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officer cannot carry out his sworn duty without getting arrested for it.”
    Clum said, “Sworn duty had nothing to do with this business.”
    “Don’t forget that guard,” Virgil said.
    The two men nodded at Allie and departed, walking stiffly with the long barrels nudging their groins. They pulled the door shut against a flat gust that strained the pegs holding the house together.
    “Allie, give me some of that laudanum.” Morgan’s voice was thick in his pillow.
    “Suffer some,” Virgil said. “I made it clear going in I never wanted any killing stuff. Wyatt and I have interests to look out for here. Some of us don’t admire to be shotgun messengers our whole lives.”
    “Well, you would have had a good view of them from up on the hill.” The nearest hill of consequence was Tombstone’s cemetery. Allie prevented Morgan from adding anything by sliding the spoon into his mouth. A fly lighted on his bandage and she brushed it away with her free hand.
    “They never wanted to make a fight in that blind alley. We could have buffaloed them.”
    Morgan swallowed, pulled a face. “You would have gone to buffalo Crazy Horse at the Little Big Horn.”
    Corking the blue bottle, Allie spotted the sheriff’s sombrero through the window. “It is Johnny come to see how you are getting on,” she said.
    Virgil said shit. “Hand me that gun.” He stretched an arm toward his Winchester leaning in a corner.
    “I said it was only Johnny Behan.”
    “And I said hand me that gun!”
    Moving hastily, she leaned the rifle against the bed and picked up Morgan’s big pistol from the table where John Clum had put it and laid it on the chair by the bed inside Morgan’s long reach.
    Behan’s rapping jiggled the door in its board frame. Virgil told her not to answer. He had drawn the Winchester across his lap.
    The rapping came again. They waited. Wind razored the corner boards outside. After a long moment the sheriff’s footsteps retreated off the little front porch. He passed the window heading back up Fremont without looking in.
    “Stack that spare mattress against the window,” Virgil said.
    The room was gray with the feather mattress blocking the light. Allie lit a lamp, stood around, then sat down and took the cover off the black-and-silver Singer sewing machine she had fought the Earp brothers to bring with her down the Sante Fe trail from Dodge City. For a moment she sat without moving, then began to work the treadle. She discovered she was still wearing the leather palm designed for hand work and put it aside. The thumping and whirring of the machinery gentled Virgil and Morgan to sleep, interrupted at intervals by one or the other’s snoring and muttered curses when a shift in positions sent fresh pain to torn flesh and muscle. Steam whistles brayed in the Dragoon foothills to the northeast and in the San Pedro Valley to the southwest, a sound not heard that early in the day since the big fire in June; it meant the miners were being called in to help maintain order. Now and again one of John Clum’s vigilantes cried out to another outside the window.
    Presently the three were joined by Morgan’s wife, Louisa, a dark, pretty woman in her middle twenties who like Allie had been on the scene following the shooting but had gone from there to be with Mattie Blaylock, alone in the house she shared with Wyatt across from Virgil and Allie’s. Lou touched Morgan’s sleeping forehead, then spelled Allie at the sewing machine. The income from their mending and dressmaking supplemented that from the Earps’ investments and gambling; during the lean time after Wyatt had been let go as a sheriff’s deputy and before their interests began to pay off, it had supported them all. The oil burned down to a coppery glow and then the porch boards whimpered under a man’s weight. Virgil was awake instantly, thumbing the Winchester’s hammer to full cock. “Al, it’s me.”
    She recognized Wyatt’s voice and undid the latch. He