Текст книги "Sliphammer"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

Seven

In a dismal morning drizzle, Tree walked down to the telegraph office, his loose oilskin poncho flapping. Water dripped from the trough of his hat brim and his feet squished in his boots, the result of having to cross intersections that were a foot deep in mud after the steady two-day rain.

His mood was as bleak as the sky, the passage of time had screwed his nerves up past the point of alert tautness, into a state of apathetic indifference. His expression had faded to blankness.

The telegrapher gave him one brief look and said, “Nothing for you today.”

“You sure?”

The telegrapher, a wizened little man, gave him a waspish glance. “I told you, Deputy, when anything comes in for you I’ll send a runner. You don’t have to keep checking in here.”

Tree turned the oilskin collar up around hii? face and ducked his head and stepped outside into the drizzle. He didn’t have to keep checking in with Western Union. But it gave him something to do. Besides, he didn’t trust the telegrapher: the man might deliver the message to Wyatt Earp before he delivered it to Tree.

By this time he didn’t trust anybody at all. It was a miserable feeling. Two weeks in this town had been ample to prove to him that the whole community was locked up tight against him. No one had threatened him, but no one had opened up to him. He was an enemy, tolerated because of Wyatt Earp’s truce. Even the miners, who were Earp’s enemies or thought they were, gave him wide berth. They probably didn’t want to get mixed up in what could turn out to be trouble-they had enough of that of their own.

Walking through town he passed occasional pedestrians darting from shelter to shelter, their faces as gray as the rain. He wandered unhurriedly toward the Inter Ocean because his orders were to keep an eye on the Earps. The fact was, the Earps weren’t going anywhere-they were safest right here, why should they leave? But this, too, gave him something to do.

Under the flowing oilskin his wrists brushed the paired sliphammer revolvers. His eyes, silver-hued in good light, seemed dulled to the color of tarnished lead. His face had developed a pinched pair of creases that bracketed his mouth, ordinarily good-humored, with a pattern of mute anger and volatility held precariously in check. At this point he would even welcome a fight with Reese Cooley: but Cooley, for reasons of his own, had made a point of ignoring him for two weeks.

He turned a corner a block from the Inter Ocean and stopped. A hundred feet away, under the shelter of the overhanging veranda roof, Wyatt Earp had posted himself in a porch rocking chair. Earp basked there with one boot up against the porch rail, lazy-eyed and droopy-mustached as a king lion keeping watch over his pride. If he saw Tree he made no sign of it, but it was inconceivable he was unaware of Tree’s appearance: Tree was virtually the only pedestrian in sight. Earp sat with a proprietary air, with the wise indolence of authority. He was smoking a cigar. Earp was a bit of an actor, Tree had learned; he liked to strike poses. He carried himself with the presumed superiority of a public figure who knew he was at all times on display. But his arrogance was earned. Tree had studied him with close care and thus far he had found in Earp no false note, no weakness, no sign that the pose was hollow bravado.

He and Earp had spent the two weeks feeling each other out-warily, like strange dogs on unfamiliar territory. Tree had come to Gunnison prepared to be impressed; Earp, hard-nosed and yet judicious, had not disappointed him. He did not want to think his judgment or intentions could be colored by the tall shadow of the Wyatt Earp legend, but he had taken care to make sure that was not the case. He had poked and prodded and by now he was more than satisfied. As a result, more than ever he did not want to have to try to arrest Earp.

While he stood watching, Josie Earp came out of the Inter Ocean, pouted at the rain, and said something to Wyatt, who nodded and gave her his sly, slow smile and whacked her rump affectionately before she turned to go back inside. At the door she paused and gave Tree a long direct glance. She excited his interest, and she knew it: she was a girl who exuded a subtle air of compressed amoral sexuality, calculated-by design or by nature-to excite a man. With a fleeting lidded smile she pulled her glance away from Tree and went inside, hips churning.

Tree dropped off the boardwalk and quartered across the muddy street, climbed onto the porch and kicked excess mud off his boots, and walked down the rail to where Earp sat. Earp only looked up when he stopped six feet away.

“Pull up a chair. I hate to have to look up at a man.”

“You could stand up.”

“Still digesting my breakfast,” Earp replied, and waved his – cigar toward a vacant rocking chair. “You keep regular hours for a man with nothing to do.”

“Habit, I guess.” Tree pulled the rocker forward and sat, batting his hat against the side of the chair and hooking it over his knee. “Another day of this and the whole town will float away.”

“Heard anything from Denver?”

Tree looked at him and grinned. “Now ask me a question you don’t already know the answer to.”

“If it’s any comfort to you,” Earp said, “I haven’t had any word either.” Which meant he had no news about whether there had been any success in his long-distance effort to pull strings in the Governor’s office.

“No particular comfort,” Tree said.

“You’d just as soon have it over with.”

“One way or the other-either way,” Tree agreed. “Waiting drags on a man’s nerves.” He gave Earp a sharp, sudden scrutiny in an effort to detect whether Earp felt the same pressure.

There was no change in Earp’s expression-the impassive face of the professional gambler. He said, “Put that you get orders to arrest me. What do you do?”

“If I didn’t mean to follow orders I wouldn’t be here at all.”

Earp’s big head moved back and forth morosely. “Then you’re a gold-plated fool, amigo. Digging yourself a grave.”

Tree shrugged. “You can’t lead my kind of life and expect to live forever. Yours either.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I expect to live to a ripe old age.” Earp gave him a guileless cocked-eyebrow glance; hard to tell whether he. meant it humorously. “If I’m religious about anything,” Earp said, “it’s that. I firmly believe I’ll have my threescore and ten, and then some.”

“Who told you that? Tea leaves or a crystal ball?”

Earp shifted his seat, leaned back and crossed his legs. He murmured, “Let’s use cards, Deputy-let’s lay them face up on the table. Now, I’ve been gentle with you because nobody had to tell me the courage it took for you to come in here at me, in a town where every gun’s against you. It takes guts to humble yourself to duty, obey an order you don’t like and maybe don’t even believe in. But you came here carrying the seeds of trouble-for me and my family. Every time the clock ticks it could mean you’re coming at us with a warrant and a gun. I don’t intend to hang, or see my brother hang, for doing what any decent man would have done to a mad dog like Stillwell. I don’t have to ask any questions, I know I’m right. You haven’t got that luxury. You’re not sure, down deep, whether arresting me is the right thing or the wrong thing. Which puts you in a bad position-you’ve got a private conscience hanging deadweight around your neck no matter what your notion of duty tells you you’ve got to do.”

Earp turned to look him in the face. “It’ll slow you down, you know. It’ll take the edge off. You’ll hesitate when you can’t afford to.”

“Maybe.” Not liking it here any more, Tree got up out of the chair, holding his hat.

Earp said, “It’d be a shame if you got yourself hurt to no purpose.”

Tree thought, God help me, I think you’re right He didn’t say a word; he walked away, putting on his hat before he stepped into the rain.

When he turned into Main Street he saw the white thatched figure of Sheriff McKesson standing just inside the open door of the sheriff’s office, ever vigilant, watching the town. As Tree went by on the opposite side of the street, the sheriff’s grave face turned slowly, indicating his interest in Tree’s passage. Tree waved at him and went on down to the little hotel. The clerk wasn’t on the desk; nobody was in sight. He went back through the corridor to his room and, from habit, glanced to see if the tenpenny nail was in place.

It wasn’t. The door stood ajar, open an inch.

He stood making a puddle in the shape of a ring around his dripping poncho. Disgust welled up in him. He drew both guns out through the pocket holes in the poncho, lifted his boot and kicked the door open.

Both of them jerked, startled. Caroline was by the window; Tree’s half brother Rafe lay on his back on the bed in sock feet.

Rafe grinned. “If I was a bushwhacker waitin’ with a gun I wouldn’t have much of a chance, would I?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Come in and shut the door and we might tell you.”

“Aagh,” Tree said in disgust, putting his guns away and lifting the poncho over his head. He tossed it across a chair, removed his hat, ran fingers through his matted hair and said, “Well?”

Rafe got off the bed and went past him to shut the door. Then he turned. Caroline was watching Tree, looking pretty and blonde and milkmaid fresh in spite of the mud on her clothes and the tangled disorder of her hair.

Rafe said, “You got a nice warm way of greetin’ us, ain’t you?”

“What the hell is this all about?”

Caroline said, “We were afraid you’d get hurt. We came to help.”

“Sure you did.”

Rafe came around him from the door and went back to the bed, where he sat down and tipped his head to one side. “That ain’t exactly the whole truth. We couldn’t get the fare together so we came in the buggy.”

“All the way from Tucson?”

“Left right after you did,” Rafe said, not without pride. “All the way across the goddamn desert and the goddamn mountains in that old buggy, campin’ out. Caroline’s a right good traveler, she’d of made a good Forty-niner.” Rafe grinned at his wife.

“Both of you,” Tree said, shaking his head. “Why’d both of you come, for crying out loud?”

“Because,” Caroline said quietly, “I wouldn’t let him go without me. He came with me or not at all.”

Looking at both of them, Tree saw how it was. Once more he remembered what Caroline’s father had said to him not too long ago: J told her not to marry your brother because he just ain’t tough enough for her. She’ll put spurs to him one time when she ain’t even thanking about it, and she’ll rip him to shreds ‘thout ever knowing how it happened. It was clear to see how this marriage had settled down, who wore the pants. Tree thought, You poor son of a bitch, you should’ve known better.

He said to Rafe, “I suppose you’ve still got your tongue hanging out over that four-thousand-dollar reward on the Earp brothers.”

“I still need the money to buy that ranch. Where else am I, gonna get that kind of money?”

“You’re both pretty damned young,” Tree said, looking straight at Caroline. “Couldn’t you settle for something less than your own ranch to start out with?”

“Why should we?” Rafe demanded. “You take what you can get, Jeremy, it’s a me-first country.”

Tree jerked a thumb toward the invisible hills. “A lot of bleached bones up in those mountains thought the same thing.”

“I ain’t scared of Wyatt Earp.”

No, Tree thought, you’re not, are you? It surprised him a little-particularly because even if Rafe didn’t think he was scared of Earp, he was certainly intimidated enough by his own wife. But that was a different sort of thing: petticoat power was too subtle for Rafe to handle. Rafe was brash, bold, full of bullheaded guts, and no less callow than an ignorant puppy.

“Listen,” Tree said, “you two just get back in your goddamn buggy and drive back to Arizona. There’s nothing here for you.”

Caroline scowled at him but did not speak. Rafe, his face red, said, “Damn it, when you gonna quit treating me like a kid?”

“When you quit acting like one.”

Caroline said, “That’s not fair.”

He looked at her. “Shut up.”

Rafe sat up straight. “Who you tellin’ to shut up?”

Tree ignored him; he said flatly to Caroline, “You put him up to this-you filled his head with notions. If you don’t want him dead, you’d better change his mind.”

Caroline gave him a savage mock-sweet smile. “Rafe’s a man-he makes his own decisions.”

“In a pig’s eye. Now grab him by the ear and get him out of here-or I’ll do it myself.”

“You just try,” Rafe growled, eyes flashing. “You just try that little thing, Jeremy.”

Tree snorted, walked around the foot of the bed and picked up a newspaper from the little lamp table. He went over to the bed and lay down, crossing his muddy boots on the coverlet, and held the newspaper up in front of his face.

Caroline said, “What do you think you’re doing?”.

“Reading,” Tree said.

“And just what are we supposed to do?”

Tree lowered the newspaper and looked at her. “I couldn’t care less what you do,” he said, and lifted the paper.

Caroline said, “We haven’t got the money for a hotel room.”

“Should’ve thought of that before you came all this way, shouldn’t you?”

“You bastard,” she said.

Tree said, “There sure as hell isn’t room for all three of us on this bed, Caroline.”

“Jerr, you’re a first class A number one son of a bitch.”

“Uh-hunh,” he muttered, reading.

Rafe got off the corner of the bed, assembled his dignity, and said, “Come on, honey, let’s you and me go get something to eat. To hell with his majesty.”

“Enjoy yourselves,” Tree intoned, without looking away from his reading matter.

Caroline said in a stifled, angry little voice, “You just wait till you need our help arresting Wyatt Earp. You’ll come begging on your knees, Jeremiah Tree.”

“All right,” Tree drawled. “You two just stay out of trouble until I do.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Rafe, yanking the door open. He stopped. “You coming?”

Caroline came away from the window. “You just wait,” she fumed.

The two of them went out; the door slammed angrily. Tree put the paper down on his chest and frowned at the ceiling. The frown turned to a scowl.

Wyatt Earp said to him, “I’ve got a skittish brother too, amigo, but I can handle him. You put hobbles on that kid or he’ll get hurt.”

Tree glowered down at the man in the rocking chair. “What’d he do?”

“Came right up here and told me he wasn’t scared of me. Now, I don’t mind a man not being scared of me. I never asked him to be scared of me, did I? But I don’t like it when a man sneers at me.”

“You won’t kill him for a sneer.”

Earp gave a loud bark of laughter. “Hardly-hardly. But I’ll tell you something, it’s the kids you always have to watch. They’re the ones who haven’t got a layer of sense grown onto their hides. At thirty you start counting up the odds, you start recognizing consequences. At twenty you don’t believe a damned thing can ever happen to you. A tough kid is a lot more dangerous than a tough grown-up man. Which is to say I won’t give your brother as much leeway as I’d give you, because I don’t trust him half as far as you. If that kid makes the wrong move in front of me I won’t wait to find out whether he’s bluffing. I state that as a warning between friends, not a threat to scare you. Understand me?”

“Aeah.”

“Then hobble him,” Wyatt Earp said, got up from his chair and went inside.

Tree stayed put, scowling. Across the street, Sheriff McKesson ambled into sight and gave him a courteous look of mild inquisitiveness. Tree yanked his hat down tight and strode away up the street, breaking out into the brass afternoon sunlight with long-legged strides, tramping his shadow into the ground, heading with enraged aimlessness toward the telegraph office, where he knew there would be no message for him.

Eight

“Look at him,” Rafe complained. “Sittin’ up there on that porch like an old lizard lazy in the sun, actin’ like he owned all of Creation. I’d like to bring him down a peg.”

Caroline said, “You couldn’t beat him in a fair fight and you know it. It’s not smart to needle him, Rafe.”

“What the hell am I doing here if I can’t lick him? Hell yes I can lick him. He ain’t so tough. Look at him, he’s half asleep-he’s tired and he’s gettin’ old.”

“He’s thirty-four years old, Rafe.”

“Which means I’m a dozen years faster than he is. Listen, whose side are you on?”

They sat at the window table in a miner’s lunchroom. Empty plates sat before them gathering flies. They had wiped up every last drop of gravy with hunks of stone-ground bread. They had almost no money and they had eaten meagerly the past three days, sleeping outside town underneath their wagon; luckily, the afternoon they had arrived the rain quit.

“I’m on your side, Rafe,” Caroline said. She was using that persuasive tone of voice that always made him pay attention. He took his eves off Wyatt Earp across the street and settled his attention on her face. She said earnestly, “You’ve got to be realistic. You’re no gunfighter. But if Jerr decides to arrest Earp, he’ll know how to go about it so there won’t be a big gunfight. Hell get the drop on the Earp brothers somehow.”

“He would,” Rafe said flatly.

“It’s the only smart thing to do. And that’s where you’ll come in. Jerr hasn’t got a soul in this town to take his side, outside of you and me. Once he arrests them he’ll need someone to guard his back against the Earps’ friends. He can’t get them out of town without help. And once you’ve helped him that way, they’ll have to pay you the reward.”

“Yeah,” Rafe said. “Sure, I guess you’re right. I was just making bluff talk anyway. I know my limitations. I wouldn’t really pick a fight with Earp. Jesus.” He grinned at her. “But by Christ I’m not scared of the bastard either.”

“I never thought you were.”

A fat waitress brought two cups of coffee to the table and waited to be paid for the meal. Rafe dug in his pocket and counted out coins with care. The waitress took the money impassively and waddled away. Rafe picked up the steaming cup of foul brew and held it in both hands, blowing across the surface and looking out the window. A small group of men-three or four-had come out onto the porch of the Inter Ocean and ranged themselves alongside Wyatt Earp. He recognized Warren Earp and the mountain-sized strikebreaker, Reese Cooley. A bartender had told Rafe about the big fight in the Inter Ocean Hotel bar, where Sliphammer Tree had wrestled Cooley down. Rafe didn’t like Cooley’s looks at all.

The group on the porch was looking across the street at something Rafe couldn’t see, something on this side of the street but down the block in the other direction. Cooley and Warren Earp were talking. Wyatt Earp hadn’t stirred in his rocking chair. Cooley walked forward and stood on one leg with the raised second boot propped against the porch rail; only a very big man could do that without losing his balance. Cooley’s right hand wag thumb-hooked over his holstered revolver. His face had narrowed down to a mean stare directed at whatever was on the sidewalk down the street.

Rafe gulped his coffee down and stood up, pushing his chair away with the backs of his knees. “You stay put,” he said. “I want to see what the fuss is all about.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Sure-sure.” He-headed for the door, weaving a threaded path among tight-crowded tables.

Warren had come out onto the porch feeling sour-mouthed and unhappy. He was remembering last night, and still feeling hung over from it. He’d made a fool of himself, he’d admitted that, but he still felt rage against the world in general.

Last night Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs early. There was no mistaking what they had in mind as a way to pass the time for the rest of the evening. Those two spent a hell of a lot of the time balling it in the sack. It didn’t make Warren angry; it made him envious. Just thinking about it got him horny. He’d had a steady girl back in Ohio, a mousy little seventeen-year-old with underdeveloped breasts and buck-teeth. She wasn’t any world-beater but in the farm country where he lived there wasn’t much choice; there were damned few girls around and not many of them would put out. An awful lot of Bible-thumping back there, patriarchal farmers protecting their daughters’ virginity as if it was crown jewels. But he’d found this one buck-toothed girl and he’d got used to doing it with her every week or two. Now he’d been gone six or seven weeks from Ohio, maybe more, it was hard to remember, and he wanted a woman badly.

So last night after Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs grinning at each other, Warren had gone on the prowl, and after he’d panned no pay dirt in three saloons he hit the real mother lode in the fourth: a big cow of a woman she’d been, but she looked ripe and ready, for it, and when he’d sat down next to her she hadn’t objected. It was one of the foul-smelling saloons the miners used; there were half a dozen used-up women in the place, but this one somehow didn’t look like a whore. She sat with heavy thighs spread loose, her big breasts lying on the table, moistening her lips when she looked at him, and after he’d bought her two drinks she’d told him her sad story-she was married to a miner on the night shift; he worked all night underground, and by the time he came home he was too tired to do anything but eat and sleep, and she was sick of it, drinking down here trying to work up the courage to leave him and go back home to Kansas where her folks had a soddy homestead.

They had both got very drunk together and she had let him take her home. He had no idea what time it was. They had gone into the dismal little shack and made love with hurried urgency on the filthy straw-tick mattress on the floor. It was after that he made the mistake: head wheeling with drink and exhaustion, he had fallen asleep, sprawled across her great mound of a snoring body.

Maybe it was something that was born into you if you were an Earp-an automatic warning signal built into the brain, like eyes in the back of the head. Wy att had it, he knew; Wyatt always seemed to know everything that went on in back of him. But whatever it was, it had saved his life this morning. He’d woken up, not completely aware of what had awakened him, but instantly and totally alert. He’d looked up and he’d seen the door creak open. The bright shaft of morning sunlight came cruelly inside the shack. The miner stood silhouetted, chest expanding to let out a roar, hefting his miner’s pickax and charging into the shack.

If Warren hadn’t been awake and alert, he’d have taken the head of that pickax through the back. As it was, he managed to roll off the far side of the mattress and scramble to his feet.

The miner roared in agonized howls, rushing forward and swinging the ax-but he’d tripped over the big woman and almost lost his balance. The pick came down and hit the floor.

Warren grabbed the pick by its head; jerked it out of the miner’s fists and thudded the handle into the miner’s belly, pushing with all his weight. The miner let out a whooshing wheeze of breath and sat down, hard, on his wife’s legs. The woman uttered a groggy howl and squirmed. The miner tried to get up. His face was murderous. Warren slammed him across the side of the face with the handle of the pickax. It knocked the miner over on his side. Warren dropped the pick and jumped over the sluggishly stirring woman and ran out of the shack. He hadn’t stopped running till he was all the way back to the Inter Ocean.

He’d tried to sneak up to his room but of course his luck hadn’t held. Wyatt had intercepted him on the stairs and he’d had to tell Wyatt the whole thing. Wyatt had surprised him by bursting out in a peal of bull-lunged laughter that had shaken the walls; Wyatt had pounded him uproariously on the back and taken him downstairs to breakfast, and insisted on him telling the whole story over again to Josie. She too thought it was the funniest damn thing she’d ever heard.

All he wanted was to go upstairs, take a bath, put on clean underwear, and sleep off his hangover, but he hadn’t had a chance to do that for another hour: first, nothing would do but that Wayde Cardiff, Reese Cooley, and everybody else in the Inter Ocean had to have the whole story of Warren’s big adventure. Finally, tasting foul and feeling sick and headachy, he’d managed to break away and go upstairs. He’d cleaned up and slept for a few hours and he’d just now come back downstairs, still feeling hung over but believing he might live.

It was Cooley who caught him at the saloon door, coming through the dining room; Cooley had grabbed him by the arm and hustled him out to the porch.

Wyatt was there, in the rocking chair. A couple of Cooley’s thugs wen tout just ahead of them and by the time Warren stepped onto the porch the thugs were standing by the porch rail. Cooley said, “Look over yonder, boy.”

Warren looked downstreet and saw, across the street half a block away, a little group of grim men standing with rifles and shotguns. He recognized Floyd Sparrow and he recognized the miner who’d almost pickaxed him this morning. The other four or five were miners too, one or two being the same ones who had mixed into the fight in the saloon a couple of weeks ago.

Cooley said, “They lookin’ for war, they gonna git one.”

Wyatt Earp, without stirring in his chair, said, “I imagine they intend to avenge that woman’s honor. Or at least that’s what one of them has in mind. Sparrow’s just using it for his excuse to get the war going. Warren?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you think, boy?”

“I didn’t rape the bastard’s wife. I only gave her what she asked me for. Man can’t keep his own wife in line, it’s his fault, not mine.”

“All right. But what do you think you ought to do about this?”

Sparrow had finished giving instructions to the miners down the street; they fanned out in a line abreast and began to walk forward along the opposite boardwalk, holding their rifles and shotguns ready. Reese Cooley took his boot down from the porch rail and lifted the six-gun out in his fist; Cooley said, “If they aimed to make advantage out of them rifles, they made a mistake comin’ inside handgun range.”

Wyatt said to his brother, “Well, boy?”

Warren shook his head. “I’ve gotno fight with them. I’m not afraid, but I don’t want a fight.”

“Good man,” Wyatt breathed. “Cooley, don’t use that thing unless you have to.”

Without taking his eyes off the miners, Cooley said, “Fuck that noise. They want their balls shot off, they can have it.”

“You’ll hold your fire, by God,” Wyatt Earp murmured in a very soft, grating voice. It was enough to make Cooley hesitate.

Wyatt got out of his chair and walked over to the pillar that supported the veranda roof. With half his body concealed behind it from the miners, Wyatt opened his coat to display the handle of one revolver. With slow motions he lifted the gun into his fist and cocked it. It wasn’t pointed at anyone in particular. Across the way, the miners were looking at each other in confusion, all except the enraged husband, whose face was black and blue; one eye was bruised shut. He had a shotgun locked in two fists the knuckles of which were white. The shotgun came around toward the veranda and the miner stopped with both feet braced. Floyd Sparrow’s piping thin voice reached harshly across the street: “We want Warren Earp for a miners’ court. Turn him over to us.”

It made Reese Cooley laugh with crude wickedness.

Wyatt Earp didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. He said, “All right, Sparrow, you wanted to test us, you’ve tested us. You can’t have him. Now put down those cannons and get off the street before all of you end up with dirt in your faces.”

It was the wronged husband who made it inevitable: the miner uttered a shrill cry of inarticulate desperation and yanked both triggers of the shotgun.

The roar was deafening. The miner clearly knew nothing about weapons; he was eighty feet away from his targets and he hadn’t aimed. The buckshot pellets made spouts and creases in the street below the porch of the Inter Ocean; a few stray pellets from the charge rattled against the boards, and one of them stung Cooley in the foot, which made him howl and made him shoot. Cooley’s first bullet hit the miner somewhere in the upper body and knocked him back against Floyd Sparrow, who wind-milled his arms and fell down under the wounded man’s weight.

All in a split fraction of a few seconds, the street erupted in battle. The miners hunched over their rifles, shooting without knowing how to aim. Cooley and his two thugs answered the fire deliberately. Wyatt Earp, lifting his gun, did not shoot; and Warren took cover behind the second post, his gun ready but unfired. One of the miners, hit in the shoulder, spun all the way around and fell flat; another broke it off and started to run, and Cooley shot him in the leg, spilling him down, skidding, onto the boardwalk.

That was when someone came crashing out of the lunchroom door a few yards down the street from Floyd Sparrow. Reese Cooley wheeled that way, gun turning. Warren’s eyes snapped to the newcomer, saw young Rafe Tree come charging out onto the street, gun in holster, mouth open and working. Warren heard Cooley’s forty-five thunder and boom.

When Rafe had got near the door, inside the lunchroom, he’d heard the shooting start. Startled and baffled, he’d climbed past two close-crowded tables and rushed the rest of the way to the door, flung it open and run outside to see what was going on. He took two steps, had no time to find out what the shooting was all about; the bullet hit him just below his belt buckle.

It knocked him down, ignominiously on his ass, and sitting there he felt the warm sticky spread of wet blood filling his pants; he felt ashamed. He did not want to look at the wound the bullet had made. He looked at Wyatt Earp, across the street. Earp was-snarling at Reese Cooley. Earp swatted Cooley across the face with the barrel of his gun and Cooley fell back against the wall, amazed. Across the street Rafe dimly heard Floyd Sparrow’s voice, piping and panicky: “Christ, let’s get the shit outa here!”