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was mangling “Look for the Silver Lining,” and Earpie had stirred from his slumber to look up sympathetically at their weeping guest. Stealthily the spitz crept away from Wyatt and curled up near Kate’s feet, careful to keep his tail out from under the rockers—that lesson had long since been learned.
    Finally, as the waterworks were letting up, Wyatt asked if she wanted a glass of lemonade or maybe something harder.
    She shook her head, the bonnet flopping a bit. “Wyatt, I’m sorry for losing my…my composure.”
    For a foreign-born, Kate sure knew some four-dollar words.
    “You see, two years ago Johnny was married to a lovely girl named Prudence. He had a dental practice in Bisbee, and he met her there—her father owns a big hardware store, downtown. Very well off. Very well-to-do, for Bisbee. The girl studied out east, some fancy female school, and came home and met Johnny at a local dance at the First Methodist Church.”
    “The Methodists are holding dances now? Times have changed.”
    “It was a square dance at a social. Nothing sinful, Wyatt Earp. But that’s where they met. And they bought a nice little house with a big yard and a picket fence.”
    “A white one?”
    “Now you’re teasing. But it was white, the fence, and so was the house. Prudence was a slip of a thing, pretty as a pansy patch, but not strong. Last summer…last summer…”
    She raised the hanky again but managed not to start the bawling back up. Just blew her nose, in a fairly ladylike manner, apologized for it, and went on.
    “Last summer, Prudence died in childbirth. The little girl died, too.”
    Wyatt drew in a breath. “I’m sorry.”
    “Johnny took it hard, as you might expect,” she said, and commenced to telling him how.
    But Wyatt wasn’t listening. His mind carried him to a place he rarely visited, and never cared to, which was the bedside of his own young bride, Urilla. He was twenty-two and she was twenty, a beautiful slender dark-haired thing with a teasing smile and serious brown eyes.
    Lamar, Missouri, where he took his first lawman job. Where Urilla’s father owned the hotel, and where he and Urilla had their own little house and their own picket fence.
    Until, a year after they were married, more or less, the typhoid took her in childbirth, and their baby son.

    “Wyatt? Wyatt, are you listening?”
    “Yes. Yes. Hit your Johnny hard, this loss.”
    Kate was staring into nothing. “He began drinking. He’d never so much as touched a drop before, and now…now he was living in saloons, drinking till he got tossed in the street.
    He…he closed up his practice. Everyone figured it would be just till he got past the grieving; but months went by, and his father-in-law got a hold of me and said I should come and be with my boy. To get him over this terrible rough patch.”
    “And you went to him.”
    “I did.” She closed her eyes. “And I made a terrible, terrible mistake.”
    “You told him he was Doc’s boy.”
    “I…I told him.” Her eyes remained closed. “I told Johnny that drink had ruined his father.
    That his father had been a brilliant man, an intellect, a gifted dentist, who gave in to his demons when the world didn’t go his way.”
    “Kate, Doc was dying. He was too sick to practice his medicine and, God, woman, you drank him glass for glass.”
    Her eyes popped open. “Do you think I don’t know that! I didn’t want that boy going down my road, either…at least, not the first leg of it. I managed to come back from that dark place, Wyatt. I wanted to keep him from going there at all!”
    Wyatt sighed. Then he asked, “And how did your Johnny react to this news about his true heritage?”
    Her smile had little to do with the usual reasons for smiling. “It gave him a new purpose. He told me, bitter as coffee grounds, that he would do precisely what I had dreamed of him doing—he would follow in his father’s footsteps! And he sold his house and took all of his savings and he