Epitaph (64 page)

It was only a quarter of eight.

THE NEXT MORNING,
the foreman of Pete Spence's woodcutting operation noticed five horsemen approaching the camp. He kept an eye on them as they started up the mountain and when they got close, he recognized Wyatt Earp and realized it was a posse. Sherm McMasters was with them. That was a surprise. Sherm didn't usually have much to do with lawmen.

“Where's Pete Spence?” Earp asked.

“Last I saw him, he was down in Tombstone.”

“When was that?”

The foreman scratched his beard. “Last week, must be. Why? Is Pete in trouble?”

“When do you expect to see him next?”

“Hell if I know. He don't come up here much. Usually it's just me and the greasers. They take the trees down, I freight 'em back to town. Hey, Sherm.”

McMasters nodded, but he was talking to the Mexican woodcutters, asking them the same kinds of questions in Spanish. They all looked blank and shrugged, except for the new man—a half-breed nobody knew well, who hung back and wiped his palms on his vest and edged toward the woods.

And suddenly took off running.

“That's Cruz,” Sherm yelled.

Wyatt spurred his horse and disappeared into the trees. The rest of the posse followed, spreading out to keep Cruz from doubling back.

They caught up to him when he tripped and fell, a hundred yards into the woods. Cruz scrambled upright, but Sherm was good with a rope and hauled him down like a yearling calf.

“You know who I am?” Wyatt asked.

Cruz nodded, arms pinned by the lariat.
“Sí, señor.”

“Then you know why I'm here.”

“
Sí, señor
, but I—I was just the lookout! I didn't know they was gonna shoot
su hermano.
”

“Who? I want names.”

Florentino glanced at Sherm McMasters. Hoping for sympathy, finding none. A moment later, the names poured out. Frank Stilwell. Pete Spence and Apache Hank came to mind first, of course, but Earp kept staring at him with those hard eyes, so Florentino kept going. Ike Clanton. Pony Diehl. Curly Bill Brocius. Johnny Ringo. Willie Claiborne. Johnny Barnes. Everybody. Anybody he could think of.

“Where are they now?” Earp asked.

“Stilwell and Hank and Ike, they went to Tucson. The others are up in the Whetstones,
señor.
” Cruz lifted his chin toward the mountain range across the valley. “They was headed for Iron Springs. That's what I heard them say,
quizás.
I don't know.”

Earp seemed satisfied and Florentino relaxed a little, but he was already thinking that spring was nice in Sonora and how it might be a good time to visit his cousins in Mexico, as far away from Johnny Ringo as he could get.

“What'd my brother ever do to you?” Earp asked then.

He was frowning, but it looked like he was just puzzled and curious. So Florentino made his voice as
suave
as he could. “Nothing,
señor.
Your brother, he was a nice, good man—that's what I heard. But the others, they paid me twenty-five dollars to watch. Me, I needed
el dinero, señor.
”

“Twenty-five dollars,” Earp repeated.

“Dead for a ducat,” the skinny man at his side murmured.

“I just watched,” Cruz reminded them, getting nervous again, looking from one hard face to the other. “I'm sorry for your brother,
señor.
He never did nothing bad to me—”

EVERYBODY BACK IN THE WOOD
CAMP
heard the fusillade, but they had work to do. At the end of the day, the foreman went out to look around. When he found the body, he had the boys wrap it in canvas and heave it on top of a load of logs, to be hauled into the city with the rest of a delivery.

“Another day, another inquest,” people said in Tombstone.

“I examined the body of the Mexican named Florentino Cruz,” Dr. George Goodfellow testified. “One shot entered the right temple, penetrating the brain. The second hit the right shoulder. A third hit the liver and made its exit to the right of the spine. A fourth struck the left thigh . . .”

When the enumeration was complete, the physician stated his opinion that the firing might have begun while Cruz was standing or running but had continued for some time after Cruz was on the ground.

“There was an absence of blood around some of the wounds,” he said, “indicating that they were received after death.”

TWO FOR MORGAN,
Wyatt thought, leading the way toward Iron Springs. Eighty-one hours for Florentino Cruz.

J
OHN HENRY HOLLIDAY WAS COUNTING AS WELL.
Eighty-two hours. Eighty-three. Eighty-four.

He had been ill his entire adult life. He had always worked indoors. Dental offices at first, then saloons. Gambling was a desk job, really. He had no more need to ride than an accountant or the clerk in a hardware store. There had been horses in his youth, of course, but he'd rarely had occasion to stay in the saddle more than a morning, say, or a long summer afternoon. He had never done anything like this.

Nothing, ever, like this.

They were moving now through a landscape as slovenly as a three-day beard, its unlovely face covered with prickly stubble. The Whetstones were failed sandstone: an ancient seabed that hadn't been under pressure long enough to compact into something harder. Uplifted, weathered over eons, broken now into immense piles of rubble. It was evil terrain. Difficult for the horse: like climbing over a mountain of loose bricks. Difficult for the rider: constant adjustments, lying back against the cantle as the animal slid down the gullies, leaning over the horn as she scrambled over the next heap of stone. One slip, and there'd be cactus or a boulder to break the fall.

His legs were finished. He had no strength left to take up the shock of a trot, and the skin on the inside of his thighs was breaking down. But he was alive to feel the pain and the fatigue. With his cheesy lungs
and broomstick legs, he had outlived Morgan Earp by almost four days.

He was working at the Alhambra when he heard the shots, but if you left the table every time you noticed gunfire, you'd never make a living. So he kept his eyes on the layout and continued to deal until John Meagher came over and said, “Morgan Earp's been killed.” He stood and the whole world tilted. When his vision cleared, he was on his hands and knees, so close to the carpet of the gaming room that he could see individual grains of sand embedded in the filthy fibers, and he could hear someone howling.

Eighty-five. Eighty-six.

He leaned back in the saddle, trusting Duchess to pick her way down a gully and clamber up the other side. The two Jacks took turns watching out for him, which was kind, but he was careful not to fall behind and rehearsed what he'd say if Wyatt turned around and told him to quit.

Have I slowed you down?

Have I asked for help?

Have I uttered one word of complaint?

I will bear witness, he thought over and over. Morgan Earp was my friend, and I will see this through.

They made camp high in the mountains and got a few hours' rest. It wasn't enough. Grief, fever, sun, exhaustion. Despite himself, he was nearly asleep in the saddle when the shooting broke out.

Duchess shied and pivoted. He almost fell out of the saddle. Gripping the horn, he righted himself, frantically trying to work out where he was, where the others were, where the gunfire was coming from. Jack Johnson took hold of the big sorrel's reins, trying to control her.

Up ahead, Jack Vermillion's horse went down, pinning him to the ground. Dick Naylor was dancing and spinning as well, with Wyatt struggling for balance while Sherm McMasters—hat flying off, face stretched, eyes wide—raced toward them yelling, “Ambush! Take cover! Curly Bill is up ahead!”

IT WAS A FLUKE, REALLY.
Not an ambush. The Whetstones were high desert. If you had stock to water, there were only a few places to do it. At the south end of the range, Cottonwood Springs was your best bet, so that's where Curly Bill Brocius had led seven men and nineteen freshly stolen head of cattle.

It was a meager return for the risk they'd run. These days the big ranchers were hiring gunmen to guard their herds. Rustling from the small operations was hardly worth the effort. Just that morning, Curly Bill had decided he was better off on Johnny Behan's payroll, collecting county taxes and getting a cut of the take. It wasn't as exciting as more conventional forms of theft, but Billy Breakenridge was congenial company and Curly Bill found it amusing to be a deputy.

“Somebody's coming,” Johnny Barnes reported. “Five of 'em, maybe.”

Ranch hands, hoping to get the cattle back, Bill thought, and he wasn't real concerned. In his experience, employees getting a dollar a day were rarely willing to die for a steer. “Move the stock,” he told the three new boys, and they took off.

Bill himself and Johnny Barnes stayed low behind an embankment with Pink Truly and Al Arnold, watching the riders approach. “When they get close, blaze away,” Bill said. “Make as much noise as you can. They'll run.”

It wasn't until after the first barrage of gunfire that they realized who they were shooting at. Bill still wasn't worried. He'd heard that Wyatt Earp was on the warpath since his brother got killed. Bill's conscience was clear on that score, though he couldn't tell a lawman, “I was stealing stock the night your brother died.”

The way Bill figured it, he'd just josh Wyatt some and then both sides would back off and go their separate ways.

“Well, hello, Wyatt!” he called. “Now, look at all of us! There's badges on every chest! I hear they're the latest thing in Paris this season.”

“I'm not here to arrest you,” Wyatt called.

“No? Well, maybe I'll arrest you! I hear there's warrants out for
you boys, and I am a duly constituted deputy of the Cochise County sheriff's office. You come to surrender?”

Wyatt Earp was off his horse by then and advancing on them with a shotgun, not hurrying, just coming toward them, eyes steady.

Curly Bill heard Pink and Al splashing across the creek. He glanced back to see them scrambling up the other side of the bank and heading for their horses. Which left Bill all alone, except for Johnny Barnes. Barnes was gamer than most, but maybe he was just too scared to move.

Time slows down at moments like that, and Bill found himself remembering a tiger he'd seen when a circus came through Houston one time. The tiger was inside a barred wagon that was all painted up with jungle pictures on the outside. It was a little cage for such a big animal, but the tiger never stopped pacing. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. His head stayed steady as he moved, looking at you all the while, his animal thoughts plain in those yellow eyes.
These bars are all that stand between your belly and my rage.

Except this time there were no bars.

WORD FILTERED BACK TO TOWN.
And soon there were half a dozen versions of what happened up in the Whetstones.

It was at Burleigh Springs. No, it was Iron Springs. Crystal Springs, I heard. Two men were killed. No, four. Curly Bill is dead. So are Johnny Barnes, Pink Truly, and Al Arnold.

No, it was four of Earp's men killed. Curly Bill shot Wyatt himself, square in the chest. No, it was Wyatt who shot Curly Bill. Damn near blew Bill in half with a shotgun blast.

Oh, hell, Curly Bill ain't even in the country. He's been living down in Mexico for months! Well, I heard ole Wyatt cut off Bill's head and brought it in to claim that thousand-dollar reward from the Cattleman's Association. Jesus! He cut off Bill's head? God's honest truth! I know a man who saw the body with his own eyes.

It would be months before the facts were known. Curly Bill was buried on Frank Patterson's ranch later that day, his head still attached, along with Al and Pink. Johnny Barnes was seriously wounded and no one expected him to live. His name was added to Wyatt Earp's tally, but he survived to kill Butcher Bill Childs about a year later. He got caught and did a twenty-one-year stretch in the Missouri State Penitentiary for the deed.

At the time, however, Ike Clanton, Pete Spence, and Apache Hank Swilling were taking no more chances. Maybe Wyatt Earp was dead but if he wasn't, the risk of a trial seemed preferable to his revenge. They turned themselves in to the Cochise County Sheriff's Office. They were allowed to keep their guns so they could defend themselves, if Wyatt and his posse rushed the jail.

THE EARP VENDETTA RIDE.
That's what the newspapers were calling it now, one hundred and six hours after Morgan Earp was killed.

Few of those hours had been spent resting. As Wyatt and his men fell back toward a sheltered site with a high, broad view of the surroundings, no one was at his best.

Silent, Wyatt veered between embarrassment and outrage. He'd loosened his gun belt while they were working their way over that last mountain. After the first shots were fired, he dismounted but the belt slipped down around his knees and there he was, trying to pull the belt up while bullets whizzed around him and Dick Naylor squealed and plunged. Finally he got the belt up and got his shotgun from the scabbard and went after Curly Bill alone, furious that Sherm McMasters had abandoned him, that Doc was too sick to fight, and that Jack Johnson too busy taking care of the dentist to be any help.