Sliphammer

With stubborn muteness Tree looked straight at him. Earp’s sleeves were rolled up; his golden-haired forearms were powerful and sleek. Tree hadn’t seen him angry before; now it was strong enough to reach through his own rage: it chilled him, a bleak coldness that came off Wyatt Earp like death.

“Now hear me,” Earp said. “You see men all the time who go around begging to get killed. They take a swing at you if you even brush by their sleeve without meaning to. They pick a fight over nothing, they accuse you of cheating at cards-anything. They go out of their way to make enemies of dangerous men when they know they haven’t got a chance of wi

“If you’re talking about Rafe-”

“I am.” Earp cut him off roughly and went on: “Your brother was begging for it. Making brags he knew he couldn’t keep. Talking it up in saloons, telling everybody in earshot what he’d do to me and my so-called gang if he ever got an excuse. I heard him and Cooley heard him. Maybe you heard him too.”

“It was just talk. Kid talk. Cooley’s going to pay-”

“Cooley will pay,” Earp grunted, “sooner or later, but not here, not now, and not for this. Listen to me, amigo. Your brother came boiling out that door over there at a time when guns were going off on this street. He didn’t just stick his head out for a look. He came ru

“No choice! Are you trying to tell me he forced Cooley to kill him when he didn’t even have a gun in his hand?”

“He was armed. He came ramming into a fight that was none of his business and it was his own stupid fault he got shot. We didn’t have time to wait to see whether he was going to start shooting at us. By God, how do I make you understand? There were guns going off!”

McKesson, at Tree’s shoulder, said in a strict voice, “Your brother was the one who had the choice to make, Deputy. He could have chosen not to come out on the street. When a man deliberately steps into the line of fire you’ve got to assume he means to take a hand in the fighting. He could hear what was happening-he wasn’t deaf, was he? — if he’d had any sense at all he’d have stuck to cover.”

Wyatt Earp said, “Just one more thing. You can come inside and try to take Cooley away from us, but I don’t recommend it. You’ll want better odds. Go home and think about it. Give yourself a chance, for the love of God.”

Abruptly, Earp backed inside and disappeared beyond the door.

McKesson reached for his arm; Tree shook him off. He stood staring at the closed door as if Earp were still there.

Finally he said in a low, throbbing voice, “What really happened here? I can’t get a straight story out of anybody.”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t here either. Don’t you believe him?”

“Why should I?”

McKesson said, “I was begi

“I was begi

“How do you know he doesn’t?”

“Rafe didn’t have a gun in his hand, did he?”

“All I know is his gun was in the holster and it hadn’t been fired.”

“Yeah,” Tree said. “So.”

“So at least you’re starting to ask questions, which indicates to me that you’re no longer suffering total mental paralysis. I talked to Cooley. He said he saw the kid come barging out of the lunchroom door and he remembered all the threats the kid had been making and he didn’t have time to stop and ask his intentions. I tend to believe that. At any rate I don’t see how you could disprove it to the satisfaction of any court of law, rigged or honest, makes no difference. You’re sworn to uphold the law. All right, Cooley’s on your shit list, but don’t go after the whole Earp crowd on that account.”

Tree scraped the back of a craggy hand across his mouth. McKesson punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I rise to remark that once you’ve thought the whole thing over and had time to simmer down, you’ll chalk the whole thing up the same way you’d chalk it up if some fatal disease had killed your brother. You don’t go out to kill somebody because a brother died of smallpox-you can’t get revenge on smallpox. You can’t avenge an accident, and that’s what this was. When you spend as many years peace-officering as I have, you’ll learn things are never as simple as the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy would have it.”

“Sheriff,” Tree said, “if there’s one thing I don’t need right now it’s one of your speeches.”

“You’re wrong. I think it’s exactly what you do need. Why, I recall one time when-”

Tree turned away and left him there, trailing off. He went blindly across the street and strode through the town in a stiff, stu

Hindsight, he thought, desperately grabbing at straws; it was no good. Neither killing Cooley nor blaming himself would bring Rafe back.

He just didn’t want to think about it.

He found in time that his steps had taken him into Poverty Row, the fringe of the tenderloin, inhabited by the dregs of Gu

Beside him he saw the face of a Chinese girl pressed against a filthy window pane. He walked on, past a row of single-story cribs each of which had the occupant’s name painted on a removable shingle sign: Goldfield Nell, Bilious Billie, French Lil. Toward the foot of the street several of the girls sat spread-thighed on chairs in their open doors, which were overhung by the red railroad lanterns that had given red-light districts their name in the Kansas railhead towns ten years ago. The girls were sixteen-year-old soiled doves, painted ladies of the half-world. Black, Oriental, Mexican, Indian, European. They solicited halfheartedly from their doorways. It was the first time he had seen them close up; he had seen them uptown at night, when the light was poor, parading up and down the street with jangling saloon bands, stirring up business. Now, in daylight, at sixteen they looked all used up. A good many of them were probably addicted to opium and morphine, if they weren’t drunks. As he went by, three or four of them shouted raucous, obscene invitations. He shook his head without speaking and wandered on. At the heart of Poverty Row he came upon the Homestead Parlour House, which had a crescent-shaped sign painted high on its false front: GIRLS TWENTY GIRLS TWENTY GIRLS and, painted under that, Beer 5?.

Past that he came to the Bijou Union Saloon. A hand-lettered sign on packing cardboard a