pull a bad tooth from a man I buffaloed. I’d hire you both in a minute, but apart from my interest in the faro game here in the Mescalero, I haven’t a cartwheel dollar to pay you for your trouble. My luck’s gone sour since the fight at Fly’s.”
Holmes finished his beer at a draught. “I shall play you for my fee when the thing’s done, and accept your promise of payment should I win. When may I speak with Holliday?”
We placed our bags in the bartender’s charge, with a warning from Earp to look after them as if they were his own, and repaired to the jail. The town’s only building of substance was constructed of stone around an iron cage transported from some wild railhead that had been dismantled the last time the tracks moved westward; American civilization, I learned, was a portable thing in that rapidly developing wilderness. A gimlet-eyed deputy bit down upon Holmes’s pound sterling, inspected the result, and gave us five minutes with the prisoner.
I have remarked frequently upon the ascetic gauntness of Sherlock Holmes, but he appeared well-fed in comparison with Dr. John Henry Holliday. Holliday was an exemplar of the attenuated Southern aristocrat, saffron in color, with the skull plain under a crown of pale thinning hair and a lank set of imperials blurred by days without a razor. He sat in a six-by-eight-foot enclosure on a cot, with a deck of sweaty pasteboards laid out on the blanket in a game of patience. A dirty collarless shirt, wrinkled trousers with the braces dangling, and filthy stockings, of good quality notwithstanding, comprised his entire costume.
“I detest this game,” he said in lieu of salutation. “It’s like making love to a mirror, with the prospect of humiliating yourself through failure.”
“If it’s the latter you wish to avoid, I should move the queen of clubs from the king of spades to the king of hearts.”
The prisoner corrected the error with a throaty noise of self-disgust that turned into a paroxysm of coughing. He stifled it against a sleeve, which bore away with it a pink stain. His gaze, bright and bloodshot, took in Holmes. “God’s wounds, an Englishman. Is business so good we’re importing hangmen now?”
Wyatt made introductions. Holmes began his interrogation before Holliday could form another ironic comment. “Your friend said Hank Littlejohn was well-liked by all but three. Who, pray, are the other two?”
“Algernon Woods and Jasper Riley. Woods stopped playing poker with Hank for the same reason I did, and Riley got into a dust-up with him on the road here over a sporting woman they both liked in Bisbee; but I wouldn’t waste my time trying to pin it on either one.” He coughed and turned up another card.
“Are their alibis so sound?”
“Jasper’s is. The Chinaman who runs the opium concession here swears he was in his establishment smoking up dreams the night Hank got it. Being a celestial, he’s got no friends in town and no reason to lie.”
“Lies don’t always need reasons. What about Woods?”
“Algernon says he was working late in his shop alone. He’s not your man, or even half of him. He’s a dwarf, and fat besides. No one would mistake him for me even on a dark night, and there was a moon out big as a pumpkin.”
“You said he has a shop. He is a merchant?”
“He’s a combination tailor and undertaker. I was his customer once and it looks like I will be again.”
“Where were you when Littlejohn met his fate?”
“Sleeping off a drunk in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse. Whisky’s a thief, but if I was to start killing poker cheats, I’d never be quit of it, and I’m a lazy man.”
“Thank you. Dr. Watson and I will do what can be done.”
Holliday chuckled, coughed, placed a red ten on a black knave. “I’d get to it directly. There’s another big moon tonight, dandy for tying a knot and finding the right tree.”
“I cannot understand such a man,” said I, when we were outside the jail.
Wyatt Earp dropped his cigar and crushed it under his heel. “You get used to that honey-and-molasses drawl. The Wester he goes, the Souther he gets.”
“I was referring to his character. My training tells me he’s a consumptive in the tertiary stage, but that’s hardly a reason to joke about hanging.”
“Life’s a joke to Doc. What part of it he’s got left is too small to take serious.”
“It’s not so small to you, however,” Holmes observed.
“Nor mine to him neither, comes to that. He’s innocent.”
“Of that I have no doubt. A man who’s so willing to accept death would sooner lie and say he’s guilty.”
“It’d stick in his craw.”
“Let us see if this Chinese opium seller suffers from that condition. There is no such thing as a watertight boat or an ironclad alibi.”
Earp led us to a large tent pitched upon a slope so steep it would flood during rains and collapse before a mild rockslide. The moss growing upon it made it as dark as a cave inside, lit only by greasy lanterns suspended above rows of folding campaign cots, some occupied by men mostly insensible. Evil smoke fouled the air. Earp slid his bandanna over his nose and mouth while I buried mine in my handkerchief. Holmes took in a deep breath and let it out with a contented sigh.
“Wantee pipee?”
This invitation came from an Oriental in a black silk robe and mandarin’s cap, round as Buddha and no taller than a child, albeit plainly in his sunset years. Gold shone in a wicked smile.
“No wantee pipee. Wantee straight talk, and not in pidgin. I know an Oxford accent when I hear it.” Holmes held up a gold sovereign, snatching it back when a yellow claw grabbed at it.
The old man shrugged and folded his hands inside the sleeves of his robe. “The missionary who taught me was a retired don. If you are here on behalf of a wife or mother, you may browse among these wretches for him who is lost. I do not insist upon introductions and so am ignorant as to their names.”
“If that is the case, how were you able to identify Jasper Riley among your customers the night Hank Littlejohn was killed?”
“I did not say I never pay attention to faces. In election years, many of my former colleagues in San Francisco went to jail because they failed to recognize the same undercover policemen who had arrested them before.”
“Did Riley pay you to say he was here all night?”
“Had he been here and made the proper offer, I should have accepted; but honestly, do you think a common teamster could meet my fee for such a risk? I bring in more in a night than he sees in a month, and it is nothing to hang a Chinaman here.”
“Very well. Here is your sovereign.”
The old man left his hands folded. “That is not the coin you showed me. You are not the magician you fancy yourself.”
Holmes grunted as if put out, slipped the coin into his waistcoat pocket, and produced another from inside his cuff. This the opium seller took with a mocking bow.
We went out, where Earp and I drew in great lungfuls of fresh air. Holmes chuckled, without mirth. “My good luck piece benefits me yet again. I took it from a German ironmonger who thought to ingratiate himself with Chancellor Bismarck by devaluing the British currency. Our educated friend inside is neither a liar nor a myopic. His price would exceed Littlejohn’s ability to pay, and it’s a very good counterfeit.”
“Then we’re licked,” Earp said. “I met Woods. He’s short as a rooster and fat as a hog. No one would confuse him with Doc with the moon out.”
“I should like to see the scene of the atrocity.”
We followed Earp to an open area a hundred yards from the nearest structure, barren but for rocks and scrub and grading downward from the mining camp, our guide reminding us to be alert for rattlesnakes. The dry earth was scored and spotted with wagon tracks and complex patterns made by overlapping hoof prints.
“A train of supplies and provisions came in from Tucson that night,” Earp said. “Littlejohn and Dundy came out to visit, and the teamsters sat around passing the jug. They say Doc came in to the top of that rise, coughing and cussing and calling for Littlejohn to show himself. When Littlejohn got up from the ground, Doc plugged him in the belly. That’s the story they told, anyway, to the last man.”
“Where was Littlejohn standing when he was shot?”
“Right where I am.”
“Doctor, will you stand where Mr. Earp indicated that Doc Holliday stood?”
I went to that spot.
