Mr. Holiday and Wyatt Earp, at a road-gait, took the trail for Tucson. In the blistering heat and whiteness of the summer dust, they disappeared; that was the last of their story in Tombstone. They didn’t see Tucson; at a fork in the trail they halted.
“Well, adios, Doc,” said Wyatt Earp, extending his hand. “Write me in ’Frisco how the world goes with you.”
“I will,” returned Mr. Holiday. “I shall try Colorado. I must consider my health, and I prefer the climate there. Adios!”
It was a year later when the Arizona Sheriff, who stood aside that Tombstone day, broke into California Gulch, and the wisdom of Mr. Masterson became for Mr. Holiday a shield of thickness.
“Your papers,” observed the Governor to him of Arizona, “are in proper form, and set clearly forth the death of one Stillwell at the hands of Mr. Holiday. But Mr. Holiday is under charges here for robbery on the highway. You cannot expect me to cheat justice of its due in Colorado, in order to send you a man whom you should never have let escape. The requisition must be refused.”
Mr. Holiday lived on in California Gulch, sheltered by the charge of the Off Wheeler. It protected him to the end, which was not far away. When his sands were running low, Mr. Masterson was by his couch.
“You must have used up a ton of lead, Doc,” observed Mr. Masterson one afternoon, being in a mood of fine philosophy; “and, considering your years in the West, it beats the marvellous. It would look as though you simply shot your way out of one battle into another. How did you come to do it?”
“It used to worry me,” gasped Mr. Holiday, “to think that I must die, and, to take my mind off my troubles, I mixed up with everything that came along. It was the only way in which I could forget myself.”
California Gulch was present at the funeral. They buried Mr. Holiday beneath a clump of cedars high up on the mountain side, and Red Jack draped the Four Flush bar in mourning.
“We’re going to miss him,” he remarked, with a lugubrious sigh, to Mr. Masterson, when, after the services, the latter came in for his evening drink. “We’ll shorely miss him from our midst! An’ when I think on his c’reer, sort o’ run over it hittin’ the lofty places, I’m here to observe that he was the vividest invalid, an’ the busiest, with which I ever crossed up. He certainly was an in-dee-fat-ig-a-ble sick man; an’ that goes!”