Doc

By then, the rain was done in the west and tapering off in town, but Front Street was a slough and Wyatt slipped as the horse danced sideways. All he got was a handful of tail, and he lost his grip on that.

The boy turned in his saddle to fire again, his face lit by the theater lights: stiff and scared now, but determined.

The slug hit the brim of Wyatt’s hat, flipping it off into the mud.

The kid’s voice broke when he shouted, “Damn!” He reined his horse around hard and dug in with his spurs, bolting for the bridge, just hoping to get out of town now, for every lawman in Dodge was in the street by then, and all of them were shooting at him.

Wyatt was following on foot, sloshing through the mire, and fell making the turn onto Bridge Street. Already down on his knees, he sat back on his haunches. The lower angle brought his target into dark relief against the sky, which was starting to lighten a little because the setting moon was beginning to show between clouds that were breaking up over Colorado. This time Wyatt aimed carefully and took a second shot, but the rider clattered on over the bridge and was gone from sight.

Bat Masterson might be a lying little weasel, but no question, he was game in a fight. He was the first out of the Commie-Q, the first after Wyatt to fire at the shooter, and the first to reach Wyatt’s side now. Huffing from the run, Bat watched the rider disappear and asked, “Who in hell was that joker?”

“Never saw him before,” Wyatt said.

Morg was there a moment later, with John Stauber and Chuck Trask and Charlie Bassett right behind him. Bat gave Wyatt a hand up, and then the rest of the officers were on the scene. Almost as quickly, their women appeared, holding shawls tight around their shoulders, white-faced in the watery moonlight, waiting at the edge of the street to be told whose man had been killed this time.

Morg called, “Go on home! Nobody’s hit.”

The women talked among themselves before going back inside, while Bat told Morg and everybody what had just happened.

“Wyatt was standing on the boardwalk out in front of the Commie-Q, and this kid comes along and opens up on him. I saw the boy through the window—looked right at Wyatt. Right at him! Not angry or anything, just: he had a job to do and he was by-God gonna do it.”

For a time, they all stood around in the slowing drizzle, speculating on who the kid was and what he had against Wyatt, but hell! There were a hundred cowboys Wyatt had bashed or arrested, or both. Could have been any one of them. And that just counted the ones he’d dealt with in Dodge this season. Could have been somebody with a grudge left over from last year. Or from Ellsworth or Wichita, for that matter.

Wyatt didn’t say much, but he never did. Finally Bat declared, “Drinks are on me! Let’s get out of the rain.”

They were on their way back to the Front Street boardwalk when one of the Riney kids came running over from the tollbooth.

“Mr. Earp,” he called, “you hit him, sir! He’s over on the south end of the bridge.”

Wet and shivering, Wyatt stood in the corner of the cell while Doc McCarty examined the whimpering boy’s wound. McCarty said, “I’m afraid it’s mortal, son,” and Wyatt closed his eyes at the news. “What’s your name?” the doctor asked the kid. “Do you have kin we should notify?”

George Hoyt, he turned out to be. Crying, he told McCarty his mother’s address and, snuffling, he asked for a drink. Fat Larry brought in a bottle. Wyatt sat on the bunk, and lifted the boy up by the shoulders, and helped him take a good long swig, and laid him down to rest after that. For a little while, he watched Hoyt sleep.

Then he went back to work.

He knew what folks were saying when he walked his rounds that night, like nothing bad had happened. Butter wouldn’t melt in Wyatt Earp’s mouth. Cool as they come, ole Wyatt.

But he was shook, and bad.

Dime novelists tried to make it seem that frontier lawmen did that kind of thing all the time, but it just wasn’t so—not even in towns like Dodge. Killings were nearly always one idiot shooting another; the police were hardly ever involved directly.

For Wyatt, the reaction set in while he was sitting in the mud watching Hoyt ride off over the bridge, when he still believed he’d missed his target. Before Bat arrived at his side and started talking, Wyatt was all alone, and what came to his mind was that he’d missed his sister’s birthday. It was a strange thing to think, under the circumstances, but he kept coming back to it, over and over. If young George Hoyt had been a little steadier with his first shot, Adelia would always have remembered that her brother Wyatt forgot to send her a happy birthday, the year that he was killed.

Funny how much the thought bothered him.

As the night went on, Wyatt marveled that he’d been wearing a sidearm because it was so unusual for him. Ordinarily, he was just about the only sober man in town, and he counted on that for his edge. He could generally tame a troublesome drunk with a well-aimed bash across the side of the head. Carrying a weighted sap was easier than lugging a big old Colt around all night in the midsummer heat.

When he got home after his shift, he asked Mattie if she’d heard a rumor that something was going to happen. She denied it but claimed she had second sight, and said she’d had a funny feeling, so she’d handed Wyatt his gun belt before he left for work and asked him to be careful. Which was the only reason he went heeled that night: to make Mattie happy.

But if you have a gun, you’re inclined to use it. And now a kid was dying.

Wyatt didn’t go home right away when his shift was over. First he checked on Hoyt, who was still alive. Then he walked out toward the east end of town to watch the sun come up in a sky that had cleared overnight, and shone gold and pink this morning.

When he heard the familiar cough behind him, he did not turn. Doc Holliday’s steps slowed and stopped. For a while they stood together silently.

“Now I am farther from heaven than when I was a boy,” Doc said after a time. “Awful, isn’t it.”

To have someone look you right in the eye and to know that he intends to kill you. To hurt somebody so bad, he was going to die from what you did to him.

Wyatt asked, “Does it get easier?”

“No.”

That was Doc. He didn’t sugar things.

“The law can relieve a man of guilt,” Doc told him quietly, “but not of his remorse.”

The next day, before work, Wyatt went back to the jail to check on Hoyt again. By then the boy had been moved to the doctor’s clinic, so Wyatt walked over there and sat with him awhile. Most of the time Hoyt babbled, but once he seemed lucid. He looked at Wyatt—right at him, like before—and said, “You seem like a nice fella. I don’t know why they want you dead.”

“Who?” Wyatt asked. “Who wants me dead?”

“They was gonna pay me a thousand dollars, and get the charges dropped, after.”

“Who?” Wyatt asked. He never got an answer. The boy kept talking, but didn’t make any sense after that.

Wyatt went to work, like usual, but for the next two days he had a strange feeling of not hearing things quite right, like there was cotton in his ears, or water or something. And thoughts kept coming to him.

I could be dead instead of walking down this street.

Morg could be standing at my grave instead of joshing me about the hole in my hat.

I could be in the ground instead of drinking this coffee.

Somebody wants me dead, he’d think, and maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was, for he was just an ordinary man doing his job, and it struck him as unreasonable that anyone would pay so much to get him killed.

Hell, he thought. Give me the grand! I’ll leave.

Finally he realized he had to snap out of it before he made a mistake and let some other fool thing happen. Somebody else might get hurt.

The wire came back the day before George Hoyt died. He was wanted for cattle rustling, down near Amarillo.