Black Hats by Patrick Culhane Read Free Book Online

Behan for sheriff in the upcoming election. Behan was already stinging from Wyatt stealing Behan’s live-in lady away…a beautiful young actress from San Fran called Josephine Marcus, nicknamed “Sadie”….
    A six-thousand-dollar Wells Fargo reward was available for the capture of the killers of shotgun messenger Bud Philpot, and when his posse came back empty-handed, Wyatt approached the new leader of the Clanton clan, Ike, with a deal. Wyatt knew damned well lowlife loutish Ike was in with the stagecoach killers, and proposed that this prize fool lead him to the fugitives in return for the six grand. The glory of the capture, Wyatt knew, would give him a lock on the sheriff ’s race.
    Ike said yes, but when the fugitives turned up dead (at neither Ike’s nor Wyatt’s doing), Clanton began to fret that Wyatt would reveal the rancher’s treachery to such deadly compadres of Ike’s as Curly Bill Brocius, Billy the Kid Clairborne and Johnny Ringo. Drunk one night, Ike accused Doc Holliday of spreading Wyatt’s “lies” (though Wyatt had leaked not a word) and Ike damned near got himself killed, saved only by Virgil breaking it up.
    Still, Wyatt understood Ike’s worry over Doc, who did travel the same gambling circuit as the Cowboys, and who drank heavily and talked freely and might drunkenly let the damning tale slip.
    One day, in October of ’81, Ike Clanton spread threats against the Earps all over town and waved around guns that city ordinance didn’t allow him to carry. The Earps cut him a world of slack—Virgil even played poker with Ike and several Cowboy cronies at the Oriental, shrugging off Ike’s bluster.

    Outside the Eagle Brewery, where Wyatt ran a faro game, he went out to catch some cool night air only to find himself with a whiskey-talking Ike Clanton in his face.
    “Let’s go for a walk, Wyatt,” the boozy, woozy rancher slurred. He was a round-shouldered character, bordering on stocky, with a scraggly goatee.
    “Got a game to mind, Ike.”
    “You can’t run forever—tomorrow morning! We’ll go man for man!”
    “I don’t want to fight you, Ike. There’s no money in it.”
    Ike snorted a laugh and staggered off down Fifth Street, then turned and shouted: “I’ll get my boys, you get yours, and we’ll fetch this feud to a close! How about it, Mr. Wyatt Earp? What are you smilin’ about? Maybe you don’t think I’ll be after you all in the morning!”
    “Ike.”
    “ What ?”
    “You talk too much for a fighting man.”
    And Wyatt went back to his game.
    Surely the whiskey would drop Ike before need of any bullet doing it. By morning, all this fight talk would be forgotten and Ike would be working off his hangover over coffee in some cantina.
    But when Ike spent the next morning staggering from one saloon to another, running his mouth about killing the Earps, Virgil had to disarm the jackass in the street, kissing him along the side of his head with the barrel of a Colt and dragging him into court for a fine.
    And later when Cowboy Tom McLaury approached Wyatt on the street to complain about this outrageous treatment of poor Ike, Wyatt had to give McLaury similar treatment—slapping his face, and whacking his skull with the long barrel of the Colt. Shortly thereafter, the Cowboys gathered at Spangenberg’s gun shop and made a big show of buying ammunition while Wyatt watched through the window glass.
    Any number of times, Wyatt and Virgil might have arrested the mudsills for carrying firearms; but the lawmen preferred to let the Cowboys run out of steam and ride out of town.
    They didn’t.
    Instead, the Cowboys gathered at the O.K. Corral, made more threats about the Earps to various passing citizens, and—two of them leading horses—walked through the corral onto the vacant lot next to Fly’s Photography Studio, which was also a lodging house where a certain Dr. John H. Holliday roomed; so drygulching Wyatt’s gambler friend seemed a likely reason for this