Epitaph (34 page)

“I kept you off the street for a while. That's gotta count for something, Mattie.”

Her face crumpled, and she began to cry. “But . . .
why
? Why did you bring me here if you never wanted me anyways?”

He paused, one hand on the doorknob. When he had an answer for her, he opened the door and spoke the only truth he could offer.

“Mattie,” he said, “I am damned if I know.”

“I TOLD YOU SO,”
Allie said, standing at the front window. “Maybe now you'll believe me when I tell you what's in the cards.”

Virgil hauled himself out of his chair with a groan and came to her side. Wyatt—carpetbag in hand—was walking away from his house. Mattie was standing on the veranda, face contorted, hands fisted. You could hear her cursing through the window glass.

“Hangman, upside down,” Allie reminded Virgil, for she'd been casting tarot all afternoon. “I told you Wyatt was due for a change.”

Well, hell, Virg thought. That could mean anything! A change of shirt. A change of job. A change of luck. A different haircut. Anything.

“I'll tell you something else,” Allie added smugly. “Morgan needs to tend to his business at home.”

Virg looked at her sharpish.

“I laid the cards for Lou,” Allie said. “Lovers, reversed. She's got someone on her mind, Virg. And it ain't Morgan she's thinking about.”

THAT WINTER,
Tom McLaury went for days at a time without another human being to speak to, but it was no hardship. He enjoyed the quiet companionship of his draft horses, Peggy and Bob. He talked to the dogs, too, and to a pair of Mexican pigs he'd bought recently.

“Your babies'll be meat someday,” Tommy told the pigs when he fed them, “but I'll give them a good life until then. That's about all a pig can ask for.”

As the weather warmed, Tom got out into his fields every day, keeping track of the growth and taking note of wildflowers growing along the edges of his fields. Later he would dig them out and pot them up in old coffee cans. Lifting each plant from the earth, gently teasing the roots loose, he would talk to Louisa Earp in his mind, planning what he'd say when he saw her next.

He would tell her, “Most folks here take what they want from the land and move on. I love you because you are trying to make things better.”

He would tell her, “The Lord meant you for me. I know you're
married, but you are with the wrong person.” If she disagreed, he'd say, “I will be patient and wait for you. A good farmer knows how to do things by littles.”

One day he would load the buckboard with sand verbenas and primroses, with lupines and gold poppies and larkspur, and drive to Tombstone and knock on her door. “You see?” he'd say. “I have brought you a wagon filled with spring and love.”

L
ISTEN TO THIS, BUDD!” MORGAN EARP SAID AROUND
a mouthful of lunch.

Budd Philpot was a patient young man, but everyone has his limits and Budd was reaching his. “Jesus, Morgan! Lemme eat in peace, willya?”

“You'll like this,” Morg promised. “It's in a book, but it's just like what we do.”

Morgan was the second of the Earp brothers to serve as the shotgun guard on the stages Budd drove between Benson and Tombstone. Most folks liked Morgan better that Wyatt, but Morg could be a talker and a lot of the time, he talked about books. Worse yet, he would
read
to you from the books, like you were just as interested in them as he was. Which was not the case.

“There's a stagecoach called the Dover mail, see, and it's in England a long time ago, but it carries passengers and the mail just like we do. There's a driver like you and a guard like me because—” Morgan held up the book and began to read aloud. “Robbery was ‘the likeliest thing upon the cards.' And then it says that the guard had an arms chest with ‘a loaded blunderbuss' and ‘six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a . . . a substratum of cutlass.' See? That's just like our box, except I've got a shotgun and revolvers. No cutlasses, though.”

“What in hell's a stradum?” Budd asked irritably. He motioned to the waitress for more coffee.

“Beats me,” Morg admitted after a few moments. “We can ask Doc Holliday when we get back to Tombstone.”

“I don't want anything to do with that sonofabitch.”

“C'mon, Budd! Doc's not so bad.”

Budd grunted. He was friendly with Milt Joyce and not inclined to be forgiving about what happened in the Oriental last September. Milt hadn't lost his hand to Holliday's bullet, but his fingers were never going to work right again. Morgan claimed the shooting was a misunderstanding, but Budd Philpot knew what he knew. Holliday was a bad-tempered, argumentative drunk who left bodies in every town he got run out of, and Budd didn't give a damn if all the Earps in the world thought different.

Morg went back to reading aloud about the Dover mail coach, and even if Budd didn't say so, it
was
kind of interesting. He admired how the book talked about horses, for example, especially about how the lead horse would shake his head and rattle his harness because he was “an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill.” That was pretty funny. Budd liked another part about how the horses drooped their heads when they were pulling uphill and how “they mashed their way through the thick mud.” Mashed. That was good. That said it just right. That was just how it was, getting a team over the hills between Benson and Tombstone where the road skirted the San Pedro River near Drew's Station. The track was sandy there and washed out whenever it rained. Gullies crosscut the road, and there were ditches on either side and steep little rises. Budd Philpot had earned his reputation as the Kinnear Stage Company's best driver, but he hated that part of the run as much as anyone. You were between towns, a long way from the law in either direction. Those hills and gullies provided plenty of cover for robbers on horseback, so Budd listened with more interest than usual to what Morgan was reading that day, until lunch was over.

They had a full coach for this run. Two salesmen, a lawyer, and another batch of whores on their way to Tombstone. The girls were all aflutter because Morgan was a good-looking sonofabitch, though if Morg ever took advantage of that kind of thing, Budd never saw it. Word was, Morgan Earp had raised his share of hell when he was younger, but now he said he was as good as married, and that seemed to be the case.

“Will you protect us if there are robbers?” That's what passengers always asked a shotgun guard, and Morgan always said, “I will do my best.” Which was sort of a lie. Drivers like Budd worked for the stagecoach company, but Morgan worked for Wells Fargo. His job was to protect the strongbox. Kinnear's passengers were a secondary consideration at best. Truth be told, passengers were in a lot more danger when the stage was carrying a Wells Fargo shipment, which everybody could see when they did. Put a man with a heavy, short-barreled shotgun across his knees up next to the driver, and you might as well paint a big sign on the side of the coach that said, “There's something worth stealing on board.” Silver bullion, payroll for miners, bank deposits. If they unloaded the strongbox at the Benson train station and if there weren't many passengers, Budd would ask the guard to sit inside on the way back to Tombstone so thieves would see there wasn't any money and leave the coach alone.

Once he was up on the bench, Morgan wasn't any chattier than Wyatt, which is why it was a surprise, and an unwelcome one, when they were a few miles out of Benson and Morgan said, “Well, now . . . what d'ya spose these boys want?”

Budd glanced at him.

“Left side,” Morg said. “Just past that white thorn.”

Budd squinted through the late afternoon dust and swore.

“Two more, right side,” Morgan said.

“Give 'em the goddam box,” Budd suggested. He wasn't joking, either.

“Where's the fun in that?” Morgan was grinning, but his eyes were
on the horsemen. “They call halt—you drop down into the boot, but hang on to those ribbons, y'hear? I'll take the ones on the left first, and then I'm gonna swing right and put the other barrel into that pair. Stay low till I tell you different.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Budd said. “Oh, Jesus.”

But he gripped the reins more firmly and got himself ready for trouble.

NOW THAT WYATT WAS LIVING
in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, his brothers would come by the hotel restaurant two or three nights a week to share a meal with him. Sometimes other friends joined them. Turkey Creek Jack Johnson or Texas Jack Vermillion, maybe. Fred Dodge or George Parsons, sometimes. Ordinarily, Morgan would have made a good story out of what happened that afternoon, but on March 10, it was just Virg and Wyatt and Doc Holliday, and while some of what Morg told them
was
pretty funny, nobody was laughing.

“I don't know who was whiter, Budd Philpot or them poor damn Mexicans. I never saw hands in the air faster,” Morg was saying. “They was out looking for a string of remuda horses that got loose and wanted to ask if we'd seen 'em, so they was standing by the track, waiting for the coach. All of a sudden they're staring down the wrong end of a shotgun with me ready to put half a pound of buckshot into 'em. And you shoulda heard Budd! One minute he's telling me to hand over the strongbox, and the next he's cussing 'em six ways from Sunday for scaring him shitless.”

“Idiots,” Virg rumbled. “Standing in the road like that, they was asking to get killed.”

Morgan shook his head at the memory. “Innocent men just don't think like guilty ones, I guess. They didn't think they was doing anything wrong—”

“And they weren't,” Doc noted. “I don't imagine they realized how that would appear to someone who was expectin' trouble. And a lawman is always expectin' trouble.”

“Damn straight,” Virgil snapped. “The day you drop your guard is the day they get you.”

“Pardon my elbows,” Doc murmured, pushing his plate away so he could rest his forearms on the table and take some pressure off his chest. “What would've happened if Morgan had opened up on unarmed men?”

“Prolly woulda been some kinda investigation,” Virg said, “but he'd have been within his rights, is my opinion.”

“Performance of his duty,” Wyatt confirmed, “but it's a hell of a thing.”

“Bad day for them,” Morgan said, “and a bad night for me.”

“More'n one,” Wyatt said quietly.

“You know,” Morg said after a time, “when we came over that little rise and I saw those fellas, I'd have sworn it was a holdup. They had bandannas over their faces 'cause of the dust, and my heart's going like a steam engine, and I've got both barrels cocked, and poor Budd's there next to me, yelling, ‘For crissakes, shoot those sonsabitches!' I was
this close
to firing when I realized they weren't armed. If they'd been a little slower about raising their hands . . .”