n the direction of
Tombstone with her two riders.

* * * * *

It was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon. That hour was the dullest
of the twenty-four in the gambling-houses, for the evening shift was
on its way to work and the day shift had not yet come off. The Earps
were dealing faro in the Oriental.

To the onlooker who does not know its hazards faro is a funereal game.
The dealer slides one card and then a second from the box. The
case-keeper moves a button or two on his rack. The dealer in the
meantime is paying winners and collecting chips from losers, all with
the utmost listlessness. In his high chair above them, all the lookout
leans back with every external sign of world-weary indifference. And
the players settle a little lower on their stools. There was about as
much animation in the Oriental that afternoon as there is in a country
church on a hot Sunday morning; less in fact, for there was no
preacher present.

Into this peaceful quiet came the sound of hoofbeats from the street.
It stopped abruptly. Two men burst through the front door on a run.
The players looked around and the faro-dealers dropped their right
hands toward the open drawers where they kept their loaded pistols.
Jack McCann and Johnny Behind the Deuce had arrived.

But before the prisoner finished his story, to which he did not devote
more than twenty words or so, a man ran into the Oriental with the
tidings that the miners who were coming off shift were arming
themselves as fast as they left the cages. The rustlers had ridden up
the hill and were gathering reinforcements.

Wyatt Earp at once took charge of the affair. He was a medium-sized
man with a drooping sandy mustache.

"We'll close up, boys," he said.

The show-down had come.

Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Jim took counsel. Doc Holliday advised
with them. A handful of their supporters stood by awaiting their
decision. All others left; the neighborhood was no healthy place for
non-combatants.

The Oriental gambling-house stood on Tombstone's main street at the
intersection of a cross street. Because of its size it would be a hard
place to defend against so formidable a mob as this which was now
moving down the hill. Several doors north on the main street and on
the opposite side, there was a bowling-alley. Its narrowness gave that
building a strategic value. They took Johnny Behind the Deuce there
and set guards at both ends.

W