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  ADOBE MOON

  WYATT EARP: AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY, BOOK ONE

  ADOBE MOON

  MARK WARREN

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  * * *

  Copyright © 2017 by Mark Warren

  Map: “Travels of Wyatt Earp.” Copyright 2017 by Mark Warren

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Warren, Mark, 1947– author.

  Title: Adobe moon : Wyatt Earp, an American Odyssey / Adobe Moon / Mark Warren.

  Other titles: Wyatt Earp, an American odyssey

  Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017022895 (print) | LCCN 2017031951 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432838027 (ebook) | ISBN 1432838024 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432838010 (ebook) | ISBN 1432838016 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432838164 (hardcover) | ISBN 1432838164 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Earp, Wyatt, 1848−1929—Fiction. | Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.)—Fiction. | Outlaws—West (U.S.) v Fiction. | Peace officers—West (U.S.)—Fiction. | Self-realization—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Western stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A86465 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.A86465 A33 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022895

  First Edition. First Printing: November 2017

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  Visit our website–http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 21 20 19 18 17

  For Susan

  There is an alchemy that burnishes the moon to gold.

  “In those days a man could pick up, head out West, and start a new life . . . choose any name he wanted. But the man who made his mark in the history books is probably one who stayed true to who he was . . . no matter what he called himself.”

  ∼Harte Canaday,

  from Last of the Pistoleers

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Summer, 1862: Earp farm, Pella Township, Iowa

  In the dark pre-dawn quiet he lay facing the window by his bed and stared at the stars hanging in the western sky. They floated over the land like the dust of jewels strewn across black water. These stars had become the milestones that marked his coming passage, and he gazed at them this one last time for the sake of preserving a memory, he supposed. One last view through the windowglass of his youth. Today he would be gone, to become a part of the larger world that waited for him. First the war in the East. Then, surviving that, he would journey west toward the promise of opportunity. It was all out there, he knew. Whatever enterprise a man was bold enough to reach for, the West would afford him a place to try.

  Were anyone to ask him why he must fight, he might only say something about duty—a topic he deemed too personal to reduce to words. Once that duty was met, he would have earned his right on the frontier. He knew that the ragged boundary of the country was creeping steadily westward, like a charred line of black smoldering across a sheet of paper, and he needed to stay ahead of that flame.

  It could not be said that he dreamed of places, for he was not the type to dream. But he planned his course with a deliberation uncommon to one his age. If one of those bright points of light out in the night sky was his lodestar, pulling him, he had not singled it out. He needed no such talisman. It was the pull that mattered.

  Carrying the bundle of clothes he had rolled inside the wool blanket, Wyatt, in his stockinged feet, picked his way across the groaning floorboards through the dark house. His boots stood just inside the kitchen door, and he sat to tug them on. Through the east windows the stars were thinning. Now they burned like the campfires of a vast and distant army fallen into deep slumber before the coming battle. Already he felt closer to the war.

  He listened to the night sounds of the house—his father’s rough snore coming from the back room, the hollow tick of the cherrywood clock in the hallway, the faint seep of air sucking through the vents of the woodstove. Outside, somewhere to the east, a coyote called a single sliding note, and it was that sound to which he connected, if only for its claim on autonomy.

  Stepping outside onto the stoop he inhaled the coolness of late summer. It was too dark to see the cornfield—eighty acres he had been working since he had been old enough to sink a hoe into this Iowa dirt—but he could smell it. The stalks were heavy with the coming harvest, and already he felt lighter for being done with it all.

  Inside the tack room he lighted a lantern and stuffed the blanket-bundle behind the heavy sacks of grain, and then he spread loose hay at the edges. Standing back to appraise his work, he imagined his father in the barn later—old Nicholas gathering up his blanket, saddle, and bridle for the ride into town. Satisfied with his cache, Wyatt stepped out to the stalls, hung the lantern, and doled out grain to each of the feed troughs. The horses nickered and nodded their big heads, some blowing air on his hands as he worked. He spoke to them quietly, letting the tone of parting soften his voice.

  If only he could have saddled the Thoroughbred without delay, headed south to Ottumwa, and be shed of this morning of tiptoes and secrets. But that was not his plan. He might be a wayward son, but he was no thief.

  When he walked back to the house, the oil lamp glowed inside the kitchen window. He kicked his boots together and pulled them off before opening the door. The sizzle of bacon had salted the air in the room, and his mother bustled about the kitchen as if she had never slept.

  “Well, you’re up early,” she said, glancing up from her busy hands.

  “Fed the horses.”

  He watched her sprinkle flour on the kneading board. She had never failed to provide a savory meal—whether sick or nursing an ailing neighbor or broken from the loss of a child. Wyatt had never seen defeat show in her face.

  “Makin’ biscuits, Ma?”

  She looked at him as she leaned her weight onto stiffened arms and worked the dough in a rolling motion with the heels of her hands. Her lips parted, but she made no sound, as though she could not speak and labor at the same time.

  “I could eat a coupl’a extras if you don’t care,” he added.

  Her gaze ran the length of him, from wheat-straw hair to the recently darned socks. “You are gettin’ to be tall as your father.” She turned her back to him, and her shoulders hunched as she leaned into the dough. He watched her until she straightened from her work.

  “We’re all beholden to you, Ma.”

  Now she turned to face him squarely, her pasty hands splayed across the sides of her apron. “Well, aren’t you full of surprises this mornin’,” she said,
wearing her crooked half smile. She lowered her eyebrows and canted her head as though trying to look at him from a new angle. “You want to eat something? I’ll have the biscuits ready soon.”

  He ate at the sideboard, taking the servings as she prepared them. Outside the formality of the dining room and his father’s presence, they talked comfortably, Wyatt following any subject she was inclined to broach. He could see she was starved for conversation, the kind he supposed a woman needed on a daily basis. When she turned her back to him as she prattled, he wrapped two biscuits in a cloth napkin and stuffed the package inside his shirt.

  First light was blooming in the eastern sky when Wyatt stepped up on the old gnarled root at the blackjack oak. He took a final look at the field of corn spread before him. How often had he perched like this, balanced by the hoe—a tripod of man and tool set up at a distance to take a bearing? He had always wondered why the vast Iowa sky could not dwarf the field of green, reduce it to a size that seemed manageable. From the oak he could see the work’s beginning but never the end. Once inside the interminable rows of stalks there would be a sense of neither. Only a blistered present, hard on a calloused past: chop, sweat, itch, breathe the dust, and swat the flies. And keep on.

  The sun floated up through the trees now, breaking into a mosaic of burning red shards and then washing out the sky from its initial burnished gold to a dingy blue-gray. Morgan came from the barn, dragging a hoe that was half again his height. His sleepy eyes were half-hidden under the shock of hair fallen over his forehead, hair the same summer-gold tint as Wyatt’s. He stopped next to the oak, shaded his eyes with his slender hand, and searched the fields alongside his older brother.

  “What’re you lookin’ at?” he said, now squinting up at the side of Wyatt’s face.

  Wyatt shook his head and stared at the broad expanse of green. It wasn’t just the size of the job . . . but keeping a rein on his two younger brothers. Their part was to lighten his load, but a day had seldom passed that they weren’t fighting or wandering off. He looked at Morgan now, trying to see in the boy the man who would have to take over the farm work after this day.

  He had told Morgan that he was joining the army, and Morg had held the secret close, as a brother should. Wyatt almost told him now that this was the day. All summer the secret had whispered inside him like a wind whistling through the cracks of a hastily built house. Yesterday it had been a gale in his ear. But now, on the day of his departure, a calm settled over him, and he decided to take no chances. He could wait.

  “You need your hat,” Wyatt said. “Where’s Warren?”

  “He’s coming. Can’t find one of his boots. Pa’s lecturin’ him.”

  Wyatt remembered when his father had toiled in a field, before the old man had refused to soil his hands with such work. Old Nick had conceived other ways of turning a dollar—a convenient credo of politics that milked a town of its coffers through the sleight of hand of the law and city governance. Mulling over his father’s methods of subsistence, Wyatt felt all the more certain about leaving. He was finished soiling his hands, too.

  “Go on back to the barn, Morg, and let the horses out.” He pointed to the southwest corner of the cornfield. “I’ll meet you yonder where we let off yesterday.”

  “Can I ride Salem back to the house to get my hat?”

  “Just don’t run ’im. It’s too early. Here . . . give me that hoe, so you don’t poke his eye.”

  Watching his little brother—wide awake now—dash off through the dew-wet grass, Wyatt wondered if he himself had ever displayed such fervor for manual labor. He remembered wanting to prove himself to his father, that was for certain, just as he remembered the futility of the effort.

  “An’ get Warren movin’!” he called out to Morg’s back.

  Wyatt returned his gaze to the drooping green blades of corn clicking against one another in the constant boil of the prairie wind. From where he stood, the corn appeared immaculate, reflecting the early morning light in metallic glints—a mirage that would flatten under the arching path of the sun.

  Some men could see glory in farming. His father always claimed to be one. Wyatt could not. He doubled his leathered hands over the pair of rounded hickory handles, trying to take some measure of his own worth as weighed against Virgil, James, and Newton. For months now, his older brothers had been at the war, and every morning when he walked toward the suffocating green of the cornfield, he imagined what they awoke to: the smell of gun oil; chicory coffee brewing over a campfire; the throat-bite taste of cannon smoke drifting through the trees; maybe some blood dried into a cloth scab on their blue uniforms. And yet here he was, the corn crop stretched out before him thicker than any army ever force-marched across a battlefield. Straight and green and wax-bright, the field rippled in the wind like a prostrate flag. He was certain there was no glory in it.

  With the country at war with itself, Wyatt’s elevated status to oldest brother had covered more than dominion over the fields and his younger brothers; it included stewardship of the horses, which was no small part of the bargain. Whenever he could, Wyatt put himself in the company of these animals, assigning the more menial tasks to Morgan and Warren. He gave the most attention to the Thoroughbred, which was, aside from the land, the Earps’ most valuable asset. Twice he had entered the stud in the town races and earned winnings. He patted the wad of bills in his pocket now, confident that it would sustain him until he could draw a soldier’s pay.

  Buoyed by the secret that had pulled him so early from sleep, he shouldered the tools and walked toward the field this one last time. When he stepped into the road that separated the house from the field, he turned to the steady cadence of a horse at a trot. A high-wheeled buggy with a flat, black canopy rattled along the road, approaching from the north. Wyatt leveled the hoes across both shoulders behind his neck, draped outstretched arms over the helves, and waited.

  “Wyatt,” the driver called as he reined up, stopping the buggy right in his path. Doc Howell nodded at the pair of tools on Wyatt’s back. “Old Nick got you working twice the load today?” He had eyes that quickly engaged whomever he greeted, the wire-rimmed spectacles seeming to magnify his friendliness.

  “Mornin’, sir.”

  “I’ve not seen you since your little sister came down with the thrush.” The doctor tilted his head and squinted. “You’d be about what now . . . fifteen?”

  “Just about,” Wyatt said.

  The doctor lost his smile, but a curious probing fire held in his eye. “Well, I guess you grow up fast when you start running things.” He nodded to the long wall of corn flanked to his right and turned back to Wyatt, studying the length of him, hat to boots. “Son, you look hard as a bundle of axe handles bound up with baling wire. How tall are you getting to be?”

  Wyatt looked at the field, uncomfortable with the idea of describing himself. “Most of six feet, I reckon.”

  Wyatt tolerated the man’s pointless questions, knowing it to be the doctor’s habit for putting young patients at ease. The horse settled into its respite with a blow from its nostrils, and Doc Howell slackened the reins and propped his forearms on his knees.

  “I sewed up that big Van den Newell boy last week,” he said, dropping his voice to a low, confiding tone. “Seems I’ve got you to thank for some business. Any more patients coming my way I might need to know about?” The doc’s eyebrows lifted high in pretended curiosity.

  Wyatt’s expression did not change. “Reckon he’ll need to lay off my brothers.”

  He felt an unexpected pang of guilt about abandoning his brothers today, but the feeling slipped away as quickly as it had come. They would have to learn how to deal with the Dutch bucks in the township. There would always be troublemakers to handle. Best learn it sooner than later.

  The doctor straightened and smiled down the road. “Oh, I doubt that one’ll be bothering anyone for a while.” He gave Wyatt a look. “He knows who the scrapper in this town is.”

  Wyatt looked off
toward the trees where the road curved. “Be best if you don’t let on about that to my pa. He’s trying to earn some votes outta the Dutch farmers.”

  Doc Howell’s laugh cut off Wyatt’s entreaty. “No need to worry about that, son.” He arched his eyebrows again, and this time his smile curled with a hint of mischief. “You should have heard Old Man Van den Newell light into his boy. He knows all about it . . . how you licked the tar out of his oldest . . . and how he needed the lickin’.” He saw the question in Wyatt’s eyes and laughed the kind of laugh meant to put a man at ease. “Van den Newell’s neighbor told him all about it . . . said you were not vicious . . . but businesslike . . . got the job done . . . quick.” He gestured with the knuckle of a bent finger, like he was knocking quietly on a door between them. “That’s good, Wyatt. You got none of that red blur that sucks so many young men into a blind rage. That kind of anger feeds off its own tissue and generally is of no use to a man.”

  Doc waited, his face open with anticipation, as if expecting some comment on this report. Looking off to the trees again Wyatt pulled in his lips, pressed his mouth into a tight line, and nodded.

  “Still,” Wyatt said, then met the doctor’s eyes again, “it’ll go better if my pa don’t know.”

  Nicholas, Wyatt knew, might punish Morgan and Warren for not fighting their own fight. He took in a deep breath through his nose and quietly purged it. Doc Howell frowned at his hands holding the reins. He shuffled the leather ribbons like he was rearranging a hand of playing cards. Two vertical lines creased into his skin above the spectacles.

  “Old Nick can be a tough piece of meat in the stew, Wyatt, but you should know he’s proud of you. Said you were methodical and straight-ahead. Said he’d never seen you make the same mistake twice. Said you would never stand for being the fool.”