- [first lines]
- Harris Claibourne: April 12, 1882 - a few miles from Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It was a also a few minutes from murder.
- [to the stagecoach passengers he is robbing]
- Sam Crane: You inside - get out here! I want everything that folds, ticks or shines!
- Dan - Stagecoach Driver: You aren't going after him alone are you, Clay? He's a killer!
- [Clay taps his holster]
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: I'm not alone.
- [to the journalist interested in Western crime]
- Sam Crane: You'll like Tombstone - it's a smoky town. Almost every night, there's a killin'.
- Kirby Crane: Sure we can trust him, Sam?
- Sam Crane: Sure! 'Cause he knows dead men don't write books.
- Jay Pell: A real live murderer at large out in those hills somewhere. I wish I could meet him.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: Why?
- Jay Pell: The deadliness! The ruthlessness! That's the stuff legends are made of.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: It's men with pens, not guns, that make legends, Mr. Pell.
- Jay Pell: I suppose Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane aren't real people.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: Bill Cody got famous for slaughtering cattle and wearing long hair. Poor old Calamity...
- Jay Pell: But they are famous!
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: For things they didn't do. What they're famous for never happened except in Ned Buntline's head - a little man with a sharp pen and an inkwell full of blood.
- [Pell is researching back issues of The Epitaph for information on an outlaw]
- Harris Claibourne: Did you find what you're after?
- Jay Pell: Nooo, I haven't found much I can use at all. Frankly, I'm surprised at your rather colorless reporting.
- Harris Claibourne: I'm running a newspaper, Mr. Pell, not a paintshop.
- Jay Pell: But Sam Crane's killed 14 men! He can't be the kind of cowardly shadow you've described. He's got to be a dangerous killer!
- Harris Claibourne: Oh-ho, I didn't say he wasn't dangerous. Cholera, dynamite and rattlesnakes are dangerous. When you mix 'em together and put boots on it, you got Sam Crane.
- Jay Pell: But it must take courage for Crane to kill!
- Harris Claibourne: Courage? It doesn't take courage to kill. It takes courage to avoid a killing.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: Has anyone ever done a story on Clay Hollister's life for the Eastern papers?
- Jay Pell: Never.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: How do his gunfights stack up against Crane's? Just how many has he killed?
- Jay Pell: Mister Pell, that's a piece of arithmetic you don't do around here - not if you're Hollister's friend.
- Kirby Crane: Put up the gun or I'll jail you.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you can't climb over bullets.
- Sam Crane: You know the layout of that Tombstone jail?
- Jay Pell: Well, yeah.
- Sam Crane: And you want to see a real shoot-out? You want a dead sheriff for supper?
- Jay Pell: Sam, you get away with this; you kill that sheriff and spring your brother and I'll make them forget Hardin and Tom Horn. I'll make you as big as Jesse James or Billy the Kid!
- Sam Crane: That was just big enough to fit in a pine box.
- [Clay and his deputy allow Tim Crane to escape so they can trail him back to his outlaw brother]
- Harris Claibourne: Well, I guess I can start setting type.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: You better wait to see how the story ends.
- Sam Crane: You don't look beat up. Kirby, how much did you tell him?
- Kirby Crane: I didn't tell him nothin'.
- Sam Crane: Pell here says that the sheriff beat your brains out and you started blabbin'.
- Kirby Crane: He hit me once, but I didn't tell him nothin'!
- Jay Pell: Well, remember I'm a writer. I color up the facts some.
- Sam Crane: Enough to send me straight into that sheriff's guns tryin' to shoot my brother out of the Tombstone jail?
- Jay Pell: Now you're a bit melodramatic.
- Kirby Crane: You and me both, Mister, and you're right in the middle, not off to one side takin' notes!
- [last ines]
- Jay Pell: [to Kirby] You and your blowhard brother - coyotes! Coyotes kill sheep. It takes a man to walk into two guns and kill. A man like this.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: So you finally got your story, huh?
- Jay Pell: "Today in the parched hills near Tombstone, I watched a killer die - Sam Crane, the Southwest's deadliest outlaw."
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: "Same Crane - a coward who killed for greed and out of ignorance."
- Jay Pell: Wellll, we've got two writers around.
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: Then change the part about coyotes. Coyotes are smart like, ah, like this one here. He decided to talk rather than hang.
- Jay Pell: You mean about his brother's killings?
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: Mm-hmm - especially the last one, where Sam killed the stage guard for a fee paid by a writer gathering information on Western outlaws.
- Jay Pell: That's a lie!
- Sheriff Clay Hollister: You paid... and you'll finish paying with ten years of your life for conspiracy to commit murder - in Yuma prison where you'll meet most of the outlaws in the territory. You can write their stories.
- [to Pell as he cocks his pistol]
- Sam Crane: You came West lookin' for somethin' to write. Well, you just found it - your death warrant!