Epitaph (11 page)

Luke nodded.

“Well, one evenin', Mr. Gordon got it into his thick-boned, liquor-addled, hayseed head that one of our bar girls would enjoy spendin' some private time with him. He was not an attractive suitor, and Miss Lucy was disinclined to accept his very insistent invitation. Mr. Gordon became cross, and Kate was on him like a duck on a June bug. Most men would have had the sense to get out and stay out.”

“But not Gordon.”

“He left but—like your Mr. Storms—it was only to find himself a gun. Came back shootin' at Kate and Lucy. I stopped him.”

“Jesus. Justifiable homicide?”

“That was the judgment, but afterward . . .”

“You couldn't stand the sight of the place.”

They both fell silent for a time.

Luke shook the mood off first. “Bat Masterson gave up on Tombstone, too. The Earps are still down there, last I heard. Course, there's always three or four of them around and even one Earp by
himself is fearsome enough to inspire courtesy. Me? I look like easy pickings. I'm going back up to Dodge.”

He didn't have to spell it out. Tombstone would eat John Henry Holliday alive.

Luke left Prescott the next day. A few weeks later, Doc left as well. Drifting south. Looking for warm, dry weather. He settled in Tucson, a little mountain town with a good climate and enough cash in circulation to support a small fraternity of professionals. He did all right for himself, too, making a decent enough living at the poker tables. There wasn't a reason in the world to visit a mining settlement so dangerous it scared Luke Short. Then he received a letter from an old friend.

Wyatt has a bad tooth
, Morgan Earp wrote.
He dont say so but he is nervis to go to another dentist. Can you come to Tombstone? We are doing good here. There is a liberry and they got a real nice piano at the Cosmopoliten hotel.

Ordinarily, the dentist would have told Wyatt to come to Tucson for treatment, but before making up his mind, he telegraphed a single question:

               
IS PIANO A STEINWAY STOP

Morgan's reply came about two hours later:

               
CHICKERING SQUARE GRAND STOP

Close enough, Doc thought, and bought himself a ticket to Tombstone. He wanted to play a first-rate piano before he died.

This ambition he had fulfilled in the company of the pathetic child who was currently being called Mrs. Behan. As for her “husband,” Doc had taken a dislike to the man before they even boarded the coach at the Tucson depot. John Behan was a talkative, pushy, self-important little jingo who misinterpreted courteous murmurs for
genuine interest. His enthusiasm for Tombstone was tiresome and at the end of their shared journey, Doc had seen no reason to stay in the city for more than a week. His agenda was uncomplicated: take care of Wyatt's tooth, host a party for his friends, and stamp the dust of Tombstone from his feet before anyone got a chance to kill or rob him.

Now, however, he had begun to reconsider his plans.

For one thing, he'd underestimated how punishing the journey here would be. Climbing back into a stagecoach when the bruises were still fresh held no allure. Seeing Morgan Earp—albeit briefly—had lifted his spirits. And after a night's sleep, he found himself receptive to the exuberance of a mechanical engineer with whom he'd just shared a restaurant table.

“We, sir, are sitting on what may be the richest silver strike in world history,” the engineer informed him as they lingered over a well-prepared meal in a very decent restaurant. “Tombstone will dwarf the Comstock strike before it's over. The ore assays at over forty-five hundred dollars' worth of silver to the ton and we're hauling a good twelve tons out of the works every day. Drilling still has to be done by hand with a steel and a hammer, and the ore is broken up with picks and extracted by the shovelful, but from that point on, processing is completely mechanized!”

There were underground tram systems. Sixty-horsepower hoists. Stamping mills, roasters, dryers, and retorts. Ironworks, lumber mills, cartage companies. Capitalists were pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the operations, but with refined silver at $1.20 an ounce, they were extracting millions. In the engineer's opinion, Arizona would produce enough wealth to bring the whole nation back to prosperity.

“All Tombstone needs is water and some good people,” he declared, “and it'll turn into a garden spot!”

The same might be said of hell, Doc thought, though it seemed unkind to say so in the face of such confident optimism.

Doc himself was too familiar with the natural history of these western boomtowns to be quite that sanguine. A handful of men
would stake out a grid in the wilderness and place gloriously deceptive advertisements in eastern newspapers, touting the location's business potential. Empty lots would be sold to the first hardy settlers, who arrived with the tools of their trade or a wagonload of stock. Soon, crudely lettered one-word signs leaned against tents or raw board shacks.
BLACKSMITH
.
BARBER
.
GROCERIES
.
LIQUOR
.
AMMUNITION
.

Often, that was the end of it. Cattle drives went elsewhere; a railroad surveyor chose a different route; a promising seam of ore narrowed and disappeared. Tents were stowed. Shacks were abandoned. Folks moved on.

Sometimes, however, a local industry flourished and a second wave of boomers would arrive. Proper walls went up around wooden floors. Roofs were shingled. Window glass was shipped in. Proprietors' names were emblazoned upon elaborate signs painted on false fronts, and it didn't matter that no one was fooled by those phony second stories. Even the pretense of impressive architecture could be gratifying in the middle of nowhere. A few men might make money in astonishing quantity for a while, but more often than not, the boomtown would dwindle into a mere village or disappear altogether within a few years.

Would Tombstone be different? It was too soon to tell. The streets remained unpaved. Wandering pigs snuffled through horse manure. Horseflies were a plague. Stray dogs fought for restaurant scraps in the alleys. The afternoon wind sent alkaline dust stinging into the eyes, and John Henry Holliday was not the only man in town with a chronic cough.

Even so, a stroll through Tombstone was impressive. There were dozens of restaurants. Several good hotels. A pharmacy. Two chartered banks. Three local breweries. A pair of ice factories. Saloons, gambling halls, and brothels were certainly in evidence, but families had settled here as well, and there were shops that sold them groceries, dry goods, clothing, and furniture. A sign on a vacant lot announced plans for a
school. The Episcopalians and Methodists already had churches; the Catholics were building one. At the edge of town, on a street called Toughnut, the foundation of a hospital had been laid near the pitheads, and . . . There it was!

The library.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen so many books. Five hundred? Six? At first he simply sat in one of the upholstered chairs, catching his breath and gazing at the shelves. Then he browsed the collection and borrowed a copy of Trollope's
The Way We Live Now.
If I don't finish it before I leave town, he told himself, I can mail it back from Tucson.

Book in hand, he returned to Allen Street, where he noticed some very fine gabardine on display at a haberdashery. Between his new hump and the most recent loss of weight, nothing he owned fit, but if he had one of those new double-breasted suits made, the additional fabric might give the impression of a few extra pounds.

My own false front, he thought as he walked on.

Admittedly, after Tucson's peace, Tombstone's industrial noise was wearying. The miners worked two ten-hour shifts, with time between to let the dust settle and the fumes dissipate. At any given hour, half were off duty, and Luke Short was right: There was a mountain of money here. But why compete with the Slopers for play against miners? he asked himself as he read the signs on office windows.

Tombstone had attorneys and physicians, bankers and accountants. Surveyors, geologists, metallurgists, hydrologists, chemists. At least six kinds of engineer. Intelligent men, literate men. Men capable of conversation, not just vulgar, repetitive, ignorant bombast. Men who gambled in quiet, carpeted rooms with crystal chandeliers and silk-upholstered chairs, where attentive waiters provided good cigars and excellent liquor to a clientele unlikely to assault or rob the player who won a game.

All around him, buildings were going up. The scent of raw pine boards reminded him of Atlanta after the war, when the city was getting
back on its feet. The streets and boardwalks of Tombstone teemed with people in a hurry, people with big plans and great expectations. He found himself smiling at the bustle, stepping more quickly, feeling less hobbled and enervated, more lively and mettlesome. It was as though he'd laid down a burden—

He stopped. And took a step back. And stumbled into a stranger, to whom he apologized without hearing his own voice. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he moved away from the crowds and noise and light and into a strange private silence where he was even more alone than usual.

When did it happen? he wondered. When did I give up?

It must have been sometime after he left the sanatorium.

He had done well with rest and decent meals, but the doctors said he needed a year or more of care, not just a few months, and he was running out of cash. “We'll buy our own place with the money we got left,” Kate decided. She would run the business; he would preside over the tables. They'd build a saloon up and sell it off at a profit. Then Doc could stay in the sanatorium until he had this damned disease beaten.

That was the plan until Mike Gordon all but demanded to be shot down in the street like a rabid dog.

It
was
justifiable homicide. He did not regret doing what he had to, but . . . afterward, simply walking in the front door of the saloon was unnerving.

Kate couldn't understand what was wrong. She would argue with him—coax and cajole and rail at him—but he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate and started losing money at the tables. One morning, he went to a lawyer, signed the property over to Kate and got on a train without saying good-bye.

He had drifted ever since. Just waiting to die, really. But now . . .

A piano. A library. Morgan and his brothers to keep the wolves at bay. Why not deal faro in Tombstone for a while? Build up a stake. A few big poker games and he'd have enough to spend a year at the sanatorium. Longer, if he had to.

Hope, long missing from his life, came rushing back. The silence around him shattered, and he stopped a passing stranger to ask, “I wonder if you can tell me where I might find the Oriental Saloon?”

“Two blocks down,” the stranger said, “at the corner of Allen and Fifth.”

JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY
would have no recollection of his first step on the twisted road that led him—and the Earps and the Clantons and the McLaurys—to a vacant lot behind a photography studio near the O.K. Corral, thirteen months later.

He would remember asking for directions to the Oriental. He would recall that he expected to be welcome in a saloon where Wyatt Earp owned 25 percent of the gambling concession. Everything else would remain fragmentary and muddled, apart from a single clear and terrifying memory: regaining consciousness in a room he did not recognize, one eye blinded by blood.

He would not remember shooting two men, nor did he have the slightest idea why he might have done such a thing, though Fred White tried to explain it several times. Later, he found a receipt in his wallet: He'd paid a $20 fine for disturbing the peace and $11.25 in court costs, but he did not know if his plea was innocent or guilty.

He would not remember making arrangements to have his belongings shipped from Tucson to Morgan's house, where he stayed while he recovered, and could only hope that he gave the delivery boy a decent tip when the trunk arrived.

Slowly, the annihilating headache would recede. Gradually, the mental fog would lift. But by then, it would be far too late to change what was going to happen on October 26, 1881.

I
N FRANK MCLAURY'S OBSERVATION, MODIFYING A
brand on livestock benefited from a certain amount of artistry. A lot of people didn't understand that. They thought it was simple to turn
U.S.
into
D.8
. Connect the ends of the
S
and you've got your
8.
Square off the left-hand bottom of the
U
, close off its top, and you're done. But Frank wasn't the kind of man who settled for good enough. An altered brand looked more convincing if he added a little extra curving bit at the top and bottom of the
D
's straight line. It wasn't easy either, not when the artist's canvas was an unhappy mule who preferred to be elsewhere. Frank had only finished with the third animal when his younger brother Tommy started to pace.