Doc

charges, George Hoover will say we’re harboring thieves.”

“Doc won’t press no charges,” she muttered. “He ain’t that kind.”

James stood and went to the stove and checked the flame, adding some small wood to bring it up a little. “You want something to eat?” he asked over his good shoulder. “How ’bout I fix you some eggs?”

She shrugged, but nodded.

“Bacon?” he asked. “Toast?”

She made a face. “Just eggs.”

He scrambled half a dozen and poured them into a fry pan with some bacon grease. While they sputtered and sizzled, he set bread and jam on the table for himself. When the eggs were done, he spooned them onto two plates and sat down again with Kate. They ate in silence, but when she was finished with her meal, James spoke again.

“Look at me, Katie.” He waited until she did. “Does Holliday ever beat you?”

She shook her head slightly and looked away.

“He don’t pimp you neither,” James pointed out. “You said yourself: he’d just as soon you quit.”

“I make my own way, goddammit! Nobody keeps me.”

“I know that, honey. Still … My opinion?” he asked. “Doc Holliday’s probably the best thing ever happened to you. Tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll listen.”

James stood and cleared the dishes off the table. He did the washing up, too, because he could hold plates steady with the bad side and scrub with the good one. He liked feeling competent with small tasks like that.

When he heard Kate snuffle, he put a wet plate on the rack and came over to plant a kiss on her head. “Go back to him, honey. Treat him good. You won’t be sorry.”

“Maybe,” she muttered, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “Maybe,” she said. “I guess.”

Wild Card

Three years later, after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, barricaded against a lynch mob in a Tombstone hotel with his brothers and Doc Holliday, James Earp would look back on that conversation with Katie and think, All this is my fault.

There was plenty of blame to go around, but James was right. If he hadn’t talked Kate into going back to Doc, that damn street fight in Tombstone never would have happened. Wyatt only got mixed up with Ike Clanton after Kate got mad at Doc one night and then got drunk enough to tell Sheriff Behan that Doc was in on the stagecoach robbery that touched the whole thing off. Her story was horseshit of the highest order, and as soon as she sobered up, she took it back. But by then? It didn’t matter. There was already bad blood between Wyatt and Behan over that Marcus girl. Kate’s accusation drew Wyatt and Morg and Virgil in on Doc’s side. Before you knew it, bullets were flying and five men were bleeding in the dirt, and everything was on its way straight to hell.

A year after that, James would have even more to reproach himself with, for the aftermath was his fault, too. He would piece everything together during those awful hours after Morg’s funeral, listening to his mother weep.

Virgil newly crippled, worse off than James himself.

Poor young Morgan, cold in his grave.

Wyatt and Doc, fugitives from the law, wanted for killing the bastards who murdered Morg.

All of it, James would think, numb and silent. All of it is my fault.

The irony is that Big Nose Kate had a reputation for meddling and for bossing other people around, but if James Earp hadn’t stuck his big nose into something that was none of his business back in Dodge, Kate would have done all right for herself. She was attractive, resourceful, and ruthless, and she did indeed make her own way all her long life, beholden to no one to the end of her days.

And Doc? Well, none of them could have known it, but absent James Earp’s well-intentioned interference in his life, Dr. John Henry Holliday would have dropped by Bob Wright’s store to pick up his mail on the afternoon of June 10, 1878, and Miss Isabelle Wright would have been waiting for him, behind the counter.

“Dr. Holliday, we are having dinner next Sunday at two,” Belle would have said. “I wonder … would you care to join us?”

That was the fork in the road.

That was when everything might have changed.

Decisions—genuine, deliberate decisions—were never John Henry Holliday’s strong suit. In youth, he’d sought the advice and consent of his large family. In manhood, poor health and a poor economy had dictated his plans, such as they were.

Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.

For all his private discipline and the countless hours of practice he devoted to the mastery of useful skills, John Henry had been borne along by ad hoc-ery and happenstance since leaving Atlanta. If questioned, he might even have admitted that part of Kate’s allure was her fearless decisiveness, which left no room for doubt or second-guessing.

“We should go to Dodge,” she said. “That’s where the money is.”

So. Here he was. In Dodge.

Standing in Wright’s General Outfitting on June 10, with a letter from Martha Anne, a copy of Harper’s Weekly, and an intriguingly large envelope from the St. Francis Mission piled on the counter before him, John Henry would not have accepted Isabelle Wright’s invitation immediately, for he would have known that it was extended under a serious misapprehension.

Belle was a Yankee girl. That clouded her judgment in matters of character. Yankees were customarily rude to their inferiors, a fact John Henry found shocking and bewildering while he lived in Philadelphia. In the North, he discovered, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought-up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual. Belle Wright undoubtedly believed that his courtesy to Johnnie Sanders and China Joe stemmed from an admirable democratic conviction that they were every bit as good as he was. In reality, he thought himself no better than they: a significant distinction. It was not a surfeit of brotherly love that informed John Henry Holliday’s egalitarianism. It was an acute awareness of the depths of disgrace into which he himself had fallen.

And in any case, it was one thing for a man like himself to befriend Johnnie Sanders; it was altogether another for a young white girl to do so. Indeed, he felt more rather than less respect for Bob Wright, knowing that the man was keeping a close watch on his daughter.

Whatever Miss Isabelle Wright thought, Dr. John Henry Holliday was not oblivious to her interest in him. He had grown up in the company of genteel Southern women schooled from the cradle in the art of flattery and concealment; Belle, by comparison, could be read like an illustrated children’s story. And yet … She was clear-eyed enough to see Johnnie Sanders for what he was. Perhaps she was not entirely wrong about John Henry’s own character. At the very least, she was offering him an opportunity to live up to a lady’s illusions.

Upon reflection, he’d have realized that he wanted to try.

Yes, she was young. And, yes, he suspected that she had learned all her manners by reading Miss Austen’s books, but she had spirit, and living in Dodge as Belle did, she was familiar with the life to which John Henry and his lungs seemed to be adapting.

Martha Anne, by contrast, seemed less and less worldly as time went by, her letters increasingly concerned with the godly and the incorporeal …

Decide, he would have told himself, standing in Bob Wright’s store while Belle gazed at him with level brown eyes, waiting for his response. Spunk up, and make your move.

Besides, it’s only dinner.

“Why, Miss Isabelle, what a charmin’ idea,” he’d have said. “You are very kind to extend the invitation. It will be my pleasure.”