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just as well its mountains and valleys, the green pine forests and the Petrified One, too.
    He’d made and lost a fortune out there on that sun-shimmering expanse. He ridden shotgun on stagecoaches, he’d led posses, he’d mined for gold, he’d gambled and won, gambled and lost, upheld the law and been chased by so-called law on murder charges.
    As he gazed upon that rugged landscape, Wyatt Earp knew that he would always live in Arizona, though he might not ever set foot there again, except perhaps to get out and stretch when this train made a stop.
    How often had he ridden across this land in pursuit of rustlers or stagecoach robbers? He and his brother Virgil had spent seventeen days on one such pursuit, following the bastards who murdered shotgun messenger Bud Philpot into the mountains….

    When they first came seeking their fortunes in Arizona, Wyatt and Virgil and younger brother Morgan (and occasionally Warren) did not see themselves as gunfighters, no matter how the rest of the world viewed them. Good-natured James didn’t bear that brand—everybody knew that particular Earp was strictly a bartender. The rest were gamblers and, on occasion, policemen, hard but fair, aware that maintaining law and order in cattle and mining towns took guts and the threat of force.
    But both Wyatt and Virgil had gone sour on police work—killing in the line of duty could do that to a man—and Tombstone had been about getting rich in a boomtown, not helping marshal it; Wyatt’s initial plan had been to start a stagecoach line, but others beat him to the punch. So Wyatt bought into the gambling concession at the Oriental, and—in addition to pursuing mining interests—he and his brothers rode shotgun for Wells Fargo, for whom they also did occasional detective work.
    Such activities put them in conflict with a loosely organized bunch of local criminals called the Cowboys, Texans for the most part, who rustled across the Mexican border and fenced the cattle through crooked ranchers like Old Man Clanton, whose spread was near Tombstone.
    The Cowboys, many of them, were brutal killers, leaving behind a bloody trail of slaughtered federales and vaqueros .
    The area ranchers (whether crooked or legit) were Democrats, Southern sympathizers, while the town businessmen were Union-leaning Republicans from back East. The former stuck a glad-handing, unqualified horse’s ass called Johnny Behan into the sheriff ’s chair, where he could ignore Cowboy crime and get rich collecting taxes.
    Behan got on Wyatt’s bad side when the two men cut a deal whereby Wyatt would not run for sheriff on the assurance that Behan would run unopposed and then make Wyatt undersheriff.
    The son-of-a-bitch Behan reneged, of course, but Virgil was a U.S. deputy marshal by this time, and after Curly Bill Brocius “accidentally” killed Marshal Fred White, Virgil got the town marshal badge, as well. Morgan became a city policeman, and in time Wyatt was appointed county deputy sheriff. A chilly truce developed between Sheriff Behan and the Earps, who for a comfortable stretch were backed up by Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Luke Short…and with gunhands like that enforcing the law, few challengers stepped forward, anyway few sober ones.
    But after Bat left town to help out his lawman brother in Kansas, and Short lit out in the aftermath of a questionable gunfight, Virgil lost the next marshal’s election, and the scales shifted to the Cowboy side.
    And the Cowboys were in need of some luck, at that, because the Mexican government had increased its federale forces, building forts along the border and confronting the rustlers in bloody battle—Old Man Clanton among the Cowboys who justly fell.
    This sent the Cowboys reeling into other crime, not just rustling on the American side, but holding up stagecoaches to plunder Wells Fargo shipments.
    Then when the new marshal unexpectedly resigned, Virgil got his badge back; and Wyatt decided to take on Johnny