along I was here.
She couldn’t hear Earp breathe now. She couldn’t hear herself.

But she heard Jesse’s voice, relentless and soft. “Never again on this ground will you kill a man at a distance. That power is sealed from you.”

A sort of binding, Jesse had said. A blood sacrifice.

“Nothing made of earth or air will do that work for you.”

The lock surrounded them, open, waiting like an inheld breath for the key to turn. Earp clenched his jaw and shut his eyes like a man in pain.

“No matter what weapon you bring, unless you can look in a man’s face when you strike, he is safe from you.”

The key turned. Mildred swayed with the force of it and clutched the door frame.

Earp raised a hand. Mildred was shocked to see it tremble. “You’re crazy.”

“You know I’m not,” Jesse whispered.

Holliday stared at Jesse in horror, in fascination. Then he looked to Earp. He opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed, and opened it again to laugh hollowly. “It is just possible that we have all, in our separate ways, underestimated Mr. Fox.”

Earp began, “I will still do—”

“—whatever it takes,” Jesse said. “But not like that. Not again.”

Earp made a fist of his raised hand. He looked at it as if it surprised him, as if he could command it with his eyes not to betray him. But it still shook. He let it fall, turned on his heel, and strode across the street and into the Oriental.

“So you’re another of them,” Holliday said. As one might say, “So you went to my college.”

Jesse closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “I am.”

“Well, don’t let it carry you away. He will do what he says; one of Wyatt’s great virtues. And when he does, I will back his play.” Holliday smiled. “Though I’ve a notion any sane man would take to his heels. But Wyatt does not share, Mr. Fox. Keep it in mind.” He touched his hat brim and followed Earp into the saloon.

Mildred left her doorway shelter and came to stand at Jesse’s elbow. “I hope I didn’t distract you.”

“If you had, I don’t think I could have done it.” The bruise stood out appallingly against his pallor.

The atmospheric oddities were gone; it was just rain, just air, just Allen Street.

“I set out to kill him,” Jesse said apologetically.

“Crane?”

He nodded. “I couldn’t do it. He was bad straight through. But he was also ignorant and scared nearly out of his wits. You were right, it was the law’s business.” His head drooped, but with a visible effort, he raised it again to meet her eyes. “Just for a moment, you were afraid I’d done it. I wanted you to know it was a reasonable moment’s doubt.”

“Very thoughtful of you,” she said, though her voice quavered. “I think
you ought to be in your bed.” She looked down the street and felt a jolt of alarm. “Where’s your horse?”

“Taking his ease at Gray’s ranch. It was a long, hard ride.”

“But he’s all right? Otherwise, I don’t think you can face Chu and live.”

“I need to say ‘You were right’ to Chu, as well.”

“Then you have a mortifying day ahead of you. Perhaps you should rest up for it.”

“All right, all right.” Jesse laughed weakly. “You need me to be quiet and go away, so you can piece together everything that just happened.”

“I need you to not fall down in the street.” But he was right; even she hadn’t known it until she heard it from his lips. Mildred shivered and thought,
I have a friend who will always know more of me than I do of him. Can I be comfortable with that?

No, not comfortable. But she thought she could learn to accept it. She held out her arm. “Feel free to lean, if you need it.”

He gave her an odd, penetrating look, as if she’d said more than she knew. Then he put his hand under her elbow. “The same to you. Anytime.”

Mildred stood at the edge of the cemetery, looking out over the valley to the mountains beyond. The rain had stopped, and the sun burned like wildfire on the western edge of the sky, washing the Dragoons in an unlikely candy-pink light. She heard the wash at the foot of the flats churning and bubbling in the blue shadows yards below her feet. A month’s rain had sprouted the seeds in the rocky soil, and grass fringed the paths and colored the plain like a vegetable blush. The land’s bones were just as they’d been on Decoration Day, but the skin over them was new and strange.

No, not strange. This was what the earth did, whenever there was rain enough.

She’d half expected everything to be different. If Wyatt Earp and Jesse Fox were nature’s laws overthrown, nature should be changed by it. But nature ran in its same unmanageable course. So perhaps they weren’t unnatural after all.

She walked back to David’s grave and crouched at its foot. “Well,” she said to his marker, and found that a dozen different thoughts had jostled each other aside on the way to her tongue. “He ought to be frightening,” she said finally. “I don’t know why he isn’t. If I put him in a story, he’d be downright hair-raising.”

Mildred grinned, imagining Jesse’s reaction to that. Maybe she’d tell him about M. E. Benjamin. Or maybe she’d just write the story and let the revelations fall where they might.

Revelations—oh, heavens, he still didn’t know about Chu, did he? He was going to find out that Mildred had known, and hadn’t told him. He’d probably like that less than being cast as a sorcerer in a frontier Gothic. She found she looked forward to the argument.

Fire, floods, Apaches, and rustlers; robbery, land swindles, and political feuds. Tombstone teetered between death and riches, and its people fought each other for every advantage. Some of them did it with a power that turned stone and blood into a weapon. And Mildred was in the middle of it, thanks to the
Nugget
and her own curiosity.

The warm and slightly quivery feeling in her chest was happiness. What would Jesse think of that when she told him?

When.
She felt the heat rise in her face. She stood up, shook out her skirts, and smiled down at David’s marker. “I’ll be all right. I promise.”

Water had welled up or trickled down from somewhere to form a still oval at her feet, like a miniature bowl of evening sky. She didn’t think it had been there when she walked up. That was water in Arizona Territory: appearing from nowhere, disappearing like a conjuring trick. Improbable, but not unnatural.

The sunset was over. She turned and started back to town.