Doc

Joker

“It may have been the most vile, undrinkable, horrifyin’ beverage in the history of mankind,” Doc told Morgan, who felt bad for laughing so hard but couldn’t help himself. “And Mr. Jau—poor soul—he is watchin’ me with such eager anticipation! ‘How you like dat, Doc?’ he asks me. And at that very instant, I was thinkin’: I sincerely believe I would rather die than choke this down three times a day … But I could hear my mamma’s voice. Now, sugar, it was very kind of Mr. Jau, and if you can just get through the next twenty seconds without up-chuckin’ …”

For the third time in half an hour, Doc laid his dental tools on the office table and turned away to cough and curse for a while, which gave Morgan time to catch his own breath. Somehow Doc made having consumption seem funny; Morg was damned if he understood how, but when the two of them were alone like this, he ended up laughing himself blue about half the time.

He poured Doc a drink and knew to wait until Doc could answer before he asked, “You ever tried Wistar’s? That’s supposed to be pretty good for a cough.”

“Morgan,” Doc said, “I have tried them all … Balsam of Cherry. Borax water. Kerosene and lard. Turpentine and sugar. Calomel. Bunchberry juice. Fish liver extract. Root of pitcher plant. Everything but eye of newt—which may have been in Mr. Jau’s concoction, now that I think of it.” He paused to clear his throat. “Laudanum stops the cough, but it stops everything else, too. Can’t work when I’m that fogged.” Doc picked up his tools. “Bourbon does the job, and I tolerate it better. Light?”

Morgan lifted the lamp again and held it so there was no shadow on the denture Doc was finishing: two front teeth, cleverly linked in a gold setting.

“It’s like a little sculpture,” Morg marveled. “Or … jewelry, almost.”

“Jewelry is mere adornment,” Doc said, peering through a magnifying glass that was clamped into a brass stand on his desk. “This will change your brother’s life in a small but significant way. If it’s the last work I do, I’ll die a happy dentist.”

Consumption was one thing. Death was another. Morg banged the lamp down.

Doc looked up, surprised; he sobered when he saw Morgan’s face. “What?”

“You keep joking about dying, and I wish you’d quit. It’s like you’re trying to get used to the idea,” Morg said. “Making friends with it, almost.”

Doc stared, but he sounded impressed when he finally said, “Well, now, ain’t you somethin’.” He lifted his chin toward the lamp. Morg held it up, and Doc went back to work on the denture. “There was some bleedin’ after the race,” he admitted quietly, “but it wasn’t arterial. And it’s over. Took time for things to settle down afterward, is all.”

True enough, the cough didn’t sound as awful as it had right after the fall. Doc’s color was better, too, but Kate said he still wasn’t sleeping well, and that made him cross.

Cross ain’t the half of it, Morg thought. Doc would tear into folks, sudden as a dogfight, and he was taking some real chances during card games. He swore he wasn’t starting anything, but Doc’s idea of “clarifyin’ a point of contention” came awful close to spitting in a man’s eye. “Doc,” Morgan had warned a few nights ago, “you gotta be more careful. I won’t always be around—” To protect you, he was going to say, but Doc cut him off and snapped, “Well, neither will I, and I am damned if I will spend my time listenin’ to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!”

Still, he was cheerful enough right now, whistling softly while he smoothed away an almost invisible burr on the gold bezel that held the teeth.

It was interesting to watch the work, and Morg was glad to be allowed back into the office. He’d been banned after Wyatt’s first appointment. Doc only let him come back today because it was the final fitting for the denture.

Wyatt didn’t feel a thing when that first tooth was pulled, but Morgan still had a knot on the back of his head from where he hit the doorknob going down. When he came to, Doc was furious with him. “Dammit, Morgan, I didn’t know whether to shit or go bust! There’s Wyatt in the chair, and there’s you on the floor, and there’s the Eberhardt boy with eyes like saucers, sayin’ ‘I pump drill now, sir?’ I can’t have it, Morg—not while I’ve got a patient under ether. It’s too dangerous!” So Mattie Blaylock came with Wyatt for the next three appointments. She was real good about things, too, cooking him soft stuff like eggs and soup for a few days after each session, while his mouth was sore.

“What is that song?” Morg asked after a while.

Doc looked up, puzzled.

“The one you were whistling.”

“Was I—?” Doc thought for a moment. “Oh! The Rondo from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.”

Morgan knew what a violin was, anyways. “You play fiddle, too?”

“Not by a wide mile,” Doc murmured, eyes on the mount. “When I was in dental school, I went to every concert and recital I could at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Fell in love with that piece … I was studyin’ the score when we were learnin’ to make bridges. Comes back to me, I guess.”

Must be hard on him, Morg thought, being so far from things like that. “Real pretty tune,” he said.

“Indeed. You have excellent taste, Morgan.” Doc put the tools down and stretched out his back, then winced suddenly, like he was snakebit. He sat still for a time, but relaxed again and went on. “Our houseboy—Wilson?—he disapproved of whistlin’ somethin’ fierce. Always said it was common. ‘A low-class, cracker habit,’ Wilson called it, but Mamma encouraged the practice when I was a boy.”

“Why would she want you to do something low-class?”

“Helped me establish control over the orbicularis oris.” Doc gestured with a finger, circling his mouth. His hand dropped into his lap and he considered Morgan for a time, like he was deciding something. “I was born with a harelip,” he said finally. “The defect was repaired when I was a baby.”

Morgan couldn’t help staring.

Doc threw his head back and stared right back, like he was daring Morg to make fun. “It is nothin’ to be ashamed of,” he declared.

And you could tell somehow: it was his mamma’s voice Doc heard when he was saying how it was nothing to be ashamed of, but he was ashamed—a little, anyways. You could tell that, too.

Morg made himself stop looking at Doc’s mouth. “I knew a kid once who had a harelip. I didn’t know they could fix it.”

“My Uncle John is a fine surgeon. You can—Oh, hell—Dammit! Some kind of—obstruction in the bronchus—I just can’t seem to—”

Morg put the lamp down and waited again while the bourbon was administered and the coughing eased off. Since the fall on the Fourth, Doc had been drinking more than usual. He drank it a little at a time, though, and it didn’t seem to affect him beyond helping with the cough. His eyes stayed clear and his hands were steady when he went back to work on the denture. It was such finicky work, but he seemed to have all the patience in the world, doing it. Strange, for a man who’d fly off the handle so easy, otherwise.

“I wouldn’t last five minutes doing what you are,” Morg said. “How can you spend so much time on something so little?”

“It’s hours for me, but it’ll be in Wyatt’s mouth for years. The tiniest flaw will be a trial to him … We all have different gifts, Mamma used to say. I’ve watched you and your brother walk straight into a mob and wondered, Where do they get the sand? I couldn’t do what you do.”

“You’ve got plenty of sand, Doc.”

“Morgan,” Doc said, “I am doin’ my best … How are you and Mr. Dickens gettin’ along?”

“I like him better than Dostoevsky,” Morg admitted. “Oliver Twist reminds me of Wyatt when he was a kid. I liked how Oliver stands up for himself and that other kid when they was so hungry. Wyatt was like that. He cannot abide a bully. Never could, even when he was little.”

“And why do you suppose that is?”

“Just his nature, I guess.”

“You met Mr. Fagin yet?”

“Yeah. Ain’t made up my mind about him. He’s good to feed all those boys, but he’s teaching them to be pickpockets, too. That don’t seem right.”

“But that is just what makes Fagin interestin’. Raskolnikoff, too. Fagin does his good deed with a bad purpose in mind, but the boys are still fed. Raskolnikoff kills the old woman, but he wants to use her money to improve society. As Monsieur Balzac asked, May we not do a small evil for the sake of accomplishin’ a great good?”

“I don’t know.” Morgan frowned. “It’s still an evil.”

“And yet, that seems to be the principle behind the crucifixion. Sacrifice the Son, redeem humanity … Hold the lamp up while you’re chewing that notion over.”

Morg tried, but it was too much to get his mind around. “I know what Wyatt would say. Fagin’s still a fence. Raskolnikoff was a murderer and a thief. Wyatt don’t care that James and Bessie run a decent house and treat their girls right. They’re still whoremongers.”

“And I suppose it doesn’t matter that my mamma inherited her people. Or that she was a gentle mistress, taught by her elders that slavery was Athenian in its dignity and blessed by the Bible itself.”

“She was still a slave owner,” Morg said quietly, braced for the reaction. Doc could be real touchy about his mother.

“We are none of us born into Eden,” Doc said reasonably. “World’s plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what’s the best way to play a bad hand? Abolitionists thought that all they had to do to right an ancient wrong was set the slaves free.” He looked at Morg. “Trouble was, they didn’t have a plan in the world for what came next. Cut ’em loose. That was the plan. Let ’em eat cake, I guess.”

He was muttering now, eyes on the bridge. “Four years of war. Hundreds of thousands of casualties … All so black folks in the South could be treated as bad as millworkers in the North! Pay as little as you can. Work ’em ’til they’re too old or sick or hurt to do the job. Then cut ’em loose! Hire a starvin’ Irish replacement! That’s abolitionist freedom for you … Heartless bastards … ‘Free the slaves’ sounds good until you start wonderin’ how Chainey and Wilson would make a livin’ when they were already so old they couldn’t do a lick of work. What was a little child like Sophie Walton supposed to do? No kin who’d care for her …” He looked up. “I doubt the abolitionists anticipated the Ku Klux Klan either, but here it is, makin’ life worse than ever for black folks.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Morg said.

“Infinitely sad, but damnably true.”

Doc sat back in his chair and stared out of the window for a long time. “Bein’ born is craps,” he decided. He glanced at Morg and let loose that sly, lopsided smile of his. “How we live is poker.” Doc looked away and got thoughtful again. “Mamma played a bad hand well.”

He shook the mood off and went back to work on the denture. Morgan lifted the lamp, feeling vaguely unsettled by the conversation. Naturally, Doc saw things different, being from the South. Still … there had been a lot of arguing about Emancipation, even in the North. Nicholas Earp was all for the war when it was to punish the secessionists. After the Proclamation, he wrote Newton and James and Virgil to quit the army and come on home. “I won’t have my sons risking their necks for niggers” was what he said, but the boys stayed on and fought to the end. And Wyatt tried to join up when he was fifteen, except the old man caught him both times and dragged him home again. Somebody had to get that eighty acres of corn in.

“Doc? You think maybe it was the Klan got Johnnie Sanders?” Morg asked.

Doc stopped what he was doing. “Never thought of that … He was friendly with Belle Wright. Sometimes that’s all it takes.” He turned the idea over for a while. “No. They’d have lynched him, I imagine. And they’d want a crowd for the occasion. The Klan enjoys an audience as much as Eddie Foy.” He sat still for a time, frowning. “I don’t suppose you recall … Was that army captain—Grier, the one with the Arab mare?—was Captain Grier in town when the Elephant Barn burned down?”

Morg’s face went blank. “Hell, Doc. I don’t remember. Why?”

“Just curious. Johnnie might’ve gone into the barn to bring out that horse.” Doc went back to his work and to Dickens. “So, now, what do you think about the odious Bill Sikes? There’s a pure bully for you, no redemption involved.”

Morg didn’t answer. Doc looked up. “Struck a nerve, did I?”

Morgan’s face had darkened, but Doc was looking past him now. “Tell me about bullies, Wyatt. I wager you have made a study of the breed.”

Morg turned and wondered how long his brother had been standing in the doorway, listening.

Wyatt took off his hat and hung it on a peg. “They were beaten,” he said simply. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred still are, inside. A man beats his boy, he wants a son who won’t buck him. He’s trying to make a coward. Mostly, it works.” Face expressionless, Wyatt walked to the window and held the curtain aside, gazing back toward Iowa as he spoke. “That’s why a bully will fold. You just … look at him, the way his old man did. It’s not anger. It’s scorn. A bully sees that look? He’s nine years old again. Small and weak, like his pa wanted him. It’s all he can do to keep from crying.”

Doc looked at Morgan, whose eyes slid away.

“And the hundredth boy?” Doc asked Wyatt.

“We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.” Wyatt dropped the curtain. “You ready for me?”

“Just about,” Doc said. “Have a seat.”

“A very natural appearance.” That’s what Dr. J. H. Holliday had promised, and that’s what he delivered.

It was just as well that neither Wyatt nor Morgan inquired about the provenance of the teeth themselves, for Wyatt’s new ones were among the hundreds of thousands collected from battlegrounds, sorted by type and size, and made available for restorative dentistry for many years after the war. With John Henry’s sketches and detailed measurements to go by, his cousin Robert had found a pair of upper centrals that matched Morgan’s closely.

“It’ll feel strange for a while,” Doc warned, making the final adjustment, “but a couple of days from now, you’ll think they were never missin’. You still need to be careful when you eat. Don’t bite into apples. Slice them up like you’ve been doin’. And don’t take up smokin’ a pipe. Too much torque’ll deform the mount … And if somebody’s likely to hit you in the mouth—”

“Right! I’ll be careful! Can I look now?”

“Not yet. Say ‘Mississippi.’ ”

“Mithithi—Oh, hell, no!” Wyatt cried, sitting up in the chair. “Doc, thith—”

“Hush, now,” Doc said. “Morgan, you laugh, and I will slap you flat. It’s goin’ to take some practice, Wyatt. Don’t let the tip of your tongue touch the teeth. Bring it down and back, just a hair. Try it again.”

“Mizzith—Hell! Mizziss—”

“Damn your eyes, Morgan!” Doc wheeled, coughing, and pointed to the door. “Go wait in the lobby!”

Chastened but still grinning, Morgan left the room, though he stayed in the hallway to listen, out of sight.

“Pay that pup no mind, Wyatt,” Doc was saying. “Try again. Just the tip of the tongue … Curl the tip back a little. There you go! Yes! You’re already doin’ better.”

This went on for about ten minutes, with time out for Doc’s cough. When Wyatt was getting it right about half the time and seemed confident that he’d get the hang of it, Doc told him, “Now try ‘fifty-five.’ Bring your lower lip up to the teeth. Just rest the lip against them … Again. Good. Yes! Better! That one’s easier, isn’t it … Now try ‘very vivid.’ It’s the same movement but voiced. Put your hand on your throat. Feel the vibration?”

“You should be in bed,” Wyatt told Doc, who was coughing again.

There was a clink of glass on glass. Doc must have been pouring himself another drink. The desk chair scraped back.

“Not yet,” Doc said, sounding breathless but serene. “Take a look.”

Morg moved closer and peered in through the crack between the door and its frame. For a while Wyatt sat still, and Morgan found himself thinking, Poor soul—like Doc always said—poor soul, he can walk straight into a mob, but this …

It was about then that his own vision blurred, but Morg could hear the barber chair creak and footsteps as Wyatt got up and went to the mirror.

Blinking hard, Morgan wiped his eyes and tried to remember if he’d ever seen Wyatt look—really look—at himself that way. There was a small, embarrassed smile, and then a broader one …

In the past weeks, while Doc worked toward this moment, Morgan had often thought about how relieved and glad he’d be to see his brother made whole again. Now the moment had come at last, but it wasn’t how he thought it would be. Instead of happiness, he felt a great weight of something like grief pressing on him. Sadness for all the years Wyatt’s smile was gone. Anger, too, remembering how Nicholas Earp had tried to make cowards of all his sons.

It came to Morgan that Nicholas must have been a beaten boy, too, and that meant Grampa Earp was, as well. Which was no surprise, really, when Morg thought about that mean old man. How many sons were in that chain? Morgan wondered, and grief gave way to the pride he’d felt the day his brother Wyatt stood up to his first bully and put an end to a chain of vengeful, frightened, beaten boys.

Wyatt turned from the mirror. “Doc, I don’t know what to th—I don’t know what to say.”

“Sure, you do, Wyatt: Mississippi. Fifty-five.”

Morgan shifted so he could see Doc, whose eyes were filled with pleasure and satisfaction and … love, almost. All mixed.

“Go on, now,” the dentist said softly. “Take a ride on that fine horse of yours, Wyatt, out where no one can see or listen. Practice makes perfect, y’hear?”

The men he worked with didn’t notice. If anyone had asked Chuck Trask or John Stauber, for example, they might have said Wyatt was quieter than usual the next few days, or that Dick Naylor was getting an awful lot of exercise.

Women saw a difference. He seemed a little less flinty and remote, and they were glad to see him loosen a bit. Morgan’s girl, Lou, told Wyatt that he looked real nice. And Mattie didn’t complain when he left her alone to go out riding and work on his words. Bessie said it was money well spent and didn’t give Wyatt a hard time about how he should have paid her and James back first. Kate seemed prickly about it, but even she admitted that Doc had done a remarkable job.

Mabel Riney asked straight out, “What’s changed, Wyatt?” Her husband, John, was sleeping off a drunk, and she was working the tollbooth while Wyatt waited around for a cattle company due to come across the river. “Something’s different,” she said, “but I can’t make out what.”

“Got my teeth fixed,” he told her.

“Lemme see,” Mabel said, like he was one of her sons.

He smiled, sort of, but looked away, coloring up like a boy. It was sweet, how shy he was about telling her.

“Doc Holliday done that?” she asked, impressed.

He nodded.

“How much he charge?” she asked, and whistled when he told her.

“It was a lot,” Wyatt agreed, “but my teeth always used to hurt. Not anymore.”

They passed the time awhile, Mabel asking things and Wyatt answering. He told her a lot about ether, which was horrible and made you think you were smothering, but then you didn’t feel it when teeth were pulled or drilled, and you just had to eat soft things afterward while you healed up.

When the cowboys got to the bridge, Wyatt was all business again. Mabel took the tolls, same as usual, but started thinking about going to see the dentist herself, because she had some teeth that had been bothering her for years.

Which was why, even without an advertisement in the Ford County Globe or the Dodge City Times, Doc Holliday’s business picked up quite a bit that summer. Word got around because women talk.

Eventually even Mrs. George Hoover overheard about Wyatt’s teeth, though no one told her directly. Few Dodge Citians spoke to Mrs. Hoover, not even other Methodists. Whores envied and resented her. Men who’d fucked little Maggie Carnahan—before Jesus saved her and Big George married her—didn’t hardly know how to act around her. And certainly, no Democrat would give Margaret Hoover the time of day.

She was used to her isolation and took a bit of pride in that evidence of her higher calling and strength of character. She had come a long way since drifting on the sea of sin and liquor that had once carried her so far from the Lord. She found it difficult to remember New York these days. She was such a greenhorn then! So foreign, so trusting.

And so much of her previous life seemed nightmarish to her, lived as it was in moonlight and in shadow.

“How old are you?” the Old Mister asked when she first came to work with her cousin.

“Thirteen, sir,” she said, dropping a curtsy, just as she’d been taught.

“Old enough for a lover,” he said. Then he cackled at her confusion.

He liked to watch while she dusted or polished or swept. In long, empty hallways and silent rooms, he would stand half-hidden in doorways, a small smile on his withered old lips.

He thought it was great fun to startle her, to make her jump. Wary, she learned to notice the musty old-man odor of stale, sweaty woolens, and cigarette smoke, and booze, and piss. Trying not to shudder, she would call out, “Morning to you, sir,” just to let him know she wasn’t fooled.

Sometimes he would speak in low, hushed, secret tones that she almost didn’t understand—so new she was from the old country, so unfamiliar with the speech of Americans. When she could make out the words, what he said made no sense.

“When you live with me, I will love you and punish you,” the Old Mister mumbled one quiet afternoon. “I will kidnap you, and you will give yourself up to me, and you will wear no clothing while you scrub floors, but I will feed you sweets … Here. Drink this. Go on. It’s only a little.”

Repulsed. Intrigued. Frightened. Intoxicated. Maggie hardly knew what she felt, except she wished she’d never left Belfast. She was so lonely, and the Old Mister was the only one who seemed to like her, and she liked the liquor. Sweet port, it was. Warming in the cold damp winter. So warming that it was possible to ignore an old man’s cold, bony hands.

“Any port in a storm,” Old Mister would mumble. Then he’d giggle, like he’d made a joke.

Young Missus could see what was going on between her father-in-law and the new maid, and she despised Maggie for it. “You are a wicked girl,” she whispered fiercely. “You’ll be punished for what you’re doing with him.” Young Missus could slap her and make Maggie’s life a trial, but she couldn’t fire her. Only the Old Mister could do that. He held the purse strings and ruled the house, and it was he who led young Maggie Carnahan to walk in lasciviousness, lusts, and excesses of wine—

All that was behind her now. Maggie Carnahan was dead. A clean new soul had risen in her place, rejoicing in Jesus. Mrs. George Hoover was a teetotal Methodist, the wife of a good man, and a rich woman—No! Better than a rich woman. She was a lady.

At the end of July, Margaret Hoover overheard talk about Wyatt Earp and the new dentist’s work. She began to pay attention to the deputy’s demeanor when she saw him at church on Sunday. It’s time he did more for temperance than pray, she decided, and that afternoon she urged her husband to approach Wyatt about the convention in August.

Big George was surprised that Margaret had thought of such a thing and was inclined to dismiss the notion, but his little wife could be remarkably insistent. Before long she had convinced him that this was a good opportunity to involve Wyatt in politics. In fact, George became so certain of the wisdom of the plan, he invited Nick Klaine along when he went to see Wyatt at the Iowa House. Which meant the newspaperman was right there taking notes for the Dodge City Times when the offer was made.

“Wyatt, I know you’re on duty in a few minutes, so I’ll get straight to the point,” George started out, after saying “Afternoon” to Doc Holliday and Morgan. “The Republican Party needs men like you. You’re respected, you’re honest, and you can’t be intimidated by the saloon interests. We’d like you to act as the Ford County representative to the party’s state convention next month. This could be the year that Prohibition gets onto the Kansas platform. Yours could be the vote that puts it over the top. Now, the convention lasts two weeks, but we can get you the time off, and we’ll cover your lost wages and expenses. What do you say?”

Wyatt didn’t say anything at all. George’s earnest smile remained unaltered, although the effort to maintain its confident brightness became somewhat more visible as the seconds ticked by. He glanced at Nick Klaine, whose pencil was poised in anticipation of Wyatt’s answer. “You see, Klaine?” George cried. “This is a momentous decision and this is just the sort of judicious consideration I expected from Wyatt Earp!”

In point of fact, Wyatt was considering the offer carefully, but he was also choosing his words, still avoiding the letter s in front of people. “I’ve been dealing faro at the Alhambra, Mr. Hoover.”

“We all do what we have to, to make a living, Wyatt,” George pointed out smoothly, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t work for a better and more moral nation.”

I guess, Wyatt would have said ordinarily. Instead he just shrugged, which made him seem more reluctant than he really was.

“You don’t have to give me an answer right now,” George said, “but representing us at the convention could lead to other things. Just think about the possibilities, is all I’m asking.”

George said good day to them all and left with Nick Klaine. Wyatt looked at Morg, who said, “Why not?”

Doc sighed, and put his head in his hands, and wondered how his life had come to such a pass that he was surrounded by Republicans. “You’ll need a suit,” he warned Wyatt. “You can’t go to Topeka dressed like that.”

The idea of buying new clothes was enough to make Wyatt say, “Oh, hell, then,” and brush the whole idea off.

For the next couple of days, he went about his business, working on his words whenever he was alone, until the sounds came natural. Wasn’t long before he was confident enough to call, “See you on Sunday,” right out loud to the preacher. And he produced a sarcastic but clearly enunciated “Very funny” when Morgan played like he was going to punch him in the mouth at supper one morning.

Wyatt had done some hunting while he was out saying “Mississippi,” and Mattie cooked up a pretty good venison stew. She’d invited his brothers over for a meal, but Wyatt regretted it because all Morg and James would talk about was his new teeth.

“You still ain’t seen Eddie Foy’s act?” Morgan cried around a mouthful of deer meat. “Well, hell, you should go! What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know, Wyatt,” James said, all serious. “You smile? Somebody might die of apoplexy or something. Might cause a riot, even. You don’t want to be responsible.”

“James is right, Wyatt. Start slow,” Morg urged. “Just hang around outside and listen for a while. Course, you’ll want to alert the docs—”

“Yeah,” James agreed, “you might need McCarty and Holliday, both, if your face cracks.”

“And don’t laugh!” Morg pleaded. “You laughed once already this year. Do it again, it’ll be the Apocalypse for sure! We’ll have the four horsemen and the rain of fire—”

They went on like that for so long, Wyatt got fed up and put off going to hear the Irishman’s show just to prove they couldn’t rag him into anything. After a while, though, Morg and James let up on him, and Wyatt started thinking how maybe one night he would just swing on by the Commie-Q after all.

In early August a long dry spell finally broke with a thunderstorm followed by a steady downpour that was keeping the streets quiet. There were just a few woeful horses out in the rain, heads down, tied at the rails; most men were willing to pay half a dollar to corral their animals just to keep their tack dry on the Elephant Barn’s indoor racks. The saloons and dance halls were more crowded than usual because of the weather. You could hear the pianos and fiddles and hollering when you passed by the open doors. Get a few paces beyond, though, and the drumming of the rain on the galleries above the boardwalks drowned the noise out.

Around eleven, Wyatt found himself walking past the Commie-Q. He still wasn’t quite ready to go inside yet, but he was willing to stand around outside the theater, just like Morg said: close enough to hear the songs and jokes.

The strange thing was, he didn’t even know that he’d been avoiding the Commie-Q before he got his teeth fixed. If anybody had asked, he’d have said he didn’t spend any time at the theater because there hadn’t been much trouble there since he got back from chasing Dave Rudabaugh around, though Morgan said there’d been a ruckus at the beginning of the season when some drovers had threatened to lynch Eddie Foy because he was telling jokes on Texas, and they took it wrong.

According to Morg, even when those boys had a rope around his neck, Eddie kept smart-mouthing them, and they admired his nerve so much, they let him live. Word of the event had passed along the trail as the Texans drifted home, and now the Commie-Q was every cowboy’s destination, along with the brothels and the gambling halls of Dodge.

Eddie’s act was a lively combination of Irish step dancing and Negro hambone mixed with songs and patter. Drovers would go see the show over and over until they knew all the jokes and could yell out the punch lines with him.

“Everything in Texas is big,” Eddie was hollering now. “I met a Texan with ears so big—”

“He wore his hat sidesaddle!” the cowboys yelled, laughing their heads off when Eddie twisted his own hat around and crossed his eyes.

“Texans grow the biggest potatoes in the world! I told a storekeeper in Dallas, I’d like to buy a hundred pounds of potatoes. No, sir, he said—”

“I don’t cut my potatoes in half for nobody!” the crowd shouted.

Wyatt thought that one was pretty good, but he didn’t like some of the others.

“Any of you boys go with that blind prostitute?” Eddie asked.

“You really have to hand it to her!”

“Last night, me girl Verelda asked, Have you been screwin’ around behind me back?”

“Well, who in hell did she think it was?” the cowboys hollered.

“They say money can’t buy happiness,” Eddie remarked, and three hundred whooping drunks yelled in unison, “But it’ll buy Verelda!”

Which was comical at first, but then seemed kind of mean-spirited to Wyatt, after what Doc Holliday said about working girls and how brave they were. That was strange when you thought about it, because the dentist had made it possible for Wyatt to laugh at the jokes, but Doc took some of the fun out of them, too.

Eddie was singing now: “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen …” There was nothing going on in the street, so Wyatt eased back toward the swing door to look around. Over in a corner, Doc was dealing faro, one hand sliding cards off the shoe, the other holding a handkerchief over his mouth. He was doing pretty good lately—dealing a few hours a night, getting some rest, taking patients for a few hours in the morning, sleeping through the heat of the day. That fall Doc took on the Fourth might have been a blessing in disguise. The dentist had been more sensible since then. Living regular. Working less, eating more. Even Kate seemed happier.

Bat had a poker game going in the back of the hall. His waistcoat was green and pink and yellow tonight, the brocade straining a bit over his gut. He’d be built like a barrel by the time he was thirty.

While Eddie sang in his high, sweet voice, Wyatt watched Bat, wondering how much a new suit would cost.

“If you’re goin’ to run against Masterson,” Doc had told Wyatt a few days ago, “wear black, to make the contrast more notable. Black frock coat, white shirt, black trousers. Simple but elegant. Get some decent boots, too. And keep them polished!”

Until Doc said that about wearing black, Wyatt hadn’t seriously considered running for sheriff, but that must have been what Big George meant, about how going to the Republican convention could lead to other things. So Wyatt asked Dog Kelley what he thought of the idea. Dog was a Democrat, but he’d always been square with Wyatt.

“May as well run,” Dog said. “Bob Wright already hates you.”

What’s Bob got to do with it? Wyatt wondered. Sure, Bob was sore about that arrest on the Fourth, but he got over it. Before Wyatt could ask Dog what he meant, a shotgun went off outside, and Wyatt left the Alhambra to deal with a brawl that had spilled out into the street, over by the Green Front.

Anyways, it wasn’t Bob Wright who worried Wyatt. It was Bat Masterson. There was something cagey and guarded about Bat these days, like he was hiding something. It seemed unfriendly to run against him, but no question, things had cooled between them lately.

Until recently, Wyatt Earp had believed himself to be a decisive man. He used to think that once he made his mind up, that was that. Except when he told Doc he was thinking maybe he would be a delegate to the Republican convention after all, Doc laughed that wheezy laugh of his, and coughed, and shook his head.

“I declare, Wyatt,” he said, “given three days, you can talk yourself into anything.” Wyatt wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, in Doc’s opinion, but before he could argue the point, Doc said, “Tell me, Wyatt: do you consider yourself an honest man?”

Wyatt blinked. “Yeah, I guess. Sure, maybe. Anyways, what kinda question is that?” Doc could say the damnedest things.

“Ever occur to you to ask yourself why the biggest liquor wholesaler in Kansas is backin’ Prohibition?”

“Henpecked, I guess,” Wyatt said. And now that he was living with Mattie, he understood better how that could happen to a man. Sometimes you went along with things you’d rather not, just to be nice.

“Or Luke, sixteen nine, maybe,” Wyatt added. “Make friends with unrighteous money.” It was a text the preacher turned to when he wanted to explain why he took contributions to the building fund from men who owned saloons and brothels.

Doc sat back in his chair, eyes amused. “Beware of good Samaritans!” he recited. “Walk to the right … Or hide thee by the roadside out of sight … Or greet them with the smile that villains wear.”

That was Doc. Half the time he was the smartest man Wyatt had ever met. The other half, he didn’t make any sense at all. Still, the more Wyatt thought about it, the more he liked the idea of being sheriff, and it began to seem pretty likely he would win. Bat had only taken the office by three votes, last election, and more Republicans had moved into the county since then …

Things were getting noisy again inside the Commie-Q. Having reduced his audience to satisfying, sentimental tears with “Kathleen,” Eddie Foy and the piano player were changing the mood by starting up a square dance. “Circle left! Swing your lady!” Eddie was hollering. “Now allemande right!”

The idea was to get all the Texans to dance with the bar girls so they’d make themselves thirsty and buy more drinks. Wyatt wasn’t interested in a bunch of clumsy boys hopping around with trollops. That’s what saved his life—because if the jokes had started up again, he’d have been listening to Eddie. He might not have turned away from the theater door and wouldn’t have noticed a horseman passing by on Front Street.

The rider reined around and jogged by a second time, like he was looking for someone, and this time Wyatt paid attention. It was a kid. Too stupid to get in out of the rain, is what Wyatt was thinking when the rider turned once more, a block away.

On his third pass, the boy suddenly spurred his horse and came pounding down Front Street at a gallop and with intent. It wasn’t so much that he fired his gun. It was the look on his face that told Wyatt this was more than just random hell-raising.

Before the first muzzle flash, Wyatt had time to think, He means to kill me. His own pistol was drawn before the second flash, and he settled himself to take his shot. Later, Doc would ask why in hell Wyatt hadn’t taken cover. Well, the boy’s horse was just a cow pony, not a cavalry mount. Wyatt knew, without words, that she’d shy or plunge or rear at the noise of the gunshot and that would spoil her rider’s aim.

She made him a difficult target as well. Wyatt fired once in reply, and missed, and cursed, and splashed out into the muddy street to take a left-handed grab at the rider as the horse passed within a yard of him.

By then, the rain was done in the west and tapering off in town, but Front Street was a slough and Wyatt slipped as the horse danced sideways. All he got was a handful of tail, and he lost his grip on that.

The boy turned in his saddle to fire again, his face lit by the theater lights: stiff and scared now, but determined.

The slug hit the brim of Wyatt’s hat, flipping it off into the mud.

The kid’s voice broke when he shouted, “Damn!” He reined his horse around hard and dug in with his spurs, bolting for the bridge, just hoping to get out of town now, for every lawman in Dodge was in the street by then, and all of them were shooting at him.

Wyatt was following on foot, sloshing through the mire, and fell making the turn onto Bridge Street. Already down on his knees, he sat back on his haunches. The lower angle brought his target into dark relief against the sky, which was starting to lighten a little because the setting moon was beginning to show between clouds that were breaking up over Colorado. This time Wyatt aimed carefully and took a second shot, but the rider clattered on over the bridge and was gone from sight.

Bat Masterson might be a lying little weasel, but no question, he was game in a fight. He was the first out of the Commie-Q, the first after Wyatt to fire at the shooter, and the first to reach Wyatt’s side now. Huffing from the run, Bat watched the rider disappear and asked, “Who in hell was that joker?”

“Never saw him before,” Wyatt said.

Morg was there a moment later, with John Stauber and Chuck Trask and Charlie Bassett right behind him. Bat gave Wyatt a hand up, and then the rest of the officers were on the scene. Almost as quickly, their women appeared, holding shawls tight around their shoulders, white-faced in the watery moonlight, waiting at the edge of the street to be told whose man had been killed this time.

Morg called, “Go on home! Nobody’s hit.”

The women talked among themselves before going back inside, while Bat told Morg and everybody what had just happened.

“Wyatt was standing on the boardwalk out in front of the Commie-Q, and this kid comes along and opens up on him. I saw the boy through the window—looked right at Wyatt. Right at him! Not angry or anything, just: he had a job to do and he was by-God gonna do it.”

For a time, they all stood around in the slowing drizzle, speculating on who the kid was and what he had against Wyatt, but hell! There were a hundred cowboys Wyatt had bashed or arrested, or both. Could have been any one of them. And that just counted the ones he’d dealt with in Dodge this season. Could have been somebody with a grudge left over from last year. Or from Ellsworth or Wichita, for that matter.

Wyatt didn’t say much, but he never did. Finally Bat declared, “Drinks are on me! Let’s get out of the rain.”

They were on their way back to the Front Street boardwalk when one of the Riney kids came running over from the tollbooth.

“Mr. Earp,” he called, “you hit him, sir! He’s over on the south end of the bridge.”

Wet and shivering, Wyatt stood in the corner of the cell while Doc McCarty examined the whimpering boy’s wound. McCarty said, “I’m afraid it’s mortal, son,” and Wyatt closed his eyes at the news. “What’s your name?” the doctor asked the kid. “Do you have kin we should notify?”

George Hoyt, he turned out to be. Crying, he told McCarty his mother’s address and, snuffling, he asked for a drink. Fat Larry brought in a bottle. Wyatt sat on the bunk, and lifted the boy up by the shoulders, and helped him take a good long swig, and laid him down to rest after that. For a little while, he watched Hoyt sleep.

Then he went back to work.

He knew what folks were saying when he walked his rounds that night, like nothing bad had happened. Butter wouldn’t melt in Wyatt Earp’s mouth. Cool as they come, ole Wyatt.

But he was shook, and bad.

Dime novelists tried to make it seem that frontier lawmen did that kind of thing all the time, but it just wasn’t so—not even in towns like Dodge. Killings were nearly always one idiot shooting another; the police were hardly ever involved directly.

For Wyatt, the reaction set in while he was sitting in the mud watching Hoyt ride off over the bridge, when he still believed he’d missed his target. Before Bat arrived at his side and started talking, Wyatt was all alone, and what came to his mind was that he’d missed his sister’s birthday. It was a strange thing to think, under the circumstances, but he kept coming back to it, over and over. If young George Hoyt had been a little steadier with his first shot, Adelia would always have remembered that her brother Wyatt forgot to send her a happy birthday, the year that he was killed.

Funny how much the thought bothered him.

As the night went on, Wyatt marveled that he’d been wearing a sidearm because it was so unusual for him. Ordinarily, he was just about the only sober man in town, and he counted on that for his edge. He could generally tame a troublesome drunk with a well-aimed bash across the side of the head. Carrying a weighted sap was easier than lugging a big old Colt around all night in the midsummer heat.

When he got home after his shift, he asked Mattie if she’d heard a rumor that something was going to happen. She denied it but claimed she had second sight, and said she’d had a funny feeling, so she’d handed Wyatt his gun belt before he left for work and asked him to be careful. Which was the only reason he went heeled that night: to make Mattie happy.

But if you have a gun, you’re inclined to use it. And now a kid was dying.

Wyatt didn’t go home right away when his shift was over. First he checked on Hoyt, who was still alive. Then he walked out toward the east end of town to watch the sun come up in a sky that had cleared overnight, and shone gold and pink this morning.

When he heard the familiar cough behind him, he did not turn. Doc Holliday’s steps slowed and stopped. For a while they stood together silently.

“Now I am farther from heaven than when I was a boy,” Doc said after a time. “Awful, isn’t it.”

To have someone look you right in the eye and to know that he intends to kill you. To hurt somebody so bad, he was going to die from what you did to him.

Wyatt asked, “Does it get easier?”

“No.”

That was Doc. He didn’t sugar things.

“The law can relieve a man of guilt,” Doc told him quietly, “but not of his remorse.”

The next day, before work, Wyatt went back to the jail to check on Hoyt again. By then the boy had been moved to the doctor’s clinic, so Wyatt walked over there and sat with him awhile. Most of the time Hoyt babbled, but once he seemed lucid. He looked at Wyatt—right at him, like before—and said, “You seem like a nice fella. I don’t know why they want you dead.”

“Who?” Wyatt asked. “Who wants me dead?”

“They was gonna pay me a thousand dollars, and get the charges dropped, after.”

“Who?” Wyatt asked. He never got an answer. The boy kept talking, but didn’t make any sense after that.

Wyatt went to work, like usual, but for the next two days he had a strange feeling of not hearing things quite right, like there was cotton in his ears, or water or something. And thoughts kept coming to him.

I could be dead instead of walking down this street.

Morg could be standing at my grave instead of joshing me about the hole in my hat.

I could be in the ground instead of drinking this coffee.

Somebody wants me dead, he’d think, and maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was, for he was just an ordinary man doing his job, and it struck him as unreasonable that anyone would pay so much to get him killed.

Hell, he thought. Give me the grand! I’ll leave.

Finally he realized he had to snap out of it before he made a mistake and let some other fool thing happen. Somebody else might get hurt.

The wire came back the day before George Hoyt died. He was wanted for cattle rustling, down near Amarillo.

Nobody in Dodge knew Hoyt personally, but the Texans in town that week clubbed together and gave the kid a big send-off. Wyatt watched the funeral procession from a small remove. A lot of the drovers looked at him like they might try something but nobody did, possibly because Morgan had rounded up Dog Kelley and Bat and Doc Holliday to stand right behind Wyatt, just in case. Even Eddie Foy stood with them.

It was Eddie’s idea to go over to the Iowa House for breakfast after the burial, when the crowd had dispersed. Wyatt had been broody since the night he shot the kid, so Eddie spent the whole meal trying to make the event into a funny story, telling Dog Kelley about how he thought he was pretty agile, don’t you know, until he saw Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday pancake onto the dance floor when the bullets started flying. Then Eddie told about how his brand-new eleven-dollar suit had sustained a mortal wound. When he went back to his dressing room after the shoot-out, he found three bullet holes in the suit and claimed that one was still burning.

Everyone but Eddie knew that wasn’t really possible. You’d have to fire close enough to have the muzzle flare touch the cloth to make it burn, the way it did when Bat’s brother Ed got shot. Still, nobody was inclined to argue the point—certainly not Bat, who appreciated that changing a few details could make for a better story.

Eddie’s tale would get even better when he wrote his autobiography, in 1928. By then the theater looked like a giant block of Swiss cheese, holed by a thousand bullets fired by a dozen men. Wyatt himself never found humor in the affair. His version of the incident was grimly laconic decades later, even after his account had passed through the imagination of a biographer who often preferred well-dressed drama to bare-naked fact.

On the day of George Hoyt’s funeral, Wyatt pushed his plate away, the eggs cold and his toast uneaten, and waited for Eddie to shut up. Then he told the others what young Hoyt had said about being promised $1,000 to kill him, and how Hoyt expected that the Texas warrant against him would be quashed once Wyatt was dead.

Everybody got real quiet.

“Well, that narrows it some,” Morgan pointed out, after a while. “Has to be someone with a lot of cash.”

“Or someone who could give that impression,” Doc said.

“And clout,” Eddie said, serious now, for he was a Chicago boy familiar with cutthroat politics. “You need a hell of a reach to pull strings in another state.”

“Jesse Driskill, maybe?” Bat suggested. “Word is, he was plenty hot after you arrested his nephew, Wyatt.”

Dog Kelley stared at Bat, giving him a chance to add a name.

Bat looked away.

He’s bought, Dog thought. I wonder how …

“Some men never look hot, but they never forget a slight,” Dog said, leaning back to dig fifty cents out of his pocket.

“Bob Wright,” Morgan said.

Morg was always about two steps quicker than his brother.

Dog stood and left the change on the table to pay for his breakfast.

“Watch your back,” he told Wyatt. “Next time, you won’t see it comin’.”

Call

“This’s a terrible hard country for women,” Eddie Foy had told Alexander von Angensperg at the end of May. And it was none too easy on men, judging by recent events.

One by one, the Jesuits at St. Francis were succumbing to the toil and privation of life on the prairie. Decades of labor in the Kansas wilderness had at last weakened Father Schoenmakers’ heart to such an extent that he laid down the burden of running the mission in June, and could now serve only as chaplain to the Sisters of Loretto at the Indian girls’ school nearby. The loss of Schoenmakers to St. Francis was not unexpected, for his debility had steadily worsened over the years, but when a measles epidemic carried off Father Bax, along with fifteen hundred Osage on the reservation, the brawny Belgian’s death was a great shock. By late June, even the vivacious and indefatigable little Italian Paul Ponziglione had been leveled by exhaustion and illness.

Which is why, in July of 1878, it had fallen to Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg, S.J., to assume the summer mission circuit that Father Paul ordinarily rode, and to do so atop Alphonsus, the mule that ordinarily carried Father Paul.

Both of these experiences were humbling.

Paul Ponziglione was one of those bewildering creatures born with an extraordinary facility for languages. Since coming to Kansas from Italy a quarter century earlier, Father Paul had added English and German to his native Italian and to the French, Latin, and Greek of any educated person. He also spoke five Indian tongues fluently, and had mastered the nearly universal sign language of the plains as well.

The transparent joy with which Paul conveyed his own faith—and the Italian’s personal charm—had done much to bring souls to Christ from among the Osage, the Sauk, the Pawnee, the Cherokee, and the Fox.

Even nearing sixty, the spry little priest traveled relentlessly across Kansas and southward into the Indian Territory as far as the Texas line. Like that of the saint for whom he was named, Father Paul’s missionary work encompassed nascent congregations scattered throughout vast lands peopled largely by those hostile to the Faith. He had begun to reap a small but significant harvest from seeds patiently sown in his youth, and it was his policy to visit every church three times a year.

In each village, Father Paul baptized catechumens and infants or those in danger of death. He joined young couples in holy (and monogamous) matrimony, heard confessions, and celebrated the Mass. He doctored wounds as well, and danced with merrymakers, and he settled individual and public disputes. When disease and injuries took their toll, he sat by the dying and wept with the grieving.

Baptized or Wilden, many Indians had come to consider Paul Ponziglione a friend and a brother, or son, or uncle, or cousin, or—indeed—a father. And in the summer of ’78, Alexander von Angensperg was able to take the exact measure of the reverence and affection with which Father Paul was regarded by noting the degree of distress and open dismay that greeted his own arrival.

Alexander did his garbled, halting best to reassure the Indians of various tribes that Father Paul was neither dead nor dying but merely much in need of rest. There was great relief when this understanding was reached, but that was followed by even more visible disappointment. Told that the sacraments celebrated by a different Black Robe were equally valid in heaven and on earth, the Indians displayed not so much skepticism as disgruntlement.

Arms crossed over chests.

Brows wrinkled.

Lips pursed in annoyance.

“I wanted Father Paul,” the bride, or the catechumen, or the dying man would say. “Father Paul is better.” And, Alexander was given to understand, he was better in all possible ways.

Father Paul spoke properly. He didn’t make confusing mistakes when signing.

Father Paul brought better presents. He was more gracious in receiving gifts.

Father Paul understood how to be polite, and he knew when to make a joke. He certainly never insulted anybody by accident.

Father Paul had kinder eyes. He was friendlier and more amusing.

Father Paul knew how to dance. He was a better singer, too.

Alexander was beginning to hate Father Paul.

Alphonsus, on the other hand, was growing on him. And that, too, was a useful measure of his own lingering vanity, for—man and boy, prince and cavalry officer—Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg had owned and ridden some of the finest horseflesh in Europe.

As long as he was alone on the empty plains, Alexander could appreciate the mule’s easy gait, his surefootedness, and his calm. When a prairie hen whirred into the air, a horse might well have bolted, but the middle-aged Alphonsus merely flicked his long, expressive ears in worldly disdain, for horses are flighty animals who accumulate fears and superstitions with each passing year, whereas mules learn from experience, becoming more sophisticated as they mature. Day after day, Alphonsus picked his way through terrain that would have lamed a horse, traversing ravines and hillocks, negotiating the holes and mounds of vast prairie dog cities without a stumble. A horse would have weakened and grown thin as the grass grew shorter and drier, but Alphonsus remained in fine flesh on poor grazing and was ready to move on each morning. He was a sensible and reliable animal, patient and uncomplaining.

It was only when Alexander was seen atop this admirable beast that he felt humiliated and embarrassed. And Indians unerringly took notice.

“Ata! There’s a man with no women to impress!”

“That horse looks pretty sick! Have you tried a sweat lodge?”

“I hope you didn’t trade your gold cup for that big rabbit.”

These sallies, and others like them, were considered the height of comedy. Maybe they were funnier if you spoke the language well, and if you didn’t have to ask for them to be repeated over and over, in a slow and painful effort to understand exactly how you’d just been mocked—an effort the Indians found almost as funny as the mule’s giant ears.

When he finally understood a joke, Alexander did his best to smile, but there was always one remark that made him blush. More mimed than spoken, it needed no translation. One of the women would look appraisingly at the mule’s ears, then at Alexander’s own, and ask, deadpan, “Cousins?”

Hilarity, inevitably, ensued.

Father Paul had warned that such teasing was to be expected among Indians. Paul himself put up with a lot of nose jokes, being Roman in physiognomy as well as in ancestry and faith. So Alexander soldiered on, in baking heat under a glaring sun, with no companion except Alphonsus on the long rides between each round of rejection and ridicule.

The summer and his own resolve wore away.

Alexander often prayed for patience and strength, but once, in what he suspected was the actual, factual geographic middle of absolutely nowhere, he lost all momentum and allowed the mule’s pace to slow to a halt. For a time, he simply sat there, his own head the highest thing on earth as far as the eye could see in any direction, and his heart the lowest.

Perhaps, he thought, it is time to take Schopenhauer’s advice. Eat a toad first thing in the morning; the rest of the day will seem pleasurable by comparison.

Assuming he could find a toad.

Staring at the table-flat horizon, he would sometimes watch an electrical storm gather, build, break, and dissipate, often in eerie silence—the entire drama so far away that he hardly heard the thunder, though he could see the lightning. Late on one sweltering afternoon, a funnel-shaped cloud emerged from the bottom of a towering green-gray thunderhead in the distance. Lengthening, reaching toward the ground, the cyclone wobbled and spun drunkenly across the empty land, its journey as useless as his own.

He had not felt so hopeless since his days as a novice, still learning the community’s ways, still doing everything he could to get thrown out—things that would have gotten him flogged in the military. “Do you want this?” the novice master demanded every time Alexander defied a superior or came to blows with one of his potential brothers in Christ.

“I want what God wants for me,” Alexander would answer, stubborn, willful, and friendless.

Which simply raised the question …

… that was, at last, answered one night on the Oklahoma plains where he lay on the open ground, in the rain and near the mule, probably lost and certainly despondent. To his dying day, he was not sure if he was awake or asleep or someplace in between when he heard a single word: Timothy.

The next morning, at first gray light, he awoke to the bland curiosity of Alphonsus, who watched, munching weeds, while Alexander rolled creakily onto his hands and knees, swatted insects away, checked his boots for scorpions, scratched a dozen new bites, took a piss, and dug a small New Testament out of his oilskin pack. He opened it to the letters of Saint Paul. Before his eyes, the text turned inside out.

Every line of Paul’s praise and encouragement whispered to Alexander of the dejection and frustration that Timothy must have been reporting as he followed in the footsteps of the saint. Like Timothy, Alexander von Angensperg was ready to teach the Gospel, willing to endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, eager to receive knowledge and understanding from God in the service of God. Like Timothy, everywhere he went, he was considered nothing more than a poor and unwelcome substitute for a man named Paul.

Over the next few days, Alexander studied and took to heart the saint’s instruction to Timothy on the teaching of sound doctrine and on being an example of faith in word, conduct, love, and spirit. While Alphonsus found his own way along a trail that the mule had walked three times a year for twenty years, Alexander’s mind was free to compose a sermon that might lead Indian converts to see a connection between themselves and the early Church established by their beloved pastor’s patron saint.

From then on, in every village, Alexander promised to convey the Indians’ concern, good wishes, prayers, and love to Father Paul, just as Timothy must have promised to convey news of the Philippians and Ephesians and Colossians to Saint Paul. He stopped trying so hard to say everything correctly and learned to laugh at his own mistakes, and learned as well to enjoy the good-humored teasing that marks so much of Indian life. When he stopped talking and listened instead, he found that even the proudest and most recalcitrant of the Wilden believed in a spiritual reality beyond the physical, that they shared his own desire to understand and join with the sacred power alive in this world. And there were moments, now and then, when he sensed strongly the presence of the Holy Spirit amid the souls who had gathered in tiny board churches or simply stood together during the Mass under broad blue skies.

In early August, Alexander arrived at yet another indistinguishably squalid village and was taken immediately to an Indian girl of fifteen. She requested baptism from Alexander himself, rather than waiting for Father Paul, for she knew she was near death from consumption and wished to join the Church. Though her relatives were heathens, they could not deny this beloved child anything that might ease her passing. Alexander had just enough time for a brief preparation before the girl’s wish could be fulfilled. Then he laid the consecrated Host on the tongue of the newly christened Mary Clare.

With that food of angels in her mouth, she breathed out her soul and was immediately united with her Creator. There was a hushed, awestruck moment before her family began to wail. She is in heaven, Alexander thought, stunned. I have witnessed a saint’s death.

In the long years to come, Alexander von Angensperg would pray for Mary Clare’s intercession, especially after he was transferred to the Rosebud Reservation in the 1890s. Nine of ten Lakota died of tuberculosis in those days, and each time Alexander was called to a deathbed like Mary Clare’s, he prayed that she would bring about one of the three miracles he needed to present her case for canonization.

By the time Alexander had assembled his evidence, the Sacra Rituum Congregatio had already begun beatification of a young Carmelite nun known to her devotees as the Little Flower of Jesus. Like Mary Clare, Thérèse of Lisieux had suffered from and died of tuberculosis, but the Little Flower had influential European supporters who were able to press her cause in Rome; Mary Clare had a single elderly Jesuit in South Dakota, so the petition on her behalf languished in back offices of the Vatican. But Alexander von Angensperg knew what he knew. That beautiful Indian child was in heaven. She was especially solicitous of those dying of consumption. And she could effect a cure—or at least a remission—of the disease in special circumstances.

He had seen this thrice, he believed, with his own eyes. The first time was in the summer of 1878, just outside Dodge City.

That August, after the crops were in and before the harvest began, a two-week platform convention for the Republican Party of Kansas was held in Topeka. Among the delegates was Wyatt S. Earp (occupation: policeman; residence: Dodge City, Ford County). Neatly dressed in black and wearing a decent pair of freshly polished boots, Deputy Earp was accompanied by a quiet woman whose age was difficult to guess. She was not young, but neither was she more worn than might be expected of a farmer’s wife, and she was well turned out in a deep blue that complemented her hair and complexion. Wyatt would introduce her as Mattie Earp but did not call her “my wife,” for they were not married then and never would be. He let her use his name for the occasion and did not tell her to quit it afterward.

The morning Mattie and Wyatt left for Topeka, Morgan and Lou and Doc and Kate came to the Dodge depot to see them off. Morgan had been on Wyatt’s back all week about letting Doc exercise Dick Naylor while Wyatt was away. Wyatt still hadn’t said yes or no. He didn’t want any trouble with Kate—there’d be hell to pay if anything happened—but he hated to disappoint Doc.

Morgan was giving it one last try as the warning whistle shrieked. “Come on, Wyatt! Doc knows to be careful, and I’ll watch out for him.”

Kate didn’t say anything, but she was standing right behind Doc, where Wyatt could see her scowl and Doc couldn’t.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt said, glancing at Kate. “What if Dick gets spooked by a coyote or something? He might throw you again, Doc. And you’d be out on the prairie—”

“I won’t go far,” Doc promised. “And I’ll stick to trails with traffic on them. And I’ll tell Morg when I’m leavin’. If I don’t get back in a couple of hours, he can come lookin’ for me. Did you read that Scientific American article I gave you?”

Doc doesn’t know! Mattie realized with some surprise. Wyatt hasn’t told him!

Which meant Wyatt was embarrassed that he couldn’t hardly read. And that was the first sign she’d had that Mr. Wyatt Earp wasn’t quite so perfect as he seemed. It made Mattie feel a little better about him.

She had listened while Morgan read the article to Wyatt. There was a new notion about how to cure consumption: a combination of hard exercise and cold baths was supposed to “build resistance to the illness” and give people like Doc the strength to get over it. Doc’s idea was that he could take Dick Naylor out for an hour or two of riding every day while Wyatt was out of town. The horse would stay in condition for a race that was coming up at the end of the month, and Doc would have a couple of weeks to find out if he got any better. “We’ll see if that punishment fits my crime” was how he put it. If the exercise didn’t help or if he felt worse, he’d give it up and let Morgan take over Dick’s care until Wyatt got back.

Mattie knew her place. She had no right to mix in, but Doc had been helpful to her and she wanted to take his side. The only reason she was going to Topeka was because Doc showed her how to pick out dresses and told her about table manners and things like that. Otherwise she’d have found an excuse, even though Wyatt thought she’d enjoy the excursion and claimed he really wanted her to come with him.

Mattie rarely said a word in public, and not much more in private. It took her until the train was almost ready to go before she found the nerve to touch Wyatt’s elbow. “He’ll break down or he’ll toughen up,” she said. “Let him find out which.”

Everybody looked at her like she was a pig that up and flew.

Wyatt blinked a couple of times and finally said, “Oh, hell. All right, then,” probably because Mattie had never asked for anything before and he didn’t want to say no to her the first time. Morg grinned that big happy smile of his. Kate narrowed her eyes and glared. Doc told Wyatt he wouldn’t regret it, then took Mattie’s hand and kissed it like she was a lady, and leaned over to whisper, “Mattie, honey, I am in your debt.”

The conductor was hollering, “Board!” by then. Wyatt tried to help Mattie up the long first step, but she told him, “I ain’t crippled.” She meant that she wasn’t some fragile little thing that needed to be treated like a china doll, but Wyatt looked kind of hurt, so she shrugged and let him take her arm, if that’s what he wanted.

Inside the car, Wyatt was going to have her sit on the aisle so she wouldn’t get dirty from the ash or get holes in her clothes from the cinders. Feeling bolder, she told him, “I’d like to see,” so he let her be by the window instead.

Doc was still standing on the platform when the train pulled away. Mattie gave him a little wave. He swept off his slouch hat, held it over his heart, and bowed, his shining eyes on Mattie’s own.

It would have annoyed her if Wyatt did that, but somehow … Doc was different.

His first foray on Dick was enjoyable and uneventful. True to his word, he didn’t ride far, turning back after half an hour, while he still had enough starch left to unsaddle the horse himself and brush the animal down.

The second day was harder, for he had stiffened some. The third, it was a real struggle to tack up. As he approached the Elephant Barn on the way back, he was sufficiently whipped to consider paying the oldest of the Riney boys to take care of the horse. Instead, he rested for a few minutes after dismounting. Then he managed on his own.

Things got better after that.

With some experimentation, he determined that the best time to ride was just past sunup, before the summer heat set in. By the end of the first week, he found it noticeably easier to lift the saddle from the rack, carry it to Dick Naylor’s side, and settle it onto the horse’s back. Even Kate had to admit that riding was good for him. He was stronger, no doubt about it. And he was hungry again—genuinely by-God hungry. For food. For music. For Kate.

Nights, he was content to deal faro, building up a stake for the next big poker game. Kate was relieved to see easy money accumulating, and her mood brightened as well. She kept a couple of special clients, but when she went over to James and Bessie’s now, it was usually a social call. That made Doc happier.

Less anxious about his health and its consequences for her own life, Kate was able to think more clearly about his day work. It was she who suggested that Doc have the Eberhardt boy keep an eye on the office in the mornings. It wasn’t necessary for Doc to sit around waiting for patients, she pointed out. If someone showed up first thing in the morning, Wilfred could run down to China Joe’s and let Doc know that he should go straight to No. 24 after he cleaned up from his ride. If nobody was waiting, Doc could come home and be on call instead of sitting around in the office.

And Kate made sure that they found a better use for his time.

Mabel Riney wasn’t taking any excuses on the morning of August 14, 1878. “It’s your job, John,” she told her husband, rousting him out of bed. “Get up and do it.” And if his head pounded with every hoofbeat as drovers crossed the bridge and went back to their herds after their own long night, well, that was just too bad.

Doc Holliday rode up to the tollgate on Wyatt Earp’s two-dollar horse a little past dawn. Wincing into the sun, John held out his palm and parts of some fingers to collect the toll.

Handing over two bits, the dentist looked out across the river and said in a singing kind of way, “Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” Then, in a regular voice, he said, “I’ll be followin’ the cattle trail south for a couple of hours, Mr. Riney. If I don’t come back across the bridge by eight, you should probably ask Morgan Earp to ride out and collect my corpse for shipment back to Georgia.”

Years later, after Mabel Riney was dead, when John Riney was old and toothless and a hopeless drunkard, he would let punks buy him beers while he told about the day the infamous Doc Holliday spoke of his bones whitening on the prairie.

“Doc got off his horse about halfway over the toll bridge, see? And he stood there at the railing, watching the river. I reckoned he was about to drown hisself because he was so sick,” John would tell anybody who’d pay for a drink. “Don’t do it, Doc! That’s what I hollered, and I guess I saved his life that day. But y’see, that’s why Doc was so fearless down there in Tombstone! Because he was going to die soon anyways, so he might as well get it over with.”

The funny thing was, nobody really believed that John Riney had ever met Doc Holliday, but they all believed what he said about the dentist hoping to die sooner than later. Of course, John Riney did know Doc—not well, but they had a nodding acquaintance. And Doc did speak of the possibility of dying out on the prairie south of Dodge, but it was a joke that John didn’t get because he tended to take things at face value even when he hadn’t been drinking most of the week, and in John’s defense, Doc did make the remark straight-faced.

So John nodded solemnly and said, “Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

Head throbbing, he watched the dentist start across the bridge and then dismount halfway across. John came to his own conclusions about that, for there was no way he could have known that it was Doc’s birthday, or that the dentist was in fact feeling remarkably cheerful.

“Twenty-seven years old and not dead yet!” John Henry Holliday had marvelled while saddling Dick Naylor that morning. “Let’s go see what’s south of that bridge this mornin’,” he suggested, flipping the stirrup leathers down.

Responding to his rider’s high spirits, Dick was prancing and full of himself coming out of the Elephant Barn into the cool of early morning, but the roadbed of the toll bridge was unfamiliar and Dick didn’t like it much. Rather than get bucked off by a skittish horse, John Henry dismounted and spoke soothingly to the animal, letting Dick come to terms with the situation. In the meantime, the arch of the bridge provided a slight rise in perspective he enjoyed.

“Dick, if you want a hill in Kansas, you have to by-God build it yourself,” he remarked.

It was a pretty morning. A thunderstorm the night before had cleared the air. Graceful in the breeze, bluestem grass rippled under a sky the color of Kate’s eyes. Phlox and mallow and goldenrod added lavender and pink and yellow to the scene. Red-winged blackbirds trilled in the cattails along the river.

It was a wonder to him now that he’d once failed to appreciate the beauty of this land. The trick of it, he’d lately realized, was to pay attention to the sky as part of the landscape. The rising sun was gilding high cottony clouds from below. In a few hours, as the light shifted upward, those clouds would send amethyst and turquoise shadows racing over the emerald ground, and their sweep across the land would reveal subtle undulations in terrain that only appeared flat to the careless observer.

His own quiet contentment calmed Dick. Soon the horse felt ready to walk over the scary, hollow-sounding surface with the noisy, glittery water below, and to let his rider remount when they reached the solid ground beyond. Swinging easily onto the saddle, sitting comfortably fifteen and a half hands above the earth, gazing at the country south of the Arkansas, John Henry found himself engulfed by a sense of his own well-being. He was grateful to Kate for insisting that they come to Dodge and glad the two of them were working things out. He was pleased that he had made friends here and elated to have returned at last to a useful profession that provided him with so much satisfaction.

And—God a’mighty—to be riding again!

Since coming West, he had been neither well enough nor prosperous enough for long enough to consider keeping a horse to ride for pleasure. Now, with Dick Naylor beneath him, he felt himself a joyful boy once more: privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being.

It came to him then that if things worked out the way he hoped, he might just buy a colt from Wyatt Earp one day. By Dick Naylor out of Roxana.

For the first time since he’d begun his practice in Atlanta at the age of twenty-one, John Henry Holliday was beginning to think of the future as though he had a right to it. And why not? Outside, in the growing warmth and the brilliant sunshine, rocking in the rhythm of a ground-eating lope, he was aware of his body from his head to his heels and he felt fine.

Thirteen and a half months had passed since Henry Kahn had tried to kill him. His hip had healed slowly but fully; the scarring gave him trouble with some movements, but most days now his cane was more fashionable than functional. The pain beneath his left scapula was probably muscular; he just needed to get used to stooping over patients again. The cough was bad occasionally; he should be more careful about the things that set it off. Granted, breathing was sometimes difficult, but he expected to do better after the cattle season ended, absent the dust.

He could ride now for a good two hours at a stretch, and he felt fortunate to have lived long enough to learn that the cure for his illness might be as simple as “Go on outside and enjoy yourself, son.” He wasn’t so certain he’d enjoy cold baths when the weather cooled off, but for now, they were remarkably refreshing after exertion. China Joe charged less for unheated water, so that part of the therapy even saved money, which pleased Miss Kate. He was tired after the rides, but that was the whole point of the exercise, and he was sleeping so much better! He awoke restored, feeling far more rested than he had during the enforced idleness imposed by Tom McCarty after the fall on the Fourth of July.

John Henry Holliday was better in every way he could think of.

It didn’t occur to him to think that better is not the same as well.

Was he fooling himself? He would not have said so. Even at twenty-two, when his diagnosis was confirmed, he was realistic. Most suffer. Everyone dies. He knew how, if not when.

Now more than ever, he was determined to cheat the Fates of entertainment, but naturally, his time would come. When it did, he believed he would accept death as Socrates had: with cool philosophical distance. He would say something funny, or profound, or loving. Then he would let life fall gracefully from his hands.

Horseshit, as James Earp would say, of the highest order.

The truth is this. On the morning of August 14, 1878, Doc Holliday believed in his own death exactly as you do—today, at this very moment. He knew that he was mortal, just as you do. Of course, you know you’ll die someday, but … not quite the same way you know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that dropped objects fall.

The great bitch-goddess Hope sees to that.

Sit in a physician’s office. Listen to a diagnosis as bad as Doc’s. Beyond the first few words, you won’t hear a thing. The voice of Hope is soft but impossible to ignore. This isn’t happening, she assures you. There’s been a mix-up with the tests. Hope swears, You’re different. You matter. She whispers, Miracles happen. She says, often quite reasonably, New treatments are being developed all the time! She promises, You’ll beat the odds.

A hundred to one? A thousand to one? A million to one?

Eight to five, Hope lies.

Odds are, when your time comes, you won’t even ask, “For or against?”

You’ll swing up on that horse, and ride.

A week earlier, while enjoying a state of happiness as profound and unexamined as Doc’s own, Alexander von Angensperg had come at last to the border of the Indian Territory. There the Great Western Trail was a wide path beaten into the grassland by millions of hooves. Trusting that it would lead him to the German farming communities of Ford County in southwestern Kansas, Alexander turned Alphonsus northward.

Pasturage improved steadily. Approaching the Arkansas River, he began to encounter cattle companies that had paused to fatten their herds before sale in Dodge. He camped with several crews overnight, but his days were spent alone until a clear mid-August morning, when he saw in the distance a coal-black dot, startling against the sunlit grass.

A lone surviving bison, he supposed, forlornly searching for a companion. But as Alexander closed on it, the shape gradually resolved into a fine dark stallion with a slender, smiling rider. It seemed a message from God when this person called out a quote from Saint Paul.

“Put to death that which is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness … ridin’ a respectable horse.”

“Dr. Holliday!” Alexander cried, adding with astonished delight, “You look … well!”

“Very kind of you to say so, sir. I am well!” Doc declared, leaning over to offer his hand. “Keats and Shelley went to France and Italy for their cure. Kansas doesn’t have the same cachet, but then I am a dentist and not a poet. What is a refined Austrian hyparchos like yourself doin’ on an ugly mule like that?”

“The Lord’s work,” Alexander replied, feeling sure of it now. “That is a splendid animal you have!”

“Isn’t he a daisy? When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk! He trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it!”

“Homer …? No! Wait—Henry V!”

“Full marks!” Doc cried, reining around. “Father von Angensperg, may I present Dick Naylor? A quarter-miler to be reckoned with.”

“And this is Alphonsus,” Alexander replied, “a mule aptly named for a saint of many virtues.”

As though no time had passed since their first meeting, they tumbled into a conversation that began with Alexander’s now unabashed admiration for Alphonsus and Doc’s gracious admission that mules were highly prized in the South and considered superior to horses for many purposes. This led to a discussion of mule breeding, and that to horse breeding, and that to Wyatt Earp, who hoped to build a stud farm around Dick Naylor.

“I fear you have missed Wyatt again, sir,” Doc told Alexander. “He’s in Topeka, at the state convention of the Republican Party—” His lip curled at the words, and he added a confession dark with melodrama: “I have fallen in with evil companions.”

From there, the conversation veered off toward the score for Brahms’ Second Symphony, which Alexander had sent two months earlier, and that became a discussion of its orchestration. Music persisted as their topic until Dodge became visible in the distance, and Doc suggested that they have lunch together after he attended any patients that might be waiting for him. “Have you ever tried Chinese food?” Doc asked. “I have developed a taste for it, myself.” It was an enthusiasm he had passed on to Morgan and Wyatt, he told the priest, and with the expansiveness that comes with recovered health, Doc had urged Jau Dong-Sing to open a restaurant on Front Street, even promising that he and Kate would invest in the venture.

“Ah … so Athena has rejoined you?” Alexander asked carefully.

“Adjustments made,” Doc said briefly. “Compromises reached.”

The couple had come to an agreement about his working hours after Doc conceded that he’d been burning the candle at both ends while getting started in Dodge. Things were going well now, and he felt sure he would one day have as large a practice as he had cared for back in Georgia. People were even coming in by train, some from as far as Wichita.

Struck by this news, Alexander asked if he might propose a short trip east. The students at St. Francis would benefit from the attention of a dentist, he told Doc. “We couldn’t pay you much,” the priest admitted. “Perhaps a train ticket—”

“Nonsense!” Doc cried. “I will do the work pro bono, of course. My Catholic cousin Martha Anne will be happy to know I am assistin’ you in your work at the mission. Can you wait until October? I hate to leave Dodge during the cattle season, but I expect things to quiet down in the autumn.”

Just then a black-tailed jackrabbit flashed by. Alphonsus walked steadily on, but Dick Naylor shied and danced.

“He has taken a dislike to dogs recently,” Doc remarked, wheeling Dick until the horse settled. “I imagine anything crossin’ his path looks fearsome now.”

This reminded Alex of a cavalry charger he’d once owned. (“Valiant under cannon fire! Terrified of chickens!”) The rest of the ride was passed in an amusing exchange regarding the irrationality of horses, during which Doc alluded to his participation in the Fourth of July race. (“Do tell, sir! I am agog with anticipation!” Alexander cried.) The story of the fall was alarming, but the dentist assured the priest that he had recovered fully and felt entirely well now. Certainly he looked and sounded vastly better than he had in May, when he was exhausted and a good deal paler.

“When, exactly, did your condition begin to improve?” Alexander asked. “May I guess? A fortnight ago?”

“About then. Why?”

“I am curious, only,” Alexander said, giving silent thanks to Mary Clare, for he had been praying for John Henry Holliday since turning north toward Dodge. “If you come east in October, we could perhaps go to St. Louis for a few days! I understand the orchestra there is excellent.”

When they reached the tollbooth, Doc insisted on paying, and insisted as well that Alphonsus should have a night of luxury at the Elephant Barn, and that Alexander himself be Doc’s guest at Dodge House before continuing his circuit around Ford County. When Alexander began to thank him, Doc held up a hand.

“My pleasure, sir, but I would like to ask for something in return, if you don’t object.”

“Anything,” Alexander said, “that is not sinful or illegal.”

“Neither of those. A little more than curiosity, I should say. A little less than suspicion.”

Doc outlined what he wanted. It was simple enough. Alexander was happy to oblige, but puzzled. “Why not ask about this yourself?”

“The sin of pride, I suppose,” Doc said. “Such an inquiry might invite others to believe that I am hopin’ to be recompensed for the expense of the wake, and that is most surely not my intent.”

“Daddy? Daddy! A man just came into the store.”

Bob Wright looked up from the order he was working on in the back room. It takes a fair amount to unnerve a child raised in Kansas, and a man coming into the store was not what you’d call unusual, but Belle was standing in the doorway, half-hiding herself, holding on to the jamb. It had been a long time since Bob had heard that little-girl uncertainty in her voice. His reaction was swift: grip the shotgun he kept under his desk and go directly to her side.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“Daddy,” she said with quiet urgency, lifting her chin slightly toward the front door, “that man is wearing a dress!”

Frowning, Bob scanned the customers for someone sporting a beard and a bustle. He’d seen stranger things in his day … But when he spotted the gentleman in question, Bob put the shotgun away.

“Father von Angensperg!” he called, going out to the counter with his hand extended in welcome. “Nice to see you again, sir.”

Belle recognized the name. It was that of Johnnie Sanders’ favorite teacher at St. Francis, back in Wichita. So that’s a Jesuit, she thought, not a crazy person!

This realization failed to make her feel a great deal better because everybody knew Jesuits took orders straight from the pope. Her father said that they were in league with Irish immigrants to take over the United States, which was why she wasn’t allowed to attend Johnnie’s funeral: because there might be some sort of papist uprising, or riot, or something. Even at the time, that seemed a little far-fetched, but the day of the funeral, Belle couldn’t argue with a locked door, and that was exactly why she took this opportunity to meet the man Johnnie had liked so much.

The moment her father stopped to take a breath, Belle said, “Daddy, would you introduce me to the gentleman, please?” Which he did, because there wasn’t really any courteous way to get out of it.

So there she was, little old Isabelle Wright, surrounded by shirts, hats, boots, canned goods, flour barrels, hair tonic, and neckerchiefs, saying howdy-do to an international conspirator wearing a dress! And she didn’t know what she might have expected such a person to be like, but it wasn’t this handsome older man with his sunburned face and smiling blue eyes and lovely manners. She was sort of thrilled by the way he straightened and clicked his heels and took her hand like he was going to kiss it, although he didn’t really—he just bowed over it and brought it close to his lips like he was going to—and said how pleased he was to meet her.

Except—and this might have been her imagination—there was something sort of strange in his expression, like he’d noticed something about her and felt concerned about it. That was disturbing, but Belle covered her confusion by telling him that Johnnie had spoken of him often.

Before she could say much more, her father cut in—so friendly in that embarrassing, fake way of his—to ask, in his heartiest voice, “What can I do for you on this fine day, sir?”

“I was wondering if I might have a minute of your time,” the Jesuit said with a refined-sounding German accent. “I would like to ask a few questions about some money Johnnie Sanders might have left in your care, if that would be convenient.”

Which caused Belle to prick up her ears, and don’t think she didn’t notice the way her father made clear that it wasn’t a bit convenient, letting his attention be interrupted three or four times for things that one of the clerks could have done perfectly well, like quoting prices for a cowboy who wanted “a bran-new rig,” and penciling a long order on some brown paper for a trail boss, and generally stalling around like anything.

Suddenly international papist conspiracies were less intriguing than her own father’s odd behavior, so just to see what would happen, Belle said in her best Helpful Hannah voice, “Daddy, I’d be happy to take the gentleman into the back until you have time to speak to him.” And before her father could say no, she asked the priest, “May I offer you a cup of coffee, sir?”

Well! That changed her father’s mind about what would be convenient and when, because he took the priest right back into the office and closed the door behind them. But Belle was determined to find out what was going on, so she stood right by the door to listen and didn’t care a rap if anybody saw her do it, either.

The priest’s voice was pretty quiet, but her father’s had a sort of carrying quality to it. Belle was familiar with some of what he was saying, so it was easy to figure out what she couldn’t hear. Bob didn’t know anything about any money, but allowed as how Johnnie might have booked his cash and put it in the safe without mentioning it. Bob himself used to keep all the transactions in his head, but he was out of town a lot, what with being a state representative and so on, lot of responsibilities, you see. He’d trusted Johnnie to do the books in his absence. Then the boy died in the fire just as the cattle season was picking up steam, and Father von Angensperg could see for himself how busy the store was. Bob had been more careful about accounts back when he had business partners in the old days, but since he bought out Charlie Rath and Henry Beverley, he’d gotten careless because there was nobody else to answer to, and that was why he’d hired Johnnie to take over the books in the first place.

Now, it was Belle’s observation that when people gave a whole lot of reasons for something, it was because they were trying hard to make sure you didn’t notice something else. And she was trying to figure out what her father was covering up when he said, “I haven’t really looked at the account books since Johnnie passed on. What kinda figure are we talking about here, do you know?”

The answer was so startling that her father repeated it, and Belle gasped, which set off one of those coughing spells that had been giving her trouble lately. It was probably just hay fever, which doctors said now wasn’t really a fever and didn’t have anything to do with hay, but Belle did feel awfully warm, at night especially, and she would be glad when the first frost hit because she expected she’d feel better after the goldenrod died back.

She was still coughing when her father opened the door and frowned at her like he knew she’d been eavesdropping and didn’t like it, but he couldn’t say anything about it because he was still talking to the priest.

“Well, I sure don’t know anything about a sum of money like that, but I’ll check into it for you, and I’ll let you know if I find anything out,” he said. Except he had a sort of stiff look on his face that meant, Hell will freeze solid before I tell you anything about my books, you Catholic fiend. You probably want that money for the pope.

Belle could tell that Father von Angensperg wasn’t a bit fooled either. He thanked her father for his time, though his eyes were on Belle as he spoke, and he had that look of compassionate concern again, which gave Belle the cold creeps because she didn’t know as there was anything to be concerned or compassionate about. Personally, she thought she was the last person in Kansas anybody should feel sorry for, given that she was tolerably pretty and her daddy was indecently rich and her whole life was laid out before her like a banquet on a fine lace tablecloth, and yet …

Wordlessly, Alexander von Angensperg reached toward the girl’s pale and pretty face. His fingers felt cool when he touched her cheek, flushed and pink.

Mary Clare’s age, he was thinking. Poor child. Poor child.

“I will pray for you,” he promised softly, cupping her chin in his hand.

Hope smiled.

The Fates laughed.

Belle frowned.

“Um. Thank you, sir,” she said.

Under the Table

At speed, steel wheels clicking over rail joins have a cradle’s rhythm. Lulled by the heat and the train’s sway, at least half the people in the second-class car were dozing. Wyatt was drowsy himself and Mattie Blaylock was sound asleep, her head drooping against his shoulder.

He was pretty sure Mattie had enjoyed going to Topeka. On balance, anyways. She liked looking in the shop windows and there were some good shows in the theaters, but she was kind of spooked by how the political people acted when Wyatt introduced her. Men would smile and tell Wyatt how he was a lucky fella to have such a lovely lady on his arm, and so on. Mattie’d just stand there without saying anything back, the suspicion plain in her face. The silence would go on until Wyatt said something like “Yes, sir. I guess I am.”

First time that happened, Mattie rounded on him when they got back to their hotel room, like it was his fault when other men paid her a compliment. “I ain’t lovely and I ain’t no lady, and you ain’t lucky to have me, and you know it!” she told him, and he couldn’t tell if she was going to cry or spit. “What am I supposed to do when people say shit like that?”

Wyatt blinked. “Well,” he said, trying to be helpful, “Lou says thank you.”

“A man talks nice, he wants something,” Mattie muttered.

She was pretty bitter about that. You could tell. And truth was, Wyatt did want something, but he was getting better at living with a woman again, and figured now wasn’t the time.

“Nice ain’t always a trick,” he said, watching her undress. “You’re prettier’n you think,” he added, realizing that it was true just as the words were coming out of his mouth. He didn’t say anything about the “lucky” part. Mattie might’ve noticed that, because she just looked at him hard and snorted before she turned her back to him.

Later that night, lying in bed, thinking, it struck him that Mattie’s story was like Dick Naylor’s. It was natural that she was nervy and suspicious. All men had ever done was ride her hard and hit her. But if a horse could change, so could a person, and Wyatt thought maybe Mattie would get used to being treated better, like Dick had. He hoped so, because Morg was right. Mattie wasn’t such a bad person. She’d just been ill-used in her youth.

Sure enough, a couple of mornings after that, when they were getting ready to go out for breakfast, he noticed Mattie gazing at her reflection in the mirror. She tried a little smile then, and he could see her lips shape the words “Thank you,” like she was practicing, the way he had practiced “Mississippi” and “fifty-five.” Before she could catch him looking, he turned away because he didn’t want to spoil it for her. He knew how different you could feel when you saw yourself different, and he liked that he was helping Mattie the way Doc had helped him.

That was when, without warning, a wave of feeling washed over him. It wasn’t love, like he had for Urilla. Even so, it felt pretty good.

As the convention went on, Mattie started saying “Thank you” out loud when somebody said something nice to her, and then she’d glance at Wyatt and he’d nod, sort of proud of her. She still looked embarrassed, and never said more than two words if she could help it, but she started standing up a little straighter, like maybe it wasn’t so bad to be noticed.

Course, nobody in Topeka knew what she used to be. As far as anyone at the convention knew, Mattie was Wyatt’s real wife. And without really wanting to, Wyatt began to wonder how it would be if he and Mattie didn’t go back to Dodge. Like: what if they just got on the train and stayed on it? What if they rode to the end of the rails, out in Colorado? They could get a clean start, both of them. Wyatt could quit busting heads and getting shot at. He wasn’t as good as Johnnie Sanders or Doc Holliday, but he guessed he could make a living dealing faro in Denver. And Mattie could be a new person. Happier, maybe. Less afraid.

Trouble was, a lot of men in Topeka had just spent two weeks telling Wyatt he should run against Bat Masterson for sheriff of Ford County, and how the party would back him if he did. And when Bob Wright came up for reelection, they said, Wyatt ought to challenge him for representative on the Republican ticket. That’s how Prohibition would get passed: one Dry representative elected at a time, until the legislature finally had enough anti-saloon men to do the right thing. But it would mean settling in Dodge for good. Which put Wyatt in mind of the train joke Eddie Foy told, where a conductor comes along the aisle and asks a drunk where he’s going. “To hell, I reckon,” the drunk says, and the conductor answers, “Ticket’s a dollar. Get off at Dodge.”

Halfway across Kansas now, listening to the chug and click of the train, Wyatt stared out the window, letting his thoughts settle some while he watched the land go by. Funny how you were traveling faster than a horse could run, and you knew you were moving, but there was no sense of the land under you. You lost the smell of grass crushed under your mount’s hooves and the sound of the leather creaking beneath your hips. You couldn’t really see anything small. The world was just two big slabs of color. Blue above, green below. Things got simpler.

It came down to this. If he was going to run against Bat, he needed more than suspicion. He needed a reason.

Put up or shut up, he thought.

It was early evening when the train pulled into Dodge. Lou and Morg were there to meet them but not Doc, who was laid up with a cold. Morgan wanted to go to Delmonico’s for a meal, so Wyatt could tell him and Lou about the convention, but Mattie had one of her headaches starting and couldn’t stand the thought of food. They stopped by Tom McCarty’s pharmacy to get her a dose of laudanum; that was the only thing that kept her from throwing up until she had dry heaves. Wyatt got her home and helped her into bed, but soon as she was asleep, he left to take a walk around town.

Morgan was back on duty by then, and he figured Wyatt would want to know what had gone on while he was in Topeka.

Wyatt brushed the report off and asked instead, “Where’s Bat?”

“He’s not at the Lone Star?” Morg asked after a moment.

Wyatt just looked at him, like he knew Morgan was stalling for time. Which he was.

“Well, it’s pretty quiet tonight,” Morg said then. “Maybe he’s over at the Iowa House?”

“Already checked.” Wyatt glanced away before giving Morgan that hard stare that could feel like a shove. “Where’s his money coming from, Morg?”

Morgan’s eyes dropped. “I ain’t gonna lie to you, Wyatt, but I’d rather you didn’t ask—”

“Morg, are you covering for him?”

“Well, see, we just figured what you didn’t know wouldn’t—”

“Where,” Wyatt said very quietly, “is he?”

Morg lasted about three seconds. “Out past Duck Creek,” he said. “A little north of Howells.”

In late November of 1853, when Catherine Masterson gave birth to her second son, nearly a dozen years had passed since the infamous Lilly-McCoy bare-knuckle boxing match in Hastings, New York. Even so, when her son Bat was a boy, men still spoke of that epic contest the way the Greeks and Trojans once spoke of mighty Achilles and brave Hector, in voices hushed by secondhand awe.

Homer sang of boxing matches. Vergil wrote of them. Pindar called down the blessings of Zeus upon them. In paint and in marble and in bronze, on vases and in murals and with heroic statuary, ancient artisans depicted the boxer’s manly beauty, with its cauliflower ears, its honorable scars and blunt, mashed nose.

For millennia, one man had squared off against another on a point of honor or simply to settle a question, here and now, once and for all. Which of us is stronger? Which more fearless and more fearsome? Which of us is the better man? In all that time, empires had risen and flourished and stumbled and failed. Maps of the world had been drawn and redrawn; globes had been invented. Wars and revolutions and science and industry had changed everything—but not boxing. It took the Lilly-McCoy fight to do that.

As a kid, Bat Masterson studied accounts of the match the way better-educated boys read The Iliad. In Bat’s opinion, the fight should have been stopped in the seventy-seventh round, and he was probably right. Even then, long before it was over, McCoy was in bad shape. All the newspapermen agreed about that, and they’d recorded his condition in lascivious detail. Lips grotesquely swollen. Blackened eyes puffed to slits. Broad chest red and slimy with the blood he vomited in quick, efficient gouts during the half-minute rest between the rounds. The darling of Irish immigrants, Tom McCoy would not concede, and swore he’d die before he’d let a fucking Englishman like Christopher Lilly best him. Cocky to the end, McCoy went 119 rounds, surviving a total of two hours and forty-one minutes until—choking on blood, blinded by it, speechless but head up and still defiant—he staggered into the ring from his corner, toed the scratch mark one last time, and fell down, stone-cold dead.

There were other fights that lasted as long or longer, fought by men as good or better, but the Lilly-McCoy event took on a larger meaning the moment Irish Tom died. Chris Lilly was forced to flee the country, skipping out ahead of a manslaughter charge. Eighteen others involved with the contest were arrested, tried, convicted, fined, and jailed.

Freelance scolds seized on boxing as a new source of indignation to fuel America’s rancorous political debates. People who’d never given boxing a thought—ladies and maiden aunties, for the love of Christ!—developed opinions about the sport. Rather than celebrate the victor’s unflagging sledgehammer power and the loser’s astonishing stamina, reformers attacked Lilly as a savage beast who had transformed McCoy’s face from the image of God into a loathsome ruin. The indomitable McCoy became a pitiable, doomed lamb led to the slaughter, and not the roaring, valorous, dying lion he was, refusing to be vanquished even as he was beaten.

Suddenly boxing was a thing to be loathed and done away with, like slavery and alcohol. Abolitionists rammed legislation through in state after state, until the fights were outlawed almost everywhere. “Goddam do-gooder busybodies,” Bat’s father always muttered whenever the subject came up, and it did so often.

Thomas Masterson was a hardworking, law-abiding man who’d never raised a hand in anger, not even against Bat, who might have benefited from a clout across the ear now and then. What Bat’s father couldn’t stand was reformers telling him what to do and think. Following the fights was a way to poke windbag meddlers in the eye. Tom Masterson did so with a boyish glee that he passed on to his sons, and he was not alone.

Across the country, boxing became more popular every year, for the new laws added the thrill of the illicit to the excitement of the sport. Arrangements were negotiated in secret, and word would go out: “A match tonight!” Sometimes the cops would catch wind and show up before the thing was settled, so fight promoters got craftier. Soon entire passenger trains called “Hell on Wheels” could be hired to transport the pugilists and the referees and spectators and bookies and bartenders and whores to a place nobody knew ahead of time. The train would stop in whatever isolated field took the brakeman’s fancy that evening. A ring would be scraped out into the dirt with a boot heel and boxers would put up and toe the line under the stars. Prize money and crowds soared into the thousands.

Then, in 1861, the whole damn country squared off to settle a point of honor, once and for all. It would be the Lilly-McCoy fight on a continental scale: a contest between inflexible, unyielding opponents—savage, bloody, majestic, and pathetic—but not even war could slake the American thirst for bare-knuckle boxing.

Amid the wholesale slaughter of civil convulsion, there was something almost quaint and strangely decent about retail violence. This was bloodletting and brutality with agreed-upon rules, fought by volunteers, not draftees. This was barbarity, but it was barbarity committed with stylish courage, appreciated by men who might be ordered to march anonymously into annihilating cannon fire the next morning. Soldiers expected to die and be buried in impersonal heaps of maimed and mangled meat, but a man could make a name for himself in a boxing match, and be remembered.

Too young for the war, boys like Bat grew up hearing about boxers as famous as any general. Yankee Sullivan, Tom Hyer, John Morrissey, Harry Paulson, “Bill the Butcher” Poole. Stoking interest and boosting sales by pretending to lament the outlawed sport, the popular press covered boxing as far away as Australia. When John Heenan sailed to England to battle Tom Sayers, the whole of red-blooded America cheered him on.

It was the most vicious congregation of roughs that was ever witnessed in a Christian city, Bat read, wishing fervently that he could have been there, betting, snarling, cheering, grunting with every witnessed blow, his own stomach tight in mirrored defense, his fists knotted and jabbing the air. He could imagine it all as he studied the account. What boiled-down savagery, concentrated in so small a space! What rowdyism! What villainy!

What fun!

Bat himself picked more than a few fights as a kid. “Bat’s like a chunk of steel,” his older brother, Ed, would tell folks. “Somebody’s always striking a spark off him.” Trouble was, Bat grew early but he stopped growing early, too. One by one, every boy he knew started to look down at him, and something about that made him even more eager to mix it up, readier than ever to teach larger, stronger, heavier kids a lesson.

Instead, he himself started learning lessons, and it wasn’t long before young Bat Masterson knew two important things for sure. First off, to box well, you need more than combativeness. You need size and power, stamina and strategy. From the age of twelve, Bat was always fighting out of his class. Unless he wanted to end up like Irish Tom McCoy, dead on his feet in the 119th, he would need a way to even things up.

The second thing he knew for sure was this. Farming is a sucker’s game. You can work like an ox—put everything you’ve got into the land—but if the weather doesn’t break you, the markets will. You want to gamble with stakes like that? You’re better off playing cards. You can still lose everything, but at least you don’t work so damn hard for the privilege, and you by God dress up nice for the occasion.

Which is why, before he turned fifteen, he was determined to run away from home. “Ed,” he told his older brother, “you can stay here and stare at a mule’s ass end if you like, but me? I ain’t never gonna plow another field as long as I live.”

Within a few weeks of leaving, Bat was carrying a frontier equalizer: the big old Navy Colt he won off a drunk in a card game. Over the next ten years, to the line “plowboy” on his résumé, he added buffalo hunter, army scout, professional gambler, city police officer, county sheriff, and saloon owner. In 1907, when he wrote his autobiography, he would extend the list to include “genius with firearms,” “a born captain of men,” “generous to the last dollar.” He decided to leave out “becomingly modest” and “the soul of Christian humility.” That might have carried the joke too far.

Oddly, he failed to mention the central passion of his life and the one constant among the many ways he made his living: boxing. Or, more precisely, prizefighting, for matches were ever more frequently fought by professionals who had nothing against each another personally and were willing to break the law simply because the money was so good.

Bat himself never boxed as a grown man but throughout the 1880s, he would build a reputation as an expert on the Chambers-Queensberry rules. By the end of the decade, he was widely recognized as an honest and reliable referee, called upon to serve in important matches featuring boxing greats like John P. Clow and John L. Sullivan. That experience would eventually land him the best job of his life: covering sports for the New York Sun, where he would indulge his flair for flamboyant storytelling to his heart’s content and his readers’ delight until he died pen in hand, at his desk, a fat old man who’d had a hell of a good time ever since he left the farm.

Of course, his sporting knowledge and repute did not appear all at once, like Athena springing full-grown from the forehead of that divine boxing enthusiast, mighty Zeus. Bat Masterson’s apprenticeship began in Ford County, Kansas. Out past Duck Creek, a little north of Howells.

Wyatt found what he was looking for with no trouble. On a windless night in open land, the roaring of four hundred men can carry.

Astride Dick Naylor, he drew up and surveyed the scene. The ropes were pitched and respected. It cost a dollar to get in. Inside the perimeter, a crowd stood ten deep around the ring. A couple of farmwives were doing a brisk business in coffee and fried pork sandwiches; their husbands rented standing room on wagons for fifty cents. There was even a bartender selling whiskey straight from a barrel, two bits a swig.

“What’s the line?” Wyatt asked a stranger.

“Nine to one, on Rowan, but I put a dollar on Hamner. He’s got sand.”

Bat was easy to pick out in the center of the ring, his fancy clothes giving him visibility and authority amid skinny boys clad in denim and dust. His frock coat and bowler hat had been removed, but the white of his shirtsleeves glowed in the moonlight, and the flare of torches made the gold threads of his brocade waistcoat glitter as he followed the action, eyes intent, concentration complete.

Wyatt had refereed fights up in Deadwood, and he’d done a little boxing himself. He recognized competence when he saw it. Bat was short and getting stout, but he was light on his feet, his rhythm and movement graceful and deft as the boxers shifted and fell back and came on. He showed no partiality, enforcing his rules consistently, his voice cutting through the spectators’ shouts with brisk authority. His timekeeping was faultless.

The bout itself was more wrestling than boxing. The opponents were a lanky young drover and a local German boy. You could see that neither was going to do much more than bloody the other’s nose. Even so, they went close to fifty rounds. When at last they’d grappled and pummeled each other into exhaustion, Bat raised the wrist of the cowboy, who’d stayed on his feet slightly longer than the farm kid. Then Bat helped the local boy up and praised him lavishly, inviting the crowd to cheer for an honorable effort.

Money changed hands with minimal grumbling. Inside the ring, Bat got both combatants to mumble “Good fight” through thick lips, their fists too cut up and swollen to allow a handshake. The crowd dispersed. The gatekeeper counted out the referee’s rake and handed it over. Bat folded a substantial wad of cash into his pocket and walked toward his horse, stopping in his tracks when he caught sight of Wyatt, waiting.

“You got no jurisdiction out here, Wyatt.”

“Didn’t say I did.”

Silence fell. Eyes on the ground, mouth turned downward in thought, Bat tugged at his vest, smoothing the brocade. “Two idiots go at it in a bar,” he proposed suddenly. “They’re disturbing the peace. What do you do?”

Wyatt didn’t bother answering.

“You bash them,” Bat supplied with a shrug. “You don’t argue. You don’t explain. You don’t hesitate. You bash them both, and jail them.” He paused before asking, “What happens after that?”

Indifferent, Wyatt said, “None of my affair.”

“That’s right,” Bat agreed. “That’s right! It’s none of your affair. You broke up the fight. The peace of the city is restored. Fines are assessed. Justice is served.” Once more he paused. “But nothing is settled.”

Letting Wyatt think that over, Bat pulled his coat off the saddle and turned away from his horse before shaking the wrinkles out.

“You lock those boys up,” Bat continued informatively, “you’re just giving them time to brood on insult and grievance.” He shrugged into the forest green broadcloth, jerking the sleeves of his shirt down so the gold cuff links showed. “Know how many homicides we’ve had in Dodge, Wyatt? Just the past couple years, say.”

Eyes narrow, Wyatt shook his head slightly.

“Forty-five,” Bat told him, “give or take. A few were knifed, but most of them were gunned down. Ambushed in alleys. Killed on their way out of town. Shot in the back, mostly. Maybe seven had any kinda chance at all.”

“You saying that’s my fault?” Wyatt asked, not buying it.

“No, Wyatt, what I’m saying is, there’s no harm done and quite a bit of good comes of telling idiots, ‘You can settle this fair and square, but we have to take it out of town.’ ” Holding up his fingers, Bat began to count. “One: it saves wear and tear on the saloons. Two: I frisk the bastards for weapons before they square off. Three: when the fight’s over, it’s done with. I see to that! Nobody walks away humiliated, nobody wants revenge, nobody gets shot in the back a few hours later.” He waited a moment before he raised a fourth finger. “Everyone goes home in the morning.”

Wyatt blinked, and Bat immediately pressed his advantage.

“Is there money to be made? Hell, yes! A lot of it. And why not? My fights ain’t legal, but they’re by-God honest, and I earn what I get.”

Wyatt looked away.

“How was Topeka?” Bat asked, for that lay between them still.

“They want me to run against you.”

“I figured. You gonna?”

Wyatt lifted his chin toward where the ring had been. “How does it work?” he asked, like he was just curious. “Are these your fights, Bat? Or are you just getting some of the gate? Because I’m guessing that Bob Wright’s the promoter, and you’re bought. If I’m wrong, then this is the only game in Ford County Bob don’t have a piece of.”

There was a time when Bat Masterson had idolized Wyatt Earp. They had slept side by side. They’d worked to exhaustion in sleet and snow and killing cold, hunting buffalo. They’d doctored broken fingers and sewn up gashes, and loaned money and borrowed it, and backed each other up in brawls. But goddam if the man didn’t think he was the gold standard.

Tired of being judged, Bat snapped, “I don’t owe you an accounting, Wyatt. You want to run against me? Run! But there’s a lot you don’t know.”

Like: how elections really worked. Like: who was on his side, and who was playing him for a fool, and why. Like: how Wyatt scared folks without even knowing it because he was cold and intolerant and wouldn’t bend.

“You vote for Prohibition?” Bat asked, jerking his head toward Topeka.

“Didn’t pass.”

“Well, thank God for that!” Bat planted meaty fists on hip bones that were already acquiring prosperity’s padding. “You know what I can’t figure? Why in hell would you trust a hypocrite like George Hoover and not me? What makes you think he’s your friend and I’m not?”

For the first time, Wyatt looked surprised. “Friendship’s got nothing to do with it, Bat!” he protested. “All I’m saying is, I never saw liquor do anybody any good, but I’ve seen it ruin a lot of men and—”

“Jesus, Wyatt! You can be so goddam thick! Prostitution’s against the law, too. So—what? Do you think Prohibition’ll stop anybody drinking? You make something against the law, people just want it more! You been to Topeka! Do you have any idea—?”

No. He probably didn’t. Wyatt wouldn’t have looked for a “club” where you had to pay a membership fee for the privilege of buying overpriced rotgut. He had no notion how much money there was in illegal liquor.

Bat took a deep breath, closed his eyes a moment, and held up a hand. “All right,” he said firmly. “Just do yourself this one favor before you go trying to make the whole damn state dry. Go ask your fine new dentist friend something. If Prohibition goes through, how much would Doc Holliday be willing to pay, to get what he needs for his ‘cough’? You ask him, Wyatt, because that drunk’s putting away a couple of quarts a day!”

Bat untied his horse, put a foot in the stirrup, and stretched for the pommel. Hopping twice, he swung up, and looked down. “You gonna do something about this?” he asked, glancing back toward the trampled grass and the smoldering torches.

Wyatt’s eyes stayed level, but something Bat said must have gotten through to him.

“Not my jurisdiction,” he said.

Bat nodded: acknowledgment, not thanks. He gathered the reins and wheeled the horse twice. “Watch your back,” he told Wyatt before he rode away. “And think hard about who your real friends are!”

Late in the summer of ’78, a little epidemic swept through Dodge City. People speculated that a drummer from St. Louis brought it in on the train. It was only a cold but it was a bad one, and pretty much everybody in Dodge suffered through it before the sickness ran its course.

Wilfred Eberhardt probably caught it from one of the Riney boys, and no question: Wil was the one who gave it to Doc Holliday and Belle Wright. The boy felt awful about that. Rather than harm the two people on earth who had been kindest to him since he was orphaned, young Mr. Eberhardt would have marched his manly little self out onto the prairie and died alone, but he didn’t even know he was getting sick until he sneezed right into Doc’s face. That wasn’t good manners, but Doc wasn’t the kind to get angry with a sick child. The dentist gave Wil a nice new handkerchief, and taught him how to use it, and told him to go on home now, and come back when he was all better.

When Wilfred got in from Dr. Holliday’s office, Miss Belle took one look at the boy and put him straight to bed. That was when Wil discovered that it wasn’t entirely bad, being sick. Doc still paid him a dime a day. And Miss Belle brought him tea with honey and read stories to him until she got sick herself.

Isabelle Wright was genuinely fond of Wilfred, a winning child with a streak of appealing sadness under his resolve not to be a bother to anyone. In addition, of course, every moment she spent caring for the Eberhardt children did double duty, for it rubbed her father’s face in what she considered his callous exploitation of the German farmers in the area. On the other hand, if Belle had known just how sick she was going to get, she might have asked her mother to take care of Wilfred. Not that it would have changed anything. If Belle hadn’t caught the cold from Wil, she’d have gotten it from one of her own brothers, or from a customer in the store, or from somebody at church.

Being out on the open prairie for twelve weeks at a time was hardship enough without adding a sore throat, a thick head, and a dripping nose to the exercise, so it was a mercy that Alexander von Angensperg was out in the countryside while the cold was making the rounds. Most Dodge Citians were over the illness when he got back to town.

Alex was hoping to see Wyatt Earp before heading toward Wichita on the northern arc of the circuit, but when the little huddle of wooden buildings came into sight, he realized that for all its ugly, violent, noisy crudity, Dodge City had come to represent to him agreeable company and convivial conversation. Approaching the place now felt strangely like a homecoming.

He tied Alphonsus to the hitching rail in front of Dodge House, thinking to see Doc in his office between patients, but before he could go inside, he heard boots clomping along the boardwalk and a familiar voice behind him.

“Staying longer this time?” Morgan Earp called genially.

“Today only, I fear,” Alexander told him, accustomed now to the way Americans omitted conversational hors d’oeuvres. “Is Wyatt back from Topeka, or have I missed him once again?”

“You caught him dead to rights this time!” Morg jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the jail. “He’s just finishing the reports with Fat Larry—There he is! Hey, Wyatt, wait up! Look who’s here!”

Jogging across the street, Morgan came to rest beside his brother and turned back toward the priest, grinning happily. “See, Alex? I told you people mix us up all the time!”

And indeed they were very like in appearance. Fair, square-jawed, broad-shouldered, and lean, with hardly a hair of separation in their height. Their differences, Alexander noted, were all in their bearing. Where Morgan was amiable and open, Wyatt seemed guarded, though not unfriendly.

After a few awkward remarks about Johnnie Sanders, he and Wyatt found themselves with nothing more to say. It was Morgan who suggested that the three of them go visit Doc, who was not in his office after all. “He’s been poorly,” Morg explained, leading the way toward a short side street lined with a few small, neat houses set on fenced-in patches of bare ground.

“But—he looked so well when I saw him last!” Alexander said uneasily.

“Just a cold,” said Wyatt.

“Yeah, bad one’s been going around,” added Morg. “That’s my house, right there, and that’s Wyatt’s—”

“They’re not ours,” Wyatt said.

“We rent,” Morg admitted easily. He gestured toward the third of five small frame dwellings. “That’s where Doc and Kate live.” Taking Wyatt’s point, he added, “They rent, too.”

Jau Dong-Sing was stepping out onto the front porch with Kate, and with the door open, they could hear Doc’s ugly, hacking cough.

“It’s like that night and day,” Morg told Alex quietly. “I don’t know how Kate stands it!”

“All she has to do is listen,” Wyatt said. “It’s Doc who’s sick.”

“You Doc’s guest!” China Joe cried, recognizing Alex. “Where you stay? You want bath? I bring plenty hot water. Doc, he very no good, but I bring more medicine, fix his chi!”

“That shit’s disgusting,” Kate muttered, not caring that China Joe was standing right next to her. “I can’t even stay in the house when Doc drinks it.” Red-eyed with sleeplessness, she glared at Alexander. “He ain’t dying! He don’t need no priest!”

“It’s just a social call,” Morg told her. “Alex is leaving for Wichita again, and—”

“Kate, you look exhausted,” Alexander said softly. “This is not a good time for a visit. We’ll let you and Doc get some rest—”

“Too late now!”

The voice was hoarse but cheerful. Still tying the narrow belt of a silk robe around a waist as slender as a girl’s, Doc appeared in the doorway, his smile fading when he saw the open shock on von Angensperg’s face.

“You make a sobering mirror, sir,” he said, but he waved off Kate’s worry and the priest’s concern, insisting that he was fine, just a little slow to get back on his feet. Thanking Mr. Jau for his concern and bidding him a good day, Doc urged the others to come on in and keep him company for a spell, and asked if anyone would like tea, or something stronger.

He sat down in a corner chair, breathless and white, while Kate sullenly did the honors, but perked up considerably as the conversation became livelier, for visitors always cheered him.

“I do believe I am hungry,” he announced with some surprise. “First time in days! You see, darlin’?” he asked Kate, as though reminding her of some point he’d made before. “Why don’t y’all go on over to Delmonico’s for steak and eggs?” he suggested. “I’ll make myself decent and meet you there directly.”

Kate didn’t argue, but it was obvious that she wanted to. Doc told her he was tired to death of being in bed and declared that it would do him a world of good to get out of the house, then shooed them all out so he could dress.

Hobbling into the restaurant nearly an hour later, he explained his limp away, saying that bed rest had aggravated an old injury. He sat down heavily, looking exhausted, but called, “Miss Nora—?”

Then the coughing fit took over.

Around the restaurant, strangers’ mouths twisted in disgust at the sound. The cough had changed, Alexander realized. It was deeper, wetter. Morgan looked away, wincing, and Kate raised her eyebrows as if to say, “See? I told you so.” Presently, Nora appeared with a tray bearing Doc’s usual tea and honey, along with a bottle of bourbon. Instead of a shot glass, however, she supplied Doc with a tumbler, and this he filled halfway.

With a silent, steady effort, he got it down in something under a minute, his face losing some of the tension that became noticeable only when it eased off, right before their eyes.

“Doc,” Wyatt asked uneasily, “when did you start drinking that much?”

“Wyatt, I’m not drinkin’ more,” Doc assured him with that crooked smile of his. “I’m just pourin’ less.”

“I fear you have overtaxed yourself to come here,” Alexander suggested, for Kate had asked them to help her keep Doc from overdoing it, and they all knew he would, given half a chance.

“You should be in bed,” Morgan agreed, and not just to make Kate happier, either; but then their meals arrived at the table.

Doc talked more than he ate, and listened more than he talked, although his brief comments were good-humored and amusing. Sitting slightly behind him, Kate was silent and didn’t touch her food. As soon as she thought Doc was too tired to balk, she made a signal to the priest. Alexander stood with an excuse about needing to get on the road before noon.

Doc waved to Nora and asked her to put the bill on his tab. Wyatt insisted on paying his own way, and so did Morgan. They were still working out who owed what when Isabelle Wright came into the restaurant and walked straight to their table.

All the men stood, even Doc, who would have made an honest effort to rise from his deathbed for a lady. Belle looked peaked, her nose red and raw. She only managed to say good morning to everyone, including “Mrs. Holliday,” before her face took on an inward, wary, weary look and she dug quickly in her little purse for a crumpled handkerchief edged with tatting. The rattling cough came from deep within her narrow chest.

Doc pulled out a chair for her and poured a little bourbon. “Miss Isabelle,” he said with quiet commiseration, “I do believe we are sufferin’ from the same malady!” Alexander looked up sharply, but Doc said merely, “You have some congestion left over from that wretched cold.”

Eyes watering, Belle nodded silently and sipped from the glass he’d pressed into her hand. Although she grimaced at the liquor’s taste, its warmth worked quickly, and her chest felt remarkably better. “A little bronchitis,” she said then, smiling wanly. “I just can’t seem to shake it!”

Doc’s face went slack: something about what she had just said … Alexander watched, waiting for the blow to land. When it did, Doc blinked once before he returned his gaze to the girl and produced a mild smile.

Unaware of his effort, Belle was still talking. “I imagine we both got the cold from Wilfred,” she said, “but everyone’s been coughing and sneezing.” She looked at the priest then. “I heard you were back in town, sir. I wanted you to know that I went through the accounts after your visit, and I found Johnnie’s money. He booked five thousand, two hundred and fifty-seven dollars over six months. He withdrew two thousand just before he died. That leaves a little over thirty-two hundred dollars. The cash is still in Daddy’s safe,” she said bitterly. “He probably expected to keep it.”

Wyatt’s mouth had dropped. Morgan’s face was alight. Doc coughed, eyes bright over the cotton cloth in his hand.

Before any of them could say a word, Belle continued, “If you’ll give me an address, sir, I’ll send a wire transfer to St. Francis, but I don’t want the money to go to that pope person—”

Suddenly silent, she held her face still. The others, even Kate, waited respectfully while Isabelle Wright fought tears, for she had spent many hours studying columns of numbers in Johnnie’s terrible handwriting and had stopped often to recall his unexpected remarks, his interesting ideas and wry observations. Ten days spent in bed with a bad cold and a good book had made Belle newly aware of what a good friend Johnnie Sanders had been and of how often she still wished that the two of them could share something notable she’d just read.

Eyes brimming, Belle raised her head and straightened her back. “I think that you should use Johnnie’s money to build a library for your school,” she told the priest firmly. “I would be honored to donate my books to begin it.”

To a man, they were stunned by Belle’s notion.

The priest was delighted, naturally, and thanked her for her generosity and for her excellent suggestion. He did not notice that Morgan was crestfallen, for that cash was his brother’s, but what could Wyatt say? It’s mine. I want to buy a horse. And Doc felt punished for his pride, for he had guessed correctly and located the money but had never anticipated this. Compassion and apology mixed in his eyes, brows lifted in inquiry, he looked at Wyatt: Do you want me to say something?

Wyatt let out a small, hopeless breath and shook his head slightly. He stood to go, dropping two bits on the table to pay his share of the bill.

“Johnnie was a real good reader,” he told von Angensperg. “Name the liberry after him.”

“It is a fine legacy for a boy who died too young,” the priest said, standing to shake Wyatt’s hand. “John Horse Sanders will be remembered.”