Hell, Bat thought, climbing into bed. If you want something written right, I guess you just have to do the job yourself.
Still, even he had to admit that the story lacked a dramatic climax. Maybe that was why it didn’t get much ink …
Unless his brother Morgan pointed out something of interest to him, Wyatt Earp never read the papers and, unlike Bat, he finished the night with a sense of satisfaction. He’d jailed five of Rasch’s men before the trail boss made it clear to the rest that he was taking the fines for drunk and disorderly out of their own pay. The Texans still got loaded, and they still gambled, and they still whored, and they still spent their last dime in Dodge before they were done, but nobody got killed. And all the deputies went home in the morning—excepting Wyatt himself, who ate a couple of boiled eggs at the Green Front and then shuffled over to Ham’s.
The new barn smelled good. Fresh wood, fresh straw, fresh manure. Down in the last stall, Dick Naylor snorted, and nickered, and looked at Wyatt as if to say, “About time. Where you been?”
“Busy,” Wyatt told him, offering a couple of carrots from a bucket Ham had hung on a spike in the wall. “I been busy.”
He gripped Dick’s halter and made a move into the aisle. Being Dick, the horse gave him an argument about it. Wyatt got a brush out of the tack room, which changed Dick’s mind about the desirability of staying put.
“Getting fat,” Wyatt noted, sweeping dust and bits of straw off Dick’s back with long, firm strokes. “You’re done with oats. Cost too much anyways.”
When he got a rhythm going and Dick relaxed, Wyatt started working out the numbers. Five arrests a night, $2 apiece, pooled, made $10 divided by seven deputies. A little over $1.40 a night, on top of his salary, which was barely enough to live on. At that rate, it would take months to pay off the loan from James, especially if Larry Deger demanded a cut of the fines because he was the city marshal, even though all he did was sit in the office eating and doing paperwork.
Course, it was pretty quiet last night, with just Rasch’s gang new in town. There’d be more arrests when they had two or three fresh crews coming in all at once. For the next few weeks, every outfit approaching Dodge would be laboring under the impression that Ed Masterson’s laxity still obtained. The new ordinances and enforcement standards would have to be explained repeatedly, and every crew would have a few idiots who needed to be knocked cold to get their attention. Eventually, as the cattle outfits returned to Texas, word would filter back along the trails that Dodge was no longer tolerating any nonsense.
Which meant there’d be fewer arrests as the season went on.
The better Wyatt did his job, the less money he’d make, and the sooner the town would let him go, come cool weather. “Dick,” he said, bending over the horse’s near front foot to clean out around the frog, “I can’t win for losing.”
Another man might have considered bashing a few extra cowboys a night, just to run the fines up. In the past, Wyatt himself had indulged in the practice, along with a few other habits involving more enterprise than integrity. That was exactly why he didn’t anymore: he knew from experience that his conscience bothered him a whole lot longer than the time it would take to pay James back legitimately.
He finished with Dick’s hooves and got him saddled.
“All right,” he said, swinging up. “Let’s see what you can do.”
With the sun low behind them, he struck west and took Dick out to the county racetrack, half a mile beyond the city limits. This time of day, the place was deserted, so Wyatt let the horse get used to the surface, alternating easy with quick laps. The track was harder than Dick was accustomed to, but he did fine.
“Best win on the Fourth,” Wyatt told him, slowing to a walk. “If I have to sell you back to some cowboy, you’ll have to work for a living.”
When he spoke to Dick now, it was just to amuse himself. Most of the time, Wyatt didn’t so much as think what he wanted. Dick would know his intentions from a little shift in weight or a slight tightening in the reins, even before Wyatt himself noticed what he was doing. This morning, for instance, Dick left the track and started off north toward the farms, like he knew they were due for some real exercise for the first time since getting back to Dodge.
It struck Wyatt as interesting how close you could get to an animal and how much you could have in common with a dumb brute. He recalled Morg reading somewheres that when the Indians first saw a Spaniard on horseback, they thought they were looking at one animal with two heads. Wyatt found that easy to understand. Watch a stockman on a cutting horse, say, and you’d come to the notion yourself. A cow would get ready to turn tail and change direction or bolt for the herd. The horse would see what she had in mind, slide to a chest-deep stop, pivot, and beat that beeve every time. A good rider just slacked the reins and kept out of his horse’s way, but he had to anticipate the action and adjust his own balance or be thrown for his inattention.
There was beauty in that wordless partnership, and Wyatt could never watch such a marvel without feeling moved. He came closest to it himself when he was on Dick at the line, waiting for the start. Dick didn’t need spurs or a quirt any more than Wyatt himself. They felt the same tension, reacted at the same instant, working the field together, driving for the inside or spotting a break and muscling through to a lead. Man and beast were one thing during a race.
In Wyatt’s opinion, Dick would have the advantage on the Fourth of July. Dog Kelley’s gelding, Michigan Jim, was the favorite in local races, but Dick would get long odds, for he would take the bookmakers by surprise. Until they’d seen him run a few times, nobody would expect “that two-dollar horse” to be anything much.
“They’re underestimating your cash value by a good fifteen cents,” Wyatt told Dick, who flicked an ear at him but otherwise minded his own business.
The sun was well up when they turned back toward Dodge. Wyatt was occupied with calculating how much he should hold back from James in order to put together a bet on Dick in the race, and what the payoff would be at thirty to one, when he saw another rider to the east, about five miles out.
Didn’t take but a glance at the lovely, floating gait to know who it was. That army captain—Grier, his name was—riding Roxana.
It was his father’s voice that Wyatt heard then. As always, an indictment.
It’s your own damn fault, you stupid worthless goddam pile of shit.
All them dreams …
Trying to get about yourself, dragging an innocent boy down instead.
Shoulda been you dead, not Johnnie.
Dick snorted and jogged sideways a few steps, and tossed his head. Distracted, Wyatt needed a few moments to work out why the horse had lost his stride.
“Hell,” he said, disgusted, when he realized that he was crying.
“Easy, now,” he told Dick. “Easy. Settle down.”
In all his life, he had wept only twice before that he could recall. Once was back when he was ten and his sister Martha passed. The second time, he was twenty-two, and his wife had just died of typhus.
He was visiting his grandparents in Lamar, Missouri, when he first saw Urilla Sutherland. She was on her way to church, dressed up real pretty but still modest and sweet-looking. In that very first moment—before Wyatt drew his next breath—he decided that it was time to quit drinking and quit drifting and settle down so he could be near Urilla and see her twice a week at church.
Before he even spoke to her the first time, he made himself break the habit of cursing and swearing, and that wasn’t easy for a son of Nicholas Earp. After years of driving freight to wide-open towns like Deadwood and Cheyenne and Yuma, Wyatt decided he should get a decent job. As much as he disliked his Grampa Earp, he became determined to study law with that cold, old man.