JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY WAS COUNTING AS WELL. Eighty-two hours. Eighty-three. Eighty-four.
He had been ill his entire adult life. He had always worked indoors. Dental offices at first, then saloons. Gambling was a desk job, really. He had no more need to ride than an accountant or the clerk in a hardware store. There had been horses in his youth, of course, but he’d rarely had occasion to stay in the saddle more than a morning, say, or a long summer afternoon. He had never done anything like this.
Nothing, ever, like this.
They were moving now through a landscape as slovenly as a three-day beard, its unlovely face covered with prickly stubble. The Whetstones were failed sandstone: an ancient seabed that hadn’t been under pressure long enough to compact into something harder. Uplifted, weathered over eons, broken now into immense piles of rubble. It was evil terrain. Difficult for the horse: like climbing over a mountain of loose bricks. Difficult for the rider: constant adjustments, lying back against the cantle as the animal slid down the gullies, leaning over the horn as she scrambled over the next heap of stone. One slip, and there’d be cactus or a boulder to break the fall.
His legs were finished. He had no strength left to take up the shock of a trot, and the skin on the inside of his thighs was breaking down. But he was alive to feel the pain and the fatigue. With his cheesy lungs and broomstick legs, he had outlived Morgan Earp by almost four days.
He was working at the Alhambra when he heard the shots, but if you left the table every time you noticed gunfire, you’d never make a living. So he kept his eyes on the layout and continued to deal until John Meagher came over and said, “Morgan Earp’s been killed.” He stood and the whole world tilted. When his vision cleared, he was on his hands and knees, so close to the carpet of the gaming room that he could see individual grains of sand embedded in the filthy fibers, and he could hear someone howling.
Eighty-five. Eighty-six.
He leaned back in the saddle, trusting Duchess to pick her way down a gully and clamber up the other side. The two Jacks took turns watching out for him, which was kind, but he was careful not to fall behind and rehearsed what he’d say if Wyatt turned around and told him to quit.
Have I slowed you down?
Have I asked for help?
Have I uttered one word of complaint?
I will bear witness, he thought over and over. Morgan Earp was my friend, and I will see this through.
They made camp high in the mountains and got a few hours’ rest. It wasn’t enough. Grief, fever, sun, exhaustion. Despite himself, he was nearly asleep in the saddle when the shooting broke out.
Duchess shied and pivoted. He almost fell out of the saddle. Gripping the horn, he righted himself, frantically trying to work out where he was, where the others were, where the gunfire was coming from. Jack Johnson took hold of the big sorrel’s reins, trying to control her.
Up ahead, Jack Vermillion’s horse went down, pinning him to the ground. Dick Naylor was dancing and spinning as well, with Wyatt struggling for balance while Sherm McMasters—hat flying off, face stretched, eyes wide—raced toward them yelling, “Ambush! Take cover! Curly Bill is up ahead!”
IT WAS A FLUKE, REALLY. Not an ambush. The Whetstones were high desert. If you had stock to water, there were only a few places to do it. At the south end of the range, Cottonwood Springs was your best bet, so that’s where Curly Bill Brocius had led seven men and nineteen freshly stolen head of cattle.
It was a meager return for the risk they’d run. These days the big ranchers were hiring gunmen to guard their herds. Rustling from the small operations was hardly worth the effort. Just that morning, Curly Bill had decided he was better off on Johnny Behan’s payroll, collecting county taxes and getting a cut of the take. It wasn’t as exciting as more conventional forms of theft, but Billy Breakenridge was congenial company and Curly Bill found it amusing to be a deputy.
“Somebody’s coming,” Johnny Barnes reported. “Five of ’em, maybe.”
Ranch hands, hoping to get the cattle back, Bill thought, and he wasn’t real concerned. In his experience, employees getting a dollar a day were rarely willing to die for a steer. “Move the stock,” he told the three new boys, and they took off.
Bill himself and Johnny Barnes stayed low behind an embankment with Pink Truly and Al Arnold, watching the riders approach. “When they get close, blaze away,” Bill said. “Make as much noise as you can. They’ll run.”
It wasn’t until after the first barrage of gunfire that they realized who they were shooting at. Bill still wasn’t worried. He’d heard that Wyatt Earp was on the warpath since his brother got killed. Bill’s conscience was clear on that score, though he couldn’t tell a lawman, “I was stealing stock the night your brother died.”
The way Bill figured it, he’d just josh Wyatt some and then both sides would back off and go their separate ways.
“Well, hello, Wyatt!” he called. “Now, look at all of us! There’s badges on every chest! I hear they’re the latest thing in Paris this season.”
“I’m not here to arrest you,” Wyatt called.
“No? Well, maybe I’ll arrest you! I hear there’s warrants out for you boys, and I am a duly constituted deputy of the Cochise County sheriff’s office. You come to surrender?”
Wyatt Earp was off his horse by then and advancing on them with a shotgun, not hurrying, just coming toward them, eyes steady.
Curly Bill heard Pink and Al splashing across the creek. He glanced back to see them scrambling up the other side of the bank and heading for their horses. Which left Bill all alone, except for Johnny Barnes. Barnes was gamer than most, but maybe he was just too scared to move.
Time slows down at moments like that, and Bill found himself remembering a tiger he’d seen when a circus came through Houston one time. The tiger was inside a barred wagon that was all painted up with jungle pictures on the outside. It was a little cage for such a big animal, but the tiger never stopped pacing. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. His head stayed steady as he moved, looking at you all the while, his animal thoughts plain in those yellow eyes. These bars are all that stand between your belly and my rage.
Except this time there were no bars.
WORD FILTERED BACK TO TOWN. And soon there were half a dozen versions of what happened up in the Whetstones.
It was at Burleigh Springs. No, it was Iron Springs. Crystal Springs, I heard. Two men were killed. No, four. Curly Bill is dead. So are Johnny Barnes, Pink Truly, and Al Arnold.
No, it was four of Earp’s men killed. Curly Bill shot Wyatt himself, square in the chest. No, it was Wyatt who shot Curly Bill. Damn near blew Bill in half with a shotgun blast.
Oh, hell, Curly Bill ain’t even in the country. He’s been living down in Mexico for months! Well, I heard ole Wyatt cut off Bill’s head and brought it in to claim that thousand-dollar reward from the Cattleman’s Association. Jesus! He cut off Bill’s head? God’s honest truth! I know a man who saw the body with his own eyes.
It would be months before the facts were known. Curly Bill was buried on Frank Patterson’s ranch later that day, his head still attached, along with Al and Pink. Johnny Barnes was seriously wounded and no one expected him to live. His name was added to Wyatt Earp’s tally, but he survived to kill Butcher Bill Childs about a year later. He got caught and did a twenty-one-year stretch in the Missouri State Penitentiary for the deed.
At the time, however, Ike Clanton, Pete Spence, and Apache Hank Swilling were taking no more chances. Maybe Wyatt Earp was dead but if he wasn’t, the risk of a trial seemed preferable to his revenge. They turned themselves in to the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office. They were allowed to keep their guns so they could defend themselves, if Wyatt and his posse rushed the jail.
THE EARP VENDETTA RIDE. That’s what the newspapers were calling it now, one hundred and six hours after Morgan Earp was killed.
Few of those hours had been spent resting. As Wyatt and his men fell back toward a sheltered site with a high, broad view of the surroundings, no one was at his best.
Silent, Wyatt veered between embarrassment and outrage. He’d loosened his gun belt while they were working their way over that last mountain. After the first shots were fired, he dismounted but the belt slipped down around his knees and there he was, trying to pull the belt up while bullets whizzed around him and Dick Naylor squealed and plunged. Finally he got the belt up and got his shotgun from the scabbard and went after Curly Bill alone, furious that Sherm McMasters had abandoned him, that Doc was too sick to fight, and that Jack Johnson too busy taking care of the dentist to be any help.
Riding double behind Doc Holliday on Duchess now, Jack Vermillion was inconsolable about the horse that had been shot out from under him and kept vowing revenge for the animal’s death. Sherm McMasters knew the others were thinking maybe he was playing both sides against the middle, that maybe he’d led them straight into a pack of Cow Boys. So he was loudly defending himself and kept talking about how he had no idea Curly Bill would be at the springs, and how his horse had panicked and run from the gunfire, and anyway it was crazy not to head for cover, and Jack Vermillion would’ve done the same damn thing if he hadn’t been pinned under his horse.
Sherm kept it up while they were making camp, and Wyatt finally got hot, snarling abuse at Sherm for not sticking and at Creek Johnson, too, because he should’ve been up front, not playing nursemaid to Doc, who was coughing and didn’t have the breath to holler, and pulled his pistol for the first time, and fired a shot into the ground to make them all shut up. Which they did.
“Wyatt, calm down,” Doc said softly. “Where are you hit?”
It was only then that the others saw that Wyatt’s duster was shredded. There were bullet holes everywhere they looked, and it seemed impossible that he was not shot to pieces. Astonished that he’d survived to berate them, they sat him down on a rock and pulled the coat off him to look for blood, and found none.
“My left leg feels strange down by the foot,” he told them—quiet by then, almost dazed. So they pulled his boot off and his pants leg up and found nothing there, either. Almost two dozen bullets had come close enough to cut his clothes, but there wasn’t a scratch on him.
“God a’mighty,” Doc whispered. Fighting tears of relief and fatigue, he sank onto the rock next to Wyatt and showed them all what he had just noticed: The heel of Wyatt’s boot had been shot off.
“Wyatt,” he said, “Achilles himself would have envied your luck.”
THEY WERE FUGITIVES NOW, wanted for capital crimes in Pima and Cochise Counties. Their horses were stumbling. The food was gone. Everyone was wet and cold, for spring in the high desert can show you four seasons in a single day. A soft and pleasant breeze at dawn. Heat that threatens to bake you crisp before noon. A wave of cold that pours in from the north at midday, bringing hail and torrential rain in the afternoon. Snow at sunset.
Doc Holliday was close to collapse. The others weren’t far from it, so they took a chance and stopped at the Percy brothers’ ranch, which was big enough to attract rustlers but too small to support the kind of private army Henry Hooker paid to protect his cattle. The loss of even one steer was significant to them, and dead rustlers were unlikely to inspire much sympathy.
“I’m glad to see you alive,” James Percy said. “We heard Curly Bill killed you.”
“Other way around,” Wyatt said. “Can you put us up for the night? I can’t pay you.”
“You’re doing God’s work,” Hugh Percy said, but his brother James added, “Not everyone sees it that way. Behan has a forty-man looking for you. It’s packed with Cow Boys wearing badges.”
“Best if you leave before daylight,” Hugh said.
“Can you lend us a horse? Jack Vermillion’s animal was killed.”
There was a long pause. The brothers looked at each other and then their eyes slid away.
“It’s all right,” Wyatt said. “I understand.”
James, who was practical, took care of the horses and fixed the men a hot meal. Hugh, who was tender-hearted, gave Doc Holliday his bed for the night. The dentist needed help undressing. When Hugh saw the state of those fleshless thighs and their huge burst blisters, he doctored them as best he could. Returning to the front room, Hugh said, “He’s in real bad shape.”
“I told him not to come,” Wyatt snapped.
AT THREE THE NEXT MORNING, he dragged Sherm and the two Jacks out of the Percy hayloft. They saddled up, but when Wyatt made no move to get Doc, Jack Vermillion went inside the Percy house to find him.
“I can’t,” Doc mumbled. “Leave me.”
If you’re caught, they’ll hang you, Jack thought, but he’d gotten to know Doc since the big fire in Tombstone and understood the man’s sense of honor. “If you’re caught,” Jack said, “the Percys will pay.”
Doc held up a hand. Jack got him to his feet.
LATER THAT DAY, a pair of prospectors noticed five men on four horses. The prospectors had been out in the mesquite so long, they had no idea who these visitors were, nor did they care. Posse? Outlaws? Either. Both. Didn’t matter.
With the hospitality of the open range, they shared a frugal meal with the riders and took special note of a sick man, who thanked them for their kindness.