Crack!—–e-e-e-e-e-ING! “Uh!” and Morgan Earp went reeling, crashing into his brother Wyatt,at his left, while a trickle of red spouted form end to end of his shoulders as the bullet ploughed its way through. And a ring of smoke drifted into the lot from beneath the neck of Tom McLowery’s horse, the first shot of the day.

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Crack! And McLowery’s horse went into the air, the flash from Wyatt’s gun streaking half way down the lot as Tom McLowery’s head appeared above the animals’ neck. With the blood spurting from a wound in its withers, the horse darted into the road….

Indeed, the manuscript is “stilted, florid and diffuse.” But it becomes easy to see how with a great amount of editing, revision and additional consultation with the story’s subject himself, this could have resulted in a document of historic magnitude. DeVoto could have managed it.

As it stands, the Flood manuscript pinpoints many of the facts, but it takes intense concentration to read and fathom them. Perhaps Flood was affected by the silent silver screen of his day. The exaggerated display of intense emotion, the stiff posturing, the abrupt movements—virtually wordless cinematic effects as opposed to smooth narrative flow—characterize Flood’s development. In truth, the manuscript is sparse on dialogue, and that dialogue is still and unreal.

Flood also falls into the trap of the untried, unpublished writer—himself seeing the events with clarity and presuming too much on the knowledge and imagination of his reader. Throughout the book the reader is led through open-ended episodes and up blind alleys; action that seems to build to a climax instead wanders away into ambiguity, leaving the reader to wonder if he has missed something. Reader bewilderment doesn’t build bestsellers.

Still, Wyatt tells of single-handedly backing down the mob in the attempted lynching of Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, and of sole responsibility for the gunfight deaths of Curly Billy Brocius at Iron Springs, and of Johnny Ringo at Turkey Creek Canyon.

A sort of pall of mysticism as well hangs over the entire effort; the reader is still not exactly sure that the wool isn’t being pulled over his eyes. Yet a provocative point emerges in the long denouement: Was Wyatt Earp psychic? Was there indeed a guardian angle hoveling over one of the West’s most involved gunslingers? One brother was maimed, another assassinated in Tombstone. Yet in gunfight after gunfight from Wichita and Dodge city to Tombstone and after, Wyatt was never as much as nicked, though shot at plenty. Many time he wound up with bullet holes in his clothing.

For some reason, Flood concentrates on this particularly in the episode of the assassination of Morgan Earp. In several instances, Wyatt vividly recalls being warned away or urged to action by some presence around him—when he is on the street, when is is alone in his room in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, and later at Bob Hatch’s Pool Hall, where he goes moments before his brother is gunned down.

Later, during the weeks of vendetta, Wyatt senses another warning out of the blue as his six-man posse approaches Iron prings, where Curly Bill Brocius is killed by Wyatt while cooking a meal. When most of Earp’s posse deserts him, he and Texas Jack Vermillion take on the balance of Curly Bill’s gang, a firefight that clearly exceeded the O.K. Corral in intensity and then some, according to Flood. As the riders approached Iron Springs, Flood handled it this way:

Before them was a rift in the plains, a well-worn channel cut by the torrents that swept the canyons and the slopes of the Mustang Mountains; a spread of willows just showing above the boundless gray; a patch of glistening sand, fifty feet in all—this was Iron Springs.

Be careful Wyatt, death is waiting for you by the waters bubbling at your feet. The sound rang in his ears, and reaching out of the void, the hand of invisible power grasped the bridal [sic] of his horse.

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