“Berry’s injury,” said Dr. George Goodfellow, “was inconsequential and hardly more than an abrasion. Technically, he died from shock. The simple fact was the man was scared to death.”
Bells of Tombstone tolled all day Sunday while Morgan Earp lay in state blanketed by flowers in the Cosmopolitan Hotel. The body was taken to Benson Monday, and, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Earp, Mr. and Mrs. James Earp, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday, started by train to its last resting place in Colton, California, home of the parents of the Earps. Virgil and James Earp were saying farewell to Arizona. Neither ever returned. Thus passed from the Tombstone scene Virgil and Morgan Earp, two of the fighting Earp triumvirate, one dead, the other broken in health and disabled by wounds, both victims of assassins who had tracked them relentlessly in skulking secrecy and whose cowardly vengeance had blazed out of the darkness of night. Of the three warrior brothers, Wyatt Earp alone was left—one, but a lion.
Stilwell, Spence, and Indian Charlie arrived at the Spence home while Morgan Earp was dying. Spence was white and trembling, according to his wife, and his teeth were chattering. Stilwell left almost immediately, and Indian Charlie an hour or so later. Spence arose from bed at six o’clock Sunday morning and ordered breakfast. He and his wife quarrelled and he slapped her. Possibly it was this slap in the face that caused his wife, at the coroner’s inquest, to reveal the secrets of the murderous plot. After a hurried breakfast, she said, Spence left on horseback for Sonora. A wise trip it proved to be. Spence’s sojourn in old Mexico doubtless saved him from the vengeance of Wyatt Earp, aroused now to the depths of his soul and filled with a raging lust for the blood of his brother’s murderers.
Bright and early Sunday morning, Frank Stilwell was in Tucson. The distance between Tombstone and Tucson, even as the crow flies, is hardly less than seventy-five miles. Across the San Pedro Valley through gaps between the mountain groups, this veteran robber of stages, who knew every secret trail and cow path of the mesas and deserts, had made the journey on horseback between midnight and daybreak and here he was in Tucson, dropping into saloons along Myer and Church streets and greeting old friends and acquaintances with smiling insouciance. His swift, secret flight by night had given him an alibi sufficiently plausible, it might have seemed, to convince any jury of twelve men of his innocence of Morgan Earp’s murder. But even the most cunning alibis, like other schemes of mice and men, gang aft agley. No jury of twelve men was to weigh the evidence of Stilwell’s crime. No eloquent lawyers, wise in the technicalities and subterfuges of the law, were to argue subtly in his defense. To only one man was he to answer for his midnight deed of blood, and that one man was Wyatt Earp.
Before Wyatt Earp left Tombstone with Morgan Earp’s body, he knew the identity of his brother’s assassins. What the secret was that was whispered into Wyatt Earp’s ear by Morgan Earp as he lay dying on the card-room lounge has remained a secret, as far as the public is concerned, to this day. Morgan Earp, it was believed, had caught no fleeting glimpse of the murderers who fired upon him through the glass of the alley door. But, according to Dan Tipton, Morgan Earp had received some mysterious warning a few hours before his death to be on his guard against assassination. This, it was thought, was Morgan Earp’s dying secret, and it may have been accompanied by definite knowledge of the identity of the men in the plot. Whatever the source of the information, this much is certain: Wyatt Earp knew.
Ike Clanton was in Tucson when Stilwell arrived. Since Billy Clanton and the two McLowerys had died beneath the guns of the Earps and Doc Holliday, Ike Clanton had been threatening vengeance, and the Earps suspected that, in alliance with Stilwell and Spence, he had been at the bottom of the plots that had resulted in the wounding of Virgil and the death of Morgan Earp. It would have fared ill with Ike Clanton if, after these tragic affairs, he had chanced to encounter any of the Earps or Holliday. Armed or unarmed, he would have been killed without mercy. In Wyatt Earp’s hatred, no magnanimity was mingled now.
Ike Clanton received several telegrams from Tombstone on Monday warning him that Wyatt Earp and Holliday were with the escort accompanying Morgan Earp’s remains and would pass through Tucson late Monday afternoon. Ike Clanton showed these telegrams to Stilwell. The situation had a tinge of danger. What was to be done?
“You stay away from the depot,” Stilwell advised Clanton. “Wyatt Earp and Holliday know you are here. They will be on the lookout for you. They haven’t an inkling that I’m within fifty miles of Tucson. I’ll give them a little surprise.”
The train with the Earp party aboard drew into the station at Tucson. It was dusk. The town seemed a great dark blur with a few lights winking here and there in the houses. Deep shadows hung over the desert that swept away from the tracks. The mountains were darkly purple against the fading colours in the sky. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday stepped from a coach. They would get a breath of fresh air and take a turn for exercise up and down the long depot platform. But they were not to be caught napping by lurking foes. Wyatt Earp carried a rifle, Holliday a shotgun. The train was to stop ten minutes.
From the end of a street, Ike Clanton watched them furtively. He would have liked to kill these two men. But they were rough-looking customers. They knew how to
