The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

• Chapter 1 Dust on the Horizon
• Chapter 2 The Silver Boom
• Chapter 3 A Badge for Wyatt
• Chapter 4 Shadows of the Cowboys
• Chapter 5 Doc Holliday’s Cough
• Chapter 6 Whispers in the Saloon
• Chapter 7 Stagecoach Blood
• Chapter 8 Lines in the Dirt
• Chapter 9 The Clanton Threat
• Chapter 10 Stolen Cattle and Broken Law
• Chapter 11 Night at the Oriental
• Chapter 12 Brother Against Brother
• Chapter 13 The Gathering Storm
• Chapter 14 Morning Frost and Cold Steel
• Chapter 15 Spurred Provocations
• Chapter 16 The Long Walk Down Fremont
• Chapter 17 Thirty Seconds of Fury
• Chapter 18 Gunsmoke Over the Corral
• Chapter 19 Tending the Wounded
• Chapter 20 Caskets on Allen Street
• Chapter 21 The Courtroom Gavel
• Chapter 22 Under the Gaze of Judge Spicer
• Chapter 23 Ambush in the Dark
• Chapter 24 The Vendetta Ride
• Chapter 25 Ghosts of Tombstone
• Chapter 26 Into the Legend

The alkali flat smelled of calcified bone, sun-scalded creosote, and the sour sweat of tired horses. Wyatt Earp leaned slightly forward in his stirrups, resting a gloved hand on the pommel of his saddle to ease the ache in his lower back. Behind him stretched hundreds of miles of sagebrush, gravel, and missed chances. Ahead, rising out of the heat shimmer like a gray scab on the desert floor, lay the low, notched spine of the Mule Mountains.

Somewhere on the northern shoulder of that range, perched on a mesa that sloped toward the San Pedro River, men were tearing silver out of the dirt with pickaxes and black powder. Wyatt had heard the stories in Dodge City, and he had heard them repeated with growing embellishment across New Mexico Territory: a prospector named Ed Schieffelin had gone looking for stones among the Apache hills, only to find ledges of horn silver so rich you could pare ribbons off them with a pocketknife. The town that had sprung up over those holes was named Tombstone, a moniker Schieffelin gave it after friends told him the only thing he would find out in the hills was his own burial marker.

Wyatt touched the brim of his flat-crowned hat, adjusting it against the white glare of the late autumn sky. At thirty-one, he was a tall, angular man with a mustache that hid the corners of his mouth, giving his face the settled, impassive look of a carved lintel. Behind him, the iron tires of three heavily loaded wagons ground the limestone gravel to fine talc.

In the lead wagon sat his eldest brother, James, nursing an old Civil War wound that left his left arm mostly useless, holding the reins with a practiced, heavy hand. Beside James sat his wife, Bessie. Behind them came Virgil Earp and his common-law wife, Allie. Virgil was broader than Wyatt, thicker in the shoulders, his face marked by an easygoing bluntness that made him quicker to laugh and slower to brood. He had already accepted a deputy’s commission from the United States Marshal before leaving Prescott, though out here in the high desert, a piece of paper signed in a distant territory capital carried only as much weight as a man’s Winchester could lend it.

The third wagon carried Wyatt’s common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock, whose thin frame was draped in a traveling cloak stained gray around the hem with grit. She sat under the canvas hood, staring down at her lap with glazed eyes that hinted at the small glass vials of laudanum tucked deep into her travel basket. Wyatt did not turn around to check on her. He knew what she looked like when the wagon jars rattled her skull, and he knew that nothing he could say over the groan of the axles would make the road any smoother.

"See any chimneys yet, Wyatt?" Virgil called out, his voice carrying thin and raspy over the clatter of harness chains.

Wyatt squinted into the glare. "Just the dust. A lot of it. Looks like half of California is already up there."

"They say water’s four bits a bucket," James grumbled from behind, spitting brown tobacco juice into the wheel rut. "Any place that charges four bits for water isn’t a town; it’s a holdup."

"If they're paying four bits for water, they're paying double that for lumber," Wyatt said, not looking back. "And they're paying ten times that for whiskey."

That was the logic that had brought them. Dodge City had cooled down. The buffalo were gone, stripped off the plains until only bleached ribs remained in the grass, and the cattle trails were shifting north and west toward Nebraska. The big money—the easy, roaring river of gold and greenbacks that washed through the sporting houses and faro tables—was heading toward the mines. An Earp did not dig holes in the ground if he could help it. An Earp ran stagecoaches, dealt cards, held real estate, and kept the peace when the city council was willing to pay a fair percentage of the arrest fees.

The road began to rise, winding out of the basin and ascending into the rolling, grama-grass hills that formed the foothills of the Tombstone district. The air changed, growing cooler and carrying the sharp tang of woodsmoke and roasted ore. Along the trail, the detritus of boom-town traffic littered the ditches: broken barrel staves, dead mules swollen tight as drums under the sun, and thousands of empty tin cans with their labels bleached white by the weather.

They passed a freight outfit hauling massive timbers toward the hills. Twenty mules, hitched in pairs, strained against leather collars as thick as bridge timbers, their nostrils flaring red. The skinner walked alongside, popping a sixteen-foot bullwhip over their ears with cracks like pistol shots, cursing the animals with an inventive fluency that covered three generations of their ancestry. He glanced at the Earps with sunken, bloodshot eyes, barely nodding before bringing the popper down near the lead mule's flank.

"Welcome to Cochise County," Virgil muttered dryly. "The hospitality just about knocks you down."

As they crested the last ridge, Tombstone revealed itself not as a city, but as an enormous, violent eruption of pine boards and canvas tents clinging to the hillside. The mesa was stripped naked. Every mesquite bush, scrub oak, and juniper had been chopped down for firewood or mine timbers, leaving raw earth that kicked up in yellow clouds under the hooves of continuous traffic.

There were no paved streets, only wide swaths of mud and dust cut between ragged rows of false-fronted buildings. Sounds rose from the camp like the noise from an overturned beehive: the endless, rhythmic thumping of five-stamp mills in the distance, pounding rock to dust; the screech of circular saws chewing through pine; the clang of blacksmiths' hammers; and, drifting faintly across the slope, the sour notes of a brass cornet from an open-air tent show.

Wyatt pulled his horse to a halt at the edge of Allen Street, the main thoroughfare that sliced through the center of town. Beside him, Virgil let his team blow, the horses dropping their heads to sniff the alkali dust.

A pair of riders trotted past them, heading out of town toward the river. Both men wore low-crowned wool hats, broad leather chaps decorated with silver conchos, and long, fringed silk neckerchiefs tied in loose knots over their flannel shirts. At their waists hung low-slung holsters containing Colt revolvers, the butts tied down to their thighs with raw-hide thongs—a Texas rig. Over the cantle of each saddle rested a canvas-covered bedroll and a scabbard holding a short-barreled Winchester carbine.

They were young men, lean and dark-skinned from wind and sun, and they looked at the newcomers with the casual, sizing arrogance common to drovers who had spent a month on the trail with a herd of someone else’s steers. One of them, a boy with teeth broken in the front and a thin smudge of a mustache, spat across the shoulder of his pony, letting his gaze linger on the fine leather of Wyatt’s boots and the gold watch chain looped across his vest.

"Nice horse, mister," the young rider said, his voice carrying the flat drawl of north Texas. "Pity he looks about spent."

Wyatt did not shift in his saddle. His pale blue eyes remained fixed on the boy's face until the youth’s grin faltered slightly. "He'll carry me as far as I need to go," Wyatt said evenly.

The two cowboys shared a brief, knowing look, wheeled their mounts with a sharp jerk of the reins, and kicked them into a lope, sending a shower of loose stones clicking against the spokes of James Earp’s wagon.

"Cowboys," Virgil remarked, watching the dust settle behind their horses. "You can tell 'em by the red sashes and the way they sit their leather. Town marshal in Prescott warned me about them. Said they run the border country like they own it. Steal cattle in Sonora, drive them up through the San Pedro valley, re-brand 'em, and sell 'em to the Army posts."

"They're just boys with irons on their hips," James said, climbing stiffly down from his wagon seat. He stood on the edge of Allen Street, rolling his good right shoulder to work out the cramp. "Seen a hundred like 'em in Abilene. Loud mouth, slow draw, and poor aim when they’re full of rye."

"Don't discount 'em, Jim," Wyatt said, dismounting with the fluid, deliberate motion of a man who spent ten hours a day in the saddle. "A boy with a gun can kill you just as dead as an old man with one. Sometimes faster, because he don't know enough to think about what happens after."

He tied his gelding to a hitching rail outside a half-finished frame building that advertised itself with a charcoal-scrawled sign: Vogan’s Bowling Saloon. Through the open frame, men could be seen setting up heavy wooden pins while a team of carpenters nailed cedar shingles to the rafters overhead, completely indifferent to the clatter below.

Wyatt stepped up onto the rough plank sidewalk, his boots ringing out on the pine. The air was thick with the scent of green lumber, horse manure, roasting coffee, and cheap whiskey. Every third door was a saloon or a gambling hell. Men jostled past one another on the narrow boards—miners with red flannel shirts and grime ground into the pores of their forearms, Cornishmen with thick accents singing under their breath, slick gamblers in broadcloth and checkered trousers, and Chinese laborers carrying baskets of laundry on bamboo yokes balanced across their shoulders.

A man could get rich here without ever touching a shovel, Wyatt thought. The money was washing through these streets like spring runoff through an arroyo. All a man had to do was dig the right ditch, and the stream would flow straight into his pocket.

Virgil joined him on the walkway, dusting his hat against his thigh. "I'm going to see the town council," he said, squinting down the road toward a canvas tent bearing an American flag. "See if they've got a place for us to park the wagons until we can secure a town lot. James, you get the women some water from the well down by Fifth. Wyatt, what're you going to do?"

Wyatt looked down Allen Street, his gaze sweeping over the bustling chaos, the canvas fronts, the heavy freight wagons churning the mud, and the unmistakable, simmering tension of a town where two thousand men lived without an inch of sewer pipe or a regular lockup.

"I'm going to take a walk," Wyatt said, adjusting his belt. "I want to see what kind of place this is before we start putting down money."

He walked alone down the south side of Allen, moving with that steady, rolling gait that came from years on the plains. Ahead of him, a team of six horses bolted as a blast from a nearby mine shook the gravel underfoot, the muffled boom of dynamite rumbling through the soles of his boots. Nobody stopped. Nobody looked up. The town simply surged forward, loud, hungry, and utterly careless of who got crushed beneath its wheels. Wyatt Earp smiled faintly, pulled his hat lower against the sinking sun, and stepped off the boardwalk into the dust.

The town did not sleep so much as it paused between shifts. At three o’clock in the morning, when the night chill off the Dragoon Mountains turned the mud of Allen Street into ridged, black stone, the miners from the Tough Nut and the Contention drifted up out of the earth like soot-stained ghosts. They carried tin lunch pails and smelled of damp slate, tallow candles, and black blasting powder. Within minutes, the boardwalks creaked under the weight of three hundred pairs of hobnailed boots, all converging on the greasy glow of all-night chophouses and the kerosene-lit doorways of the saloons.

Wyatt Earp sat on an overturned nail keg near the corner of Fourth and Fremont, watching the river of men churn past. A cup of boiled Arbuckles coffee cooled between his palms. Beside him, James leaned against the canvas wall of an assay office, his coat collar turned up against the wind. The assay office was dark, but a hand-lettered sign in the window offered crude testimony to the madness gripping the mesa: Assays run at $2.00 per specimen. High grade bought on sight. Silver bullion bar guarantees available.

"That’s sixteen tons of ore they hauled down the hill since midnight," James said, nodding toward the heavy freight wagons parked in the lot across the road. The draft horses stood with heads hung low, steam venting from their nostrils in rhythmic white plumes. "Sixteen tons. And the smelters down in Contention City can’t crush it fast enough. They’re dumping tailings right into the river."

"There’s more than silver coming out of those hills," Wyatt said, blowing the steam off his coffee. "There’s men from everywhere who think they’re going to pick dollars off the sagebrush."

"Most of them will pick gravel out of their teeth," James observed with the dry humor of a man who had seen booms in Montana and Colorado collapse into ghost camps within eighteen months. "Look at that lot over on Third. Guy put up a canvas tent on Tuesday, put four cases of Maryland club whiskey on two barrels on Wednesday, and by Thursday he was calling it the Alhambra Palace and clearing forty dollars a day. If you don't stake something soon, Wyatt, we’re going to be renting blankets by the hour."

Wyatt didn't answer right away. He was not a man to jump at the first piece of cloth flapping in the wind. In Dodge City, he had learned that the quickest way to end up broke in a boomtown was to chase what everyone else was chasing. While half the drifters in Cochise County were walking the ridges with rock hammers, breaking their knuckles against quartz outcrops, the men who actually kept the money were the ones who owned the wagons hauling the quartz, the water tanks supplying the boilers, and the tables where the miners dropped their pay on Saturday nights.

By daybreak, the gray light revealed the sheer, chaotic violence of Tombstone's expansion. The sound of hammers was so constant it seemed part of the atmosphere, like the wind or the smell of burning mesquite. Two months ago, Fremont Street had been a deer trail winding through the scrub; now, two-story frame structures were rising on cedar posts sunk straight into the dry dirt. Carpenters earned six dollars a day, paid in silver coin, and worked until their thumbs bled. Green pine boards, hauled sixty miles from the sawmills in the Chiricahua Mountains, wept sap down the front of half-finished dry-goods stores.

Virgil caught up with them around seven, his boots powdered with gray dust up to the shins. He looked haggard but pleased with himself. Under his arm he carried a rolled sheaf of butcher paper covered in penciled notations.

"Found us a spot," Virgil said, unrolling the paper against the wall of the assay tent. His big, blunt finger tapped a spot near the corner of First and Fremont. "Two lots. Cheap, because the slope falls off toward the arroyo, but nothing a team of scrapers and some cedar cribbing can’t level out. We can put up a house for the women and keep the stock in the back."

"Who owns the title?" Wyatt asked, not looking at the map, but at Virgil’s face.

Virgil gave an irritated shrug. "Everybody and nobody. That’s the trouble. A fellow named Clark says he homesteaded the section back in seventy-seven. The Tombstone Townsite Company says they’ve got a federal patent pending from the land office in Tucson. And there’s three different miners claiming the vein under the lot belongs to the Grand Central lode. If you dig down four feet to put in a cellar, you’re liable to hit a drift and have a Cornishman stick his head up through the floorboards."

"Pay the Townsite Company," Wyatt advised. "They’re the ones with lawyers in Tucson. A squatter can be run off with a shotgun, but a lawyer with a district judge’s ear will take your boots and charge you for the shoelaces."

"Already gave them twenty dollars on deposit," Virgil said. "James, Allie needs you down by the wagons. Some fellow tried to claim our lead team was grazing on his mineral claim. She nearly took his ear off with an iron skillet, but he’s still lingering around the tongue."

James grunted, pushed off from the canvas wall, and limped toward Allen Street with his left hand hooked into his coat pocket.

Wyatt and Virgil walked south toward the main artery of the town. Allen Street was wide enough for three sixteen-mule teams to pass abreast, though it was currently choked with every manner of vehicle that could roll on wooden wheels. There were spring wagons from the ranches down along the Babocomari, canvas-topped prairie schooners from Utah, sleek buggies belonging to mine superintendents, and water wagons dripping precious moisture onto the pulverized stone.

The wealth was real, undeniable, and loud. Down at the corner of Fifth Street, a crew of bricklayers was putting up the front of the Gilded Age saloon. The red bricks had been freighted in from Benson at ruinous expense, each one wrapped in straw like fine china. Through the framed opening, Wyatt could see mirrors that stretched eight feet toward the ceiling, their silvered backs catching the desert sun and throwing blinding rectangles of light into the street. Men were carrying in mahogany bar fixtures shipped around Cape Horn to San Francisco, hauled by rail to the Arizona border, and dragged across the desert on high-wheeled wagons.

"Takes a lot of ten-cent whiskey to pay for that glass," Virgil remarked.

"They won't be selling ten-cent whiskey in there," Wyatt said. "Champagne at five dollars a bottle, French brandy, and cigars with bands on them. There’s mine superintendents here drawing four hundred dollars a month from syndicates in Boston. You think they’re going to drink rotgut in a tent with muleskinners?"

They stopped outside the Wells, Fargo & Company office, where a small crowd had gathered. A green-painted Concord coach had just rolled in from Benson, its leather thoroughbraces creaking under the weight of the passenger compartment. The six-horse team stood trembling, their coats lathered to a white foam that flecked off their chests and pooled in the dirt. On the high box sat the driver, a leather-faced veteran of the California roads, and beside him, sitting casual with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun across his knees, was a messenger named Fred Dodge.

Two guards jumped down, their hands resting on the grips of their revolvers, and began sliding iron-banded treasure boxes out of the boot. Each box carried five hundred pounds of solid silver bullion—cast into fifty-pound "pigs" that were purposely made too heavy for a lone horseman to carry off.

"Look at that," Virgil whispered. "A fortune twice a week. That road between here and the railhead is like a vein of gold running right through the mesquite."

"And every hard case from the Indian Territory knows it," Wyatt noted. He watched the crowd parting to let the guards haul the iron boxes through the heavy door of the express office. In the periphery of the gathering stood three men leaning against the awning posts of the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

They were not miners. They did not have the rounded, labor-bent shoulders of men who swung picks, nor did they wear the broadcloth of business agents. They wore high-heeled boots with silver-inlaid spurs that jingled faintly in the dust, loose trousers tucked into their tops, and wide, greasy Mexican sombreros tied under their chins with rawhide. Broad cartridge belts sagged across their hips, heavy with .44-40 ammunition, and the pearl handles of Colt revolvers stuck out from unbuttoned holsters.

One of them was a youth with a face pitted by smallpox, chewing on a dried apricot and spitting the stones onto the boots of passing pedestrians. He watched the silver boxes with a lazy, measured insolence that was more dangerous than an open scowl. When his eyes met Wyatt’s, he didn't look away. Instead, he hooked a thumb into his gun belt and let his weight shift onto his left leg, letting the long fringed ends of his leather scabbard swing clear of his coat.

"That’s Billy Clanton," Virgil said under his breath, stepping half an inch forward so his larger frame blocked Wyatt’s shoulder. "His old man runs cattle down in the San Pedro valley, near Lewis Springs. Got a spread that takes in half the water rights between here and the border."

"I saw his kind in Wichita," Wyatt replied, his voice flat, his gaze remaining locked on the younger man until Billy finally turned to spit another stone into the dust. "Boy thinks because he can kill a rabbit from thirty yards off the back of a pony, he’s a man of war."

"They don't just shoot rabbits, Wyatt. A deputy from Pima County went down to their ranch last month looking for twenty head of steers that went missing from a government herd at Fort Huachuca. Came back with his saddle empty and his horse’s ears notched. Nobody went back to look for him."

Wyatt turned away from the hotel, uninterested in posturing. He had work to do. He had fifty-four dollars left in his leather billfold, three horses that needed oats, and two women who expected something better than salt pork and bacon fat before the week was out.

By afternoon, Wyatt had made the rounds of the business district. Tombstone was not merely a mining camp; it was an economy built on immediate satisfaction. A man who might die tomorrow from a falling timber or a stray shot of bad liquor didn't want to save his earnings. He spent them. He spent them on canned peaches from California at a dollar a tin, on velvet waistcoats, on women who called themselves Spanish dancers but had been born in Missouri, and, above all, on the games.

In the back of the Oriental Saloon—which was then still operating out of a sprawling frame building on the corner of Fifth and Allen—the air was thick with the reek of stale beer and cigar smoke. The faro tables were already crowded, even in the middle of the afternoon. The case-keeper sat behind his wooden abacus, sliding the ivory buttons with steady, mechanical clicks, while the dealer, an oily man with grease-slicked hair and a diamond stickpin the size of an acorn, handled the cards from the silver box with the fluid grace of a priest at the altar.

Wyatt stood near the rail, watching the play. He understood faro better than he understood the Bible. It was the game of the frontier because it gave the player the best odds—nearly even against the house, save for the occasional "split." A good dealer had to be faster than his players, completely cold-blooded, and able to calculate percentage splits while three drunken teamsters screamed in his face.

The dealer at the front table was none of those things. His hands were sweating, leaving dull smudges on the enameled backs of the cards, and he was miscalling the bets on the queen-ten split. Behind him, three miners with dirt under their fingernails were leaning over the baize, their eyes wide as they spotted the mistake. One of them, a big man with a red beard that reached his chest, reached out with a ham-sized fist and shoved a stack of twenty-dollar gold pieces onto the high card.

"You called it wrong, mister," the miner growled, his voice carrying above the noise of the room. "The king was top card, not the knave. Pay the layout or pull your iron."

The dealer froze, his eyes darting toward the empty space behind the bar where the house man usually stood. But the house man was down at the far end, arguing with a drayman over a broken barrel of port.

Wyatt stepped through the opening in the railing before anyone realized he was moving. He didn't raise his voice, nor did he put his hand on his revolver. He simply reached out with his left hand, caught the miner’s wrist with a grip like an iron vise, and set the red-bearded man’s hand back onto the edge of the wood.

"The knave came out of the box second, friend," Wyatt said, his voice entirely devoid of anger. It had the dry, absolute finality of an iron door closing. "Look at the discard pile. The king’s on the bottom. You lose the double, but the ten pushes. Pick up your eight dollars and let the man deal."

The miner spun, his free hand dropping instinctively toward his belt, but he stopped when he found himself staring into Wyatt’s eyes. Wyatt was taller, wider through the chest, and his eyes had that flat, unblinking grey-blue quality that belonged to men who did not consider violence an event, but merely an administrative detail.

"Who the hell are you?" the miner spat, though he did not pull the knife from his sash.

"Wyatt Earp."

The name didn't carry the weight in Arizona that it did in Kansas, but the cold certainty with which it was delivered did the work. Two other men at the table, older drifters who had spent time around the stockyards in Dodge City, exchanged glances and pulled back from the felt.

"Earp," one of them muttered. "He was marshal up in Dodge. Left three Texans in the ditch behind the Long Branch."

The lie was as good as the truth. The red-bearded miner looked at the discard pile, saw the edge of the knave showing beneath the brass lip of the box, and grunted. He swept his remaining gold pieces off the cloth, gave Wyatt a long, sour look, and pushed his way out through the swinging doors into the afternoon sun.

The dealer let out a long breath, pulling a handkerchief from his sleeve to mop his forehead. "Obliged," he said, his voice shaking. "Name's Milt Joyce. Well, part-owner, anyway. That bastard was about three seconds from sticking an eight-inch blade into my counter."

"You need to keep your eyes on the case-keeper," Wyatt said, not looking at Joyce, but scanning the room to see who else had noticed the brief stir. "He missed the turn on the four. That’s what started it. A game that looks crooked will get your house burned down faster than bad liquor."

Joyce tucked his handkerchief back into his cuff and looked Wyatt up and down, taking in the long frock coat, the neat black string tie, and the immaculately brushed hat. "You know faro, Mr. Earp?"

"I know it," Wyatt said.

"Looking for a game?"

"Looking for an interest," Wyatt corrected. "I don't deal for wages. Wages are for men who like getting shot at for fifty dollars a month while someone else owns the roof."

Joyce gave a short, hard laugh that showed two gold fillings. "Well, you won't get an interest in the Oriental today. Mike O'Rourke and Lou Rickabaugh own the paper, and they don't give away slices of the melon to strangers. But Rickabaugh’s coming down from San Francisco on the next coach. He’s got half the gambling concessions from here to Prescott, and he needs men who know how to keep the peace without calling in the town constable every time a miner loses his watch."

"I'll talk to Rickabaugh when he gets here," Wyatt said. He turned to leave, but Joyce caught his sleeve.

"One thing, Earp," Joyce said, lowering his voice. "If you're going to be hanging around Fremont and Allen, keep your head down around the county crowd. Johnny Behan was just through here an hour ago. He’s the deputy sheriff for the district, and he’s running for sheriff when they split Cochise off from Pima County next winter. He’s got the ranchers in his pocket, and the ranchers don't like town men who walk like they own the sidewalk."

Wyatt looked down at Joyce’s hand until the saloon man let go of his sleeve. "I don't own the sidewalk, Mr. Joyce," Wyatt said. "I just walk on it."

He stepped back out onto Allen Street. The sun had dropped behind the Huachuca Mountains to the west, throwing long, purple shadows across the desert floor. The wind was picking up, carrying with it the bitter dust of the lime kilns and the cold bite of the mountain night.

Across the street, Virgil was standing on the corner of Fifth, watching two freight wagons try to untangle their harness chains. A small boy was running along the wooden walk, shouting out the headlines of the newly printed Tombstone Epitaph: "Silver strikes at the Lucky Cuss! Rich ledge found on the hills! Population reaches four thousand!"

Four thousand people, Wyatt thought, and not two dozen of them knew what they were doing here beyond getting rich or getting drunk. It was a town built on nothing but a pocket of gray metal buried four hundred feet under the caliche, surrounded by Apaches who would kill you for your horse, and cowboys who would kill you for your boots.

He walked up Fremont Street toward the temporary camp where the wagons were parked. In the gathering dusk, he could see Mattie sitting near the back flap of their wagon, her knees pulled up to her chest, rocking slowly back and forth while the iron stove in the camp kitchen sent up a thin plume of cedar smoke. She looked up as he approached, her eyes heavy and slow, but she didn't speak. She didn't need to. The desert was terrifying to her; she saw only the emptiness, the dust that got into the flour, and the sound of the wind that never seemed to stop blowing through the mesquite.

Wyatt laid a hand on the wagon wheel, feeling the iron cool under his skin. He didn't share her fear. To him, the town was not empty; it was full of possibilities that smelled of money and gunpowder. All that was required was patience, an iron nerve, and the common sense to keep one’s back to the wall when the cards were dealt.

Virgil joined him a few minutes later, carrying two tin plates of beans and fried bacon from the campfire. He handed one to Wyatt without a word and sat down on the wagon tongue.

"Got the deed filed," Virgil said between mouthfuls. "Cost me twelve dollars, but the Townsite Company signed the slip. We own sixty feet of front on Fremont. Just down from the stage office."

"Good," Wyatt said, taking a bite of the bacon. It was saltier than brine, but it was hot. "Get the posts sunk tomorrow. Put up the lumber before the price goes up another cent."

"What about you?" Virgil asked, glancing up. "Find any business?"

Wyatt looked out over the town, down toward the cluster of saloons where the coal-oil lamps were flaring to life one by one, painting the dust of Allen Street in shades of amber and blood-red. Faintly, through the sound of the wind, came the rattle of an ivory ball in a roulette wheel and the distant, lonely bark of a coyote down in the draw.

"I found it," Wyatt said. "It just hasn't arrived on the stagecoach yet."