Back and forth Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday strolled leisurely. A man walking beside the track ahead of the train caught Wyatt Earp’s eye. A diffused glow from the long ray of the locomotive headlight faintly illuminated the distant figure, and something about it seemed vaguely familiar.
“There, Doc,” said Wyatt Earp in a tense voice hardly above a whisper, “look there. That’s Frank Stilwell.”
“By God, it is!” answered Holliday.
Stilwell was moving toward a string of box cars standing on a siding. His purpose, it was believed, was to take a position alongside the track and assassinate Wyatt Earp as the train went past. Possibly Wyatt Earp would be standing on a platform. If not, he might be killed by a bullet fired through a window. A shot in the dark was Stilwell’s favourite form of murder.
Going on tiptoe as noiselessly as possible but almost at a run, Wyatt Earp and Holliday hurried after him. Stilwell passed along one side of the box cars as Wyatt Earp and Holliday sped along the other. At the far end of the string of cars, the three men met.
Two short whistles sounded from the locomotive. With vast, smoky puffs and a hissing of steam, the giant machine slid forward. Half drowned in the thunderous rumble of the train, a sudden explosive report boomed upon the fireman’s ears as he leaned out the window of the engine pilot house. Then another. Four more in quick succession. Six in all.
“Sounded like shots,” yelled the fireman across the cab to the engineer sitting at the throttle.
“Some drunk celebratin’, I guess,” the engineer shouted back.
The coaches began to flash by, their windows brilliantly lighted. Two men seized the step-rails and swung aboard. From his cushioned seat, Virgil Earp, his crutches leaning beside him, glanced up to see Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday coming toward him through the aisle. Both were smiling. After they had taken seats, something Wyatt Earp said caused Virgil’s eyes to grow suddenly bright and his face to glow. Virgil shot out his hand. Wyatt Earp, then Holliday, shook it with solemn fervour. A passenger reading a magazine across the aisle looked over his spectacles with a touch of surprise. Strange. Why should these three men who had been travelling together for hours be shaking hands in such crazy fashion? Well, the world was full of funny people. The man across the aisle fell to his magazine again.
A railroad trackman carrying a lantern saw at dawn next morning some undefined, dark object on the ground at the end of the string of box cars. He stopped curiously and swung his light toward it to see what it was.
“Humph!”
A dead man lay on his face in the shine of the lantern. The dark, packed cinders about him were stained moistly red. The trackman lifted the edge of the coat gingerly to learn the cause of a sharp bulge above the hip. The heavy handle of a six-shooter was projecting from the pocket. Whoever this poor devil was, he had died without a chance to draw his weapon.
At the inquest, the coroner discovered six wounds on the body, four made by rifle balls and two by buckshot. The rifle balls had passed entirely through. One charge of buckshot had shattered the left thigh and tearing through the abdominal region, had splintered the spinal column. The other had entered the breast over the heart, leaving a gaping hole, above which a great burned spot showed in the coat.
Wyatt Earp’s vengeance had been swift. Morgan Earp had died at midnight Saturday. A little after sundown the following Monday, Frank Stilwell had paid for the murder with his blood.
An eastbound train was flagged to a stop after midnight at the little station of Rillito, nine miles west of Tucson. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday evidently had changed their minds about going to California. They boarded the train and returned to Benson. Before next morning’s sun was high above the Dragoons, they were back in Tombstone.
But Tombstone no longer was stronghold or refuge for them. The power of the Earps had been broken and their day was over. Of the old fighting oligarchy of four men that had ruled supreme in the town for more than two years, only two were left, and with enemies closing in, the position of these two was precarious if not desperate. Though in the retrospect, the fall of the Earps from power gives an impression of crashing suddenness, it was rather a process of gradual disintegration. Victories and defeats had alike contributed to their overthrow. Beset by political and personal foes, by secret machinations and murderous violence, the wonder is not that their power was so brief but that it endured so long.
The Benson stage affair was the beginning of the end. Doc Holliday’s innocence of participation in that crime had never been satisfactorily established and his friendship with Jim Crane, leader of the highwaymen, had tended to confirm belief in his guilt. At the same time the whispered suspicions against the Earps had had their effect upon the public mind and had been strengthened by the testimony of Ike Clanton in court. The battle against the Clantons and McLowerys had been for the Earps a Pyrrhic victory with the effect of a defeat. Nothing had done more to swing public sentiment against them. Billy Clanton’s heroic fight against hopeless odds and the fact that Ike Clanton and Tom McLowery were unarmed had engendered general sympathy for the three outlaws who had gone with splendid courage to their death and, while kindling to flaming intensity the hatred of the enemies of the Earps, had alienated not a few friends. Apologists found the tragedy difficult to defend and foes openly proclaimed it cold-blooded murder.
Morgan Earp’s assassination had left a serious gap in the Earps’ fighting strength
