“Who did the shooting?” Josie said.
“I don’t know. Some fool.” Freddie paused in his pacing to furiously polish his spectacles. “And I will be blamed. This was supposed to occur when I was in the saloon, playing cards in front of witnesses. Instead it occurred when I was in bed with you.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Ain’t I a witness, Freddie?” she said in her mocking New York voice.
Freddie laughed bitterly. “They might calculate that you are prejudiced in my favor.”
“They would be right.” She rose, took Freddie’s hands. “Perhaps you should leave Tombstone.”
“And go where?” He put his arms around her. The scent of her French perfume drifted delicately through his senses.
“There are plenty of mining towns in the West,” she said. “Plenty of places to play poker. And almost all have theaters, and will need someone to play the ingenue.”
He looked at her. “My friends are here, Josie. And it is here that you are queen.”
“Amor fati,” she murmured. He felt her shoulders fall slightly in acknowledgment of the defeat, and then she straightened. “I had better learn to shoot, then,” she said. “Will you teach me?”
“I will. But I’m not a very good shot-my eyesight, you know.”
“But you’re a-” She hesitated.
“A killer? A gunman?” He smiled. “Certainly. But all my fights took place at a range of less than five meters- one was in a small room, three meters square. But still-yes-why not? It can do us no harm to be seen practicing.”
“What is the best way to become a gunman?” Josie said.
“Not to care if you die,” Freddie said promptly. “You must not fear death. I was deadly because I knew I was dying. John Holliday is dangerous for the same reason-he knows he must in any case die soon, so why not now? And John Ringo-he does not value his own life, clearly.”
She tilted her head, looked at him carefully. “But you weren’t dying at all. You may live as long as any of us. Does that make a fight more dangerous for you?”
Freddie considered this notion in some surprise. He wondered if he now truly had reasons to live, and whether the chief one was now in his arms.
“I am at least experienced in a fight,” he said. “I’ll keep my head, and kill or die as a man. It is important, in any case, to die at the right time.”
Small comfort: he felt her tremble. Treasure this while you may, he thought; and know that you have treasured it before, and will again.
In the event it was not Freddie who died first. Three days after James Earp was appointed sheriff, Curly Bill Brocius was found dead on the road between Tombstone and Charleston. Two friends lay with him, all riddled with bullets. The only Earp not a suspect was Morgan, with a near-mortal wound in his spine, who had been carried into the county jail, where he was guarded by a half-dozen of the Earps’ newly deputized supporters.
The other three Earp brothers, and a number of their friends, were not to be found in town. For several days the sound of volleys boomed off the blue Dragoon Mountains, echoed over the dry hills. Apparently they were not all fired in anger: most were signals from the Earps to their friends, who were bringing them supplies. But still three Cowboys were found dead, shot near their homes; and the Clanton spread was burned. A day later John Ringo rode into town on a lathered horse, claiming he’d been chased by a half-dozen gunmen.
“And Holliday’s with them,” Ringo said. “I saw the bastard, big as life.”
Freddie’s heart sank. “I was afraid of that.”
“His hip’s still bothering him, and Virgil’s leg. Otherwise they would have caught me.” He blew dust from his mustache and looked at Freddie. “We need a posse of our own, friend.”
“So we do.”
They called out their friends, but a surprising number had made themselves scarce. Freddie and Ringo assembled a dozen riders, all that remained of Brocius’s mighty outlaw army, and hoped to pick up more as they rode.
Josie surprised everyone by showing up in riding clothes at the O.K. Corral, her new pistol hanging from her belt. “I will go, of course,” she said.
Freddie’s heart sang in praise of her bravery, but he touched his hat and said, “I believe that Helen should remain on Ilium’s topless towers, where it is safe.”
She looked at him, and he saw the jaw muscles tauten. “Those towers burned,” she said. “And I don’t want to survive another lover.”
Freddie’s heart flooded over. He kissed her, and knew he would kiss her thus time and again, for infinity.
“Come then!” he said. “We shall meet our fate together!”
“Let slip the dogs of war,” Ringo commented wryly, and they rode out of town into a chill dawn.
They followed a pillar of smoke, a mining claim that belonged to one of the Cowboys. No one had been killed because no one was home, but the diggings had been thoroughly burned. From the mine they followed the trail north. After two days of riding they were disappointed to discover that the trail led to the Sierra Bonita, the largest ranch in the district. Ringo and his friends had been running off Sierra Bonita’s cattle for years. The place was built like a fort against Apache raids, and if the Earps and their friends were inside, then they were as safe as if they were holed in Gibraltar.
“Hic funis nihil attraxit,” Ringo muttered. This line has taken no fish. Freddie hoped he didn’t smell Brocius’s dead cat on the line.
The posse retreated from the Sierra Bonita to consider their options, but these narrowed considerably when they saw a cloud of dust on the northern horizon, a cloud that grew ever closer.
“Looks like we’ve been outposse’d,” Ringo said. “Their horses are fresh-we can’t outrun them.”
“What do we do?” Freddie gasped. Two days in the saddle, even riding moderately, had exhausted him- unlike Josie, who seemed to thrive once cast in the role of Bandit Queen.
Ringo seemed almost gay. “They have tied us to the stake, we cannot fly.” Freddie could have wished Ringo had not chosen Macbeth. “I think we’d better find a place to fort up,” Ringo said.
Their Dunsinane was a rocky hill barren of life but for cactus and scrub. They hid the horses behind rocks and dug themselves in. Within an hour the larger outfit had found them: the Earps had been reinforced by two dozen riders from the Sierra Bonita, and it looked like a small army that posted itself about the hill and sealed off every exit. The pursuers did not attempt to come within gunshot: they knew all they had to do was wait for the Cowboys’ water to run out.
Ringo’s crew had a smaller store of water than their enemies probably suspected, and one night on the hill would surely exhaust it. “We shall have to fight,” Freddie said.
“Yes.”
“Few of those people have any experience in a combat. Holliday and Virgil Earp are the only two I know of. The rest will get too excited and throw away their fire, and that will give us our chance.”
Ringo smiled. “I think we should charge. Come down off the hill first light screaming like Apaches and pitch into the nearest pack of them. If we run them off, we can take their horses and make a dash for it.”
“Agreed. I will have to follow you-otherwise I can’t see well enough to know where I’m going.”
“I’ll lead you into the hornet’s nest, don’t you worry.”
Freddie sought out Josie, lying in the shade of some rocks, and took her hand. The sun had burned her cheeks; her lips were starting to crack with thirst. “We will fight in the morning,” he said. “I want you to stay here.”
She shook her head, mouthed the word no.
“You are the only one of us they will not harm,” Freddie said. “The rest of us will charge out of the circle, and you can join us later.”
The words drove her into a fury. She was in a state of high excitement, and wanted to put her pistol practice to use.
“It is not as you think,” Freddie said. “This will not be a great battle, it will be something small and squalid. And-” He took her hands. She flailed to throw off his touch, but he held her. “Josie!” he cried. “I need someone to publish my work, if I should not survive. No one else will care. It must be you.”
