Tombstone by Walter Noble Burns — Read

John Ringo was drunk. For ten days he had been morosely, broodingly, tragically drunk. As straight as an Indian, he stalked about Tombstone streets, a tall, silent, sombre figure, looking a little more like Hamlet than ever, his hollow black eyes clouded and melancholy. As a toper, he was not hilarious. No antic impulse moved him to shoot out the lights or indulge in whooping cowboy deviltries. The intellectual outlaw took his pleasures quietly. He played a little faro and a little poker and of an evening dropped in at the Bird Cage Opera House. But chiefly he mellowed the acerbity of life by steeping himself in great quantities of pleasant liquors. He was in Tombstone frequently in these piping summer days of 1882. The Earps had been gone for months, and the old town gave him friendly welcome.

Ringo's boon companions on this ten-day drinking bout were Buckskin Frank Leslie and Billy Claibourne. Buckskin Frank still tended bar at the Oriental. Like Ringo, he went on sprees which sometimes lasted a week or two. Claibourne was himself a fairly stiff tippler, but he had the elasticity of youth in his favour. Ringo was now thirty-eight and Leslie forty. Hard drinking had begun to tell on both. Ringo's periods of hopeless despondency had grown upon him, and he frequently threatened suicide. Leslie was the same lighthearted desperado he had been in earlier days, but liquor now brought the devil in him close to the surface, and his drunken mood was murderous.