With Tombstone swarming with their enemies and with Sheriff Behan fully informed concerning the killing of Stilwell, their arrangements for departure were made without hurry and with no pretense of secrecy. For four days they remained in town busy in winding up their affairs. They shipped their effects out of the country, they told their friends goodbye. Warren Earp, Sherman McMasters, Texas Jack Vermillion, and Jack Johnson, minor satellites in days of power, decided to accompany them.
On the morning of , Wyatt Earp assembled his five followers for a stirrup cup at the Oriental bar. All were armed with six-shooters and rifles. Their horses, with blanket rolls strapped on their saddles, were hitched in Allen Street.
“Tombstone,” said Wyatt Earp, pouring out his liquor, “is a good old town, after all. I’m leaving a lot of friends behind me, and as the fellow says, a host of enemies. I’ll keep my friends warm in my heart. As for my enemies, they can go to hell. The old town has been good to me and it’s been bad to me. But good and bad luck are all one now. My job is finished. I’ve played a man’s part. I regret nothing. I am ashamed of nothing. I’ll never forget Tombstone, and Tombstone will remember me to its last day.”
Wyatt Earp raised his glass.
“Here’s happy days, boys,” he said. “And goodbye to Tombstone.”
As the men at the bar were turning down their farewell bumpers, Sheriff Behan came bustling in. His customary smile was absent. He vouchsafed no word of greeting. This was not Johnny Behan but the Sheriff of Cochise County clothed in august authority.
“I have warrants here,” he said austerely, drawing the two official documents from the inner pocket of his coat, “sworn out in Tucson and charging Wyatt Earp and J. H. Holliday with the murder of Frank Stilwell. I have come to arrest these two men.”
Wyatt Earp set down his glass on the bar and with frigid eye looked the sheriff slowly up and down from head to foot.
“Johnny Behan,” he said, “you have been my enemy from the time you set foot in Tombstone. You have lied about me. You have played every underhanded trick you knew how to play against me. I have never made a move that I have not heard your rattles in the grass. A man had only to be my enemy to be your friend. You have hated me. You have tried to put me in the penitentiary. You have done your best to ruin me. I have known every undercover play you have made. But I have conducted myself like a gentleman toward you. I have treated you with a civility you did not deserve. But now I am sick of you, sick of your treacheries, sick of the gang behind you. I despise you. You can’t arrest me.” Wyatt Earp snapped his fingers under the sheriff’s nose. “I’d see you in hell before I’d allow myself to be taken a prisoner by you.”
Wyatt Earp and his companions walked out the door past the sheriff, unhitched their horses, and swung into the saddles. With Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday side by side in advance of the others who followed four abreast, the little calvalcade moved northward out Allen Street, the horses reined to a walk in a last gesture of defiance. Crowds lined the curbs to watch them go. Many a man was in those two lines of people who hated Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday with a deep and bitter hatred. Many a curse was muttered. Many a glance surcharged with deadly malevolence was bent upon the two leaders. Hatred’s last chance was passing by. Here were targets impossible to miss. But no one made a hostile move. Sitting calmly in their saddles, their faces of the stillness of marble, their rifles resting across their laps, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday rode through a lane of silence. With cool, steady eyes, Wyatt Earp watched the banked faces along one side of the street, Holliday those along the other. Only after they had arrived at the edge of town did the horsemen increase their pace. Then, at an easy gallop, they passed over a hill and were lost to view.
Old-timers, hostile, of course, will sometimes tell today in careless phrase how the Earps were “run out of Tombstone.” This is how they were run out. In such deliberate manner did they take their “flight.” They fled at a walk.
So Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday turned their backs upon the past with its drama and romance and tragedy, and riding on over the deserts and the purple mountains, disappeared from Tombstone forever.
XV
The Out Trail
Ramon Acosta was tired and hot. He sat down to rest on a log and, getting out a sack of tobacco, rolled a yellow-paper cigarette. Near the ramshackle log cabin, Ted Judah was busy stacking firewood to be marketed in Tombstone.
“Sam Williams,” remarked Acosta, letting a luxurious puff of smoke trickle from his nostrils, “has been gone a long time. Those mules must be hard to find.”
The two young workmen were camped with other woodchoppers at
