did that—wire Morg and wait around for a reply, to be sure the rest of the family was all right. In early May, a return telegram arrived within the hour, and this one was a shock.
ED MASTERSON KILLED STOP DODGE
HIRING REPLACEMENT STOP COME
BACK STOP MORG STOP
Wyatt certainly hadn’t wished Ed ill and was sorry to hear of his death and disliked to profit by it. Even so, this was a stroke of luck, and Wyatt headed back to Dodge feeling pretty good about his prospects.
This time, he’d get the chief deputy job Ed had vacated. That would mean a lot more money. He’d held on to every dollar Dick had won and counted it out often. Add that to his salary and … Well, it still wasn’t enough, but with Johnnie’s help, it wouldn’t be long before he could buy Roxana. If the timing was right and she wasn’t already in foal this year, Dick might sire a colt that could begin to race by ’81. In a few years’ time, Wyatt would have a string of horses that would run the legs off anything west of St. Louis.
And then, by golly, he could quit the law and finally get somewheres in life.
There were no towns, the last long stretch of the ride. No houses, no fences, no sign of human life, let alone a place to send or receive telegrams. Until you got to Dodge, there was just grass and sand hills and silence, day after day.
That was why he didn’t get the news. See, Dick’s right foreleg felt a little hot and Wyatt decided to give him a couple days’ rest and grazing on good grass before they started the final push into the city. But the leg wasn’t that bad. If he’d known, Wyatt could have reached Dodge in time for Johnnie Sanders’ funeral.
A day late, he would think when he finally stood staring at the boy’s grave.
Just like always: a day late and a dollar short.
Down Cards
The body was charred. It could have been anyone, in Morgan Earp’s opinion. On any given night during the cattle season, as many as fifty drunken cowhands might bed down in the loft of Hamilton Bell’s Famous Elephant Barn. Could have been one of them.
Morg kicked at a chunk of smoking wood. “You sure, Doc? It’s Johnnie Sanders?”
It was an innocent question, and Morgan didn’t mean anything by it. Doc Holliday was, however, a man of ardor and conviction as regards matters of personal dignity, and the dentist was already at a social disadvantage, kneeling next to the corpse as he was, peering into its gaping jaw and studying its teeth.
Doc looked up over his shoulder at Morgan. “Which is in doubt?” he asked. “My competence or my veracity?”
“I was just hoping maybe you was wrong, is all.”
“Help me up,” Doc muttered.
Morgan offered an arm.
When he was on his feet, Doc brushed the ash off his trousers, wiped his hands on one of those white cotton handkerchiefs he always carried. “There is a diastema between the upper central incisors, and I can palpate a raised lingual margin on those teeth as well. The left eyetooth is slightly twisted. I filled the lower right six-year molar myself, two weeks ago.”
Morgan didn’t know what any of that meant, except: Yeah, Doc was sure.
“Hell,” Morg said. “Wyatt’s gonna take this hard.”
“When’s he due back?” Bat Masterson asked.
“I thought he’d be here by now.”
Legally, Bat had no standing in this matter. The fire was inside Dodge City limits, so it wasn’t in Bat’s jurisdiction. On the other hand, Morgan Earp had never dealt with a death like this one. This would be his third season as a deputy, but he was used to working with his brothers. Without Wyatt or Virgil around, Morg didn’t mind having Bat there to back him up.
“Poor soul,” Doc murmured, looking at the corpse. “Seventeen years old …” He straightened and declared by way of eulogy, “John Horse Sanders was the second best faro dealer I ever met.”
“Who’s the best?” Bat asked him. “You, I guess.”
There was fame to be had and money to be made writing dime novels about the Wild West. Bat Masterson hadn’t published anything yet, but he was on the lookout for salable material. He already had a good title for his first story:
Morgan had heard the rumors about Holliday, but he already suspected Bat was making some of Doc’s exploits up. Bat didn’t lie, exactly, but he never told a story that didn’t improve some, over time. Far as Morg knew, the dentist’s only crime was rivaling Bat Masterson as the best-dressed man in Dodge.
“No, sir,” Doc was telling Bat, “best I ever saw was a little bitty gal name of Sophie Walton. My Aunt Permelia took Sophie and me in, after the war. Sophie taught all us cousins to play cards, but she didn’t teach us everything. She’d clean up four times out of five. Young Mr. Sanders was near as good.”
“Johnnie don’t belong on Boot Hill,” Morgan said. “We should take up a collection. Bury him right.”
Bat shrugged. With his brother Ed barely cool in the grave, it was probably hard for him to summon the feelings he’d need to give a damn about this death. Mostly Bat seemed angry with the barn’s owner, Hamilton Bell. Ham was friendly to a fault—same as Ed, who got himself killed by being nice to a drunk.
“I knew something like this was going to happen,” Bat muttered. “It was only a matter of time ’til this place burned down.”
Morgan nodded to the mortician’s boys, who were waiting at the edge of the smoking timbers. It was gingerish work, moving a burned body. They had just tipped it onto a stretcher so they could carry it to the coffin shop when Doc Holliday stopped them.
“You see something?” Morg asked.
Leaning on his cane, the dentist took a closer look, coughing again when the smoke and smell got to him. The back of the corpse was unburned, and he felt through the dark hair, moving his fingers systematically over the skull, stopping behind one ear. His hand came away sticky, and he held it out to the lawmen before wiping the mess off on his handkerchief.
“Blow to the head,” he said. “
Morg was going to ask Doc what he meant by that part about his auntie, but Sheriff Masterson wasn’t willing to look ignorant.
“Probably got hit by a barrel,” Bat said.
Somebody’d had the idea of hoisting empty whiskey casks onto Dodge’s rooftops. The notion was that the rain-filled barrels would tumble over as a burning building caved in, thus extinguishing the flames. From the looks of the Elephant Barn, the heavy casks had simply compounded the generalized destruction.
“No barrels near the body,” Doc noted.
“Might’ve rolled,” Bat said.
“Can we take him now?” one of the mortician’s boys asked.
“Sure,” Morg said. “I guess.”
A crowd had formed just beyond the smoldering ruins of the barn. Standing a little apart from the others, Edwin Fitzgerald hugged himself morosely. The black-haired Irishman had a body blessed by the gods—lithe and superbly coordinated, capable of acrobatics and grace—but it was topped with a rubbery, comical face and a head full of sarcasm and mockery. The combination would make his fortune, for young Mr. Fitzgerald had recently taken the stage name Eddie Foy, and he had a stellar future in vaudeville ahead of him. One day there would be a movie and books about his life, as there would be about so many men who lived in Dodge that year: Bat Masterson, and the Earp brothers, and Doc Holliday, to name a few. For a good long while, Eddie’s fame would shine most brightly, though it would fade the soonest.
That afternoon, he stood by himself and waited for Doc Holliday to make his slow and careful way out of
