Warren looked downstreet and saw, across the street half a block away, a little group of grim men standing with rifles and shotguns. He recognized Floyd Sparrow and he recognized the miner who’d almost pickaxed him this morning. The other four or five were miners too, one or two being the same ones who had mixed into the fight in the saloon a couple of weeks ago.
Cooley said, “They lookin’ for war, they gonna git one.”
Wyatt Earp, without stirring in his chair, said, “I imagine they intend to avenge that woman’s honor. Or at least that’s what one of them has in mind. Sparrow’s just using it for his excuse to get the war going. Warren?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you think, boy?”
“I didn’t rape the bastard’s wife. I only gave her what she asked me for. Man can’t keep his own wife in line, it’s his fault, not mine.”
“All right. But what do you think you ought to do about this?”
Sparrow had finished giving instructions to the miners down the street; they fanned out in a line abreast and began to walk forward along the opposite boardwalk, holding their rifles and shotguns ready. Reese Cooley took his boot down from the porch rail and lifted the six-gun out in his fist; Cooley said, “If they aimed to make advantage out of them rifles, they made a mistake comin’ inside handgun range.”
Wyatt said to his brother, “Well, boy?”
Warren shook his head. “I’ve gotno fight with them. I’m not afraid, but I don’t want a fight.”
“Good man,” Wyatt breathed. “Cooley, don’t use that thing unless you have to.”
Without taking his eyes off the miners, Cooley said, “Fuck that noise. They want their balls shot off, they can have it.”
“You’ll hold your fire, by God,” Wyatt Earp murmured in a very soft, grating voice. It was enough to make Cooley hesitate.
Wyatt got out of his chair and walked over to the pillar that supported the veranda roof. With half his body concealed behind it from the miners, Wyatt opened his coat to display the handle of one revolver. With slow motions he lifted the gun into his fist and cocked it. It wasn’t pointed at anyone in particular. Across the way, the miners were looking at each other in confusion, all except the enraged husband, whose face was black and blue; one eye was bruised shut. He had a shotgun locked in two fists the knuckles of which were white. The shotgun came around toward the veranda and the miner stopped with both feet braced. Floyd Sparrow’s piping thin voice reached harshly across the street: “We want Warren Earp for a miners’ court. Turn him over to us.”
It made Reese Cooley laugh with crude wickedness.
Wyatt Earp didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. He said, “All right, Sparrow, you wanted to test us, you’ve tested us. You can’t have him. Now put down those cannons and get off the street before all of you end up with dirt in your faces.”
It was the wronged husband who made it inevitable: the miner uttered a shrill cry of inarticulate desperation and yanked both triggers of the shotgun.
The roar was deafening. The miner clearly knew nothing about weapons; he was eighty feet away from his targets and he hadn’t aimed. The buckshot pellets made spouts and creases in the street below the porch of the Inter Ocean; a few stray pellets from the charge rattled against the boards, and one of them stung Cooley in the foot, which made him howl and made him shoot. Cooley’s first bullet hit the miner somewhere in the upper body and knocked him back against Floyd Sparrow, who wind-milled his arms and fell down under the wounded man’s weight.
All in a split fraction of a few seconds, the street erupted in battle. The miners hunched over their rifles, shooting without knowing how to aim. Cooley and his two thugs answered the fire deliberately. Wyatt Earp, lifting his gun, did not shoot; and Warren took cover behind the second post, his gun ready but unfired. One of the miners, hit in the shoulder, spun all the way around and fell flat; another broke it off and started to run, and Cooley shot him in the leg, spilling him down, skidding, onto the boardwalk.
That was when someone came crashing out of the lunchroom door a few yards down the street from Floyd Sparrow. Reese Cooley wheeled that way, gun turning. Warren’s eyes snapped to the newcomer, saw young Rafe Tree come charging out onto the street, gun in holster, mouth open and working. Warren heard Cooley’s forty-five thunder and boom.
When Rafe had got near the door, inside the lunchroom, he’d heard the shooting start. Startled and baffled, he’d climbed past two close-crowded tables and rushed the rest of the way to the door, flung it open and run outside to see what was going on. He took two steps, had no time to find out what the shooting was all about; the bullet hit him just below his belt buckle.
It knocked him down, ignominiously on his ass, and sitting there he felt the warm sticky spread of wet blood filling his pants; he felt ashamed. He did not want to look at the wound the bullet had made. He looked at Wyatt Earp, across the street. Earp was-snarling at Reese Cooley. Earp swatted Cooley across the face with the barrel of his gun and Cooley fell back against the wall, amazed. Across the street Rafe dimly heard Floyd Sparrow’s voice, piping and panicky: “Christ, let’s get the shit outa here!”
Warren Earp stepped into sight beside a porch pillar, his gun lifted but not firing, watching the miners run away down the street. Rafe tried to turn his head to see them but he seemed very tired all of a sudden, too tired to move his head. He felt surprise, not fear; he felt very little pain but the wet discomfort in his pants was embarrassing.
He thought, I better get this tended to right away. They must have a doctor in this town. Hell, I ain’t dead, I’m okay, only if I don’t get it tended to I might bleed to death eventually.
A quick cramp, more spasm than agony, made him bend over. It felt like the aftereffect of a big meal spiced with hot chili peppers and coarse tequila-pressure of belly gas, a little pain beginning now, starting to spread through his abdomen, and he thought he would just sit here a moment longer until he felt alittlestronger, and then he would go find a doctor to patch him up so he could help Jeremy arrest those Earp bastards and collect the reward.
Caroline beat a path through the lunchroom, screaming, knocking people aside. She pummeled her way to the door-people were crowding forward to find out what was going on. She elbowed past two men at the door, wrenched it open, and plunged outside.
She took it all in with one glance. The little Knights of Labor agitator-Sparrow-running away down the street with a scuttling, scrambling gait, following the big miners who ran hard, two of them obviously wounded, their clumsy jackboots pounding the boardwalk; big Reese Cooley standing slumped under the veranda against the wall of the Inter Ocean, his face bleeding; Warren Earp and the two thugs with him, watching the miners run away, holding their guns ready but silent; and tall Wyatt Earp stepping down off the Inter Ocean veranda and dogtrotting forward toward the crouching man in the street-Rafe.
An involuntary sound gurgled in Caroline’s throat. She started forward with numb steps. Earp crouched down by Rafe just as Rafe tipped over and fell on his shoulder. Caroline’s hand rose to her mouth. She saw Earp reach out to feel for a pulse; she said with a little cry, “How bad… how bad is it?”
Earp looked up slowly, his eyes hooded by heavy over-hanging brows. “As bad as he can get.”
She closed her eyes tight. Slowly her shoulders slumped. She dropped her face into her hands. After a moment she felt a hand on her arm and she looked up to see Wyatt Earp beside her.
She said in a very small voice, “If you don’t take your hand off me right now I swear to God I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”