Suddenly jubilant, Morgan couldn’t keep still any longer. Giggling like a six-year-old, he did a little dance, and threw an arm around John Holliday’s shoulders, and pulled him close. “Hot damn! We got him good, Doc! Look at that, will you? He’s … Yes! Here it comes! A smile! Wyatt Earp is smiling!”
“Nice teeth,” Doc remarked.
Wyatt laughed. “Should be,” he said. “They cost enough.”
“Somebody get Nick Klaine!” Morg yelled out at the empty street. “Stop the press! Wyatt Earp is laughing!”
Wyatt murmured, “Doc, I don’t know what to say.”
“Sure you do, Wyatt,” Doc said softly. “Mississippi. Fifty-five. Go on, now. Take a ride on your brother’s fine new horse.”
Wyatt walked out to Roxana, who pranced some and shifted away, but settled as he stood talking to her quietly, letting her get to know him a little. When the time was right, he swung up and wheeled her a turn or two, until she was ready to pay attention.
He leaned forward. She gathered herself beneath him. They took off, headed north through the short grass toward a ripening wheat field, gold and copper and ocher in the mellow autumn light.
“Now, that is a sight to see,” Morgan said, for it appeared that his brother was flying, as though Roxana had no legs at all but just swept along, weightless as a bird skimming the prairie. “You did good, Doc. That was a real nice thing to do.”
“Yes,” Doc said, sounding content. “She’ll be something to remember me by.”
Morgan turned and looked at him hard, but Doc’s eyes were on Kate, who was walking up the street now with some groceries.
“Morgan,” Doc said warily, “if Miss Kate were to ask you about Roxana? Remember: I cut the cards for the horse with Grier the other night, just after she and Bob Wright left.”
Turning the Play
For Morgan, autumn had always been a special joy. Of all the Earp kids, he was the one who liked it best when the family lived close enough to a town for him to go to a regular schoolhouse in the fall. Back when the Earps lived in Iowa and Illinois, he liked how the air got crisp as an apple, and how the leaves smelled when they piled up in heaps against buildings. He liked how his mother’s eyes warmed when he brought in as big an armload of wood as he could lug for the stove. Most of all, Morg liked climbing up to the attic after supper and getting into bed with a book.
He always claimed the space closest to a western window. It was colder there, but he’d pull a knitted cap down over his ears and burrow into the quilts and stick the book up to catch the dying light, reading until his hands were frozen and his eyelids were too heavy to stay open for another word. Now, of course, working nights the way he did, he didn’t go to bed in the dying light, but his and Lou’s bedroom window faced east. When the bright morning sun came in and hit his eyes and helped them close, he got that same feeling as he read himself to sleep.
This fall, he was working on a book called Black Beauty that he’d borrowed from Belle Wright. It was kind of strange because you were supposed to believe a horse was telling you the story, but it was good, too, and said a lot of true things about horses and made you think different about what you saw every day. Morgan thought Wyatt would enjoy the story if he could get past the silliness of animals talking to each other, so Morg was planning to read it aloud to Wyatt this winter when the weather closed in.
Unless him and Wyatt and James wound up moving to the Arizona Territory, that is. Morg would have to give the book back to Belle before the Earps left Dodge.
“There’s no end of silver down by Bisbee and Tombstone.” That’s what Virgil’s last letter said. The veins were so rich, the metal was right out on the surface, the way gold was in California back in ’49. So Wyatt and James were talking about how if they all went down to Arizona right now, the Earps could get in on the ground floor of something big, instead of showing up a year late, when the big money was done.
Bessie wasn’t real happy about the notion. And Morg hadn’t actually agreed to the plan yet, either. Lou wanted to go up to Utah to see her family again and find out if her folks had softened any about her and Morg getting married. So Morgan was caught in the middle, because he didn’t want to say no to Lou but James was ready to pack, and Wyatt was edgy and restless and not inclined to what Doc called “rational argument.”
For Wyatt, autumn meant the end of the cattle season, and that meant he’d be laid off again. The injustice of it ate at him, and his temper shortened with the days. Dodge was down to half a dozen herds a week, and the city had already let John Stauber and Jack Brown go. Wyatt had a big argument with Mayor Kelley over that. Sure, the number of cowboys was down, but so was the quality. These were men nobody wanted to hire, peak season, and they joined idlers who’d been fired or quit work the minute they hit town: drunks and shirkers and troublemakers who couldn’t be bothered to ride back to Texas. It was no time to cut police staff, but that’s what the city council wanted, so that’s what happened. And then Chalkie Beeson and the other saloon owners grumbled that Wyatt was bashing extra cowboys and hauling them in on the smallest pretext so he could rack up arrest fees before the winter, but all the deputies shared that money, so it wasn’t like Wyatt was making anything extra in October. He just didn’t have any patience with idiots this time of year. About the only thing that cheered Wyatt up was going to the Elephant Barn to spend time with Dick and Roxana, working them in a circle corral or taking one of them out for exercise.
Every time Morgan thought about what Doc had done, he could feel himself getting a big, dumb smile on his face. Good thing, too, because it made him more tolerant when Doc got himself into trouble.
The little German kid who pumped the foot drill for Doc—Wil Eberhardt, his name was—he’d taken to keeping an eye on the dentist when Doc was gambling, even if it meant staying up all night, or sleeping in a corner of a saloon. When a bartender noticed things getting out of hand, he’d send the boy to find Morgan, and Morg would have to stop whatever he was doing and go on over and settle everyone down some. That was happening a lot lately, so Morg knew what it meant when Wil came running over around two in the morning, calling, “Mr. Earp! Come quick! There’s trouble at the Lady Gay!”
Didn’t take long to get to the bar. Front Street wasn’t near as crowded as it had been even a couple of weeks ago, but the mood was worse. Spring carousing was celebratory and pretty good-natured; at the end of the season, knots of drunks stood around outside, passing bottles and glaring. There was more sullen defiance about the city ordinances and a greater willingness to pick fights just for the hell of it. The crib girls hated October. It was a lot more dangerous and they were more likely to get cheated, so they stole more. Usually they were too plastered to do that without getting caught and they got smacked around for it. Even at James and Bessie’s, there was trouble almost every night.
So Morg figured that Doc was probably getting roughed up, but when he got to the saloon, it was quiet except for some young drover who was noodling around on the piano, trying to pick out a tune that might have been “Lorena” or maybe “Bonnie Blue Flag.” Or “Buffalo Gals.” Hard to tell.
Doc was just sitting at a table, playing poker. True enough, the other fellas looked pretty unhappy. Well, that’s what makes it gambling, Morg thought. Not everybody gets to win.
Brows up, Morg turned back toward Wilfred, who was peeking underneath the swing doors, afraid to come inside. “Ask him,” Wil mouthed, and pointed toward Kevin Ballard, who was wiping up beer slops but watching Doc and the cowboys.
“Hey, Kev,” Morg said quietly. “What’s the trouble?”