Born to the Badge Page 6

  A crowd gathered in Rupp’s Saloon, where Moser insisted on treating Wyatt and Behrens to a round of drinks. The onlookers watched as the wagon craftsman counted out two stacks of bills on the counter. Wyatt pocketed his share as John Behrens shuffled through his bills to tally up the total for himself.

  “These boys fear nothing and nobody,” Moser announced, raising his glass. “Too bad we don’t have a police force up to these boys’ standards.” He motioned for the bartender to pour drinks for his hired detectives, but Wyatt waved away the offer and moved the glass to the far side of the counter.

  “I’ll take some coffee if you have it,” he said.

  The bartender nodded, poured a glass for Behrens, and then started for the back of the room where a blackened kettle sat upon the wood heater.

  “Well,” Moser laughed, “tell me what Smith’s face looked like when you boys delivered those scoundrels to his jail.”

  Behrens snorted. “Pleased as punch, I’d say, that he didn’t have to get off his ass and do some work.” John leaned in closer to Moser. “But he did look a little bare-assed.” Behrens winked. “Smith knows when his feathers have been trimmed.”

  Moser shook his head. “Oh, he’ll find some way to make the credit slide over to his side.” He turned to Wyatt. “He’s a fool not to use you boys on the force.”

  The bartender set down a cup of coffee on the counter, and Wyatt picked it up and sipped off the top. It was not fresh, but it was hot, and the warming liquid was welcome to cut the October chill from the last stretch of the ride.

  Wyatt tilted his head toward Behrens. “John and I don’t much agree with the way Smith handles things . . . and Smith knows it. It ain’t likely he’ll hire us unless he gets desperate.”

  Moser made a crooked smile and leaned in closer to Wyatt. “Come April, some of us businessmen are going to see to it that Smith doesn’t hold an office.”

  Wyatt tried his coffee again and began preparing what he would say if the merchant offered to back him in the elections. Being marshal of Wichita would be a step up. It was a job he knew he could handle well. After a term or two, he might be better positioned to ascend to a higher aspiration—some business that did not involve chasing after out-of-luck drovers across a thankless prairie.

  “Wyatt, you boys be patient, and I think you’ll find you’ll have jobs next spring . . . with a marshal who knows how to get things done.”

  Wyatt’s expression did not change. He took another swallow of coffee and set the mug on the bar.

  “That so?” he said in a flat voice. Around him the crowd began to break up at the bar.

  Moser flashed a knowing smile, leaned in, and lowered his voice. “We’re going to make a push for Meager, the federal deputy. He was a good marshal once before. We like his cut.”

  Wyatt fitted his hat to his head and nodded. “ ’Preciate the pay . . . and the coffee, Mr. Moser.”

  The farmer reached down for Wyatt’s hand and pumped it four times. Wyatt tolerated the man’s enthusiasm, nodded to Behrens, and started out. As soon as he had pushed through the doors into the cool of the evening, he felt the anger that he had pent up inside his chest now course through his veins like heat rising through a stove flue. Walking the middle of the street in long strides, he tried to purge the flame burning at the center of him. When he neared the bridge and made out the silhouette of the claptrap house where James and Bessie ran their whoring business, it struck him why Moser would never consider him for the marshal’s post. The respectable businessmen of the town could never support a man whose brother managed a brothel.

  On the bridge, he walked a few yards over the river and leaned on his forearms against the railing to think things through. The dark water slid beneath him like a giant serpent intent on some immutable destination that lay somewhere out in the night. The lights from the saloons in Delano reflected off the water like candle flames wavering gently in a breeze. Wyatt listened to the water part around the pilings and then fold together again on the downstream side.

  It shouldn’t matter what a man’s brother does, he reasoned. It’s what the man is . . . what he does . . . that’s what counts. Anybody who judges a man by studying his brother is a fool. He straightened and looked back into the business district.

  “Damned fools,” he muttered. “To hell with them.”

  As he walked toward James’s house, he smoothed out his pace and felt the heat in his chest dissipate. Already he was convinced the people of the town would come around to his way of thinking. They would have to. It would only take some time. He had five months before the election.

  “Plenty of time,” Wyatt said, and, hearing the rough certainty in his voice, he was reminded of the times he had heard his father ordain a future he demanded from the world. For old Nicholas those imperatives had seldom panned out. Everywhere the elder Earp had dragged his family along the smolder-line of the frontier, he had run up against the same failed dreams.

  Stopping in James’s front yard, he turned to look at the moon. The pale orb glowed behind a stratum of clouds like a solitary lamp seen across a smoky room. Its luminescence was muted by the overcast sky, but its color was a clear and pure white. Nothing like the mud-dappled moon the Mexican girl had prophesied for him in California.

  Valenzuela Cos. He had not thought of her for months. Where was she now, he wondered. If he ran into her on the streets of Wichita, what would she think of his ambitions? His lot was not much improved since he had last seen her. Outside of gambling, he had no real job. He had acquired no fortune. Beyond a handful of Texas cattle pushers, his name was not well known.

  Pivoting around, he studied the front of James’s ramshackle establishment. Here was the Earp legacy, it seemed. This whorehouse was the Earp landmark in Wichita, and Wyatt was connected to it by blood, no matter what his aspirations might be. There were some things that could not be changed, and this was one of them.

  Though he did not look up again, he felt the moon now like a condemning eye, peering down at him through the haze and making its own judgment as if by the sanction of God. Turning away from the brothel, Wyatt started down Douglas Avenue for the Sedgwick House. As he walked, the cloud cover thickened until the glow of the moon was lost altogether. His boots in the dirt set up a steady rhythm—a confident sound full of industry and endurance. He decided to never again think of Valenzuela Cos. Or that damned moon made of mud.

  CHAPTER 7

  Winter, 1874-75: Pole Cat Creek, Indian Territory

  When the first snows came to the plains, Wyatt and John Behrens were hired again over a private concern—this time to guard a herd of cattle whose ownership was under dispute by two livestock buyers. To avoid legal confrontations, they drove the beasts into the Nations and nestled them in a scrub valley where the shoulders of Pole Cat Creek widened to form a natural bowl in the land. Just upstream of the corral they set up a decoy tent where they prepared meals but never slept. After dinner they banked the main fire, and then each man retired to his distant blind on higher ground to pass the long winter night with what heat he could trap under a four-inch heap of blankets. Neither man had any wish to be gunned down in his sleep, though Behrens sometimes lamented in the morning that no one had put him out of his frozen misery.

  On a bitterly cold afternoon, with Behrens having taken the wagon into Sapulpa for grain, Wyatt built a small pit fire on high ground that commanded a view of the herd and the main trails leading into camp. The cold crept into his bones, and he opened the blankets draped around his shoulders to gather heat from his fire. The sky promised more snow.

  Two hours before sunset a lone rider approached on the trail from the north. Wyatt watched the interloper ride straight into the main camp, dismount, and look around as though searching for signs of inhabitants. The stranger wore a heavy overcoat and wide-brimmed hat and walked with a stilted gait as though unsure of his footing.

  When the intruder disappeared inside the tent, Wyatt waited until he was satisfied that no one else
had accompanied the newcomer. Then he banked his fire and started down the hill.

  Coming up on the back of the tent, he stopped thirty feet away and worked the lever of his rifle. The sound was like an axe splitting oak and sufficient warning for anyone inside that the upper hand had just been dealt.

  “I got a full magazine of forty-four-forties that’ll tear that canvas to hell,” he called out. “Come out with your hands high and empty.” After quietly changing his position, Wyatt crouched and braced the butt of his rifle against his shoulder as he looked down the barrel at the tent opening. In the cold quiet, a bawling calf mewled from the valley in the few seconds while Wyatt waited for something to happen.

  The intruder emerged slowly—hatless, with slender white hands raised over her head. With her hair gathered above her ears, Wyatt barely recognized James’s whore, the one who sat so still in the room whenever Wyatt visited. He relaxed his grip on the gun, and she lowered her arms.

  “Sally? Something wrong at James’s place?”

  She pushed out a sudden sharp breath that steamed white in the air, but she would not answer. When she shifted her attention to the cattle and glared at them for too long, Wyatt knew that any trouble she had brought with her was of her own making.

  “I’m leaving!” she finally said and pinned him with a defiant stare.

  She looked altogether different in the daylight, though mainly as a result of some internal energy that rose up from deep inside her. Wyatt looked away from her determined gaze and recognized her gray horse as one from the pair that pulled James’s wagon. Balancing the rifle in the crook of his arm, he walked toward her.

  “James know about this?”

  “He doesn’t own me.”

  Wyatt nodded to the horse. “Prob’ly owns that mare, though.”

  “I don’t want to work there anymore. I never wanted to.”

  “I reckon you can do what you want, Sally.”

  She laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “Sally Earp,” she hissed. “We all had to be ‘Earps,’ you know.” Her nostrils flared when she spoke the name. “Otherwise, we might look like, you know, a brothel.” Her tight mouth loosened and began to quiver. “My name is Celia, not ‘Sally.’ But back home I was ‘Mattie.’ ”

  When tears formed in her eyes, Wyatt busied himself wiping at the ice forming on the rear sight of his Winchester. She would not continue talking until he looked at her again.

  “When you run away,” she continued, “you change your name if you don’t want to be found.”

  She set her jaw, and her eyes seemed to blaze with white heat. The wind heaved against them and stirred the winter-dry grass into a frenzy. Small flecks of snow began to flutter diagonally through the air and cling to her hair. Clutching the overcoat tighter to her throat, she let go of some of her anger.

  “I’m tired of being ‘Sally.’ I’m not a whore, Wyatt.”

  Hitching his head to one side he looked north toward Wichita. “Nothing wrong with being a whore.” When he looked back at her, she was gazing out into the prairie at nothing . . . to a place that perhaps no man could see. A cold gust of wind strained the tent ropes into a tight, ticking sound.

  “Can we get out of this?” she said, clutching the overcoat lapels against her pale throat.

  Without waiting for an answer, she bent and slipped through the tent opening. After a few moments, Wyatt followed, tied down the door flaps, and turned to find her weeping in the half-light. Her misery seemed genuine enough.

  “I could build a fire outside,” he offered.

  He watched her wipe at the silvery streaks that shone on her cheeks. Now she would not look at him.

  “Where’re you headed? Don’t you know you can freeze out on the prairie on a night like this?”

  “I came to find you,” she whined in a mousy voice.

  “Well . . . you done that. Now what?”

  “I’m not a whore, Wyatt.”

  “All right,” he said and nodded once to her. “But you might be a horse thief.”

  “Maybe I earned that horse,” she replied, lifting her chin.

  Wyatt stared at her for a time. She looked so serious about everything. Finally he nodded.

  “Maybe you did earn it. I earned the title once myself . . . ‘horse thief,’ I mean.”

  “You stole a horse?”

  “People said I did. I doubt anyone’s above it if the situation’s right.”

  “Or wrong,” she said.

  He propped his rifle against the crate of cooking pots and utensils. “I guess that’s what I meant,” he said.

  Outside, the wind whipped the brittle grasses against the canvas, the sound like frantic birds scratching to get in from the weather. The windward side of the tent bowed taut and bulged inward, thrumming as though it had been pitched under a waterfall.

  “Bad night for travelin’,” Wyatt said.

  “Can I stay here?”

  “Nobody sleeps in here. Could be dangerous.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  He pointed. “Up on the rise. I set up under a piece of low canvas. Not too hospitable, I’m afraid. Only got a small pit fire, and I can’t have that after dark.”

  “I’m going to stay with you,” she declared.

  Wyatt looked down at the dirt floor and moved his toes inside his cold boots. When he looked back at her, she was staring at him as though she could read his thoughts.

  “Well,” he allowed, “it’ll be cold as hell out there.”

  “Only half as cold tonight,” she said quietly.

  She sat down on the card-playing crate. The grainy light was fading by the minute, but it settled around her without dampening her will. She was like a stone statue that could outwait any man.

  “I’m gonna start a fire,” he said. “Can you eat some salt pork and beans?”

  She nodded. Wyatt waited, because it looked like she wanted to say more. When her gaze met his again, she seemed to have traded her look of desperation for a stab at certainty.

  “People need each other, Wyatt.”

  He frowned and stared at the strain of the tent on the windward side. “Well,” he said and narrowed his eyes, as though nothing could be so easily summed up. “Sometimes, I reckon.”

  He sorted through a crate and found a tin of beans. Then he pushed out through the flap and started tying it back in place, but she slipped out through the gap before he could stop her. She snatched the tin from his hand.

  “You work on the fire,” she said. “I’ll handle the food.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Spring, 1875: Wichita, Kansas

  By the time the snow on the prairie began to melt, Wyatt knew he had made a mistake taking Mattie in with him at the hotel. There was not enough space in the room, but neither was there a place for her in the privacy of his thoughts. Quiet as she was, she was nonetheless a constant noise that had begun to chatter in one corner of his mind. Even when he stayed up all night gambling in the saloons, he felt her like a scent clinging to his clothes, hovering around him, making it harder to breathe.

  He had not foreseen the tenacious grip of which she was capable—the way she had of making him feel that taking care of her was somehow owed her. Wyatt knew that James had not forced her into her line of work. Mattie was simply one of those people who found others to blame for her problems.

  At the bottom of it all, he knew that she was like a wounded animal, hopeless on her own. When he wasn’t bedding her or tolerating her, he felt sorry for her, and she had learned to thrive off his pity, taking it as a definition of his commitment. Whenever he tried to back away from her to give her room to stand on her own, she rededicated herself to his every need: washing and starching his shirts, cleaning his boots, and keeping their room dust-free. Wyatt began going to the gambling halls earlier and getting back later.

  In April, when the citizens of Wichita expressed through ballot their discontent with Billy Smith, Mike Meagher took over as city marshal. He was a tough enforcer who had run
the marshal’s office for three years before Smith’s glad-hand reign. In addition, he had been commissioned a deputy US marshal, a post he still held. Now Meagher appointed his old friend John Behrens as assistant marshal, and, at Behrens’s suggestion, Wyatt and Cairns became full-time deputies. Because of Meagher’s no-nonsense expectations, the four officers worked together well—each knowing exactly where he stood on the issue of enforcement: the law came first, politics a distant second.

  With the steady income of his deputy’s salary, and with a regular profit from his faro table, Wyatt was able to rent a small house to better accommodate Mattie and himself. The change was good for her, he reasoned, giving her more space for the sewing work that seemed to be her only natural talent. With that change he thought there might be a chance she could develop the fortitude to disengage from him and start over on her own.

  He seldom took her out, hardly wishing to send her a message that he was settling with her. Whenever she asked to go with him into town, he begged off, saying he never got a chance to spend time at home. Before long, he didn’t have to lie. Most nights, by the time he came home, she was drunk, sprawled out on the bed in her house clothes. To counter the stench of alcohol, he went through a nightly ritual of opening the bedroom window and covering her with a blanket. Then he lay down beside her, his back to her heavy breathing, his face to the rejuvenating night air and the sequins of stars hanging over the flat skillet of the plains.

  Just as the spring wildflowers dappled the prairie with color, Morgan, Wyatt’s younger brother, arrived from Montana. Footloose and ever quick to laugh, he divided his time between “enforcing” at Bessie’s and running his luck in the gambling houses.

  As James told Wyatt, “Morg wants nothing more than to be like his older brother, and I ain’t talkin’ ’bout me or Virgil.” James laughed. “Hell, he even looks just like you . . . or at least he will in a few years when he fills out.”