Doctor Who_ The Gunfighters - Donald Cotton [6]
Ike intervened rapidly. ‘Sure, Seth, sure... Phineas here is only funnin’. Now, come on, Seth – we’re all friends here, ain’t we? Now, ain’t we all in this together?’
‘You mean, I’m in it. Seems like you three’s gonna be together – jest settin’ at the ringside – an watchin’.’
‘Now that ain’t so, Seth,’ said Phineas. ‘We’re backin’
you – you know we are. You make your play, and then we gun him down. That’s the way we planned it. Easy as skinnin’ summer frogs!’
This went down very well. ‘Summer frogs,’ agreed Ike.
‘Frogs, sure,’ said Billy.
‘Don’t know about frogs,’ said Seth, ‘but you surely have got a way with words there. Okay then – frogs!’ and he smiled for the first time. They hoped it would be the last.
It showed his teeth.
So, a consensus having been reached, they slapped each other around a while; and then, still chuckling at Phineas the phrase-maker, they settled down to pass the time with a little light drinking.
And there, for the moment, it will be more pleasant to leave them...
3
The Brief Career of Dead-shot Steve There ain’t nothing like dressing the part, is there? And so our three time travellers eventually emerged into the quagmire of the Corral, as if for a provincial production of old Bill Cody’s Road Show! Well, of course, you get conditioned by the cheaper sort of Western fiction, such as I have been known to write myself, on occasion; but still and all, you might have thought the foul reality of Tombstone would have modified their choice of costume somewhat... Never mind; when it comes to the Wild West, everyone is a boy at heart – except the girls, of course; and I expect they’ve got their own problems. Dodo was certainly in the way of acquiring a few, I’d say; wearing, as she had chosen to do, a little number made up of scarlet furbelows and flounces trimmed with black lace – the whole set off with a picture-hat of such dimensions that an enterprising florist could well have opened a branch department on a corner of its brim. Not to put too fine a point on it, she looked like the proprietress of a broken-down cat-house in one of the less select quarters of New Orleans; but when she prinked and preened in front of the Doctor, and asked his opinion, he contented himself with saying
‘Absurd!’ and left it at that. After all, you don’t want to give needless offence; and, in any case, his tooth was still savaging him more than slightly.
So, with the merest, scarcely perceptible shudder, he turned to Steven, and asked why he had deemed it essential to disguise himself as Billy the Kid. ‘Asking for trouble, I’d have thought,’ he groaned. ‘Why couldn’t you have worn something inconspicuous, like I have done?’
Since the garments in question were, from North to South, a Mexican sombrero, an eye-shattering fancy gambler’s weskit, inadequately concealed by a velvet box-back coat, and yellow whip-cord breeches, tucked into silver-ornamented riding boots, Steven forbore to answer the question; but assured the Doctor that he was quite well able to look after himself, thank you, when it came to a show-down.
‘Stranger,’ he snarled, in an accent which seemed to have originated in the region of the Okefenokee Swamp, ‘I guess you don’t know who I is? Folks call me Dead-shot Steve. Moreover, my daddy was a bull-alligator, an’ I can wrastle my own weight in cougars!’
To prove this contention, he drew two pearl-handled revolvers, and twirled the surprised weapons by their trigger guards. Very impressive! Or would have been, if they hadn’t immediately been shot from his hands by a party who had approached unnoticed, and been an interested audience to the foregoing.
A tall man, he was; lean, and with the flickering hell-fire eye of a misogynistic Methodist preacher. He leant over the sway-back of a skeletal horse, as though it was the pulpit rail of the last tin chapel left standing in Gomorrah; and in his black-gloved hand was a smoking pistol with a twelve-inch barrel – as I know, because I designed and gave it to him long ago in Dodge City. He was, they were glad to see, smiling – but only