Doc - Mary Doria Russell [155]
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