Doctor Who_ The Gunfighters - Donald Cotton [4]
But whatever eventuality she anticipated, it was already too late. For the TARDIS had materialised.
They looked out upon an unprepossessing landscape. To start with, it was raining heavily. And even had it not been, the outskirts of Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, were not such as to qualify for an architect’s award. Too little thought, the adjudicators would probably have felt, had been given to environmental considerations. Mind you, the town did blend in with its surroundings – but since these were of mud, that hardly constituted an advantage.
However, the Doctor was as jubilant as if he’d just discovered El Dorado, the shining city of legend; and furthermore, caught it living up to expectations in a big way.
‘There you are!’ he crowed. ‘What did I tell you?
Civilisation at last!’
‘Civilisation?’ Steven and Dodo sought unhopefully for some small evidence of Humanity’s widely advertised rise from barbarism, and found it wanting.
With typical unerring accuracy, the TARDIS appeared to have homed in somewhere to the unsavoury rear of a disused livery stable – and one which had not been left entirely as a horse would wish to find it.
The place had atmosphere, all right; but they rather wished it hadn’t. They could have breathed better in...
well, in the ammonia swamps of Alpha Centauri, for instance – and that was saying something!
Through the leaning door of the premises could be seen a distant, straggling vista of sagging shacks and sloping adobes, which even the shrewdest property speculator could only have described as offering ample scope for instant demolition. But if he ever had, then unfortunately he had found no takers. Because there it still stood, idling into corruption, like, as Steven put it, a souvenir copy of the Slough of Despond.
‘Oh, come on, Steven,’ said Dodo, ‘at least we’re back home...’
He looked at her in astonishment.
‘So this is where you come from, is it? Explains a lot!’
‘Oh, really!’ she expostulated. ‘Just for once, can’t you try to look on the bright side?’
‘Very well, you point to it – then I’ll look at it. It’ll be a pleasure!’
‘At all events,’ interrupted the Doctor, hastily, ‘the inhabitants are obviously at an advanced stage of development...’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Look,’ he said triumphantly, ‘there’s a wheel! At least they’ve discovered that!’
It would have been difficult for them not to. Quite a number of these triumphs of ingenuity lay about the place
– most of them with spokes missing, but nonetheless indubitably wheels! And broken-down buggies, there were; and discarded horseshoes, wrapped in their own rust. The fact is, as you will have gathered by now, they had landed slap-bang in the middle of the O.K. Corral – and there was even a signboard, hanging sideways from one bent rail, to prove it.
‘Whoopee!’ said Dodo. ‘We’re in a Western!’
United for once, her two friends glared at her...
2
The Last Chance
And while all this was going on, life – or what passed for it
– was moving on its sinister way through the thriving hell-hole about them.
For the three surviving Clanton boys were riding into town. Reading from major to minor, their names were Ike, Phineas and Billy – and they didn’t care a damn who knew it! They wanted people to know, you hear? And to emphasise this point, Billy even went so far as to rear his horse in a way he’d seen it done somewhere, and fire his initials into the ‘Gone to Lynching’ sign on the sheriff’s office. Not having seen it done anywhere, the horse sank to its haunches in a puddle, which rather spoiled the effect; but still, he’d made his point – and Ike clicked his tongue reprovingly.
‘Now, why for d’you want to do a fool thing like that?’
he enquired, tonelessly. ‘Save your slugs for Doc Holliday, boy!’
‘I ain’t scared of Holliday,’ asserted this junior all-American gun-slinger. ‘Reckon I can take him any time!’
Impressed, Phineas parted his beard, and spoke through it. ‘You hear that, Ike? Brother Billy here ain’t scared!
Haw! Haw!’ he added, unkindly.
‘Nobody said you was scared, boy; not that I recall.
Brother