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  Because Virgil had once served as a spur-of-the-moment deputy and provided the crucial firepower during a shootout in Prescott, US Marshal Crawley Dake stopped by the Earp train and asked him to wear a federal deputy badge in the Tombstone district.

  “You’ll need more’n one deputy, won’t you?” Virgil said.

  “I will.” Dake sighed. “I figure you’re a good start. There’s one or two more I’m considering.”

  Virgil’s laugh rumbled quietly from his chest. He beckoned the marshal with a curl of his finger.

  “Come over here and meet my brother,” said Virgil, grinning.

  As they walked toward the back of their small, three-wagon train, Virgil snapped his fingers, and his little caramel-colored dog trotted on short legs to keep up. Virge turned to smile at Dake. He lowered his voice but his face shone with pride.

  “Wyatt was assistant marshal in Dodge City . . . and before that . . . Wichita.”

  Dake lifted his eyebrows and nodded.

  Wyatt crouched by the Studebaker, where he helped Allie tie her sewing machine to the side panel. Smiling openly now, Virge showed off his badge to Allie, who seemed not to know how to react to the commission. Wyatt straightened up and said nothing as he stared first at his brother and then at the federal marshal and his well-manicured beard.

  “Crawley Dake,” the marshal began affably and offered his hand.

  Wyatt met the man’s smooth grip and shook, but let his eyes angle away to the half-lashed sewing machine. Dake propped his hands on the sides of his pear-shaped hips, exposing the bright silver federal shield pinned to his vest. He made a crisp nod toward Wyatt.

  “Your brother tells me you were a lawman in Kansas.”

  “Was,” Wyatt said.

  The marshal nodded encouragingly. “I need some reliable agents in the Tombstone district. Are you interested?”

  Wyatt faced Dake and studied the little hammocks of sagging flesh beneath the man’s eyes. The bureaucrat must have been desperate to rise so early before the Earp train departed Prescott.

  “I already got plans,” Wyatt said and let the marshal see the determination in his eyes. “Gonna open up a stage line.”

  Dake’s brow furrowed in a show of regret. “You might be a little late on that, I’m afraid. There are two lines running a price war in Tombstone right now. Might be hard to elbow your way into that business.”

  Wyatt looked away, and his gaze fell on Mattie, already seated in the driver’s box of the wagon. She was fitting a bonnet over her new way of piling her hair on top of her head. The wagon she sat upon was his hope for a future, and now this pasty-faced bureaucrat with a woman’s hands was telling him his plans were for naught. He snugged the rope on the sewing machine and fixed it fast with an unforgiving hitch.

  Dake smiled. “I admit the pay is not so enticing. You only draw wages when you are on assignment. But I need another good man. You’ll be reimbursed for time, mileage, meals, and horse rentals. You would supply your own weapons and ammunition.”

  “Don’t hurt to have a badge, Wyatt,” Virge prompted.

  Wyatt tightened the last knot and pushed his anger back into its cage. “No,” he said in a flat tone. “I reckon I can get my hands into something.” He plucked at the lashing with a forefinger, and the rope thrummed with a deep, taut note.

  Virgil picked up the dog and laughed quietly as he moved Dake away. “Having Wyatt down there with me will work in your favor, Crawley. He’ll help me out when I need it.” Looking into the dog’s eager face, he tousled the fur at the base of its ears. “Ain’t that right, Frank?”

  “You’ll have the power to appoint deputies,” Dake said and nodded back in Wyatt’s direction. “I hope he’ll be first on your list.” The marshal offered his hand to Virgil. “I know Dodge City’s reputation. I can use a man who stood up to that.”

  Virgil shifted the dog in his grip and shook hands. He smiled as he watched Wyatt secure an extra rope to the sewing machine.

  “Hell, Crawley,” Virge said and grunted as he lowered the dog to the ground. “Wyatt was born to it. He just won’t admit it.”

  When Dake walked away, Wyatt climbed up into the driver’s box with Mattie and found that she had cushioned the plank seat with folded blankets. He nodded his appreciation and began untying the reins from the brake handle.

  “Reckon you’ll be all right bouncing ’round up here?” he asked. “We could set a pallet in back. Might go easier on you.”

  Mattie smiled at him and then looked out over the stretch of desert and its unfamiliar plant life. The plains of Kansas had been stark with the sameness of its endless grasslands. Now this sandy terrain beyond the mill Virgil and Allie were leaving was no less stark by its own right.

  Venturing forward, for Mattie, was as daunting as setting out into a foreign land whose story was known only through rumor. Sitting straight backed on the seat, she shook her head in tiny increments and lifted her chin.

  “I want to see where we’re going, Wyatt.”

  She pushed a loose strand of hair from her forehead and tucked it under the bonnet. When she turned to Wyatt, he leaned from the box to check the status of the horses behind them.

  “Who was that man you talked to?” Mattie asked quietly.

  Wyatt settled back on the seat and took up slack in the reins. He propped his boots on the front of the box and rested his elbows on his thighs.

  “US marshal.”

  She frowned and kept studying the profile of his face. “What did he want?” she probed.

  Wyatt pursed his lips and looked down at the reins laced through his fingers. “Appears Virge accepted a federal appointment.”

  Mattie frowned. “What does that mean? What kind of appointment?”

  Wyatt squinted into the distance. “Means he’s a deputy US marshal in the district where we’re headed.”

  She was quiet for a long time. He could feel her stare burning into the side of his face. It was like heat radiating from an oven. He rubbed his thumbs against the smooth leather straps in his hands and watched the horses twitch at flies with controlled shivers from isolated muscles along their flanks.

  “I thought the Earps were through with lawing and whoring,” she said as gently as she could.

  Slowly Wyatt began to nod. Then he turned to her and saw the worry that had spread across her simple face.

  “Virge is gonna do whatever he wants to. I can’t control that.”

  “But they listen to you, Wyatt.”

  He huffed a quiet laugh through his nose. “Apparently, not all the time,” he said.

  “What about you, Wyatt?” she whispered.

  “What about me?”

  “Are you a deputy, too?”

  He shook his head and looked as far down the trail as the morning light allowed. In the east the red smoldering sun was still broken into shards of burning light behind the low canopy of an orchard. As he watched, the top of the blood-red orb bobbed above the treetops and cast an eerie glow on everything it touched.

  Wyatt had hoped to be traveling by first light, but already he was making the necessary adjustments that are part and parcel of joining up with family. The benefits, he knew, would eventually outweigh the inconveniences.

  “Mattie, all I want to do is travel down there to this new silver strike and fill this wagon up with money. Enough to set us up for life.” He turned back to her and nodded toward her belly, where the promise of a child lay hidden beneath her handmade outfit. “Then we’ll find us a more hospitable place to set down roots.”

  When he gazed back at the horizon, she slid closer and hugged his arm. “Do you think we’ll be rich, Wyatt?”

  He gently swung one of the reins in a shallow arc and shooed a fly from the off-wheeler’s rump. “There’s lot o’ people gettin’ rich in Tombstone, Mattie. No reason we can’t be a part o’ that.”

  She squeezed his arm tighter and pressed her cheek into his shoulder. “Why would they want to name a place ‘Tombstone’?” she
wondered aloud.

  Wyatt said nothing. Up in front, the dog made a series of yipping barks until Virge climbed down from the Studebaker to lift the animal into the crowded bed of his wagon. With the addition of the dog, James was teasing Virgil and Allie about the volume of freight in their wagon. Virge knew better than to play into James’s bantering, but Allie was holding her own.

  Wyatt slipped from Mattie’s grip and leaned to check on his brothers. James made a little salute from his receding hairline, and Virgil brusquely waved at the air as a semaphore to get moving. Wyatt jerked the brake handle free and set his boots down on the floor of the box.

  “Reckon when we get down there, Mattie, we’ll have to ask somebody ’bout that name,” he said and lifted the reins to snap them lightly on the backs of his team.

  When the wagons began to roll, there seemed to be something more than wheels and horses set into motion. Wyatt and his brothers were on their way to find their fortune. Joined together as they were, it seemed improbable that they could not succeed. Just like the light filling the morning sky, there was promise in the air. The Earps would make their mark in Tombstone. Wyatt was betting it all.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Wyatt Earp, The Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997

  Doc Holliday, The Life and the Legend by Gary Roberts: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006

  Wyatt Earp; The Search for Law and Order on the Last Frontier by Gary Roberts, from With Badges and Bullets, edited by R. W. Etulain & G. Riley: Fulcrum Publishing, 1999

  Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend by Lee Silva: Graphic Publishers, 2002

  Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931

  Dodge City by Frederic Young: Boot Hill Museum, Inc., 1972

  The Illustrated Life and Times of Wyatt Earp by Bob Boze Bell: Tri Star-Boze Publications, 1993

  The Illustrated Life and Times of Doc Holliday by Bob Boze Bell: Tri Star-Boze Publications, 1994

  The Buffalo Hunters by Charles Robinson III: State House Press, 1995

  Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns: 1867-1886 by Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snell: University of Nebraska Press, 1963

  The Cowboys by William H. Forbis: Time-Life Books, 1973

  The Gunfighters by Paul Trachtman: Time-Life Books, 1974

  Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998

  Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend by Robert DeArment: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979

  Famous Gunfighters of theWestern Frontier by W. B. (Bat) Masterson: Dover Publications, Inc., 2009

  Age of the Gunfighter by Joseph Rosa: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993

  Wyatt Earp: A Biography of a Western Lawman by Steve Gatto: San Simon Publishing Co., 1997

  Wyatt Earp Speaks by John Stevens: Fern Canyon Press, 1998

  The Earp Papers: In a Brother’s Image by Don Chaput: Affiliated Writers of America, Inc., 1994

  The Truth About Wyatt Earp by Richard Erwin: The O.K. Press, 1993

  The Earps Talk by Al Turner: Creative Publishing Co., 1980

  Virgil Earp:Western Peace Officer by Don Chaput: Affiliated Writers of America, Inc., 1994

  The Earp Brothers of Tombstone (original transcript in Arizona Historical Society) by Frank Waters: University of Nebraska Press, 1976

  Travesty: Frank Waters’ Earp Agenda Exposed by S. J. Reidhead: Jinglebob Press, 2005

  Wyatt Earp: The Untold Story, 1848–1880 by Ed Bartholomew: Frontier Book Co., 1963

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mark Warren is a teacher of Native American survival skills. He lives with his wife, Susan, and dog, Sadie, in the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia. His research into the Earp story has spanned sixty-plus years. Through his travels and studies he has interviewed the storied writers of the Earp saga and trekked with them to sites where the actual events in Earp’s life took place.

  Warren is the author of Two Winters in a Tipi, Lyons Press, 2012, Secrets of the Forest, Volumes I, II, & III, Waldenhouse, 2016-18, and Adobe Moon, Five Star Publishing, 2017.

  The employees of Five Star Publishing hope you have enjoyed this book.

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