XIV
The Red Road of Vengeance
Play was slow that night at the Oriental. Too soon after Christmas, perhaps. Holiday gifts had told on purses. Only thin groups were at the faro and roulette tables, and only stragglers at the bar. Wyatt and Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday sat against the wall in desultory talk.
“Among the Christmas gifts from my many friends in Tombstone,” remarked Doc Holliday with a whimsical smile, “was a neat little box wrapped in tissue paper and tied with pink ribbon. ‘Ah-ha,’ thinks I, ‘here’s a present from my sweetheart.’ ”
“Big Nose Kate probably,” laughed Wyatt.
“All bundled up in soft white cotton,” continued the doctor, “was a forty-five calibre bullet. A little card enclosed was signed ‘Well Wisher’ and said, ‘I’ve got another one just like this that I’m going to give you some day—in the neck.’ ”
“All old Santa Claus dropped in my Christmas socks,” observed Wyatt, “was some threats. From Ike Clanton’s gang, I suppose. Those fellows are not through with us. I hear our friend, Mayor Clum, is being threatened. And Judge Wells Spicer for deciding in our favour. And Marshall Williams. The Lord knows what they’re threatening Williams for.”
“For being our friend,” cut in Virgil. “Ain’t that crime enough?”
“Johnny Behan probably thinks so,” said Wyatt. “Except for Ike Clanton, the sheriff was the strongest witness the prosecution had. It wasn’t Johnny’s fault we weren’t sent over the road.”
“Harmless cuss,” commented Holliday.
“Not so harmless as you think,” returned Wyatt. “If it hadn’t been for a bodyguard of citizens, we’d never have lived to get to Contention after our second arrest.”
The Earps and Holliday had been rearrested on warrants after their discharge by Judge Wells Spicer at the preliminary hearing and taken by Sheriff Behan and a posse to Contention for trial. Fifty friends of the Earps accompanied them. The prisoners were released on writs of habeas corpus, and the trial never took place because the grand jury refused to return indictments.
“I think myself we’d have been assassinated on the road by Ike Clanton, Frank Stilwell, Pete Spence, and their friends,” said Virgil. “But I don’t think Johnny Behan knew anything about it. I’ll give him credit for that.”
“Maybe not,” replied Wyatt. “But we’d have been killed just the same, if it hadn’t been for our friends who went along.”
“That certainly was a funny yarn Ike Clanton told on the stand,” declared Virgil, “about meeting Leonard, Head, and Crane at Hereford after the Benson stage holdup, and how Leonard told him Doc murdered Philpot. Those three fellows at that time were streaking through the mesquite two good jackrabbit jumps ahead of the posse, and they must have had to talk pretty fast to drop that piece of information into Ike’s ear.”
“Ike,” replied Holliday, “overplayed his hand on the stand. Judge Spicer thought his testimony too good to be true.”
“I’ve heard,” said Virgil, “that Johnny Behan contributed money to help prosecute us.”
“Yes, that story’s been going around,” responded Wyatt, “but Johnny denied the charge on the witness stand.”
“I’ll never forgive you for not killing Ike Clanton when he grabbed you, Wyatt,” said Holliday. “I wish he’d grabbed me instead of you. I’d have cooked his goose so quick he’d never have known what hit him. I did the best I could as it was, but he was running too fast, and I had to shoot too quick. Ike ought to turn professional sprinter. He’d make money as a footrunner at county fairs.”
“There’s been talk,” remarked Virgil, “that Ike had a gun on him but was too big a coward to use it. While he was on the witness stand, you remember, one of the lawyers said to him, ‘Is it not the truth, Mr. Clanton, that as you were running from the fight, you threw away a large-calibre pistol?’ There was a hunt made for that gun but none was found.”
“I heard a story,” said Wyatt, “that Ike, Finn, and Billy Clanton, a few weeks before the fight, pretended to have killed Curly Bill and tried to collect a reward from Old Man Hooker of the Sierra Bonita ranch. They say Hooker got tired of Curly’s stealing his cattle and his monthly pay rolls and offered a reward of $1,000 for Curly’s head. For his head, mind you. The Clantons took a dead man’s head in a burlap sack to the Sierra Bonita, so the story goes, and said it was Curly Bill’s and they had killed him at Monkey Springs. And Hooker, they say, paid the Clantons the $1,000. Hooker, however, denied emphatically that he paid them a cent. But I wonder whose head that was?”
“Some Mexican’s the Clantons had murdered in the San Pedro, probably,” suggested Holliday. “They say they killed half a dozen greasers over there right after Mexicans got their daddy in Guadalupe Canyon.”
The latest stage robbery came up for discussion. When the stage, on its way from Tombstone to Bisbee, passed Lewis Springs near the Clanton ranch, W. S. Waite, driver, and Charles Bartholomew, shotgun messenger, grew suspicious when they saw five men armed with rifles riding ahead off at the side of the trail. At Hereford, Bartholomew added a Winchester to his armament. While the stage was in the hills eight miles from Bisbee in the afternoon, five men in the road ahead opened fire at a distance of seventy-five yards. Two shots hit one of the wheel horses. Driver Waite turned the team around and went galloping away on the back trail. The robbers on horseback pursued the stage for five miles, keeping up a fusillade to which Bartholomew replied with shotgun and Winchester. The wounded horse grew weak, and, as the stage slowed down, two of the nine passengers jumped out. The driver stopped to pick them up. This halt gave the robbers their chance. They circled the stage out of gunshot range and blocked the road ahead. Then they sent a note to Driver Waite by a Mexican wood-hauler saying that all aboard the stage would be killed unless the money box was tossed out. Waite and Bartholomew deemed it advisable to comply, and the box, containing $6,500 of Copper Queen payroll money, was thrown to the ground. Three of the robbers with handkerchiefs over their faces rode up and took possession of the treasure box. One of the bandits liked the looks of one of the lead horses and unhooked the animal and took it with him. The highwaymen ordered the stage to turn round again and head for Bisbee. But when Waite said he couldn’t make the mountain grade with only two horses, they allowed him to drive back to Hereford.
“I suspect Ike Clanton of that job,” said Wyatt Earp. “When I made the proposition to him to betray Leonard, Head, and Crane, he said he would lure them into a trap by inviting them to help in the robbery of a Copper Queen payroll.”
“If he did it,” added Virgil, “I’d be willing to bet Frank Stilwell and Pete Spence were in with him.”
“Stilwell and Spence are not playing Tombstone very hard these days,” interposed Holliday. “But I hear they’ve been making threats against us.”
“Yes,” replied Wyatt, “I’ve heard they are planning to murder us. They’re bad fellows. They may bushwhack us or shoot us in the back. But they’ll never make a fight in the open. And, by the way, John Ringo, who used to make a habit of parading up and down Allen Street looking for trouble with us, hasn’t been in town since the big fight.”
“Ringo knows when to play safe, just like all the rest of these bold, bad outlaws,” sneered Holliday.
“Ringo sent me a message the other day by Briggs Goodrich,” went on Wyatt. “Goodrich met him in Charleston. ‘Tell Wyatt Earp,’ said Ringo, ‘that, if any more fighting comes up, I’ll have nothing to do with it. I’m looking out only for myself from now on.’ Sounded as if Ringo wasn’t as anxious for our game as he used to be. Maybe he’s acquired the idea we’re a little harder than he thought we were.”
Virgil Earp arose.
“What time is it, Wyatt?” he asked.
“Lacks fifteen minutes till midnight,” replied Wyatt, looking at his watch.
“Guess I’ll take a look around town and see what’s doing,” said the marshal.
The front door of the saloon had hardly closed upon Virgil when Wyatt Earp and Holliday heard a roar of guns outside. They rushed out and found Virgil lying bleeding and unconscious in the middle of Fifth Street between the Oriental and the Crystal Palace. He had been fired upon with shotguns loaded with buckshot by five men in ambush in an unfinished building at the southwest corner of Fifth and Allen streets where the Tourist Hotel stands today. The would-be assassins escaped across a deep ravine at the edge of town and disappeared in the darkness through the hills in the direction of Charleston. They were never apprehended, it may be added, and their identity was never learned.
Virgil Earp had been wounded in two places. One bullet had entered his back above the left hip and passed through his body. Another had fractured the upper bone of the left arm and surgeons removed a section of the bone. It was thought at first his injuries would prove fatal. News went out from Tombstone that the marshal had been killed. He lingered between life and death for several weeks. Then he began to mend. But his arm remained helpless, and he suffered from the wound in his back to the end of his life. He was a cripple on crutches when the lurking enemies of the Earps, secretly plotting vengeance, struck a second time from the dark.
Mrs. Marietta Spence and Mrs. Francisco Castro, her mother, sat on the porch of their cottage in the outskirts of Tombstone in quiet enjoyment of an evening in early spring.
“That star hanging over the Dragoons,” remarked Mrs. Spence, “looks like a diamond as big as an orange.”
Three men slinking through the street with furtive, noiseless tread materialized out of the night like ghosts.
“Why, hello, Pete,” said Mrs. Spence. “I didn’t hear you coming. You startled me.”
“Cook us some supper,” ordered Pete Spence brusquely, as he and his companions hurried inside.
Pete Spence was not one of the world’s great lovers. This was his greeting to his Mexican wife after a month’s absence from home.
The two men with Spence were Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz, an Indian-Mexican half-breed otherwise known as Indian Charlie. After eating their meal in silence, they retired into a locked room and talked in low tones until long past midnight. Stilwell and Cruz slept at the Spence home. At noon next day, which was Saturday, Spence and Indian Charlie went up town. Stilwell remained hidden in the house.
Spence and Indian Charlie ensconced themselves inside the door of an Allen Street saloon. For an hour they watched the passersby on the sidewalk. No word was exchanged between them. Spence appeared nervous. The half-breed stood motionless, with stolid, inscrutable face. Morgan Earp chanced to saunter by.
“That’s him,” exclaimed Spence excitedly in a whispered shout. “That’s him.”
Indian Charlie became instantly transformed. He awoke from his seeming lethargy to tense, tingling interest. It was as if a bronze statue suddenly had come to life. He shot through the door like a bloodhound on a trail. He hurried after Morgan Earp, passed him, stopped, pretended to look in a shop window for a moment, and then faced about. Morgan Earp apparently did not see him. But the keen black eyes of Indian Charlie scrutinized Morgan Earp narrowly from head to foot. On Indian Charlie’s brain was pictured indelibly, as by a flashlight camera, Morgan Earp’s strong young fighter’s face, bold blue-gray eyes, yellow hair, straight, stalwart figure. No danger that the half-breed ever would forget this man. Indian Charlie would know Morgan Earp henceforth anywhere he saw him.
It was perhaps ten o’clock that night that Spence, Stilwell, and Indian Charlie left Spence’s house. Stilwell and the half-breed had six-shooters buckled around them and carried magazine carbines. No arms were visible on Spence, though he had a revolver in his hip pocket. The night was cloudy and very dark. The sinister trio slipped through the streets like phantoms. At the edge of the lighted business section they separated. Stilwell and the half-breed slunk away toward some clandestine destination. Spence mingled with the throngs on Allen Street. He strolled along with a casual air, idled on a corner, lounged in a doorway. But never on bandit raid or Indian campaign did Pete Spence scout more vigilantly than he was scouting this night on Tombstone’s crowded street. Somewhere off in the darkness, in their secret hiding place, Stilwell and Indian Charlie were awaiting his directions.
Morgan Earp was leaning against the bar in Campbell & Hatch’s saloon and billiard hall on Allen Street between Fourth and Fifth when Bob Hatch, one of the proprietors, returned at eleven o’clock from a performance at the Bird Cage Opera House.
“You’ve been making your boasts for a long time, Bob,” said Morgan banteringly, “that you can beat me playing pool. I’ll play you now, and if I beat you, I never want to hear another cheep out of you.”
“All right, Morg,” laughed Hatch, “I’ll go you once, if I lose. Come on.”
The pool table on which they elected to play stood at the end of the long hall close to the rear wall. At the north side of this rear wall and opening into an alley was a door, the upper portion of which was like a window set with four panes. The two lower panes were painted white, the two upper were clear glass. Morgan and Hatch laid aside their coats, and the game began. Sherman McMasters, Dan Tipton, and Pat Holland seated in chairs against the side walls, looked on.
“This is for the championship,” said Morgan jokingly.
“You bet,” returned Hatch.
While the game was in progress, Pete Spence wandered in off Allen Street, took a drink at the bar in the front of the house, sent a momentary lazy glance across the long intervening row of billiard tables at the players in the rear end, and sauntered out again. But as soon as he stepped out on the sidewalk, his seeming listlessness fell from him. Walking rapidly, he turned a corner and faded into darkness.
Morgan’s eighth ball clicked into a pocket. He had won. Laughing uproariously, he gave Hatch a resounding clap on the shoulder.
“Knew I could beat you,” he bumbled jovially.
“Don’t crow yet awhile,” flashed back Hatch. “Wait till I get warmed up.”
Just at that moment, Frank Stilwell and Indian Charlie arrived at the alley door. From the black darkness, they peered silently in through the upper clear-glass panes. Pete Spence’s scouting expedition had worked to climax. From the brightly lighted interior of the hall, the two upper panes in the door had the appearance of dark mirrors glimmering with dim reflections. No one saw the two cold faces looking in out of the night with burning, basilisk eyes upon the merry scene. No one suspected that just beyond the door lurked murder.
The second game had begun. Hatch was bending over the table making a studied shot. Morgan stood chalking his cue a few feet from the door and with his back to it.
Came in the momentary stillness a sudden deafening crash. Then quickly a second.
Morgan spun round toward the door. His cue flew from his hand and clattered against the wall. His arms shot above his head and, lunging in a stumbling fall, he crumpled upon his face among a myriad glittering splinters of broken glass. A gust of wind whisked through two shattered jagged panes in the door. Hatch, McMasters, Tipton, and Holland, stunned for an instant by the quick tragedy, rushed into the alley. Only empty darkness there. A staccato clamour of boots thudding on packed earth came to them out of the black distance.
Morgan Earp, still conscious, was laid upon a lounge in a cardroom. Wyatt, Virgil, and Warren Earp gathered round him.
“Bend down to me, Wyatt,” Morgan murmured. “I’m dying.”
Bending over him, Wyatt nodded his head grimly as the mortally wounded men whispered some secret in his ear.
Morgan lingered for a half hour. He smiled faintly as the clock on the wall marked midnight.
“The game’s over,” he said in a clear voice.
The game of life and the game of pool both over. Life for him had been in truth a game, and he had played it with the spirit of a cavalier adventurer, gaily, carelessly, recklessly, bravely—above all, bravely. He had cashed in his chips, shoved back his chair, and gone out with a smile into the eternal silence.
Of the two shots fired by the assassins through the door, one had passed through a lower opaque pane and the other through an upper pane of clear glass. The second bullet bored into the wall above Sherman McMaster’s head. The first struck Morgan Earp in the small of the back, shattered his spine, and passing through his body, lodged in the thigh of George Berry standing by a stove at the front of the hall. Berry’s wound caused his death.
“Berry’s injury,” said Dr. George Goodfellow, “was inconsequential and hardly more than an abrasion. Technically, he died from shock. The simple fact was the man was scared to death.”
Bells of Tombstone tolled all day Sunday while Morgan Earp lay in state blanketed by flowers in the Cosmopolitan Hotel. The body was taken to Benson Monday, and, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Earp, Mr. and Mrs. James Earp, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday, started by train to its last resting place in Colton, California, home of the parents of the Earps. Virgil and James Earp were saying farewell to Arizona. Neither ever returned. Thus passed from the Tombstone scene Virgil and Morgan Earp, two of the fighting Earp triumvirate, one dead, the other broken in health and disabled by wounds, both victims of assassins who had tracked them relentlessly in skulking secrecy and whose cowardly vengeance had blazed out of the darkness of night. Of the three warrior brothers, Wyatt Earp alone was left—one, but a lion.
Stilwell, Spence, and Indian Charlie arrived at the Spence home while Morgan Earp was dying. Spence was white and trembling, according to his wife, and his teeth were chattering. Stilwell left almost immediately, and Indian Charlie an hour or so later. Spence arose from bed at six o’clock Sunday morning and ordered breakfast. He and his wife quarrelled and he slapped her. Possibly it was this slap in the face that caused his wife, at the coroner’s inquest, to reveal the secrets of the murderous plot. After a hurried breakfast, she said, Spence left on horseback for Sonora. A wise trip it proved to be. Spence’s sojourn in old Mexico doubtless saved him from the vengeance of Wyatt Earp, aroused now to the depths of his soul and filled with a raging lust for the blood of his brother’s murderers.
Bright and early Sunday morning, Frank Stilwell was in Tucson. The distance between Tombstone and Tucson, even as the crow flies, is hardly less than seventy-five miles. Across the San Pedro Valley through gaps between the mountain groups, this veteran robber of stages, who knew every secret trail and cow path of the mesas and deserts, had made the journey on horseback between midnight and daybreak and here he was in Tucson, dropping into saloons along Myer and Church streets and greeting old friends and acquaintances with smiling insouciance. His swift, secret flight by night had given him an alibi sufficiently plausible, it might have seemed, to convince any jury of twelve men of his innocence of Morgan Earp’s murder. But even the most cunning alibis, like other schemes of mice and men, gang aft agley. No jury of twelve men was to weigh the evidence of Stilwell’s crime. No eloquent lawyers, wise in the technicalities and subterfuges of the law, were to argue subtly in his defense. To only one man was he to answer for his midnight deed of blood, and that one man was Wyatt Earp.
Before Wyatt Earp left Tombstone with Morgan Earp’s body, he knew the identity of his brother’s assassins. What the secret was that was whispered into Wyatt Earp’s ear by Morgan Earp as he lay dying on the cardroom lounge has remained a secret, as far as the public is concerned, to this day. Morgan Earp, it was believed, had caught no fleeting glimpse of the murderers who fired upon him through the glass of the alley door. But, according to Dan Tipton, Morgan Earp had received some mysterious warning a few hours before his death to be on his guard against assassination. This, it was thought, was Morgan Earp’s dying secret, and it may have been accompanied by definite knowledge of the identity of the men in the plot. Whatever the source of the information, this much is certain: Wyatt Earp knew.
Ike Clanton was in Tucson when Stilwell arrived. Since Billy Clanton and the two McLowerys had died beneath the guns of the Earps and Doc Holliday, Ike Clanton had been threatening vengeance, and the Earps suspected that, in alliance with Stilwell and Spence, he had been at the bottom of the plots that had resulted in the wounding of Virgil and the death of Morgan Earp. It would have fared ill with Ike Clanton if, after these tragic affairs, he had chanced to encounter any of the Earps or Holliday. Armed or unarmed, he would have been killed without mercy. In Wyatt Earp’s hatred, no magnanimity was mingled now.
Ike Clanton received several telegrams from Tombstone on Monday warning him that Wyatt Earp and Holliday were with the escort accompanying Morgan Earp’s remains and would pass through Tucson late Monday afternoon. Ike Clanton showed these telegrams to Stilwell. The situation had a tinge of danger. What was to be done?
“You stay away from the depot,” Stilwell advised Clanton. “Wyatt Earp and Holliday know you are here. They will be on the lookout for you. They haven’t an inkling that I’m within fifty miles of Tucson. I’ll give them a little surprise.”
The train with the Earp party aboard drew into the station at Tucson. It was dusk. The town seemed a great dark blur with a few lights winking here and there in the houses. Deep shadows hung over the desert that swept away from the tracks. The mountains were darkly purple against the fading colours in the sky. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday stepped from a coach. They would get a breath of fresh air and take a turn for exercise up and down the long depot platform. But they were not to be caught napping by lurking foes. Wyatt Earp carried a rifle, Holliday a shotgun. The train was to stop ten minutes.
From the end of a street, Ike Clanton watched them furtively. He would have liked to kill these two men. But they were rough-looking customers. They knew how to use those guns that rested lightly in the crook of their arms. Their deaths could wait a while. So, through the street back into town faded this apostle of personal safety.
Back and forth Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday strolled leisurely. A man walking beside the track ahead of the train caught Wyatt Earp’s eye. A diffused glow from the long ray of the locomotive headlight faintly illuminated the distant figure, and something about it seemed vaguely familiar.
“There, Doc,” said Wyatt Earp in a tense voice hardly above a whisper, “look there. That’s Frank Stilwell.”
“By God, it is!” answered Holliday.
Stilwell was moving toward a string of box cars standing on a siding. His purpose, it was believed, was to take a position alongside the track and assassinate Wyatt Earp as the train went past. Possibly Wyatt Earp would be standing on a platform. If not, he might be killed by a bullet fired through a window. A shot in the dark was Stilwell’s favourite form of murder.
Going on tiptoe as noiselessly as possible but almost at a run, Wyatt Earp and Holliday hurried after him. Stilwell passed along one side of the box cars as Wyatt Earp and Holliday sped along the other. At the far end of the string of cars, the three men met.
Two short whistles sounded from the locomotive. With vast, smoky puffs and a hissing of steam, the giant machine slid forward. Half drowned in the thunderous rumble of the train, a sudden explosive report boomed upon the fireman’s ears as he leaned out the window of the engine pilot house. Then another. Four more in quick succession. Six in all.
“Sounded like shots,” yelled the fireman across the cab to the engineer sitting at the throttle.
“Some drunk celebratin’, I guess,” the engineer shouted back.
The coaches began to flash by, their windows brilliantly lighted. Two men seized the step-rails and swung aboard. From his cushioned seat, Virgil Earp, his crutches leaning beside him, glanced up to see Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday coming toward him through the aisle. Both were smiling. After they had taken seats, something Wyatt Earp said caused Virgil’s eyes to grow suddenly bright and his face to glow. Virgil shot out his hand. Wyatt Earp, then Holliday, shook it with solemn fervour. A passenger reading a magazine across the aisle looked over his spectacles with a touch of surprise. Strange. Why should these three men who had been travelling together for hours be shaking hands in such crazy fashion? Well, the world was full of funny people. The man across the aisle fell to his magazine again.
A railroad trackman carrying a lantern saw at dawn next morning some undefined, dark object on the ground at the end of the string of box cars. He stopped curiously and swung his light toward it to see what it was.
“Humph!”
A dead man lay on his face in the shine of the lantern. The dark, packed cinders about him were stained moistly red. The trackman lifted the edge of the coat gingerly to learn the cause of a sharp bulge above the hip. The heavy handle of a six-shooter was projecting from the pocket. Whoever this poor devil was, he had died without a chance to draw his weapon.
At the inquest, the coroner discovered six wounds on the body, four made by rifle balls and two by buckshot. The rifle balls had passed entirely through. One charge of buckshot had shattered the left thigh and tearing through the abdominal region, had splintered the spinal column. The other had entered the breast over the heart, leaving a gaping hole, above which a great burned spot showed in the coat.
Wyatt Earp’s vengeance had been swift. Morgan Earp had died at midnight Saturday. A little after sundown the following Monday, Frank Stilwell had paid for the murder with his blood.
An eastbound train was flagged to a stop after midnight at the little station of Rillito, nine miles west of Tucson. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday evidently had changed their minds about going to California. They boarded the train and returned to Benson. Before next morning’s sun was high above the Dragoons, they were back in Tombstone.
But Tombstone no longer was stronghold or refuge for them. The power of the Earps had been broken and their day was over. Of the old fighting oligarchy of four men that had ruled supreme in the town for more than two years, only two were left, and with enemies closing in, the position of these two was precarious if not desperate. Though in the retrospect, the fall of the Earps from power gives an impression of crashing suddenness, it was rather a process of gradual disintegration. Victories and defeats had alike contributed to their overthrow. Beset by political and personal foes, by secret machinations and murderous violence, the wonder is not that their power was so brief but that it endured so long.
The Benson stage affair was the beginning of the end. Doc Holliday’s innocence of participation in that crime had never been satisfactorily established and his friendship with Jim Crane, leader of the highwaymen, had tended to confirm belief in his guilt. At the same time the whispered suspicions against the Earps had had their effect upon the public mind and had been strengthened by the testimony of Ike Clanton in court. The battle against the Clantons and McLowerys had been for the Earps a Pyrrhic victory with the effect of a defeat. Nothing had done more to swing public sentiment against them. Billy Clanton’s heroic fight against hopeless odds and the fact that Ike Clanton and Tom McLowery were unarmed had engendered general sympathy for the three outlaws who had gone with splendid courage to their death and, while kindling to flaming intensity the hatred of the enemies of the Earps, had alienated not a few friends. Apologists found the tragedy difficult to defend and foes openly proclaimed it cold-blooded murder.
Morgan Earp’s assassination had left a serious gap in the Earps’ fighting strength and the departure of Virgil Earp disabled by wounds had meant the loss to the faction of police power. Finally the killing of Stilwell—an Earp victory, if one chooses to call it that—was disastrous in that it placed Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday outside the pale of law. If it could be considered justifiable under the unwritten law, the written statutes would hold the slayers to strict account. The two avengers of Morgan Earp’s death stood at the forks of the road. They must stand trial for murder or leave the country. A trial might mean acquittal but it might also mean the penitentiary or the gallows. They determined not to stake their lives and liberty on the dubious chance of a jury’s verdict and made preparations to seek safe harbour beyond the boundaries of Arizona.
With Tombstone swarming with their enemies and with Sheriff Behan fully informed concerning the killing of Stilwell, their arrangements for departure were made without hurry and with no pretense of secrecy. For four days they remained in town busy in winding up their affairs. They shipped their effects out of the country, they told their friends goodbye. Warren Earp, Sherman McMasters, Texas Jack Vermillion, and Jack Johnson, minor satellites in days of power, decided to accompany them.
On the morning of March 25, 1882, Wyatt Earp assembled his five followers for a stirrup cup at the Oriental bar. All were armed with six-shooters and rifles. Their horses, with blanket rolls strapped on their saddles, were hitched in Allen Street.
“Tombstone,” said Wyatt Earp, pouring out his liquor, “is a good old town, after all. I’m leaving a lot of friends behind me, and as the fellow says, a host of enemies. I’ll keep my friends warm in my heart. As for my enemies, they can go to hell. The old town has been good to me and it’s been bad to me. But good and bad luck are all one now. My job is finished. I’ve played a man’s part. I regret nothing. I am ashamed of nothing. I’ll never forget Tombstone, and Tombstone will remember me to its last day.”
Wyatt Earp raised his glass.
“Here’s happy days, boys,” he said. “And goodbye to Tombstone.”
As the men at the bar were turning down their farewell bumpers, Sheriff Behan came bustling in. His customary smile was absent. He vouchsafed no word of greeting. This was not Johnny Behan but the Sheriff of Cochise County clothed in august authority.
“I have warrants here,” he said austerely, drawing the two official documents from the inner pocket of his coat, “sworn out in Tucson and charging Wyatt Earp and J. H. Holliday with the murder of Frank Stilwell. I have come to arrest these two men.”
Wyatt Earp set down his glass on the bar and with frigid eye looked the sheriff slowly up and down from head to foot.
“Johnny Behan,” he said, “you have been my enemy from the time you set foot in Tombstone. You have lied about me. You have played every underhanded trick you knew how to play against me. I have never made a move that I have not heard your rattles in the grass. A man had only to be my enemy to be your friend. You have hated me. You have tried to put me in the penitentiary. You have done your best to ruin me. I have known every undercover play you have made. But I have conducted myself like a gentleman toward you. I have treated you with a civility you did not deserve. But now I am sick of you, sick of your treacheries, sick of the gang behind you. I despise you. You can’t arrest me.” Wyatt Earp snapped his fingers under the sheriff’s nose. “I’d see you in hell before I’d allow myself to be taken a prisoner by you.”
Wyatt Earp and his companions walked out the door past the sheriff, unhitched their horses, and swung into the saddles. With Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday side by side in advance of the others who followed four abreast, the little calvalcade moved northward out Allen Street, the horses reined to a walk in a last gesture of defiance. Crowds lined the curbs to watch them go. Many a man was in those two lines of people who hated Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday with a deep and bitter hatred. Many a curse was muttered. Many a glance surcharged with deadly malevolence was bent upon the two leaders. Hatred’s last chance was passing by. Here were targets impossible to miss. But no one made a hostile move. Sitting calmly in their saddles, their faces of the stillness of marble, their rifles resting across their laps, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday rode through a lane of silence. With cool, steady eyes, Wyatt Earp watched the banked faces along one side of the street, Holliday those along the other. Only after they had arrived at the edge of town did the horsemen increase their pace. Then, at an easy gallop, they passed over a hill and were lost to view.
Old-timers, hostile, of course, will sometimes tell today in careless phrase how the Earps were “run out of Tombstone.” This is how they were run out. In such deliberate manner did they take their “flight.” They fled at a walk.
So Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday turned their backs upon the past with its drama and romance and tragedy, and riding on over the deserts and the purple mountains, disappeared from Tombstone forever.