Another man might have considered bashing a few extra cowboys a night, just to run the fines up. In the past, Wyatt himself had indulged in the practice, along with a few other habits involving more enterprise than integrity. That was exactly why he didn’t anymore: he knew from experience that his conscience bothered him a whole lot longer than the time it would take to pay James back legitimately.
He finished with Dick’s hooves and got him saddled.
“All right,” he said, swinging up. “Let’s see what you can do.”
With the sun low behind them, he struck west and took Dick out to the county racetrack, half a mile beyond the city limits. This time of day, the place was deserted, so Wyatt let the horse get used to the surface, alternating easy with quick laps. The track was harder than Dick was accustomed to, but he did fine.
“Best win on the Fourth,” Wyatt told him, slowing to a walk. “If I have to sell you back to some cowboy, you’ll have to work for a living.”
When he spoke to Dick now, it was just to amuse himself. Most of the time, Wyatt didn’t so much as
It struck Wyatt as interesting how close you could get to an animal and how much you could have in common with a dumb brute. He recalled Morg reading somewheres that when the Indians first saw a Spaniard on horseback, they thought they were looking at one animal with two heads. Wyatt found that easy to understand. Watch a stockman on a cutting horse, say, and you’d come to the notion yourself. A cow would get ready to turn tail and change direction or bolt for the herd. The horse would see what she had in mind, slide to a chest-deep stop, pivot, and beat that beeve every time. A good rider just slacked the reins and kept out of his horse’s way, but he had to anticipate the action and adjust his own balance or be thrown for his inattention.
There was beauty in that wordless partnership, and Wyatt could never watch such a marvel without feeling moved. He came closest to it himself when he was on Dick at the line, waiting for the start. Dick didn’t need spurs or a quirt any more than Wyatt himself. They felt the same tension, reacted at the same instant, working the field together, driving for the inside or spotting a break and muscling through to a lead. Man and beast were one thing during a race.
In Wyatt’s opinion, Dick would have the advantage on the Fourth of July. Dog Kelley’s gelding, Michigan Jim, was the favorite in local races, but Dick would get long odds, for he would take the bookmakers by surprise. Until they’d seen him run a few times, nobody would expect “that two-dollar horse” to be anything much.
“They’re underestimating your cash value by a good fifteen cents,” Wyatt told Dick, who flicked an ear at him but otherwise minded his own business.
The sun was well up when they turned back toward Dodge. Wyatt was occupied with calculating how much he should hold back from James in order to put together a bet on Dick in the race, and what the payoff would be at thirty to one, when he saw another rider to the east, about five miles out.
Didn’t take but a glance at the lovely, floating gait to know who it was. That army captain—Grier, his name was—riding Roxana.
It was his father’s voice that Wyatt heard then. As always, an indictment.
Dick snorted and jogged sideways a few steps, and tossed his head. Distracted, Wyatt needed a few moments to work out why the horse had lost his stride.
“Hell,” he said, disgusted, when he realized that he was crying.
“Easy, now,” he told Dick. “Easy. Settle down.”
In all his life, he had wept only twice before that he could recall. Once was back when he was ten and his sister Martha passed. The second time, he was twenty-two, and his wife had just died of typhus.
He was visiting his grandparents in Lamar, Missouri, when he first saw Urilla Sutherland. She was on her way to church, dressed up real pretty but still modest and sweet-looking. In that very first moment—before Wyatt drew his next breath—he decided that it was time to quit drinking and quit drifting and settle down so he could be near Urilla and see her twice a week at church.
Before he even spoke to her the first time, he made himself break the habit of cursing and swearing, and that wasn’t easy for a son of Nicholas Earp. After years of driving freight to wide-open towns like Deadwood and Cheyenne and Yuma, Wyatt decided he should get a decent job. As much as he disliked his Grampa Earp, he became determined to study law with that cold, old man.
To win Urilla’s favor and to gain her family’s consent to a marriage, Wyatt made a dogged yearlong effort to read an entire law book, but the words just wouldn’t stick. Reluctantly, he lowered his sights and got a job as the Lamar town constable. It was not close to what he had hoped to offer Urilla, but it was enough. When she agreed to marry him and her parents gave their blessing, Wyatt felt it proof that he’d made something of himself at last. He didn’t even have time to get over his amazement that such a good Christian girl had married him when Urilla came down with typhus.
“Don’t begrudge the Lord what is his own to give and to take.”
That’s what Urilla told Wyatt when they both knew she was dying, and that she would take their child with her, too: one who hadn’t even lived long enough to quicken and who would never see the light.
Wyatt tried to accept it like Urilla did. When the fever and sickness got worse, he was almost willing to let her go, if only to put an end to her suffering. Then—at the very end—she was lucid again.
He had just enough time to think, The fever’s broken. She’s going to live.
For the space of those few moments, he saw it all: how he’d nurse her, and how she’d be stronger every day, and how the baby would come and be joined later by a pack of rowdy brothers and pretty sisters. He could
“Don’t cry, Wyatt. I’m going to a better place,” Urilla told him.
Then she was gone. Just like that. And he was left to stare at the husk of that dear girl, and to hear his father’s voice.
For a good long while after Urilla’s passing, Wyatt lost his way. He only started going to church again when a Wichita preacher suggested that he honor Urilla’s memory by honoring her faith in the Lord. It was never easy and it was sometimes impossible, but Wyatt kept trying, though he did not fear God so much as he feared Urilla’s disappointment, for he felt her eyes upon him whenever he did what he knew to be wrong or failed to do what he thought was right.
The dead are in a better place. That’s what Urilla had told him. That’s what Wyatt Earp wanted to believe, but this is what he knew. Gone is gone. Some things can’t be fixed.
Wyatt wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
Could be, it’s better this way, he tried telling himself, for in his experience, not many were improved by age. People generally got meaner and harder and sadder. So maybe it was a blessing to die before life could compromise and coarsen you, and twist you into someone you didn’t hardly recognize. Johnnie was a good kid, but who knows what kind of man he’d’ve been?
“Hell,” Wyatt said, aloud. “I shoulda sent him back to school.”
He wanted to make himself hear his own regret, and to see if his voice was steady.
He was almost back to town before Dick Naylor settled down.
