Bloody Season Read Free Page A

in.”
    “That’s a hell of a thing for you to say to me.”
    They stared. Virgil cleared his throat and extended the shotgun to Doc. It was a full-length Stevens ten-gauge with a brass frame. “Hand me that cane and hide this under your coat. Don’t let them see it until we come within range.”
    Doc slid his left arm out of the sleeve of his ankle-length greatcoat, traded Virgil the cane for the shotgun, and snugged the butt under his arm with the muzzles hanging down, pulling the coat closed over it. The procession continued in a column of twos.
    Fremont Street, home of the Epitaph office and the Cochise County courthouse, was much quieter than saloon-lined Allen Street, and nearly deserted at that hour. Clumps of panicum grass twitched down the center. At the corner the party turned west. Someone said, “Here they come,” and Doc was aware of a crowd watching from the doorway of Bauer’s butcher shop. He pursed his lips and whistled a tune he had heard in Fort Griffin. Playing the rubes.
    “Son of a bitch pisses icicles.”
    Nearing Bauer’s they spread out four abreast with ten feet between each man and his neighbor. Morgan and Virgil took the outside while Doc moved to Wyatt’s right. Gusts pulled at the flap of Doc’s coat, exposing the shotgun in teasing glimpses like white thigh on a variety girl. “Let’s try and disarm these jackasses,” Virgil said.
    Morgan caught Doc’s eye. “Let them have it.”
    “All right.”
    They were within sight of the fifteen-foot-wide lot between Fly’s boardinghouse and a private residence belonging to W. A. Harwood, where a group of men stood, two of them holding horses, thirty yards west of the O.K. Corral. Doc spotted John Behan’s sombrero just as the sheriff separated himself from the others and came trotting up Fremont with his palms stretched out in front of him.
    “Earp, for God’s sake don’t go down there,” he told Virgil. “You’ll all be murdered.”
    “I mean to disarm them, Johnny.” He passed Behan, accompanied by the others.
    “I have disarmed them all.”
    Virgil had his big Army thrust inside his trousers on the right side and was holding Doc’s cane in his left hand. Now he rotated the pistol to his left hip and shifted the cane to his right hand. He did these things without breaking stride. The group gathered in the lot had withdrawn inside, out of sight from the street. Entering the lot slowly, the Earps and Doc closed ranks. Out of the corner of his eye Doc glimpsed Wesley Fuller’s lanky coated length weaving into the passage between Fly’s boardinghouse and the skylit photograph gallery behind it. The gallery door swung to with a clatter.
    The newcomers were facing Frank McLaury and Ike Clanton on the outside of a tight group with Billy Clanton and Tom McLaury in the center and the whitewashed wall of the Harwood house at their backs. Billy was standing in front of his blaze-face with his hand on the Frontier Colt’s on his hip. Frank McLaury was armed similarly, his fingers on the stag handle, and his brother Tom stood a little behind Frank’s strawberry roan, resting a hand on the Winchester butt showing above the saddle. Ike’s hands hung empty at his sides. Apart from the group, near the gallery, slouched Billy Claiborne’s insolent young frame with his thumbs hooked inside his cartridge belt.
    At Fourth and Allen Doc had transferred his nickel-plated Colt’s Lightning from its scabbard to his right coat pocket. Now it was in his hand. His left was still holding the shotgun under the gray coat. A sweetish warm stink of fresh manure filled his nostrils from the corral three doors down.
    Wyatt’s knuckles showed yellow around the cedar handle of his big American. He said, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight.”
    Billy Claiborne took his thumbs out of his belt and broke for the gallery. Sheriff Behan, having passed around the other side of the boardinghouse, held the door for him.
    Virgil lifted Doc’s