Gun Man by Loren D. Estleman

Author:Loren D. Estleman [Estleman, Loren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: old west
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2015-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

But the lawman’s life is a lonely life,

of friends he numbers none,

Though his wish may be to take a wife,

his vows are to his gun.

Her name was Laurel DePaul, although it came out Laurie in Harper’s New Monthly in December 1879, and when the moving pictures got around to telling John Miller’s story twenty-three years after his death they called her Lauren Dawes and made her a schoolteacher—which she was once, in another place two years before Miller met her in Madame Phillipe’s Hospitality House in Emporia, Kansas. Some said she’d left a husband and a small child in Dayton before coming West. In October 1952 a man who gave his name as Clarence DePaul Miller, dying of pneumonia in a hospital for the indigent in Chicago, gave an interview to a newspaper in which he claimed to be the illegitimate son of John Miller and Laurel DePaul, born in Emporia in 1867, but as the Lyon County courthouse burned down sixteen years after that no records exist to prove or deny this assertion. Found among his effects was an old locket containing a postage-stamp-size tintype of a young dark-haired woman with wide-set eyes and a small, pointed chin, which, if the old man’s story was true, could be the only known existing likeness of the one woman said to have claimed John Miller’s heart. She was twenty-three when they met in May 1866.

She had hair that looked blue-black in lamplight but showed glints of red in summer sunshine, or it did in that first year of their acquaintance. When they met again in Wyoming in 1873 it was starting to glitter with steel shavings, and by Dakota 1880 it was black again—a harsh, flat black that brought out the lines in her face. The reason for the confusion over her name had to do with the failure of a New York journalist named Frazee to get Laurel to collaborate on a book about the life of John Miller, then dead ten days; costing her a place in legend. The 1903 moving picture used this and explained how in a fit of grief and rage she turned the man out of her house at gunpoint. In reality she had demanded too much money for her cooperation and Frazee went ahead and wrote the book without her and without mentioning her.

Whether she loved him, or whether he just represented customer reliability in a time and place that cared nothing for the requirements of a woman alone, is lost to history. But over a period of fourteen years, in locations a thousand miles apart, she remains the only woman whom documents can place at three key points in John Miller’s short life.

Jack Stonewarden’s diary, published posthumously in 1910, identifies her at the scene when Miller learned of the robbery of the Farmer’s Trust in Emporia, one day short of six months after the former marshal swore in his successor.

“By daylight?” Throwing aside the coverlet in the room across the hall from the

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