Doc

Bad Beat

The former prince and present priest Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg had been warned about Johnnie Sanders. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Father John Schoenmakers told him. “These children will break your heart.”

Twenty years on the Osage reservation had taught Father Schoenmakers to temper his expectations. So many obstacles had hindered the spiritual and educational progress of the Indians. The scarcity of Jesuit missionaries and the miserable conditions under which they worked. The violence and dislocation of “Bleeding Kansas,” and of the civil war that followed. The American government’s policy of deliberate neglect. The rapacity and corruption of Indian agents. The fear and intransigence of the Indians themselves.

“The work of bringing the Osage from barbarism to civilization and thence to Christianity is a labor not of years but of centuries,” the stolid Dutch priest told Alexander von Angensperg when the Austrian arrived at St. Francis School in 1872. “Mere decades are too brief a time to yield significant effects.”

The younger priest did not argue with Father Schoenmakers, but neither did he accept what his superior said. Alexander von Angensperg was a man in his prime. Energetic and fit, his hair still cropped cavalry short, his bearing still military, he was an aristocrat accustomed to achievement, eager to serve Christ among the red Indians and prepared to charge through enemy lines when necessary. Father Schoenmakers was not the enemy, of course, but Alexander believed it was important to resist the older man’s weary pessimism. To do this work, it was imperative to keep a high heart and even to believe in miracles.

In that spirit, Alexander had allowed himself to imagine a glowing future for Johnnie Sanders. Finishing his secondary education with the Jesuits in St. Louis. Going on to university. Conversion to the True Faith. Perhaps, one day, even a call to the priesthood, for it was plain to Alexander that the young man would have made a good Jesuit. John Sanders is a natural teacher, Alexander wrote to the Missouri Provincial, outlining the boy’s potential and inquiring about the possibility of a scholarship. He is at home on the borderlands between races, languages, and religions.

The letter was posted just a day before Johnnie disappeared, last autumn.

They did that, Indian children. They disappeared. You had to be on guard all the time. Father Schoenmakers was usually able to detect the signs. “Keep a close eye on Paul Little Dog,” he’d say at breakfast. Or “Joseph Two Birds is going to turn rabbit soon.”

Sometimes, they’d find the runaway before he made it off the mission grounds. Sometimes, they would never see him again. They might hear that a boy had gone back to his tribe; a few days or months or years later, they’d learn that he had been shot dead by a frightened settler west of Wichita, or that he was killed in a skirmish with the cavalry, or that he’d died of alcoholism on the edges of Kansas City. Once boys left St. Francis, their chances of survival fell like stones dropped from a high tower.

Some Indian parents understood that grim fact. They insisted that the runaway return to the mission school, often with a younger brother in tow. Small, skinny children would arrive all but destitute of clothing, and what little they wore was fit only to be burned. The boys themselves had to be dosed for ringworm, bathed with yellow soap, their heads shaved and their bodies rinsed in kerosene to kill their fleas and lice. When that ordeal was over, they were shown how to put on the school uniform and escorted—stumbling in their unfamiliar shoes—to the classroom. Scrubbed, shorn, and shod, they sat on wooden benches, wary as deer. If they spoke English at all, it was a poor and ungrammatical pidgin. Most seemed almost mute.

When Alexander von Angensperg walked into the classroom his own first day, he was nearly as overwhelmed as the newest boy at St. Francis. All the children were dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and they seemed to him as indistinguishable as the dark little chokecherries that grew on bushes near the school. On any given day there might be fifty students in his class, though their numbers were often thinned by illness, for scarlet fever, colds, whooping cough, mumps, and chicken pox spread easily in the close quarters of the dormitories. Each had been given a short, plain Christian name—easy to spell and write, but not memorable, not individual. Daniel, Thomas, Paul, Joseph. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.

“Me, I’m not named for the Evangelist,” Johnnie Sanders told Alexander. “I’m named for John Horse. He was a Seminole general. My daddy fought at his side in Mexico and Texas.” The boy looked thoughtful for a moment and added, “Course, could be John Horse was named for the Evangelist.”

Everything set Johnnie Sanders apart. His fluency in English. His looks: the curling hair, the flaring nose, his pride in bearing. His responsiveness and immediacy in class. His curiosity and openness to learning. He was only twelve when he came to St. Francis, but he was calm, not wary. Self-possessed, not speechless. He had been orphaned in June of 1873, but told Alexander that he’d already gotten through the worst of his sadness while staying with Wyatt Earp, a Wichita policeman who’d brought the boy to the mission school that September.

During his four years at St. Francis, John Horse Sanders absorbed lessons as good soil takes in rain. “I’m here because my parents were killed,” Johnnie said when Alexander praised his hard work. “I don’t want to waste the tears.”

In addition to English, Johnnie spoke his mother’s tongue, not the Osage of his classmates, but he was good with new boys, patiently showing them how to work door latches and pump handles, how to button shirts and tie shoes. Before long, he could communicate with the others in their own language, and full-bloods would tell him things they’d not been willing or able to tell the Jesuits. It was Johnnie who explained why they resisted looking adults in the eye. (“They don’t want to be disrespectful, Father.”) And it was he who helped Alexander understand why cutting the boys’ long hair was so distressing to them. (“Indians cut their hair for mourning, Father. When you cut their hair, they think someone in their family died, but they don’t know who.”) Alexander came to rely on Johnnie as an interpreter and as an informal assistant teacher. Working together, they had many of the new boys reading reasonably well and writing a good hand by the end of each school year. And Johnnie invented ways to teach arithmetic with card games, an unorthodox but effective method that was enormously popular with the other students.

John Horse Sanders was the last one Alexander expected to turn rabbit. Even Father Schoenmakers was surprised.

For the children’s own good, punishment for running was severe. One winter, a boy attempted to walk back to his parents and froze to death in the snow. His body was found the next spring, and Father Schoenmakers took no chances after that. Those who were recaptured were made examples, to discourage further attempts at escape.

Just before he disappeared, Johnnie had been involved in a serious altercation with Brother Sheehan, the massively muscled Irishman who managed the mission farm and taught the boys to plow and plant. Brother Sheehan was generally indulgent with the Indians, except when their conduct deserved stern treatment. In Johnnie’s case, Alexander had counseled leniency, if the prodigal returned.

Brother Sheehan was not too awed by a priest’s authority to argue. “Father, you’ve led that kid to believe he’s as good as anybody. Well, he’s not, and he never will be, not while he’s living on God’s green earth! If a boy like that bucks me in here, he gets a beating. If he bucks men out there, they’ll kill him for it. That’s a lesson the little shite needs to learn, and when we catch him, by God, I’m going to teach it.”

Too late now, Alexander thought, the flimsy yellow paper of the telegram crackling softly in his hand.

REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF THE DEATH

OF JOHN HORSE SANDERS STOP

DETAILS TO COME STOP WILL YOU

CONDUCT SERVICES STOP REPLY PAID STOP

JH HOLLIDAY DODGE CITY STOP

Alexander took word of the tragedy to Father Schoenmakers, asking for and receiving permission to travel to Dodge. He exchanged additional telegrams with J. H. Holliday, who promised to make all the arrangements and to delay the interment until Friday. On Wednesday, an envelope arrived with a round-trip train ticket, first class, to Dodge. The note inside was on good rag paper, written in a precise copperplate hand. Johnnie had died in a barn fire. The promised details were conveyed with tact, but Alexander read the truth between the lines. J. H. Holliday suspected that the boy had been assaulted and robbed before the building burned down.

On Thursday at first light, Brother Sheehan drove Alexander through a soaking rain to the train station in Wichita. The Irishman hardly spoke a word, but there was no need. All the way to town, the mule’s hooves clopped out a rhythm. I told you so, I told you so, I told you so …

Hours later, still damp from his dawn drenching, Alexander von Angensperg stepped down onto the railway platform and learned a lesson of his own: you needn’t be a mixed-blood boy to experience mortal and moral danger upon leaving St. Francis and arriving in Dodge City.

The first shot passed closely enough for him to feel the breeze of it near his ear before the bullet went pinging off a brass train fitting. The second shot was high, but if Alexander had not jumped aside quickly, he’d have been run down by a panicky riderless horse a moment later. Before he could react to any of that, a glassy-eyed girl with a painted face roped her arms around his neck, planted a wet kiss on his lips, and declared with exuberant hospitality, “Welcome to Dodge, Father!”

Decidedly cognito in a Roman collar and black soutane, Alexander tried to preserve some crumb of dignity while peeling the intoxicated prostitute off his chest. To the amusement of the station crowd, the task proved impossible, and the best Alexander could do was to feign serene indifference and address the assemblage more generally.

“Can anyone tell me, please, where is J. H. Holliday?” he asked.

A familiar-looking young man wearing a deputy’s badge pushed toward Alexander through the crowd, though his eyes were on the whore. “Clear off, Verelda,” he ordered. “Show a little respect, will you?”

“He ain’t here to pray, honey. Nobody comes to Dodge to pray, f’crissakes!”

“He’s here for Johnnie’s funeral.”

“Oh.” Verelda stepped back and dropped a simpering little curtsy. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said piously, adding with a boozy laugh, “and sinned and sinned and sinned!” Enjoying the laughter around her, the grinning girl spotted a prosperous-looking salesman and moved with blurry enterprise toward her next target.

Of his single meeting with Wyatt Earp, Alexander retained a clear recollection of a natural horseman who’d have done well in the imperial cavalry. Lean. Fair, with a heavy chevron mustache. An overall impression of calm command. The lawman before him matched that memory, and Alexander offered his hand.

“Deputy Earp, it is good to see you again, though in sad circumstances.”

“You know my brother, not me, Father. I’m Morgan,” the young man said. “Wyatt ain’t back from Texas yet.”

“My apologies! I met your brother once only, when he brought Johnnie Sanders to St. Francis.”

“Folks mix me and Wyatt up all the time. All us Earps look alike,” Morgan told the priest genially. “Here, lemme take your bag.”

Alexander hesitated. “I was supposed to meet a J. H. Holliday at the station—”

“I know. Doc sends his regrets. He’s with a patient and couldn’t get away.”

There was another volley of gunshots and the sound of breaking glass nearby. With an indifference worthy of a hussar, Morgan ignored a pack of cowboys thundering by on horseback, their leader holding high a pair of lacy pantaloons in a drunken game of capture the flag.

“We put you up at Dodge House,” he said, striding across a muddy street toward a large two-story hotel. “I hope that’s all right with you.”

“Usually I stay with a Catholic family,” Alexander said, trying not to sound ungrateful. “We must be careful about expense.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that none. Doc’s taking care of everything—Watch your step, Father.” The deputy grabbed Alexander’s arm, pulling him back before he could put his foot into a pile of horse dung. “Your English is real good. You German?”

“Austrian, but I have lived in America since five years already.”

A few doors down, three boys tumbled out of a bar, singing with an enthusiasm undiminished by rare agreement regarding melody and lyrics. Suddenly, one of them bent double and vomited into a puddle. The other two leaned against each other, laughing so hard that they fell to their knees in the mire, helpless with Schadenfreude. None of them looked older than sixteen. In Wichita, Alexander was the youngest priest at forty-five. In Dodge, he was a good deal more than twice the average age of those around him.

“Sorry about all this,” Morgan said. “We got three herds coming in all at once. Town’s been wide open since Ed Masterson was killed. The office is pretty shorthanded.” He reached past Alexander and pulled the hotel door open. “Deacon?” he called. “Guest for you!”

The hotel seemed hushed, Front Street’s cacophony effectively damped by heavy window curtains in sun-faded maroon velvet. The wooden floor was carpeted in mud-stained bilious green, the lobby furnished with a suite of dusty furniture upholstered in blue plush with yellow floral figuring. Several vivid chromolithographs decorated walls papered in a red-flocked geometric pattern.

Morgan whispered, “Doc says temperance ladies decorated the place to punish hungover guests.”

Alexander stared.

“Joke, Father!” Morgan said, with a remarkably sweet and open smile. “Deacon Cox just has bad taste.”

The hotelier appeared a moment later, dressed as soberly as his decor was flamboyant. There was a flurry of welcome, and an explanation of his title (“George Cox, Father. Folks call me Deacon, but it’s just a nickname.”). This was followed by assurance that Dodge House was the best hotel in town, confirmation that all of the priest’s expenses were covered, information about a Chinese laundry and the possibility of getting a bath, and the location of the privies.

In the midst of it all, another deputy stuck his head in the door and called, “Morg? Some idiot just rode a horse onto the second story of your brother’s cat house. We can’t get the damn thing to come back down.”

Morgan excused himself to deal with the emergency, leaving Deacon Cox to show Alexander up a steep staircase.

“We expanded last year. Fifty rooms now,” Deacon told the priest. “Best billiard parlor in the city. Restaurant, bar—no charge to you, sir. Doc says everything’s on him. That’s Doc Holliday for you! First class, all the way! You can come down to eat or I can send your meals up. Just ring the bell. We got room service, same as St. Louis. Oh, and the preacher says you can use the Union Church tomorrow for the funeral. Ten in the morning, we told people. Drovers’ll be sleeping it off that time of day—more peaceful for the burial, follow? Some of the Germans are coming in from the farms for your service. Mass, it’s called, right? Mostly Methodists here in the city, although the majority of the populace is as heathen as China Joe. Still, you should have a pretty good crowd. Folks thought well of Johnnie.”

Deacon opened the door to a room at the end of the corridor, then stepped back with a sweep of his hand. Alexander entered and crossed to the window, pulling a coarse lace curtain aside, hardly listening as the hotelier pointed out amenities. The room was on the far side of the building, away from the street and the railroad and the stockyards, overlooking an expanse of buffalo grass that stretched northward into Canada. It was quiet, apart from the occasional report of a pistol shot and Deacon Cox’s chatter.

“We told people you’d be hearing confession this afternoon. That’s how you say it, right? Hearing confession? Four o’clock, we told them. That’s when the dago priest always does it. Father Poncy—? Damn, I can never say that fella’s name! Something Eye-talian—”

“Ponziglione.” The room was generously sized, with an ornate woven wicker screen to divide a sitting area from a bedroom with a washstand and a dresser. He could use the screen to shield penitents. “Thank you. This will do very well. Four o’clock will be fine.”

There was more talk, including a promise to knock on the door at three forty-five, but at long last, the hotelier bid him a good afternoon and left.

Staring dumbly at the door, Alexander listened as Deacon Cox’s footsteps retreated down the corridor. Belatedly it came to him that he should have asked about Dr. Holliday and why he was being so generous.

Too late, too late, too late …

With a long, shuddering sigh, Alexander von Angensperg stretched flat on the bed, exhausted and empty. Since Tuesday morning, when he’d stood in the mission doorway and read that awful telegram, each passing hour had required all the self-discipline he could muster.

Placing one foot before the other.

Going through the motions.

Getting himself to this moment: when he could be alone at last, cover his face with his hands, and cry.

As promised, the knock came at a quarter to four. “I hope you got some rest,” Deacon Cox said through the door. “You got quite a line out here.”

Alexander straightened the bed linens and left the room to use the privy, keeping his eyes down so he would not recognize anyone waiting in the hallway. When he returned, he rolled up a blanket, put it on the floor as a kneeler, placed a purple stole over his shoulders, and settled himself in the chair behind the dressing screen.

“We may begin now, if you please,” he called out quietly.

For the rest of his long and eventful life, Alexander von Angensperg might have topped just about any war story told in a Jesuit residence. He could have listened, and nodded, and acknowledged each man’s most colorful adventure, and then achieved an awed, respectful silence with just six words: “I heard confessions in Dodge City.”

The seal of confession imposed silence, so he never told a soul. Had others tried to imagine the litany of violence, greed, deceit, and debauchery, they could not have come close. The average priest would rarely hear in all his days what Alexander did in a single memorable afternoon.

Everything but sloth, he realized afterward. Dodge was diligent in sin.

Nearly all the women were whores, most of them Irish girls hardly more than children. “A hooker’s never worth more than she is on her first night,” a tired young voice began. “I told my pimp I’m thirteen. Sure, if he finds out the truth, I’ll be working the cribs that much sooner, then, won’t I. So I lie.”

“And what was I going to do with a baby? I’d be out of work for months, wouldn’t I! It was get rid of it or starve. So I got rid of it.”

“He drug me out here all the way from Ohio, and then the sonofabitch died on me! There I was, with three little kids to feed. I tried to work honest, Father. I tried being a dressmaker, but I can make so much more money this way!”

“So he fell asleep, and I by God stole every penny he had. After what that bastard made me do, I reckon I earned it!”

“You have to drink, then, don’t you, Father? It’s so much easier if you’re drunk, now, isn’t it.”

On, and on, and on …

The sins of the men were more varied, if no less dismal.

“I swear: the gun just went off. I only wanted to scare him. It was an accident!”

“I was winning all night long, and then the sonofabitch drew a jack. I lost it all, Father. I can’t go home. I just can’t face her and the kids. They think I’m dead.”

“We knew he stole them horses, so we had to hang him, but Jesus! The way he looked at me … Did we do murder, Father? If we was pretty sure he done it?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her so bad, but she wouldn’t shut up, and I couldn’t stop hitting her.”

“We only did it twice, Father. We was so damn lonely, see?”

On and on and on …

A few vaqueros provided variation. God alone knew what those Mexican cowboys said, for Alexander understood no Spanish.

And then there was the German who simply sobbed for five agonizing minutes before choking out the words “Est tut mir Leid. Ich bitte tausendmal um Verzeihung.” I’m sorry. I am so dreadfully sorry.

In the end, there was an Irishman who announced his presence with a cheerful greeting. “Buck up, Father,” this voice said. “I’m your last, and I’ll be quick about it. I’ve broken all the commandments except murder, theft, and worshipping false gods. I’ve done more’n me share of whoring, but you know how it is yourself, then, don’t you, what with Verelda throwing herself at you, same as she does me. She’s not a bad girl, Father. This’s a terrible hard country for women. Anyway: no time for a rosary before me first act! Whaddya say? A few Hail Marys, and we call it square!”

Without waiting for an answer, the Irishman rattled off an Act of Contrition. Alexander was too benumbed to argue.

“I’ll be on me way, then,” the lilting voice said, but a hand snaked around the screen. In it was a liquor bottle, a shot glass perched upside down over the cork. “Here you go, then, Father. It’s from himself. ‘Something to wash the taste of transgression from your mouth,’ says he. There’s a note on your dresser. We’re after having a wee wake for sweet Johnnie tonight.”

The stationery was rag, the handwriting copperplate. On occasion, the note read, a good Kentucky bourbon may be considered therapeutic. If you’d rather not drink alone, please join the friends of John Horse Sanders at Delmonico’s, 7 P.M.—J. H. Holliday

He had hardly finished reading when there was a knock on the half-open door. Alexander looked up and saw a stocky middle-aged Chinese carrying a large tin bathtub, accompanied by two helpers with buckets.

“You want wash up?” this person asked. “Doc say bring you plenty hot water.”

Whoever Dr. Holliday was, he seemed to have thought of everything. A good stiff drink, a reviving hot bath. Even a clean shirt, trousers, and a set of underclothing had been provided—a little too large, but not a bad fit—with a promise from the laundryman that the priest’s own things would be returned by morning: “I brush, no wash. No time for dry. Doc say make ’em nice for funeral.”

Freshly bathed and freshly dressed, hungry for the first time in three days, Alexander went downstairs at the appointed time. Deacon Cox directed him to the restaurant a few steps down the boardwalk. The entrance to Delmonico’s was shut, and there was a handwritten sign in its window: Private Party This Evening. Alexander knocked and waited to be let in. He meant to stay a short while only, just long enough to express his thanks for his host’s generosity and to have a bite to eat.

A small, neatly made woman opened the door and waited, brows up.

“I am Father von Angensperg,” he told her. “I was invited—”

“Hochwürden! Willkommen,” she said with warmth and dignity. “Ich bin so froh, das Sie sich durchringen konnten, sich uns anzuschliessen.”

Her German was cultivated, though charmingly accented by Magyar, and her voice was wonderful—low and husky. “Please,” she urged, “do come in. I am so pleased you decided to join us—we had feared you might be too fatigued.” She offered her hand, still speaking his own mother tongue. “I am Mária Katarina Harony. Americans call me Kate.”

She was handsome, not beautiful, but she had a creamy complexion and flaxen hair, and her eyes were perfectly matched by the aqua watered silk she wore. To find such a creature in such a wilderness! His response was courtly and automatic: to straighten, heels together, to incline his head and bring her hand close to his lips. Only then did the astonishment hit him.

“Harony? But I know that name! There was a Michael Harony, a physician—he served at the court of Maximilian in Mexico, yes?”

“My father.”

“I met him twice, though I doubt he would remember me. My grandmother was his patient. How is Dr. Harony?”

Her head remained high. “He died some years ago.”

“I am so sorry to hear it,” he began. “Ach! The revolution, of course!”

Before he could say more, Kate turned and, with a practiced smile over her shoulder, led him inside. She was the only lady in attendance. The restaurant was crowded with men eating, drinking, talking, smoking, none of them startled by the intermittent gunfire in the street as gangs of horsemen charged by, whooping like savages.

Speaking English now, Kate began to introduce him, and those dazzling eyes sparkled with mischief, for she had recognized his family name, as he had hers. As she expected, the arrival of Prince von Angensperg created a minor sensation.

“Can a priest be a prince?” someone asked.

“I was rather a small prince, and for rather a short time,” Alexander said modestly. “Our lands are less than a county here in Kansas. The title is now my nephew’s.”

Names came at him from every side and, once again, Alexander was struck by the youth of everyone around him. Few appeared beyond thirty, and most were a good deal younger. Only one among them was approaching forty: Mr. Robert Wright, an unimposing man with an ill-considered walrus mustache that only made his receding chin look weaker. He was, however, the owner of the biggest store in town, the city’s postmaster, and a recently elected Kansas state representative who talked at length about his admiration for Johnnie’s gumption. (“Reading all the time,” Bob said. “That boy was trying to make something of himself. Real admirable, sir. Real admirable.”) A Mr. Hamilton Bell was also important in some way having to do with elephants. He seemed to feel responsible for Johnnie’s death somehow.

Before Alexander could ask about that, a man named Chalkie Beeson introduced himself. (“It’s really Chalkley, sir, but nobody says it right.”) He owned the Long Branch, whatever that was, and talked about a brass band that would have played for Johnnie’s funeral, except that the instruments hadn’t arrived from St. Louis yet. “I ordered the kind with silver trimmings,” Chalkie confided. “Cost me over two hundred dollars!”

Each of these worthies had handed him a drink. With no food to buffer the alcohol pressed upon him, Alexander was already working hard to appear unaffected when he was cornered by the town’s mortician, whose poorly fitted glass eye was almost as distracting as the moistness of his palms when he grasped and held Alexander’s hand between both of his own. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” the undertaker said earnestly. “I did what I could for the body, but it’s not easy to embalm remains when they’ve been burned. We put him on ice, but the weather’s getting pretty warm, and—”

A barber, whose name Alexander didn’t catch, mercifully interrupted the undertaker before additional detail could be supplied. The barber, too, had many nice things to say about Johnnie Sanders, as did everyone who’d known the boy, one way or another.

It was heartwarming but all rather overwhelming, and Alexander was relieved when Kate reappeared at his side and steered him through the crowd toward a table covered by a variety of aperitifs, spirits, and wines.

“And Dr. Holliday?” Alexander asked, pulling out her chair. “Am I correct in believing that J. H. Holliday is also the ‘Doc’ to whom I owe so many thanks?”

“Ja, das ist mein Mann,” Kate said comfortably when Alexander sat across from her. “He’s going to be a little late.”

Mein Mann. The term meant “husband” in German, but Kate had introduced herself as Harony, not Holliday. The discrepancy registered, though his curiosity remained focused on his host. “Und so, Dr. Holliday is a physician, as your father was?”

“A dental surgeon.” She lowered her eyes, adjusted her skirt, and folded small hands in her lap. The rustle of silk took Alexander back to his days at court, as did the impact of her eyes when she slowly raised them to his own. The effect was slightly diminished when she added in English, “A cowboy got shot in the face at the Bon Ton this afternoon. Doc’s doing the surgery. He’ll be here soon.”

When they were settled, a stout blond waitress pushed through the crowd to provide Alexander with a menu. The selection was amazing, and he frowned at it in a mighty effort to focus on what might best counter the liquor. Iced oysters, broiled salmon, turbot in lobster sauce, fillet of sole, trout. Roasted beef and lamb and venison. Spring chicken, duck, and quail. Potato dumplings. Green peas. Six kinds of cheese. Strawberries. Compote of cherries. Ice cream. A Neapolitan cake, charlotte russe—

“Doc had most of it brought in, iced, on the train. I recommend the pork tenderloin,” Kate said in German, smiling. “It’s Doc’s favorite. He’s from Georgia, and Southerners like pork almost as much as Austrians do! The cabbage strudel is quite good, as well. Sweet and buttery, savory and crisp in just the right proportions. Those are made right here. Delmonico’s cook is from Straubing, the widow of an immigrant farmer.”

Alexander was silently pleased to know that at least one woman in this town had found honest work with which to support herself. “I shall rely on your recommendations,” he told Kate, and smiled vaguely at the waitress as Kate translated the order.

The meal was as good as Kate promised, as was the bottle of wine she ordered and the brandy she selected after the dessert. There was an excellent cigar at the end of the meal, but still no sign of their host. To pass the time, Alexander offered his hostess amusing if rather dated court gossip. Guests came and went around them, ordering dinners, taking full advantage of the freely available liquor. Every few minutes, someone would raise a glass and call out, “To Johnnie!”

With each round of drinks, the room got noisier. Conversation with Kate grew difficult, then ceased. Alexander had always found small talk somewhat enervating; small talk at the top of his voice was even less pleasurable, and he was becoming aware of the fatigue beneath an alcoholic fog.

With every new arrival, Kate turned toward the door. Over and over, her look of eager anticipation was replaced by a disappointment that was hardening into unconcealed anger. Rolling cigarette after cigarette, she was drinking now with alarming steadiness, no longer pretending that this was in response to the toasts. Alexander was concerned, if not shocked. He had, of course, witnessed indiscretion among ladies at court who embarrassed themselves and others with overindulgence, but Kate’s mood was like the crackle in the air just before a lightning strike. While he pitied the poor man upon whom this matrimonial storm would soon be unleashed, he felt no desire to witness the event. Indeed, he decided, it might be considered an act of charity and a sign of respect to remove himself from what might well turn into an unpleasant public scene.

Sliding to the edge of his chair in careful preparation for departure, he suggested loudly, “Perhaps Dr. Holliday has been drawn into some other medical emergency. I’m afraid I’m no longer used to such late hours, so with your permission?”

Fingers drumming on the table, Kate shrugged. With some relief, Alexander rose, but before he could withdraw, he saw Deputy Earp pushing through the crowd.

“Doc’s on his way,” Morgan reported to Kate, “but he went over to China Joe’s to clean up first. He was bloody to the skin—”

The first curse was like the thunderclap that heralds a cloudburst. In quick succession Kate called down the wrath of God on drunken Texans, on someone named Tom McCarty, who “should do his own goddam surgeries,” and on Doc himself for “wasting his time with that shit when he can make so much more at the tables!”

Wincing at her language, Morgan took Alexander aside. “I know how you feel,” he said quietly, glancing at Kate, “but Doc’s really looking forward to meeting you. Educated people are kinda scarce around here. If you can stay a little longer, I promise he’s worth the wait.” The deputy must have noticed that Alex was impaired, for he added, “You should probably sit down, Father.”

A graceful exit effectively blocked, Alexander took his seat once more. Morgan tried to raise Kate’s spirits a little but gave up when she snarled at him, leaving uneasy silence at their table amid the general din. Suddenly, the restaurant door was flung open to admit a loudly dressed young man with a mop of curling black hair, who made his entrance to a round of applause and came straight to their table. For a disorienting moment, Alexander thought this might be Doc, but with an impish grin, the fellow dropped into a chair and introduced himself as “Eddie Foy, headlining at the Commie-Q Theater, I’ll have you know!”

Alexander recognized at once the voice of the Irishman who’d handed him the bottle of bourbon that afternoon.

“I decided not to bring Verelda tonight,” Eddie said in a stage whisper, leaning over to nudge the priest in the ribs. “I’d hate to have to fight you for her, Father.”

For the next half hour, Kate drank steadily, fuming and smoking like Vesuvius, while the Irish boy tucked into a thick steak, told jokes, sang snatches of song, and complained about the paucity of imagination American mothers employed when naming their sons.

“Watch this,” he told the priest before yelling, “Hey! John!”

At least a third of the men in the room turned around.

Eddie waved to them happily, pointing as he listed, “John Riney, John Tyler, John Mooar, John Pope, John Morgan, John Reynolds, John Mueller … And that doesn’t count Doc or Johnnie Sanders, let alone all the Jacks. Texas Jack, Jack Belmont, Missouri Jack—Ah, Christ, look who’s coming, will you? You’ve heard of mountain men, Father? Well, here’s a man worthy of the title! That boyo’s suit must have been stitched from a whole day’s output at a Massachusetts mill, without taking a bit of his shirt into consideration!”

Alexander turned to see a giant approaching. Easily two meters tall, almost half that broad, with a nearly square head sitting on massive sloping shoulders, this colossus slowly made his way through the room on a circuitous course that would eventually lead to the table at which Alexander and Kate and Morgan and Eddie sat.

“Big George Hoover,” Eddie said, leaning sideways and speaking close to Alexander’s ear. “Reform Party, and he’ll shake every hand in the room. Watch, now! Grasp the hand firmly! Grip the elbow! Yes … Gaze into the eyes … Ah, the sincerity! If a politician can fake that, he’s got it made. Damn few votes for him in this room, but he’s a grand hopeful optimist, our George. That speck behind him is the former Maggie Carnahan. Not a bit better than Verelda, but all dignified she is now.”

When the couple arrived, Eddie hopped to his feet and did the introductions. “Father von Angensperg, may I introduce Mr. George Hoover?”

The hand firmly grasped. The elbow gripped. The sincere gaze applied.

“Very pleased to meet you, sir,” Hoover said in a startlingly high voice. “And welcome to our community. It’s an honor to have a man of learning and religion in our midst. Until just last year, I was the mayor of Dodge City, and I hope to serve the public again—”

“George Hoover has always served the public,” Eddie declared in a burlesque of civic pride. “Served the public bourbon. Served the public rye.”

“You are the proprietor of a drinking establishment?” Alexander asked politely.

“Long ago, sir—”

“Four years,” Eddie noted. “Everything in America is done double-time, Father.”

“I am in wholesale liquors, wines, and cigars now,” Hoover said, “but my wife and I yearn for the day when Demon Rum is driven from our community and I am reliant on tobacco alone for a modest but honest income—”

“Hypocrite,” Kate muttered.

“To be put out of business, sir, that is my ambition,” Hoover continued smoothly. “What a blessed day that will be! And what a tragedy young Sanders’ death was, sir! The second dreadful loss to our community in less than a month, and all on account of drunkenness!”

Alexander stared. “Am I to understand that Johnnie was a drunkard? Because he had never touched liquor when—”

“No, sir. No, you mistake me! While young Johnnie did not take the pledge, neither had he fallen to the depths of so many of his kind. Nonetheless! He was the victim of drink, sir—”

“We don’t know that,” Morgan said, but Hoover didn’t even pause.

“—just as our late chief deputy Edward Masterson was, and that, sir—” There was a small noise behind the massive Mr. Hoover, and he paused in his stump speech to look behind him. “Goodness! Margaret, my sweet. I forget my manners! Permit me to introduce my wife, Father.”

Hoover reached down and took the tiny hand of a tiny woman whose head barely topped the middle button on her husband’s waistcoat. Emerging from his considerable shadow, this miniature brunette dropped a well-tutored curtsy, her eyes downcast.

“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure, Father,” she said, Ulster still audible in her voice.

“The lovely Margaret,” Eddie announced, “and isn’t she a picture!”

Eddie said something in Gaelic then, and the lovely Margaret shot him a defiant look, as though accepting a dare.

“I’m a Methodist now, Father,” she said, chin tilted upward. “And didn’t I leave the Church because Rome refuses to join the battle against intemperance! German Catholics have fought Prohibition every step of the way in Ford County, and aren’t you a fine example! If I were a betting person, I’d wager you heard this afternoon how many drink has ruined. Lives blighted. Pay pissed away, wives in despair, sons thieving, daughters on the street!”

Kate moaned with boredom and tossed back another shot.

“The church will be free tomorrow by half past twelve,” Eddie told her helpfully. “Come back then, and you can preach all you want, Maggie.”

“Not afraid to speak her mind, my little Margaret!” George declared, putting a huge square hand on Maggie’s shoulder. He pulled her toward him with affection and not a little pride, but with a slightly better idea of how their audience was taking her remarks. “You came in from Wichita, I understand,” Hoover said, and turned the conversation toward weather. “We had quite a rainstorm here last night! It must have reached you by this morning!”

Appointing himself host, Mr. Hoover inquired then as to the comfort of the priest’s journey, his satisfaction with his hotel room, his enjoyment of the meal, and his possible desire for anything additional to eat, or to drink, or perhaps to smoke. (“Those cigars are Cuban, sir! The very finest in the world!”) The interrogation stopped only when Kate demanded, “Who in hell do you think you are? It’s Doc’s party, not yours, you arrogant sonofabitch.”

“You see, Father?” Margaret Hoover asked. “You see the depths to which liquor has brought this woman?”

Kate was on her feet. An instant later, Morgan Earp was between her and Maggie, who was shouting now about walking with Gentiles in lasciviousness and lust and excesses of wine, while Kate cursed in three languages. Big George lifted his wife off the ground and deposited her behind him, concocted a credible excuse for leaving early, and promised to attend the funeral in the morning. Before the Hoovers were halfway to the door, Alexander found himself refilling his glass.

“You see, Father?” Kate mimicked triumphantly. “You see the depths to which that woman has driven you?”

“The pair of them don’t bear thinking of, now, do they, Kate?” Eddie remarked. “She must ride that bull or risk being squashed flat!”

Kate hooted. Morgan snickered. Alexander choked on his drink.

Eddie clapped his hands and pointed at the priest. “Got you good with that one, now, didn’t I, Father!” Just then, the comedian’s eye was caught by the tall and sparely built young man entering the restaurant. In the voice that filled the Commie-Q twice nightly, Eddie Foy announced, “And here’s himself at last!”

Kate’s face lit up, only to darken in a mixture of wifely concern and fury. Like everyone else in the room, Alexander had turned toward the door.

The newcomer was in his mid-twenties, slim in well-tailored silver-gray. Freshly barbered, with a neatly trimmed imperial mustache, he was also visibly fatigued and leaned on a walking stick that was not merely a fashionable accessory. Shaking hands, murmuring greetings, he occasionally paused in these brief conversations to cough into a square of fine cotton cloth.

When he came even with Mr. and Mrs. Hoover, he learned that they were leaving. His disappointment at this news might have been just a shade too sincere. When he glanced at Kate, one eye twitched ever so slightly in what might have been a wink.

Uncharmed, Kate snarled, “Just look at him! He’s exhausted, goddammit.”

Alexander tried for diplomatic neutrality. “So! This must be your husband at last!”

“That’s Doc,” she confirmed, but her tone implied correction. With drunken hauteur, Kate lifted her head and chose High German. “My husband left me the day that he discovered I was pregnant, Hochwürden. Oh, the baby wasn’t his,” she admitted breezily, speaking now in the language of the brothels, “but the bastard didn’t know that when he left me high and dry.” She looked at the priest, and then at the other two—the Irishman and Bessie’s brother-in-law—and laughed at their dismay. “And that makes my husband a no-good goddam lying sonofabitch! Doesn’t it!”

“Kate, darlin’,” Doc said, now standing just behind her. “What a remarkable line of conversation you have opened!” He leaned over to kiss the back of her neck and spoke into her ear. “Is there any of Kentucky’s finest left? I was hopin’ for a drink myself.”

Slightly breathless, the young gentleman then reached across the table to offer his hand. “Father von Angensperg, I presume. John Holliday. An honor, sir. Johnnie Sanders spoke highly of you.”

Roughing the Edges

Alexander stood. “Dr. Holliday, you have been far too generous, but I am very grateful for your thoughtful—”

“Don’t mention it, sir! It was the least I could do for the man who educated John Horse Sanders.” Doc straightened and glanced toward the noisy crowd. “Would y’all mind, I wonder, if we were to move to a quieter table? I am happy when my guests enjoy themselves, but it has been a longer day than I anticipated. I don’t have a lot of shout left in me.”

Naturally, everyone agreed. Doc nodded to the manager, who hurried off to ready a table that was tucked into an alcove in the back, where the clamor of the party would be muffled.

“Dr. Holliday,” Alexander urged, “please, sit while we are waiting.”

“You are very kind, sir, but if I go down now, you’ll have to winch me out of the chair,” Doc admitted with weary good humor. Kate started to say something tart. Like a man calming a skittish horse with a touch, he ran his fingers lightly down her neck until his palm rested on her bared shoulder. “Miss Kate tells me the Angenspergs are from the Ansfelden region. Bruckner was born there, was he not?”

“Why, yes! I’m astonished that you have heard of him, or of Ansfelden!”

“My mamma insisted that I study some of his work, but Bruckner was one composer upon whom we disagreed.” Doc took the cigarette from between Kate’s lips and brought it to his own. Squinting through smoke, he said, “I hope I will not offend you when I say that I keep waitin’ for that man to get to the point, myself, but he never seems to arrive.”

“Yes,” Alexander agreed. “As a Viennese critic once put it: a Bruckner symphony is like coitus interruptus. All the work with none of the joy.” He blinked. “Mein Gott,” he said, horrified. “Forgive me … I have had too much of your good brandy, I fear!”

Doc had coughed in surprise, but a slow, appreciative smile emerged, mainly visible in his tired eyes. “Mamma would’ve skinned me for sayin’ such a thing,” he murmured, “but the observation is apt, sir! Very apt. Now, Brahms—perhaps you have heard, sir! I read recently that Brahms has finished a second symphony. Any truth in the rumor?”

Morgan looked at Eddie, who shrugged, palms up.

“Music,” Kate hissed, rolling her eyes.

“I am afraid we are quite isolated at St. Francis, but I will write to a friend in St. Louis who will know this,” Alexander promised, attempting to sound sober. “I shall certainly inform you when I hear from him.”

The manager reappeared and led them to their new table. Waving the others on, and looking ready to drop, Doc brought up the rear. Morgan got to the table first and gave one of the heavy wooden chairs a shove with his boot, trying not to make the move look too solicitous. Doc flicked a glance at him, acknowledging the assistance, and lowered himself carefully.

“I trust y’all will forgive my late arrival,” he said, returning a hollow-eyed gaze to the priest. “I speak no German myself, but I had hoped for the pleasure of watchin’ Miss Kate enjoy the sound of one of her cradle languages. Instead, I have spent the evenin’ in the unedifyin’ company of a Texan who disliked bullets so much, he tried to damage one with his face.”

“Your work must be rather like that of an army surgeon in a town like this,” Alexander suggested.

“Beginnin’ to look that way. Days, it’s general dentistry, but after dark …” Doc shook his head and leaned over to stub out the cigarette butt on his boot heel. “Roll me another, will you, darlin’? I treated facial trauma back in Philadelphia, and there were plenty of barroom brawls in that fine city, but nothin’ like this gunshot wound! Cracked ascendin’ ramus on the impact side. Molars shattered, tongue torn up. Mandibular body blown apart on the way out—”

“Jesus, Doc!” Eddie cried. “We just ate, now, didn’t we!”

“When do you sleep?” the priest inquired.

“Still figurin’ that out,” Doc said, ignoring the little sound of annoyance Kate made.

“I got the night off,” Morgan pointed out, “but the doctors are on call all the time.”

Without being asked, a waitress delivered a tray laden with clean glasses and a full bottle of bourbon, along with a cup of tea and a little pot of honey.

“Why, thank you, Miss Nora. You are very kind,” Doc said, smiling up at her. She poured the first round, and Doc lifted his glass. “To John Horse Sanders,” he said, and they repeated the toast. More quietly, Doc added, “And to the nameless young fool from the Lone Star State who has just entered eternity with half his jaw shot off.”

“So he died anyway! After all you did for him!” Disgusted, Kate lit the cigarette, took a pull herself, and handed it to Doc. “And now who will pay you?” she demanded, shooting a plume of smoke upward.

Doc’s wheezy laugh became a dry cough that eased when he took a sip of bourbon. “I doubt the boy expired just to avoid his dental bill, darlin’.” He paused to stir some honey into his tea before addressing the priest. “Not countin’ Johnnie, the tally this week is one dead, three others shot up, and two knifed—one of whom has no more than a fair prospect of survival. And it is only Thursday, sir.” Cigarette between two fingers, Doc lifted the cup with both hands and breathed over the surface of the tea to cool it. “Healthy young men, throwin’ their lives away,” he said softly, eyes unfocused. “Sometimes the sheer waste is more than I can bear.”

From his vantage at the end of the table, Morgan smiled a little, watching Father von Angensperg try to make out what he’d just heard. Before Morg himself met Doc a few weeks ago, he’d hardly ever spoken to anyone from the South, excepting Texans, and about the only thing he ever said to them was, “Shut up. You’re under arrest.” Tonight, Doc was whipped, and that must have made his accent even harder for a foreigner to understand.

Sometimes th’ sheah waste is mo’en ah kin beah …

You could see the Austrian’s wheels turning, but by the time he began to say something back, Kate had started in on Doc again.

“You look terrible! You’ll make yourself sick again! And for what? For nothing!”

“I am beat hollow,” Doc admitted, “but there is no fever or chest pain, darlin’. And paid or not, there is considerable satisfaction in the exercise of a hard-won competence. For example,” he said, trying to head her off, “the good father here was not materially recompensed for the time he spent teachin’ our young friend Johnnie, but I believe he must have found the effort rewardin’. Am I correct, sir?”

“Indeed,” von Angensperg said quietly. “He was an extraordinary student.”

“An unusual and intriguin’ mind,” Doc said. “One night, we were havin’ a smoke outside the Alhambra and he remarked that the Greeks and Romans named the heavens—Venus, Mercury, Mars—but Indians named the ground beneath our feet. Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska … It was a moment of poetic metanoia, sir. I had never thought of things that way.”

Doc pulled out a pocket watch and checked the time. It was a nice enough piece, Morgan noticed, but not extravagant, as you might’ve expected, given how freely he was spending money on this affair. Morgan had heard about Doc’s win the other night—walked away with fifteen grand and damn near killed a cattle boss, according to Bat. There had to be some truth to the story. Patching up Texans and pulling teeth for farmers wouldn’t hardly pay for the priest’s train ticket and hotel room, let alone this kind of shindig. The liquor alone …

Doc returned the watch to his pocket and caught the waitress’s attention with a wave. “Nora, honey, I am perishin’ for a dish of peaches in cream. Will y’all join me?” he asked the table. “Father von Angensperg, I calculate there is plenty of time yet, sir. As I recall, the rule is nothin’ after midnight when you are going to say Mass in the mornin’ and—”

“All this is costing us a fortune,” Kate muttered.

Doc slowly turned his gaze toward Kate. “Us?”

“Yes, us! I bring money in, too. I staked you—”

“A loan, darlin’, repaid with interest six hours later.” Doc stared until Kate’s eyes dropped. Then he smiled at his guests. “I assure you, gentlemen, peaches in cream will not bust the Holliday bank.”

As much to spite Kate as to please Doc, Morgan and Eddie accepted the offer, as did von Angensperg.

“You know the rules for the fast,” the priest observed with some surprise. “Are you a Catholic, Dr. Holliday? I have thought Catholicism rare among Southerners.”

“It is, outside of New Orleans. My people are Presbyterians and Methodists for the most part, but our clan does hold in its wide embrace a few lace-curtain Irish—”

“Does it now!” Eddie cried. “Is it possible we’re family, then?”

“Why, Eddie Foy, you miserable shanty bog rat,” Doc said affably, “kindly give my kin credit for some taste.”

Eddie took it for the joshing it was, but Kate said, “Even if you have none, I suppose? Is that what you’re saying?”

There were a dozen things about Doc Holliday that Morgan didn’t understand, but this was the most baffling: why did he put up with Kate? She was not bad-looking and she was nice enough when she was sober, but at least once a week, she’d tie one on and try to pick a fight with him.

“—so I am not unfamiliar with the customs of the Church of Rome,” Doc was telling von Angensperg. “My dearest cousin prays for my conversion nightly, I am given to understand.”

“That girl!” Kate said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Poor Penelope! Still weaving …”

“And shall your cousin’s prayers be answered?” the priest asked.

They were following Doc’s lead now, pretending Kate wasn’t there.

“After the war, the Lord God in his infinite wisdom,” Doc said with sudden hot sarcasm, “saw fit to take my mother—who was as fine an example of Georgia womanhood as ever walked this earth—while electin’ to leave that vile, murderous Yankee barbarian William Tecumseh Sherman alive and—”

As often happened when Doc’s blood got up, he started to cough, and this time it was pretty bad.

“You see? I told you!” Kate said, sounding satisfied. “You’re killing yourself, damn you!”

Father von Angensperg didn’t seem to mind profanity or cursing, but he was beginning to realize that Doc was a lunger. Concerned, the priest started to say something. Morgan caught his eye and shook his head, for in Morg’s opinion, the best policy was to wait things out and let Doc finish whatever he was saying, after he got his breath. Eddie, by contrast, usually tried to fill in.

“Vile, murderous Yankee barbarian …” the Irishman recited dreamily. “Miserable shanty bog rat … Ignorant goddam Carolina cracker … I collect them,” he told the priest brightly. “Georgia poetry, that is! An artist with an insult, our Doc.”

“—alive and well,” Doc repeated with hoarse insistence, still holding a handkerchief over his mouth, “a state that despicable—”

“Goddam,” Eddie supplied joyfully.

“Yankee—”

“Sonofabitch!” Eddie cried with a happy grin.

“—continues to enjoy to this very day.” Doc drained the bourbon in his shot glass and cleared his throat before finishing. “The Almighty and I have scarcely been on speakin’ terms since the sixteenth of September 1866.”

Nora delivered the peaches just then and Doc thanked her prettily, his voice genteel once more. “I must say,” he told the priest, “that the opportunity to listen to Latin regularly constitutes Catholicism’s most considerable temptation. Johnnie felt the same way.”

“He never found his way to the Faith,” von Angensperg said, but the priest looked a little dazed, and Morgan sympathized. He’d never known anybody to get as mad as Doc did, as quick as he did, but he got over it fast, too. That could be just as startling if you weren’t used to it.

“Nevertheless,” Doc was saying, “Johnnie told me that he was always pleased to attend the Mass. He said that the prayer book had Latin on the left and English on the right, and he enjoyed followin’ the ceremony in both languages. I recall one day when he asked if I knew offhand what turb meant. ‘Has to be Latin,’ he said. He was tryin’ to work out a derivation, you see: perturb, disturb, turbulence, turbid.”

“Turbare,” von Angensperg said. “To stir.”

“Yes, indeed, sir! And when I told him that, you’d have thought he’d struck gold. That boy had a mile-wide smile. Did my heart good to see it. Do you happen to know, sir, who taught Johnnie to deal faro?”

“Pharaoh?” The priest blinked, trying to follow. “From Exodus, do you mean?”

“I’ll be damned,” Doc said. “Never thought of that! Could well be the origin of the name … No, sir, faro is a game of chance, a variation on a slave game called skinnin’. I learned from a freed slave myself, after the war, and I wondered who had taught Johnnie to play.”

“Johnnie was gambling? I thought he worked for the barber.”

“He did that as well,” said Doc, “and helped Bob Wright with his accounts, too, I understand. Johnnie was a hardworkin’ young man, sir, but he was also a mechanic of the first water.”

“A mechanic?”

“Sleight of hand, clipped edges, cold-decking,” Morg explained.

When the priest looked blank, Doc said, “Let me put it this way: Johnnie was dealin’ faro, but the way he played? It wasn’t gamblin’.”

“I won’t believe that,” von Angensperg said, offended now. “Johnnie was an honest boy.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, he was, fundamentally,” Doc agreed. “But a dealer generally gets a percentage of the house, so there is every temptation to cheat, and a thousand ways to do it. John Horse Sanders knew more of them than I do, and that is no small statement.”

Doc raised his handkerchief again and turned away. He coughed hard—deliberately and only once. Everyone could see that it hurt him and they kept quiet while he sat still.

“A dealer needs three, four hundred dollars to bank a small-stakes faro table,” he continued a moment later. “I have asked around Dodge a bit, but nobody seems to know how Johnnie got his game started. Do you have any notion from whom he might have obtained that kind of money, sir?”

“I’m quite sure I have no idea,” von Angensperg said. “Certainly no one at St. Francis had such a sum, and we would not have encouraged gambling.”

“Just as well, for whoever staked him may have placed him in the line of fire, so to speak. Dealin’ faro is a dangerous occupation. I myself have learned to avoid it when I can,” he added, tapping his cane lightly with an index finger. “I wonder if Johnnie mentioned any kin to you. I understand that he was born in Texas, though the family was livin’ in Wichita when he was orphaned. Perhaps there is someone who should be informed of the boy’s passin’.”

“We do not encourage our students to keep their ties to the past,” von Angensperg said, shifting in his chair when Doc’s mouth opened in astonishment. “It can only hold them back.”

“I do not believe that is the case, sir,” Doc said. “Johnnie was knowledgeable about his family and their traditions. He took considerable pride in them, as I do in my own, and as I expect you do in yours. Tell me, sir, how did his parents die?”

“I never asked.” Von Angensperg was starting to sound a little huffy. “Many of the children come to us after a tragedy,” the priest explained. “We try not to allow them to dwell on their sadness.”

“I can tell you, Doc,” Morg offered, glad to take some pressure off the priest. Doc could be pretty relentless when he was riding down an idea. “See, Johnnie’s mother was a squaw and his father was a buffalo soldier.”

“A Seminole Negro Indian Scout,” Doc said.

“The Indians call them buffalo soldiers, Father,” Eddie told him, “because Negro hair is curly, like a buffalo’s.”

“Anyways,” Morg said, “Charlie Sanders—that was Johnnie’s father—his regiment moved up from Texas to Fort Sill during the Indian wars. Charlie brought his family up north, too. They moved to Wichita after he mustered out. This was a few years back,” Morgan told the priest, “when the cattle drives all went to the Wichita railhead. And you’ve seen what these cow towns are like! Wichita was almost as bad as Dodge, in its day. Charlie was working as a hod carrier in the city and when he got home one night, he found a couple of drovers interfering with his wife. Beat the tar out of ’em.”

“I expect the Texans came back with their friends,” Doc said. “To even the score?”

“Murdered Charlie and his wife, both,” Morgan said.

“Don’t never bow down …” Doc said, eyes closing. “Charles Sanders had more courage than wisdom. It is a trait I fear he passed on to his son.”

“I blame myself,” von Angensperg confessed. Everyone looked at him. “I was too lenient with Johnnie. He argued often with Brother Sheehan, and I interceded, but I was wrong to do so …” He looked away.

“Sheehan. Now, there’s a name I know,” Doc said, narrow-eyed. “Tried to thrash the devil out of Johnnie a couple of times, I was told. Any truth in that?”

“Johnnie, Johnnie, Johnnie!” Kate muttered.

“Yes, and I see the reason for it now!” the priest told Doc. “There are many men in this country who would kill an Indian or a Negro who is disrespectful, or who is simply better than they—”

“Who is Johnnie Sanders to you?” Kate demanded suddenly. “Why do all of you care so much about some nappy-haired—”

“Kate!” Doc was working on the tea again, staring at her over the rim of the cup. “Say another word,” he warned softly, “and you will regret it.”

“These are excellent,” von Angensperg said of the peaches.

He’s learning, Morgan thought. And he was sobering up a little, too.

“They are canned,” Doc pointed out apologetically, “but they are a taste of home, and a comfort to me.”

“Ah! Georgia peaches—of course!” the priest said, his tone changing slightly. “You are a most gracious host, but I must confess, Dr. Holliday, that I am somewhat surprised by your kind regard for a boy like Johnnie, and by your keen interest in his life.”

Doc’s brows rose slightly. “And why should that be, sir?”

“Well, you are a Southerner, and … of a certain class.”

“Why, Father von Angensperg,” Doc said, “whatever do you mean?”

Morgan shifted uneasily. Doc’s voice always took on a peculiar musical quality when he was about to go off on someone. “Come on, Doc. Don’t take it like that. He didn’t mean—”

“The hell he didn’t,” Doc snapped, not even glancing Morgan’s way. His eyes remained steadily on the priest’s. “Twenty dollars says Father von Angensperg has read Mrs. Stowe’s little book and now he knows all … about … Southerners. Any takers?”

“Ah, Father,” Eddie cautioned happily, “you’re in grave danger of learning a lesson, so you are!”

“I have offended you,” the priest said.

“Yes, sir, you have.”

“C’mon, Doc,” Morgan said, “let it go.”

“No, Morgan, I don’t believe I can do that,” Doc replied with that eerie musical malice. “If the good father and I are goin’ to be friends, this is a topic worth explorin’. I am curious to know what he means by ‘a boy like Johnnie.’ I am reasonably certain I understand ‘Southerner of a certain class.’ Father von Angensperg is callin’ me a bigot.”

The priest blinked. “Not at all—”

“I beg to differ, sir,” Doc said politely. “I believe you are callin’ me an idle, vicious, slave-ownin’, nigger-beatin’ bigot.”

Von Angensperg looked stunned. “I assure you: I never meant—I said no such thing!”

“Not in those words, but that is most certainly what you meant to imply, and I will thank you not to deny it.” Doc leaned forward suddenly, the anger open now. “I was thirteen years old when the war ended, sir. I myself never owned a slave. It is true that my father had seventeen hundred acres under cotton before the war. He owned slaves who worked his fields. It is also true that I was served by slaves in my childhood. I was born to that life, sir, as princes are born to theirs.”

“Let it go, Doc,” Morgan said again, but the priest shook his head. He seemed willing to hear Doc out, which was just as well, because Doc didn’t even pause.

“Of course, we are told in Scripture that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. Do you believe that, sir?” Doc asked. “Or perhaps there is somethin’ about my own behavior or my conversation that strikes you as bigoted?”

“No, of course not.”

“And yet you are surprised by my regard for John Horse Sanders. Earlier today, I took my noon meal with a Chinaman. Morgan here is a Republican. Why, at this very moment, there is an Irishman at my table!”

“Which is as low as any gentleman in Dodge is willing to go,” Eddie noted proudly.

“And I’m a whore,” Kate declared. She was really skunked now.

“Miss Kate’s marital status cannot be regularized,” Doc said in her defense, “which places all her associations beyond the pale, but I must point out that in many social circles, sir, Jesuits are considered the very worst that the Great Whore of Babylon has to offer in the way of papist idolaters. And yet: you, too, are my guest, sir. Where, then, do you suppose I might draw the line?”

Eddie was grinning his head off and even Kate seemed entertained, but Morgan felt bad for the poor damn priest, who only wanted to know something Morg himself had wondered about, because it was kind of strange how Doc was doing all this for a kid he’d only known a few weeks.

Doc’s voice was getting roupy again and he turned away, coughing hard into his handkerchief to clear some obstruction. “I admit,” he said a few moments later, “that I might not have an equal regard for other boys like John Horse Sanders. Then again, I have never met anyone remotely worthy of the category. In fact, I am inclined to argue that anyone who imagines that such categories exist should be considered a bigot himself.”

“Your points are taken, Dr. Holliday,” von Angensperg said.

“Then perhaps you would like to reconsider your words,” Doc pressed.

“All right, that’s enough, Doc,” Morgan said. He meant it, too, because John Holliday was—bar none—the most educated man Morgan Earp had ever met, and he could be the most courteous and kind, but there was just no quit in him when he got like this, and he was stupid sometimes about how long and how hard he pushed. Morgan himself had made a study of this sort of thing. You didn’t have to be chummy like Ed Masterson, and you didn’t have to bash heads with no warning, the way Virgil did. You could give an order and make it stick, like Wyatt did, but you had to leave a man some pride to walk away with. That’s what Doc just never seemed to see.

To Morgan’s surprise, the priest thought it over and replied, “Yes. I believe I would like to correct myself.” He straightened, looked directly at Doc, and declared, “There was only one John Horse Sanders. He was worthy of respect. I am pleased and grateful that he had yours, as he had mine.”

There was a considerable silence.

“Sunt lacrimae rerum,” Doc said finally, “for he is gone now, and that is a pity, and I offer you my hand on it, sir.”

“No victor, no vanquished!” Eddie cried.

Doc poured them all another round. “To Johnnie,” he said, “and to men who won’t bow down. Requiescant in pace, by God. They ever catch the killer, Morg?”

Morgan put his glass down and frowned. Doc could pivot like a stock horse sometimes.

“Johnnie’s parents,” Eddie prompted.

“Oh! No, but everybody knew who done it. Fella name of Ramsey rode through town right after, shooting his mouth off about how he pulled the trigger. My brother Wyatt, he wanted to ride after Ramsey, but the city marshal called him off.”

“Nobody wanted trouble with the cattlemen,” Doc guessed.

“Bad for business,” Eddie agreed with a shrug.

Morgan nodded. “Anyways, Wyatt was just a part-time deputy and he—”

Kate, who had drifted off into her own world, suddenly turned to von Angensperg. Her eyes were teary when she asked, “And what could Penelope offer Odysseus but illness and death if he returned to Ithaca?”

Baffled, Eddie and Morg looked at each other and then at the priest, who seemed about to say something, except Doc answered her instead.

“Calypso was offerin’ Odysseus immortality, darlin’. Penelope offered him endurin’ love. I myself just wanted some company.” Kate’s mouth opened, and she looked like she’d been slapped, but Doc turned to Morgan. “You were sayin’?”

“Yeah, well … Wyatt don’t hardly ever get mad but when he does, look out! He told Marshal Smith off, and they got into it some. The town ended up putting Wyatt on full-time, but Ramsey was long gone by then.”

“And that’s why your brother took Johnnie into his home, after the boy’s parents were killed?” von Angensperg asked.

“Wyatt took Johnnie in?” This was news to Morgan.

“Yes, that is what Johnnie said.”

“I’ll be damned! Wyatt never said anything about that part—”

“I don’t need you,” Kate told Doc, defiant now. “I never did!”

“Darlin’,” Doc said, weary of her at last, “the door is behind you and to the left.”

“Go to hell,” she muttered, getting unsteadily to her feet. She flounced off through the main room, staggering against a table, knocking over some bottles. “To hell with all of you!” she shouted. “I’m going to find myself a Texan! With some meat on his bones!”

In the alcove and in the big room, forty-some men watched Kate go, then turned uneasily toward Doc Holliday to see how he would take it. For a while there was no sound in the room but the thrum of moth wings as the big white insects thumped against glass lamp chimneys.

Eddie was the first to speak. “Hellion and a half, our Kate,” he said. “You’re a better man than I am, Doc.”

Doc seemed distant, his face expressionless. When he spoke again, it was with that quiet, careful thoughtfulness that Morgan Earp liked best in him.

“When I am sick,” he told them softly, “she fears that I will die, and she will end up on the street. When my health improves, she fears that I will go back to Georgia, and she knows I will not take her home to my family.” He glanced at the others. “Strikin’ a balance eludes me.”

Nobody said anything. Apparently unperturbed (unstirred, Morg thought), Doc finished his tea and set the cup down carefully before taking a shallow, careful breath. “Not Calypso,” he decided. “Athena. She is a warrior.”

“And she is fighting wounded,” Alexander said, pouring the next round.

Their eyes met. Doc tossed back the liquor and began to recite.

“Desire with loathin’ strangely mixed … On wild or hateful objects fixed … To be beloved is all I need … And whom I love, I love indeed.”

“Deny it, if you will, but there’s an Irishman revealed!” Eddie accused, thumping his emptied shot glass on the table. “Make him sad, get him drunk, and on to the poetry, it is!”

Doc unleashed a sudden charming, crooked smile. “Morgan!” he cried with theatrical good humor—loud enough for the others in the restaurant to hear. “What ever happened with that horse up in your sister-in-law’s bordello?”

Three Grand Gone

With Kate’s departure, the mood cleared the way prairie weather does after a short, violent summer storm. Doc called for more bourbon, and cigars all round, and the crowd began to gather.

“You sure?” Morgan asked, because Doc was tired hours ago.

“Hell, yes,” Doc insisted. “Why, the evenin’s hardly begun!”

“Well, all right, then,” Morg began, “you know how narrow Bessie’s second-floor hallway is—”

“I most certainly do not, sir,” Doc insisted amid howls of disbelief, “and I hope you will never again suggest such a thing in polite company.”

“Polite company?” Eddie asked innocently. “And what would that be, then?”

“Any gatherin’ without an Irishman,” Doc replied.

“What’s the difference between a Chinaman and an Irishman?” Eddie asked, shouting above the laughter. “Either one’ll sell you his granny, but the Chinaman won’t deliver!”

“Narrow,” Morg yelled, trying to take back the floor. “The hallways are narrow! Anyways, this dumb sonofabitch decides to ride up the stairs to visit his temporary best girl, right? And the horse is fine going up, but once he’s on the second floor, he can’t turn around. Now, James—that’s another one of my brothers, Father—James wants to shoot the animal, but Bessie—that’s James’s wife—she says it won’t be any easier getting a dead horse out of the building—”

“To Mrs. Earp, a levelheaded woman,” Doc said, raising his glass, and every man in the place joined him.

“—so me and John Stauber climb in one of the windows—”

“Spoiling some poor Texan’s fun,” Eddie noted mournfully.

“Right,” Morg said, “and we apologize for the interruption, and go on out into the hallway, and there we are—looking at this horse, who’s looking at us like he wants to say, ‘I hope you got a plan, because I’m fresh out.’ So we decide to take him into Dora’s room, down at the far end of the hall—”

“Christ, Morg,” Eddie cried, “you’re lucky Lou’s not here! ‘And how would yourself be knowing that was Dora’s room,’ she’d be asking you!”

“ ‘Lou,’ I’d swear, ‘I only know because Stauber told me,’ ” Morgan said, ignoring the hoots. “Lou’s a girl I’ve been seeing, Father. Anyways, Dora’s not in her room because she’s singing down at the Bird Cage—”

“And,” Alexander offered sagely, “it is easier to ask forgiveness than to obtain permission.”

There were cheers for this useful notion, and the priest inclined his head.

“—so we open up her room and lead the horse inside, figuring that we’d have enough play to head him around, but the stirrup gets hung up on the damn doorknob. So, now, I’m inside Dora’s room, and the horse is halfway through the door, and Stauber’s down on his knees trying to reach the girth and the horse gets nervous—”

Everyone moaned.

“Yeah, well, Stauber can take a bath, but the carpet in that hallway’ll never be the same,” Morgan told them. “So, me and Stauber get the saddle off, and we get the horse turned around, and we’re leading him back out into the hallway, and now he’s headed toward the stairs, but when we get there, the animal just will not budge. Stairs are fine going up, I guess, but he’s not having any part of going down. I’m hauling on this horse’s head, and Stauber’s pushing from behind because—hell, he already reeks, and I’ve been a deputy longer than he has. But it’s just no use, and—”

“Wait!” von Angensperg cried, to everyone’s surprise. “You found a mare in season?”

“Yes!” Morgan yelled, and there were shouts of laughter. “The horse caught the scent and damn near ran over me trying to get to her! How did you know?”

“I served in the imperial cavalry in my youth,” the priest told them, adding, “Dodge City is not the first town to be invaded by unruly young men on horseback.” He waited for the reaction to die down before noting with a sly grin, “And narrow hallways are not unknown in Europe.”

Eyes widening seraphically, Doc poured another shot into von Angensperg’s glass. “Do tell, sir! We are agog with anticipation.”

Alexander’s own stories came first. These were matched, then topped by a variety of other tales. The laughter was raucous and good-natured, the cigars were very fine indeed, and there was no bottom to the bottle. Dressed as he was in a soft cotton shirt, without the nudge of a starched Roman collar to remind him of who and what he was, Alexander relaxed into the general conviviality. For the most part, however, he found himself talking to John Holliday, whose accent became more familiar as the evening progressed, and whose opinions were as strong and undiluted as his bourbon.

Before long, their conversation made Alexander think of two starved men falling upon a banquet table laden with richer food than either had tasted in years. The Chinese labor question, Dodge City politics, Mr. Darwin’s proposal. (“The notion explains a great deal of natural history,” in Doc’s opinion, “but considerin’ the presidency from George Washington to Rutherford B. Hayes, I believe we can dismiss the case for evolutionary progress.”) The electrical principles underlying telephony. Strategy in poker. The Schliemann excavation of Troy, and Lucian’s satires, which they both loved, especially The True History. Homer’s “Wrath” reminded Doc of Saint John’s “Logos,” and he asked if Alexander thought the beginning of that Gospel reflected the philosophy of Heraclitus. “Quite likely” was Alex’s answer, which led them on to biblical criticism and the work of Hermann Reimarus, and somehow that wandered into a discussion of German versus Italian opera.

They only noticed that the room had emptied out when the manager came to the table, asking if he could lock up. There was a short, whispered discussion. Doc counted out what must have been over three thousand dollars and made one last purchase of cigars and a final fifth of bourbon. Cane in one hand, bottle in the other, Doc led them around to the north side of the building, away from Front Street’s all-night carouse. There they sat on kegs and packing crates, smoking and drinking under the stars, and talking about home.

By that time, only four men were left: Doc himself, Morgan Earp, Eddie Foy, and the former Prince Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg, who was just plain Alex by that time, drunker than he’d been in fifteen years and long past noticing how late it was or how soon he would be saying Mass.

Many hours later—when the funeral was over and Johnnie had been buried—on the train back to Wichita, Alexander should have been preparing himself to confess gluttony and public intoxication and a failed fast. Instead he found himself trying to remember everything he’d said to Doc in the deep dark before dawn when, for the first time since leaving Europe, Alexander had felt—suddenly and fully—how homesick he was, how much he missed his mother tongue, and his brothers and sisters and friends, and skiing and parties, and simply having a good time. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d become rather maudlin at one point, and suspected that Doc had saved him from making an ass of himself.

“Yes … Kin and conversation,” Doc had agreed before deflecting the talk delicately. “And good music—played well,” he emphasized, for somewhere out on Front Street, a Strauss waltz was being hammered approximento. “At my last count, there are nineteen saloons in this town. Seven have pianos, not a single one of which is in tune. I cannot bear to put my hands on any of them.”

“You are a pianist, then?” Alex asked.

“Thalberg was a pianist, sir, but I do love to play.”

“Thalberg! So you have been to Europe?”

“Regrettably: no. The maestro toured the South when I was a boy.”

“I heard Liszt in Paris,” Alex said, like a man laying aces on the table.

“They say he changed pianos the way another man might change horses,” Doc said, “to keep from wearin’ the beasts out.”

“And that he played so intensely the very keys would bleed! I can testify that he drove women to frenzy. A young lady sitting next to me wept so, she fainted during a sonata. I preferred Chopin’s performance, frankly—”

“You heard Chopin?” Doc fell back against the clapboards. “I am prostrate with envy, sir!”

“He played at a private salon one night. I was young, but the evening was unforgettable … He played the Polonaise in A-flat, and some truly magical variations on a Bellini aria. Such delicacy! His pianissimo was like angel’s breath! A selection of mazurkas—those were remarkable, as well, his left hand always in strict tempo, but the right rubato: ahead of the beat, behind it. And when we thought he had nothing left, an encore! The G-flat Waltz. It was such a demanding program, and the poor man was half dead from consumption, but somehow he got through the whole—” Alex stopped. “Forgive me. That was thoughtless.”

“Yes,” Doc said coolly, but he waved the moment off. “Apart from Miss Kate, you are the first person I have spoken to since leaving Georgia with the slightest notion of who Chopin was. We, sir, are an atoll of culture on this godforsaken ocean of grass,” he said, lifting a hand toward the vast darkness around them. “Kate loves the mountains, as you do, but my own eyes are schooled to a gentler landscape. Rollin’ hills. Curvin’ roads. No vista entirely untouched by human hands …” Doc looked at Eddie, who’d been strangely quiet all this time. “How do you stand this wilderness, after Chicago?”

“It’s a job, then, isn’t it, and that’s more than I could find at home,” Eddie snapped, his brogue deepening. “It’s a bed to sleep in and a roof over me head when the show is over, and don’t that beat a traveling carnival all hollow, now? And I don’t mind the wilderness one wee bit. It’s being trapped in a burning city gives me the cold creeps, and if any of youse so much as breathes the name O’Leary, I’ll have your guts,” he promised. “Changed my name from Fitzgerald to get out from under the curse—they blamed all us micks for that damn cow. I tell you true, Father: when I shuffle off the mortal coil, I’m going straight to heaven, for I’ve served me time in hell. Run for miles, I did, me sister’s small boy in me arms, and there was us standing in Lake Michigan, watching the whole city go up, not knowing if there was anyone left alive at home. There’s nothing worse than burning, that’s the lesson I learned from Chicago! At least in Dodge, there’s a fighting chance you could get away from a fire—”

Silence fell. They were all thinking the same thing. Finally Eddie asked the question that had gnawed at him since he’d smelled Johnnie’s charred remains as the mortician’s men carried the body out of the ruins.

“Doc, do you think he was dead, then? Before he burned, I mean.”

“No,” Doc said, “but I believe he was unconscious. He would not have felt the flames.”

“Christ,” Eddie said, holding his hand out for the bottle, and speaking for them all. “That’s a mercy, then.”

They listened to the pianos, and shouts, and drunken laughter, to the wind in the grass and to the crickets. A few yards away, a vixen’s eyes caught a bit of light from a saloon, then darkened again as she turned her head; presently, they heard the whir of wings—a prairie chicken, flushed by the fox and caught to feed her kits.

“And you, Morgan? Where is home for the Earps?” Alex asked.

“You know, I been sitting here wondering about that,” Morg said. “I don’t guess my family stayed anywheres long enough to call it home. Illinois. Iowa. Missouri. California. Pa always had some reason for moving on. New opportunities, he told us, but there were debts … And trouble with neighbors, usually. It was hard on my mother. And my two sisters hated losing their friends over and over, but there was six of us boys, and we didn’t need anybody else. We’re all grown now, even Warren, but we keep moving. Utah, Nevada. The Dakotas. Colorado. Kansas. Arizona. I guess wherever my brothers are, that’s home. When we’re scattered, like now? I guess missing them is like being homesick for you and Doc.”

“The early Church,” Alex said. “Wherever two or more of you are gathered …”

“Yeah, well, Earps seem to need at least three or four brothers to feel right. It’s just me and James here in Dodge, and that’s still pretty lonesome … I wish Wyatt would get back. I keep hoping he’ll show up for the funeral, but we’re running out of time.”

Roman Venus was climbing. Greek Eos—saffron-frocked and rosy-fingered—had begun to show herself over the gray-green Kansas prairie. Alex stood and stretched and groaned.

“I think I must turn in, gentlemen, and get a few hours’ sleep before Mass. Dr. Holliday, this has been an extraordinary experience. Nothing in Vienna could compare! Thank you again for all you’ve done.”

Doc was slumped over, elbows on his knees. Head cocked to look up at the priest, he raised a hand to accept the one Alex offered. “My pleasure, sir. Next time: happier circumstances, I hope.”

Alex shuffled off, and Morgan told Doc, “You should be in bed, too,” but the dentist remained where he was.

Eddie asked, “Would you like me to go find out where herself has fetched up, then?”

“Check our room. If she’s not there, I don’t need to know more.”

“Sure, Doc,” Eddie said, exchanging a look with Morgan before he left.

“I can ask Deacon Cox if he’s got a different room for you,” Morg offered.

Doc’s wheezy laugh ended with a cough. “Can’t afford it, son. Spent my last two dollars on those Cuban cigars,” he said with a lopsided grin.

So much for the fifteen grand. Morgan made a note to divide anything Bat Masterson said by five. “You can bunk with me. If you need to.”

“I ’preciate the offer, Morg, but Kate usually stays at Bessie’s.”

“Doc, I probably shouldn’t ask this—”

“Then don’t.”

“It’s not about Kate.”

Doc didn’t say anything, but he didn’t tell Morg to shut up, either.

“I just wondered—and it’s not ’cause you’re Southern or anything—I just wondered about why you did all this tonight. I mean, I don’t know how much a piano costs, but it seems like you could’ve bought a nice one with what you spent on the wake. I liked Johnnie, too, but you seem to care so much …”

Sudden, slanting light broke the horizon and made the dew glitter. Doc sat silently for a time, watching the short grass ripple in the breeze, listening to the red-winged blackbirds down by the slough, and to the meadowlarks and the quail.

Morg was about to apologize for asking when Doc spoke at last.

“Oh, it was selfishness, I expect.”

Which didn’t make any sense at all until Doc finished.

“That poor boy died all alone,” he said softly. “He has no kin to bury or remember him … So I took him for my own.”

Eddie came back. The room was empty. It was safe to go to bed. Half-amused by the situation, Doc let Morgan haul him to his feet. Anyone watching would have thought he’d drunk himself bandy-legged.

“I fear I shall not be able to attend the funeral,” he told Morg and Eddie as they walked him back to the hotel. “I may have overplayed my hand.”

He refused to let them accompany him to his room, insisting that he was fine now, and demonstrating it by taking the staircase with a sudden show of energy. He had discovered a few years ago that if a thing could be accomplished quickly—between one breath and the next—it could be done with a brief but serviceable burst of strength, though there was a price to pay. The ache in his hip became a sharper pain and he was winded when he got to the second floor, but no matter. For a few moments, he looked and felt healthy and unimpaired.

In case Kate had returned with someone in the meantime, he knocked on their door. No one answered. He let himself in. The sun was climbing, and he pulled the curtains closed.

Sleeping was somewhat easier this time of day. Dodge roared in the darkness, but it was quiet in the early morning light. He thought, We live like bats in this burg, and wondered idly if the habit of being up all night had given Sheriff Masterson his nickname.

Undressing seemed almost more trouble than it was worth, but in that way lay degeneracy and ruin. Feeling pleased by his own resolve, he slipped out of his coat and by-God hung it up. Carefully removed the diamond stickpin that Uncle John had given him and returned it to the small velvet-lined box. Unknotted his cravat. Folded it neatly. Placed it on the chiffonier. His boots proved more of a challenge. He sat down, intending to take them off, but gave the project up and laid his head against the high-backed chair.

He was learning to doze while sitting up. Sometimes it was easier to breathe that way. The chair was upholstered and reasonably comfortable, but when he woke, he wouldn’t feel rested, and that would make him short-tempered. Still, when he was tired enough, it was possible to drop off for a few hours.

Soon he would have a better alternative. Last week, he’d fallen asleep while getting a shave. Upon awakening, it came to him that barbers and dentists had the same basic requirements for working on people’s heads. A reclining chair that could be raised to a comfortable level would reduce the muscular effort expended while leaning over during examinations, and he could nap in it between patients. That afternoon, he’d telegraphed an order to a supplier in St. Louis and asked Bob Wright to transfer the money.

Tom McCarty had been generous about sharing his clinic space, accepting no payment apart from occasional help with injuries of the face, teeth, or neck. Still, it would be good to have a proper office of his own again, and Deacon Cox had given him very reasonable terms on No. 24, Dodge House.

Jau Dong-Sing was surprisingly distressed by this good news when told of the new office. Mr. Jau had peculiar ideas about numbers. “Twenty-four no good! Bad luck for you,” the Chinaman had insisted with strenuous conviction. “Number nine much better.”

Too late now. The lease was signed.

In any case, he himself did not believe in lucky numbers. He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it’s fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what’s out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses. Observe your opponents. Be aware of the chemistry of the table, the nerves, the tells. At his best, he played poker with the same combination of informed artistry and complete concentration he had once brought to the keyboard, and yet …

There is always something else—something uncontrollable—at work in every hand. The most cold-blooded card counter knows that, though he might not name it luck.

Moera, the Greeks called Mother Fate, the ancient apportioner of lots. Her decisions were unalterable and made long before a mortal’s birth, rendering human striving valueless and vain. Fortuna was the Romans’ answer to that grim Grecian goddess. Not everything was settled before a babe drew breath, but Fortune ruled over half of life; her caprices could explain why a man might prosper one day and come to ruin the next, without a single change in his habits or his character. Providence, Christianity countered. Destiny is divinely dictated, but influenced as well by our decisions and our deeds. Providence, moreover, holds out the promise that, one day, a just God’s plan will be made known to his puzzled people.

John Henry Holliday believed in none of them.

He did not imagine that Moera had decreed before his birth that he would die as soon and as wretchedly as his young mother had. He could not accept that Fortuna might smile on him for half of his short life, only to watch pitilessly while his lungs gave out, leaving him to suffocate slowly. He refused to bow before a Providence determined to deliver him to an unmarked pauper’s grave in Colorado, fifteen hundred miles from the home he would never see again.

John Henry Holliday believed in science, in rationality, and in free will. He believed in study, in the methodical acquisition and accumulation of useful skills. He believed that he could homestead his future with planning and preparation: sending scouts ahead and settling it with pioneering effort. Above all, he believed in practice, which increased predictability and reduced the element of chance in any situation.

The very word made him feel calm. Piano practice. Dental practice. Pistol practice, poker practice. Practice was power. Practice was authority over his own destiny.

Luck? That was what fools called ignorance and laziness and despair when they gave themselves up to the turn of a card, and lost, and lost, and lost …

An hour later, he woke to Kate’s fingers on his buttons, to her lips, to her voice, to her breath, whiskey sweet, smoke sour.

“Viens au lit,” she was saying. “Viens t’allonger près de moi, mon amour.”

“Darlin’, please,” he mumbled. “I am beat flat. I can’t—”

“You don’t have to do nothing, Doc. I’ll do it all,” she said. “You’ll sleep good.”

“I was sleepin’.” His voice sounded fretful and peevish, even to himself, and he tried to spunk up. “You have to let me rest, Kate.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Doc. I was drunk last night, that’s all. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make it right.”

The vulgarity. The exaggerated, theatrical, lascivious carnality. All that was gone. In its place was this fearful, earnest, pathetic need to please. He fought to open his eyes, too tired to lift a hand and stroke her hair.

“Let me make it up to you,” she said. “You’ll get some rest, you’ll feel better.”

He was consumptive and exhausted; he was male and twenty-six. And Kate, too, was practiced in her trade.

“See how good that is?” she whispered, lifting her skirts now, straddling him, lowering herself. “That’s good, isn’t it, Doc?”

She watched his face as she worked, saw the growing tension, the rigidity. She slowed her rhythm, deepening her hold, smiling when she saw release, triumphant when his breathing caught, and stopped, and then went on, without any coughing at all.

“That’s my man,” she said softly. “That’s my loving man …”

The doctors said this was bad for him, but she knew that they were wrong. They all said something different. He should rest. He should exercise. He should go to the mountains. He should stay on the plains. Get plenty of fresh air. No, stay inside. They said the smoking was bad for him, the drinking, the all-night games, but he could make so much money at the tables, and it was so easy for him! It was this day work that was killing him, anybody could see that. And it didn’t pay!

Doctors don’t know nothing, she told herself. They said he’d be dead by now, but I’m good for him. He don’t cough with me.

She waited until he slipped from her, then lifted herself and backed away. Leaving him asleep in the chair, she lay down on their bed and watched his thin chest rise and fall, rise and fall, regular and even.

Well, a little shallow, a little labored …

Don’t mean nothing, she told herself, but he looked so pale in the sunlight, his skin as colorless as his ash-blond hair.

“Ne meurs pas, mon amour. Non morais,” she whispered in the language of love, and the language of prayer. “Don’t die on me, Doc,” she whispered, over and over, watching him until her own eyelids drooped and closed. “Don’t die on me. Don’t die …”

When Wyatt Earp rode across the Arkansas River toll bridge into Dodge the morning after Johnnie’s funeral, it was not quite noon and the city was still pretty much asleep. Apart from a few hungover cowpunchers who’d drawn the short straw and had to work the stockyards, the only things moving were cottonwood fluff, dust, and Dog Kelley, who was crossing Front Street with half a dozen skinny greyhounds.

Dog knew what was coming, and waited. “Wyatt,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“You still mayor?” Wyatt asked.

“Reelected in April,” Dog confirmed.

“Still looking for a chief deputy?”

“Job’s open yet.”

“If you’d hired me in the first place,” Wyatt said, “Ed Masterson would still be alive.”

Dog squinted up toward a clouding sky, scratching at the three-day beard on his stretched-out neck. “Wyatt,” he said peaceably, “you’re probably right about that.”

Wyatt Earp was the most fearless man Dog Kelley had ever met, and Dog had known a fair number of truly brave men in his time, for he had ridden under the Stars and Bars in the late war, and courage was commonplace among his comrades. That said, Wyatt Earp was not quite the most arrogant bastard Dog had ever met, for Sergeant James H. Kelley had also served in the U.S. Cavalry after the war, scouting for General George Armstrong Custer. It was, in fact, a direct result of Custer’s unwavering, unflappable belief that he was something awful damn special in the eyes of God and man that Dog Kelley had inherited his former commander’s pack of coursers and wolfhounds, acquiring a nickname into the bargain.

No doubt about it: George Custer took first prize for arrogance. But give the devil his due, Dog thought, watching Wyatt ride on. That prissy goddam sonofabitch comes in a real close second.

Just then Bob Wright appeared outside his store with a broom. “So,” Bob said to Dog, sweeping up the boardwalk, “Wyatt’s back. That’s good news for the town.”

“Could be,” said Dog.

“Say, Dog! You suppose the town oughta hire Wyatt again?” Bob asked.

Like he hadn’t already decided.

“Maybe so,” said Dog.

“Let’s talk about that at the city council meeting,” Bob said.

Like it was a suggestion.

“Whatever you say, Bob,” Dog replied, but his eyes were on Wyatt, who was halfway down Front Street now.

I’ll take honest arrogance over fake humility any day, Dog thought.

“See you at council,” he said.

Bat Masterson was sitting in front of the Green Front. He was dressed like he was going to a wedding except for a black mourning band around his arm for his brother. Wyatt drew up.

“Hey, Wyatt,” Bat called. “You finally shoot that two-dollar horse?”

“This’s him. You spend all your money on clothes, or just most of it?”

“Appearances count, my friend. Appearances count.”

“I was sorry to hear about Ed. What happened?”

“Drunk shot him.”

“Hell. You get the drunk?”

Bat looked like he was deciding something. Then he said, “Damn right I did.”

“Good.” Wyatt glanced over his shoulder at the Elephant Barn. “When’d that happen?”

“Monday night,” Bat told him, and looked away.

It wasn’t until he found Morgan that Wyatt learned the rest.

The first time a man was killed in Dodge, the corpse just lay around all day until, toward evening, somebody decided to dig a hole in a scrubby little hill northwest of Front Street. The deceased was buried as he’d died: with his boots on and without the dignity of a coffin.

Boot Hill received sixty-two more bodies in the next three years—mostly killings, though smallpox took a few one season. At that rate, it wasn’t long before Dodge outgrew its makeshift cemetery. On top of the crowding, there was the additional problem of where to bury townspeople whose friends and families didn’t want to plant their dearly departed next to some overconfident fool who’d picked a fight with the wrong stranger in a bar. So Bob Wright opened the Prairie Grove Cemetery down by the Union Church. It was prettier than Boot Hill, but you had to pay to get in.

Leave it to Bob, everybody said. Damn if he didn’t find a way to make money off you, even after you was dead.

“It was a real good funeral, Wyatt,” Morgan told him. “Almost as handsome as the one for Ed Masterson. That priest—Alex? He came in from Wichita. The service was real pretty.” Wyatt was staring at the plank with Johnnie’s name and dates. “Wasn’t sure about his birthday … Did I get it right?”

“Near enough, I guess.”

“Alex said you took Johnnie in. After his parents.”

“Owed him that much. Ramsey got off clean.” Wyatt ran a hand over his face. “I shoulda known better’n to let him stay in Dodge. He was doing good in school. I shoulda taken him straight back to St. Francis.”

“Wyatt, I been wondering … Why’d you pick a Catholic school for Johnnie?”

“White school wouldn’t have him.” Wyatt frowned and looked away. “I don’t guess there was any money in his room.”

“Nope. Just his clothes and some books.”

A wilted bouquet was lying on the mound. Wildflowers, purple and yellow and pink, but tied with a thin black ribbon. “Who left those flowers?” Wyatt asked.

Morgan shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

Wyatt bent over and picked up a playing card half-shoved into the dirt near the bouquet. Ace of hearts. There were some words written on it. “Mix forever with the … elements, brother to—What’s that word?”

“Insensible.”

“Brother to insensible rock. Make any sense to you?”

“Sounds like some kinda poetry,” Morgan said. “Must have been Doc left that. He couldn’t come to the funeral, but he threw a hell of a wake for Johnnie.”

Wyatt looked surprised. “Why would McCarty do that?”

“Not Doc McCarty. Town’s got a dentist now. John Holliday. He says he met you down by Fort Griffin.”

“Skinny? From Georgia?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Bat says Doc’s real dangerous, but—”

“Bat’s full of it. Always has been. But there’s talk about Holliday.”

“No trouble here. Couple of fights with his woman. Kate’s registered as his wife at Dodge House, but about half the time she’s over at James and Bessie’s.”

“Working?”

Morgan smirked. “I don’t think she’s there for the uplifting conversation.”

“His idea?”

“Doc puts up with it. More like Kate pimps him, the way she finds poker games for him.”

Wyatt looked at the card in his hand once more before pushing it back into the dirt where he’d found it.

With anyone else, Morgan would have known what to do next. Take him to a bar or a brothel, or both. Get him drunk, get him laid. Wyatt might have been a happier man, and better liked, if he developed a taste for the commoner vices, but he didn’t drink and he didn’t fornicate. Didn’t even curse. Worst word he ever used was hell.

“Jake Collar opened up a soda fountain in his place this spring,” Morgan told him. “How ’bout I buy you an ice cream?”

They walked back into town. It was getting hot. A gang of drovers came rumbling over the bridge, hollering and waving their hats and shooting into the air. One of them rode up onto the boardwalk and straight into the Long Branch.

Wyatt watched, indifferent. Wasn’t his job to deal with them, not yet.

He looked down the street toward where the old Elephant Barn had stood. The debris had been shoved off to one side. New walls were already framed up. A crew boss was yelling orders as two dozen men hoisted a truss into place. Wyatt would pasture Dick out by Anderson’s for now, but he could move the horse back into Ham’s by next week, looked like.

For a long time, he said nothing at all but he was thinking hard, grateful that Morgan left him alone as he worked out what was bothering him.

What business did Johnnie have in the barn that night? he wondered. Why would he go there at all? Johnnie Sanders didn’t have a horse.

Stacking the Deck

One by one, the Dodge City fathers assembled around the poker table on the second floor of Wright’s General Outfitting. Cigar smoke climbed the walls, pooling in the ceiling, filling the room like a fog.

“Anybody know where Dog’s at?” Bob Wright asked, half an hour into the game. “I’ll raise, I guess.”

“Start without him,” Deacon Cox suggested. “Call.”

“Can’t do that, Deacon. Dog’s the mayor.”

Chalkie Beeson folded. “Why ain’t you mayor, Bob?”

“I’m awful busy these days, what with being representative and going to Topeka all the time. Anyways, it was Dog’s turn. Deacon?”

“Pair of jacks.”

“Well, all I got’s a pair, too, but they’re ladies,” Bob said, sounding apologetic.

“Damn,” said Deacon. “Your deal, Chalk.”

Several hundred dollars circulated. A great deal of detail about Chalkie Beeson’s new brass band was conveyed and ignored. A bottle’s contents disappeared. Finally the click of nails and the ropy thump of a long, nearly hairless tail announced the arrival of a bony harlequin hound hauling its narrow carcass up the stairs, a few steps ahead of Dog Kelley.

“ ’Bout time, Dog,” Bob said quietly.

“That is the ugliest animal I ever seen,” Chalkie said, just like he did every damn time the council met. “He ain’t got enough room in that skull for a prairie dog’s brains.”

“Don’t have to be smart to be fast,” Dog said, sitting. “Told you not to bet against him Sunday. What’s the ante?”

“Sawbuck,” Deacon told him. “Bob? Let’s get started.”

“Well, all right, then,” Bob said. “I call to order the Dodge City Council meeting of June fourth, 1878, at”—Bob pulled out his pocket watch—“at nine forty-five P.M. Let’s begin with a prayer. Mayor Kelley?”

Placing his palms together just like his dear old mother taught him, James H. Kelley aimed his eyes heavenward. “May the saints preserve us, the Blessed Mother protect us, and the Lord Jesus Christ save us from honest men and Methodists.”

“Amen to that,” said Chalkie. “You don’t drink? Fine, but don’t tell the rest of us to go dry. Deacon! Ante up.”

Deacon Cox tossed ten dollars into the pot.

“And may God damn George Hoover to eternal hellfire while he’s at it,” Chalkie added. “Tell me that jackass ain’t putting together a Reform ticket to run against us again.”

“The man is an opportunist,” Deacon said.

“Know what an opportunist tells you?” Dog asked, looking straight at Bob. “Tells you who’s winnin’.”

Takes one to know one, Bob thought.

“Raise you twenty,” Dog said.

Bob folded. “You fellas see who’s back in town?” he asked. “Wyatt.”

There were groans around the table.

“He wants chief deputy,” Dog told them, and the groans got louder.

“Newspaper’s on his side, too.” Bob reached down for a copy of the Dodge City Times lying on the floor by his chair. “Says here, Mr. Wyatt Earp, who served with credit on the police force last summer, arrived in this city from Texas on Saturday last. We hope he will accept a position on the force once more.”

“That teetotaling killjoy,” Chalkie muttered, tossing twenty into the pot. “Jesus. Business fell off something terrible when he was cracking heads last year. Call.”

“That was mostly his brother Virgil,” Dog pointed out.

“James and Morg’re good people, though,” said Deacon, folding.

Chalkie had two pair, kings and tens. “What’ve you got, Dog?”

“Deuces,” Dog said, but there were three of them.

“Damn,” Chalk said. “Deuces! Is that all?”

“Good enough to beat you,” Dog told him.

“I’ll give odds George Hoover gets Wyatt to run against Bat Masterson on the Reform slate,” Chalkie said. “Any takers?”

“No percentage in a sure thing,” Dog said, scooping up the pot.

Bob Wright could have argued that point with Dog, for he had grown wealthy dealing in a sure thing. The men at this table represented half a million dollars in gambling, prostitution, and liquor, but Bob could match them—on groceries alone. It was only a month into the season and Bob had already cleared more than $12,000. Drovers ate on their way north. They ate while their herds grazed and fattened on the grassland south of Dodge. They continued to eat until the cattle were sold and loaded onto the trains to be shipped east. Occasionally, they even made time to eat while they were in the midst of drinking, whoring, and playing cards. There was money to be made, as well, supplying groceries to townspeople and to restaurants like the Iowa House and Delmonico’s, where cattle buyers and railroad officials dined. And then there was the Fort Dodge trade, and the railroad crews. Even lawmen and prostitutes had to eat. Nobody seemed inclined to legislate against the selling of canned goods, coffee beans, and soda crackers, so Bob Wright didn’t stand to get hurt all that much if the Prohibitionists took hold in west Kansas, the way they had in the eastern part of the state.

It was that steady stream of morally unobjectionable cash that allowed Bob to admire the iron self-control George Hoover needed to keep a straight face while he talked about putting brothels and gambling dens and bars out of business.

Big George aimed to be on the right side of Front Street when civilization arrived, and that was smart. Any day now, the politics and the economy of Dodge City were going to shift from one side of the tracks to the other. And when they did, there’d be no going back. Saloon owners like Chalkie and Dog considered it the cost of doing business when they replaced window glass shot out by drunken cowboys, but there were families moving into town now and random gunfire scared them. Local grangers feared the Texas longhorns would infect their own stock with tick fever, and local farmers complained that the drovers cut their fences and let the herds trample cropland. Soon, settlers like that would hold more votes than those who served the cattle interests. When they did, old-timers like the men at this table—who’d built towns up from the bare ground—they’d be on the outs. It had happened in Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell. It was going to happen in Dodge, too, and soon.

Chalkie Beeson was right about half of it. George Hoover intended to run for mayor on a Reform ticket again, and this time he’d have the railroad men behind him. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had a lot invested in the roaring hell that was Dodge, but its owners had begun to back Reform demands to close the saloons and dance halls on Sundays at least. Eastern visitors were disturbed by the open drunkenness that offended George Hoover’s birdy little wife, Maggie, and by the same brazen prostitutes who annoyed Bob’s own wife, Alice.

Even Bob was starting to be concerned. He tried to keep his daughter inside when the drovers were in town, but Belle had a mind of her own. He couldn’t watch her round the clock or keep her locked up half the year. Short of posting an armed and gelded guard in the hallway, there wasn’t much more Bob could do, apart from getting her married off before she got out of hand.

Ignore it, deny it, or fight it, change was inevitable. “The smart man doesn’t just wait for the future,” Bob often told his children. “The smart man shapes it.” His whole life was proof of that.

He had come west alone in 1856, a boy possessed of nothing but a fierce desire to better his condition. He was still driving freight for the Mexico trade when he saw the commercial potential of a site where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Arkansas River just west of Fort Dodge. It was spang in the middle of the buffalo range, but it could have been a fine homestead, with a trading post, maybe. There was a spring-fed creek nearby. Geese and duck, three seasons out of four. Fish year round. Otter, beaver, and muskrat for the fur trade.

Bob kept his eye on that piece of land, especially after he got himself appointed sutler to Fort Dodge after the war. In those days, the fort was just about the only thing on the prairie between Kansas City and Denver. Soldiers had no recreational alternative to standing at the bar in Bob’s store, spending all $13 of their monthly pay on drink. Given the fort’s atmosphere of general boredom, simmering rancor, and the assiduous cultivation of grudges, manly moments of indignation or disagreement were liable to get physical. Bob insisted it was no extra trouble to deliver whiskey to combatants who’d been hurt badly enough to require a stay in the post hospital. Didn’t even charge extra for the service!

When the medical officer complained about drunken brawls breaking out among convalescents, the fort commandant prohibited liquor on the post. Bob considered this an infringement on his constitutional right to sell whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, to whoever had the cash to buy it, but there was no sense paying a lawyer to argue the point. The solution was to ride five miles west, stake out that creekside site on the bluffs above the Arkansas River, and invent Dodge City.

Bob knew what men saw when they looked at him. They saw a scrawny fella with a weak chin—the kind that was supposed to be a sure sign of mental inferiority and a feeble character. He hated mirrors, but Bob made himself study his reflection every morning when he shaved: to see what others saw and daily renew his determination to turn that disadvantage to his benefit. Let ’em believe what they like, he’d tell himself as he trimmed the luxuriant mustache that overhung his little jaw like a mountain crag.

All his life he’d made men pay for their slights and disregard. In Topeka, the legislative big bugs in the Kansas House of Representatives had taken one look at the storekeeper from Dodge and dismissed him as a good-natured, slightly simpleminded rube. And yet after two years in office, the Honorable Robert C. Wright had deftly blocked a boneheaded farmers’ relief bill, and then cornered the southern cattle trade for Dodge by getting the Texas tick quarantine line moved to the eastern boundary of Ford County.

Let ’em sneer, that was his motto. Stupid sonsabitches.

He was only thirty-eight, but he had already exceeded his boyhood dreams of wealth and power. In the six years since he drove his first stake into the ground, while the rest of the whole damn country was going bust, he had made himself quietly, securely rich, and groceries were the least of it.

Millions of dollars changed hands in Dodge each season and every penny of it passed through the massive safe Bob Wright had in his back room. Cattlemen, shippers, meat processors, the army, freight companies, the railway. They all had payrolls. They all needed transfers, checks, credit. They all paid fees and interest. No matter what it was or who was involved, Bob got a slice of every transaction. It all added up, and every single dollar was revenge for the snickers and jests of lesser men.

Of all the men Bob hated, and that was just about every man he knew, only Big George Hoover had ever taken Bob’s true measure. In a few months’ time, George might well take the mayoralty. Worse yet, he had applied for a license to open a real bank. There was only one conclusion: George Hoover was aiming to beat Bob Wright at his own game. And Bob would sooner sell his daughter to white slavers than let that happen.

So when the time was right, Bob brought the poker conversation back around to politics, and when it was his turn to deal again, he laid the cards aside. “Seems to me, Chalk, what you’re asking is, how do we cut the legs out from under Reform and make a buck doing it?” He looked around the table and saw no bright ideas waiting to be expressed. “How about if we don’t wait for the reformers to outlaw vice altogether? How about if we regulate it some, and tax it?” he suggested, like he was offering an idea that just occurred to him.

“No taxes!” Deacon cried.

“Well … All right, then, we could fine it.”

“Same thing,” Dog said, shrugging.

“But it’s not a tax,” Bob said innocently. “And then, see, we could use the fines to pay the men we hire to enforce the regulations. Wyatt Earp, for instance.”

“Oh, hell!” Chalkie cried. “Not that prig!”

“Well, see, I’ve been thinking—”

Deacon snorted. “Don’t hurt yourself, now, Bob.”

Bob joined in the laughter at his expense, but it was right then and there that he decided to open a hotel and put the Dodge House out of business.

“Well, see, Deacon, when I heard the Times might back Wyatt for Ford County sheriff, I thought, How about if the city appoints him chief deputy? It would make reformers who read the Times happy, and it would make Wyatt beholden to us, not George Hoover. What do you fellas think?”

“If Wyatt’s enforcing the laws,” Deacon admitted, “he’ll think he’s on the side of the Lord.”

“And he’ll be makin’ money off the fines,” Dog observed. “Which means you don’t have to pay him much.”

You, Bob thought. Interesting choice of words … It was time to shorten up on Dog Kelley’s leash.

Chalkie grinned. “The bastard’s bought—and he’s bought on the cheap. I like it!”

By the end of the poker game, the new ordinances had been discussed and written up. Public drunkenness was prohibited. Why allow cowboys to wander the street when they could be corralled inside, drinking and gambling and whoring? Disorderly conduct—understood to mean prostitutes soliciting during daylight hours—was also banned. Everybody knew where to find the girls anyway. No riding on the sidewalks passed without quibble. No horses above the ground floor of any building took longer.

“Don’t need that,” Dog argued. “Can’t get a horse to the second floor without ridin’ up on the sidewalk. That’s already illegal.”

“I don’t put anything past a drunken cowboy,” Deacon said darkly.

“Two ordinances means two fines,” Bob pointed out. “Better for the city treasury.”

“Maybe we should make it No livestock above the ground floor,” Deacon mused.

“That include dogs?” the mayor asked, leaning over to pat his greyhound’s bony haunch.

“Oh, for crissakes!” Chalkie cried. “Dogs ain’t livestock. Any fool knows that.”

There was already an ordinance against the discharge of firearms within town limits. Dog made a motion to start enforcing it. Chalkie suggested they make an exception for the Fourth of July and New Year’s. The resolution passed. Then Bob proposed that they outlaw the carrying of guns within town limits.

All hell broke loose.

“Well, see, George Hoover has people all stirred up about Ed Masterson,” Bob told them. “You fellas don’t mix with the locals much, but I hear a lot of talk down at the store. A city marshal, gunned down on Front Street! Where’s it going to end? What’s it going to take to get a little law and order around here? So I thought, well, how about if we put gun racks in our places, the way they did in Abilene, right? We write the law so’s the first place they go into, they have to hang the guns up when they get there and they get a claim number. And then when they’re ready to leave—”

“They gotta come back to our places to get their guns!” Chalkie said. “One more opportunity to sell ’em a drink ’fore they leave town!”

Bob smiled happily. “You’re right, Chalkie! I never thought of that!” Before last year …

“Texas boys won’t like Yankees disarmin’ them,” Dog pointed out.

“Aw, hell. You’re right, Dog,” Bob said, sounding abashed. “Why, just telling them to take off their guns’ll be dangerous. Arresting them if they refuse’ll be even worse. After what happened to Ed, we can’t ask the police to take chances like that. Forget the whole idea. Sorry I mentioned it.”

“Well, now, not so fast, Bob,” Deacon Cox said. He was dumber than shit, which was to say, almost dumber than Chalkie, but Deacon thought he was real sharp. “I believe that a fine, upstanding lawman like Wyatt Earp would do his duty, no matter how dangerous it is.”

“And if the sonofabitch gets killed like Ed did?” Chalkie asked. “We’ll give him a fine funeral. Fifty bucks says he’s dead before the Fourth!”

“I’ll take that,” Dog said comfortably. “I don’t like him, but Wyatt gets the job done.”

“How much should we pay him in the meantime?” Deacon asked.

Bob said, “Ed got a hundred a month, and three bucks for every arrest.”

Chalkie said, “Make it seventy-five salary, and two bucks for the arrests. The lower the fee, the more chances he’ll take.”

Dog shook his head. “Can’t see cuttin’ the pay like that.”

Bob let them argue a while before suggesting a vote on Wyatt’s salary. Dog lost. Deacon Cox made a motion that the meeting be adjourned. Chalk seconded. The men stood. Dog’s greyhound rolled off his bony back and rattled himself all over in preparation for departure.

“What do you think, Dog? Will that horse of yours win on the Fourth?” Chalkie asked as they made their way toward the stairs.

“Fastest quarter-miler in Ford County,” Dog said.

“I lost money on him last month,” Bob lied.

“Like hell you did,” Dog said over his shoulder, without even doing Bob the courtesy of glancing back. “You never lost a nickel in your life, Bob.”

“Hey, fellas?” Bob called, before they got down the stairs. “I heard something else at the store you might be interested in.”

This time, they turned to look up at him, and Bob Wright knew exactly what they saw. Good ole Bob. Simple, uncomplicated Bob.

“There’s probably no truth to it,” he said, “but people are saying maybe George Hoover paid somebody to start that fire in the Elephant Barn.”

“Why in hell would he do that?” Dog asked. There were a few more of his damn greyhounds circling at the bottom of the staircase, and Bob sighed inwardly.

“Well,” Bob said, “I guess maybe he couldn’t wait to get elected fair. Maybe he figured if Reform couldn’t close the businesses south of Front legally, he could burn ’em out. Maybe he figured the fire would spread on that side without touching his place on this side of the tracks.”

“Why start a fire in Ham Bell’s place?” Chalkie objected. “Ham’s Reform, too.”

“Throw off the suspicion,” Deacon said shrewdly, and Bob almost laughed.

They clomped down the staircase and patted Dog’s hounds, who whined and curled under their hands. Bob let them out, cleaned up some dog shit and a puddle of piss, locked the store doors, and went home satisfied by the evening’s accomplishments.

Nobody even noticed that he’d won close to $800.

“How was the game, Daddy?” Belle asked when Bob got home.

“Fine,” he said. “You didn’t have to wait up, honey.”

“Oh, but I wanted to, Daddy.”

The words were nice as pie, though there was something about the niceness that seemed false. Like father, like daughter, Bob thought. The notion did not please him.

“How much did you win, Daddy?”

“Oh, more than I lost, I reckon.”

She laughed, a shimmery musical sound. Like crystal: brilliant and brittle. It broke his heart, the chill between them now. Why, just last year, she was happy to be his little angel.

“Did you hear the news?” Belle asked. “Mr. Eberhardt killed himself.”

Bob stared.

“His son Wilfred—you remember Wilfred, Daddy. Eight years old? A little towheaded boy? So serious at his mother’s funeral, taking such good care of his sisters while his poor father sobbed! Wilfred heard the gunshot and found his father’s body in the barn. He walked the girls down to the Krauses’. Poor things, all that way, crying … Mr. Krause rode over and buried the body. Isn’t it sad, Daddy?” Belle asked, but she seemed almost … satisfied, somehow. “Mr. Eberhardt was about to go bust, I guess. He just didn’t have the gumption to go on, after his wife died. I suppose he never should have come out here. Kansas isn’t quite the agricultural Eden all those advertisements make it out to be.”

“You can’t blame me for that, Belle! It’s not my fault when—”

Her large, dark eyes widened. “Why, Daddy! I never said it was your fault,” she protested. “What would I blame you for?”

“Go to bed, Belle,” Bob said.

“Of course, Daddy. Whatever you say, Daddy. Good night, Daddy.”

She started up the stairs, then paused and turned, one delicate, perfect hand on the carved oak newel post he had shipped in from St. Louis, special.

“Mother and I said we’d take the Eberhardt children in,” Belle told him. “That’s all right with you, isn’t it, Daddy?”

She didn’t wait for his reply.

In the Dodge City Times of June 8, 1878, it was reported that the regular meeting of the city council had been held the prior Tuesday from seven to nine P.M., Mayor James H. Kelley presiding. Councilmen Colley, Anderson, Straeter, and Newton were listed as present. The minutes of the previous meeting were said to have been read. Some new city ordinances had been approved. A salary of $75 per month was allocated for the new deputy marshal, Wyatt B. Earp. There was no mention of Bob Wright, Chalkie Beeson, or Deacon Cox.

“Look, Wyatt,” Morgan said. “Your name’s in the paper. Spelled right, too.”

Morg handed the Times across their breakfast plates and pointed out the notice. The waitress brought the coffeepot over and refilled their cups. Morgan smiled at her. Wyatt glanced his thanks.

When he finished reading a while later, Wyatt said, “Charlie Bassett’s getting a hundred as undersheriff for the county, and he does even less than Bat. What’re you making, Morg?”

“Seventy-five. Same as you.”

“So why does Charlie get a hundred?”

“Politics, Wyatt.”

It was late afternoon. They were expecting Richard Rasch’s Flying-R crew to come across the river this evening. Wyatt wiped up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast and finished his coffee. “Well,” he said, “we’re all going to earn our pay tonight.”

“Sworn in yet?”

“I’ll stop by Dog’s on the way to the bridge.”

Wyatt was about to hand the newspaper back to Morg when he noticed the advertisement headlined DENTISTRY.

“J. H. Holliday very respectfully offers his—What’s that word?” Wyatt asked.

“Professional.”

“—professional services to the citizens of Dodge City and the … surrounding county—”

“Country,” Morg said quietly. “See? There’s a r.”

“Country,” Wyatt said. “Office at Room No. 24, Dodge House. Where—” He pointed to another word.

“Satisfaction.”

“Where satisfaction is not given, money will be re … refunded.” Wyatt looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Wyatt had a good memory and he wasn’t stupid by any stretch, but he had a hell of a time reading. The words never seemed to add up for him.

“It means,” Morg told him, “Doc knows he’s so damn good, you won’t mind paying. You should go see him,” Morgan urged then, because what had happened to Wyatt was Morg’s fault, really, and he still felt bad about it, all these years later. “Doc fixed a tooth for me a few weeks back. Didn’t feel a thing!”

“Gone is gone, Morg. Some things can’t be fixed.”

“Just ask, is all I’m saying.”

“Maybe.” Wyatt stood and dropped fifteen cents on the table. “Wake up John Stauber and Jack Brown and Chuck Trask,” he told Morg. “I want everybody on tonight. Bat and Charlie, too. Meet me at Dog’s in half an hour.”

It is human nature to notice differences. Mothers are only human, so it’s not unusual for one child among many to be a mother’s favorite. Commonly a woman will favor her youngest: the babe in arms who reminds her of the others when they were small and milky sweet and sleepy, before they walked and talked, and made noise and trouble. On the other hand, the oldest is often appreciated for being a sort of vice-parent, providing companionship and practical help in raising the younger children.

Wyatt and Morgan were middle kids, the fourth and fifth of six sons and not special like Martha and Adelia were, just for being girls. Ordinarily, those two boys would have been lost in the shuffle, unnoticed amid the growing tribe of Earps crammed into a series of small houses or an even smaller Conestoga wagon. And yet, Wyatt and Morg were especially dear to their mother.

Virginia Cooksey was the second of Nicholas Earp’s two wives and stepmother to Newton, his oldest boy. The family moved a lot and often settled far from any school, so Virginia herself taught all the kids to reckon and to read. Most of the children were competent, if impatient, at their lessons, but poor Wyatt struggled from the alphabet on up, though he was good at sums. Morgan—four years younger—took to books like a foal to running. That was what distinguished those two boys from the others in Virginia’s heart. Wyatt’s earnest, frowning effort. Morgan’s pure joy in reading.

Even when he was little and just listened, Morg loved the feel of a book in his hands, loved the pictures books drew inside his head, loved even the smell of paper, and leather binding, and glue. Lord, but it did Virginia’s heart good to watch that child with a book, his solid little body almost motionless while his mind traveled. And she admired the way Morgan helped Wyatt with his lessons instead of making fun of him, like the older boys did.

Morg was as unruly and active as any of his brothers, but from the start he had a sunnier and more tolerant nature. Morgan was able to get along with folks, able to imagine that somebody else might have a different notion of things without that person being wicked or wrong. Morg wasn’t slack or morally adrift, but he wasn’t so rigid and hard-minded as the family Virginia had married into.

Bless his heart, Virginia always thought, Morgan is a Cooksey.

Morgan loved stories, and Virginia herself saw no harm in reading them, but her husband was dead set against the practice. Nicholas approved of reading so long as it was confined to the Bible and the newspaper; stories he considered not just a waste of time but close to sinful, for they were make-believe and akin to lies. In Virginia’s opinion, stories were simple amusements at worst and windows into other lives at best. The way people talked in stories was a source of freshness and novelty after a stale day of listening to the boys’ squabbling, the girls’ complaints, and her husband’s stream of demands, instructions, and orders. Reading about people in stories was like having visitors.

The Earps seldom had real visitors, let alone guests. When people dropped by to see Nicholas on business, he never said, “Stay to supper,” though Virginia would have liked to have someone new at the table now and then. Nor did Nicholas ever call on others. Earps didn’t do such things. They were sufficient unto themselves. Of all the boys, only Morgan ever made friendships beyond the family. The rest were solitary in a crowd, reticent among strangers.

At home, the boys would josh and tease Virginia, and torment their sisters, and argue and scuffle amongst themselves—unless Nicholas was in the house. Their father’s presence was like the lid on a pot, hiding the simmer, bringing things to a sudden boil. Nicholas had a temper and there was no knowing what would set him off. An opinion ventured. Spilled food. Crying. His was often the only voice during meals. Sometimes Nicholas would read aloud from the newspaper, pointing out corruption and folly and wrongheadedness. More often he lectured the children on their own shortcomings and warned them about the consequences of their failings.

The girls kept their heads down. The boys became respectful and obedient to Virginia, but there was an edge to it. The older ones—Newton, James, and Virgil—made a show of their quick responses to Virginia’s quiet requests, doing willingly for her what they resented and resisted when Nicholas snapped commands like he was back in the army, ordering recruits around.

Wyatt was born after his father got back from the Mexican war and had never known him to be any different. Of all the boys, Wyatt was always the most conscientious. From the time he was small, he made it his business to stay ahead of his father’s orders. Asked about his chores, he’d look Nicholas in the eye and say, “Done it, sir.” Quizzed about the details of the job, Wyatt answered briefly. He was always polite enough, as far as Virginia could see, and he never shirked, but that just seemed to make Nicholas hot up more. All of the boys took their beatings, but Wyatt always caught it worst.

When Morg was little and things got tense, he would climb up into Virginia’s lap, too young yet to be directly involved in these hushed skirmishes but braced, like his mother, for the moment when his father would explode because Wyatt didn’t say “sir,” or because Wyatt hadn’t answered quick enough, so Nicholas could accuse him of thinking up a lie to tell.

“Say sorry!” Morgan would plead, speaking Virginia’s mind. “Say sorry and he’ll stop!” But Wyatt was pure Earp. Even when he was a boy, there was something stern and resolute about him, something that could absorb his father’s anger and draw strength from it, something that would not bend and could not be broken.

Wyatt wasn’t more than seven when he first took on the full fury of his father’s rage, and he did so not on his own behalf but on Morgan’s. Morg was only four, but he’d snuck off to the barn to look at a picture book instead of going out to pick berries like he’d been told. When Nicholas went out looking for him, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. That child was about to be thrashed.

Wyatt was on his father’s heels. Without thought or hesitation, he darted between his father and his little brother, and gave Nicholas back the language Wyatt himself had heard from earliest childhood.

“Leave him be, you worthless goddam pile of shit!”

It took Virginia and three of the boys to drag Nicholas off Wyatt. When they did, the child was bleeding from the mouth and almost senseless, but that afternoon Wyatt won for life what Nicholas had lost forever: the respect and ferocious loyalty of James, Virgil, and Morgan Earp.

It wasn’t the last time Nicholas beat the daylights out of one of the boys, but it was the first time he felt ashamed. He never admitted it was wrong for a grown man to do that to a little kid, but a couple of days later he came home with a book for Morgan.

For the next few weeks, all Nicholas got from any of the children was “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” He didn’t even get that much from Wyatt, whose battered, swollen, unmoving little face was a wordless rebuke.

Go ahead, those calm, steady, ancient young eyes said. Go ahead, old man. I can take your worst.

Dodge didn’t have a city hall. Generally, the saloon owned by whoever was mayor served that purpose, which made the Alhambra the seat of government for now. The Alhambra wasn’t as big as the Long Branch and the bar didn’t offer as many drinks as the Saratoga, which served everything from straight whiskey to milk punches, but Dog Kelley’s bartender was said to be the best damn billiard player in the by-God world, and a lot of men came there to test Jake Schaeffer’s claim to the title or to bet on the outcome of such competitions.

“Raise your right hand,” Dog told Wyatt. Frowning at the piece of paper on which the oath was printed, Dog said, “Repeat after me: I, Wyatt Earp, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Kansas …” Dog waited.

“Go on,” Wyatt said.

Dog shrugged, finishing, “And that I will faithfully and honestly discharge the duties of deputy marshal of the City of Dodge durin’ my term of office, so help me God.” The crack and roll of ivory balls stopped, as did the conversations at the gambling tables. Dog looked up from the paper. Wyatt was just standing there with his brother Morgan and the rest of the police force. Waiting. Sometimes Dog thought Wyatt might be a little slow. “You want me to read it again?”

“I got it the first time. I want to get something straight,” Wyatt said. “Somebody breaks the law, I don’t care whose friend he is, I’m taking him in.”

“Sure, Wyatt. That’s fair,” Dog said.

“That goes for everybody,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the other men. “Not just me and Morg.”

“You bet.”

“I want Bat and Charlie sworn in as city, too.”

“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” Bat told Dog. “Dodge is inside Ford County, so I’m thinking maybe we have jurisdiction in town, too.”

Wyatt shook his head. “City police have jurisdiction inside town limits. Sheriff’s department covers unincorporated territory in the county. I don’t want somebody getting off because Bat or Charlie made the arrest.”

“I’ll swear them in as city,” Dog said, “just in case. Anything else?”

“Shotguns. One for each man. An extra, loaded, in every saloon, behind the bar.”

“Bird or buck?” Dog asked.

“Bird. I want a bang, not bodies.”

Dog nodded.

“It’s two dollars for every arrest, right?”

“That’s right, Wyatt. I tried to get you three, but—”

Wyatt turned to the other men on the force. “We work in pairs. Point and backup. Morg and Stauber, Bat and Charlie, Jack and Chuck. I’ll circle. We pool the fines. No money for dead men. End of the month, we split the cash up even.”

Nobody objected.

“All right, then.” Wyatt picked up the Bible with his left hand and raised his right. “I, Wyatt Earp, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Kansas, and that I will faithfully and honestly discharge the duties of deputy marshal of the City of Dodge during my term of office, so help me God.”

He got it word perfect, too, Morgan noticed, which was better than either Bat or Charlie did when Dog swore them in. By that time, everybody in the saloon was watching as Wyatt pinned the badge on his shirt and drew a map in the beer slops on a table.

“The river,” he said, making a wavy line. “The bridge.” A straight line over the wavy one. “Tollbooth.” A dot, and then a T-shape. “Bridge Street. Front.”

He looked up. The deputies nodded.

“Morg and Stauber: north end of the bridge, here and here. Bat and Charlie, south end. Jack and Chuck, down at the corner, second-floor windows of the Green Front and the Lady Gay. Street’s mine.”

Wyatt looked at each one of his men in turn, for that was what they were. His, and no argument about it.

“Everyone carries a shotgun, every night. You need help, fire it. Rest of us’ll come on. You see any weapon at all, bash whoever’s carrying it. Don’t argue. Don’t explain. Don’t wait.”

He looked away and then at each of them. Bat. Charlie Bassett. Chuck and Jack. John Stauber. Morgan.

“Last time I saw a lawman gunned down, the drunk who did it walked away for a twelve-dollar fine.” Wyatt fell silent. No one moved. When he spoke again, he seemed to be talking to himself. “Nobody dies tonight,” he said. “We all go home in the morning.”

In the back of the Alhambra, at a table as far from the noise and dust of the street as possible, John Henry Holliday shuffled and reshuffled a deck with absentminded precision, watching as the policemen left the saloon—all except for Morgan, who had noticed Doc and Kate there and stopped by their table briefly.

“Hey, Kate. What’re you reading?” Morg asked.

“Crime and Punishment. Translated from the Russian.”

“Sounds interesting. Can I borrow it when you’re done?”

She shrugged.

“Twenty bucks says Wyatt don’t even raise his voice,” Morg offered, “and the Texans do as they’re told.”

Doc reached over to lift Kate’s hand to his lips. “You’re on your own with this one, darlin’. I wouldn’t take that bet.”

“Make it ten,” Kate told Morgan. “We’re short.”