Holliday John Henry - Dead mans hand: the saga of Doc Holliday

Victoria Wilcox is Founding Director of Georgias Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum (the antebellum home of the family of Doc Holliday, now a site on the National Register of Historic Places), where she learned the familys untold stories of their legendary cousin. Her work with the museum led to two decades of original research, making her a nationally recognized authority on the life of Doc Holliday. She is the author of the documentary film In Search of Doc Holliday and the award-winning historical novel trilogy The Saga of Doc Holliday, for which she twice received Georgia Author of the Year honors and in 2016 was named Best Historical Western Novelist by True West Magazine. She has lectured across the country, appeared in local and regional media, guested on NPR affiliates, and was featured in the Fox Network series Legends & Lies: The Real West. She is a member of the Western Writers of America, the Wild West History Association, Women Writing the West, and the Writers Guild of the Booth Museum of Western Art and has been a featured contributor to True West Magazine. In the summer of 2017, she joined actor Val Kilmer ( Tombstone ) as guest historian at the inaugural Doc HolliDays in Tombstone, Arizona, site of the legendary OK Corral gunfight.

For
Jennifer, Heather, Ashley, and Ross
My best creations.

A TWODOT BOOK

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Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2015 Victoria Wilcox
Previously published as The Last Decision

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Names: Wilcox, Victoria, author.

Title: Dead mans hand : the saga of Doc Holliday / Victoria Wilcox.

Other titles: Last decision | Saga of Doc Holliday

Description: Guilford, Connecticut ; Helena, Montana : TwoDot ; Distributed by National Book Network 2019. | Previously titled The last decision, published by Knox Robinson (London), 2015. The third volume in the Doc Holliday trilogy. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018109 (print) | LCCN 2019018842 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493044740 (e-book) | ISBN 9781493044733 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Holliday, John Henry, 1851-1887Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Western stories. | Historical fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3623.I5327 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I5327 L37 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018109

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992.

KATE ELDER DESPISED WYATT EARP. THERE WAS NO OTHER WORD TO describe it. She hated him with the kind of passion that some women reserved for a romantic rival. And in some ways, he was a rival, being John Henry Hollidays most admired friend and recipient of some of the time and attention that Kate thought was owed to her as a wife. Except that Kate Elder wasnt Mrs. Holliday, just Doc Hollidays mistress, a fact that never ceased to rankle her. She was always bringing it up, as though he might have simply forgotten the lapse and just needed reminding to rectify it. But his memory was fine, especially in the matter of why he hadnt, and wouldnt, make Kate his wife.

Problem was, Kate didnt just hate his friend Wyattshed tried to have him killed, back in Dodge City, a sin which John Henry could neither forgive nor forget. But he also couldnt forget how Kate had saved his own life once, taking him over the mountains from Colorado to the New Mexico Territory and the miraculous Montezuma Hot Springs. He wouldnt be alive, and healed, without Kate. So he owed her his life, if not his legal name.

So theyd arrived in the Arizona Territory as something of a common-law couple, and he hadnt objected when she signed the register at the Prescott Hotel as Dr. and Mrs. J.H. Holliday. The register wasnt a legal document anyhow, much less a marriage license, and for a time, Kate had seemed happy enough. She was happy anywhere Wyatt wasnt, and hed only stayed in town a few weeks, just long enough to restock his Conestoga before traveling on to try his luck in the silver boom camp of Tombstone, south by the Mexican border.

But John Henrys fortunes were doing just fine in the Territorial capital of Prescott, nestled in the cool highlands of central Arizona, and he declined Wyatts invitation to ride along to Tombstone. Although Prescott was still so new that it was mostly a string of sawmills along Lynx Creek and a half-finished wooden courthouse on a half-built town square, there were already enough big-stakes gambling games in the saloons on Montezuma Street to make things interesting. Besides, hed had enough of sitting a horse and breathing in trail dust for one season, after traveling in Wyatts wagon train across the high desert from New Mexico, and he intended to enjoy the brisk pine-scented air of Prescott for awhile. So he sold the horses hed bought in Las Vegas and used the money to rent rooms at the Prescott Hotel, and settled down to his accustomed routine of sleeping late before dressing for an evening of gambling halls and saloons. It was pleasant enough, and profitable enough, that when Wyatt wrote letters from Tombstone to say that the town was even more than hed imagined and that John Henry should join him there, Kate protested loudly. She liked Prescott, she said, with its boisterous newness and its busyness as Territorial capitalthough what she meant was that she liked having John Henry all to herself without Wyatt Earp around as competition.

But when Wyatt wrote yet again, saying that there was no dentist in Tombstone, and that a man who could pull teeth and pull fast cards as well was sure to make a comfortable living, John Henry was finally persuaded. The truth was, it was Kates protestations that made up his mind to go. He didnt like the idea of doing what a woman wanted just because she wanted him to do it, especially when she acted like she had some right to make such demands. She wasnt really Mrs. Holliday, after all, in spite of that hotel register signature, and taking Wyatt up on his offer seemed like a good way of telling her so without saying it right out loud.

Although Kate wasnt pleased at the news that John Henry was packing up for Tombstone, she went along without objecting too muchat least as far as Gillette, a two days stagecoach ride away. That was where the Prescott-to-Phoenix stage laid over for the night, though the town was nothing much more than the headquarters for the Tip Top Mine, without a proper hotel or anywhere else for passengers to sleep. And maybe it was the discomfort of their accommodationsa narrow cot in the office of the mine superintendent and a paltry plate of supper served up from the mines general storebut Gillette was as far as she could force herself to go.