THEY WERE ALL TIRED. THAT WAS PART OF IT.
The McLaury brothers got up long before dawn on the day of the gunfight. Their youngest sister was getting married, and Tommy needed to clear up some business in Tombstone before he and Frank left for Fort Worth. That’s where their brother Will lived with his three little kids. The six of them were going to take the train north to Iowa so they could all be there for Sarah Caroline’s wedding.
Virgil Earp was still recovering from a punishing but fruitless effort to track down three men who’d broken out of jail a few days earlier. His posse had covered nearly 100 miles when a sudden torrential rainstorm left them with no trail to follow. On October 25, they returned to Tombstone, frustrated and beat.
Before leaving on that goose chase, Virg had deputized Wyatt as a town policeman so that Officers Flynn and Bronk had backup during the chief’s absence. A few hours after he went to bed, Wyatt was called out when a brawl erupted between the day-shift miners of the Goodenough and the Tough Nut. Near as anybody could make out, a disputed call in the eighth inning of a baseball game played the previous Sunday had inspired a lingering sense of injustice that flared up in the middle of the night.
Morgan and Doc were weary as well, having just completed the rushed trip from Tucson at Wyatt’s request. Doc got Kate settled in at Molly Fly’s a little after midnight on October 26, but he and Morg decided they’d best find out what Wyatt was so nerved up about. Morgan went looking for Wyatt, and Doc went over to the Alhambra to wait for them.
Always randy, Little Willie Claiborne and his best friend Billy Clanton had ridden into Tombstone for some fun. They spent the final hours of Billy’s life drinking, gambling, and whoring. Which he might not have regretted, even if he’d known what was going to happen.
And Ike? Ike was hitting the bars and drinking to drown the dread. He was scared again, and muttering to himself, and went looking for Wyatt, hoping for reassurance. Instead, he found Doc Holliday.
WHO WAS, BY THEN, sitting in the Alhambra’s restaurant, letting his split pea soup cool while he waited for Wyatt to show up and explain the abrupt summons to Tombstone. Doc had, in fact, just begun to eat when a shadow fell over his table and a man who looked vaguely familiar said, “If you told him, I’ll kill you before he gets me.”
Blinking, Doc put his spoon down to free his hand. “Pardon?”
“If you told him, I’ll kill you!”
Still trying to place the man, Doc frowned for a moment and then sighed. Elephant boogers, he thought, recognizing Ike Clanton, who stank of horse and sweat and liquor and fear.
Feeling very tired, Doc asked, “Told what to whom?”
“You know who, and you know what!”
“I assure you, sir, that I do not.”
“Don’t you ‘sir’ me! Don’t you try to get around me! I know what you told him, and I’ll by-god kill you for it! You hear me, Holliday?”
“People in El Paso can hear you,” Doc said, beginning to lose patience, “but I suspect they don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, any more’n I do. Why not shout it at them, so we’ll all know?”
It was about then that John Meagher sent a busboy to find an Earp or two, for while Doc Holliday was skinny and sickly, he did not take much crap. Ike could get on anyone’s nerves, and now he was yelling about how Doc had killed somebody. Though the rest of the diners seemed entertained by the farce, Meagher knew it was only a matter of time before dishes or a window got broken, so he went over to Doc’s table to see if he could settle things down on his own.
“Anything wrong?” he asked Holliday.
Halfway between bewilderment and annoyance, Doc began, “Mr. Clanton here seems to have some notion about me—”
“I got a notion!” Ike echoed. “Damn right I got a notion!”
“—but I cannot seem to make this impenetrable block of drunken Arizona imbecility understand that I have no idea what he is shoutin’ about.”
“Ike,” Meagher said, “if you’re not going to play cards or get something to eat, move on.”
But Ike wasn’t having that. “I know my rights!” he declared, with Frank McLaury in his head. “It’s a free country! I’ll go where I please!” And then it was Ringo inside him, making him yell, “Gimping around, bragging about it. Eye for eye! Tooth for tooth!” And then the old man took over and Ike sneered, “Our secret. Hah! Our secret. You can’t fool me. I don’t trust nobody! I never woulda turned on them boys if Wyatt hadn’t made me that deal. And you!” Ike cried in summation, pointing at Doc. “You are a killer and a goddam liar!”
“Oh, Jesus,” John Meagher sighed, for while Doc would not have disputed the first assertion, he took violent exception to the second and would have caned Ike to the floor if John hadn’t got between the two men, pushing Ike backward, meaning to dump him outside on the boardwalk.
“Take your hands off me!” Ike was hollering. “I know my rights! Take your goddam hands off me! I’ll get you, Holliday!” he yelled over Meagher’s shoulder. “I’ll get you before he gets me!”
Which is where things stood when Virgil Earp arrived and coldcocked Ike without so much as a howdy-do.
A sudden silence fell. Fascinated diners around the room sat back to take in whatever happened next.
“Goddammit, Doc,” Virg cried, “what in hell was that about?”
Wide-eyed, Doc looked up from Ike’s inert body. “Virgil, it beats me hollow. I have only been in town for half an hour—”
“And you’re in trouble already?”
“I swear, Virgil! I was just eatin’ my supper when that tragic example of nature’s cruelty started accusin’ me of tellin’ somebody something, and I have not the slightest idea what he meant by any of it! I only came back to Tombstone because Wyatt said he needed me, and Morgan— Wait! There they are! Wyatt, what in hell is goin’ on?”
Before either Wyatt or Morgan could say anything, Virg held up his hands for silence and then pressed his fingers against tired eyes. “Morg, take this idiot to the jail,” he said, nodding at Ike, who was beginning to come around. “No charges. Just let him sleep it off there. Wyatt, do you know what this is about?”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go to bed, Virg. I’ll take care of this.”
NOBODY IN THE RESTAURANT was near enough to hear what was being said at the table in the far back corner. What they could see was Wyatt Earp leaning over his elbows, making his case with sober earnestness as Doc Holliday’s face registered first confusion, then disbelief, and finally what appeared to be a retreat into prayer, for it was then that John Henry Holliday put his head in his hands.
“‘Laughter of children. Discretion of slaves. Austerity of virgins,’ he chanted softly. ‘It begins in loutishness and ends among angels of flame and ice . . . ’” He fell silent, rubbing his forehead rhythmically with fingers that were still so powerful with a pianist’s musculature he could have closed them around Wyatt Earp’s throat and crushed the man’s windpipe flat. “I have despaired of many things,” he told Wyatt. “Health. Home. Honor. Myself. There remains just one thing I rely on, one thing I can put my faith in. Human folly never disappoints.”
“Doc, I know you’re mad, but try to understand! I thought if I could bring in Leonard and Head and Crane, I could clear you. I was trying to protect you—”
“From what? There was nothin’ but Kate’s drunken petulance linkin’ me to that stagecoach attack. The charges were dismissed for an utter lack of evidence. I am no more a suspect than Molly Fly!”
“But, see, when I made the deal, you were still—”
“A grown man, damn you! Compos mentis, and someone who should have been consulted, at least, before bein’ dragged into the middle of whatever ill-conceived scheme you’ve cooked up with an ignorant, drunken, cracker cattle thief who is—and I will try to be perfectly fair to Mr. Clanton—a contemptible traitor to his own kind. Now that wretch is mortally afraid that I will expose his eagerness to sell his friends out, and that they will kill him for it. As well they might! Which places me directly between Ike Clanton and whatever peace his dim, blinkered, unlettered mind can yearn for! And you—” He stopped, trying and failing to control the cough. Pale when the fit was over, he continued: “And you expect thanks?”
“Well, not thanks, but something, I guess,” Wyatt admitted. “I didn’t think—”
“That is just the trouble,” Doc cried, unknowingly echoing Johnny Behan. “Nobody ever thinks!” He closed his eyes for a moment and lowered his voice again. “You meant well. I understand that, but . . . Wyatt, you aren’t afraid of any man on two legs. Call it confidence. Call it competence. Call it an abject failure of imagination! You don’t understand how very much a fearful man wants to destroy what he fears . . .” Hands fisted, elbows on the table, he paused to get his breath back. He rarely spoke so much anymore, and it was hard to keep talking now. “Wyatt, you have made Ike Clanton fear me. The only way he can ever feel safe is if I am dead. And now I can’t even leave town! If I do, people will say Ike Clanton ran me out of Tombstone and I will be fair game for every moron with a gun between Mexico and Canada.”
“Doc, I— I didn’t mean for it to go like that. I was just trying . . .” To be shrewd, he thought. To beat Johnny Behan at his own game. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I am imperfectly consoled,” Doc snapped. “And I am damned if I see a good way out of this.”
SOMEBODY WAS BANGING on Virgil Earp’s front door. Again.
Ike Clanton had been released around four in the morning. Instead of going home or getting a room someplace, he’d been reeling from one saloon to the next ever since. Already two bartenders had come to tell Virgil that Ike was threatening to shoot the Earps and Doc Holliday on sight. “He’s all mouth,” Virgil told them. “Ignore him.” This latest visitor was probably delivering the same news.
“Allie?” he called.
“I got it!”
Exhausted but past the point when there was a chance in hell of getting back to sleep, Virg sat up on the side of the bed and stared bleary-eyed out the window. Took a moment before he understood why it was so bright in the room. Huh, he thought, rubbing his face. Snow in October! Crazy damn weather . . .
Still only half-awake, he marveled at Ike’s capacity for drink. Why isn’t that idiot passed out in an alley by now? he was wondering when Allie came in, but he snapped to when he saw her face.
“That was Bob Hatch from the billiard parlor,” she said. “Wyatt’s alone and he’s up against four Cow Boys out in front of Spangenberg’s gun shop. Bob says they’re liable to kill him before you get there.”
“Christ.” Virg grabbed his pants. “Jesus. Go tell Morg!”
“Bob went to Morgan’s first, but Lou says Morg left home with Doc about twenty minutes ago. Ike has been over at Fly’s, yelling about how he’s going to shoot all of you.”
“Christ,” Virg said again, pushing his feet into his boots. “Jesus.”
“WYATT EARP HAULED OFF and hit Tommy for nothing at all!” Frank McLaury was telling Willie Claiborne and Billy Clanton. “Just hit him, like he hit Curly Bill! Sonofabitch pulled Tom’s own gun right out of his belt and hit him with it! We were on our way out of town! We’ve got every right to be carrying guns on the way out of town! He had no call doing that!”
Tom was on his feet, trying to understand what was going on. Everything seemed very loud, and his brother’s voice made his ears ring. “I’m gonna throw up,” he warned, but nobody was listening.
“Wearing a badge don’t give him the right to go around hitting people,” Frank was saying. “Assault and battery’s what it is! I want that bastard arrested and prosecuted!”
“Frank, I don’t feel good,” Tom mumbled. “Let’s go home.”
“And then he says, ‘I oughta kill Ike,’” Frank was telling Billy Clanton. “That’s just what he said: ‘I oughta kill that idiot myself!’”
“PULL A GUN,” Ike was muttering. “You want respect? Pull a gun.”
He was already carrying a Winchester and bought a pistol when Spangenberg’s opened. He was still outside Fly’s Photography Studio, but in his mind he was already back at Spangenberg’s. “I want another gun,” he was going to say. “Treat me like a dog! Hah. I’ll fight’m all. Eye for eye!”
“Go home, Ike. You’re drunk.” That’s what he expected Spangenberg would tell him, because that’s what everybody was saying. They were all against him. “Come back when you’re sober,” Spangenberg would say.
“You’re all in on it! You and the Earps. And Holliday,” Ike muttered. “You’re all in on it.”
“Mr. Clanton,” Molly Fly was saying. “Dr. Holliday isn’t here.”
There was another woman with her. Small and blond, with a funny accent. “He’s gone. He don’t live here no more,” that one said. “Go away. Leave us alone.”
“You’re all in on it,” he told them. “I’ll get him. You’ll see.”
Scattering threats as dark as any the old man had hurled, Ike left Fly’s and was out on Fremont when his brother Billy saw him and waved.
“Ike! We’re over here!” Billy called. “Jesus, what happened to your head? Did Wyatt Earp hit you, too?”
“They’re all in on it,” Ike told him. “All them Earps. And Holliday, too.”
BY THREE IN THE AFTERNOON, there was a crowd in front of the police chief’s office. Everyone had been expecting a brawl, but word was getting around that the Cow Boys were carrying guns in defiance of town ordinances and that the Earps were going to have it out with them.
“Ike has come by twice to threaten me,” Doc was saying. “He’s frightenin’ the women. I won’t have it, Virgil. This has got to stop.”
“It’s not just Ike,” Morgan reported. “His brother Billy’s here, and both of the McLaurys. Willie Claiborne’s with them, too. They’ve got a dozen guns among them.”
“And they’ve been buying more,” Wyatt said.
Virgil took a breath. The appearance of Willie Claiborne was a bad turn. The Clantons were rustlers. The McLaurys were fences. Claiborne was out on bail after shooting a blacksmith in the face, and that little shit was trouble.
Members of the Vigilance Committee were showing up now, each newcomer offering help. Which was the last thing Virgil Earp wanted: a bunch of jumpy civilians, ready to shoot. There’d be bodies all over the street.
“Chief Earp!” Mayor Clum called, pushing through the crowd. “There are five armed men in the O.K. Corral!”
And that was the best news Virgil had heard all day. “They got horses?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, then, they’re probably on their way out of town,” Virgil said, flooded with relief. “As long as they leave, I won’t move against them.”
“Those men are defying the law, Chief. It’s your duty to disarm them,” Clum insisted, and he began to work the crowd. “Just six weeks ago, this nation lost a great man to assassination. But Tombstone has learned from the murder of President Garfield. We have beaten back anarchy. We have reestablished the rule of law in this city. The Cow Boys are threatening to kill public servants, but we shall have no Guiteaus in Tombstone! Chief Earp and his deputies will enforce every ordinance, without exception!”
Morgan was watching Johnny Behan cross the street. “What does he want?”
“Votes,” Wyatt said, but Behan was careful to address the officer in charge.
“What’s the trouble, Chief?” he asked.
“Some of your constituents from Sulphur Springs are in town,” Virgil told him, “and they’re looking for a fight.”
“They can have all the fight they want,” Morgan muttered.
“Shut up, Morgan,” Virgil snapped. “I don’t need anybody mouthing off.”
Doc was wound up tight and Morgan was standing shoulder to shoulder with him, ready to fight. But Ike Clanton was just a drunk, talking big. Billy Clanton and Willie Claiborne could be trouble, and Frank McLaury would strut like a bantam rooster, but Wyatt had clocked Tom McLaury, and Tommy was about as inoffensive as they came. Something else was going on here, and Virgil was damned if he could put a finger on it. Which meant that Johnny Behan might just be of use.
“Ike Clanton’s been making drunken threats all night,” Virg told him, trying to sound bored. “Says he’s gonna shoot us and Doc Holliday on sight. He’s down at the O.K. Corral with his brother Billy now, and they’ve got the McLaurys and Willie Claiborne with them. Wyatt had a run-in with the McLaurys this morning outside of Spangenberg’s gun shop.”
Behan frowned. “So they’re heeled?”
“Goddam right they’re heeled,” Morgan said. “Pistols, shotguns, rifles.”
Behan glanced at Doc Holliday. “And why is this man armed?”
“Mr. Clanton says he intends to kill me,” Doc told him. “I have a right to defend myself.”
“It’s legal,” Morgan said. “He’s got a permit.”
“And I’ve deputized him,” Virg added. “Just in case.”
“All right,” Behan said, like it was his place to be satisfied or not with that explanation. “Let me try to iron this out, Virg. If you go, there’s sure to be a fight. Those boys won’t give up their guns to a Yankee.”
Watching the sheriff walk away, Editor Clum told Virgil quietly, “That will make Behan the hero of the story. You should’ve sent Wyatt.”
“This ain’t a story,” Virgil snapped. “And it ain’t an election, Mayor.”
I am the only veteran in this mess, Virg thought, his heart pounding against his ribs.
Wyatt and Morgan had stood up to plenty of drunks with guns and Doc was game, but he was just a dentist who played cards. None of them had ever been in combat. Virgil had. He’d seen plans go to pieces when the shooting began. He’d seen men freeze under fire, or break and run, or panic and empty their guns long before they were within range. He’d seen his brother James, shattered and bleeding. His dreams were filled with terror and chaos, and . . . And this felt like the war, all over again. It was politicians saying, “Let’s you and him fight!” It was rebels with guns, hollering about their rights, waiting for you to come and get them, and—
Blinking hard, he got his bearings and raised his voice to cut through the noise of the crowd. “Everybody! Just calm down!”
“Chief, this is a city matter,” Clum insisted. “It’s not in the sheriff’s jurisdiction.”
Well, if Johnny Behan could damp the fuse on this, he could take all the credit he wanted. “Those boys are his friends,” Virg told the mayor. “Let’s not make a war out of this.”
“NO, SIR!” Frank McLaury was telling the sheriff. “I’m not going anywhere! Wyatt Earp assaulted my brother and nobody’s got the right to tell me to go home and forget about that.”
“And he hit my brother, too,” Billy Clanton said. “Look at Ike’s head!”
“I’m not telling you to forget it, Frank,” Johnny Behan soothed. “I think Tommy might well have a civil suit against Wyatt. And Ike, as well, but for now? Let’s let things simmer down.”
“You’re in on it,” Ike complained. “You’re all in on it!”
“Frank, Billy,” Behan said, “take your brothers home, all right?”
“We have a wedding,” Tommy said to no one in particular. “Let’s go. Please, Frank. I’ve got a headache. Let’s just go.”
“I’m not going anywhere!”
Down at the corner of Fourth Street, Willie Claiborne was keeping watch.
“They’re coming!” he yelled. “The Earps are coming!”