“I don’t want any trouble,” he kept saying. “There must be no fight.”
The sheriff stopped at Fly’s front door. If bullets began to fly, he could step at one stride to safety.
Keeping their alignment, almost shoulder to shoulder, the Earps and Holliday came on with lethal momentum. As they drew near, they pulled their guns. Holding their weapons at a level before them, they halted within five feet of the Clantons and McLowerys, so close that if the foemen had stretched out their arms their fingertips would almost have touched. They could look into the pupils of one another’s eyes. The whisper of an Earp would have been audible to a Clanton.
“You fellows have been looking for a fight,” said Wyatt Earp, “and now you can have it.”
“Throw up your hands!” commanded Virgil Earp.
What happened now in the smoke of flaring guns happened while the clock ticked twenty seconds—twenty seconds packed with murderous hatred and flaming death.
Ike Clanton asserted that all the Clantons and McLowerys threw up their hands “as high as their shoulders,” at Virgil Earp’s command, and that Tom McLowery threw back his coat, saying, “I am unarmed.” He declared, too, that Billy Clanton, as he held his hands in the air, said, “Don’t shoot me. I don’t want to fight.” But according to Wyatt Earp, Billy Clanton and Frank McLowery jerked out their six-shooters and started shooting on the instant. Whatever the truth, two guns blazed almost simultaneously with Virgil’s command. These two first shots, it was believed, were fired by Wyatt Earp and Morgan Earp.
“Billy Clanton levelled his pistol at me,” said Wyatt Earp, “but I did not aim at him. I knew that Frank McLowery was a good shot and a dangerous man, and I aimed at him. Billy Clanton and I fired almost at the same time, he at me and I at Frank McLowery. My shot struck Frank McLowery in the belly. He fired back at me as he staggered out across the sidewalk into the street.”
Morgan Earp’s first shot struck Billy Clanton, who fell against the wall of the dwelling behind him and slid to the ground on his back. Dangerously hurt, the boy drew himself up on one knee, and grasping his six-shooter in both hands—a heroic figure of dauntless courage worthy of deathless bronze—kept on gamely fighting, his gun coughing swift spurts of fire.
Tom McLowery sprang toward his brother’s horse, probably with intent to get Frank McLowery’s rifle out of its saddle scabbard. The coolly alert Doc Holliday suspected such purpose. Throwing open his overcoat, Holliday seized his sawed-off shotgun hanging in its loop to his right shoulder and fired both barrels quickly with unerring accuracy. Tom McLowery, lifted off his feet by the heavy double charge of buckshot, crashed sidewise to the earth in a lifeless, limp huddle, his head between the horse’s hind heels. As McLowery fell, Holliday allowed his shotgun to swing back on its shoulder band beneath his coat and fought from now on with his six-shooter. Terrified by the sudden rattle of battle and the acrid, drifting swirls of powder smoke, the two horses belonging to Frank McLowery and Billy Clanton dashed pell-mell from the lot and went careering off through the street in wild, clattering flight.
Ike Clanton, the pot-valiant one, whose drunken, braggart threats had brought on this tragedy, rushed upon Wyatt Earp and caught him by the left arm, hung on tenaciously for a moment, doing what he could do to distract him and spoil his marksmanship and make him an easy target for his foes. Wyatt Earp could have killed Ike Clanton. Nine out of ten men under the same circumstances would have killed him. But lion-like in his magnanimity as in his courage, Wyatt Earp only flung him aside.
“The fight has begun,” said Wyatt Earp. “Go to fighting or get away.”
Ike Clanton darted into Fly’s photograph gallery into which Sheriff Behan already had disappeared, ran through a hall, and out the back door across a lot to Allen Street, where he hid in a Mexican dance hall. But if Wyatt Earp was merciful, no such quixotic chivalry actuated Doc Holliday, “the coldest blooded killer in Tombstone.” As Ike Clanton fled across the lot, Holliday turned for a second from the fighting and sent two bullets after him which missed him by inches and thudded into the walls of an adobe outhouse.
Pitiful, chickenhearted Ike Clanton. No hero soul in him. No knightly gallantry or warrior devotion that might have prompted him to stay and die with his brave brother and equally brave comrades. The panic fear of death was upon him, and he ran like a frightened rabbit to save his worthless hide. One almost feels a twinge of regret that this craven fellow escaped, but there is a certain pagan consolation in the knowledge that he preserved his paltry life only to lose it ingloriously in later years while again running from his enemies.
Billy Clanton, still down on one knee and handling his six-shooter with both hands, was resting his elbow on the crook of the other knee and taking deliberate aim at every shot. Virgil Earp fired at him, the bullet boring a hole through the flap of the boy’s hat. Billy’s blue eyes flashed and his face twisted into a murderous snarl as he threw the muzzle of his gun around upon the marshal and pulled the trigger. The ball cut through the calf of Virgil Earp’s right leg and brought him to the ground. He, too, rose on one knee and continued firing. Now there were two wounded men fighting on their knees.
Frank McLowery was wavering and weaving about in the middle of the street, clasping his left hand now and again to his body where Wyatt Earp’s bullet had torn into him. He was plainly in agony. Doc Holliday ran toward him, firing once as he ran and halted within a distance of
