But if, as a man, Johnny Behan was small potatoes, as a politician he was some pumpkins. Canny and sly and very crafty was the sheriff at the deep and subtle game of politics. He knew every crook and turn and sharp angle of it and was a wizard at all the tricks. When he smiled a little more than usual, people used to say, “Johnny’s probably up to some top-and-bottom trick or dealing from a marked deck.” Or if his face was particularly lamblike and innocent, he was suspected of having an ace up his sleeve. No amateur politician had any business sitting in at Johnny Behan’s game. The man who gambled with the sheriff at politics had to nurse his chips and play his cards close to his belly, or he would find himself pushing his chair back from the table without bed money or the price of a breakfast. As a politician, Johnny Behan was a foxy, dangerous boy.
Sheriff Behan was hardly more than comfortably settled in office when Wyatt Earp announced himself a candidate for sheriff at the next election. So the two men were political rivals from the first, and political rivalry developed into personal enmity. Friendly with Sheriff Behan and solidly arrayed against the Earps were Curly Bill and his outlaws. After Wyatt Earp had on one occasion knocked Curly Bill about the head with the butt of a six-shooter and dragged him off to jail, the freebooter chieftain nursed his wrath and thirsted for revenge. Sharing his deadly antipathy were such leading figures in the outlaw confederacy as Ike, Finn, and Billy Clanton, ferocious Old Man Clanton, their father, Tom and Frank McLowery, John Ringo, Pete Spence, and Frank Stilwell.
A power to be dreaded and reckoned with were these outlaws. They were strong in numbers, and most of the dwellers up and down the lonely reaches of the San Pedro, Sulphur Springs, and San Simon valleys were either their avowed friends and allies or maintained a show of friendliness through fear. If the Earps ruled in Tombstone, all the wild region in which Tombstone was an oasis lay under the shadow of outlaw dominance and was, it might be said, in fief to these murderous and powerful bands. The hostility of the outlaws, countenanced, it might seem, by Sheriff Behan’s friendly attitude toward them, finally brought in the day when the power of the Earps was broken and they withdrew from Tombstone forever, leaving behind them a crimson trail to mark their vengeance.
This, then, was the lineup in a situation that rapidly developed into hair-trigger tension. On one side Sheriff Behan and his puissant political machine, with murderous outlaw hatreds in the shadowy background; on the other side, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday, as the fighting force of the Earp faction, entrenched in power in Tombstone but ringed with enemies who watched and waited unseen in the deserts and mountains.
Wyatt Earp cleaned up Tombstone. His motives may have been those of an honest champion of good government, or they may have been those of a self-seeking politician establishing a record on which he might stand for election in the shrievalty contest. One’s choice is optional in the matter. But the fact remains that he did a good job. His faction became known as the Law and Order party. He had the support of the best citizens. The Tombstone papers of the period were outspoken in his praise.
Sheriff Behan’s administration, on the other hand, was repeatedly and severely criticized. His complacent relations with the outlaws particularly brought about his head the protests of citizens and the denunciations of the press. It is not surprising, in view of the bitterness of the political situation, that all the charges made against the Earps had their origin in Sheriff Behan’s faction. The desperate character of Wyatt Earp and his colleagues was pointed out. It was hinted that the Law and Order party was controlled by gunmen bent only upon their own aggrandizement. Vague rumours were set going that the Earps were in collusion with stage robbers. Suspicion was aroused in the public mind, but with the machinery of the law in his control, Sheriff Behan took no steps to arrest or bring to trial the men against whom these whispered insinuations were directed.
The long-smouldering feud between the two men might have been comic if its results had been less tragic. Wyatt Earp ignored the little sheriff or roused himself only occasionally to make a lazy gesture as if brushing a fly from the end of his nose. It was as if a truculent pygmy with twanging bow were shooting pins at some drowsy old saga giant. But when Johnny Behan fell back upon the ingratiating tactics of a politician, the advantage was all on his side. Johnny Behan was friendly, Wyatt Earp was grim; Johnny Behan smiled, Wyatt Earp shot from the hip; Johnny Behan was the personification of the glad hand, Wyatt Earp the personification of the trigger finger. … A lion stalks with measured stride through the dewy shadows. Back of him is the darkness of the donga. The moon is a sickle of silver in a glowing green sky against which a tall palm leans blackly. The grunting roar of the old wilderness monarch rolls with dim, menacing clamour across the veldt. From the mimosa thickets a fox fills the twilight with a thin uproar of shrill, savage barks.
IV
Wyatt Earp Plays a Lone Hand
Mr. Henry Schneider sat at a pine-board table in the Chinaman’s in Charleston and ate his breakfast in silence. Mr. Schneider was the chief engineer at the stamp mill of the Tombstone Mining and Milling Company. He could see through the front window of the restaurant the big plant on the other side of the San Pedro just across the bridge, its stacks pouring out a steady stream
