Bloody Season

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Book: Read Bloody Season for Free Online
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
Tags: historical western
three steps from the crowd and met Wyatt Earp right at the corner of the building. He stuck his six-shooter at me and said, ‘Throw up your hands!’ The marshal also told the other boys to throw their hands up. Tom McLaury opened his coat and said that he had no arms. They said, ‘You sons of bitches, you ought to make a fight!’ At the same instant, Doc Holliday and Morg shot. Morgan shot my brother and I don’t know which of the other boys that Doc Holliday shot. I saw Virge shooting at the same time. I grabbed Wyatt Earp and pushed him around the corner of the house and jumped into the gallery. As I jumped, I saw Billy falling. I ran through the gallery and got away.”
    He spat. The cuspidor bonged. “Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury, and myself threw up our hands at the order from the Earp party, and Tom McLaury threw his coat open and said, ‘I have got no arms.’”
    Matthews rubbed his left eye, the one with the tic. “Did you have any trouble with the Earps previous to the day in question?”
    “Doc Holliday came into the Alhambra Saloon and said I had been using his name. I said, ‘I have not.’ I never had any previous trouble with the Earps. They don’t like me. We had a transaction—I mean, myself and the Earps—but it had nothing to do with the killing of these three men. There was no threats made by the McLaury boys and Billy Clanton against the Earp boys that day, not that I know of. They had ordered me to heel myself, and I told them I would be there.”
    Matthews asked some more questions, which Clanton answered with his chin on his chest and his hands folded loosely between his spread knees, turning his head occasionally to use the cuspidor.
    “I did not expect any trouble from Wyatt Earp but from Virge and Morg Earp and Doc Holliday. The boys expected no attack until somebody told them just before they were leaving town, and they never left.. . . I did not have any arms on when the Earp party came down and ordered us to throw up our hands. Virge Earp had my arms, a Winchester and a six-shooter. . . . I had not seen Frank McLaury or my brother for two days before the shooting. I never had a conversation with the McLaury boys and Billy as to making a fight in my life. . . . When the firing commenced, Virge and Doc Holliday were about six feet from the McLaury boys and Morg Earp’s pistol was about three or four feet from Billy when he commenced firing. I did not see my brother or either of the McLaurys fire a shot.”
    Matthews thanked him.
    “...Martha J. King. I live in the City of Tombstone. I am a housekeeper.”
    In her late thirties, the woman looked a few years older, with most of her dark hair pinned back and the rest falling in sausage curls behind her ears, a style too young for her that accentuated the lines in her neck and from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. She wore a black dress still gleaming from the brush, with a white lace collar secured at the throat by an ivory brooch. Her hands were red and peeling and clutched a rose embroidered handkerchief in her lap. She nodded when Matthews, his tone low and funereally solicitous so that the recorder had to strain to hear him, asked her if she was present on Fremont Street at the time of the trouble, then said yes so that her answer could be taken down.
    “I was coming from my house to Bauer’s meat market to get some meat for dinner,” she said. “I saw quite a number of men standing in a group together on the sidewalk by the door of the market, and I passed on into the shop to get what I went for, and the parties in the shop were excited and did not seem to want to wait upon me. I inquired what was the matter, and they said there was about to be a fuss between the Earp boys and the cowboys. I was standing back at the time they said it. I stepped to the door of the market and I heard someone talking but did not understand at first what they said.
    “Then the party seemed to separate, and this man who was standing with

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