Holliday admitted he had hired a horse in Tombstone on the afternoon of the attempted robbery. He said, however, that he had hired it, not from Charlie Tribolett, but from John Dunbar’s corral. He denied that he had been in Charleston or that he was the man on the blaze-face roan whom John Slaughter had encountered at night on the Charleston road. He had returned to Tombstone, he declared, at dusk, at about the hour the attempted stage robbery was taking place some sixteen miles away. He had hitched his horse in the street, he said, and after taking supper in a restaurant, played faro for several hours in the Alhambra. After his faro game, he declared, he returned the horse to Dunbar’s corral.
Holliday’s story, if true, was a clear alibi, despite the fact that he failed to tell where he had gone on his trip out of town. Moreover, his alibi had apparent corroboration in a story told by a man named Fuller, who did a business hauling water from the Wells to Tombstone. Fuller declared that, just after he had left the Wells with a wagonload of water, about four o’clock on the afternoon of the stage holdup, Holliday had joined him. Holliday, Fuller said, hitched his horse to the rear of the wagon and took his seat beside Fuller. Holliday, according to Fuller, had come back to Tombstone seated in Fuller’s wagon. Wyatt Earp also corroborated Holliday’s alibi.
“I received a wire message about half past six o’clock that evening direct from Bob Paul at Benson telling me that the stage had been held up,” said Wyatt Earp. “Immediately after I had received the telegram, I found Doc Holliday playing faro, and it would have been impossible for him to have been at the scene of the attack on the stage. In identifying Holliday as the rider of Charlie Tribolett’s blaze-face roan, John Slaughter simply made a mistake.”
One point generally overlooked at the time stood out in Doc Holliday’s favour. This was Luther King’s statement that Leonard, Crane, and Head were alone in the attempted robbery. Despite the printed assertion of positive information that there were four robbers, it was never definitely settled there were more than three. It may be pointed out that there were stronger grounds for suspecting King as a possible fourth robber than for suspecting Holliday.
“Despite King’s denials,” said Wyatt Earp, “there was never any doubt in my mind that he was the fourth robber. I never took any stock in the fishy story he told when we captured him loaded down with guns and ammunition. If King had not escaped, I think his participation in the robbery would eventually have been proved.”
Holliday was never arrested. If the authorities had any evidence against him, they never saw fit to bring it into court. Leonard, Head, and Crane were chased all over the map of southeastern Arizona, but Holliday lived unmolested in Tombstone. But from the time of the Benson stage affair, Holliday remained in a fourth dimensional vagueness of suspicion, his guilt never established and his innocence never proved. Which, it may be remarked in passing, worried the genial doctor not at all.
Gossip was still acute when this second statement, as astounding as the first, was printed in the newspapers:
Evidence in the hands of the authorities implicates four robbers and five accomplices and arrests will follow as soon as everything is ready. Meanwhile it is certain that several men around Tombstone, among them one who was a participant in the preliminary pursuit, are under surveillance.
Identity of the five men under suspicion as accomplices was a more difficult riddle than the Holliday affair. Though the Clantons and McLowerys were mentioned it was generally assumed that the accomplices indicated were the Earps and Marshall Williams, and Williams was identified as the man who had “participated in the preliminary pursuit.” There was no evidence against Williams, and he was suspected only because he was a friend of the Earps and was in a position to know when shipments of money and bullion went out on the stages. But the gossip had it that Williams had tipped off the treasure cargo to the Earps and the Earps had assigned Holliday as their personal representative to assist in the robbery and see the spoils were evenly divided. But these innuendos were circulated only in the most discreet whispers. None of the promised arrests ever was made, and it is doubtful that at this time Wyatt Earp and his brothers realized that they were under suspicion. It was not until six months later that the first and only open charge against them was made.
Long before the Earp-Clanton feud reached its climax of battle in Tombstone’s streets, the three highwaymen who had made the attack on the Benson stage and were the indirect cause of the vendetta were in their graves. Jim Crane died with Old Man Clanton in the fight with Mexicans in Guadalupe Canyon. Leonard and Head were killed at Owl City, New Mexico, by Ike and Bill Haslett, whose ranch the two outlaws had coveted and whose lives they had threatened. When Bob Paul fired on the stage robbers, his aim had been better than he knew. Leonard said with his last breath that he was glad to die to escape the agony from a gaping wound in his groin left by the shotgun messenger’s charge of buckshot.
XII
Flashes of Storm
The Earp-Clanton feud has passed into the melting pot of tradition in which so much frontier history has been changed into myth. The Southwest has a nebulous idea that in some way or other it grew out of the attempted robbery of the Benson stage, but it may be ventured that not a half-dozen persons in Tombstone or in all Arizona have any definite knowledge of its origin.
But the bloodstained facts of the old story are still memories strangely surcharged with bitterness. The opinions of the fathers
