Dear Reader,

For the past several weeks, I have been sharing, at no cost, several chapters of Book #1 in the Finding Billy Battles series on Substack. It was a way for me to introduce readers to the three-book series. Today, my experiment in book marketing will end with Chapter 10.

If you are one of the readers who followed along with the account of peril, transgression, and redemption that permeated Billy’s remarkable life, I invite you to pick up an e-book or softcover edition of Book #1 of the Finding Billy Battles series at Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere else where books are sold. And while you are at it, go ahead and pick up Books #2 and #3 of the series. They are all on sale at reduced prices on Amazon.

As I said when I began posting chapters of Book #1 on Substack, my objective in writing the Finding Billy Battles series was to tell a compelling story by weaving fact and fiction into what I call “faction.” Therefore, many of the events, places, and people in Billy’s life are real, and I have attempted to be as accurate as possible with those facts.

I am proud to say that each book in the series has won several literary awards. You can read about some of those awards and read reviews of each book on my Amazon book page, https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001KHDVZI/?ccs_id=24ac3875-21a9-421b-9a04-ec9dcb645d14, or my website, https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/

If you choose to follow Billy Battles on his rousing and sometimes perilous journeys—and I hope you will—I welcome your thoughts about the book. Feel free to drop me a line at jhawker69@gmail.com.

If you missed any of the earlier chapters, they are still available in the Substack Archive https://ronyates.substack.com/archive or my blog at https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/.

I invite you to join Billy Battles on his incredible 100-year-long journey through life. You won’t be disappointed.

Finding Billy Battles: An Account of Peril,

Transgression and Redemption

(Book 1 of a Series)

Copyright © 2014 by R. E. Yates

Published by California Times Publishing,

Los Angeles

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921605

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or using any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is an original work of fiction. However, some names, characters, places, and incidents described in this book are based on facts. The author invented others, and any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

CHAPTER 10

The whiskey mills of Tombstone back in 1880 were something to behold. No doubt the most opulent of all was the Crystal Palace Saloon at the corner of Fifth and Allen Streets. And that was where Charley and I headed.

We ordered beer, and the Crystal Palace, formerly known as the Eagle Brewery, had plenty of cool beer on hand—a rarity in the days before electric refrigeration. Beer was stored in an ice house behind the saloon, and the ice was transported to town in special “ice wagons” that carried it the twenty miles from Benson, where the Southern Pacific Railroad stopped with specially insulated refrigeration cars.

Just across Fifth was the Oriental Saloon, and after that, so many watering holes you could hardly count them. In all, at the height of the boom, there were 110 establishments licensed to sell liquor, or a place of hard liquor refreshment for every one hundred of Tombstone’s residents.

That night, and early into the next morning, we must have hit at least half of them. Between the Crystal Palace and a place called the Miners’ Home, we kept our eyes open for that piebald horse and Bledsoe.

When we walked into the Oriental, we saw Wyatt and Doc Holliday. Doc was dealing faro to eight loud and well-lubricated miners, and Wyatt was observing the game. When we told him of our adventure that afternoon, and why we were making the rounds of Tombstone’s saloons, he offered this piece of wisdom:

“I have always noticed that when a man goes out hunting for trouble in these parts, he almost always finds it.” In other words, his advice was to let things rest.

We didn’t.

Instead, we continued to make the rounds. After the Oriental, it was the Cancan Chophouse, followed by the French Rotisserie, the Alhambra, the Maison Dore, the City of Paris, Brown’s Saloon, the Fashion Saloon, Kelly’s Wine House, the Grotto, the Tivoli, and finally, the Miners’ Home.

That’s where the trouble began.

The Miners’ Home was a lot like most saloons in those days: a long paneled and well-polished oak bar. Hanging on the wall behind the bar was a mural of a voluptuous nude woman, and below that, a long horizontal mirror fronted by shelves filled with bottles of various liquors and whiskeys. Running along the base of the bar was a gleaming brass foot rail with a row of spittoons spaced along the floor. A ledge along the bar was fitted with towels, allowing patrons to wipe the beer suds from their mustaches.

On the other side of the forty-foot-wide saloon were chuck-a-luck, three-card Monte, and faro tables. Some thirty feet to the back was a round table devoted to poker. The light was not good in the saloon, illuminated as it was with kerosene lamps and large candles. It was difficult to see the faces of patrons who were more than fifteen feet away.

Charley and I walked up to the bar and settled in next to a man who looked as if he had just come from one of the silver mines that ran under the streets of Tombstone. His clothing was covered with dust, and he wore heavy knee-high boots that were not made for riding. As was the custom in those days, Charley offered to treat the man to a drink—an offer readily accepted. I ordered a beer, but unlike the Crystal Palace, the beer in the Miners’ Home was served at room temperature.

As the bartender poured whiskeys for Charley and the miner, a voice boomed from the poker table.

“I wouldn’t drink with them sand cutters if I was you.”

We looked around and saw a wiry man wearing a faded red shirt and denim pants; he was sitting at a table with two men who appeared to be hard cases. It was Nate Bledsoe.

“I don’t know who you are,” Bledsoe said, looking at Charley, “but that flat-heeled peeler standing next to you is a cold-footed woman killer.”

At that, the entire saloon seemed to grow quiet.

“I think you have the wrong man,” Charley said. “And you best supply an apology.”

“He’s the right one, and that’s a fact. I been trackin’ him since Dodge City.”

Charley shot me a perplexed glance.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

Then I looked at Bledsoe. “You know damned well what happened.”

“Yeah, you dirty sand eel,” Bledsoe yelled. “I know what happened. You shot my mother and brother down like dogs.”

I looked around the saloon. Just about everybody had moved away from Charley and me, and I was getting some pretty nasty looks from the saloon’s clientele, who were not too happy to be in the company of a woman killer.

“Now you listen to me, you lick finger,” I shot back. “Your mother gettin’ shot was not an intentional act. You and your brother opened up on us with buffalo guns. We were only defending ourselves when she stepped right into the fray. And that’s a fact.”

“That’s your story, you murdering son of a bitch.”

With that, Bledsoe and the other two men with him rose from the poker table and began making their way toward us.

“What you got me into?” Charley muttered.

Because of Tombstone’s ordinance against carrying side arms while in town, nobody was heeled. However, Charley quickly produced an Arkansas toothpick and boldly displayed its twelve-inch blade as the men approached. He had moved to the middle of the room, away from the bar. I grabbed the only weapon I could find—a whiskey bottle.

“Before I cut all of you up so bad your kin wouldn’t know you from fresh hide, I want you bushwhackers to apologize for stretchin’ the blanket about my cousin here.”

The men stopped dead in their tracks. At first, I thought the sight of Charley wielding his big Bowie knife had done the trick. Then I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“You boys are sure hell-bent for trouble, ain’t ya?”

I turned around. It was Wyatt and his brother Virgil.

“You might want to put that pig sticker away,” Virgil continued, nodding at Charley’s knife.

“Just defendin’ ourselves,” Charley said.

“I’ll do the defendin’ if there is any to be done,” Virgil replied. At that, he opened his coat to reveal a silver city marshal’s badge.

“You boys new in town?” Wyatt asked Bledsoe and his companions. “Don’t I know you from Dodge?”

“I reckon not,” Bledsoe said.

“I reckon I do,” Wyatt said, looking at Bledsoe. “Ain’t you kin to some crawler in the governor’s office?”

“He ain’t no crawler. That’s my cousin, and he has plenty of pull back in Kansas.”

“Well, we ain’t back in Kansas now, are we?”

Virgil jumped in. “So whatever pull you boys have don’t matter more than a stack of dried cow shit here in Tombstone.”

“I suggest you boys head out before there is any more trouble,” Wyatt said, nodding toward Bledsoe and his friends. “I suggest you might want to start back for Benson at first light. Because if there is any trouble from any one of you anywhere in Cochise County, all of you will play hell leavin’ the territory in one piece.”

“Mighty big talk when you’re heeled and we’re not,” said one of the two men with Bledsoe.

He was a big man, well over six feet in height and probably weighing in at 230 pounds. He had moved up so that he was only about four feet from Wyatt and Virgil, both of whom stood between us and the Bledsoe group.

The big man had no sooner uttered his words when Wyatt jerked his Colt and raked him across the face with it. Then he followed that up with a crushing left hook to the man’s chin. The two blows sent the man crashing to the floor, where he sat bleeding from the mouth.

“Why did you do that?” Bledsoe demanded. Wyatt glared at him with steel-gray eyes, his Colt still in his right hand. Bledsoe and his other friend retreated several steps backward. Wyatt slid his Colt back into a pocket in the black coat he was wearing.

“Why did I do that? Because he is about as useless as a four-card flush,” Wyatt said, “and didn’t know it. Now he does.”

This was vintage Wyatt Earp. He was as handy with his fists as he was with a Colt. He was, in fact, a natural boxer, as Bat Masterson once told me.

“Wyatt had catlike reflexes, and I never saw him back down from any man, no matter how big he was,” Bat told me. “Wyatt was just about the most fearless man I ever met. And yet people today don’t know much about him, and what they do know is usually as shy of the truth as a goat is of feathers.”

From what I had seen of Wyatt, he was not a man you wanted to get crossways with. He rarely spoke, and he seldom smiled. He was a natural leader, and men just naturally tended to follow him.

“Life is a serious business,” Wyatt once told me. “And if you don’t take it serious, like as not you won’t last very long—at least not out here in this town of sun, sand, an’ blisters. In my experience, I have learned one thing about men: let anybody get up on you or let them think they can, and you are asking for trouble. And I don’t wait for that kind of trouble, not from men with too much spread.”

At the time, I considered those words to live by. And I still do.

By now, the man on the floor had pulled himself up and was leaning on a table. “You son of a bitch,” he whimpered. “I wasn’t ready.”

“I was,” Wyatt said.

Virgil picked up the man’s hat and handed it to him. “Go hunt up somethin’ you can use for a backbone and keep on going. You boys are no longer welcome here,” he said. With that, Bledsoe and his two friends left the Miners’ Home.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last time Charley and I saw them.

“I figured if you two went looking for trouble, you’d find it,” Wyatt said. “You best steer clear of that bunch. Bledsoe may not know cow dung from wild honey, but those other two with him look about as hard as whetstones. I am sure I seen them around Dodge. Used to hunt buffalo.”

That made sense. Both Bledsoe brothers had been buffalo hunters, and the two men with Nate were probably old hunting partners.

Wyatt and Virgil walked to the door of the saloon and took a cautious look outside, perhaps expecting an ambush from Bledsoe and his friends. But the street outside was deserted. The four of us walked outside and stood on Allen Street, just east of Sixth Street.

“What are your plans now?” Wyatt asked me.

“I need to send a telegram to the Denver Sun tomorrow, and then I expect I will be heading for Tucson to meet up with Signor Difranco.”

“What about you?” Wyatt asked, nodding at Charley.

“I’ll be trailing along with Billy here at least to Benson. Then I have to get back to the Hooker spread and report that I couldn’t find them cattle.”

A cool evening breeze kicked up the dust along Allen, and Wyatt buttoned his black coat.

“You both best be on the lookout for that Bledsoe bunch,” he said. “I expect they’re thinkin’ they might want to limber up their long Toms once they get you in their sights.”

“Thanks, Wyatt, Virgil. I’m not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t come along when you did.” The two men, who on their most loquacious days said very little, nodded and walked west along Allen toward the Crystal Palace Saloon.

Charley and I walked toward the Grand Hotel, but as we got close, Charley decided to visit one of the saloons near the Occidental Hotel. I was in no mood to spend more time in one of Tombstone’s raucous saloons, so we made plans to meet the next morning at the Russ House for breakfast.

Funny how the best-laid plans can go awry.

–30–

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