Doc - Mary Doria Russell [98]
Doc looked out the restaurant window, toward the tracks. He was trembling, as some men will when they have been very angry, or very frightened.
Presently, the dentist took as deep a breath as he could and let it out slowly. Cool again, he said, “I myself do not believe that it is cheatin’ to calculate odds by takin’ note of cards layin’ in plain view on a table. Do you believe that is cheatin’, Wyatt?”
Wyatt shook his head: No. Of course not.
“And yet,” Doc said, “when some men lose to me, they reckon it theft, and when such men believe they have been cheated, they are not inclined to express their dismay with a well-turned phrase.”
The cattlemen completed their business and rose to go, tipping their hats to Nora as they left. With the door open, you could hear the competing pianos, the drunken shouted threats, the raucous singing across the tracks.
That was when Doc looked Wyatt in the eye and dropped his voice again. “So, while I may not be quite as fearsome as I sometimes make out, if you were to noise that around …?”
Morgan’s age, Wyatt thought, but built like young Warren was at sixteen. All bone, no beef. Sickly. Scared.
Wyatt nodded. Some of the tension went out of Doc’s face.
“Thank you, Wyatt,” he said graciously. “I ’preciate your delicacy in the matter.” Back in control, the Georgian gathered up the deck. Tapped it into alignment. Tucked it into a breast pocket. “Naturally,” he added, ever so softly, “you and all your fine brothers may rely equally upon my own discretion.”
It might have been a threat. Hard to tell.
“You’ll excuse me?” Doc inquired courteously. “I am off to spend another evenin’ in the temples of unreason. Like everybody else in this godforsaken wilderness, I need to make a livin’.”
Snake-slender and casual in fresh-pressed linen the color of cream, John Henry Holliday pushed himself to his feet—slowly this time—performed a slight bow, and left Delmonico’s.
Wyatt watched him saunter off across the tracks.
The sunset beyond shone vermilion through the dust.
Next morning, Wyatt sent out the wires. All his queries were answered by the end of the week.
“No outstanding warrants in Texas, Colorado, or Georgia,” he told Morgan over pancakes and bacon. “He’s clean.”
“Told you he was quality,” Morg said. “What about—?”
“The police never heard of him in San Francisco.”
“Well, hell, if he did what Bat said—”
“There’d be something on the books.”
“So Bat just—”
“Looks like it.” Wyatt sat back and stared out the kitchen window of the little frame house he and Morgan had started renting. “Morg, did you see what happened when Ed Masterson was killed?”
“Hell, yes. I was coming out of the Lady Gay. Ed was rousting drunks at the Lone Star, and one of them—Jack Wagner, his name was—he up and pulled a gun. Gut shot, point-blank. Ed didn’t have a chance.”
“Who got Wagner?”
“Ed. He didn’t die right away. He was on the ground, but he got his pistol out and put three bullets into Wagner. Ed died about half an hour later. Wagner died the next day.”
Wyatt snorted. “Bat told me he killed the man who got his brother.”
Morg’s eyes widened. “Well, Bat shot at Wagner, but he was way down by the billiard parlor when Ed got it.” Morgan shook his head as though to clear it. “I guess maybe Bat could have hit Wagner, but the odds’re against it—Bat was coming on at a dead run.”
For a time they both sat there, taking it in.
“What’s that?” Wyatt asked then, lifting his chin toward the book Morg had propped against the sugar bowl.
Morg put a finger in his place and showed Wyatt the spine. “It’s not what I expected,” Morg admitted, “but it’s good.”
“Crime and Punishment … ’Bout time you read a law book.”
“No, it’s a story, but it’s not like anything I