Doctor Who_ The Gunfighters - Donald Cotton [2]
‘And I didn’t then,’ said Holliday, grinning like a friendly hyena into the neck of his bottle. ‘Never utilised that class of instrument no how! No, sir. Why use a bone-saw when you can use a chisel, as I used to say when I was a dentist? No, that particular rumour is a dad-blasted lie!’
‘Then why does everyone say... I mean, a twelve-bore ain’t quite according to the code of combat, is it?’
‘Calling me a liar?’ he enquired pleasantly; preparing, it seemed, to fan a last hammer in a good cause.
‘No, not for a moment!’ I assured him. ‘But, in that case, how’d the story get about?’
‘It’s a way stories have,’ mused Holliday. ‘Ain’t it always the same? Do a friend a favour; and in no time you’re known as a hooch-crazed killer with no kind of a social conscience. Why, I could happily massacre a man who said a thing like that! I could cut out his yellow liver with a Bowie knife!’ he added, thinking about it. ‘And then toss it to a hungry coyote; so’s it’d pizen the crittur...’ he concluded, with an air of having done justice all round.
Even so, a story is a story, so I was fool enough to pursue the matter. ‘It’s one of the things Wyatt wouldn’t talk about,’ I told him. ‘Odd, that! You’d think he’d have been glad to put the record straight – seeing he was such a friend of yours.’
‘Well, there’s some things you can’t really talk about –
not if you don’t truly understand them. Never talked about it myself, come to that... But now... Well, I guess it makes no never mind, this late in the game. You see,’ he said, ‘like I’ve been civil enough to tell you, though I never carried such a weapon myself, there was another Doctor at the O.K.
Corral... and he did! Oh, by God, didn’t he just!’ chuckled Holliday. ‘And that without any particular conception of accuracy, as I recall! Blasted the thing off every which way, like it was a Gatling gun mounted on a roulette wheel! And I tell you, Mr Buntline, that I, the great Doc Holliday, have never been so scared gutless in all my born days!
‘Now, in case you’re tempted to think,’ he continued,
‘that I am about to jeopardise my highly regarded immortal soul by some kind of falsehood, it seems to me I’d best explain about this other Doctor; before you give voice to the kind of disbelievin’ sentiment as I’d have to kill you for! Seems I’ve enough blood on my boots without notching up another plea of self-defence on the very frontier of the Promised Land; where I hear they judge you a mite more vengeful than even Judge Bean used to, in the great days, West of the Pecos! So, if you’ll jest sit there peaceable, and drink as much of the juice as you can accommodate like a gentleman, I’ll do my damnedest to tell you how it all came about: and then, if you will, we can depart on our separate paths to Perdition, with everything fair and square between us...’
‘So I take it, Mr Buntline, that at your tender age you may not have heard of time travel... or even, so help me, of the TARDIS? Well, like I say, it ain’t that easy to understand: but the TARDIS, if you’ll kindly believe me, was – and is, for all I know – a kind of four-wheel buggy designed for ridin’ every sort of direction through eternity, without much decent respect for the laws of physics. And this other Doctor feller I was tellin’ you about, he drives it back an’ forth through the star-spangled centuries, like it was a rodeo-bull got loose in Jackson’s Hardware Store! It’s a fact! Never seems to know quite where he’ll land up next!
And back in 1881, by golly, it was Tombstone, Arizona –
where the poor old buzzard got hisself taken for me!’
At this point Doc Holliday broke off to remark that it was an unprintable pity if a dying man couldn’t get a drink around here; so it would pleasure him some if I’d kindly oblige with the bottle...
I passed him his cure-all; and was, in fact, happy to do so – because, from where I’d been swallowing, the brew tasted like a blend of panther-fat and snake-oil. And while he was occupied with it, I risked raising a doubtful eyebrow. I mean, time travel? And what was it – the TARDIS?