III
Glad Hand and Trigger Finger
Wyatt Earp, who was to achieve sinister eminence as the six-shooter boss of Tombstone, and whose name, for good or bad, was to be bruited more widely, perhaps, than that of any other man in Tombstone’s history, was born in Monmouth, Illinois, March 19, 1849. He went West as a youth, when Kansas and Nebraska were the frontier and Omaha and Kansas City were border towns. As a freighter, he drove bull teams on the Overland and Santa Fe trails. He hunted buffalo for a living when the prairies were black with the wild herds. He had experience as an Indian fighter. He became a professional gambler in the days when euchre was giving way to faro and draw poker on the frontier. He served as a policeman from 1874 to 1876 in Wichita, when that town was as hard boiled as any west of the Missouri. He was town marshal of Dodge City from early in 1877 to late in 1879.
Dodge City was then in its palmy days. It was the last of a succession of Kansas railroad towns that rose to lurid prestige at the end of the cattle trails from Texas. Abilene, Caldwell, Wichita, Newton, Ellsworth, and Hays had had their crowded hour and passed into peaceful obscurity. Farmers had spread over eastern Kansas and the old Texas trails were blocked by fenced fields of corn and wheat. Texas, still without railroads, was the West’s only great cattle preserve. The cattle business in New Mexico and Arizona was still in its infancy. Northern ranges in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, in later years to swarm with cattle, were still wilderness. Millions of longhorns pastured half wild over the vast pampas between the Rio Grande and Red River and to Dodge City poured the Texas herds for shipment over the Santa Fe Railroad to Eastern markets.
While Wyatt Earp was marshal, Dodge City was as rough a village as ever welcomed the old, wild breed of Texas cowboys storming in after hard weeks on the trail to refresh and enjoy themselves in riotous pleasures. Among the notable fighting men whose exploits sent the town’s fame swirling to the frontier skies in clouds of six-shooter smoke were Sheriff Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, Mysterious Dave Mather, Charlie Bassett, Bill Tilghman, Luke Short, Ben Thompson, Clay Allison, Pat Shugrue, Prairie Dog Dave Morrow, Neil Brown, Bob Wright, Ben Daniels, Dave Black, Charley Coulter, and Shotgun Collins. A man was a man who in such fighting company managed to escape the oblivion of Boot Hill. But during his three years as a peace officer in this toughest town of the Kansas prairies, Wyatt Earp became famous for personal force and desperate courage. After Dodge City, he was ready for Tombstone.
When the glories of Dodge began to fade and the fame of the bonanza silver strike at Tombstone was spreading over the West, Wyatt Earp set out for the new boom camp in Arizona. At Prescott, where he stopped to visit his brother Virgil, he met C. P. Dade, United States Marshal of Arizona, who, impressed by the veteran’s record at Dodge City, offered him an appointment as federal deputy marshal for the Tombstone district. Wyatt Earp declined. He had had enough, he declared, of a frontier peace officer’s thankless hardships. But, under Marshal Dade’s persuasion, he at length accepted, and when Wyatt Earp first set foot in Tombstone, December 1, 1879, he wore the badge of a United States deputy marshal pinned on his breast. He held this position from first to last during his Tombstone career.
Wyatt Earp was thirty years old when he arrived in the city of silver and six-shooters. His face was long and of pronounced pallor; his deep-set eyes were blue-gray; his chin was massive; a heavy, tawny moustache hid his mouth and drooped beneath the edges of his jaws. His hair was as yellow as a lion’s mane, his deep voice was a booming lion-like brool, and he suggested a lion in the slow, slithery ease of his movements and in his gaunt, heavy-boned, loose-limbed, powerful frame.
He had been roughly moulded by the frontier and he had the frontier’s simplicity and strength, its sophistication and resourcefulness, its unillusioned self-sufficiency. He followed his own silent trails with roughshod directness. He was unaffectedly genuine. Whatever he did, he did in deadly earnest. He was incapable of pretense or studied pose; he had no genius for the heroic gesture. He was cold, balanced, and imperturbably calm. If whirlwinds slumbered deep in the soul of him, no hint of emotion showed in his face, which had the cold stillness of sculptured stone. There was no swashbuckler bluster about him. Nothing marked him as a desperate man. But in his blue-gray eyes was a calm unafraidness, as of a man not to be frightened by phantoms or realities or anything else in the world.
With the turbulent conditions Wyatt Earp found in Tombstone, he had been familiar all his life. He was a natural master of such conditions. Probably no man of his day in the West was more logically fitted to become the man of Tombstone’s hour. Brains, courage, and dominant qualities as a leader carried him quickly to the top; a myriad enemies pulled him down. He rose to power in romance and fell from power in tragedy, and the story of his rise and fall is one of the most dramatic in the history of the frontier.
Doc Holliday, the fighting ace of the Earp faction and considered by connoisseurs in deadliness the coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone, had accompanied Wyatt Earp from Dodge City. He was a rather tall, extremely slender, ash-blond, gray-eyed fellow, immaculate in attire, fastidious in his habits, temperamental, hot tempered and cold-blooded, querulous and sometimes a little quarrelsome, a wit as well as a desperado. He might become quite excited if his breakfast eggs were not just so, but no man was cooler when bullets were flying. He was a consumptive, and the malady had left his face emaciated and very white and given it a look of refinement that might have passed for spirituality. One might have been tempted to suspect that this quiet, pale man with the fine gray eyes was a poet or a scholar who pored over erudite volumes under midnight lamps. But except for a few elegies done with finished elegance with his six-shooter, the doctor never displayed any poetic or literary leanings.
He was, after a kind, a cynical philosopher, and his passing observations were spiced with a dry, acrid humour. Life seemed a bitter joke to him. He was reconciled to tuberculosis, he said, because it had left him so thin that it took mighty good shooting to hit him. He was still ready to bet, however, that in the homestretch drive, a bullet would nose out consumption at the wire.
He was an excellent shot. Buckskin Frank Leslie was the only man in Tombstone credited with being his equal in quickness and accuracy with a six-shooter. When deputized to assist the Earps in any little emergency that happened to arise, the doctor appeared with a sawed-off shotgun, deadliest of weapons, swung to his shoulder under his coat; he was not one to waste time, energy, or ammunition; when any shooting was to be done, he shot to kill.
He had been educated as a dentist. He sometimes dug out of his trunk to show to an intimate friend a souvenir that he had carried through all his peregrinations in the West. It was an old tin sign on which was painted “Dr. J. D. Holliday—Dentist,” and it had once swung in front of his office in Dallas. The doctor often laughed to think that a true knight-errant and adventurer like himself ever had engaged in filling cavities and crowning molars.
A Southern man, well born and well educated, his speech was the soft slurring drawl of the South, and he could play the polished gentleman when he chose. No scruples of any kind handicapped the doctor in his busy life. Though square with his friends, who would have trusted him with their last dollar, his honesty had various shades and nuances. If honesty was convenient, he was honest; otherwise, he used a cold deck.
His courage was his one outstanding virtue. He was afraid of nothing. Despite his delicate appearance and his physical weakness, there was something in the calm, cold look of him which warned of danger. Men of gun-handle notches, whom everybody else feared, themselves feared Doc Holliday.
Holliday was born in Valdosta, Georgia, of a fine and very old Southern family, members of which still live in the little town just north of the Florida line. His ancestors had been cotton-planters and slaveholders for generations, and his father served through the Civil War as a major in the Confederate Army. The white boys of the town had reserved a swimming hole in the Withlacoochee River for their own exclusive use, and when they went to swim one day and found it filled with Negroes, young Holliday emptied his revolver among the darkies. One story says that he killed three and another that he only wounded that number. But as a result of this escapade, he disappeared from Valdosta and was never seen there again.
He was next heard of practising dentistry in Dallas. Having abandoned dentistry for gambling, he killed a man over a game of cards in Jacksboro. He killed a soldier a little later in another Texas town, and, to avoid capture by the military authorities, he rode alone across eight hundred miles of wild, unsettled country, swarming with hostile Indians, and arrived in Denver in 1876. There, in a knife duel, he almost killed Bud Ryan. He shot and seriously wounded Kid Kolton in Trinidad. He quarrelled with Mike Gordon in Las Vegas and shot him dead. He drifted then into the Texas Panhandle, where he fell in with Wyatt Earp.
“I first met Doc Holliday in Fort Griffen, Texas, in 1877,” said Wyatt Earp. “I was down in that country from Dodge City after a bunch of cow thieves. There was a woman in town—well, you can call her Doc’s inamorata. Her name was Kate Fisher, but in that refined town they called her Big Nose Kate. A name like that might suggest a big, coarse female, but Kate wasn’t like that; she was what you might call handsome, in a way. I liked Doc; he was a witty fellow and good company; he asked me a lot of questions about Dodge and thought he and Kate might like to come there. I had to go to Fort Clark for a few days, and when I got back to Fort Griffin, I found the town buzzing with excitement over Doc and Kate.
“Doc had sat in a game of poker one night with a fellow named Ed Bailey. This Bailey was a crooked card man, and he was always monkeying with the deadwood, which is to say, the discards, and Doc admonished him once or twice to quit this and play poker. Finally, a pretty nice pot came along. Doc called and Bailey spread down three kings. Doc didn’t say a word but just quietly pulled down the pot and threw his hand away without showing what he held. Of course, Bailey started a big holler.
“ ‘I saw you palming one of those kings,’ said Doc.
“ ‘Give me that money,’ roared Bailey. ‘I won it and I’ll have it.’
“Doc was stacking the chips in front of him as Bailey reached for them. Doc knocked his hand away. Bailey went for his six-shooter and was coming up with it when Doc drew a long knife from under his coat collar—he had it hanging by a cord down his back—and with a sidewise swipe below the brisket ripped Bailey wide open.
“Doc was arrested. While he was being held in the hotel office under guard of the town marshal and two policemen, Bailey’s gambler and cowboy friends gathered in the street. The crowd kept growing and getting uglier. There was talk of getting a rope, and things began to look pretty bad for Doc. Big Nose Kate got word of what was going on and hurried to the hotel. The officers let her in, and she had a little talk with Doc and went away. Now a big nose generally means a strong, bold character—at least, so I’ve heard tell—and right now Big Nose Kate lived up to her nose.
“She ordered a couple of horses saddled at a livery and hitched them in an alley. Then she started a blaze in a shed back of the hotel and ran into the street yelling, ‘Fire!’ When, just as she had figured, the mob deserted the front of the hotel and rushed to the burning building, Kate walked into the hotel office. This time she had on a man’s pants, coat, boots, and hat. From a satchel she was carrying she jerked a pair of six-shooters. Doc grabbed them and ordered the marshal and the two deputies to throw up their hands. While Doc kept the marshals covered, Kate disarmed them, and, stowing their artillery in her bag, she and Doc backed out of the door.
“When the mob got back from the fire, madder than ever and still talking about a lynching, Doc and Kate were galloping hard across the prairies on a four-hundred-mile ride to Dodge City. I found them there on my return, living in style at a hotel, and they laughed as they told me about their adventure and seemed to regard it as a fine joke.”
Between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, as cold, deadly men, perhaps, as the frontier knew, existed a friendship classic in its loyalty. For his friend, the coldest-blooded killer in Tombstone risked his life time and again, and only the accidents of the fighting prevented his making friendship’s last supreme sacrifice. And what Doc Holliday gave in friendship, Wyatt Earp returned in a friendship as staunch.
“Doc Holliday saved my life in Dodge City once,” said Wyatt Earp. “I had arrested a man known to be dangerous. His friends surrounded me to rescue him. Doc saw one of these cutthroats draw a gun and throw down to shoot me in the back. ‘Look out, Wyatt,’ Doc shouted. But before the words were out of his mouth, he jerked his six-shooter and shot the man who in another second would have murdered me. Lifelong friendships on the frontier were founded on such incidents as this. Doc was my friend and I was Doc’s friend until he died. Many a man told me this and that about Doc Holliday—and he was no saint—but nobody on earth could knock Doc Holliday to me. He was one of the finest, cleanest men in the world, though, of course, he was a little handy with his gun and had to kill a few fellows.”
So these two friends stood side by side through good and evil report, through fortune and misfortune, through thick and thin, and back to back they fought in the swirling gloom of the final storm that threatened to engulf them.
Virgil, Morgan, James, and Warren Earp, his brothers, soon joined Wyatt in Tombstone. Of the five Earps, Virgil was the eldest, Wyatt, Morgan, James, and Warren following in descending age sequence. Though Wyatt was the second born, he was the undisputed leader of the fraternal quintette by right of brains, initiative, and force of character. All were stalwart blond men, the family resemblance strong in every face, all plainly whelped in the same lion’s litter. Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan alone played important roles in Tombstone’s colourful drama, James and Warren being looked upon by their elder brothers as mere cubs, promising, perhaps, but of an age too tender for the game of fang and claw.
Virgil Earp, who rose to historic importance as town marshal of Tombstone, had fought through the Civil War in the Union Army, was old to the frontier, and had himself served as early marshal of Dodge City. He had the stern look of a soldier and a soldier’s stern sense of duty. He was a taciturn man of rough simplicity and blunt honesty, moving toward whatever destination he had in view with crushing inevitability and stolid, blind fearlessness. Morgan Earp was more headstrong and impetuous and mentally keener. With the cool poise that was a distinguishing mark of the breed, he, too, was slow to wrath, but when once aroused, fought with the same desperate, merciless courage that distinguished his two older brothers. He also had been schooled to the frontier in Dodge City.
When the railroad went through Arizona and the new town of Benson became the depot for all incoming and outgoing freight for the entire Tombstone region, Wyatt Earp for seven months rode as shotgun messenger for the Wells-Fargo Company on the Benson stages. With stages being robbed with startling frequency on all the other lines centering in Tombstone, it might be supposed that these seven months were crowded with thrilling adventures. But, on the contrary, nothing at all happened. When highwaymen saw the grim Dodge City fighter sitting up on the box with a shotgun across his knees, they left that stage alone. Not a single Benson stage was robbed during Wyatt Earp’s term of service. Bear this fact in mind. It will prove an illuminating footnote to certain events that happened later.
While Wyatt Earp was guarding Wells-Fargo treasure boxes, the Oriental saloon and gambling house, then the largest in Tombstone, got into difficulties. Dave Rickabaugh, one of the owners, had offended a clique of gamblers who were trying, by threats and gunplay, to run the proprietors out of town. Luke Short, an old-time Dodge City friend of Wyatt Earp’s, was dealing in the Oriental. He was a quiet, gentlemanly fellow who, despite his diminutive stature, had a reputation as a gun fighter. Charlie Storms, formerly of Deadwood, one of the opposition gamblers, ugly and half drunk, came in.
“Any man who’ll work for Rickabaugh is a yellow coyote,” he snarled at Luke. Luke slid a case card out of the box and said nothing.
“You goin’ to sit there and take that?” sneered Storms. Luke took a yellow stack off the five-spot and set it in the rack.
“These Dodge City fighters ain’t deuce high here in Tombstone,” taunted Storms. Luke paid off a bet on the queen.
Friends dragged Storms away; Luke went out to lunch. When Short returned, Storms stood in the doorway of the Oriental with a six-shooter in his hand.
“Say, you Dodge City killer, come on and fight,” roared Storms. “I’ll give you the first shot.” Short took the first shot. Then two more for good measure. Storms fell dead.
But the killing, for which Short was acquitted in Tucson—he never returned to Tombstone—did not stop the campaign of intimidation. As a last resort, the proprietors of the Oriental offered Wyatt Earp a partnership in the place. He accepted. The new partner took over the management of the house. He moved among the patrons with a genial smile and a pair of big six-shooters buckled around him. He sent this message to the firm’s enemies:
“If you fellows are still looking for trouble, drop into the Oriental and I’ll fill you so full that it’ll run out of your ears. I aim to please.”
The sight of the gaunt old lion ready and perhaps eager for battle, discouraged the gamblers of the hostile faction. They thought him, as one expressed it, “too gosh-darned accommodatin’.” There were no more attempts at terrorism. The Oriental became the most orderly place in town. Also one of the most popular and prosperous. As part proprietor of a big saloon and gambling house, Wyatt Earp seemed on the road to affluence. He resigned his position with the express company, and Morgan Earp succeeded him as shotgun messenger on the Benson stages.
Bat Masterson, former sheriff of Dodge City, joined Wyatt Earp in Tombstone but remained only a few months. Bat returned to Dodge City when he learned that his brother, Jim, was having trouble with George Peacock and Al Updegraft. Peacock and Jim Masterson were partners in the Lady Gay saloon and dance hall in Dodge, and Updegraft was their bartender. Bat went by stage to Deming, where he struck the railroad. As he dropped off the train in Dodge, he saw Peacock and Updegraft coming toward the depot and opened fire. Updegraft got a bullet through the lungs and staggered back into the dance hall. Peacock dodged behind a calaboose across the railroad tracks, and Bat behind a box car, and they shot it out until their ammunition was exhausted. Neither Bat nor Peacock was injured. Updegraft was in bed for two months, and when pneumonia set in, he died.
“Bat Masterson was a brave man,” said Wyatt Earp, whose estimate of the famous sheriff is of interest. “As a peace officer he deserved all the celebrity he ever had, but as a killer his reputation has been greatly exaggerated. Old stories credit Bat with having killed twenty-seven men. The truth is, he never killed but four in his life.
“I knew Bat when he was a kid in Wichita and he and I were bosom friends in Dodge. I hunted buffalo with him when he was hardly big enough to handle a rifle and I’ve been with him on many a roundup after outlaws. I shared the same home with him in Denver after my Tombstone days were over and kept up a correspondence with him until his death a few years ago in New York. I know his career from beginning to end.
“Bat killed his first man at Sweetwater, Texas, when he was eighteen years old. While he was serving as a civilian scout with the army, a dance hall girl in Sweetwater took a shine to him. A cavalry sergeant named King grew jealous. When King went into the dance hall one night and saw Bat and the girl dancing together, he drew his gun. The girl saw him first and threw her arms around Bat to protect him. King’s bullet killed her and, passing through her body, wounded Bat in the thigh. As the girl fell, Bat put a bullet through King’s heart.
“When I was marshal of Dodge in 1877, I went out with a posse to hunt some train robbers who had held up a Santa Fe express at Kinsley, and in my absence, Ed Masterson, Bat’s brother, acted as marshal. Some Texas cowboys were raising cain in a dance hall, and Bat and Ed went to quiet the disturbance. At the door, Jack Wagner, one of the cowboys, shot and killed Ed Masterson. As Ed reeled out into the street, Bat killed Wagner. When Alf Walker, the ringleader of the cowboys, came rushing out of the hall with a six-shooter Bat shot him twice. Walker ran up the street and through a saloon and dropped dead in an alley. Bat went into the dance hall and opened up on the other cowboys, but they piled out through the windows and got away.
“The next man on Bat’s list was Updegraft. Bat showed me the message he received in Tombstone and it was not from his brother. It didn’t say what kind of trouble Jim Masterson was mixed up in. It only said that Peacock and Updegraft were threatening to kill him. Bat had had a quarrel with Jim and was hardly on speaking terms with him at the time but he took the first stage out of Tombstone to go back to Dodge and help his brother. That was the old frontier’s brand of loyalty. These four—King, Wagner, Walker, and Updegraft—are the only men Bat ever killed, and there has always been a doubt whether Updegraft died of pneumonia or the wound from Bat’s bullet.”
The Tombstone stage was set and the drama getting under way when John H. Behan, his entrance slightly delayed, as befitted that of so important an actor, made his bow as the first sheriff of Cochise County. He was appointed to the position by the governor when Cochise County was organized out of Pima County in the winter of 1880–1881, and Tombstone was made the county seat. Behan had lived in Arizona since 1836, having come across the plains from Missouri, had had varied frontier experience, and had served as recorder and sheriff of Yavapai county.
Already in middle life, he was a bustling, self-important man, never too busy to stop and shake hands or clap somebody on the shoulder with a great show of friendliness. Everybody in Tombstone was soon calling him Johnny Behan.
Johnny Behan was a good man misplaced in a tough mining camp, his life and character twisted by circumstances into which he had been hurled by one of destiny’s unfortunate accidents. In a happier environment, he would have been considered a splendid character. He was sunny, companionable, kindly, honest, generous, loyal. But in Tombstone he was a twenty-two calibre man in a forty-five calibre town. Tombstone thirsted for strong waters; John Behan had only sarsaparilla and lemon pop on tap.
He was not devoid of courage or initiative. But his indecision left an impression of timidity, and he lacked the force to finish what he started. He was vacillating, flustered, impulsive. He darted at a problem instead of calmly thinking it out. He had energy but clouded vision. He was a man of words rather than action. He blustered and failed to live up to his bluster. He talked like a big man and acted like a little one. He was perhaps not wholly inoffensive and free from guile but, judged by his Tombstone career, he seems to have been rather futile. However, Johnny Behan was nobody’s fool. He knew a cholla from a prickly pear when the desert wind was southerly.
But if, as a man, Johnny Behan was small potatoes, as a politician he was some pumpkins. Canny and sly and very crafty was the sheriff at the deep and subtle game of politics. He knew every crook and turn and sharp angle of it and was a wizard at all the tricks. When he smiled a little more than usual, people used to say, “Johnny’s probably up to some top-and-bottom trick or dealing from a marked deck.” Or if his face was particularly lamblike and innocent, he was suspected of having an ace up his sleeve. No amateur politician had any business sitting in at Johnny Behan’s game. The man who gambled with the sheriff at politics had to nurse his chips and play his cards close to his belly, or he would find himself pushing his chair back from the table without bed money or the price of a breakfast. As a politician, Johnny Behan was a foxy, dangerous boy.
Sheriff Behan was hardly more than comfortably settled in office when Wyatt Earp announced himself a candidate for sheriff at the next election. So the two men were political rivals from the first, and political rivalry developed into personal enmity. Friendly with Sheriff Behan and solidly arrayed against the Earps were Curly Bill and his outlaws. After Wyatt Earp had on one occasion knocked Curly Bill about the head with the butt of a six-shooter and dragged him off to jail, the freebooter chieftain nursed his wrath and thirsted for revenge. Sharing his deadly antipathy were such leading figures in the outlaw confederacy as Ike, Finn, and Billy Clanton, ferocious Old Man Clanton, their father, Tom and Frank McLowery, John Ringo, Pete Spence, and Frank Stilwell.
A power to be dreaded and reckoned with were these outlaws. They were strong in numbers, and most of the dwellers up and down the lonely reaches of the San Pedro, Sulphur Springs, and San Simon valleys were either their avowed friends and allies or maintained a show of friendliness through fear. If the Earps ruled in Tombstone, all the wild region in which Tombstone was an oasis lay under the shadow of outlaw dominance and was, it might be said, in fief to these murderous and powerful bands. The hostility of the outlaws, countenanced, it might seem, by Sheriff Behan’s friendly attitude toward them, finally brought in the day when the power of the Earps was broken and they withdrew from Tombstone forever, leaving behind them a crimson trail to mark their vengeance.
This, then, was the lineup in a situation that rapidly developed into hair-trigger tension. On one side Sheriff Behan and his puissant political machine, with murderous outlaw hatreds in the shadowy background; on the other side, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday, as the fighting force of the Earp faction, entrenched in power in Tombstone but ringed with enemies who watched and waited unseen in the deserts and mountains.
Wyatt Earp cleaned up Tombstone. His motives may have been those of an honest champion of good government, or they may have been those of a self-seeking politician establishing a record on which he might stand for election in the shrievalty contest. One’s choice is optional in the matter. But the fact remains that he did a good job. His faction became known as the Law and Order party. He had the support of the best citizens. The Tombstone papers of the period were outspoken in his praise.
Sheriff Behan’s administration, on the other hand, was repeatedly and severely criticized. His complacent relations with the outlaws particularly brought about his head the protests of citizens and the denunciations of the press. It is not surprising, in view of the bitterness of the political situation, that all the charges made against the Earps had their origin in Sheriff Behan’s faction. The desperate character of Wyatt Earp and his colleagues was pointed out. It was hinted that the Law and Order party was controlled by gunmen bent only upon their own aggrandizement. Vague rumours were set going that the Earps were in collusion with stage robbers. Suspicion was aroused in the public mind, but with the machinery of the law in his control, Sheriff Behan took no steps to arrest or bring to trial the men against whom these whispered insinuations were directed.
The long-smouldering feud between the two men might have been comic if its results had been less tragic. Wyatt Earp ignored the little sheriff or roused himself only occasionally to make a lazy gesture as if brushing a fly from the end of his nose. It was as if a truculent pygmy with twanging bow were shooting pins at some drowsy old saga giant. But when Johnny Behan fell back upon the ingratiating tactics of a politician, the advantage was all on his side. Johnny Behan was friendly, Wyatt Earp was grim; Johnny Behan smiled, Wyatt Earp shot from the hip; Johnny Behan was the personification of the glad hand, Wyatt Earp the personification of the trigger finger. … A lion stalks with measured stride through the dewy shadows. Back of him is the darkness of the donga. The moon is a sickle of silver in a glowing green sky against which a tall palm leans blackly. The grunting roar of the old wilderness monarch rolls with dim, menacing clamour across the veldt. From the mimosa thickets a fox fills the twilight with a thin uproar of shrill, savage barks.