The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [74]
Sheriff Tommy Butterfield couldn't recall later if he was the first person to mention calling in Buckskin Prank—he wasn't—but being the consummate politico, Tommy was more than willing to take credit for the idea: If using Frank worked out, he could plug it right in as the keystone of his next campaign. Tommy knew there'd be a barrel full of details to sort out before they could spring him, but there was one thing the mob in camp could agree on that morning: If any man in the Arizona Territory could track down this homicidal heathen, it was Buckskin Frank McQuethy.
Unlike Sheriff Tommy, Buckskin Frank had shot, stabbed, and strangled a number of individuals on both sides of the law. Frank began his illustrious career as a deputy under Arizona's genius of publicity, Wyatt Earp, during Tombstone's heyday in the early '80s. Long before Wyatt reinvented himself as an ail-American folk hero, Frank had worked with the Earps as bouncer and bartender at the Oriental Saloon, one of the grandest whorehouses in the West. Wyatt was a charismatic son of a bitch—Frank couldn't help but admire his verve and relentless ambition—and when the Earps seized economic control of Tombstone, Frank rode their coattails to prosperity and minor celebrity.
But for a man who made his living with a gun, when it came to outright murder Frank had an inconvenient sense of right and wrong, and it led to a falling-out with the Earps when he refused to help slaughter the Clanton clan, a rotten bunch of horse-thieving half-wits who made the fatal mistake of horning in on their operations. With Wyatt busy transforming that nasty, one-sided ambush into the triumph of the O.K. Corral, Frank wandered north and solidified his hard-nosed reputation with a stint as an Army scout in the Geronimo Campaigns. His nickname came from the yellow buckskin jacket he took to wearing; the minute he put it on, the papers started writing that Buckskin Frank could track a man across a hundred miles of hardscrabble and shoot the eyes off a rattlesnake, but then he had learned the art of self-mythologizing from a master.
Except when he was drinking, Frank McQuethy was never anything less than a gentleman. Unfortunately, he had been drinking that night in '89 when he pushed Molly Fanshaw, his favorite girl, off the balcony of Whitely's Emporium in downtown Tombstone. Frank had been so pickled he couldn't even remember what they were fighting about—Molly was a mean drunk and had no doubt provoked him beyond human endurance—but he'd killed the only woman he'd ever loved in front of a crowd, plain and simple, so he pleaded guilty, took his life sentence like a man, and for the last five years had been a model prisoner at the Territorial Prison. And Frank hadn't touched a drop of liquor since Molly went over the rail.
Fellow inmates, the warden, even the guards, were all crazy about Frank; his courtesy, the not too obvious effects of his education, the way he held his head high in spite of his hard time, most of which he spent in the infirmary as chief assistant to the resident sawbones. During the cholera epidemic of '92, at considerable risk of contagion, Frank deprived himself of sleep for weeks to stand by their beds and ease the suffering of die afflicted. Frank's buckskin jacket hanging in a glass case remained the hands-down highlight of the twenty-five-cent tour the prison offered the paying public. Nearly every day, guards at the gate had to turn away some impressionable young dove who'd come to catch a glimpse of Frank exercising in the yard, brokenhearted that law would not allow her to speak with him face-to-face.
But Frank never failed to answer their letters, delicately suggesting that yes, it was likely they were destined never to meet, but perhaps a letter to the governor attesting to his character from such an upstanding