DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Buena Vista Pictures, Paramount Studios, and… no, wait, scratch that. This story is partially based on actual historical figures and events, and partially based on our own hours of twisted fantasies produced by seeing Tombstone one too many times. No money is being made and no offense is intended.
Posted By: Elspeth and Pixyofthestyx
Ships: Doc/Kate, Doc/Wyatt, Virgil/Allie, Morgan/Louisa. The list goes on and on.
Warnings: This instalment of Gunslinger contains profanity, drinking, violence, historical inaccuracy, and non-heterosexual touching. It does not contain hot sex. Sorry.
Gunslinger: Dodge City
Part Six: The Sons of Ma Elder
"Here's my fee, Marshall Earp." Chalk Beeson took a bill from the Long Branch's register and handed it to Wyatt.
"Thanks." Wyatt folded the money and stuck it in his inside coat pocket with the other saloon keepers' licensing fees. "Nice change to have someone pay without complaining."
"Well, I figure you boys have earned your keep this month, and since your salary comes out of Kelley's taxes…" Beeson shrugged and stroked the waxed ends of his moustache. "I'll likely earn it all back from your bar tabs anyway."
"Yeah, I guess you probably will," Wyatt said. He smiled at Beeson, who smiled back broadly. The Long Branch's proprietor had been extremely grateful that Dobson was no longer around to bother his customers. The peacekeepers' drinks had all been half price since they had chased the preacher out of town.
Wyatt's gaze shifted to the long mirror behind Beeson. Doc was playing a hand of cards at the table directly behind them, his back against the wall so that the mirror gave Wyatt a clear view of his face. He was wearing that pleased little smirk that meant he was cheating. He'd have to remember to point this out to Doc later, since Doc insisted that he didn't have any tells.
Doc glanced up, meeting Wyatt's eyes in the mirror, and smiled at him. For a moment, he looked downright innocent, and not at all like some one who was probably dealing from the bottom of the deck.
"What're you so happy about?" one of Doc's fellow card players demanded.
Doc's cheerful smile changed to something more predatory. "Anticipation. I call, gentlemen." And he spread his hand of cards out face up on the table.
For a moment, Wyatt was sure that the gunshot that echoed through the room had come from one of Doc's defeated opponents, that one of the men had realized he was being cheated and blown the gambler away, like Bat kept saying somebody would. Then he realized that the noise was nowhere near loud enough to have come from inside the Long Branch, and that he could still see a completely unharmed Doc in the mirror.
Doc had jumped to his feet, drawing the gun he was not supposed to have. One of his opponents had thrown himself out of his chair and taken refuge under the table.
"What in hell is that?" the man under the table yelped.
"A shotgun," Wyatt told him. At least, he was pretty sure it was a shotgun—it had been too loud to be a pistol. He was also pretty sure it had come from the direction of the bank. He turned away from the bar and grabbed Doc by the wrist. "Come on, Doc."
Doc pulled back against Wyatt's grip, grabbing for the pile of coins and bills in the center of the table. "At least let me collect my winnings first."
Wyatt ignored this and yanked Doc away from the table and towards the door. Somehow, Doc still managed to sweep up a handful of cash on the way, and as the two of them hit the street, he was trying to shove it into his inside coat pocket one-handed. "Let go of me!"
Wyatt let go. Doc holstered his Colt, then rubbed his wrist and glared.
"Sorry," Wyatt said. "I think that came from the bank. I could probably use some help…" he trailed off because Doc was still rubbing his wrist.
Doc looked up and grinned. "Asking is good, Wyatt." He drew his gun again, and the weapon's nickel plating gleamed in the sun. "Let us protect the good citizens of this towns' money." For a moment, Wyatt looked at that gleeful little smile and remembered why getting Doc to back you up wasn't necessarily the world's best idea. But they had wasted enough time already.
"Right," Wyatt said. He took off for the bank at a run, trusting that Doc would follow.
This being Dodge, the bank had already attracted a crowd. Wyatt shoved his way through the onlookers, Doc following at his heels. As the reached the building's steps, he saw Virgil pushing between two cowhands and past Three-Fingers Jack Danvers, one hand on his gun.
"What's going on, Wyatt?"
"Don't know," Wyatt said. "I was at the Long Branch collecting Beeson's license fee."
"There's a whole gang inside there," Three-Fingers Jack announced helpfully. He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the street and added, "Jim there says they got the manager in there with 'em."
"Great," Virgil sighed. He looked past Wyatt at Doc, and his frown deepened. "Why's he here?"
"Free entertainment," Doc announced cheerfully.
Wyatt ignored Doc—turning around to look at him would only encourage him—and glanced from Virgil to the bank. "You ready?"
"Just make sure Holliday doesn't shoot the hostage."
"Right. Doc?" Wyatt turned to see Doc grinning evilly, gun in hand. Doc thumbed the hammer back, and grinned wider. "Don't shoot the bank manager," Wyatt said.
And then Wyatt kicked the door in.
The three of them rushed into the bank to be greeted by the sight of Evans, the bank's cashier, kneeling on the floor by the safe while two men pointed guns at his head. Three more men were standing by the windows, each with a weapon in his hands. One of them had a massive, double-barreled shotgun. There were bits of plaster scattered across the floor, and a large chunk of the ceiling was gone, which explained the gunshot Wyatt had heard.
All of the guns were pointed straight at Wyatt, Virgil, and Doc.
"Y'all are gonna put those guns down and back out of here," the man holding the shotgun announced. "or we're gonna blow off the cashier here's head."
"And then you'll have no one to open the safe," Evans spat out, glaring up at the robbers. There was a red mark across his cheek that would be a bruise eventually; Wyatt guessed he had tried to fight back.
"He's got a point, Cole," one of the men guarding Evans said.
"Shut up, Billy."
Billy shut up.
"Don't be stupid, boys," Virgil said. He held one hand up, palm out, in a calming gesture. The other hand stayed down at his side, hovering over the handle of his gun. "No one has to get hurt here."
"Yeah," Cole said, hefting his shotgun, "not so long as Mister Smart-mouth here gives us our money and you let us leave all peaceable-like."
"Shoot him, and none of you will leave this room," Wyatt told him. He aimed his colt at Cole's chest, and tried not to think about the sounds George Hoy had made as he coughed out blood from his shot-up lungs. If this Cole, or any of his fellows, pulled the trigger on Evans, there wouldn't be any option left but to shoot them.
Virgil had his gun out now, and was holding it low by his side, the barrel pointed at the ground.
Doc's gun was trained on Billy. "I'd listen to him if I were you," he suggested. "The three of us can have the five of you on the ground before Mr. Evans there has finished twitching."
Evans turned a shade paler, and eyed Doc uneasily. His forehead glistened with sweat, and he had balled his hands into fists to keep them from shaking.
The five would-be bank robbers exchanged glances. Cole lifted one hand from the stock of his shotgun to scratch at his scraggly beard, thinking. For a long moment, nobody moved. Then,
"The hell with that!" Billy shouted. He yanked Evans off the ground and flung him at Doc, then fired his gun in Wyatt's general direction.
Evans collided with Doc, and the cashier's weight knocked Doc into the wall
Wyatt dodged sideways, and fired his own gun at Billy, missing him on purpose and hitting the safe, so that the bullet would make a nice, threatening sound. Billy threw himself forward, out of the way of the ricochet, and Wyatt grabbed him by the shoulders and thrust him at Virgil, then turned to chase the rest of the fleeing robbers out the door.
Doc pushed off from the wall and followed him, still holding his gun, which he had somehow managed not to drop when he'd been thrown into the wall.
The four remaining robbers pelted down the steps and around the side of the building. For reasons known only to God, the people clustered around the bank watching the show all stepped out of the way instead of trying to stop them.
Wyatt managed not to skid in the mud as he turned the corner. And then he saw the horses that were waiting, saddled, about thirty yards away. The horses that the bank robbers were going to reach before he could catch up with them.
"What about the money?" one of the robbers hollered, as they all dashed for their mounts.
"Forget the money!" Cole shouted.
"What about Billy?"
"Forget Billy!"
And then they were at the horses, scrambling into their saddles. One of them planted his hands on a horse's rump and vaulted into the saddle in one movement, losing his hat in the process.
Wyatt skidded to a halt as the horses galloped away from him, watching the four robbers—and one riderless horse—disappear down the street.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. He hated it when they got away. He especially hated it when the stupid ones got away.
Doc staggered to a stop beside Wyatt. He bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for air. He coughed twice, a deep, harsh cough, and then straightened up, hugging his ribs. He took a step towards Wyatt and then stopped, going white and swaying on his feet.
Wyatt took him by the arm to make sure he didn't pitch over into the mud. "You okay?"
Doc stared at him for a second, blue eyes unfocused, then blinked and shook himself. "Perfectly. I just needed to catch my breath." He was still gasping for air, making the words breathy and hoarse.
"Right," Wyatt said. He tightened his hold on Doc's arm for a second, and then let go, but didn't step away. Just in case Doc hadn't quite finished catching his breath. "Guess we've got to go tell Virgil they got away."
"You're the lawman," Doc wheezed. "You tell him."
The two of them trudged empty-handed back around the bank to find Virgil tying their sole prisoner's wrists with a bandana. Billy the would-be bank robber was glaring resentfully at Virgil, at Mr. Evans, and at the various spectators who were treating his arrest as free entertainment. Out in the sunlight, Wyatt could see that he was barely old enough to shave. His attempt at growing a beard had produced only patchy blond stubble.
If the rest of them were this young, it was no wonder the gang had all panicked so quickly. Evans was lucky he still had a head. If they'd decided to cut their losses and shoot him rather than just run away…
As it was, Bat was likely going to have a stern letter from Dolores Conklin and sundry other 'concerned citizens' on his desk by this evening. Tomorrow morning at the latest.
And to speak of the devil, here Bat came. He was coming up the street at a jog, limping as his bad leg threw off his stride. He slowed to a walk as he caught sight of Virgil and his prisoner, Doc leaning against the wall, still wheezing, and Wyatt standing there with nothing to do.
"I'm late, aren't I?" Bat asked. He exchanged glances with Doc, who was just beginning to get his breath back, and some sort of silent communication passed between the two of them. It made Wyatt feel vaguely left out. "Hell. Sometimes it's damned inconvenient not being able to run fast."
Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Bat glanced around again and asked, "Where are the rest of them?"
Their prisoner turned out to be Billy Elder, the youngest of a gang of Missourians wanted for robbing three banks in east Kansas. According to the descriptions given on the wanted posters Virgil had unearthed from Bat's desk, the four escaped robbers were his brothers Cole and James, and his cousins Ned and Pete. How the five of them had gotten all the way to Ford County without being arrested, Virgil didn't know, but he was putting it down to stupidity on the part of some other town's lawmen. That, or blind luck.
Billy was worth a twenty dollar reward, low for a bank robber. Then again, he and his kin didn't seem to be very good bank robbers; when they'd held up the bank in Independence, they'd left half the money behind in their efforts to escape the town's law. This time, they'd left behind Billy. Billy, unfortunately, wasn't talking. Bat and Wyatt's best efforts hadn't managed to pry any information out of him on where his brothers might have gone to ground.
Which meant that Virgil and Wyatt had to ride out after them and just hope they didn't lose the trail. Bat had announced that his bad leg was acting up, and that he was therefore going to stay behind and watch Billy and the town. Morgan had been nowhere to be found. Virgil had looked for Miss Louisa, in hopes that she might know where he was, but she was nowhere to be found either. So Wyatt brought Holliday instead.
The three of them had been on the Elders' trail for hours, trying to make up for the gang's considerable head start. They had lost a lot of time questioning Billy. Holliday had proved to be a less obnoxious trail companion than Virgil had expected, riding almost silently next to Wyatt. Now, though, even his occasional comments on the Elders' 'mental acuity' had faded away and been replaced by muffled coughing.
If he keeled over in the saddle when they came up on the Elders, it wasn't going to do anybody any good. Virgil had considered pointing this out, but Holliday only listened to Wyatt. Besides which, what Holliday chose to do with himself was none of Virgil's business anyway. Unless he managed to get them all shot, the way he nearly had in the bank, in which case Virgil was going to kill both Wyatt and Morgan. Provided, of course, that he and Wyatt weren't dead.
Holliday coughed again, and Wyatt looked back over his shoulder at him, frowning. "It's starting to get dark," Wyatt said. "Keep going too much longer and we could lose the trail."
Wyatt had never been very good at subtlety. "Good idea," Virgil said. "Those boys will probably be stopping, too. I doubt they'd keep on all night in this country."
"There's a stream a little ways up ahead. We could stop there and water the horses."
Virgil nodded agreement. Remarkably, Holliday didn't say anything.
By the time they reached Wyatt's stream, it was already twilight. The sliver of moon hanging above the horizon was too narrow to give any real light; if they had kept on much longer, they really would have lost the trail, or somebody's horse would have stepped in a gopher hole and lamed itself. Hopefully, this had also occurred to the Elder gang.
Setting up camp didn't take long; they unsaddled the horses, and Holliday dug a blanket out of his saddlebags and stretched out on the ground with his head against his saddle while Wyatt and Virgil built a fire and made coffee.
"You sure hauling him out here was a good idea?" Virgil asked.
Wyatt glanced at Holliday, sound asleep next to a fallen cottonwood trunk, then turned to stare at the coffeepot sitting half-buried in coals. "He insisted on coming."
"You could have said no."
"You know Doc; he doesn't listen to anybody. Besides, that would have left just the two of us against all four of those bank robbers."
Virgil stared out at the horses, avoiding looking at the fire. One of them needed to keep his night vision intact. "You think they'll come quietly this time?'
"They aren't going to have any hostages this time around," Wyatt said. "And they didn't seem too eager to be shot back in town. Coffee's ready," he added.
By Allie's standards, which were the standards Virgil had gotten used to, the coffee wasn't quite ready, but it was still hot. He leaned back against his saddle and sipped it, and watched Wyatt prod Holliday awake to offer him a cup.
"Thanks." Holliday took the cup, produced a flask from inside his coat, and added some of the contents to his coffee. He saluted Wyatt with the cup, took a sip, and then settled back against his saddle again, cradling the coffee in his hands. "Wyatt, next time I make the coffee."
"What's wrong with the coffee?" Wyatt asked defensively. He sat down on the cottonwood trunk next to Holliday and gazed into his own cup, a puzzled expression on his face.
Virgil took another sip from his tin mug, and said, "Next time, Holliday makes the coffee."
"Why, what's wrong with it?"
"So," Holliday asked, "how do you want to handle things when we apprehend our inbred bank robbers?"
"Well, for one," Virgil told him, "don't try to egg them into shooting at you."
Holliday gave him a look of injured innocence that only Wyatt would have fallen for.
"We want them to come quietly," Wyatt said. He looked down at Holliday, and added, "There's been enough shooting recently. Things are looking bad enough for Bat as it is, first with Hoy and then with this afternoon's disaster."
"So, Masterson's up to be re-appointed soon, is he?"
"If Bat's replaced as sheriff, we're out of a job, too," Virgil pointed out. If Bat was ousted by the town commissioners, his replacement wouldn't want the Earps working with him, or for him. Half of those commissioners who didn't like Bat didn't like him because of Wyatt. Of course, the other half disliked him entirely on his own merits. Maybe it was because of the dandified bowler hat. Or possibly because he and Wyatt both tended to settle disturbances by hitting people. Generally, Virgil didn't have a problem with this—some people just needed to be hit—but folks like the Conklins generally favored less violent tactics.
"I could always ride shotgun for Wells Fargo again," Wyatt said. He drained his cup and set it down by his foot.
"You used to ride shotgun for the stage?" Holliday sat up. He looked quizzically at Wyatt, then coughed and slumped sideways again, leaning his shoulder against Wyatt's side. "That must have been a sight."
"It was work." Wyatt shrugged, apparently oblivious to the fact that Holliday was now using him as furniture.
They were silent for a moment. Virgil poured himself another cup of Wyatt's coffee. Holliday took another sip of his, then returned to playing with his cup.
"If we start out at first light, we should catch the Elders some time tomorrow morning," Virgil said eventually.
"Yeah, it looks that way." Wyatt glanced down at Holliday again. By this point, the gambler had slid downward far enough that his head was resting on Wyatt's leg, his eyes closed. "These Elder boys wouldn't be related to Kate, by any chance, would they?" Wyatt asked.
"One," Holliday said, without opening his eyes, "Kate is Hungarian, not white trash from Missouri. Two, Elder isn't her real name."
"What is, then?"
"I don't know. I never asked," Holliday said. He coughed quietly, and set his coffee cup down on the ground at his side. Even though his eyes were still closed, he managed to set it down without spilling a drop. Wyatt placed a hand on Holliday's shoulder, in a gesture clearly intended to be comforting. Holliday coughed again, still quietly, but made no move to sit up.
"Wyatt, you have first watch," Virgil said. He set down his own coffee cup and stretched his arms out, rotating his shoulders till they popped. His back was going to hurt tomorrow; he really was getting too old for sleeping on the ground. "Wake me up in three hours."
"Sure, Virge," Wyatt said. He had moved his hand to Holliday's head, and was absent-mindedly stroking the other man's hair. Holliday looked eerily content with this turn of events. Wyatt, almost as eerily, didn't even seem to realize he was doing it.
Virgil quelled the urge to remind his little brother that, all appearances aside, Holliday was not his pet. He unrolled his bedroll, laid down, and went to sleep.
They broke camp early the next morning, before the sun had risen. There had been a thin mist hanging over the streambed, and the birds had been singing.
Sleeping on the ground hadn't been kind to Wyatt's back and neck. From the stiff set of Virgil's shoulders, it hadn't been kind to him, either. Doc had spent the first minutes of their ride coughing into a handkerchief and trying to hide it. Dragging him out here had been a bad idea, Wyatt decided for what was probably the fourth time. Doc had spent Wyatt's entire stint on watch dozing against Wyatt's side. He'd woken up when Wyatt had gotten up to rouse Virgil for his watch, and glared at Wyatt for moving. When Wyatt had returned and laid out his own bedroll a few feet away, Doc had been curled up on his side with his head on his saddle again. By morning, he'd been only inches away, shuddering visibly with cold even though the night had been fairly mild. He looked all right now, riding along on his bay gelding as coolly as if he hadn't spent half the night huddled in a blanket, shivering, but then, Doc would probably contrive to hide his discomfort even if he'd been gut shot.
"Their trail swings to the left again up ahead," Virgil announced.
Oh shit. "Shit. They're turning around," Wyatt groaned. The Elders were headed back to town. And when they got there, there would be no lawmen to take care of them but Bat. And maybe Morgan, if he'd turned up yet.
They couldn't possibly be trying for the bank again. The Elders might shoot up the town, or attack the jail to try and break Billy Elder out, or God alone knew what.
"We'd better get back to town," Wyatt said. He tugged his horse's head around and dug his heels in, nudging him into a canter. Doc followed, and behind him, he could hear Virgil's horse snort as he prodded it into a faster pace.
They pushed the horses hard all the way back to town, switching between a canter and a walk. They made the ride back in a little over half the time it had taken them to ride out, but the Elders remained a good several hours ahead. Possibly stopping for the night had been a bad idea on his part. Of course, letting Doc keep riding until he fell off his horse would have been an even worse idea.
The pace Wyatt and Virgil set was clearly even harder on Doc than it was on the horses, but he kept up with them without complaint.
They reached the outskirts of Dodge by early afternoon. Dodge, contrary to Wyatt's visions of Elder-related chaos, was still in one piece. It looked, in fact, remarkably peaceable. Wyatt pulled back on his horse's reins and let the animal drop to a slow walk, feeling vaguely silly as he took in the crowd of people going about their business as if nothing at all was wrong.
A small herd of longhorns were being driven along Front Street, and the three of them had to edge their way up the street against the flow of cattle. Wyatt dismounted stiffly in front of the jail, and took the steps up to it two at a time, Virgil on his heels. Doc climbed down from his horse more slowly, pausing to lean on it for a second after he had both feet on the ground.
Wyatt and Virgil burst into the jail to find Morgan and Louisa standing deep in conversation by the window and all five of the Elder brothers firmly locked in the cells. Billy still enjoyed sole occupancy of the cell on the far right, but the other two were each filled by a pair of sullen and somewhat bruised Elders, all four of them handcuffed to the bars.
"Wyatt, Virge," Morgan said, "you're back."
"Damn," Doc said from the doorway, "they're all here. I take it you and Masterson managed to apprehend them?"
"They came back and tried to break their brother there out of jail," Morgan announced proudly, nodding at the cell where Billy sulked. "Bat and I put a stop to that."
"He was very brave," Louisa put in, smiling up at Morgan. He smiled back down at her, and she blushed and turned away. Wyatt was pretty sure now that he knew exactly where Morgan had been yesterday.
"Good job, Morg," he said, trying not to be resentful that Morgan had stayed at home and been the hero while he and Virgil—and Doc—rode halfway to Edwards county and back.
"Did he hit any of them over the head with his gun?" Doc inquired, glancing at Wyatt with an expression in his eyes that Wyatt couldn't quite decipher.
Wyatt was about to protest that he didn't hit people that often, but Louisa spoke before he could get the words out, frowning delicately at Doc,
"Of course not," she said.
"Ah, pity," Doc said.
"I think Mr. Masterson hit one with his cane," she added thoughtfully.
"That's nowhere near as much fun to watch."
"What happened?" Virgil interrupted, speaking over the end of Doc's sentence.
"Like I said, they tried to pull off a jailbreak a couple of hours ago." Morgan pointed to the small window in Billy's cell, which Wyatt saw now had been broken. "I guess they thought they could get him out through the window or something. Bat heard the glass break and ran around to the back, and I was coming up to the jail with Louisa and saw him running out…" he trailed off, and shrugged his shoulders. "They were real surprised when we came around the building at them."
"Why have you got them handcuffed?" Wyatt asked, indicating the four more recently captured Elders' chained-up state.
"That was Bat's idea," Morgan said. "They started arguing about who was at fault for their getting captured, and next thing you know, we had a full scale brawl going on. So we put them in different cells and got out the cuffs."
"And the one you've got hogtied?" Doc asked, waving at Cole Elder, whose hands had been pulled through the bars and tied up with rope.
"We only have three pairs of cuffs," Virgil explained.
"Ah." Doc nodded at this, then turned to Wyatt. "Remind me again why it was necessary for us to ride halfway to Missouri after these inbred cretins?"
"Because we would've looked even dumber if they'd gotten away," Wyatt told him.
Doc folded his arms and stared up at Wyatt, radiating put-upon irritation. His grey coat was covered in dust, and his hair had come loose and was hanging in his face. His blue-grey eyes were narrowed with annoyance, and he looked a bit like a disgruntled cat that had just been in a fight with a large dog. "I shall have to see that I don't make a habit of following you into things. You're continually getting me into trouble."
Virgil made a sort of snorting noise of disbelief, and Doc ignored him.
"You owe me a drink. And a game of poker, since you interrupted the one I was in yesterday."
"Later," Wyatt said. Louisa's dainty, lace-shawled presence made him acutely conscious of just how dusty and unshaven he and Virgil were. Doc wore dusty and disheveled a good deal better than he did. "I need a change of clothes, and to see to my horse."
"Naturally, later." Doc glanced down at his dusty coat sleeve, then looked up again. "I have to go explain to Kate why I disappeared yesterday." He brushed at the sleeve, then coughed at the cloud of dust it raised. "Make that two drinks."
Authors' Notes: Look! This chapter has action… and five pages of gratuitous conversation porn. But action!
The entire bank robbery plot for this chapter was made up out of whole cloth, as were the Elder brothers, who are essentially a less intelligent and less violent version of the Younger gang—their name is both a play on that and an excuse to reference an old John Wayne western in the chapter title.
Evans, our cashier-slash-hostage, is this chapter's only real historical cameo; R. W. Evans was the cashier for the Bank of Dodge City when it opened several years later in 1882.