The last Ringo post? Hope so, because the subject's about all played out on this end.

William Barclay. Well, not exactly who anyone would seriously describe as the most reliable source with respect to the details about much of the matter at hand, wouldn't you agree? Especially regarding all things Wyatt. (Talk about folks with agendas! We cannot take anything on faith with Bat, just as we cannot with Wyatt himself.)

When you write and publish a "reminiscing" article for public consumption 25 years after the fact and entitle it, "My Friend Wyatt Earp," you can pretty much assume that what you are getting is not exactly a fair and balanced, even-handed, but rather to one degree or another a factually dubious account.

Moreover, Bat wasn't in the vicinity for either the gunfight or the Vendetta business--believe he was in Dodge and/or Colorado--so where is all of his impeccable information coming from exactly? Wherever it's coming from, it's coming not only a quarter-century later, but second or third or fourth hand. (I hesitate to suggest that he is making anything up wholecloth. We'll leave that sort of thing to Wyatt himself.)

This is not to suggest that everything Bat said or wrote should be dismissed out of hand. It is to say that everything Bat said or wrote with respect to these matters (e.g. "Wyatt killed Curly Bill at the Whetstone Springs") should be approached on tiptoe and viewed with several doses of healthy skepticism, if not a jaundiced eye. (Plus, he was a newspaper reporter, a fact that, believe me, rather cuts less in his favor than against it.)

Finally, the parts of the sentences that you have upper-cased (for emphasis, I assume) are nothing if not contingently vague and circumspectly non-specific. They certainly are not enough from which to draw any meaningful inference much less to suggest that 1) "OTHERS" might conceivably refer to Ringo or 2) "THE TIME BEING" might be construed to suggest that Wyatt may have returned to AZ at a later date. It would utterly strain credulity to believe either of those things.

Forgive me, Bob, but in citing these two examples, I suspect that you may have weakened your case instead of bolstering it. I might even go so far, though it pains me to do so, to suggest that the slip of your pro-Earp bias is (however-so-slightly?) showing.