The Last Ride of German Freddie (5 page)

“That's what I've been trying to tell them!” Billy Claiborne added, and then moaned, “Oh Lord, they'll make a blue fist of it!”

“Hell,” said Tom McLaury. The side of his head was swollen where Wyatt Earp had clouted him. “We've got to fight the Earps sooner or later. Might as well do it now.”

“I agree you should fight,” Freddie said. “But this is not the time or the place.”

“This place is good as any other!” Tom said. “That bastard Earp hit me for no reason, and I'm going to put a bullet in him.”

“I'm with my brother on this,” said Frank McLaury.

“Nobody can stand up to us!” Ike said. “With us five and Freddie here, the Earps had better start praying.”

Exasperation overwhelmed the exaltation that sang in Freddie's skull. With the ferocious clarity that was an aspect of his euphoria, he could see exactly what would happen. The Earps were professional lawmen—they did not chew their own tobacco, as Brocius would say—and when they came they would be ready. They might come with a crowd of vigilantes. The Cowboys, half unarmed, would stand wondering what to do, would have no leader, would wait too long to reach a decision, and then they would be cut down.

“I have no gun!” Freddie told Ike. “
You
 have no gun. And the Kid here has no gun. Three of you cannot fight a whole town, I think. You should go home and wait for a better time. Wait till Bill Brocius' trial is over, and get John Ringo to join you.”

“You only say that 'cause you're a coward!” Ike said. “You're a kraut-eating yellowbelly! You won't stand by your friends!”

Murder sang a song of fury in Freddie's blood. His hand clawed as if it held a gun—and the fact that there was no gun did not matter, the claw could as easily seize Ike's throat. Ike took a step backward at the savage glint in Freddie's eyes. Then Freddie shook his head, and said, “This is folly. I wash my hands of it.” He turned and began to walk away.

“Freddie!” Behan yelped. He sprang in front of Freddie, bouncing on his neat polished brown boots. “You can't leave! You've got to help me with this!”

Freddie drew himself up, glared savagely at Behan. Righteous angels sang in his mind. “You are the sheriff, I collect,” he said. “Dealing with it is your job!”

Behan froze, his mouth half-open. Freddie stepped around him and marched away, down Fremont to the back entrance to the O.K. Corral, then through the corral to Allen Street. Exaltation thrilled in his blood like wine. He crossed the street to the shadier south side—the sun was still hammering his head—and began the walk to the Grand Hotel. At Fourth Street he looked south and saw a mob—forty or fifty armed citizens, mostly hard-bitten miners—marching toward him up the street.

If this crowd found the Clantons, the Cowboys were dead. Surely Freddie's friends could now be convinced that they must fight another day.

Freddie turned and hastened along Allen Street toward the O.K. Corral, but then gunfire cracked out, the sudden bright sounds jolting his nerves, and he felt his heart sink even as he broke into a run. A shotgun boomed, and windows rattled in nearby buildings. He dashed through the long corral, then jumped over the fence, ran past the photography studio, and into the back door of Camillus Fly's boarding house.

John Behan crouched beneath a window with his blue-steel revolver in his hand. The window had been shattered by bullets, and its yellow organdy curtain fluttered in the breeze, but there was no scent of smoke or other indication that Behan had ever fired his pistol. Shrieks rang in the air, cries of mortal agony. Freddie ran beside the window and peered out. His heart hammered, and he panted for breath after his run.

The narrow vacant lot was hazy with gunsmoke. Lying at the far end were the bodies of two men, Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton. Just four or five paces in front of them were the three Earps and John Holliday. Morgan was down with a wound. Virgil knelt on the dry ground, leg bleeding, and he supported himself with a cane. Holliday's back was to Freddie—he had a short Wells Fargo shotgun broken open over one arm—and there were bright splashes of blood on Holliday's coat and trousers.

In Fremont Street, behind the Earps, Frank McLaury lay screaming in the dust. He was covered with blood. Apparently he had run right through the Earps and collapsed. His agonized shrieks raised the hair on the back of Freddie's neck.

Of Billy Claiborne and Ike Clanton, Freddie saw no sign. Apparently the two unarmed men had run away.

Wyatt Earp stood over his brother Morgan, unwounded, a long-barreled Colt in his hand. Savage hatred burned in Freddie's heart. He glared down at Behan.

“What have you done?” he hissed. “Why didn't you stop it?”

“I tried!” Behan said. “You saw that I tried. Oh, this is horrible!”

“You fool. Why do you bother to carry this?” Freddie reached down and snatched the revolver from Behan's hand. He looked out the window again and saw Wyatt Earp standing like a bronze statue over his wounded brother. Angels sang a song of glory in Freddie's blood.

Make something of it, he thought. Make something of this other than a catastrophe. Make it mean something.

He cocked Behan's gun. Earp heard the sound and raised his head, suddenly alert. And then German Freddie put six shots into Earp's breast from a distance of less than a dozen feet.

“My God!” Behan bleated. “What are you doing?”

Freddie looked at him, a savage grin taut on his face. He dropped the revolver at Behan's feet as return fire began to sing through the window. He ran into the back of the studio, out the back door, and was sprinting down Third Street when he heard Behan's voice ringing over the sound of barking gunfire. “It wasn't me! I swear to Mary!” Mad laughter burbled from Freddie's lips as he heard the crash of a door being kicked down. Behan screamed something else, something that might have been “German Freddie!” but whatever he was trying to say was cut short by a storm of fire.

*

A steam whistle shattered the air as Freddie ran south. Someone was blowing the alarm at the Uzina Mine. And when Freddie reached the corner, he saw the vigilante mob pouring up Allen Street, heading for the front gate of the O.K. Corral. He waited a few seconds for the leaders to swarm through the gate, and then he quietly crossed the street at a normal walking pace. Despite the way he panted for breath, Freddie had a hard time not breaking into a run.

He had never felt such joy, not even in Josie's arms.

By roundabout means he made his way to his room at the Grand Hotel. Once he had Zarathustra in his hand he began to breathe more easily. Still, he concluded, it was time to leave town. There were any number of people who could place him near the site of that streetfight, and possibly some of the vigilantes had seen him stroll away.

And then a thought struck him—he had no horse! He was a bad rider and had come to Tombstone on the Wells Fargo stage. The only way he could get a horse would be to stroll back to the O.K. Corral and hire one, with the lynch mob looking on.

He laughed and put Zarathustra in his coat pocket. He was trapped in a town filled with Earps and armed vigilantes.

“It is time to be bold,” he said aloud. “It is time to be cunning.”

He washed his hands, to remove the reek of gunpowder, and changed his shirt.

It occurred to him that there existed a place where he might hide.

He put his journal in another pocket, and made his way out of the hotel.

*

Oh, she is magnificent! Freddie wrote in his journal a few hours later. She hid me in Behan's house while Behan lay painted in his coffin in the front window of the undertakers—Ritter and Reams are making the most of this opportunity to advertise their art! I rested on Behan's bed while she received callers in the front room. And then, at nightfall, she had Behan's horse saddled and brought to the back door.

“Will I see you again?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Destiny will not permit us to part for long.”

“Do you have money?”

I confessed that I did not. She went into the house and came back with an envelope of bills which she put in my pocket. Later I counted them and found they amounted to five thousand dollars. The office of sheriff pays surprisingly well!

I took her hand. “Troy is afire, my Helen. Do you have what you desire?”

“I did not want this,” she said. Her fingers clutched at mine.

“Of course you did,” I said. “What else did you expect?”

I rode to Charleston with her kiss burning on my lips. Charleston is a town ruled by the Cowboys, and so I knew I could find shelter there, but it is also the first place a posse will come.

It will be a war now—my bullets have decreed it. I welcome the war, I welcome the trumpet that will awaken the new Romulus. Battles there shall be, and victories. And both those who die and those who live shall be awarded a Tombstone—what an irony!

I am curiously satisfied with the day's business. It is a man's life that I am leading. Were I to live these same events a thousand times, I would find no reason to alter the outcome.

*

“There are more Earps than before,” John Ringo observed from over the rim of his beer glass. “James and Warren have come to town. You're creatin’ more Earps than you're killin’, Freddie.”

“Two hundred rifles,” Freddie urged. “Raise them! Make Tombstone yours!”

Curly Bill Brocius shook his head. “No more shootings. The town's riled enough as it is. I don't want my parole revoked, and besides, I've got to make certain that our man gets in as sheriff.”

“Let us purge this choler without letting blood,” Ringo said, and wiped foam from his mustache.

“Still these politics!” Freddie scorned. “Who is our man this time?”

“Fellehy.”

“The laundryman? What kind of sheriff will he make?”

Brocius gave his easy grin. “No kind,” he said. “Which is 
our
 kind.”

“He will be worse than Behan. And it was Behan's bungling that killed three of our friends.”

Brocius' grin faded. “I don't reckon,” he insisted.

Freddie had made good his escape and met Ringo and Brocius in the Golden Saloon in Tucson. He was not quite far enough from Tombstone—Freddie kept his back to a wall and his eye on the door, just in case a crowd of men in frock coats decided to barge in.

“So when may we start killing Earps?” Freddie asked.

“We're going to do it legal-like,” Brocius said. “Ike Clanton's going to file in court against the Earps and Holliday for murder. They'll hang, and we won't have to pull a trigger.”

Disgust filled Freddie's heart. “You are making yourself ridiculous,” he said. “These men have killed your friends!”

“No more shooting,” said Brocius. “We'll use the law's own weapons against the law, and we'll be back in charge quick as a dog can lick a dish.”

Freddie looked at Brocius in fury, and then he laughed. “Very well, then,” he said. “We shall see what joys the law brings us!”

You could play the law game any number of ways, Freddie thought. And he thought he knew how he wanted to bid his hand.

*

“Ike Clanton said he was going to kill Doc Holliday,” Freddie testified. “His brother supported him, and so did the McLaurys. Claiborne and I were trying to talk sense into their stupid heads, but Ike was abusive, so I left in disgust.”

There was stunned silence in the courtroom. Freddie was a witness for the prosecution, but was handing the defense its case on a plate.

The prosecution witnesses had agreed on a story ahead of time, how the Cowboys had been unarmed, and the Earps the aggressors. Now Freddie was blowing the case to smithereens.

Price, the district attorney, was so stunned by Freddie's testimony that he blurted out what had to be absolutely the wrong question. “You say that Ike was 
intending
 to kill Mr. Holliday?”

Freddie looked at Ike from the his witness' chair. The man stared back at him, disbelief plain on his face, and out of the slant of his eye he saw Holliday look at him thoughtfully.

“Oh yes,” Freddie said. “But Ike is too much the drunken coward to actually carry out his threats. He ran away from the streetfight and left his brother to die in the dust.”

Bullets or nothing, Freddie thought. We shall honor valor or honor shall lie dishonored.

“You son of a bitch,” Ike Clanton said in the Grand Hotel's parlor, after the trial had adjourned for the day. “What did you say those things for?”

“Because they're true,” Freddie said. “Do you think I would lie to protect a worthless dog like you?”

Ike turned red. “You skin that back, you bastard! Skin that back, or I'll settle with you!”

Freddie wiped Ike's spittle from his chin with his handkerchief. “It's Doc Holliday you hate, is it not?” he said. “Why don't you settle with him first?”

“I'm gonna get him! And you, too!”

“Do it now,” Freddie advised, “while you're almost sober. You know where Holliday lives. Perhaps if you work up all your courage you can shoot him in the back.” Freddie reached into his pocket, took hold of Zarathustra, and thumbed back the hammer. Ike's eyes widened at the sound. He made a little whining noise in his throat.

“Don't shoot me!” he blurted.

“You can kill Holliday now,” Freddie said, “or I will shoot you like a dog where you stand. And who will take 
me
 to court for such a thing?”

“I'll do it!” Ike said quickly. “I'll kill him! See if I don't!”

“I believe you checked your gun with the desk clerk,” Freddie reminded him.

Freddie followed him to the front desk and kept his hand on the pistol. Ike cast him frantic glances over his shoulder as he was given his gun belt. He made certain his hand was nowhere near the butt of the weapon as he strapped it on—he did not want to give a man with Freddie's murderous reputation a chance to shoot.

Freddie followed Ike out into the street, and glared at him when it looked as if he would step into a saloon for some liquid courage. Ike saw the glare, then began to walk faster down the street. Freddie pursued, boots thumping on the wooden walk. At the end of the long walk, when Fly's boarding house came into sight, Ike was almost running.

Freddie paused then, and began a leisurely stroll to the hotel. Gunfire erupted behind him, but he didn't break stride. He knew Ike Clanton, and he knew John Holliday, and he knew which of the two now lay dead.