Bloody Season by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page B

silver trim and placed in the window of a general merchandise and hardware store on the south side of Allen between Fifth and Sixth with a wooden sign strung over them reading MURDERED IN THE STREETS OF TOMBSTONE. Camilius Fly captured the tableau in a whump and flash of magnesium powder.
    The bodies were returned to the undertaking parlor the following afternoon. There, miners and townsmen come too late for seats lined walls ambuscaded with plaster cupids and death-angels and divided their attention between the service and the families and friends occupying the benches. These included cowboys in new denims and clean bandannas and too-tight boots and ranchers in store suits smelling of camphor and naphtha. Ike Clanton attended in his black inquest suit. With his chin whiskers trimmed and waxed and his hair arranged in a curl on his forehead he looked slightly less lifelike than his brother Billy; only the tobacco lump under his right ear moved. His sister Mary sat equally motionless beside him in the front row in the same black dress she had worn to bury their father three months earlier. Ike’s brother Phin sat on the other side of her in a stiff collar, and Billy Claiborne occupied a seat farther back wearing a calico shirt with striped braces and garters, his hands resting on his pinch hat in his lap. All three men sported black armbands.
    The Tombstone-trained eye might have spotted Charleston notables Frank Stilwell and John Ringo among the cowboys standing in the rear with their hats in front of them, but for the most part the mourners were strangers to the deceased. Proper funerals were rare entertainments in an area whose cemetery contained more nameless corpses than Gettysburg’s.
    The procession down Allen Street and north to the hill bore more spectacular distractions. The Tombstone brass band, plumed shakos and gold frogs on red velvet, led off with tubas, a trumpet, a bass drum, and a slide trombone, followed by twin eight-thousand-dollar hearses with glass sides and glowing side-lanterns and hard rubber tires; Ike and Mary in a hired trap with Phin Clanton riding the axle; Billy Claiborne following in a buckboard; and others strung out behind in buggies and on foot, the rest of the column deteriorating into a rabble with children kicking apart green horse-apples at the end and mongrel dogs snapping at heels and stopping to urinate against the boardwalk. Strings of firecrackers snapped and spat sparks, shying horses and starting small fires in the chaparral that were quickly tramped out. A bow-tied Sheriff Behan, Undersheriff (and Nugget editor) Harry Woods, and Deputy Billy Breakenridge accompanied the procession on foot with shotguns cradled.
    On the rocky slope studded with Spanish bayonet overlooking town, two gravediggers in overalls with cuds in their cheeks leaned on their shovels and watched as the caskets were lowered by ropes into a hole twelve by eight by six and the last handful of earth thumped the lids. Then they came over and began tipping sand and gravel and clumps of yucca into the cavity. The wind pasted their brims to the crowns of their hats and caught and carried smoking dust from the disturbed earth, spreading it across the graves farther down. A shovelful landed in the middle of Tom McLaury’s face and skidded over the glass.
    Ike Clanton shook hands and supported his sister’s elbow as Phin helped her up to the crest of the hill where the carriage waited. Ike hung back a little, watching the laborers. The hole was half-filled now.
    “Well, Billy, good-bye,” he said. “You never did have the sense God gave a loafer wolf, to run when you’re outmanned and outgunned.” He pulled on his hat and turned away.
    The band, playing “Tenting Tonight” as it left town, sounded tinny in the Oriental, where Wyatt Earp sat at the faro table in the gaming room dealing to Tom Fitch and flicking long white fingers at the sliding counters in the cue box to keep track of the cards dealt. He had on