“I’m on your side, Rafe,” Caroline said. She was using that persuasive tone of voice that always made him pay attention. He took his eves off Wyatt Earp across the street and settled his attention on her face. She said earnestly, “You’ve got to be realistic. You’re no gunfighter. But if Jerr decides to arrest Earp, he’ll know how to go about it so there won’t be a big gunfight. Hell get the drop on the Earp brothers somehow.”
“He would,” Rafe said flatly.
“It’s the only smart thing to do. And that’s where you’ll come in. Jerr hasn’t got a soul in this town to take his side, outside of you and me. Once he arrests them he’ll need someone to guard his back against the Earps’ friends. He can’t get them out of town without help. And once you’ve helped him that way, they’ll have to pay you the reward.”
“Yeah,” Rafe said. “Sure, I guess you’re right. I was just making bluff talk anyway. I know my limitations. I wouldn’t really pick a fight with Earp. Jesus.” He grinned at her. “But by Christ I’m not scared of the bastard either.”
“I never thought you were.”
A fat waitress brought two cups of coffee to the table and waited to be paid for the meal. Rafe dug in his pocket and counted out coins with care. The waitress took the money impassively and waddled away. Rafe picked up the steaming cup of foul brew and held it in both hands, blowing across the surface and looking out the window. A small group of men-three or four-had come out onto the porch of the Inter Ocean and ranged themselves alongside Wyatt Earp. He recognized Warren Earp and the mountain-sized strikebreaker, Reese Cooley. A bartender had told Rafe about the big fight in the Inter Ocean Hotel bar, where Sliphammer Tree had wrestled Cooley down. Rafe didn’t like Cooley’s looks at all.
The group on the porch was looking across the street at something Rafe couldn’t see, something on this side of the street but down the block in the other direction. Cooley and Warren Earp were talking. Wyatt Earp hadn’t stirred in his rocking chair. Cooley walked forward and stood on one leg with the raised second boot propped against the porch rail; only a very big man could do that without losing his balance. Cooley’s right hand wag thumb-hooked over his holstered revolver. His face had narrowed down to a mean stare directed at whatever was on the sidewalk down the street.
Rafe gulped his coffee down and stood up, pushing his chair away with the backs of his knees. “You stay put,” he said. “I want to see what the fuss is all about.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Sure-sure.” He-headed for the door, weaving a threaded path among tight-crowded tables.
Warren had come out onto the porch feeling sour-mouthed and unhappy. He was remembering last night, and still feeling hung over from it. He’d made a fool of himself, he’d admitted that, but he still felt rage against the world in general.
Last night Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs early. There was no mistaking what they had in mind as a way to pass the time for the rest of the evening. Those two spent a hell of a lot of the time balling it in the sack. It didn’t make Warren angry; it made him envious. Just thinking about it got him horny. He’d had a steady girl back in Ohio, a mousy little seventeen-year-old with underdeveloped breasts and buck-teeth. She wasn’t any world-beater but in the farm country where he lived there wasn’t much choice; there were damned few girls around and not many of them would put out. An awful lot of Bible-thumping \ back there, patriarchal farmers protecting their daughters’ virginity as if it was crown jewels. But he’d found this one buck-toothed girl and he’d got used to doing it with her every week or two. Now he’d been gone six or seven weeks from Ohio, maybe more, it was hard to remember, and he wanted a woman badly.
So last night after Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs grinning at each other, Warren had gone on the prowl, and after he’d panned no pay dirt in three saloons he hit the real mother lode in the fourth: a big cow of a woman she’d been, but she looked ripe and ready, for it, and when he’d sat down next to her she hadn’t objected. It was one of the foul-smelling saloons the miners used; there were half a dozen used-up women in the place, but this one somehow didn’t look like a whore. She sat with heavy thighs spread loose, her big breasts lying on the table, moistening her lips when she looked at him, and after he’d bought her two drinks she’d told him her sad story-she was married to a miner on the night shift; he worked all night underground, and by the time he came home he was too tired to do anything but eat and sleep, and she was sick of it, drinking down here trying to work up the courage to leave him and go back home to Kansas where her folks had a soddy homestead.
They had both got very drunk together and she had let him take her home. He had no idea what time it was. They had gone into the dismal little shack and made love with hurried urgency on the filthy straw-tick mattress on the floor. It was after that he made the mistake: head wheeling with drink and exhaustion, he had fallen asleep, sprawled across her great mound of a snoring body.
Maybe it was something that was born into you if you were an Earp-an automatic warning signal built into the brain, like eyes in the back of the head. Wy att had it, he knew; Wyatt always seemed to know everything that went on in back of him. But whatever it was, it had saved his life this morning. He’d woken up, not completely aware of what had awakened him, but instantly and totally alert. He’d looked up and he’d seen the door creak open. The bright shaft of morning sunlight came cruelly inside the shack. The miner stood silhouetted, chest expanding to let out a roar, hefting his miner’s pickax and charging into the shack.
If Warren hadn’t been awake and alert, he’d have taken the head of that pickax through the back. As it was, he managed to roll off the far side of the mattress and scramble to his feet.
The miner roared in agonized howls, rushing forward and swinging the ax-but he’d tripped over the big woman and almost lost his balance. The pick came down and hit the floor.
Warren grabbed the pick by its head; jerked it out of the miner’s fists and thudded the handle into the miner’s belly, pushing with all his weight. The miner let out a whooshing wheeze of breath and sat down, hard, on his wife’s legs. The woman uttered a groggy howl and squirmed. The miner tried to get up. His face was murderous. Warren slammed him across the side of the face with the handle of the pickax. It knocked the miner over on his side. Warren dropped the pick and jumped over the sluggishly stirring woman and ran out of the shack. He hadn’t stopped running till he was all the way back to the Inter Ocean.
He’d tried to sneak up to his room but of course his luck hadn’t held. Wyatt had intercepted him on the stairs and he’d had to tell Wyatt the whole thing. Wyatt had surprised him by bursting out in a peal of bull-lunged laughter that had shaken the walls; Wyatt had pounded him uproariously on the back and taken him downstairs to breakfast, and insisted on him telling the whole story over again to Josie. She too thought it was the funniest damn thing she’d ever heard.
All he wanted was to go upstairs, take a bath, put on clean underwear, and sleep off his hangover, but he hadn’t had a chance to do that for another hour: first, nothing would do but that Wayde Cardiff, Reese Cooley, and everybody else in the Inter Ocean had to have the whole story of Warren’s big adventure. Finally, tasting foul and feeling sick and headachy, he’d managed to break away and go upstairs. He’d cleaned up and slept for a few hours and he’d just now come back downstairs, still feeling hung over but believing he might live.
It was Cooley who caught him at the saloon door, coming through the dining room; Cooley had grabbed him by the arm and hustled him out to the porch.
Wyatt was there, in the rocking chair. A couple of Cooley’s thugs wen tout just ahead of them and by the time Warren stepped onto the porch the thugs were standing by the porch rail. Cooley said, “Look over yonder, boy.”