Doc - Mary Doria Russell [15]
Which just goes to show you how dumb Wyatt was.
Sure, he’d heard that jobs in Dodge were passed around from one insider to the next, but hearing things is not the same as understanding them. Morgan tried to explain what happened, but Wyatt had no talent for politics and could not keep the shifting alliances and factions straight. All he knew was Big George Hoover lost the mayor’s race to Dog Kelley by three votes. Suddenly the Earps were on the outs, for no reason Wyatt could fathom.
Mayor Kelley promptly reappointed Fat Larry as Dodge City marshal, which was a good joke, what with Larry weighing upwards of 320 by then. Wyatt thought he’d get chief deputy at least, but Dog settled on Ed Masterson for that.
Wyatt asked why. Dog told him, but it didn’t make any sense.
“Everybody likes Ed,” Dog said.
Which was true, Wyatt acknowledged, but kind of beside the point, in a marshal.
Ed Masterson was personable, Dog said. He made a good impression on important people. He was chatty and had a winning smile.
Wyatt had not smiled since 1855, and didn’t like to say much more than six or seven words in a row to anyone but his brothers.
That same election, Ed’s younger brother, Bat, got voted in as sheriff of Ford County. Wyatt had done the Mastersons some favors over the years, like hiring Ed and Bat as buffalo skinners back in ’72, when they were just a couple of kids who needed work. Seemed reasonable to expect that Bat would return the favor now and hire Wyatt as undersheriff, but that job went to Charlie Bassett instead.
So. There he was. Out of work again.
Disgusted with the situation, Wyatt’s older brother Virgil packed up and moved to Arizona with his girl, Allie—they had some kind of ranch down there now. But his younger brother Morgan got himself an off-season job as bailiff for the Ford County Court, serving papers on the side, so he was staying in Dodge. Their older brother James managed his wife Bessie’s bordello, and there was enough local trade to keep them open year-round. They were staying, too.
Past winters, Wyatt had gone back to driving freight or cutting firewood for a dollar a cord but that was getting old, and so was Wyatt. This time he asked around more and landed an appointment as a deputy federal marshal. That sounded good, but it was really just another temporary job. For the space of six months, from November of 1877 to April of ’78, Wyatt S. Earp was empowered to follow David W. Rudabaugh across state lines, to arrest him for a train robbery, and to return him to Kansas for trial. To sweeten the deal, the Santa Fe Railroad was offering a big reward for Dirty Dave, a thief whose personal hygiene was notoriously unwholesome and whose notion of personal property consisted of, “If I can take it, well, I guess it’s mine.”
Wyatt aimed to collect that reward, just on general principles, and because he was almost broke. On top of his regular expenses, he had a bill for stabling Dick, and decent feed cost extra. That salve did a good job on the horse’s spur sores, but it wasn’t cheap. And before Wyatt could chase after Dirty Dave, he had to buy a pack mule and outfit himself at Bob Wright’s store for a winter ride south, because Dave had headed for Texas after the robbery. Which left a little under five bucks in cash money after an entire season of risking his neck in Dodge.
That was the story of Wyatt Earp’s life. He’d get ahead a little, something would