“You are the man I want,” cried McLowery. “I’ve got you now.”
“Got me to get,” flung back Holliday with a poisonous smile.
McLowery rested his six-shooter across his left arm and drew a careful bead. Just as he pulled the trigger Holliday suddenly turned sideways to him. This cool trick in the thick of the furious tumult of battle was characteristic of this cheerful desperado, whose poise no desperate circumstance could shake. The stratagem saved the doctor’s life. With his side turned to his antagonist Holliday, who was only skin and bones offered the merest sliver of a target. McLowery’s bullet crashed through Holliday’s pistol scabbard and burned a deep crease across his thigh.
At that instant, Billy Clanton shot Morgan Earp through the shoulder.
“That one clipped me good,” shouted Morgan, as the impact of the forty-five calibre ball bowled him over flat on his back.
Frank McLowery, staggering about blindly, had drawn close to Morgan Earp. Wyatt Earp saw his brother’s danger.
“Look out for Frank McLowery, Morg,” Wyatt called.
Morgan flung himself over on his side, snapped his pistol down on Frank McLowery, and let fly on a quick chance. Doc Holliday fired at the same moment. McLowery fell dead with a bullet through his brain. Whether Holliday or Morgan Earp killed him has been a subject of conjecture to this day.
Ike Clanton evaporated in shameless flight, Tom and Frank McLowery dead, Billy Clanton, in the last few seconds of the battle, was left on a lost field to fight alone. Wounded to the death, without hope or a single chance for his life, but still undaunted, the boy faced his remorseless foes.
“God damn you!” He hurled the curse at them as he crouched upon his knees. “I’ve got to kill one of you before I die.”
He straightened up his lithe young body, his tortured face flamed defiance, and the sunlight sparkled on the long, nickelled barrel of his heavy revolver as he brought the weapon to a level for his last shot. A bullet fired, it was believed, by Virgil Earp, struck him full in the breast, and he toppled over upon his back. But the fearless youth was still not ready to die or give up the battle.
“Just one more shot,” he murmured as if in prayer. “God! Just one more shot.”
He was too weak to roll over, too weak to raise himself to shooting position. He managed to prop his head against the foundation stones of the house at his rear. Lying at full length on his back, he raised his gun and pointed it blindly toward his enemies. For a second, the weapon wavered weakly in the air. His finger fumbled on the trigger. Then his hand fell limply at his side. The six-shooter rolled upon the ground. A shiver shook him from head to foot. He collapsed and lay still. The battle was over.
Citizens carried Billy Clanton across the street into Dr. George Goodfellow’s upstairs office.
“Pull off my boots,” whispered the dying boy. “I promised my mother I’d never die with my boots on.”
As he breathed his last, the promise to his dead mother was fulfilled. The bullet that had killed him passed through a letter from his sweetheart which he had carried in his pocket.
As the Earps started back up town, Virgil limping as he leaned on Doc Holliday’s arm, and Morgan supported by Wyatt, Sheriff Behan bustled out of Fly’s photograph gallery.
“I will have to arrest you, Wyatt,” he said.
“I will not allow you to arrest me today, Johnny,” Wyatt replied. “Maybe I’ll let you arrest me tomorrow. I’m not going to run away.”
At the inquest held by Coroner H. M. Matthews, eyewitnesses estimated that twenty-five or thirty shots had been fired during the third of a minute the battle lasted. Billy Clanton had been struck twice, once below the midriff, and a second time within an inch of the heart. Frank McLowery’s body showed two wounds. The first, made by Wyatt Earp’s first shot, was a straight, penetrating wound in the abdomen; the second was in the head, just below the right ear. Twelve buckshot from Holliday’s gun had torn a hole in Tom McLowery’s right side six inches below the armpit and between the third and fifth ribs. Coroner Matthews said the wound could have been covered by the palm of a man’s hand. A report was circulated that Tom McLowery had been killed while holding his hands in the air. Coroner Matthews set this rumour at rest by testifying that the charge of buckshot had also left a torn wound in the fleshy rear portion of the right upper arm. Such a wound obviously could not have been made if McLowery’s arms had been elevated.
The Earps were tried before Judge Wells Spicer late in November. The most important witnesses were Sheriff Behan, Ike Clanton, and Wyatt Earp. It was on this occasion that Ike Clanton told his story of the attack on the Benson stage in which he attempted to implicate Holliday and the Earps. Though some of the witnesses said that the two shots that opened the battle were fired by Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp testified that the first two shots were fired by himself and Billy Clanton simultaneously.
“No shots were fired,” Wyatt Earp said on the witness stand, “until Billy Clanton and Frank McLowery drew their guns. If Tom McLowery was unarmed, I did not know it. His six-shooter was in plain view when he and I had had our encounter an hour or so before in front of Justice Wallace’s courtroom and I had no reason to believe that he had later laid aside his weapon. Though no evidence has been introduced to sustain me, I still believe he was armed and fired two shots at our party before Holliday killed him.
“Because of Ike Clanton’s repeated threats against my life, I believe I had a perfect right to kill him when I easily could have done so but I did not do it because
