When the buckboard had clambered out of Twin Gulches past Robbers’ Roost, Johnny Behind-the-Deuce saw far back a long, trailing veil of dust sweeping up from behind a ridge in filmy whorls against the sky. He watched it with the fixity of fascination. A horseman galloped out of the dust over the crest of the road. A swarm of others came riding hard after him. Small in the distance, they looked like menacing goblins to his frightened eyes. He half rose from his seat, his hand clutching McKelvey’s shoulders.
“Here they come!” he yelled in McKelvey’s ear.
McKelvey lashed his mules into a run. Of a sudden came a soft tiny noise like the smothered popping of a cork. A sharper metallic ping like the vibration of a taut, mile-long wire. Then the distinct and unmistakable thin whine of a bullet. Spouts of dust shot into the air beside the wheels. The road behind began to dance with dusty puffs as under a thunder shower. The faint clatter of hoofs grew into a rushing storm of sound. McKelvey and Johnny Behind-the-Deuce bent forward in their seats with white, tense faces. Around the flanks of the plunging mules McKelvey wrapped his rawhide whip. Down the slopes, up the grades flew the swaying buckboard, taking the curves on two wheels. The pursuers were gaining rapidly, firing at every jump, yelling like savages. For Johnny Behind-the-Deuce it looked like cases in a losing deal; a skeleton hand seemed reaching out for his last stack of chips.
Two miles out of Tombstone stood Jack McCann’s Last Chance saloon. McKelvey and Johnny saw the long adobe roadhouse looming ahead with one last flicker of hope.
“Guess McCann’s is our last chance all right,” said McKelvey between clenched teeth. “We’ll never beat ’em into Tombstone.”
“If we get inside, maybe we can stand ’em off,” replied Johnny desperately.
McCann had just mounted a race mare that stood saddled in front of his saloon. This filly was a thoroughbred named Molly McCarthy and had won local fame by showing her heels to the best horses around Tombstone. McCann had her entered for a race over at the Watervale track on the Contention road and was preparing to give her an exercise gallop to tune her up for this event. A slim, spirited beauty was Molly McCarthy, and her satin skin sparkled as she champed the bit and pranced about on her clean, antelope legs in her eagerness for the run. McCann had turned her head to the road, when he caught sight of the pell-mell chase bearing down upon him. He stared in amazement. Well, what the devil?
“Take this lad behind you quick and get him into Tombstone before those fellows lynch him,” shouted McKelvey as he brought his mules back on their haunches.
McCann didn’t know Johnny Behind-the-Deuce, but he numbered many outlaws among his friends and had a lurking sympathy for fellows in trouble with the law. Many an all-night carouse Curly Bill and his merry men had had in the Last Chance saloon. And here was a sporting proposition that might stir the blood of any sporting man. McCann wasted no time in questions, but brought Molly McCarthy alongside the buckboard.
“Pile on,” he said.
As Johnny Behind-the-Deuce wrapped his arms around McCann’s waist, the mare broke at a bound into racing speed as if at the drop of a starter’s flag and went skimming over the road with long, frictionless strides. Drawing his jaded mules off to the side of the road, McKelvey watched McCann and Johnny Behind-the-Deuce dwindle in the distance. As the lynching party roared past, McKelvey rubbed his chin and grinned.
“You’ll play hell catching him now,” he yelled cheerfully.
As McCann and Johnny Behind-the-Deuce rode into Tombstone, the mine whistles on the hill began to boom. News of the murder of the engineer had been telegraphed ahead from Charleston. Miners flocked from the shafts and streamed down the hill toward town.
Wyatt Earp was dealing faro in the Oriental. Doc Holliday lolled in the lookout chair. Virgil Earp lounged against the bar. Business was dull. The place was as quiet as a prayer meeting. McCann and Johnny Behind-the-Deuce burst in upon the peaceful scene.
“Mob coming,” McCann broke out breathlessly. “Going to lynch this boy. Hurry up. Do something, for Christ’s sake. No time to lose.”
Wyatt Earp slid one card off the deck and then another. He took in a bet or two. He paid a few winning wagers. With the skill of old habit, he levelled off the tops of the stacks of chips in the check-rack and carefully evened them along the sides with the backs of his fingers. He overlooked no detail of customary routine. Then he turned up his box. The game, for the present, was over.
“Hold on to your chips, boys,” he said to the players. “I’ll cash ’em as soon as I’ve finished with this little business matter.”
As a gambler, he pushed back his chair. He rose as an officer of the law. Stepping to the front door, he saw a block west, at Fifth and Tough Nut streets, an excited crowd gathered about the newly arrived horsemen from Charleston. On beyond, the hill was swarming with miners. The situation impressed him as having possibilities. But the Oriental, facing on two streets and with great doors and windows, was no place in which to stand off a mob. There was a bowling alley across Allen Street in the next block to the north, narrow and wedged between stores and with doors only at front and rear. A handful of determined men might hold it against a multitude. Wyatt Earp escorted Johnny Behind-the-Deuce to the bowling alley. He posted Virgil Earp at the rear and Doc Holliday behind the locked front door. He was ready now.
He had never met Johnny Behind-the-Deuce before. He had seen him a few times around Tombstone gambling houses and had chuckled over his strange nickname and the origin of it. He knew nothing of the right or wrong of the
