Territory (18 page)

So the new voice belonged to Doc Holliday’s lady. Kate Holliday laughed. “Oh, that man of yours is kind, all right, if it gets him what he wants. Wyatt’s the root of it! He’s got his claws deep in a poor, sick man who—”

A sudden flurry of sound: a wooden bang, the clatter of falling objects. Mildred started back from the parlor door. She heard a piercing cry—Mattie?

Yes, Mattie—and a scrabbling sound. “Wyatt’s suitcase,” Mattie whimpered, her words broken up by some physical effort. “He wouldn’t like it—”

“So that’s where Wyatt moved ’em to,” Mrs. Holliday said, bitter satisfaction in the words. “I told him if he didn’t get that suitcase out of Doc’s room I’d throw his trash in the street.”

“What are they?” Allie asked, barely loud enough for Mildred to hear.

“Wyatt’s disguises, honey. Every con man and stage robber and two-bit tinhorn needs himself a few fake beards and masks and such from time to time.”

“You’re lying,” Lou snapped.

“Am I? I think your Morgan was wearing one of those just lately.” Under Kate Holliday’s words Mildred could hear Mattie crying softly. “I wouldn’t give a damn, but Wyatt’s pulled Doc into it.”

“Wyatt’s a lawman!” Mattie sobbed out. “Your husband don’t need Wyatt’s help to get into trouble.”

I shouldn’t be hearing this conversation.
How could Mildred not have thought of that until now? She’d wanted gossip about the stage robbery. She hadn’t wanted to be a silent witness to the kind of pain that lay on the other side of the kitchen door.

“I think you’ve wore out your welcome, Kate,” Allie said harshly.

“Oh, I wish I could be done with the lot of you! You’ll wish you were out of it, too, pretty soon. Wyatt left that suitcase full of trouble in
your
closet, after all. It won’t be long before he’s got your stupid Virgil under his thumb just like Morgan.”

A chair scraped on the floor. “You can’t talk about my Virge like that!” Allie shouted.

A moment of silence, in which Mildred imagined the women staring each other down. Then Kate said, “You ignorant little Mick.” There was a weary pity in her voice that leached the insult from her words. “Oh, God, Mattie, get up off the floor and quit fussing with that trash. It’s too late now.”

After a moment Mildred heard the rustle of skirts, and the opening and shutting of the front door.

This kitchen had looked so simple and peaceful when Mildred had first walked through it, so clean and orderly and homely. The women in the parlor, busy with real, sensible work, had seemed so content. It was false, paint over rust. There was fear here, and secrets. The devil on the porch had been her first warning.

A sound behind her made her turn. Allie stood in the doorway to the parlor. When Mildred met the little woman’s eyes, she saw that Allie knew she’d overheard everything.

“I’m sorry,” Mildred murmured. “I didn’t mean—”

But Allie’s stricken look had nothing to do with Mildred.

“I’m sorry,” Mildred said again, in a very different voice, and watched the tears spill over and down Allie’s cheeks.

 9 

“Arthur Ortega died last night,” Marshal Sippy said.

Jesse had half expected the words—but the other half had hoped for better. It was an instant before he grasped which news he’d heard. Then his head went unpleasantly light. “I’m sorry.”

Sippy’s face suggested “I’m sorry” was an unusual and possibly inappropriate response. “There’s no doubt Ortega stole your horse. So there’s no charge against you.”

“Won’t there be an inquest?” Wasn’t that what happened, when a man died untimely?

Sippy shook his head. “Judge Spicer didn’t see the point.”

“There was a hearing?”

“My goodness, we must have forgot your invitation. I wouldn’t call it a hearing. I brought the statements before the judge in chambers, he said if we had an inquest on every damned shooting in the county, court’d be in session night and day, and he threw the case out.”

“Threw it out,” Jesse repeated, stunned. There was a corpse where a living man had been. Equations balanced; this one came up short.

“His exact words were, ‘Absence of felonious intent.’ If he’s wrong, you go tell him so.” Sippy frowned, his hands planted palms-down on the scarred tabletop. “Now, so long as you let me get back to work, you can stay or leave Tombstone as you please.”

He could stand in the marshal’s office all day; nothing would change. “If there’s anything else, you can find me at Brown’s.”

Sippy grunted and turned back to the pile of documents he was sorting.

Jesse let himself out onto Fremont Street. The sun sent needles through his eyes into his skull, and his head began to throb. Lung had sworn his eyes would return to normal, but it hadn’t happened yet. He ought to replace his dark spectacles.

Ortega was dead. Lung would be unhappy over the news. But not as unhappy as Jesse.

In the high desert, in Apache country, stealing a man’s horse was considered equivalent to trying to kill him, and shooting a horse thief in the act was self-defense. But when Jesse had heard Sam’s whinny and the scramble of his hooves, seen him bolt into the firelight with his eyes white with fear and a stranger in the saddle silhouetted against the deep blue night, he hadn’t thought of self-defense.

His pistol had been in his hand and the hammer back between one breath and the next. When the recoil rocked the grip in his palm he’d seen the man-silhouette jerk, but not fall. He’d cocked again. Sam had carried the thief out of range and into the dark. It had been a long time before he’d noticed the burning in his left arm and felt the blood on his skin. He couldn’t remember seeing the muzzle flash from Ortega’s pistol, or hearing the shot.

He looked up and realized he was walking toward the
Daily Nugget
office. Did he mean to share his unquiet mind with Mrs. Mildred Benjamin? She would be setting up a page of type, as she had been when he’d first seen her. He imagined her listening to him without looking up, imagined the ease with which he would say the most difficult things to that bent head.

“Stupid,” he said aloud, and the picture scattered like sand. Not to her, not to anyone. One dealt with one’s troubles or set them aside; they weren’t to be handed off like an unsatisfactory present.

Besides, why should she listen to him? Mrs. Benjamin seemed like a woman who did plenty of thinking, and might expect to be listened to herself. She was as likely to throw her composing stick at him as to sympathize.

What he ought to do now was get a drink to strengthen his resolve, then go deliver the bad news to Lung. And submit himself to whatever strange equation-balancing Lung would insist on.

Lung had described his studies as a kind of science. Could he think of them that way? Metaphysical formulae with rules to learn and apply? It was comforting, but was it true?

In a spirit of self-flagellation he headed for Hafford’s Saloon, which he disliked. The stuffed and mounted birds hung like wallpaper all over the long room troubled him. Light seemed to come and go in their glass-bead eyes, and their outstretched wings seemed to have just moved, or be about to move. It was as if time and not their lives had stopped, and at any instant it would start again and fill the room with trapped, frantic birds.

He was nearly to Allen Street when two men turned the corner and came
toward him. Abreast, they occupied most of the physical sidewalk, and even more of the philosophical one. Jesse hugged the street edge.

He recognized them a moment before the gaunt one spoke. “There, now, Virge,” said the dentist, Holliday. “Here’s the very man, awake and standing. I’ll wager he’s even had his breakfast. Mr. Fox, Mr. Virgil Earp.”

Something about the bland smile Holliday gave Earp suggested this was the latest installment of a running joke. Earp’s raised eyebrow suggested that only Holliday found it funny.

Earp extended a hand. Jesse shook it while he made a swift inventory of his position. John Ringo had some bone to pick with the Earps, and they with him, but John Ringo seemed a poor barometer by which to predict a man’s behavior. Jesse couldn’t think of anything he’d done, besides play cards with Ringo, that would cause Holliday or Virgil Earp to come looking for him. Unless they objected to Ortega’s death or Luther King’s release.

“Mr. Fox, Doc here says you might know somewhat about horses,” Earp said.

“And since
my
knowledge consists of mostly managing to stay on one,” Holliday interrupted, “I shall leave you two gentlemen to become better acquainted.” Earp frowned, but Holliday only touched his hat brim and winked at Jesse. Then he turned and headed back to Allen Street.

Not King or Ortega, then. At least, not yet. Virgil Earp didn’t look like a man who consorted with stage robbers or murderers; but Jesse wasn’t sure what such a man
would
look like. Or what one of Lung’s “knowledgeable men” would look like, for that matter. Ortega died; that meant Jesse himself was both. What did he look like now?

They stood in uncomfortable silence. From the brother, Wyatt, Jesse had gotten an impression of ice and steel and a weighing of every action, though what it was measured against was impossible to guess. Virgil Earp’s face was much like his brother’s in bone and flesh and coloring. But it hinted that the man who wore it might have weighed life a little less and felt a great deal more.

“You were playing cards in the Oriental,” Earp said, and Jesse realized that Earp had been studying him, too.

“First game I happened on.” Why should he apologize, even that much, for playing with Ringo, Brocius, and McLaury?

“Win any?”

“No.”

For some reason, Earp relaxed at that. “Doc tells me you have the best-schooled horse he’s ever seen. You break him yourself?”

Jesse nodded. “I do it for a living.”

Earp eyed him again, doubtfully. Did Jesse not look like someone who trained horses? Maybe he ought to walk with a limp. “I’ve got a colt bred for harness,” Earp went on. “Everything fine about him—except he’ll kick a rig to kindling if he’s put between the shafts. I paid too much for him to give him up easy.”

The colt took on immediate life in Jesse’s imagination. Foolish. If he’d known a dozen horses like this one, that didn’t mean he knew this one. Still— “I can school him to drive.”

Earp waited, as if he expected more.

When a horse-breaker introduced himself it was generally with the claim that he could stick on anything ever foaled. If sticking were the issue, that might be worth something. “It’ll cost you twenty dollars.”

When Earp’s eyebrows went up, Jesse added, “You’ll be able to harness and drive him the next morning and every morning after with no trouble, unless you teach him bad habits.”

“I don’t intend to teach him bad habits,” Earp drawled.

“I don’t suppose you do. But a horse won’t pick up his notions out of the air. Where’d he get the ones he’s got?”

Earp’s eyes narrowed. “How do you figure I went about teaching him to kick?” he asked, ominously mild.

In for a penny, in for a pound. “Easiest thing in the world. Horses can be smart as fence posts and brave as sparrows. Anything will scare them. They’ll run away if they can, or fight ’til they can run away. Somebody hitched that colt up before he knew what was what. He felt the weight on his collar, heard the rattling at his heels, and thought the Devil was reaching for his tail. There’s been nothing to disabuse him of the notion.”

“Sounds like the way a hundred other horses get taught to drive.” Earp’s mouth pinched as if to shut off the next sentence.

Jesse could imagine that frightened colt, pursued by something he couldn’t see. It made him reckless. “Then you have horse number one hundred and one. You’ve got three choices: give up on driving him, bully him into it and maybe ruin him for good, or let me have him for the day and see what happens.”

He watched Earp’s face. The man was proud, but not proud enough to make the horse suffer for it. Jesse added, a little gentler, “You’d only be out twenty dollars and a day of his use.”

“You can do it in a day?”

“I can do it this afternoon.”

Earp thought Jesse was pitching snake oil; he could see it in his face. “I won’t pay ’til the job’s done.”