Make something of it, he thought. Make something of this other than a catastrophe. Make it mean something.
He cocked Behan’s gun. Earp heard the sound and raised his head, suddenly alert. And then German Freddie put six shots into Earp’s breast from a distance of less than a dozen feet.
“My God!” Behan bleated. “What are you doing?”
Freddie looked at him, a savage grin taut on his face. He dropped the revolver at Behan’s feet as return fire began to sing through the window. He ran into the back of the studio, out the back door, and was sprinting down Third Street when he heard Behan’s voice ringing over the sound of barking gunfire. “It wasn’t me! I swear to Mary!” Mad laughter burbled from Freddie’s lips as he heard the crash of a door being kicked down. Behan screamed something else, something that might have been “German Freddie!”-but whatever he was trying to say was cut short by a storm of fire.
A steam whistle shattered the air as Freddie ran south. Someone was blowing the alarm at the Uzina Mine. And when Freddie reached the corner, he saw the vigilante mob pouring up Allen Street, heading for the front gate of the O.K. Corral. He waited a few seconds for the leaders to swarm through the gate, and then he quietly crossed the street at a normal walking pace. Despite the way he panted for breath, Freddie had a hard time not breaking into a run.
He had never felt such joy, not even in Josie’s arms.
By roundabout means he walked to the Grand Hotel. Once he had Zarathustra in his hand he began to breathe more easily. Still, he concluded, it was time to leave town. There were any number of people who could place him near the site of that streetfight, and possibly some of the vigilantes had seen him stroll away.
And then a thought struck him-he had no horse! He was a bad rider and had come to Tombstone on the Wells Fargo stage. The only way he could get a horse would be to stroll back to the O.K. Corral and hire one, with the lynch mob looking on.
He laughed and put Zarathustra in his coat pocket. He was trapped in a town filled with Earps and armed vigilantes.
“It is time to be bold,” he said aloud. “It is time to be cunning.”
He washed his hands, to remove the reek of gunpowder, and changed his shirt.
It occurred to him that there existed a place where he might hide.
He put his journal in another pocket, and made his way out of the hotel.
Oh, she is magnificent! Freddie wrote in his journal a few hours later. She hid me in Behan’s house while Behan lay painted in his coffin in the front window of the undertakers-Ritter and Reams are making the most of this opportunity to advertise their art! I rested on Behan’s bed while she received callers in the front room. And then, at nightfall, she had Behan’s horse saddled and brought to the back door.
“Will I see you again?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Destiny will not permit us to part for long.”
“Do you have money?”
I confessed that I did not. She went into the house and came back with an envelope of bills which she put in my pocket. Later I counted them and found they amounted to five thousand dollars. The office of sheriff pays surprisingly well!
I took her hand. “Troy is afire, my Helen. Do you have what you desire?”
“I did not want this,” she said. Her fingers clutched at mine.
“Of course you did,” I said. “What else did you expect?”
I rode to Charleston with her kiss burning on my lips. Charleston is a town ruled by the Cowboys, and so I knew I could find shelter there, but it is also the first place a posse will come.
It will be a war now-my bullets have decreed it. I welcome that war, I welcome the trumpet that will awaken the new Romulus. Battles there shall be, and victories. And both those who die and those who live shall be awarded a Tombstone-what an irony!
I am curiously satisfied with the day’s business. It is a man’s life that I’m leading. Were I to live these same events a thousand times, I would find no reason to alter the outcome.
“There are more Earps than before,” John Ringo observed from over the rim of his beer glass. “James and Warren have come to town. You’re creatin’ more Earps than you’re killin’, Freddie.”
“Two hundred rifles,” Freddie urged. “Raise them! Make Tombstone yours!”
Curly Bill Brocius shook his head. “No more shootings. The town’s riled enough as it is. I don’t want my parole revoked, and besides, I’ve got to make certain that our man gets in as sheriff.”
“Let us purge this choler without letting blood,” Ringo said, and wiped foam from his mustache.
“Still these politics!” Freddie scorned. “Who is our man this time?”
“Fellehy.”
“The laundryman? What kind of sheriff will he make?”
Brocius gave his easy grin. “No kind,” he said. “Which is our kind.”
“He will be worse than Behan. And it was Behan’s bungling that killed three of our friends.”
Brocius’s grin faded. “I don’t reckon,” he said.
Freddie had made good his escape and met Ringo and Brocius in the Golden Saloon in Tucson. He was not quite far enough from Tombstone-Freddie kept his back to a wall and his eye on the door, just in case a crowd of men in frock coats barged in.
“So when may we start killing Earps?” Freddie asked.
“We’re going to do it legal-like,” Brocius said. “Ike Clanton’s going to file in court against the Earps and Holliday for murder. They’ll hang, and we won’t have to pull a trigger.”
Disgust filled Freddie’s heart. “You are making yourself ridiculous,” he said. “These men have killed your friends!”
“No more shooting,” said Brocius. “We’ll use the law’s own weapons against the law, and we’ll be back in charge quick as a dog can lick a dish.”
Freddie looked at Brocius in fury, and then he laughed. “Very well, then,” he said. “We shall see what joys the law brings us!”
You could play the law game any number of ways, Freddie thought. And he thought he knew how he wanted to bid his hand.
“Ike Clanton said he was going to kill Doc Holliday,” Freddie testified. “His brother supported him, and so did the McLaurys. Claiborne and I were trying to talk sense into their stupid heads, but Ike was abusive, so I left in disgust.”
There was stunned silence in the courtroom. Freddie was a witness for the prosecution, but was handing the defense its case on a plate.
The prosecution witnesses had agreed on a story ahead of time, how the Cowboys had been unarmed, and the Earps the aggressors. Now Freddie was blowing the case to smithereens.
Price, the district attorney, was so stunned by Freddie’s testimony that he blurted out what had to be absolutely the wrong question. “You say that Ike was intending to kill Mr. Holliday?”
Freddie looked at Ike from his witness chair. The man stared back at him, disbelief plain on his face, and out of the slant of his eye he saw Holliday look at him thoughtfully.
“Oh, yes,” Freddie said. “But Ike is too much the drunken coward to actually carry out his threats. He ran away from the streetfight and left his brother to die in the dust.”
Bullets or nothing, Freddie thought. We shall honor valor or honor shall lie dishonored.
“You son of a bitch,” Ike Clanton said in the Grand Hotel’s parlor, after the trial had adjourned for the day. “What did you say those things for?”
“Because they’re true,” Freddie said. “Do you think I would lie to protect a worthless dog like you?”
Ike turned red. “You skin that back, you bastard! Skin that back, or I’ll settle with you!”
Freddie wiped Ike’s spittle from his chin with his handkerchief. “It’s Doc Holliday you hate, is it not?” he said. “Why don’t you settle with him first?”