Black Hats by Patrick Culhane Page A

rather than dress for bed in its constricting confines (he was too tall for that, and maybe too old), he used the dressing room at the end of the car and walked back in robe and slippers. He found the steady rhythm of train travel soothing, and dropped off immediately, sleeping better and sounder than an innocent man.
    Nonetheless, deep in the night, the screech of steel on steel and the whine of the train making a stop, perhaps more sudden than intended, woke him with a start; and he sat up and lifted a corner of shade and saw just another depot looming in darkness and drifting steam.
    Perhaps his earlier reflecting on his Arizona days caused it, but immediately he was back there, at the depot in Tucson, on the train escorting Morg’s body….
    Wyatt had no intention of making the whole trip to Colton, California, where his parents and Morg’s widow awaited—he’d already put together a posse of Doc, brother Warren, gunfighters Texas Jack Vermillion, Sherm McMasters and Turkey Creek Johnson, armed to the teeth, to go out after Frank Stilwell, Curly Bill Brocius, Ike Clanton, Johnny Ringo and Indian Charlie, the assassins who tried to kill Virgil and succeeded in murdering Morgan.
    But then Wyatt had been warned that Ike and Stilwell and maybe several other Cowboys were watching every train coming through Tucson, going on cars with shotguns and searching for the Earps and any associates. So he and Doc decided to accompany the funeral party on the first leg of the journey.
    Dusk draped the station as they pulled in, dark enough already to make the town a shapeless sprawl; blue shadows engulfed the desert as it stretched to mountains that were purple silhouettes against a burning, dying sky.
    At the station a crowd awaited, as travelers arrived in welcome and departed in farewell and gawkers neither coming nor going got a gander at the Earp party, which the whole territory seemed to know was heading through Tucson that evening. A damned newsboy was hawking papers, shouting, “ Hell is coming! Read about it here !”

    Wyatt and Doc were guarding the wounded Virgil as he and his wife Allie and brother James and wife Bessie as well as Wyatt’s “wife” Mattie departed the train to eat in the station’s dining room.
    On the platform, Doc tugged Wyatt’s sleeve, but Wyatt spoke first: “I see them.”
    Frank Stilwell—the man witnesses said had back-shot Morg and narrowly missed Wyatt in the poolhall shooting—stood in a long duster with a shotgun barely hidden beneath, his affable oval face shadowed by a tan sombrero and a smile contradicted by the frown of a droopy dark mustache. Next to him lurked Ike Clanton, similarly attired right down to the shotgun, though Ike was as usual scruffier in appearance than the typical gaudy Cowboy.
    “And,” Doc said, as the pair of assassins fell back into the crowd, “they see us ….”
    Neither Wyatt nor Doc ate, and when they accompanied the family back to the waiting private car, Wyatt spotted a string of flatcars about twenty feet down on the adjacent track, noting something glinting off the station’s gas lamps.
    Something metal.
    On the train Wyatt got his brother settled comfortably into a chair, Virgil’s wife next to him with her husband’s holster and sixgun around her waist in absurd support of their dire situation. And the Earps did make tempting targets in the well-lighted windows of the private car….
    Wyatt put a hand on Virgil’s good shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you.”
    Virgil’s eyes tightened. “I’ll be seeing you, too—if you take care of yourself.”
    Wyatt nodded, gave Doc—in the aisle behind him—a glance that conveyed the need for him to stay with the party and guard them; then, double-barreled shotgun in one hand, Wyatt moved toward the rear of the car and soon was climbing down onto the side of the yards opposite the platform.
    At just after seven, darkness had settled onto the station with the gas lamps and illumination of the train