Epitaph Read online

  Budd shook his head. “Belly cramps, still.”

  “Want me to drive?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Can you wait until we get to the next stop?”

  Budd didn’t answer that time either, but he did manage to shout, “Roll down the curtains!” before he loosed a second gout of vomit.

  Bob twisted on the bench and caught the eye of the passenger who’d been sitting on the roof. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Roehrig,” the young man yelled back. “Peter Roehrig.”

  “Peter, I’m gonna change places with the driver. You hang on to this,” Bob said, handing him the shotgun. “Don’t worry. This won’t take long.”

  They were moving fast in the starless dark on an awful road with patches of ice in the ruts, but there didn’t seem to be any plan to pull up while the switch took place. Holding his breath, Peter watched the guard grip the railing around the rooftop, stand up backward in the box, and make a Roman arch of his body. The driver kept the reins until he’d scooted over on the bench, then gave them to the guard, who pivoted face forward and sat down with a bump as the coach hit a rock. The maneuver was neatly done and completed in just a few seconds. Good thing, too, for the driver was clearly in misery: stiff-faced, eyes closed, hunched over.

  Grinning, the enormous guard winked over his shoulder and held out a huge hand for the shotgun, laughing when he saw Peter trembling. “Cold?”

  “Freezing!” Peter yelled back, grateful not to be mocked for his nerves. “I’m from Wisconsin, but I didn’t bring a winter coat. I didn’t expect it to be so cold this far south.”

  “Lie down flat on that roof,” the big man hollered, eyes on the team now, the shotgun gripped between his knees. “Stay out of the wind!”

  “How much farther to the next stop?”

  “Not long, son. You can warm up there.”

  So young Peter Roehrig of Kenosha, Wisconsin, bellied down and gripped the rail with both hands. He was chilled to the bone and scared by the bad road and the swaying coach, but the giant guard seemed competent and that poor, sick driver was having a much worse night. At least I’m not throwing up, Peter consoled himself as he lay his head on his outstretched arm to cushion the jarring ride.

  “Christ, Bob, I’m sorry,” the driver said, “but I gotta take a shit.”

  They were on a steep grade, the team mashing their way toward the crest of a draw where the track skirted the San Pedro River. It was a stretch of road that Dickens might have recognized. A long way from the law in either direction.

  Intent on the turmoil within, Budd Philpot didn’t notice the three men in the road. He might have seen the the first muzzle flash but did not live long enough to hear the gunfire that followed, for the second slug hit him square in the heart. He was dead before he toppled out of the driver’s box.

  Peter Roehrig saw the driver fall and heard the shouted order: “Hold!”

  The big guard yelled, “I hold for no man, damn you!”

  A third bullet hit the seat next to Bob Paul, and the fourth tore through young Roehrig lengthwise, entering the top of his shoulder and tumbling through his left lung toward his spleen.

  Later, one of the passengers inside the coach would tell everyone about the gasping, wet cough he heard that night. “It came from somewheres outside and above the coach,” he’d say. “Sounded like somebody with consumption.”

  THE MEN AT DREW’S STATION were in bed when they heard the gunfire just after ten at night. Pulling on pants, they grabbed their rifles, rushed outside, and were nearly run over for their trouble, for by then the team was at a dead run, and the big man with the reins was yelling, “Hyah! Hyah! Hyah!” The coach went flying past them and disappeared into the darkness, headed toward Benson. They sprinted for the top of the hill and arrived in time to see four mounted men racing off in the other direction, toward the river.

  A few minutes later, one of the boys found Budd Philpot’s body lying on the side of the track and asked, “Who in hell was driving the stage?” But Mr. Drew himself decided that this wasn’t the important part and sent the kid to Contention City to tell the Wells Fargo agent there’d been an attack on the Kinnear stage.

  Western Union didn’t have an office in Contention yet, so the agent rode to Tombstone with the news. By that time, Bob Paul had reached the telegraph office in Benson and his wire had thrown Tombstone into a state of alarm.

  Roused from bed at eleven P.M., Mayor Clum dispatched members of the Citizens Safety Committee throughout the city to spread the alert. When the Wells Fargo agent finally arrived half an hour later, men on foot and men on horseback were rushing in all directions, ready to take action—but against whom?

  Garbled, embellished, made up out of whole cloth: All night long, the stories circulated. Another stage holdup, and this time a man’s dead! No, two fellas, that’s what I heard. No! It was three passengers and Bob Paul.

  Bob Paul was killed? Wait, it couldn’t’ve been Bob Paul! He sent a telegram from Benson about the holdup.

  It was Budd Philpot! A fella from Drew’s Station said Budd was gut-shot, just like poor Fred White. Musta been Curly Bill again!

  Anybody know a fella named Rorig? Bob Paul’s telegram said a passenger named Rorig was killed. Wasn’t he the fiddle player over at the Maison Doree? Hell, they killed a fiddler?

  They got eighty grand from the Wells Fargo strongbox, I heard. Took the mail pouch, too. Jesus, they stole the mail? Nobody ever tried that before!

  This time, jurisdiction was clear, if interwoven. The murders were a county affair. Sheriff Behan was organizing a posse that would leave at first light. An attack on a stage carrying the U.S. mail was a federal crime, so the posse would include Deputy Federal Marshal Virgil Earp, and he had deputized his brothers, Wyatt and Morgan. Wells Fargo would be represented by an armed agent named Marsh Williams.

  By five in the morning, this posse had assembled at the sheriff’s office, waiting for their tracker, Buckskin Frank Leslie, to appear.

  “What’s the plan?” John Clum asked Johnny Behan.

  “Am I addressing the mayor of Tombstone or the editor of the Epitaph?” Sheriff Behan asked in return, understandably wary after weeks of bad press.

  Clum considered the question and answered honestly. “Both.”

  Eyes on the lightening sky, Behan settled his hat, shrugged deeper into a sheepskin jacket, and pulled on his gloves. When he answered, his tone was civil and unstressed. “We’re heading for Drew’s Station. We’ll track the killers from there.” He spoke slowly then, to make sure Clum quoted him correctly. “The cold-blooded murder . . . of two men . . . during the attempted robbery . . . of the Kinnear stagecoach . . . requires the sheriff’s direct involvement.”

  “Who’s in charge of the office while you’re gone?”

  Behan put a foot in the stirrup and swung up. “Undersheriff Woods.”

  “Any notion yet about who was involved?”

  “Nothing reliable.”

  It was Williams—the Wells Fargo agent—who said, “According to the Benson police, a passenger told them one of the robbers had a bad cough. Probably a lunger.”

  “Bill Leonard, maybe?” Morgan suggested.

  “He hangs with the Cow Boys,” Wyatt agreed.

  At last, Johnny’s deputy Billy Breakenridge came around the corner with Buckskin Frank. They made an odd couple. Small, spruce, and bespectacled, Billy Breakenridge would not have looked out of place in the business district of Chicago or New York. Hungover and bleary-eyed, Frank Leslie was something out of a Wild West show. Long, blond hair lank beneath a wide-brimmed hat, an eagle feather stuck in its beaded leather band. Indian-style fringes fluttering on his buckskin jacket and leggings. Their arrival was the signal for the rest of the riders to mount up, and Mayor Clum stepped back onto the boardwalk, though not so far away that he did not overhear a quiet exchange between Wyatt and Morgan Earp.

  “You find Doc?” Wyatt wanted to know.


  “He’s out of town,” Morgan said. “I left a note for him at Molly Fly’s.”

  “Let’s go,” Johnny Behan said.

  “Good luck,” the mayor called, and he led the cheering as the posse left town.

  BY DAWN, CLUM WAS IN THE PRESSROOM, composing the morning’s special edition. It was easy to write the editorial, for he’d been beating this drum all year, in print and in City Council meetings. Tombstone was an island in a storm-tossed ocean of crime. Dire consequences could be expected when the tide of violence began to rise. Sheriff Behan and Undersheriff Woods were themselves southern Democrats who seemed reluctant to take action against the Cow Boys. There’d been shootings and stagecoach robberies within a few miles of Tombstone and a number of break-ins right in the city. Were Behan and Woods inadequate to their tasks, the Epitaph asked, or actively colluding with the outlaws?

  In response to his own paper’s editorial urging, Mayor Clum himself had organized a one-hundred-man vigilance committee in anticipation of riotous lawlessness that might break out in the city at any moment. Among its members were Tombstone’s most prominent citizens. All Yankees, all Republicans, all likely to back a political candidate who’d serve their interests in Prescott, or perhaps even in Washington . . . Gratifyingly, the murmurs had already begun. Who better to succeed Governor Frémont than the crusading editor and incorruptible mayor of the territory’s largest, wealthiest, and most important city? Who better than John Philip Clum, a progressive Republican reformer after President Garfield’s own heart? A man who could be counted on to serve the mining industry’s interests.

  A man who had Richard Gird’s blessing, and wanted to keep it.

  Mrs. Fly was making breakfast for her boarders when John Clum knocked on her door. “Terrible thing about the stagecoach robbery,” she said, drying her hands on her apron. “Is it true they killed a woman?”

  “I believe that is merely a rumor,” the mayor told her. “There are a lot of unfounded stories going around. Mrs. Fly, is Doc Holliday in?”

  “No, sir, he’s been gone since yesterday morning. Why?”

  “Did he mention where he was going?”

  “Well, he said he’d been invited to a card game in Charleston and that I shouldn’t expect him until today sometime. Probably in the late afternoon.”

  “I wonder if I might leave a note for him in his room.”

  “Why, of course you can, Mr. Clum! Morgan Earp just did the same.”

  Flattered to be visited by the city’s chief executive and proud to show off the quality of her rooms, Mrs. Fly led the mayor up the stairs, pulling a chatelaine’s key chain from her apron. “Try not to touch anything,” she warned, stepping aside to let the mayor enter alone. “Dr. Holliday likes his things just so.”

  There were two books on the table by the bed. L’éducation sentimentale, by Gustave Flaubert. Principles of Geology, by Charles Lyell. A framed daguerreotype of a mother with her small, solemn-eyed child. On the bureau, several issues of Dental Cosmos: A Monthly Record of Dental Science in a neat-edged stack. A bundle of letters tied with a blue ribbon from St. Vincent’s Convent, of all places! A gold watch. Sheet music for the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, transcribed for solo piano, composed by someone whose name was a typesetter’s nightmare: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. There was a handwritten message on the cover page. My dear John, Father Erbarth says you really ought to study something composed after you were born! Blessings, Alex. Morgan Earp’s note was in plain sight as well, left on a tall pile of bed pillows. Doc, we are gone with a posse. Look after the women.

  “I scrub the floors, wash the windows, and do his laundry,” Mrs. Fly said, still standing in the hall, “but he always leaves his room neat as a pin.”

  “Is he often out of town?” the mayor asked.

  “Well, recently, he’s been visiting friends in Charleston. He usually stays overnight. It’s a long ride for him. He’s not well, you know.”

  He was, in fact, Molly Fly’s best boarder. Quiet and clean, John Henry Holliday always paid on time, didn’t eat much, and was unfailingly courteous. He was also unlikely to want anyone snooping around in his room, and Molly Fly was beginning to think that there was something not quite right about the mayor’s visit.

  “Would you like a piece of paper, Mr. Clum?”

  The mayor turned. “Sorry?”

  “You said you wanted to leave Dr. Holliday a note.”

  The mayor looked blank for an instant, as though he’d forgotten he’d said anything about a note earlier.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Fly, I’ll speak to him when he gets back to town. No need to tell him I was here,” Clum said pleasantly. “It was nothing urgent.”

  HE HAD NOT EXPECTED a dangerous, dissipated gambler to be so tidy. It gave him pause—seeing the man’s life laid bare in a few surprising possessions—but the pause was brief. Whatever John Holliday might be in private, in public he was an albatross hung round Wyatt Earp’s neck and one that Richard Gird wanted removed.

  Clum headed back to the newspaper office by a circuitous route, stopping along the way to interview a few chatty citizens about the stage robbery, though no one in Tombstone was an eyewitness. “It is being said that Doc Holliday was involved in the crime,” he would begin, and that was strictly true, for he himself was saying it, at that very moment. “A passenger heard one of the robbers coughing . . .” The trick was to raise the brows and look expectant, holding pencil and paper at the ready. With a serious frown, he would take down the words of people who had no information at all except for what they’d heard, or thought they’d heard, or thought John Clum might like to hear, for people take great satisfaction in seeming more “in the know” than they might really be.

  By noon on March 16, Clum had accumulated a useful collection of assertions about the well-read gentleman from Georgia who was holding back Wyatt Earp’s political possibilities.

  Holliday had engaged a horse at a Tombstone livery stable and told the stable boy he’d likely be gone for seven or eight days.

  Holliday was seen departing the city, armed with a Henry rifle and a six-shooter.

  Holliday had started south but doubled back and headed for Benson instead.

  Holliday got back early and had just returned a rented horse to the livery stable, but the horse was all fagged out and so was Holliday. He must have been riding hard to get away from the posse that was tracking the killers!

  Most of this was fiction, and most of the informants knew it. Still, John Clum had been asking questions about Doc Holliday. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right?

  BEN SIPPY DIDN’T THINK the attack on the Kinnear stage would have anything to do with him. He was the Tombstone city marshal, and the crimes had not been committed in town. Then Mayor Clum showed up at the jail and gave him a direct order. “We can’t have a man like Holliday walking the streets. Find him and do your duty!”

  This was not the first time Ben Sippy had found himself wishing that Virgil Earp had beaten him in the race for city marshal. The pay was less and the job was more than Ben had figured on, and arresting Doc Holliday for murder struck him as an unhealthy way to spend an afternoon.

  Ben’s first move was to go down to the sheriff’s office, hoping to persuade Harry Woods to come along as backup, but Harry declined the invitation.

  “After all the shit John Clum has printed about Sheriff Behan? Nobody in this office is gonna arrest a registered Democrat on that lying bastard’s word.”

  Anybody else Ben might have called upon was already in the posse chasing the stagecoach bandits. So Ben was on his own, but he did his duty. He checked Molly Fly’s boardinghouse, where Doc ate and slept. He checked the Alhambra, where Doc worked. He checked the library, where Doc read, and the music room at the Cosmopolitan, where he played piano. Came up dry all round.

  It wasn’t until the night after the stage attack that he finally found Holliday, gambling in a dark little faro joint on the eastern edge of town. That was the first odd thin
g, because it was the kind of place favored by two-bit whores hoping to parlay a good night’s take into a few days’ rest.

  Not the kind of place Doc Holliday usually frequented.

  “Doc?” Ben said. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Marshal Sippy,” Holliday noted, eyes on the layout. “Wait until this game is finished, sir, and you may speak to me at your convenience.”

  “C’mon, Doc. It’s important—”

  Holliday leaned back. “So is this game, and be damned to you if you break my concentration again.”

  “Oh,” Ben said, withering under that slate-blue stare. “Sorry.”

  Not wanting to rile Doc further, Ben watched quietly. As far as he could see, the deal was square. Course, Doc himself would know if somebody attempted to cheat him at his own game and considering his reputation, few men would try. Two minutes later, Doc collected his winnings, which seemed to be something under fifty dollars. That was peculiar, too. Small-stakes games didn’t much interest professionals, who saw no point in risking cash without a fair probability of a substantial payoff.

  Another man was waiting for a game, so Doc moved to the edge of his chair and planted his cane, but he had trouble getting up and looked like hell. Sweaty, pasty-faced, tired. Drunk, too, which was a real surprise, no matter what gossips said. Sure, Doc put away a lot of bourbon, but so did many lungers—Ben’s own cousin Jack among them. They drank in small doses all day long, to control the coughing and ease the chest pain.

  “Now, then,” Holliday said, finally on his feet. “You have something to discuss with me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said. “Let’s go over to the office.”

  “I doubt that is necessary. What is this about?”

  “Something you might not want to discuss in public.”

  Drink in one hand, cane in the other, Holliday limped to a table at the back of the room. Ben followed, and they both sat down before Holliday asked again, slowly and deliberately, “What. Is this. About?”

  Ben looked away for a moment. “The Kinnear Stage holdup.”

  “A lamentable affair. What has it to do with me?”