Free Bloody Season by Loren D. Estleman Page B

pig-sticker he carries and shove them down their craws and then shoot them for mumbling.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Doc is mean but fair,” Virgil said. “He will have no truck with whoever held the horses.”
    “I held the horses!”
    Wyatt, big and lean and sunburned and needing a shave, his jaw purpling where Len Redfield’s knuckles had raked it, looked at his brother. Virgil plucked a fresh tick off his neck and contemplated it before cracking it between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s get the others in here.”
    Morgan went out. Minutes later the room was crowded with three Earps, Bob Paul, Marshall Williams, Sheriff Behan, and Deputy Breakenridge. Masterson stayed outside with the Redfields. A sour-sweet mix of sweat and leather and horse and gun oil filled the house.
    Luther King spoke, pressing his lip at times to make his words clear and playing with a cigarette Williams had rolled for him. No one had given him a match.
    “It was Billy Leonard, Jim Crane, and Harry Head done the shooting. I held the horses like I said. I rid with them to Wheaton’s for fresh mounts and left them at Hank Redfield’s to get cartridges and money from Len. I was fixing to meet up with them when Morg catched me.”
    “They changed horses at Hank’s?” Wyatt asked. King nodded. “Where are they camped?”
    The prisoner smiled. Blood trickled down his chin. He had a bowl haircut and no hair on his face and the grin made him look like a schoolboy. “You won’t get them. I have talked all I am fixed to.”
    Wyatt said, “You will talk a blue streak when Doc commences to sawing on the family jewels.”
    King paled a shade but said nothing.
    Virgil stood, stretching and cracking some bones. “Doc’s woman was never on that stage, Luther,” he said. “Bob snookered you.”
    Before the other could react, Behan cleared his throat loudly. The sheriff’s sombrero was dusty and his neck had broken out in an angry rash under several days’ growth of beard. “King is my prisoner, Earp. I am arresting him for complicity in attempted stage robbery. That’s a county offense, not federal. I am taking him to Tombstone.”
    “I will go with you,” said Williams.
    “That won’t be necessary.”
    “It is a long ride. You and Billy might fall asleep.” The silence was spoiled by Morgan’s singing. “Can you bake a cherry pie, Billy-girl?”
    Breakenridge glared.

Chapter Six
    W yatt Earp and his brothers and their women called her Mattie. She had been christened Celia Ann Blaylock, a mannish-looking strawberry blonde with iron-curled hair and deep-set eyes that seemed always in shadow. She did fancy sewing, took in laundry, and had a temper that was slow to blow and then impossible to cap when it did. She had been with Wyatt since 1870, shortly after his first wife Urilla died delivering his stillborn child. Mattie and he had traveled together to Deadwood and Dodge City and all the other places on the circuit, and although like Virgil and Allie they had never taken vows, she had been known as Mattie Earp in all of them.
    When word reached Tombstone that the Earps were returning from their manhunt, she peeled hurriedly out of her faded calico and brushed and put on the one good dress she had brought from Dodge, a black velvet brocade with a high ivory-lace collar. She fretted over the trunk creases in the skirt, brushed her hair, pinched color into her cheeks, and put a drop of vanilla extract behind each ear. Wyatt hated scents of any kind and never knew the true source of the fresh natural smell he admired in Mattie, or had admired until recently. Morgan’s woman Lou arrived in time to help her with the buttons in back. Lou was wearing a shift made from leaf-print percale that looked as good as new calico with a close row of bone buttons down the front.
    Heavy boots struck the porch boards while Lou was adjusting Mattie’s collar. The three brothers came in carrying their saddlebags and carbines, looking more alike than ever under