“Forget what?”
“Wyatt Earp. He’ll destroy you-he’ll swat you like a fly, if you get in his way.” Absently, he made a face at the coffee and put the cup down to’ cool. He leaned back, crossing his legs and hooking one arm over the back of the chair, and in a sleepy way he added, “You’ll never get him out of this town if he doesn’t want to go.”
“Funny way for you to talk,” said Tree.
“Why? Because I wear a badge and you and I are supposed to be on the same side?”
“You might say that.”
“I might, but I won’t. You see, I’m an elected official with a duty to the constituency that voted me into office.”
“What’s that got to do with Earp? He didn’t vote for you.”
“His friends did,” McKesson murmured, smiling a little. He was being deliberately mysterious and it irritated Tree.
Tree said, “All right, since you want me to ask. What friends?”
It made McKesson laugh. “Very good. I’m glad to see you’re not the usual kind of bumbling half-assed farmer they use for deputy sheriffs down in Arizona.”
“Spare me the kind words, Sheriff. Get to the point, if you’ve got one.”
One bushy white eyebrow went up, a warning sort of expression that might have been accompanied by tongue-clucking. “Easy, young fellow,” McKesson said. “You haven’t got so many friends in his bailiwick that you can afford to alienate me.”
“I didn’t know we were friends.”
“I’m doing my best to be friendly,” McKesson answered. “I’m trying to give you some advice that may save your skin. What could be friendlier than that?”
“You said something about Wyatt Earp’s friends.”
“Friends,” the sheriff echoed. “Everybody’s somebody’s friend.” His hard smile did not give him the disarming appearance it was evidently intended to provide.
Patiently, Tree reached for the coffee and tasted it. It was a far cry better than the Chinese cafe’s.
McKesson said, “You’ll have to forgive me. I like to act as if I’m absentminded and vague-as if I’m not aware of events. It’s often an effective pose-it puts people off their guard, which makes it easier to get around them and cut them off. I should warn you I’m an overeducated old fart but I’m not as slow as I appear.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
“You do that. Now, about Earp and his friends. You arrive here one bright sunny morning all by yourself, evidently expecting to be able to do single-handed what a small army couldn’t do. In the interests of keeping the peace, which is what I’m hired to do, I feel it’s incumbent on me to alert you to the realities of the situation you’re in. You’ve been posted up here to keep surveillance on the Earps until you get word from Denver that Governor Pitkin’s signed the extradition papers. At that point you’re supposed to arrest Wyatt and Warren Earp and take them back to Arizona in custody. Is that right?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think you can do that? If you do, you’re a fool. How do you expect to pull it off?” McKesson looked as if he were genuinely curious.
Tree gave him a long scrutiny, trying to see past the mask of wordy pomposity. Clearly McKesson was, as he said he was, a lot faster than he appeared: if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have this job. A mining boom camp was no place for an addle-headed old law man.
Tree decided it might be profitable to play McKesson’s own game. And so he said, “Let’s put it this way. If I don’t have a plan, I’d be stupid to admit I was that much of a fool. And if I do have one, I’d be stupid to tell you what it is.” And he smiled.
The white eyebrow went up again. “Smart,” McKesson commented. “Smarter than I took you for-and coming from me that’s both a compliment and a confession. I rarely fail to size a man up correctly at first crack. You took me by surprise twice. Either I’m slipping or you’re a damned clever young man.”
“Uh-hunh.” Tree was beginning to enjoy the game; he would have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been for the looming shadow of Wyatt Earp, which lay dark in the back of his mind and colored every thought and deed.
McKesson said, “I do like you. You size up like a man. I think you deserve a free lesson in politics-it may save your life.”
“I thought we were talking about friends.”
“We are. To a man like Wyatt Earp, friends and politics mean the same thing.”
“All right. You’re in a mood to lecture-I’ll listen.”
“Smart,” McKesson remarked again, and then he chuckled. “If you’d known me longer you’d know I’m always in a mood to lecture. Lately I haven’t had many good audiences, though, unless you count the drunks I gather into the fold every night. All right, young fellow, settle back and enjoy your coffee and try to appreciate my wisdom as much as it deserves. I’ll tell you about Gunnison and I’ll tell you about Wyatt Earp, and his politics, and his friends.”
McKesson was smiling-but his eyes were at odds with his lips. He spoke with a flat down-East accent, Tree noticed.
McKesson said, “We’ve got a tough Httle town often thousand tough people here. It’s a new mining region but it’s rich as hell. If you’ve seen the town, and you couldn’t have helped that this morning, then you’ve seen that — it’s a spectacular monument to what unlimited money and baroque bad taste can achieve. That ought to tell you something about the kind of men who built this town-the men who still own it. There are about fifty of them all told-strike-it-rich millionaires. Two years ago almost every one of them was a down-and-out prospector. They’ve got all the money in the world but they’ve got no traditions, no education, no taste, and not a hell of a lot of good sense. I’ve seen two of them sit in the lobby of the Inter Ocean Hotel during a cloudburst and bet fifty thousand dollars on which of two raindrops would first reach the bottom of a windowpane.”
The sheriff sipped coffee and cleared his throat. “Now, these old boys made their strikes just in the past couple of years, and big-money mining’s changed a good deal since the old days when they used to pan and sluice. The fortunes that are being made in these mountains are coming out of deep shafts in the ground, not out of creek-bed gravel. It takes a lot of manpower to dig a thousand-foot mine shaft and drag ore out by the thousands of tons and wagon it down into the smelters and mill it down into pure metal. A hell of a lot of manpower. For every overnight millionaire in Gunnison there are a couple of hundred hardscrab-ble miners working for day wages. Or more-some of these mines carry payrolls of six or eight hundred men. Nowadays a lot of these miners think they aren’t getting paid enough or looked after well enough. We’ve got a troublesome little bunch of loudmouthed agitators frdm back East calling themselves Knights of Labor trying to form strike unions. Maybe you’ve heard what happened in Leadville and Creede when they tried the same thing-a lot of heads were smashed.”
“I heard,” Tree murmured, lulled by the rambling run of the sheriff’s voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”
“I’m coming to that. Let’s look and see what we’ve got here. We’ve got a handful of lucky millionaires who want to stay rich and get richer, and we’ve got thousands of unhappy miners being stirred up by radical agitators, and into the middle of this comes a big man with handlebar mustaches and two revolvers and a big-gun reputation that’s made him as much of a legend as Wild Bill Hickok. This is the man who licked the Clan tons in Tombstone, the man the dime novels call the Lion of Tombstone.”
McKesson paused to see what effect his speech had taken. Tree was lighting his pipe. He was thinking about Wyatt Earp, a man he had never met, wondering how it would be, not liking the possibilities.