A Handful of Dust: Wyatt Earp's Last Gunfight

By Charles Knief

It has been twenty-five years since the notorious gunfight at the O.K. Corral when Wyatt Earp and his wife, Josephine, move to Los Angeles. Bringing eighty-five thousand dollars in cash and gold with them, the reward for a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck. By 1910, they are broke and on the verge of starvation, thanks to insatiable gambling habits and inadequate talents.

Now sixty-two, the Old West icon is forced to return to his career in law enforcement with the LAPD tracking bail skips. In true Wyatt Earp fashion, he creates an international incident by kidnapping two murder suspects from Mexico and bringing them back across the border while staying two steps ahead of the Mexican cavalry. When he is fired from the LAPD, he is offered a job to run off a group of trespassers from a mine in Searles Valley, California. After partnering with Bat Masterson, his friend of forty years, Wyatt has no idea that he is about to ride into the biggest gunfight of his life.

A Handful of Dust tells the exciting tale of Wyatt Earp’s final gunfight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665715492

Charles Knief

Charles Knief is a former airborne soldier, pilot, and engineer. He has traveled widely and lived in Hawaii for a number of years. His first John Caine adventure, Diamond Head, won the SMP/ PWA contest for Best First Private Eye novel in 1995. He and his wife currently live in Irvine, California.

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Copyright © 2022 Charles Knief.

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the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-1550-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1548-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1549-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021923736

Archway Publishing rev. date: 4/21/2022

CONTENTS

Part I

Chapter 1   July 1910

Chapter 2   Second Street & Temple

Chapter 3   August 1910

Chapter 4   Second & Santa Fe Boulevard

Chapter 5   First & Broadway

Part II

Chapter 6   Central Station

Chapter 7   The San Gabriel Valley

Chapter 8   South of Victorville

Chapter 9   Victorville to First Camp

Chapter 10   The Crossing

Chapter 11   The Badlands

Chapter 12   The Arrival

Chapter 13   Contact

Chapter 14   The Plan

Part III

Chapter 15   Easy Does It

Chapter 16   Mano a Mano

Chapter 17   Siege

Chapter 18   Winner Take All

Chapter 18   The Fortress

Chapter 20   Ambush

Chapter 21   Out of the Frying Pan

Chapter 22   Into the Fire

Chapter 23   Mirage

Chapter 24   A World Gone Mad

Chapter 24   All Good Things

Chapter 26   A Rental Cottage Near Chinatown

Afterword

Endnotes

I WILL SHOW YOU FEAR

IN A HANDFUL OF DUST

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

For

ILDIKO,

who always makes life worth living,

and for Kylie and Hunter,

who make it so much fun!

PART I

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CHAPTER 1

JULY 1910

A RENTAL COTTAGE NEAR CHINATOWN

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

We round the corner and there they stand, waiting in the yard between Fly’s and Harwood’s, pistols on their hips and hands at the ready. Billy Clanton, wearing two .44 Russians and a leering grin, winks at me. Not one minute ago, Johnny Behan looked me in the eye and told me he had disarmed the whole bunch.

I hear myself say, Son of a bitch!

Virgil calls out, Throw up your hands, boys! I intend to disarm you!

I keep my eye on Frank McLaury, knowing him an experienced gun hand. He grabs for his pistol, I raise mine and shoot him in the stomach, knocking him against Fly’s clapboard. He hangs there a moment, then slides down the wall and sits in the dirt.

I snap off a shot and miss, the bullet striking a foot above his head.

Billy Clanton pulls one of his Russians and fires. Glass breaks somewhere behind me. I’m thumbing back the hammer on my Colt’s as Ike Clanton grabs my arm and my shot goes wild. While I am struggling to get the old man off me, I see Tom McLaury behind Billy’s horse and Behan pushing Billy Clairborne to cover behind Fly’s.

Virgil grunts, swears and falls to the ground.

The yard is filled with the bittersweet smell of gun smoke.

Ike is still grabbing at me, pleading for his life. I shove him away, shouting, This fight’s commenced! Go to fightin’ or get away!

Ike’s son Billy is shooting as fast as he can and lead is buzzing by my head. Dust puffs off his shirt and he gasps, holding his stomach but keeping to his feet.

Morgan fires and Billy’s right hand disappears in a cloud of red mist, his pistol flipping into the dirt behind him.

Virgil shoots Billy at the belt and the boy falls.

Tom McLaury fires from behind Billy’s horse and Morgan goes down. I shoot the horse in the withers. It breaks away, dashing toward Freemont, leaving Tom off balance and without cover. As he tries to regain his footing, Doc cuts loose with Virgil’s shotgun, spinning Tom around, but not bringing him down. He starts running down Freemont and Doc, swearing, drops the shotgun, pulls his pistol, takes aim like a target shooter and hits him once between the shoulder blades, then twice more. Tom stumbles but keeps going until he reaches the telegraph pole beyond Harwood’s. He pauses, one hand on the pole, then falls and is still.

Doc starts to reload, pulling cartridges from his pocket.

Frank McLaury lifts himself off the ground and fires, putting a hole through my coattail. He shoots at Morgan and misses. I snap a shot in his direction. He turns and staggers into the street. He makes it to the far side of Fly’s, sits down in the dirt and leans over, both arms at his side, blood soaking his shirt and pooling on the ground.

A bullet from nowhere whizzes between Virgil and me. Someone shouts, Watch it! We’re getting it from the back! I fire at a running figure as he disappears around the corner of the Aztec House.

Frank McLaury, still sitting in the street, raises his head and points his pistol at Doc. I’ve got you now!

Doc is closing the gate on his pistol. Blaze away! You’re a daisy if you have!

Frank’s bullet blows a hole through the back of Doc’s coat and he cries, I’m shot right through! and shoots Frank in the chest.

Morgan, lying in the street, fires and hits McLaury in the head. Frank falls over onto his side and does not move.

You’re dead, Earp! One of Billy’s hands is destroyed and he’s been shot in the chest and stomach, but he’s got me square with his second Russian. I’ve nowhere to run. My gun’s empty, Virgil’s is too, and Morgan’s is silent. Doc is rolling on the ground screaming like a demon and the Wells-Fargo shotgun lies ten feet away.

Billy aims that .44 at my face and pulls the trigger...

A mockingbird practiced his variations outside my window, running up the scale and then back down, twittering, chattering, whistling and crowing. Leaves on a lemon tree fluttered in gentle breezes against a cloudless sky the color of a robin’s egg. I rubbed my eyes, half-awake. That October day from so long ago sometimes returns to me in dreams, a reminder of my great good luck. Of all the men who stood against each other in Harwood’s lumberyard, I was the one who didn’t suffer a wound and I was now, at sixty-two years of age, the only participant left alive.

Everyone knows the story. Those thirty seconds changed my life, made me famous and taught me that fame can be used when you want it to, but it also can use you, and can make you its slave. Newspaper reporters and book writers have constantly hounded me to tell them the story of that fight. If I told the tale once, I’ve told it a thousand times, as if I never did anything else in this life. Maybe I should have charged those writers money for those stories. They surely made theirs. And Josie and I could use that money now.

I was tired and hungry but could do nothing about either. We had no food and no money, and last night Josie disappeared.

I did not retire to bed until the parlor clock chimed twice. Waiting for Josie when she was in the gambling mood was seldom pleasant, but last night was among the worst. She had not returned at a reasonable hour, and I worried for her. I waited until my conscience sent me searching.

She was not in her usual haunts, the gambling dens above the Chinese stores or in backrooms along North Broadway and Hill Street. That had been my first target, probing one smoky cardroom to the next, working my way up one side of Chinatown and down the other, eventually running out of places to look and returning to our cottage, empty-handed, still concerned and hoping she would be here. She was not. I continued to sit, listening to the clock tick off each minute, having nothing else to do but wait and worry.

Exhaustion inevitably overcame my worries and I reluctantly crawled into bed.

What sleep I did manage was fitful.

Listening to the mockingbird’s annoying good cheer, I carefully rolled from the bed, set my bare feet on the polished oak floor, slipped into last night’s trousers and headed for the indoor outhouse. The room and what it contained was what caused Josie to choose this bungalow. Having an indoor outhouse was something that took some getting used to. This one, what they called a double-you see would have come in handy out on the prairie in January. The feeling of your bare cheeks on icy boards is an experience not soon forgotten nor wished to be repeated.

Urinating was something that had become difficult since my sixtieth year. The flow didn’t start easily or quickly. It waited—I could feel the build-up—and then began the dribbling, the dribble increasing to a piddly stream and then stopped. I waited impatiently. I had other things to do besides stand in a tiny room hanging on to my tallywhacker, but I had learned that I had no control of the process once it began, and good manners dictated that I should not move until the event truly was over.

I heard the front door open and close.

The dribbles started again, increased to a half-hearted stream, continued for another few seconds, and then stopped for what I hoped was for good. I shook myself and tucked the damn thing back into my long johns.

Josie stood motionless just inside the parlor, next to the coat rack, her head down, her face hidden.

Sadie? I used my special name for her. No one else but Bat Masterson could call her that.

She looked at me, her expression one of hopeless misery. I lost, she said, her voice breaking. I went to her and held her close. She put her head against my chest, but she didn’t hug me back, her body stiff as a board.

Lost what?

I lost everything, all our money. I won, at first, then I lost a little, and then big, more than enough to keep us for a month. Her body shook with her sobs. It took some time for her to get her voice back. I was going to come home then but there was one more game and I had been drinking. They gave it to me, all I wanted, I didn’t pay for it. And after I had some wins, they invited me to play in the backroom for the big pot. It was a chance to support us for the rest of the year. I won a little more there, Lady Luck was with me, or so I thought until she deserted me. When I started to lose, I looked for a way out, but was in too deep. The pot was big, and it grew and grew and my only chance to win it back was to keep playing. I had a full house of deuces and treys and I fought as long as I could and then… She looked away.

And then? I asked gently.

She swallowed, then molded her face against my chest. And then, well, the hand wasn’t good enough. I lost everything I had won and every penny I had brought. Every penny we had.

I held her tightly. When was this?

She looked at me as if I was speaking another language.

When did you win? When did you lose?

Last night. Around midnight.

Where was this?

Chin’s.

I knew Chin’s, one of the oldest Chinese restaurants in the city, and a front for most of the big games. Upstairs, above the dining area, was a fully functional Oriental pasteboard gambling palace. The big games moved around Chinatown with no permanent locations, but always including professional cardsharps, and they circled back to Chin’s on a regular basis. Today all trace of last night’s action would be gone. I was there asking about you just after midnight. Chin told me he had not seen you.

She looked up at me, her eyes filled. I hugged her tighter. She tried to push me away, but I held on. She was a strong woman and I had to struggle to keep her against me. What did you do since then?

She pushed harder. I held on tight.

I was too drunk to leave. I couldn’t walk home like that. I knew we were hungry, that you would be hungry…did you eat?

I’m fine.

You would say that. she said. Even if you were starving.

It’s all right, I said, my stomach growling at the lie. What did you do then?

I had to wait until my head wasn’t fuzzy and then I walked…I walked from Chinatown to Spring Street, wandering around trying to get the courage to come home. I forgot how frightening a city can be at night and I was alone, so I came home. There was no light in the house, so I knew you were asleep, and I didn’t want to wake you, so I waited on the porch. When the sun came up, I felt foolish and came in.

All this time you were on the porch?

Let me go!

I stepped back, still holding her gently at arm’s length. Sadie, it doesn’t make any difference to me whether you won or lost or what you did instead of coming home. I’m just grateful you are not hurt.

She nodded, closing her eyes. I knew you’d say that. She had spoken so softly, I barely heard her.

And I felt shame.

Josie had taken upon herself the role of the provider when I had failed. She did what she knew, and sometimes was good at, and had won and then had been swindled by cardsharps. She had been cheated and I could not be angry with her.

If we had our money, I said, we wouldn’t be in this fix. In 1906 we came to Los Angeles with eighty-five thousand dollars in cash and gold, the result of decades of hard work and a lot of good luck. We had done well in Alaska, even better in Arizona, and had achieved some measure of success in San Francisco before the earthquake. We were on Easy Street, but Los Angeles was the Land of the Lotus Eaters: too much was too easy to come by, and the weather was so benign it was as though life was easy, too. I should have known better. We were invited to parties of the elite—we were the famous gunslinger and his lovely lady—and we made friends who were not really friends but were those who wished to use us by attaching themselves to our fame. Over the course of the last four years, we managed to gamble and fritter away of our fortune. All of it. And now we were starving.

I promised Josie I would not return to law enforcement, but in truth I wasn’t qualified for much else. I thought I could earn a living dealing cards but found there was nothing I could do here. Gambling was illegal in Los Angeles although there was plenty of it around. Even when we had money, I couldn’t afford to start my own establishment. Unless you were protected by the tongs or you paid off the police, the authorities would break down your door and steal the pot every place you set up. I had seen enough to understand where the line had been drawn and so stayed away from the tables. Josie, on the other hand, kept trying her hand as a patron, with the expected result. We should have moved on and put Los Angeles behind us, but neither of us could bring ourselves to leave, comfortable in the city’s air, light and excitement. You could say many things about this town, but the weather was the best we had experienced. We spent our winters along the Colorado River, where I prospected for gold and filed claims on the California side. In summer we lived in this rented bungalow, a few blocks east of Chinatown. It was how we managed, with the help of a stipend from Josie’s family. When the money ran out, we lost our friends and there were no further party invitations, and yet we still hung on for reasons we could not explain.

You are hungry, aren’t you? Josie could hear my stomach growl.

Let’s see what we can find, I said.

Our kitchen was a tiny room at one end of our cottage with white painted cabinets and a tin draining board on either side of a small porcelain sink. West and south facing windows made it the brightest room in the place. Water came from a faucet, another anomaly. In the wilderness, we either drew water from a stream or a well. Here, water came from a pipe buried in the ground.

There’s nothing, Josie said. We ate the last of it two days ago. You must be starving.

In truth, I was, but I had no room to complain. I was the one who allowed us to descend to this point. Between now and sunset I had to find food for us. And then I had to find a way to continue the means or we would starve to death. After all we had been through, after all the dusty towns, the gunfights, the times in the wilderness when the elements threatened our very existence, it looked like we might expire in a place filled with abundance.

I patted her back and held her close. You must be exhausted.

She yawned and snuggled her head against my shoulder. I’m sorry. Her voice was muffled against my chest.

Nothing to be sorry for, girl, I said. Let’s put you to bed and I’ll go see what I can do.

I closed the curtains as she undressed and crawled into bed. She gave me a sheepish little grin and I gave her my warmest smile in return. Still smiling, she turned over, closed her eyes and hugged my pillow. I watched her from the doorway as she lay quietly. When I heard her breathing deeply, I closed the door, making sure the latch made no sound.

It was time for this old man to face a hard reality.

Supporting us, feeding us, keeping a roof over our heads, that was my job, not hers. Mark Twain once said that the older he got, the better he was. When one has a reputation as a gunfighter, nothing could hold more truth. I could break my promise to stay away from policing and beg for a job at the Los Angeles Police Department. I was no longer that man in the alley near Harwood’s, the event that writers recently began calling the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but our situation had been reduced to the point where I could no longer afford to be choosey. I knew my name would open doors there. Whether or not I could secure a position, I had to try. I knew that Josie would be hungry when she awoke and would find nothing but a rotten onion in the breadbox.

I fished the keys from my coat, went to the hall closet and opened my old steamer trunk. My guns might be valuable, especially the one I carried in Tombstone and the subsequent battles that followed. Bat Masterson once told me he made good money selling his guns and while I found it amusing then, it was instructive now. Bat was like me, a gunfighter and a lawman, and we had been fast friends for more than forty years. These days he was a columnist for a New York City newspaper, and he was good at it. He was also a United States Marshal. His friend, Teddy Roosevelt, appointed him to that office, and President Taft had not yet gotten around to replacing him. Like me, Bat spent his money as fast as it came in, but unlike me, whenever his purse ran low, he would send a copyboy to buy an old six-gun from a pawn shop. Once the weapon was in his hands he would carve twenty-two notches on the grip, rub smooth the raw cuts in the walnut with fine sandpaper and oil, and sell the gun to a collector he had been grooming. He told me he always got handsome money for those fraudulent antiques. I figured Bat must have owned more than a hundred pistols in his life, if only for a day or two.

I picked up the long-barreled Colt’s Single Action Army .45 that was in my hand that day in Tombstone and removed the oily rag from around the blue steel. The walnut grips were worn smooth, and spots of the bluing had been rubbed away by years of contact with leather. Like Bat, this gun had been by my side for almost half a century. And like an old friend, there was not a chance in the world I would willingly part with it.

The other revolver was the big Smith & Wesson I had taken from Curly Bill Brocius, Morgan’s admitted assassin. From thirty feet, Curly Bill let fly at me with both barrels of a shotgun, the buckshot holing my duster, cutting my trousers and blowing the hat off my head, but missing everything important. I put five quick slugs through the back-shooter’s heart, the group so close the bullet holes looked like a single ragged tear in his shirt. I took his pistol and shotgun afterward and left his corpse for the buzzards.

I wouldn’t sell either of those guns. Others were more recently acquired, without history. I had carried them in Alaska, Arizona and San Francisco, had never fired them in anger, but found them useful in Los Angeles. People tell stories of how violent and lawless Tombstone and Dodge City were back then, in what they now call the Old West, but those were peaceful places compared to the City of Angels. A gun is a necessity in this town.

The cut-down Colt’s .45 with a bird’s head grip was the gun I carried in the city. It fit a shoulder rig a San Francisco Chinaman made for me and its three-inch barrel didn’t poke out my jacket like the two war horses I’d used in the Old West. I wouldn’t sell that one, either. It was functional and comfortable in its holster, and I carried it every time I stepped from the house.

That left a collection of single-action revolvers and a .44 Russian I had picked up here and there. I don’t know why, but people give me guns merely because they’ve heard of me. Sometimes I’d confiscate pistols from men who demonstrated they had no business carrying a firearm. Some of those men were dead when I took their guns. Most were able to walk away, in a fashion, and after a time of recovery.

Two of the Colt’s were a different caliber than the one I favored. I’d never used them, did not know why I’d kept them, except to consider them spoils of war. That’s what Bat called it when he seized a gun from a defeated opponent: the spoils of war. Bat was a writer and he read a lot of history.

I brought Curly Bill’s double-barrel ten-gauge from the chest, broke it open and inspected the breach, finding it clean, though a little dry. I suspected, but would never know, that this was the shotgun used to maim Virgil and murder Morgan in Tombstone. Feeling the smooth-grained walnut stock, I recalled how it had come into my possession, the memory as vivid as if the barrels were still smoking.

I shot Curly Bill and he fell backward. The shotgun flew into the air and landed across his chest as if it had been carefully placed there. I lifted it from the corpse, ejected the two spent shells, wiped the blood away and kept it. The spoils of war. It was also a reminder of my unassailable good luck. All those times when bullets flew, even when standing toe-to-toe with an enemy, I had never once been wounded. Two of my brothers were shot at the Harwood’s fight and Doc was grazed when a bullet struck his shoulder holster. Virgil caught lead in his leg then and later, while still recuperating but ambulatory, was shotgunned from ambush. He survived that, as well, but his arm was crippled for the rest of his life. Morgan caught a bullet creasing the meat across his back, a painful but minor wound. My younger brother was murdered four months later by Curly Bill, backshot through the window of a saloon as he played billiards. Bat had been shot in the groin as a young lawman in Dodge, the lead remaining in his hipbone ever since, the reason he sometimes used a cane. And then there was Warren, my youngest brother, dead now these five years, murdered while trying to emulate me. Bullets had pierced my clothing, struck the heel of my boot, ripped a hat from my head and even killed my horse, but none had ever touched my flesh. No explanation of that could ever be made satisfactorily.

And when Billy Clanton had me dead to rights on that dusty Tombstone street, he pulled the trigger and found his gun empty. He was so disappointed he started calling for help or shells. When no one came to his aid or bothered to shoot him again, he lay down in the dust and quietly died.

I rewrapped the shotgun in its oily rag, placed it back in the chest, chose two of the unremarkable revolvers and carried them to the kitchen table. They looked clean, but I took out my kit and gave them a thorough scrubbing and oiling. I thought about carving notches in the walnut but thought better of it. I wasn’t as accomplished a storyteller as Bat. Satisfied they were clean as they could get, I wrapped them in oily rags and stowed them in a handsome leather satchel Josie had given me a few Christmases back, when we still had that kind of money.

I put the kit away, relocked the chest and dressed for town. I would walk. Our Franklin parked outside had no petrol. I shrugged on the shoulder rig, loaded the short-barreled Colt’s with five fat brass cartridges, eased the hammer down on the empty cylinder, and slipped it under my arm. I checked on Josie, listened to her breathing. Convinced she was resting comfortably, I put on my coat, tied my tie, picked up the satchel and went to the hat rack by the entry. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw an old man, straight, tall and a little starchy, with a trimmed gray mustache and a mouth that looked like he disapproved of nothing in particular, but perhaps everything in general. I nodded at the man and my stomach grumbled.

I put on my hat and stepped into the bright morning light. It was a long walk from Chinatown to downtown and the trolley didn’t run from our part of the city, so I set off at a brisk pace, a starving man, but one now with a plan and a purpose.

CHAPTER 2

SECOND STREET

& TEMPLE

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

I usually purchased cartridges from the Chinese grocery store near our home, but they wouldn’t be interested in buying my guns. A pawn shop would offer me next to nothing. So I walked down the hill to the gun store I noticed while strolling downtown with Josie one bright Los Angeles Sunday afternoon. It must have been a city thing, having a specialty shop featuring only guns and the like. I found it amusing, but this was a city, and one could find almost anything you could imagine here. And many things you could not.

The sign on the building read Anthony’s Gun Shoppe in gilt letters on a varnished mahogany board. A bell tinkled when I opened the door. The walls were lined with rifles in vertical racks: Winchester, Remington and Marlin rifles and those new bolt-action hunting rifles I had seen only once or twice. A hunter could make a kill from a long way off with one of those. Two black metal ceiling fans turned slowly, barely stirring the air. The room smelled of cigars and some chemical I could not identify.

A short, thin man stood at one of the counters. He looked up as I stepped inside and quickly turned back to the display of guns beneath the glass. His black suit was worn at the cuffs, but clean, his shoes highly polished but worn down at the heel. A bulge on this left hip told me he was armed. And something in the man’s quick look away told me that I had been recognized.

A well-fed man I assumed to be the proprietor came out of the backroom carrying a small black pistol and placed it on the counter. It was another unfamiliar kind of firearm. I stepped closer to have a better look. With no hammer or cylinder, it appeared to be a back-up gun, smaller than my cut-down single-action army