Doctor Who_ The Gunfighters - Donald Cotton [30]
‘Seems to me,’ continued Seth, laboriously, ‘that some party jest addressed you as Doc?’
Expressing silent thanks to Dodo, Holliday confirmed that this was indeed the case.
‘Well now, could it be that this high falutin’ soubriquet is but the prefix to the further word, "Holliday", by any chance?’
It was not in Doc’s nature to deny the truth when it was unavoidable. So he agreed that the name had been attached to him in infancy, and had clung there ever since.
‘In that case, friend, you ain’t goin’ no place – except maybe to hell!’ Seth qualified.
Too late he remembered that, whereas he was now alone, Holliday had his reputation with him. But, oh, what the hell? He’d started the thing now, and couldn’t rightly figure how to discontinue. So he reached for his gun...
His eyes, as we have previously noted, had always been close: but now they felt that something had come between them. They were right. Doc had performed a miracle of marksmanship, and squeezed a bullet into that tiny gap!
As he sank to his knees, Seth’s last draining thought was that if he’d played things right in his youth, and studied hard, he could perhaps have been a school-teach... if only he hadn’t been so goddamned ug...ly...
But that was it! No use thinking along those lines now –
and he’d nothing left to do it with, anyway... Because the last drops of his inadequate brains were oozing bloodily on to his go-to-show-down weskit... So he subsided slowly to the sawdust, and left it at that.
Well, I warned you, it weren’t by no means pretty.
16
Wyatt Plays It By The Book
Some moments later, Charlie, bar-proud entrepreneur that he was, mopped up Seth’s slimy detritus with a face-flannel, and felt he’d better say something because he’d been warned about this sort of carry-on in his premises by Bat.
‘Stranger,’ he said judicially, ‘you shouldn’t rightly have done that...’
‘So I’m supposed to stand back at three paces, till such time as he gets the range worked out? Look at this!’ said Doc, indicating the splattered corpus delicti. ‘Bits of him all over my boots! Borrow your flannel?’
‘And welcome,’ said Charlie, agreeably. After all, the late Mr Harper had not been a highly valued customer.
‘So then, I’ll be on my way – long as you don’t plan to give me no further argufyin’ – ‘cause I don’t take kindly to such...’
Having registered his complaint, Charlie assured him that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was now closed.
‘But if’n you are indeed Doc Holliday,’ he continued,
‘which personally I am now prepared to believe, then if I was you, I wouldn’t go out there. There’s a mob fixin’ to lynch you,’ he explained.
‘Now why in tarnation would they want to do an unfriendly thing like that? I mean, conflagratin’ my surgery, an’ stealin’ my chair is one thing – two things,’ he amended. ‘But lynchin’ is pushin’ it some!’
‘The Clantons has got ’em all riled up... an’ supposin’
they hadn’t, you’ve jest given ’em another pretty fair excuse for a hang-me-high, I’d say. No offence, of course.’
He reached for the bleach, and sprinkled it some. ‘But you know how towns-folk is? One touch o’ fancy shootin’, an’
they’re sayin’ it ain’t safe fer their kids to step into a bar-room no more! No, if I was you, Mister, I’d have lit out backwards by now.’
So here was yet another deportation order, however friendly meant; and, for the first time, Doc began to wonder if there was maybe something in it, at that. Because you gotta be more than fast to get the drop on a whole town
– you gotta be mayor; which he wasn’t. And no use appealing to a higher authority for help, either; since the said authority had already hoofed him in the slats, and told him to get lost come sun-up! So what was one chair more or less, he finally figured.
Somewhere over the far-away hills would be a booze-packed, shining new horizon; and rolling summer meadows, no doubt, crammed with rotten teeth for a man to pick. So, what the hell?
Furthermore, considering Wyatt’s unfriendly attitude,