Chapter Sixteen

LAS VEGAS, 1879

HE HALF-EXPECTED KATE TO BE WAITING FOR HIM AT THE RAILROAD depot when the Santa Fe stopped in Otero on its way to Las Vegas. It was, after all, the first train to roll down the newly laid tracks that far into New Mexico, heading on to Santa Fe, and its arrival was met with noisy celebration at every town along the way. But there was no Kate in Otero, nor had anyone seen her since John Henry himself had left town. There was no Kate in Las Vegas either, though it seemed that everyone else in town had come to the new rail station to hear the Governor welcome the era of steam travel to the meadows of northern New Mexico. But Kate Elder, who had called herself Mrs. Holliday in happier times, was gone as she said she would be.

John Henry was surprised to find himself actually disappointed not to see her there. It would have been amusing to share the celebrating with someone who appreciated a party as much as Kate did, and there was plenty of partying going on in the two towns of Las Vegas: the quaint Spanish village that surrounded the plaza and slept under the watchful eye of the Nuestra Señora de Dolores, and the jumble of tent saloons and boarding houses a mile away across the Gallinas River where the newly laid tracks of the Santa Fe stretched out into the meadowland. The old village was being called Old Town, while the railroad settlement was called New Town, but other than sharing the official name of Las Vegas, the two towns had nothing much to do with each other.

Even the celebrations held in the two towns of Las Vegas reflected the differing characters of the two communities. In Old Town, the arrival of the railroad was heralded with a fancy dress ball and speeches at the Exchange Hotel on the Plaza. In New Town, the party was an all-night affair of gambling and other vices.

John Henry didn’t have any trouble deciding where to do his celebrating. For although Close and Patterson’s Dance Hall, across from the new railroad depot, wasn’t nearly as elegant as the Exchange Hotel, it had the attraction of twenty-five regular dancing girls and a commitment to entertaining everybody in the best possible manner—or so said the painted sign hanging over the bar. And by the amount of entertaining the place did that night, it was clear that saloons and dance halls were going to be the boom business of New Town.

John Henry had never owned or operated a saloon before, but the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. So within days of his arrival, he paid a call on the city fathers and arranged to lease three lots on Centre Street, the wide dirt avenue that led from the Santa Fe depot up toward the Gallinas River. And though the Holliday Saloon was nothing more than a big canvas tent with a floor of wood planks and a bar bill that boasted only beer and two brands of whiskey, it did well right from opening day.

He liked to think that it was his gaming tables that made the place so popular, but he knew that some of his quick success was owed to the serving girl he’d hired to help the barkeep with the drinks. Her name was Flor, a little Mexican from Old Town with wide dark eyes and glossy black hair and such a following among the railroaders that she kept the saloon busy just serving her admirers. “The Señorita,” the customers called her, and began calling the saloon by the same name—which suited John Henry fine, as long as they kept coming in to buy his drinks and play at his tables.

While Flor took care of the customers, John Henry ran the gambling games, banking Monte and keno and acting as his own police. Although New Town had its small police force, there wasn’t nearly enough law to keep the peace, so business owners had to do a little peacekeeping themselves—which John Henry took to mean that he was allowed to keep a pistol in his pocket. He was in good company, carrying a pistol or two, as even the Mayor of New Town packed a sidearm.

The Mayor wasn’t really a mayor, just a sporting man who’d got himself elected Coroner for Precinct 29 of San Miguel County with jurisdiction over New Town and a tenuous authority over the local police, themselves mostly gamblers recently come to Las Vegas. They called the Mayor “Hoodoo Brown,” and told how he was formerly of the western gambling circuit and most recently of a ranch on the Jones Plummer cattle trail in Kansas—though no one ever mistook him for a rancher. He had only come to own the place by winning it in a poker game, and only kept it long enough to break it up and sell it off to land-hungry homesteaders. “Land speculating,” he called it, though others called it stealing, as Hoodoo was an expert card player and seldom lost on a wager of real estate. But John Henry had no reason to criticize the Mayor for using his skills to a profitable advantage; a man who could weasel a land deed out of a poker hand probably deserved to make a little money.

John Henry knew the story of Hoodoo Brown by rumor only, not having met the man himself, though he had met a few of the Coroner’s hired guns: Chief of Police Joe Carson, Constable Jack Lyons, Deputies Bill Baker and “Mysterious Dave” Mather. Being sporting men like their boss, they had the best interests of New Town at heart and only interfered in the business of the saloons and gaming establishments when things got dangerous. And even then, they didn’t interfere all that much, as John Henry learned on one hot evening toward the end of July.

He’d been doing well at the tables that day, taking in a good profit from his Monte bank and a neat percentage from the dice games as well, when Flor came to him complaining of personal trouble.

“It’s mi novio, Señor, he wants me to go out with him.”

“Well, tell him you can go when you’re done workin’,” he replied, not understanding why he should have to give permission for the tryst. What the girl did in her private time was none of his affair.

“No, Señor, he wants me to go with him now, out of the saloon. I told him to go away until later, but he won’t go. He says if I don’t come out, he will come in and get me. And Señor, he is very drunk today and I am afraid of what he will do to me if he does come in here. He gets very bad when he is drunk, Señor.”

John Henry sighed and called to the barkeep to take over his Monte bank. Flor was right in what she said of her beau; Mike Gordon had already gained a reputation around New Town as a drunk and a brute and John Henry was bewildered as to what the girl saw in him. Still, a lady’s request for protection couldn’t go unanswered, and he pulled the pistol from his pocket, rolling the chamber to count the cartridges. One shot into the night sky would probably be enough to scare Mike Gordon away and let Flor get back to work serving drinks.

Mike Gordon was out in the street, as Flor had said, standing with wobbly legs and hanging onto a half-emptied whiskey bottle as though the liquor could steady him. He was also singing, though the sound was something more like a hound howling at the moon, and attracting an appreciative audience around him. A drunk was always good entertainment, even in a town with more than its fair share of them.

“Hey, Mike Gordon!” John Henry called out cheerily, and the man turned toward him unsteadily.

“Who’s calling my name?” Mike asked, his words sliding together like slippery stones in river mud.

“Your lady-friend’s employer. I’m gonna have to ask you to move on and take your singin’ elsewhere, as Flor has work to do.”

“Flor?” Mike Gordon asked, then he laughed. “You mean Flower! My little flower!” and he launched into another refrain of whatever it was he was trying to sing.

“He doesn’t sound so dangerous to me,” John Henry said to Flor, who had stepped out of the tent saloon and into the street behind him. “He seems to be in fine enough spirits.”

“Fine for now, Señor,” she whispered, keeping herself hidden behind him, “fine until you tell him I am not going with him.”

“Well sung, Mike!” John Henry said with a smile, “but I must ask you again to move on. Your performance is distractin’ Flor, and as I said, she has work to do.”

“She has work to do, all right,” Mike said, taking a break from his singing to swig at the whiskey bottle, “and I’m it. Come on out, little Flower, and give me something to sing about!”

“She’s not goin’ with you, Mike,” John Henry replied reasonably, “but I’m sure a fine gent like yourself can procure other company to keep yourself occupied until she’s through workin’. The way I hear it, half the whores in New Town have been askin’ after you.”

“They have?” the idea seemed as implausible to Mike Gordon as it really was, for to John Henry’s knowledge, there wasn’t anyone asking after Mike Gordon, except maybe the Magistrate when he did some real disturbing of the peace.

“That’s right, Mike. In fact, there’s some ladies down at Close and Patterson’s right now, askin’ for you. If I were you, I’d remove myself from Centre Street straight-away and get down to Railroad Avenue. A gentleman shouldn’t keep a passel of whores waitin’.”

Mike Gordon pondered a moment, then took a final swig of the whiskey.

“I guess you’re right,” he said, wiping his mustache, then running the same whiskey-wet hand through his greasy hair. “Better go find me them whores while they’re willing and able. But you tell Flor I’ll be back for her, y’hear? Wouldn’t want my little sweetheart to think I forgot about her.”

It was laughable, almost, how little sense one had to make to reason with a drunk, but when John Henry turned back toward the saloon, his laughter stopped before it could start. Flor was still standing behind him, and there were tears in her eyes.

“You see?” she said in a shaking voice. “You see how mean he can be?”

“But he didn’t do anything to you. I sent him off to the dance hall. You’ll be safe enough until he finishes with the women there . . .”

It was only then that he understood what she meant. It wasn’t only in the supposed beatings that Mike Gordon was a brute, but in his well-known chasing after other women, as well. Yet somehow, John Henry hadn’t expected the little Mexican girl to have the same feelings a real lady might have over such things. Was it possible that the girl was a lady at heart? Or were all women more the same than he had ever imagined? And following behind that thought was another memory: Kate’s tears the day he had left for the Royal Gorge war.

“We’re wasting good gamblin’ time with this nonsense,” he said in irritation, and Flor obediently sniffed back her tears.

“Si, Señor,” she said with a hurried curtsy as she hustled back into the tent saloon.

John Henry watched the canvas door fall back into place behind her. If Flor weren’t so good at bringing in customers, he’d fire her and hire another barkeep to help out, instead, and be done worrying about women entirely.

Mike Gordon came back later, as promised, but in worse spirits than when he’d left. His evening with the whores at Close and Patterson’s had evidently not gone well, and he was determined to have Flor make up for his disappointments. And this time, he came armed with a shotgun and ready to take her by force.

“Flor!” he yelled, as he pushed his way into the tent saloon, setting the hanging oil lamp swaying over the gaming tables. “Your soldier’s come back for you, and I mean to have you this time around!”

Flor looked up from the back of the room, dark eyes darting between Mike Gordon and John Henry.

“I am still working, Miguel,” she called. “Besides, you’re drunk. I don’t want to go with you when you’re bad drunk.”

“I am drunk,” he agreed, though he seemed more sober than he’d been before. But that was just the way the whiskey hit some men, making them jolly at first and steely later—and Mike Gordon looked to be getting steely in his resolve. “I am drunk,” he repeated, “and you are coming with me.”

But he was too occupied with Flor to notice John Henry off to the side of the saloon, pulling his own pistol and taking aim.

“Drop the shotgun, Gordon,” John Henry said, “or take a bullet in the brain. You choose.”

Mike wavered a moment, then let go of the gun, the whiskey making him bold, but not quite suicidal.

“That’s an interesting way of impressin’ a lady,” John Henry commented, “but I don’t think Flor’s all that impressed. Now leave the shotgun here and get yourself out of my place. You can pick up your firearm tomorrow when you’re not so drunk.”

Mike turned slowly toward him, eyes fixed on John Henry’s finger hovering over the trigger of his pistol. Then, bold but not stupid, he backed out of the saloon without saying another word.

“Well, I reckon that’s enough excitement for one evenin’,” John Henry said as he pocketed the pistol. “Flor, bring me two fingers of that Jack Daniels behind the counter. All this fuss is givin’ me a thirst.”

The little Mexican girl nodded and hurried to the bar. But as she bent down to find the bottle that John Henry kept special for himself, shots rang out in the street and a bullet came whistling in through the canvas wall of the tent saloon, lodging in the wood of the bar.

Flor screamed as she and the customers dropped to the floor. Only John Henry stayed standing, still waiting for his drink. He didn’t have to ask to know that it was Mike Gordon doing the shooting, no doubt having grabbed another gun somewhere and turned it on the saloon. Then another shot sailed into the place, catching a customer in the leg as he cowered on the floor, and John Henry sprang into action.

He dove for Mike’s abandoned shotgun and came up cocking it with one hand while he pulled his own pistol with the other. Then, both hands full of lead, he sprang to the canvas door of the saloon. With one quick glance, he saw Mike Gordon standing alone in the moonlit street reloading a six-shooter for another volley at the saloon, and he pulled up the pistol and drew a bead, firing off three shots before Mike could get his own pistol into play.

It was a bad setup for a shooting match, with the canvas tent door hanging in his way and one hand still holding the shotgun, but one of the three shots found its mark, and Mike spun around and grabbed at his shooting arm.

“I’m hit!” he screamed, dropping his six-shooter and looking with surprise toward the door of the tent. “I’m hit!” he said again, the reality of blood and broken bone somehow making its way through the fog of liquor. “Dammit, Flor, he shot me!”

“And I’ll shoot you again if you don’t go off and leave us in peace,” John Henry said from behind the canvas, keeping his pistol aimed at the wounded man. “I have four shots left in my pistol and two charges left in this shotgun, and I’ll gladly give you all of ‘em if you dare fire another shot into my place.”

But Mike Gordon wasn’t listening to him, cradling his bloodied shooting arm and starting to cry.

“Flor!” he moaned, “I’m bleeding out here. Won’t you come out with me now? I only wanted to take you dancing, and now I’m shot to pieces!”

“You’re not shot to pieces, yet,” John Henry replied, finding himself unable to feel any sympathy for a drunk with a deadly weapon. Behind him, the customer Gordon had hit was moaning as well, and Flor was kneeling over him with her apron stanching the bleeding.

“He needs a doctor, Señor. We must send someone right away.”

“I reckon your boyfriend’s gonna be needin’ a doctor as well,” he commented, but when he looked back toward the street, there was only moonlight and no Mike Gordon to be seen.

“Let him find a doctor for himself,” Flor said bitterly. “I am glad to be rid of him. And grateful to you, Señor, for keeping him away from me tonight. I will light a candle for you tomorrow at Nuestra Señora de Dolores. But for him, I hope he dies.”

While Flor lit her candle, John Henry had more practical matters to attend to. The gunfight with Mike Gordon had shown him how flimsy a structure a tent saloon could be and that it was time he invested in something more substantial. Wind and rain coming in around the edges of the tent walls were merely uncomfortable; gunshots tearing through the canvas and into the customers were downright dangerous. So he signed a contract with a local carpenter to build a real board and batten structure to take the place of his shot-through saloon, and paid out $45 in cash to get the job started.

The tent saloon came down on a Monday morning at about the same time that George Close found a body in the drainage ditch behind his Railroad Street dance hall. It was Mike Gordon, Flor’s lover, dead of a gunshot wound to the arm. He’d bled to death seemingly, though a doctor could have saved him with no trouble at all. Now, his unnecessary death would be trouble for John Henry, for everyone knew that Mike Gordon had been shooting up the town in front of Doc Holliday’s Saloon that Saturday night, and someone’s well-aimed answering shot had stopped the noise. So it wasn’t surprising when the owner of the saloon was subpoenaed as a witness in the Coroner’s hearing into the untimely death of poor genial old Mike Gordon. What was surprising was how a town’s perceptions of a man could change just because he was dead.

The Coroner’s hearing was held in the dining room of the Exchange Hotel on the Plaza in Old Town Las Vegas, a place John Henry knew well, having paid good money to live in luxury there after his miraculous recovery at the Hot Springs. But he hadn’t lived there alone, and as he stepped into the chandeliered lobby where the afternoon light filtered through fancy lace curtains, he couldn’t help but think of Kate. She had loved the Exchange, with its shiny brass beds and deep feather mattresses, it’s printed artwork adorning papered walls, its long windows looking out over the Plaza where the hanging gallows stood encircled by a white picket fence. The Exchange, he realized, was much like Kate in some ways: elegance in the midst of trail dust and wagon trains, ease and comfort in the face of affliction.

He had never thought of Kate and comfort in the same breath before, except when she was nursing him back to health. But she had been comfortable, in her way, standing by him when other women would have been long gone. It was her companionship, mostly, that he was missing, he decided, and the comfort of having another human being near. It was a comfort that would be welcome this afternoon, as he walked into the dining room of the hotel and faced a crowd of spectators—hearings on suspicious deaths being close to hangings as entertainment in Las Vegas.

He found a seat on a curved-back dining room chair and looked around the room, noting the number of sporting men in the audience. He was in good company, at least, if anything untoward came of the hearing. Still, he couldn’t help but wish he’d brought along someone for moral support. His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a red-haired, red-faced stranger.

“You must be Doc Holliday,” the man said, not bothering to offer his hand in a proper introduction. His hands, in fact, were already occupied with a pencil and sheaf of paper on which he scribbled as he spoke.

“I am,” John Henry said. “And who do I have the pleasure of addressin’?”

“Kistler,” the man replied brusquely, “Russell Kistler, Editor of the Otero Optic and soon to be Editor of the Las Vegas Optic as well. Currently working as a court reporter covering murder cases in San Miguel County.”

“Then you’re in the wrong courtroom, Mr. Kistler. This isn’t a murder case.”

“Oh?” the newspaper reporter said, voice and pencil poised in midair. “And why do you say that?”

“Because Mike Gordon wasn’t worth murderin’. Ask any of his limited number of friends.”

“I have,” the reporter replied, “and they all think you killed him, shooting out the door of your saloon.”

“I didn’t have a door on my saloon last Saturday night,” John Henry said coolly. “It was nothin’ but a tent until two days ago, so I’m afraid Mike’s friends must have it wrong.”

“And who do you think shot him?” the reporter asked.

“I think that’s a question for the Coroner,” John Henry answered, noting with irritation that the reporter scribbled down those words, too.

“And what do you think of our acting Mayor and Coroner?” Kistler questioned, ready to write down another reply.

“I haven’t had the pleasure of meetin’ him yet,” John Henry replied carefully, “though I hear he has the best interests of New Town at heart. And you may quote me on that.”

“Oh, I already have,” the reporter said with a smile.

It was a smile John Henry didn’t find comforting, and he was almost relieved to hear the Constable’s cry of attention.

“All arise for the honorable Hoodoo Brown!”

John Henry’s irritation at the annoying reporter turned into amusement at the ridiculous ceremony being afforded the Coroner. He was, after all, just another sporting man with an outlandish nickname and little qualification for a legal career. But the laughter left him as the Coroner swept into the room, bedecked in judge’s robes and jeweled finger rings that sparkled as he took up the gavel.

“That Hoodoo Brown’s quite a dandy, ain’t he?” a man beside him whispered. “Where do you suppose they dug up such a daisy?”

John Henry stared at the Coroner, his reply coming out in a hoarse whisper. “St. Louis,” he said, hardly believing the words himself, “on the Levee in St. Louis . . .”

If the man looked at him quizzically, he didn’t notice. His mind was racing back to a night when he’d played poker with the cunning owner of a saloon on the cobblestoned levee in St. Louis. He could still see the signboard hanging over the saloon door: a man fighting an alligator and losing. He could still hear the echo of riverboats sliding past and the warning of a river man whose words echoed in his memory: Hoodoo be black magic, and that man in there, he be hoodoo, too, he be bad luck. . .”

Hoodoo, the Jamaican had called him. Hoodoo Brown folks called him now, but it still meant the same thing: bad luck. For the Coroner of New Town Las Vegas, the man who had come to make a charge of murder in the death of Mike Gordon, was the man John Henry had played poker against at the Alligator Saloon back in St. Louis, the gambler named Hyram Neil.

It had been seven years since John Henry had wagered his inheritance and lost, leaving St. Louis without making good on the debt. And for most of those seven years, he hadn’t given Hyram Neil a second thought. But now it came back to him all at once: the youthful arrogance that had made him think he could beat a sophisticated sporting man; the horror of realizing he hadn’t beaten him after all and had lost his family’s property; the fear that Hyram Neil would come to collect on the debt and deal him worse than a creditor. And now, he was face to face with Neil again and the gambler had the power to make him pay at last, or punish him, at least, for not paying up.

The Coroner’s dark eyes took in the room and John Henry felt himself flinch under their appraising gaze. Surely the man would recognize him and remember the debt he’d never paid. But Neil’s glance only flickered past him, showing no more interest in him than in any of the other men the room. And even when the name of Doc Holliday was called as a witness in the hearing, the Coroner’s face seemed as undisturbed as the slow-moving waters of the muddy Mississippi River. But like the Mississippi, where treacherous shoals and twisting currents lay hidden beneath the surface of the water, a poker player’s face hid his real thoughts—Hyram Neil was, above all things, a poker player.

John Henry put on his own poker face to answer the Coroner’s questions, hoping to look as unruffled as Hoodoo did.

“Yessir, Your Honor, I own a saloon on Centre Street. Next door to Heran’s Saloon, except for an alley in between.”

“And how long have you owned this saloon?”

“Just a month, more or less. I bought the lot and had a tent put on it, like they do down in New Town. Though the tent is gone now since I’m havin’ a board saloon built in its place.”

“You must be prospering, Dr. Holliday,” the coroner said, and John Henry answered warily.

“I’m doin’ all right. Prosperity bein’ a matter of interpretation, I reckon.”

“And were you in your saloon on Saturday evening last?”

“Yessir, I was.”

“Describe the evening, if you would. Was it a clear night?”

“It was.”

“And was there a moon overhead?”

The question was ridiculous, since everyone in the courtroom surely knew the weather and the phase of the moon that night.

“Yessir, there was. A three-quarter moon, as I recall.”

“And what was the mood of the customers in your saloon?” “Cheerful. Whiskey has a way of makin’ men cheerful.”

There was a ruffle of laughter in the room, but the Coroner ignored it and went on. “And your employees, were they cheerful as well?”

“They were cheerful, too, for the most part.”

“And by that, do you mean to say that some of your employees were not in a cheerful state?”

“I only have two employees, and one of them was less than cheerful.” “And which employee would that be?”

“My waitress, Flor Hernandez.”

“And what was the cause of her unhappiness?”

“Some trouble with her lover, as I suppose. One never knows for sure with women.”

Again there was laughter from the crowd, ignored by the coroner.

“And the lover you mention was the late Mike Gordon?”

“Yessir.”

The Coroner paused to write something on the papers in front of him, and John Henry noticed newspaper reporter Kistler doing the same. Then the Coroner looked up again, his dark eyes glinting.

“As I hear it around town, Dr. Holliday, you were Flor’s lover and Mike Gordon was your rival for her affections. Cause enough for you to kill him.”

The laughter in the courtroom turned to a sudden silence.

“I believe I would like to speak with a lawyer,” John Henry said carefully. “I would like to be represented by counsel.”

It was a reasonable enough request in any other court of law. But in New Town Las Vegas, the Coroner was the law and he set his own rules. And surprisingly, Hyram Neil laughed.

“Come now, Dr. Holliday, that won’t be necessary! This isn’t a trial and you haven’t been charged with anything. This is only a hearing to find whether there is cause to make a charge. Now, why don’t you tell me your version of the story and let me decide your fate?”

It was as unattractive an offer as he had ever received, yet he had no choice but to accept it and say everything he knew about the shooting, from Mike Gordon’s first appearance in the street that Saturday night to his last words to Flor. But, true as John Henry’s story was, it was only his word against Hyram Neil’s and no guarantee of justice. And as he waited for the court to consider the story and render judgment, he remembered the words his uncle Will McKey had spoken long ago: What a man could prove and what he got accused of were two different things—and sometimes all it took was an accusation to ruin a man’s good name. Or his life, John Henry thought as the moments dragged on and the Coroner still considered.

The silence in the courtroom was broken only by the pencil-scratching of Russell Kistler who was, no doubt, relishing the drama and readying it for the front page of his Otero Optic. And still the Coroner held his silence, considering.

John Henry had heard that kind of silence before, in the tense moments of a high-stakes poker game. And suddenly, he understood: Hyram Neil was playing poker and about to raise the stakes.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Court,” he said at last, “this is a difficult matter to decide. As our witness tells it, the death of Mike Gordon is a simple case of excusable homicide, as the shooting was done by way of a police act to protect the customers in an established place of business. But as certain other sources tell it, the shooting was more than a police action. It was, in fact, a premeditated and efficiently accomplished act of revenge. It was, in fact, murder in the first degree.”

John Henry glanced out the long windows of the dining room toward the Plaza and the gallows waiting there, and shivered in spite of the summer heat. Hyram Neil had raised the stakes, all right, and he had nothing left to play.

“However,” the Coroner went on in measured tones, “since this is such a difficult matter, I feel it my duty to give careful consideration to the situation. Court is hereby adjourned until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” The slam of his gavel on the makeshift judge’s bench rattled the water glasses and the windows in their casements, making the gallows outside seem to come alive.

Hyram Neil was hanging him already, just by leaving him hanging.

In his dreams that night he was back in St. Louis, playing cards down on the levee. He knew the place was the Alligator Saloon because there was an alligator sitting across the table from him, making wagers in the wavering light of a hanging oil lamp. But try as he might to find a winning play, he kept losing to the grinning monster before him.

But the alligator didn’t eat him, which seemed like a good sign, and as he shaved and dressed the next morning and took a drink to steady his nerves, he hoped the dream was right.

Russell Kistler met him at the door of the Exchange Hotel, madden-ingly cheerful about the morning’s coming events.

“Well, you’re famous in Otero already, no matter how the hearing goes. The judge called the trial so early yesterday I was able to get the type set in time for this morning’s press. ‘Course today’s story could make the headlines, too, depending on Hoodoo’s call.”

John Henry wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to such exciting news, but was sure he didn’t much like reporter Kistler.

“I’ll try not to disappoint you,” he commented as he pushed past the newspaperman and made his way into the dining room—more crowded this morning than it had been the day before. If Hoodoo did make a murder charge and the thing came to a real trial, they’d have to build a new courtroom to accommodate all the spectators.

But Hoodoo Brown didn’t make any charge at all, and instead, had his constable Jack Lyons read the court’s brief decision that there wasn’t enough evidence to make a charge against anyone—yet. As soon as something turned up, or was made to turn up, the case could come to a hearing again. But John Henry was too relieved at the temporary stay of execution to worry over what might come in the future, and when Russell Kistler asked for his comments for the readers of the Otero Optic, he could only shrug and say, “I reckon I’m lucky.”

But as made his way back out of the Exchange Hotel and into the summer sunlight, the warm wind seemed to carry a sound like a haunted laugh:

That man be Hoodoo, mon. Good luck with that man be bad luck.

As reporter Kistler had said, the story of the unsolved murder of Mike Gordon made the morning paper in Otero, and went from there to every other town in the Territory. It was just the kind of thing Russell Kistler liked to write about, extolling the excitement of life in New Town Las Vegas and warning of the dangers of too many sporting men and not enough police. Kistler, it seemed, was on a crusade to clean up New Town while promoting its growth. In his vision of things, New Town would soon overtake Old Town as the real Las Vegas and leave the Plaza and the Nuestra Señora de Dolores in a sleepy siesta.

It was the newspaper article that brought Kate back to Las Vegas, the story of the murder of Mike Gordon having been picked up from the Otero Optic and reprinted in the paper in Santa Fe.

“I was hoping to see you hang,” she said tenderly on the afternoon that she swept back into town and found him at the Senorita Saloon. “I’m sure you deserve it for something or other, even if you didn’t shoot Mr. Gordon.”

“Oh, I shot him, all right,” John Henry replied, his tone matching the sarcasm of her own, “but I don’t consider that I killed him. He’d still be alive if he’d been sober enough to find a doctor. His own fault for drinkin’ too much and tryin’ to tree the town. I was only doin’ my civic duty in protectin’ my establishment. But I suppose the paper neglected to mention that part.”

“I don’t recall,” Kate replied, pulling off a soft leather glove and running her hand across the construction dust that covered the bar. “So you’ve given up dentistry for something more sophisticated, I see.”

“Not entirely. I’m just makin’ a little money off the railroad boom. I’ll get my tools out again when things quiet down.”

“And how was Dodge?” she asked, as though they were having a real conversation instead of preparing for a duel.

“Muddy. But Colorado was nice, though I had to hurry back before I could see much of the Royal Gorge. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure trip.”

“Wasn’t it?” she said, one brow artfully raised. “You seemed quite pleased to be leaving me.”

“I was, at the time,” he replied, letting the almost imperceptible pause convey his meaning. If Kate had come to reconcile, he was willing. If she had only come to spar, he was willing to do that, too.

But her own momentary silence showed she had caught his intent.

“Otero got dull,” she said with a stage sigh, “and Las Vegas never did interest me much. So I went on to Santa Fe and auditioned for a role in the theater company there. I was about to accept a part in a new play they’re staging when I noticed the story in the newspaper. Of course, I had to come and see if the shooting outside Doc Holliday’s Saloon had anything to do with you. The newspaper said there’d likely be a hanging once the culprit was discovered.”

“So that explains why you’re wearin’ your best gown,” he commented, though her attire was more suitable to a fancy party than a frontier strangling. She was wearing a bosom-baring frock of midnight blue satin with black velvet trim, an outfit entirely wrong for the season, but entirely fetching on her—which she knew, of course.

“I thought you should see me looking well before you died,” she replied, but there was a light in her eyes that said she was enjoying the repartee.

And so was he, having missed the kind of cat-and-mouse conversations Kate was so good at. “Well, I am sorry to disappoint you in regards to the hangin’,” he said. “But if it’s any consolation, I did think of you while I was away.”

“And now that you’re back?”

He smiled wryly. “It’s hard not to think of someone who says she wants you dead, but dresses like she hopes there’s plenty of life in you yet.”

“But it’s really the undressing that proves the life in a man,” came her quick reply, and by the way she smiled when she said it, he knew she’d be proving him again soon enough.

Kate’s comment on the sophistication of keeping bar for a living inspired him to make another real estate deal: he purchased the eight-foot alleyway between his saloon and the building next door with the intent of planting a dental office on it. Eight feet wasn’t much space across, but it was enough to set up a chair and a dental engine, especially since his saloon could serve as waiting room and laboratory. During the slow afternoons, before the real gamblers and drinkers came around, he could amuse himself by doing a little dentistry—and appease Kate that their life was still something more than cards and booze. And to prove his acceptance of her return, he had her name added to the deed as well, though the judge questioned his intent. After all, a man didn’t have to share his property with a real wife; why make such a legal entanglement with a woman who only pretended to be Mrs. Holliday? But John Henry was resolute: add her name to the deed regardless of who was pretending what. He knew that he could never offer what Kate really wanted, but he could give her part ownership in his land, at least.

The Senorita Saloon reopened for business on the second Saturday evening in August, and on the following Tuesday, its owner was arrested for keeping a gaming table. In any other town, he’d have considered the fine just a normal business expense, a license fee of sorts for the privilege of banking bets. But when the gaming charge was followed the next day by a warrant for his arrest for carrying a deadly weapon, he knew there was more to it than just license fees. It was Hoodoo Brown who was finding excuses to have him arrested again and again, playing a kind of shell game with John Henry’s life—and keeping him wondering when Mike Gordon would rise from the dead to seek his revenge.

Kate thought his suspicions unfounded. “Why would he have you arrested just to pay off an old debt?”

“Not to pay it off,” John Henry explained, “to settle up. I ran out on him and now he’s gonna take his revenge, one arrest at a time.”

“But you said he never even spoke to you after the hearing, and didn’t really speak to you there either. What makes you think he remembers you at all? Why, I passed him on the street yesterday and he didn’t take any notice at all, and I used to be a big star back in St. Louis.”

To hear Kate tell it, she’d been the toast of every town along the Mississippi instead of just a varieties actress with a mostly male following. The truth was, she had never quite made the big time and probably never would. Even her supposed starring role in the Santa Fe theater company would have been nothing more than a chorus part. But he had no need to tarnish the silver-lining of her dreams, so he let her remember herself as the West’s Greatest Actress. What did her past matter now, anyhow?

His own past, however, mattered a great deal. In spite of Kate’s assurances to the contrary, he knew that the coroner wasn’t quite through with him yet. It was one of those things only another card player would understand: the wariness that came from a half-seen glance across a table, a second-sense foreboding that ran under the skin. Hoodoo Brown might be arresting him on proper grounds, but Hyram Neil was finding opportunities.

Hoodoo’s harassment only lasted a few days, however, before the town was taken over by the excitement of a robbery on the Barlow and Sanderson Stage. The stage was on its regular route from Santa Fe to Trinidad, carrying payroll for the military post at Fort Union, when it was set upon near the village of Tecolote, eight miles from Las Vegas. According to the driver, three masked riders came alongside the coach flourishing shotguns and commanding the express messenger to open the treasure box and throw down the payroll bag. As it was a small payroll and not worth endangering the lives of the passengers, the messenger did as he was told and the robbers rode away satisfied—but not before the driver recognized the masked bandits as three lowlifes from Las Vegas.

Though the robbery was County Sheriff ’s business, the Coroner was quick to send his own police to aid in the chase—an irony not lost on the residents of New Town. For it was common knowledge that the three robbers had also done work for Hoodoo Brown, which made it seem unlikely that the Coroner would make any real attempt to apprehend them. More likely, he was sending his police to lead the county sheriff off the trail, and would be paid for his efforts out of that stolen military payroll. And when another Barlow and Sanderson stage was robbed a week later, the irony seemed like proof that something mysterious was going on in Las Vegas—especially when the driver identified the bandits as three of Hoodoo Brown’s underlings.

This time, the stage company didn’t leave the investigation to the local authorities, but brought in their own man to make the chase, a part time officer of the law from Dodge City by the name of John Joshua Webb.

Josh was still proudly sporting his shiny gold tooth when he walked into the Senorita Saloon, though his smile was lacking.

“Seems like the old Dodge City gang has just moved on down here, or at least the lesser aspects of it,” he told John Henry over a short glass of whiskey, Josh never having been one to drink to excess, especially when he had business to conduct. “Fact is, so many of the gang have left town, the Lady Gay isn’t doing much business at all anymore. Trouble with a cowtown: when the cows are gone, so are the cowboys, which leaves things quiet and poor. Which is why I took this job with the express company to make a little money on the side. But the express won’t pay if I don’t find their robbers.”

“And you think both robberies are connected?” John Henry asked. “Couldn’t they just be random highwaymen takin’ advantage of the summer weather?”

“Could be,” Josh replied, “but the express ain’t going to wait around and find out. They’ve lost two payrolls in a week, and that’s too much. They keep losing money like that, folks won’t trust to have them ship anymore.”

“So where do you reckon to find these robbers?”

Josh considered a moment, looking around as if wary of overhearing ears. “Fact is, Doc, I was hoping you could help me with that, which is why I stopped by your place first. You’ve got your ear to the ground, most of the time. I figured you could give me the heads-up on what’s going on in this town.”

John Henry took a sip at his own whiskey glass before answering.

“I’m afraid I’m in a bad position to help you out, Josh. Seems the guilty parties already have an interest in seein’ me in distress, and I don’t want to give them anymore cause. But I can tell you that what looks like law around here is more like a cover for law-breakin’. The rest you’ll have to cipher for yourself.”

Josh nodded. “That’s pretty much what I expected, what with the names that keep turning up on the express wanted list. I’m just surprised they haven’t tried to rob the train as yet.”

“The stage is easier, you know that. You only have to down a horse to stop a coach. But I wouldn’t put it past this gang to try the rails next. Seems like they’re gettin’ mighty cocky and self-assured. ‘Course, the way they keep gettin’ away with things, maybe they have some Jamaican luck on their side and a cause to be so cocky.”

“Jamaican luck?”

“That’s right,” he said, keeping his eyes on his whiskey glass. “I heard about it back in St. Louis, from a colored down on the levee. He told me that Jamaican luck is bad luck. He had a name for it, even.” He paused, as if waiting for the word to come to him, then shrugged. “Can’t remember what it was, just now. But that’s the thing you’re lookin’ for, Josh. You find that Jamaican luck, you’ll find your bandits.”

He didn’t dare say more, but knew that if anyone had enough imagination to figure out the clue, Josh Webb did, black magic not being all that strange for a man who believed in sea monsters.

Though Kate claimed to have no jealousy over John Henry’s rumored romance with Flor, she still fired the girl the first chance she got. John Henry had been away from the saloon that evening, trying his own gambling hand at Close and Patterson’s down by the railroad tracks, and by the time he got back, Flor was gone and Kate was serving the drinks instead—and wearing a look that said she wasn’t going to be challenged over the arrangement. So it was Kate, not Flor, who got the pleasure of pouring for Hyram Neil when he came into the saloon later that evening, looking for a poker game. At least, Kate acted like it was a pleasure, flirting and trifling with Hoodoo Brown as if she had a real interest in him.

“I’m only being nice to the customers,” she said, when John Henry mentioned her surprising behavior. “Seems like you’d want a high roller like Hoodoo Brown to be happy in your saloon, so he spends more money. But you act like you want him out of here.”

“I do want him out,” John Henry said under his breath. “I wish he’d leave Las Vegas altogether, and I wish you’d stop playin’ up to him.”

Kate smiled and slid her arm around his neck. “Are you jealous, my love?”

John Henry brushed off her seduction. “Just cautious, that’s all. Neil is still tryin’ to settle up with me somehow. I can feel it, and I don’t want to give him any advantage in doin’ it. And your flirtations don’t help any, encouragin’ him.”

Kate’s arm slid back down and her smile turned to a frown. “I suppose I can flirt with anyone I want, as long as I’m still a single woman.”

It was the same old complaint she’d always made and that he always tried to ignore. Make Kate his wife? It was a ridiculous thought.

“Why, Kate, if I were to marry you, I wouldn’t have a mistress anymore. And a sporting man can’t be without a mistress; it doesn’t look right.”

For a moment, she seemed torn between crying and slapping him, then she tossed her head and laughed.

“Then you can’t complain when I flirt with other men! And I happen to find Hoodoo Brown quite charming in spite of your guilty notions about him. He’s only come here to play cards, not seek revenge.”

She said it with such a dramatic flair that he almost laughed himself, until he glanced toward the gaming tables and saw Hyram Neil looking his way, dark eyes glinting. He’d seen those eyes before, in the alligator dream. Hoodoo was after him all right, he had no doubt of that.

But there wasn’t any black magic in the saloon that night, only card games, and the Coroner left with a respectable profit and nothing more; although, when he came back the next night and the night after that, even Kate began to wonder why he had taken such a liking to Doc Holliday’s Saloon.

“It’s you, my dear,” John Henry said, taunting her. “He’s recognized you, after all, and is challengin’ Silas Melvin for your affections like another stage-door Johnny.”

“And you’re still jealous of Silas!” she said with satisfaction. “But Hoodoo won’t be fighting you for me, not now.”

“And why is that?”

“Because he’s going to be busy fighting Marshal Joe Carson instead. From what I hear, Mrs. Carson agrees with me about the Coroner being charming, and he thinks the same of her.”

“Marshal Carson isn’t a man to fool with,” he said, remembering the impressive physical presence of the leading lawman in Las Vegas— two-hundred fifty pounds, at least, packed onto a frame something over six feet tall. “Seems like suicide to fool with his wife.”

“The Marshal doesn’t know about it just yet,” Kate replied. “Joe’s been out with your friend Josh Webb, chasing those stage robbers while his wife philanders with Hoodoo.”

“So how did you happen to come upon this information?”

“Women’s intuition,” Kate said smugly. “Some things I just know.”

“Well, it’s knowledge you ought to keep to yourself, Kate. A story like that could get someone killed, true or not.”

“Oh, I hope so,” she said. “It’s been altogether too quiet around here so far.”

Kate’s quiet was good news for John Henry’s business, as it meant the gaming tables at the Senorita ran undisturbed nearly night and day. And whenever a gambler came in with a toothache or a broken bit of bicuspid, Dr. Holliday ushered him into the lean-to dental office next door for an extraction or a new gold crown. There were some days when the dental office brought in more than the gaming, which made John Henry feel almost like a professional man again.

When he wasn’t doing dentistry or playing the games, he was up Gallinas Canyon taking the water cure for the consumption. And it had been a real cure, the attendants at the hot springs all assured him, as his lungs sounded so clear that there surely must be no remains of the disease. John Henry wanted to believe them, and there were days that he did as he lay in the sulphureted water smelling the pungent perfume of rotting eggs and Piñon pine. There were days that he stepped from the bath into a waiting wrap of Turkish toweling to be swaddled and set to dry in the clear mountain air and felt almost his old self again. And on those days, staring up at a sky of startling blue broken by the evergreen of the pine-covered mountains, he felt like he might live forever. Twenty-eight years old he was that summer, with the whole rest of his life before him still.

In the quiet of the canyon, he missed the next excitement that came to town when the Barlow and Sanderson stage was robbed again and another payroll stolen. But this time, Josh Webb was near enough to follow the clues. The robbers—Frank Cady, Slap Jack Bill, and Bull-Shit Jack—had colorful names but not very bright minds, as they went straight from the sight of the robbery to the nearest bar to start celebrating their success. By the time they returned to Las Vegas, they were happily inebriated and telling everyone who would listen that they had robbed the Barlow and Sanderson and got to keep all the money minus the portion paid to the men who had set-up the scheme.

Josh didn’t have to do much to bring them in, only buy them a few drinks and listen admiringly to the story. Then without so much as pulling his pistol, he genially escorted the boys out of Close and Patterson’s Dance Hall and up Main Street to where there was another big party, so he told them—the location of the party being the county jail, where the sheriff was equally happy to entertain them and hear their tale.

As for the planners behind the robbery, catching them wouldn’t be so easy. According to the robbers’ drunken story, the masterminds were Mysterious Dave Rudabaugh and Joe Carson, the town marshal of Las Vegas.

Josh had crossed paths with Rudabaugh before, but he doubted the outlaw’s involvement in the Las Vegas hold-up as Dave was known to be back in Kansas at the time and far from the meadows of New Mexico. As for Marshal Joe Carson, that was business Josh didn’t want to get mixed into. The express company had promised to pay him for arresting robbers, not cleaning up the law in Las Vegas, and he had already made good on that deal. Leave it to the citizens of the town to clean up their own corruption; he was headed back to Dodge City to see after his Lady Gay Saloon.

Josh had said that Dodge City was clearing out and heading down to Las Vegas, and that seemed to be true, with most of the refugees coming by way of Pueblo and Trinidad on the newly completed southbound rails of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. They were the sporting men who traveled light and took up temporary residence in the hotels and brothels around the railroad depot of New Town and swelled the crowds in the Centre Street saloons. The family groups mostly took a different route, moving by wagon train with all their homely belongings and traveling slow along the old Santa Fe Trail. Where the trail ended at the Plaza in Old Town, they made a campground, ringing the square with the white canopies of the prairie schooners and drawing water from the well below the hangman’s gallows. And so the divergent populations of Old Town and New Town grew with their separate citizenry: family folk in their campground around the Plaza; sporting men and dance halls girls in the boomtown down around the depot, and neither mixing much with the other. So it was an unusual evening when one of the denizens of Old Town took a walk down the hill and over the Gallinas River bridge to pay a social visit on one of the denizens of New Town.

He was a long lean fellow, so tall that he had to bend his head to get through the door of the Senorita Saloon, though he didn’t try to accommodate the space by taking off his hat. To the contrary, he kept his hat on his head as if needing to shade his face from the fading rays of the sun. Or needing to hide himself somehow, John Henry thought, as he watched the man step into the saloon. But it was impossible to hide such height or such natural swagger, though the man didn’t mean to make a show of himself. He was, indeed, the least showy man John Henry had ever known, a quiet self-deprecating soul who somehow kept bringing fame to himself. And John Henry knew in a moment, just by the way the fellow shed a tall shadow, that Wyatt Earp had come to town.

Wyatt was his usual laconic self, as short of words as he was long of body, and John Henry had to work to get any kind of conversation out of him.

“So you packed up and brought the whole family along with you?” he asked, and Wyatt nodded under the shadow of his hat brim.

“All that was left in Dodge: just Jim and Bessie and their kids and me and Celia. Virgil’s already moved out, gone to Arizona to try his hand there. Owns a sawmill up above Prescott.”

“And Morgan?” John Henry asked. “Any word since he went off to get married?”

Wyatt shrugged, which said more than any words would have. Wyatt had never cottoned to the idea of his brother’s union with Miss Louisa Houston, considering her more ornamental than useful in a wifely way. Wyatt’s own taste ran to the sturdy independent type of woman, and Louisa was more southern belle than prairie flower. But his opinion hadn’t quelled Morgan’s infatuation with the pretty Louisa, which was something of a stumbling block between the brothers. Wyatt was accustomed to being trailed by Morgan like an eager puppy following a hunting dog, but in this thing, Morgan had taken another lead.

“So what are your plans from here?” John Henry asked, ambling away from the undiscussed subject.

Wyatt touched a hand to his hat, settling it back a bit on his head, signaling his willingness to entertain the topic. It was an unthinking action, John Henry suspected, but it was always the same: Wyatt with hat down low over his face closed himself off from the world; Wyatt with hat pushed back allowed the world in. Funny how you could grow to know a man just by the way he wore his hat.

“We’re traveling, going to Arizona Territory to pick up Virgil and Allie. Then we’re headed down to the silver country.”

“Why, Wyatt, I never figured you for a miner!” John Henry said with a laugh. “Since when did you get interested in silver?”

“Since Ed Shieffelin staked his claim down on the border. The Tombstone mines are the richest in the whole United States, or so says Virg. He’s been keeping an eye on the boom since he got to the Arizona Territory, and he figures we can follow the mines to some good business opportunities.”

“Such as?”

“Milling, for one thing. That’s what Virg’s been doing in Prescott. A new town’s got to have fresh lumber milled. Plus transportation for the wood and whatever else needs transporting. Which is why I’ve been thinking of turning our prairie schooner to transport use, after we get there. A wagon’s a big investment to just retire when the traveling’s done, and I know something about the shipping business. Used to drive freight out of California, when I was boy.”

“The Earp Brothers Express,” John Henry said, trying out the idea. “Has a ring to it. Though I never figured you for a freighter, either.”

“It’s not the freight I’m interested in,” Wyatt countered, “just the business. There’s money in it, and that’s my aim. I’ve been looking for a money-making business, and I think this may be it.”

“You’ll need a good guard, if the roads there are anything like the roads around here. You heard Josh Webb was hired by the Adam’s Express to chase stage robbers?”

“I heard something of it. But the way I see it, the Earp Brothers have something the Adam’s doesn’t.”

“And what’s that?” John Henry asked, though he already knew the answer.

“The Earp Brothers,” Wyatt replied with something like a smile, the most humor he ever showed. “Between me and Virg and Morg, we’ve got three of the best guns around. That ought to do.”

“If you can get Morgan out of Montana,” John Henry said, pointing out the most obvious difficulty in the endeavor.

Wyatt nodded. “Which is why I came to see you, Doc. I was hoping you might help me write a letter to Morg, convincing him to join us. You’re good with words and writing and all. I was thinking that if you wrote Morgan, you might convince him to leave Sam Houston’s party and join back up with us again.”

“So you want me to play Cyrano, read poetry from balconies on your behalf?” John Henry said, considering.

“There’s no need for poetry,” Wyatt replied, his literal mind missing the literary allusion. “I figured you could paint a pretty picture of the silver country, make it seem appealing to him.”

“I reckon I could, if I’d seen the place myself. But the closest I’ve been to Tombstone is a summer south of the Texas border, and there wasn’t any silver there that I could see. I’d just be makin’ up stories: ‘The streets of Tomb-stone, paved like Heaven in bricks of precious ore,’ perhaps, or ‘the undulating hills where the silver shimmers like veins straining at a whore’s breast. . .’”

He’d meant the fanciful lines as an example of the foolishness of the plan, but Wyatt nodded in seeming appreciation.

“Stories will do, if they get Morgan back with the family. ‘Course, if he heard you were coming along, he’d have that much more reason. He always was partial to you.”

“Why, Wyatt, are you invitin’ me to join your caravan?”

The sarcastic tone was meant to cover his surprise. Having Wyatt ask for his help in writing a letter was one thing; having him extend an invitation to go along with the family was quite another. He was flattered by the first and flustered by the second, and hardly knew how to answer. But one thing he did know: he couldn’t leave Las Vegas and the hot springs up Gallinas Canyon. After returning from dusty Dodge City with a relapse of his cough, he’d spent every free day soaking in the springs and drinking the mineral water, taking the cure. He couldn’t take a chance of having another relapse that might not be so quickly overcome.

But he couldn’t say all that to Wyatt, admitting how fragile he sometimes felt. Wyatt wouldn’t understand something as unmanly as that.

“I’m asking you to come along, if you’re interested,” Wyatt went on. “If Tombstone turns out to be what Virgil says it is, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to go around.”

“Well, I do appreciate your thinkin’ of me,” John Henry replied with a calculatedly casual tone, “but I’m already knee-deep in opportunities here. Las Vegas is boomin’ and just right for a man of my many talents. Besides, Kate would hate the desert. She likes to be close to the dressmakers in case she needs new ruffles and such.”

He threw in the words about Kate as an afterthought, to lighten the conversation, and wished as soon as he’d spoken that he hadn’t.

“So you’re still with Kate? I never took you for a saint, Doc.”

“No saint, just payin’ up on a debt,” he said, for hellion or not, she had saved his life. “Besides,” he added by way of explaining, “she’s good with the saloon clientele, keeps the sporting men occupied while I take their money.” Although the Senorita Saloon wasn’t much of a theater, Kate could make an audience out of any crowd. And thinking of the way she had saved him and traded away her acting career for a boomtown saloon, he had a sudden surge of compassion for her. It wasn’t love, not in the way he had feelings for Mattie, but there was something special in his feelings for Kate.

“Well, suit yourself,” Wyatt said, downing the last of his drink and pushing his hat back down low on his head. “I’ll be back along tomorrow or the day after that, if you’re still willing to help me write that letter. May even take in a poker game, if there’s some rollers in the crowd.”

“Why, Marshal Earp, I’d be happy to have you lose your money in my saloon. It would be a real honor.”

“And what makes you think I’m going to lose?” Wyatt asked, eyes squinted against the thought.

“’Cause I’ll be the first to ante in,” John Henry replied with a smile.

September brought another visitor to Las Vegas, this one even more unexpected than Wyatt. For the last person John Henry figured on seeing was someone from his own far-off past and his days as a respectable Atlanta dentist. Though, if he had to have a former friend see him in his current sporting life, Lee Smith was the right one to see him.

Lee had been the owner of the Maison de Ville Saloon during John Henry’s Atlanta days, and had been interested in Western investments even then: railroads, banks, iron and coal. Now he was traveling the west looking for interesting new opportunities, which was what brought him to Las Vegas that fall on a scouting trip down from Colorado and into the silver southwest. But it was a newspaper article about his upcoming adventure, published in the Atlanta Constitution, that had brought him to Doc Holliday’s Saloon in Las Vegas.

When the Holliday family of Atlanta had read of Lee Smith’s intended itinerary, they’d sent him a note asking him to visit their cousin in New Mexico should his travels take him that direction—or more precisely, it was Miss Mattie Holliday who had made the request. She knew of Lee Smith by reputation only, never having ventured into his Maison de Ville, but she knew the family was acquainted with him and used that social connection as reason to send him a politely worded request—

“As you may have heard, my Uncle Henry Holliday’s son, our cousin John Henry, has been on an extended tour of Texas and the west. He is currently a resident of the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory where he practices his profession of Dentistry . . .”

That was the way Lee Smith remembered her words, anyhow, when he told them to John Henry upon his arrival in New Town—where he was more than a little surprised to find Dr. Holliday not only practicing dentistry, but keeping bank at a Faro table in his own saloon, as well. In fact, his surprise had started when he first got off the southbound Santa Fe at the depot in New Town and checked into the Mackley House Hotel where he asked if the clerk could direct him to the dental office of Dr. John H. Holliday.

The clerk looked mystified at first, then laughed as if the traveler had made a clever joke. “You mean Doc Holliday’s place? Well, Sir, I can direct you to his treatment room, if it’s pain relief you’re after.” Then he said that Dr. Holliday could no doubt be found at a place called The Senorita, a block or so up Centre Street. It wasn’t until Lee found the saloon by that name with young Dr. Holliday running the games that he got the joke.

It was a reunion so amusing to Lee Smith that he told the tale again and again to every sporting man and at every game he happened into: how young Dr. Holliday, heir of the esteemed Holliday and McKey families of Georgia and an expensively educated professional man, should have chosen the same career as he himself had chosen who had no fine family or professional education to stand behind him.

John Henry didn’t mind so much Lee’s recitations to the only somewhat interested gamblers of Las Vegas. What concerned him was the possibility that Lee would return to Atlanta and share the same story with the newspapers there—or worse, with Mattie. Lee found John Henry’s double vocation of dentistry and saloon dealing merely amusing—Mattie would not be so favorably inclined. But as it turned out, he should have worried less about Mattie and more about Las Vegas.

The little lean-to dental office he had built next to the saloon kept him interestingly occupied when he wasn’t busy banking Faro or joining in a poker game. As always, he found his dental practice to be pleasurable in a way he couldn’t have made anyone else understand, and though some might say that it was a sadistic streak that made him enjoy causing pain to his patients, he didn’t see it that way at all. In fact, he more often put them out of pain than caused them the same by removing a damaged or decayed tooth and replacing it with something more serviceable.

But it was for himself, mostly, that he enjoyed practicing. He liked the craft of his profession, being able to do something with his hands and know he was doing it well. It was just too bad that there was no one around who could really appreciate his work—not that he was the only dentist in Las Vegas, of course. He was just the only one working out of a saloon in New Town, which gave him a somewhat limited professional association. And that was a shame, when he was doing such fine work as he was just now, crafting a gleaming porcelain and gold bridge for a railroader who’d lost his two front teeth in a saloon fight. The railroader, a big Irishman with more brawn than brain, had chosen to use only his fists, while his opponent had pulled a pistol and shoved the butt end of it into his mouth. The Irishman lost his teeth, but the other man lost the fight, going down in a heap of bruises and groans. It was the luck of the Irish, the man said, that the loser had a wad of greenbacks in his pockets which he took as winnings—and which he was happy to give to Doc Holliday to make him look presentable again.

John Henry was happy to take the hard-won money, and happier to take on the dental case, which was far more challenging than the usual fillings and extractions that occupied his occasional work hours. And so it was that he found himself engrossed in carving and excavating and making plaster impressions, and ignoring what was going on in his saloon on the other side of the doorway until a boisterous voice drew his attention. Most days, the hubbub of the Senorita’s bar and gaming tables was just a pleasant background sound to the louder whir of his dental drill, but on this late September afternoon, even the drill couldn’t drown out the sound of a man’s laughter as he told an old story to anyone who would listen.

The man was Lee Smith, of course, holding court somewhere in the saloon like he used to hold court in his Maison de Ville in Atlanta. His voice, from long years of speaking across the noise of his own saloon, had learned a resonance that carried it to every corner of a room. He might have made a name for himself on the theater stage, John Henry mused, the way his voice carried through the thin walls of the saloon like it was carrying across the footlights, though the tale he was telling would never make for good drama. He was recounting, in what John Henry heard as dully accurate detail, the history of the Holliday family in Georgia and how he came to be associated with them all.

“Yessir,” said Lee, “I was pleased to see John Henry here following in the family footsteps, goin’ into the liquor business. A stable sort of livin’, I’ve always found it to be. No matter the economic turn of things, there’s always call for a good saloon. In fact, the worst times is oft the best of times for a saloonkeeper, as bad times make a man needful of a good drink. Then the good times come and what’s a man gonna spend his money on but another drink? Yessir,” he said again, as though proving a point, although no one could be heard disputing him, “there’s no business better suited to a stable and satisfying lifestyle than sellin’ drinks across the bar. ‘Course the Hollidays have known that from way back. As I recall it, there was a Holliday saloon in Georgia in the frontier days when the roads cut through the Indian nation to get from one white town to another. Though, in those days, they weren’t called saloons, a fancy sort of name that came later. They were taverns back then, part hotel and part drinkin’ room, and welcome wherever they were established. That was the first business of John Henry’s Grandpa Bob Holliday, and they say a finer tavern keeper you never did meet: friendly, fast on the pour, full of talk. Like me! So the way I see it, John Henry comes by the saloon business naturally. What’s that you say?”

There was a pause as though Lee were listening to a question, which he then readily answered.

“That’s right, they came into some money after those days. Came from land, mostly. The Holliday boys—I’m talkin’ John Henry’s father and uncles now—were smart about the women they married. All of them married into families of some substance, at least as to bein’ landowners. And Henry Holliday—that’s John Henry’s father and a longtime friend of my own—and his brother John, they married best of all. Both of them wed planter’s daughters, so they got the slaves along with the land when it came time for the inheritances to be doled out. ‘Course they lost the slaves after the War, but they kept most of the land. Henry did, anyhow, and kept buyin’ up more when he relocated down toward the Florida border.”

There was another pause, but whether for another question or for Lee to take a drink to wet his throat, John Henry couldn’t tell.

“Oh, I’m sure there’s still plenty of that property left, even so. But the real money isn’t in property anymore, it’s in commodities. It’s his Uncle John, himself a Dr. Holliday, who’s the wealthy one now. He made the smart move to Atlanta just when it was boomin’ and settled himself and his businesses there. Bought an old general store and turned it profitable, then made some investments. The Holliday money now is in jewelry and silver and such things—easier to trade than land down in the swamps.”

Another pause, a longer one this time.

“Inheritance? Well, I suppose he does. There was quite something to it at one time between the land and the other properties. I’d say there’s plenty of inheritance left. Why do you ask?”

John Henry couldn’t hear the answer, though he had stopped the foot-treadle that kept his dental drill smoking away and excused himself from his patient, near enough done to be dismissed for the day anyhow, and stepped into the barroom to see whom it was that Lee Smith was entertaining in such eager fashion.

At first glance, he saw only Kate at Lee’s poker table, sitting beside him in all her satin and finery. No matter the time or the company, she always dressed like she was on her way to some fancy dress ball or an opening night on the stage, and this afternoon was no exception as she sat decorating the room and hanging on Lee’s every word. But it wasn’t Kate that Lee was addressing himself to, but one of the players in the poker game, a man with his back to the wall and his face toward the door, guarded. And though John Henry couldn’t see his face, he knew by the man’s hands who it was that was asking after his inheritance—they were gambler’s hands, decked out in jeweled rings and with a pearl-handled derringer resting beside them.

It was Hoodoo Brown who was playing poker with Lee Smith that afternoon, and who was encouraging his talk of the Holliday family properties. And it seemed to John Henry, as he stood there taking in the sight and calculating the situation, that Hyram Neil had come back like the alligator in his dreams, sniffing around dark river water and looking for something to eat.

“Oh, there he is now,’ Kate said, glancing up and seeing him listening, “the hero of our little drama. Why don’t you come join us, darling, and tell us if what Mr. Smith is saying here is true. I had no idea you had such fine family connections.”

“My connections are tenuous, these days,” he replied with a cool he didn’t feel, “and my fine family is far away with nothin’ to do with my present circumstances.”

It was then that Hoodoo Brown turned around, his dark-mustached face sporting a smile that glinted like the dark jewels on his gambling hands.

“But it’s your past circumstances that interest me, Dr. Holliday. For I seem to recall a certain wager made by you with your family’s property back in Georgia as collateral. A wager you lost then left without honoring, though I remember quite clearly your signing a promissory note guaranteeing payment on the same. I wonder what your fine Georgia family would think about that? I wonder if they would be pleased to hear that their dear relation is both a bad gambler and a bad debtor, and that he still owes me what he promised: his inheritance.”

His words had been spoken with such modulated tones that only those sharing his gaming table heard him. But that was sufficient.

“Is this true, John Henry?” Lee Smith breathed out incredulously. “It’s one thing, followin’ in the family footsteps and ownin’ a drinkin’ saloon, but wagerin’ your family’s hard-earned wealth . . .” And for once, Lee Smith was beyond words.

But Hyram Neil had enough to fill the stunned silence.

“Oh, I assure you my words are every bit the truth. In fact, I’m sure I could produce that promissory note for you to take back to Georgia, if you’d like. Perhaps Dr. Holliday’s fine and upstanding family there would be better about honoring a debt than their dissembling relation has been.”

“No –” John Henry said weakly, his voice revealing the dread Hoodoo’s words put into him. If that promissory note, signed by him one drunken night in a St. Louis saloon, should find its way back to Georgia, he’d lose whatever respect his family still had for him—and whatever affection Mattie still had for him, as well. If she ever came to know the truth of his circumstances. . .

“No,” he said again, this time decisively. “I will make good on that debt myself, Mr. Neil. You don’t have to trouble my family.”

Hoodoo looked at him a long appraising moment before speaking.

“Well, then,” he said, “I accept your pledge, in spite of your past lack of fidelity. But how do you plan to repay the debt? Have you a large bank account from which to draw the money? Have you, yourself, the kind of property holdings your inheritance boasted?

“He’s got this saloon,” Lee Smith put in unhelpfully. He didn’t need Hoodoo finding out how meager his assets really were, and decide to send the promissory note off to Georgia after all.

“But it’s cash I’ve got mostly,” he said quickly, “my winnings from all these poker games. The house takes a cut, as you know, and business has been brisk since the Santa Fe came to town.”

Kate looked at him with raised brows, surely knowing his deceit. For though he always had money for the clothes and baubles she demanded, they were still living in a rented boarding house room and not in the more elaborate Exchange Hotel that she would have preferred. But she was ever an actress at heart, and said with dramatic flair:

“Yes, Mr. Neil, business has done very well. Why, I recently returned from a little trip down to Santa Fe, inquiring after purchasing a theater company there. Doc has always wanted to buy me one for my own. Haven’t you darling?”

The words came like sugared syrup out of her prettily painted lips, so sweet that John Henry almost believed them himself. And he could have kissed her right then for being clever enough to see a role and play it to his advantage.

“Yes indeed, my sweet. I look forward to seein’ you on the stage again. But I think Santa Fe is too small an audience for your talents. Why don’t we try for San Francisco instead, just as soon as I clean out Mr. Neil here in a little poker game? Unless he thinks he’s game enough to beat me again and win back what he thinks I stole from him . . .”

His only hope, as he could see it, to save himself from disgrace in the family—and in Mattie’s eyes—was to make Hyram Neil agree to another poker game and then to beat him at it. But would the alligator take the bait?

“That’s a helluva deal,” Lee Smith put in, this time his comments coming with more welcome. “John Henry here’s quite a poker player. It would take a real sport to beat him at his own game.”

Neil gave another one of his long appraising looks, as if measuring out a meal. “Well then,” he said again, “shall we call it my promissory note against the wagers in a friendly poker game? You win, I return the note to you. I win, I take everything you put up against me. Fair enough?”

Fair didn’t even enter into it.

Neil offered his own fresh deck for the game, which John Henry, of course, declined. He’d resealed too many marked decks himself to fall for such a common ruse. So, in the end, they sent out for a deck and a dealer from another saloon, taking equal chances—then John Henry shuffled and Neil cut, and they were both satisfied.

They played a few small-stakes hands at first, getting a feel for the game and gathering a crowd, as well, and by the time the real contest began, the saloon was busier than it had ever been, and John Henry was making money on the drinks even before he made money on the cards. Though it wasn’t money he was after on this night, but a reckoning. He hadn’t understood, last time they’d played, the difference between playing the cards and playing the man, and Neil had taken him for everything he had and more. Now he understood that it didn’t really matter what hand a man was dealt, if he knew how to wager and raise and bluff his way around it. And in that, poker was much like life.

There was something else that John Henry hadn’t known before: that every poker player gave himself away somehow, and all an opponent had to do was pay attention until he figured out the signs. Some men sucked in their breath when a bad card was drawn, some did the same thing for a good card. Some men chewed their cigar too eagerly, or blinked their eyes nervously, or got an itch on their nose when things were going well—or perhaps when things were going wrong. Some men sweated and dripped perspiration from their brow onto the baize when they were about to lose a hand and an important pot, while others sweated when they were about to win. But everyone had some response to the stress of the game, and the best players watched for those signs.

Hyram Neil, however, seemed inscrutable. His black eyes glittered whether he was winning or losing, his face a stony calm no matter what the turn of the cards. Indeed, his whole person seemed in repose as he played, only his hands moving as he fanned or tucked the cards, as he fingered his jeweled rings.

John Henry played with his own ring, the one Mattie had given to him as they’d stood together in the stained-glass light of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. It had become something of a talisman to him, a comfort when things got difficult. Even little Lenora Seegar had commented on it, noting that he played with it all the time, and asking where he got such a small ring, too small for a man’s hand. It had been nearly too tight to slip over his knuckle at first, but as the years had gone by, his fingers had grown thinner like the rest of him, and the ring slid around easily, turning circles as his thumb reached across his palm to play with it.

When the final deal came, they were evenly paired, well-matched players, luck and skill working for both of them. “Five cards to you, Doc,” said the dealer, “and five to you, Mister Brown. Wagers, please.”

John Henry picked up his cards and considered them: a pair of Queens and three small cards. It was an acceptable hand that could become three-of-a-kind or even two pair on a lucky draw, or stay a pair if the draw brought him nothing useful. But even a pair could win him the game, if he could figure out what Hyram Neil was thinking.

Neil took his own cards, his face stony as always, his eyes sharp and shining as obsidian. And then came the wagers: Neil’s being another note, promising to relinquish all claim to John Henry’s inheritance property in the form of land or cash or any other conveyance; John Henry’s a collection of other valuables, with his pearl-handled revolver and his diamond stickpin, along with Kate’s derringer taken against her will from its hiding place in her lacey garter.

“Wager with your own things!” she said angrily, as John Henry slid a hand under her satin skirts and reached along her thigh for the little revolver.

“I am,” he said, retrieving the derringer and laying it down on top of the other items in the pot. “I believe it was my money that paid for this, like most everything you’re wearin’.”

She stiffened to show her anger but didn’t argue, taking the reminder that if he did well at the gambling tables, she would do well herself. But Neil seemed unimpressed by the offering.

“Come now! A derringer? I can buy my own pocket pistols. I don’t need to steal your lady’s protection.”

“So what did you have in mind?”

Neil took a glance around the crowded saloon that looked more prosperous this night than it usually was. “How about the deed to your place here?”

“You want me to put my property up against my own property?” John Henry asked, incredulous. There was no end to the man’s bravado.

“Not yours anymore,” Neil replied. “Your inheritance is legally mine now, remember? So it’s your property against mine, for now, at least. After this hand, it will all be mine.”

Such confidence would have cowed him, times past, but watching Hyram Neil fan his cards, John Henry wasn’t cowed at all, for he suddenly knew how to beat the alligator. As he played with the Irish ring on his little finger, mindlessly twisting at it, so Neil played with his own finger rings, caressing the diamonds and the emeralds whenever he had a good hand of cards—and leaving them alone when he did not. And the fact that Neil wasn’t playing with his rings, stroking them with satisfaction as he did on a good hand, showed that the dealer hadn’t dealt him well.

“Wagers, gentlemen?” the dealer asked.

“Kate, write me a note for the saloon,” John Henry said. Then he added with a purposefully heavy sigh: “I reckon it’s not all that much of a prize, anyhow . . .” as if he really thought he might be losing it. All part of the show, the play of the game.

Neil nodded, acknowledging the wager, and the dealer stacked the deck on the baize, cutting it halfway and separating the cards into draw and deadwood.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “how many cards would you like?”

“I’ll take three, please,” said Neil, dropping his unwanted cards onto the deadwood and slipping the newly dealt ones into his hand without a flicker of expression.

“And I’ll take two,” John Henry said, keeping his own face as emotionless as Neil’s. He’d wagered on his two Queens, hoping for three of a kind or maybe another pair at least on the draw, but got nothing useful. And though he didn’t let his disappointment show, he caught himself reaching thumb to little finger for the comfort of Mattie’s ring—caught himself and stopped. If he were watching for Neil’s giveaway, then Neil was surely watching him, as well.

Across the table from him, Neil was still stony-faced, still not toying with his jeweled finger rings. And John Henry knew, through his own years of poker playing and his stint as a Denver card dealer, what was going on in Hyram Neil’s mind: should he fold now, give up the pot and its promised land and money? Should he raise the stakes, bluffing and hoping that John Henry would get nervous and fold instead? And if he did raise, how much did he want to risk, if John Henry had a better hand?

He wasn’t surprised when Neil said at last, “I believe I’m all in,” and opened his money purse to sweeten the pot, one last ploy to frighten his opponent.

John Henry had nothing much left to wager but his dental equipment, and he told Kate to write another promissory note. He was going to win big or lose big, one or the other, and he was gentleman enough to allow Hyram Neil the same opportunity. So with everything on the table, he said coolly, “I call.”

The dealer nodded. “Show your cards please, Mr. Brown.”

Neil’s always expressionless face didn’t quiver as he laid out his hand: a pair of fives and nothing much more, easily bested by the pair of Queens that John Henry showed.

“Well, I believe it’s congratulations, Dr. Holliday,” Hyram Neil said smoothly, as though he’d given up pocket change in a parlor game instead of losing what he’d been wanting for years. Then he turned to Kate, taking her hand and raising it to his lips and said, “It’s been an enchanting evening.”

Although he’d beaten Hyram Neil at last and put his troubles behind him, John Henry still spent a couple of sleepless nights battling bad dreams. This time, the alligator was slinking along in the dark water at the edge of the levee, watching him and waiting for one misstep, mouth open and ready to bite.

Kate, who said his sleeplessness was disturbing her own rest, took to sleeping in her dressing room, which meant that he was alone when a visitor came knocking early one morning. He groaned and slid out of bed, standing shakily and not bothering to draw on his dressing gown before answering the door.

Josh Webb was back in town and standing in the doorway, hat in hand and looking uncomfortable. “We got trouble, Doc,” he said in a hushed voice, as if someone might be listening.

“What is it now?” John Henry asked wearily. “Stage robbers again?”

Josh shook his homely head. “Stage robbers would be better,” he said. “It’s the rails this time, Doc, like you said it would be. The robbers held up the southbound Santa Fe. Took a payroll bag from the mailcar—$5,000.”

John Henry let out a whistle. “Well, Josh, sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. Who do you suppose did it?”

“It’s not who I suppose. This time it’s who I know. I finally figured out that riddle you gave me, but that don’t make it any easier. Remember you told me to find some Jamaican luck and I’d find the robber-chief? Well, I was down at Close and Patterson’s the other night when a trainload of travelers comes in. Rich folks from the east, I reckon, talking about their adventures. And the last place they visited was the islands past Cuba. It’s magic out there, they said, full of mysterious doing and voodoo. But they didn’t say voodoo exactly. It was hoodoo they called it, bad luck and such. Well, my ears picked up at that, remembering what you told me. It’s Hoodoo Brown that’s behind the robberies, isn’t it? The robber-chief is Hoodoo Brown, the Mayor of Las Vegas as he calls himself.”

“Congratulations,” John Henry said cheerfully, as though Josh had just won a spelling bee. “Now all you have to do is bring him in and your job is done.”

“But it’s not him I gotta arrest this time,” Josh said, looking even more uncomfortable, “even though I know he’s the one behind it. But he says different, naming names and making accusations.”

“Naming his own men?” John Henry commented in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like his style.”

“It ain’t his own men he’s naming, Doc. It’s you.”

“Me?” John Henry said with a laugh, “a train robber? And when would I have had time to do this dastardly deed, between runnin’ my saloon and doin’ my dentistry? Ask Kate where I’ve been, if you’re brave enough to wake her. She’s a mean woman when she hasn’t had her night’s rest.”

“It’s not me you gotta convince, Doc. I don’t think you’d bother robbing a train when you got easier means of making money. But what I think don’t much matter. It’s what a jury’s gonna think, if Hoodoo makes a charge. And from what I hear, he’s getting ready to make one.”

And then, John Henry realized what was happening. Hyram Neil, having lost out on his winnings once in St. Louis and again in Las Vegas, was going to take his vengeance at last. In a town full of people who already considered John Henry a killer, it wouldn’t be too hard to find a jury that would consider him a train robber, as well. And once Hoodoo had made the train robbery charge stick, he could easily invent evidence that the killing of Mike Gordon was really a murder after all, and hang him for both crimes.

“So what do I do, Josh?” he asked, all the warmth of sleepiness gone in a sudden shiver of cold fear.

“I’d get out of town, if I was you, and soon. But I wouldn’t make any big show of it, more like sneak out, I’d say. If he knows you’re going, he’ll have his road agents stop you, or worse.”

He didn’t have to ask Josh what his imaginary mind was thinking up this time. It seemed his good luck at the poker table had been hoodoo again, and this time it was deadly.

He knew what he needed to do, and hoped it wasn’t too late to do it. Wyatt had invited him to join the Earps on the journey into the Arizona Territory, and he had laughed off the invitation when it was made. The last thing he’d wanted to do was make a long trip across the open desert, riding for weeks alongside a plodding wagon train. His health seemed to take a turn for the worse just imagining such an effort. But the last thing he wanted now seemed like the one thing he needed: a way out of Las Vegas without drawing attention to his leaving. There were hundreds of wagon trains traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, passing through Las Vegas on their way to wherever else they were headed. No one much noticed their coming or going, other than to make a quick profit off the provisions they bought to supply their outfits. No one would notice John Henry joining in with one of those wagon trains headed west into the desert—at least that was his hope.

It didn’t take him long to find the Earp caravan, their wagons still camped at the Plaza in Old Town, though by the looks of things they’d be pulling out soon.

“The weather’s cooling,” Wyatt explained when John Henry found him and inquired after their impending departure, “better climate for desert traveling.”

“I reckon,” John Henry replied. “So how long do you figure on drivin’ before you have to stop to provision again?” Wyatt’s wagons, he noted, were already neatly filled with barrels and boxes and odd household belongings. There was even a rocking chair, positioned so as to take in a nice view of the landscape they were leaving behind.

“Virgil says we can make it to Prescott all right, if the weather holds. We’re hoping to get there before the snow starts, it being up toward the mountains and all.”

“Any word yet from Morgan?” John Henry asked, trying to keep the conversation seemingly light. If Wyatt had been surprised to receive his visit to Old Town, he didn’t show it. But then, Wyatt didn’t show much of any kind of emotion anyway, surprised or not.

“No word, yet,” he said with a shrug as his hefted a bag of sugar into the wagon bed. “Not sure he even got that letter yet, up there in Deadwood. If he’s still in Deadwood. That was his last known whereabouts, or Sam Houston Junior’s, anyhow.”

Wyatt didn’t mention any thanks for John Henry’s hand in writing that letter, which he, himself, considered a small masterpiece of creativity. But he hadn’t come to discuss literature.

“I’ve been thinkin’ about your offer, Wyatt,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I’ve been thinkin’ maybe I’d like to try my hand in Arizona after all, give another locale the pleasure of my presence.”

Wyatt glanced at him a moment, then nodded. “We leave at dawn. You planning to ride along or bring your own wagon?”

He hadn’t actually thought that far into the matter in his haste to find Wyatt and his relief at locating him still in Las Vegas.

“I reckon I’ll just ride,” he said, and started figuring the cost of buying a horse for the trail. A horse and saddle would set him back a bit, along with a bed roll and whatever saddle provisions he could carry for himself. As for his dental equipment, he’d have to arrange to have that sent along to him later, once he got himself settled somewhere, an arrangement that seemed to be turning into a routine. Then there was the matter of the management of his saloon. He couldn’t very well just walk away and leave his business to tend to itself, and wondered if maybe Josh Webb would be interested in buying in or buying him out altogether. Josh had been considering making Las Vegas his permanent location now that Dodge City had dried up and his own Lady Gay Saloon wasn’t bringing in the money that it used to.

“And how about Kate?” Wyatt asked, interrupting his plans. “Will she be coming along, as well?”

He’d given even less thought to Kate than he had to the horse he’d ride out of town.

“Not this time,” he said easily, certain that Kate would have no interest in a long wagon train crossing the desert, especially one led by Wyatt Earp. This time, it would be just himself he was having to please.

Kate, however, had other ideas when he arrived back at their boarding house room and began packing up his belongings.

“I can travel as well as you,” she said in an angry voice that didn’t do much to cover her hurt. “Though, I’d rather you’d have bought tickets on the train to Santa Fe, instead. We could travel on from there to anywhere, even San Francisco.”

“And why would I want to go to San Francisco?” he asked, irritated at being corralled into such a conversation when he had more important things on his mind. If he didn’t get himself out of Las Vegas, fast and quiet, it wouldn’t much matter where else he went. Hyram Neil had let him slip away once before; he wasn’t likely to lose him again.

“So I can act on the stage there,” she said petulantly, “like you said the other night. I know we’ve talked about going back to St. Louis, or even to New York, but San Francisco would be fine by me. San Francisco would be like heaven compared to anywhere else we’ve been . . .”

“San Francisco will be like hell, if Hoodoo follows us there. For me, at least, though you might find the show entertainin’. As I have tried to explain to you before, he isn’t one to lose gracefully. But I don’t intend to hang for his greediness.”

“But why do you have to go with Wyatt?” she said, with something more than anger or hurt mounting in her voice. “Why can’t we just go off alone?”

“I’m safer travelin’ with a group, if trouble comes along. Wyatt’s a handy man with a gun, as you may have noticed. Why, he tried to hold off a whole gang of cowboys by himself, back in Dodge City, until I happened along to help him. I believe he’d do the same for me, if it came to that.”

“So you’re trusting your life to him, when it’s me who’s already saved you?”

There was a surprise of something like tears in her voice, and he stopped his packing for a moment to console her.

“I know what you did for me, Kate, and for that I thank you. I know I could have died back there in Trinidad if you hadn’t brought me down here to the hot springs. It’s a miracle, the doctors keep tellin’ me, the way I’ve healed so well. And there wouldn’t have been a miracle at all if you hadn’t arranged for it. But I don’t think you can help me out of this trouble. This time, I need Wyatt.”

It was hard admitting that he needed anyone, especially to Kate, and harder to admit that it was Wyatt whom she seemed to hate out of pure jealousy. But he didn’t have time to worry about Kate’s extravagant emotions if he planned to stay alive. After all those nightmare dreams of alligators and dark water, he felt like he was about to go under at last.

“Then let me come with you!” she said fervidly, as he turned his attention back to folding shirts into his valise. “I know I’ve caused you trouble where Wyatt is concerned. But you know how I feel about you; you know how I love you . . .”

She was always saying it, so much that the words hardly meant a thing to him anymore. But this time, there was something like desperation in her voice, like she was holding on and sliding away at the same time.

“Please let me go along, please . . .” she said, and this time the tears filled her eyes and spilled over onto her red-rouged cheeks.

He could stand up to her stubbornness, answer her anger with his own, even hit her when she slapped at him in a fury. But he couldn’t take her tears.

“All right,” he said with a sigh, “all right. Though I don’t know where we’ll put all your gowns and shoes and such. Hell never did see a hellion better dressed than I’ve made you. Pick out what’s best in all that,” he said, gesturing toward her overflowing dresser and the trunks that held the rest, “and pack it up as fast as you can. I’m off to buy some horses. I suppose you’ll be wantin’ another white-blazed thoroughbred you can name Wonder.”

She looked up at him in surprise. “You remembered the name of my horse?” she said, her tears drying up as fast as they had come.

“I remember everything about you, Kate. Even the parts I wish I could forget.”

He might as well have said that he loved her, the way she smiled at him in triumph.

They left Las Vegas the next morning, pulling out with Wyatt’s wagon train in the dark hour before dawn. There were seven of them in that outfit: Jim Earp and his wife and daughter, Wyatt Earp and his common-law wife Celia, and Dr. J.H. Holliday and the former actress who called herself Mrs. Holliday. And if anyone in the still sleeping town had roused at the sound of their wagons and animals passing by long enough to take a look at them, there would have been nothing unusual to notice at all, just another wagon train headed on down the Santa Fe Trail.

But there was something unusual about it, at least to John Henry’s way of thinking—something ironic even. For while he had first gone west as a wanted man, running from the law and hoping to lose himself somehow, now he was running from the robbers and riding with the law instead, and feeling like maybe he’d finally found himself. He might not be every bit the gentleman anymore, not like he’d been in Georgia, but he wasn’t an outlaw anymore either, and his friendship with Wyatt Earp was proof enough of that.