Doc Read online

  “No, and that’s final,” he muttered. He wasn’t even sure why he didn’t want to go. He just didn’t like being pushed.

  Then a few days later, Kate’s enthusiasm for Dodge was endorsed during a chance meeting in a Fort Griffin saloon with a deputy federal marshal named Wyatt Earp.

  With their brief conversation concluded, John Henry rose carefully and hobbled outside, leaning on his stick. For a good long while, he stared at the featureless, scrubby desolation around him.

  Kansas can’t be worse than this, he thought.

  In the spring of 1878, John Henry Holliday sent word to his cousin Robert, informing him of another change of address.

  Thanks to your brother George, my health and spirits are considerably improved. I have made inquiries about opening a practice in Dodge City, Kansas. The town appears to have escaped the worst of the Depression and is prosperous now. In any case, I believe I have enjoyed about as much of Texas as I can stand. Give my love to your parents, and to George and to Sophie Walton. Tell Martha Anne I will write as soon as I get to Dodge.

  YOUR COUSIN JOHN HENRY

  The Deal

  As far as Wyatt Earp knew, it was not illegal to beat a horse.

  In the past few years, he’d worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort to study the ordinances he was supposed to enforce, but he wasn’t much of a reader. In Ellsworth, he asked a lawyer for some help. “Wyatt,” the man told him, “the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don’t kill the customers.”

  Most of the time, it seemed sensible to keep things just that simple.

  It was, after all, a long way from the cattle roundups in south Texas to the railheads of Kansas. There were dozens of ways for a cowboy to prove his mortality before he got that far. He could be trampled in a stampede or get himself gored by a cranky longhorn. He could be rolled by a spooked horse or break his neck falling off one. He could get snakebit. He could drown crossing a river. He could die of ptomaine poisoning or bloody flux. A cut could go bad. Sometimes that’s all it took.

  Once they got their herd to town, drovers collected their accumulated pay and it was “Whoop it up, Liza Jane!” After three months of relentless labor—enduring bad weather and worse food, sleeping in their clothes, unsheltered on the ground—when they thundered into Wichita or Abilene or Ellsworth, Wyatt guessed that those Texas boys could be forgiven for presuming that such places existed for no other reason than to show them a good time.

  Certainly, Kansas businessmen did nothing to discourage the illusion, what with the “Longhorn This,” and “Alamo That,” and “Lone Star the Other” on every sign on every saloon and whorehouse north of the Arkansas River. Dodge City’s leading men were especially ardent about conveying the splendid reception Texans would receive, should they elect to follow the Great Western Trail to the southwest corner of the state. All winter, there were advertisements in Texas newspapers to that effect. Bob Wright’s General Outfitting Store offered to send supply wagons south to provision cattle companies along the trail—for a small fee, of course—and Bob himself was so accommodating, he’d take a cattleman’s word as bond for payment. When the long, hard drive was done and the herds were delivered to Dodge, weary cowboys would find clean, comfortable rooms at the Dodge House Hotel and enjoy excellent dining at the Delmonico Restaurant (Deacon Cox, proprietor). Big George Hoover declared his intention to reduce the wholesale prices of liquor and tobacco during the entire cattle season, just to make those fine young Texans feel right at home in every saloon in town. Mayor James “Dog” Kelley assured them that the attitude of the townspeople toward high spirits was tolerant and friendly. Dog himself was a veteran of the Confederate Army, and his recent election to Dodge City’s highest office was proof that Southerners would receive fair treatment there—not like in those east Kansas towns where unbearably victorious Yankees would likely cheat those Southern boys every chance they got.

  Some of that was even true, mostly, but it wasn’t comradely fellow feeling that accounted for the welcome Dodge extended.

  The facts were these. Dodge City did not invent or manufacture goods. Dodge did not raise or educate children. It did not nurture or appreciate the arts. Dodge City had a single purpose: to extract wealth from Texas. Drovers brought cattle north and got paid in cash; Dodge sent them home in possession of neither.

  Dead men don’t pay for baths, haircuts, meals, or beds. Dead men don’t buy new clothes, or ammunition, or saddles. Dead men don’t desire fancy Coffeyville boots with Texas stars laid into the shank. They don’t gamble, and they don’t spend money on liquor or whores. And that was why, when the Texans got to Dodge, there was really only one rule to remember. Don’t kill the customers. All other ordinances were, customarily, negotiable.

  So Wyatt was pretty certain it wasn’t illegal to beat a horse. It was just stupid and mean. Dick Naylor was proof of that.

  It was August of ’77 when Wyatt first laid eyes on Dick. Overridden and underfed, the horse was a ewe-necked, long-backed, club-footed three-year-old whose coal-black flanks were marred by weeping spur sores. He was shaking like he had a chill and his eyes were white-rimmed with fear, but they were set well back on a good broad head with a tapered muzzle. There was quality to be noticed, if you had the sense to look.

  The Texan who owned him was shouting and hauling on the lead, trying to drag eight hundred pounds of bony horseflesh where it didn’t want to go. Wyatt hated to see that.

  “Halter’s too tight,” he called. “Loosen the strap behind his ears. He’ll stop pulling.”

  “Go to hell,” the Texan replied, and since no law said you couldn’t wreck your own property, all Wyatt could do was watch.

  Scrawny as the animal was, he had that cowboy scared, for the fella backed away every time the animal bobbed his head and snapped. It’s all show, Wyatt wanted to say. He could’ve reached your shoulder if he wanted to. You’re scaring him, is all.

  The Texan didn’t see things that way. Sputtering curses, he pulled a gun out of his coat pocket and declared, “Why, I’ll shoot you, then, you worthless no-good bag of shit!”

  The shot went wild when the horse jerked on the lead. A moment later, Wyatt had disarmed the idiot and bashed him with his own pistol.

  “Discharging firearms inside city limits is a misdemeanor. Fine’s five dollars,” he informed the Texan, who had crumpled to the ground, stunned but conscious. Wyatt dug into his pocket and counted what he had. “You can go to court or you can sell me this horse,” he said, dropping $2.15 onto the dirt. “I’ll let you off with a warning.”

  “Take him and be damned,” the Texan muttered, gathering up the coins. “I hope he kills you.”

  “What do you call him?” Wyatt asked.

  “Besides sonofabitch? Dick Naylor,” the Texan told him.

  He didn’t seem inclined to explain how a horse got his own last name.

  Two months later, Dodge laid Wyatt off again. Cattle towns needed all the law they could hire during the season. When the weather cooled off, toward the end of October, the streets went quiet. Didn’t matter how well he did his job, Wyatt was always out of work come winter.

  He had harbored some hope that things would turn out different in Dodge. He’d worked there with his brothers Virgil and Morgan for two seasons running, and they got a grip on the town when it was still making national news for being the most violent and lawless place in the country, even counting Deadwood and New York City. When the Earp brothers were hired in ’76, their boss was Larry Deger. Fat Larry was already close to three hundred pounds, too big and too slow to do much more than file the charges when somebody else made an arrest. By the end of ’77, everybody knew Wyatt was running the Dodge City police department. He honestly expected to be appointed city marshal at the end of Larry’s term.

  Which just goes to show you how dumb Wyatt was.

  Sure, he’d heard that jobs in Dodge were passed aro
und from one insider to the next, but hearing things is not the same as understanding them. Morgan tried to explain what happened, but Wyatt had no talent for politics and could not keep the shifting alliances and factions straight. All he knew was Big George Hoover lost the mayor’s race to Dog Kelley by three votes. Suddenly the Earps were on the outs, for no reason Wyatt could fathom.

  Mayor Kelley promptly reappointed Fat Larry as Dodge City marshal, which was a good joke, what with Larry weighing upwards of 320 by then. Wyatt thought he’d get chief deputy at least, but Dog settled on Ed Masterson for that.

  Wyatt asked why. Dog told him, but it didn’t make any sense.

  “Everybody likes Ed,” Dog said.

  Which was true, Wyatt acknowledged, but kind of beside the point, in a marshal.

  Ed Masterson was personable, Dog said. He made a good impression on important people. He was chatty and had a winning smile.

  Wyatt had not smiled since 1855, and didn’t like to say much more than six or seven words in a row to anyone but his brothers.

  That same election, Ed’s younger brother, Bat, got voted in as sheriff of Ford County. Wyatt had done the Mastersons some favors over the years, like hiring Ed and Bat as buffalo skinners back in ’72, when they were just a couple of kids who needed work. Seemed reasonable to expect that Bat would return the favor now and hire Wyatt as undersheriff, but that job went to Charlie Bassett instead.

  So. There he was. Out of work again.

  Disgusted with the situation, Wyatt’s older brother Virgil packed up and moved to Arizona with his girl, Allie—they had some kind of ranch down there now. But his younger brother Morgan got himself an off-season job as bailiff for the Ford County Court, serving papers on the side, so he was staying in Dodge. Their older brother James managed his wife Bessie’s bordello, and there was enough local trade to keep them open year-round. They were staying, too.

  Past winters, Wyatt had gone back to driving freight or cutting firewood for a dollar a cord but that was getting old, and so was Wyatt. This time he asked around more and landed an appointment as a deputy federal marshal. That sounded good, but it was really just another temporary job. For the space of six months, from November of 1877 to April of ’78, Wyatt S. Earp was empowered to follow David W. Rudabaugh across state lines, to arrest him for a train robbery, and to return him to Kansas for trial. To sweeten the deal, the Santa Fe Railroad was offering a big reward for Dirty Dave, a thief whose personal hygiene was notoriously unwholesome and whose notion of personal property consisted of, “If I can take it, well, I guess it’s mine.”

  Wyatt aimed to collect that reward, just on general principles, and because he was almost broke. On top of his regular expenses, he had a bill for stabling Dick, and decent feed cost extra. That salve did a good job on the horse’s spur sores, but it wasn’t cheap. And before Wyatt could chase after Dirty Dave, he had to buy a pack mule and outfit himself at Bob Wright’s store for a winter ride south, because Dave had headed for Texas after the robbery. Which left a little under five bucks in cash money after an entire season of risking his neck in Dodge.

  That was the story of Wyatt Earp’s life. He’d get ahead a little, something would happen, and the money’d be gone again.

  On his way out of town, he saw an army officer approaching from the direction of Fort Dodge, riding a mare like nothing Wyatt had ever before beheld.

  Even at a distance, the captain saw Wyatt’s jaw drop and he laughed, though kindly. “Roxana has that effect on folks,” he called as they closed on each other in the road. He reached across and offered his hand. “Elijah Garrett Grier,” he said.

  “Wyatt Earp. She’s something, all right.”

  “Arabian, bred for sand,” Grier told him. “Tremendous endurance.”

  “What would you take for her?” Wyatt asked, thinking of the reward he stood to collect when he brought Dave Rudabaugh in. “I’d go two hundred.”

  The officer looked at Wyatt’s clothes, and his gear, and his horse, none of which was impressive. “You’d have to add a zero to that figure, I’m afraid,” the officer said, friendly but firm.

  They spoke for a time about the mare’s exotic bloodlines and her temperament. Wyatt wondered if Grier had raced her. The officer admitted that her performance was uneven. “She’s a three-miler by nature,” he said. “Shorter contests don’t do her justice.”

  She was restive, standing there when she’d expected to run.

  “Best we move on,” Grier said.

  Raising his hand in a half salute, the officer leaned forward slightly. The mare took off, and she was a sight: her body perfectly balanced, her timing beautiful. She had a lovely floating stride that made you forget she had muscles at all. Fast, but you almost didn’t notice it, dazzled by how effortless the movement appeared.

  Roxana, Wyatt thought. Pretty name.

  He wheeled Dick southward, and kicked him into a lope.

  For the rest of the day and most of that night, Wyatt fought the thoughts, but he had a tendency to ruminate on the trail, and there was no quieting an idea once it took hold. At dawn, he doubled back toward town and rode all day, arriving in Dodge by late afternoon. When the mule was unpacked and Dick was settled into his usual stall at the Elephant Barn, Wyatt went looking for Johnnie Sanders.

  The boy was a newcomer in Dodge, but he already had half a dozen small jobs around town. Johnnie was responsible and pleasant, so people mostly overlooked that he was colored. Bob Wright had hired him to restock shelves at the store, but then Bob found out that Johnnie was real good with numbers; now the boy was helping with the account books, which were always a mess because Bob did a lot of bartering and carried debtors for a year at a time. Johnnie got another job sweeping up at the barbershop, which led to cleaning the floors at a couple of saloons. Then he showed how he could cover at the faro tables when regular dealers needed to take a piss or something. So now he did that pretty regular, too.

  Wyatt found him at the barbershop and motioned him outside.

  “Mr. Earp,” the boy said, leaning his broom against the wall. “I thought you was goin’ to Texas.”

  Almost ashamed, Wyatt explained what he had in mind. Listening carefully, the boy started to smile, and the smile turned into a wide gap-toothed grin.

  “You can count on me,” Johnnie told him. “We’ll get that mare for you, Mr. Earp. And I’ll be careful, I promise.” For the first time, the boy offered his hand, man to man. “Thank you for lettin’ me do this, sir. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to pay you back for your kindness.”

  He was so pleased to be trusted. So eager and grateful. It would haunt Wyatt later on, that gratitude.

  Wyatt walked across the tracks to the bordello and went inside. Bessie started to welcome him. Then she realized who he was.

  “You’ll be wantin’ James,” she said.

  Wyatt nodded, not meeting her eyes.

  “Have a seat,” she suggested, and left him alone in the vestibule.

  Perched on a horsehair sofa, Wyatt waited for his brother. He was doing the sums in his head again and gave a little jump when James said, “I thought you was going to Texas.”

  “Loan me three hundred—Hell. Make it three-fifty, to be safe.”

  “It’s yours if you need it,” said James, but he didn’t hide his surprise.

  Wyatt took a dim view of his older brother’s business and an even dimmer view of his older brother’s wife. “Wyatt, what have you got against Bessie?” James had asked him once. “Well, James … she’s a whore.” “Yes, she is,” James replied with perverse pride, “and a hardworking one, too.” Wyatt had never reconciled himself to the situation and thought the brothel money was tainted. But here he was, asking for a good-sized pile of it.

  James counted out the cash and handed it over.

  “Pay you back,” Wyatt said, and left to finish his business with Johnnie Sanders.

  Dawn, the next morning, he headed south again.

  He kept back enough of the mone
y to have Dick reshod every five weeks. Usually Wyatt tried to get at least three months out of each set of shoes for a horse, but it’s important to keep a clubfoot leveled. He needed to equalize the work of the shoulders and hindquarters, so Dick’s gait stayed balanced during the long ride south. Morning and evening, Wyatt stretched out that leg good, too.

  Dick’s mouth was ruined, so Wyatt had taken him off the metal bit and used a bosal instead. Treated with kindness, filling out, the horse appeared to appreciate that his situation had improved, but Wyatt had come to understand why that Texan had hated the animal. There was just no give in Dick. He had heart and smarts, but even when his halter fit right, he’d balk when you tried to lead him and just about pull your arm out of the socket. Or he’d move up and snap at your back to let you know he could take a chunk out of you if he cared to. On the other hand, Dick enjoyed being groomed. He was the first horse Wyatt knew who really liked to have his face brushed. Afterward, Dick would lean his muzzle into Wyatt’s shoulder and they would just stand together quietly. It was a sign of growing trust and made a nice end to the day.

  The long, steady rides that winter served two purposes. They were the best thing you could do for a horse hard done by in his youth, and they kept the pressure up on Dave Rudabaugh.

  In February, Wyatt almost caught up with his man at Shanssey’s Saloon in Fort Griffin, Texas. When Wyatt asked about Dirty Dave, John Shanssey directed him to the table of a thin, ash-blond gambler from Georgia who’d played cards with Dirty Dave a few days earlier.

  About Morgan’s age—twenty-six or so, Wyatt guessed. Dressed nice, but not flashy. Nickel-plated pistol, cross-draw shoulder holster. No other weapons visible.

  “Forgive me, sir, if I do not rise,” the Georgian said, using a silver-headed walking stick to tap a chair in invitation. “I am still recoverin’ from an unfortunate injury.”

  He offered Wyatt a drink. Wyatt turned it down. The Southerner’s brows rose coolly above slate-blue eyes. An explanation seemed both courteous and wise.