Bradshaw and McIntyre are not only business partners but old pals. Bradshaw goes shopping and buys a gorgeous shirt with black, green, and red stripes. When he saunters through Allen Street in this portentous garment, he achieves instant prestige; it is an event of great public moment. There is a current song of great silliness and popularity in these days called “Where Did You Get That Hat?” This song, slightly altered, seems to fit the occasion, and as he strolls along the boulevard Bradshaw is saluted on all sides by facetious citizens who shout with boisterous guffaws, “Where did you get that shirt?” Bradshaw is vexed by such ribaldry, but his show of displeasure only incites his tormentors to new derision. He flies into furious anger at last and declares flatly, “I will kill the next man who makes fun of my shirt.” The next man is McIntyre. The shirt strikes McIntyre as excruciatingly ridiculous. He laughs so immoderately that for a time he cannot speak. He bends double in unholy glee, he twists, he squirms, all the while pointing a finger at Bradshaw but unable to articulate a syllable. Finally, between gurgling outbursts, he manages to ejaculate the fateful words, “Where did you get that shirt?” Whereupon Bradshaw, beside himself with rage, draws a six-shooter and kills him, the bullet entering McIntyre’s mouth, which is wide open with merriment. Tombstone takes this murder lightly, holding McIntyre fortunate in that death comes to him as a sort of joke and that he goes out into the other world holding his sides with laughter.
Julius Caesar rises to fame as the greatest of Tombstone restaurateurs and the Maison Dorée over which he presides has dimmed the original prestige of the Can Can. Portly, rubicund, with triple chin, he rubs his hands unctuously, welcomes his patrons with smiles and bows, suggests epicurean dishes, and tours the crowded tables, inquiring solicitously as to the cookery. His steaks and chops are especially celebrated among Tombstone gastronomes, and a quail on toast at the Maison Dorée is an event. Julius Caesar grows comfortably rich but falls finally, not beneath dagger stabs at the foot of Pompey’s statue in the Capitol, but beneath the fascinations of faro. He is last heard of running a cheap lunch counter at Benson.
A coroner’s physician “performs assessment work” on the remains of an unfortunate gentleman who has been badly shot up and finds the body “rich in lead but too badly punctured to hold whisky.”
Johnny Blair of Double Dobe ranch comes to Tombstone to see the sights with a bunch of cowboy comrades and is taken down with the smallpox. His friends quarantine him under care of a Mexican woman, immune from the plague, in a cabin out on the mesa, themselves occupying another cabin a half mile away to lend whatever long-distance assistance they may. After five days, the Mexican nurse approaches within earshot and announces that Señor Juanito is very dead. To bury the victim of the dreaded disease without endangering the lives of the other cowboys becomes the immediate problem. Having scooped out a grave, they play seven-up to determine who will officiate as mortician. The loser at the game saddles his pony and, riding to the open door of the cabin where the dead man lies on a blanket on the floor, throws the loop of a riata about the feet. Spurring his pony to a gallop, the corpse dragging and bouncing at the end of the rope, he races toward the grave, into which the dead man flounces headlong. The other cowboys, rushing up with spades and making the dirt fly as they fill the grave, establish doubtless a world’s record for lightning speed in funerals.
A sheriff’s posse has a fight at the Stockton ranch with two outlaws. A member of the posse is killed. Also one outlaw. The other outlaw is wounded and brought to Tombstone, where he is placed in the hospital, the authorities declaring him too badly hurt to be locked in jail. In a week or two, the outlaw strolls out of the hospital and is seen no more. The townspeople view the official laxity with indignation. A little afterward a crowded audience greets the amateur performance of Pinafore in Schieffelin Hall. When Ralph Rackstraw in his tuneful farewell to the captain’s daughter, sings “I go to a dungeon cell,” Dick Deadeye interrupts. “Say, Cap,” says Dick Deadeye, “have you got a dungeon cell on board this ship?” “No,” replies the captain, “but we have a hospital.” This suggestive quip, you understand, brings down the house.
Martin Costello, a shrewd fellow, runs the St. Louis Beer Hall. He is the first saloon-keeper to sell St. Louis beer in Tombstone, and as he handles a famous brand, his bar does a land-office business. Costello in a little while accumulates much money, but is always looking for opportunity to make more. He grubstakes a prospector who makes a lucky strike in the Mule Mountains, locating the copper mine afterward known as the Irish Mag. Costello sells his interest in this mine a few years afterward to the Calumet & Arizona Company for close to a million dollars. So Martin Costello bids goodbye to his Tombstone saloon and establishes himself in a handsome residence in Los Angeles and lives there in princely style for many years. One day he is found dead in a lodging house, a pistol beside him and a bullet hole in his head. Though some suspect murder, his death, it seems pretty clearly established, is suicide, but why he should have been in a lodging house, or why he should have killed himself, remain mysteries. Costello had invested in much Tombstone realty which his widow owns today.
Miss Ethel Robinson, now Mrs. Macia, hostess of the Arcade Inn, joins the choir of the Episcopal Church upon her return from graduation at the University of Arizona at Tucson. A handsome young
