'I like Hoppy. Hoppy is fine.'
'If you want to go back further, I have Hoot Gibson, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, John Wayne as Sandy the Singing Cowboy, though he can't carry a tune to save his life. What about Gene Autry?'
'Gene can sing.'
'Yes, he can. Also, I've got some old William S. Hart. Have you ever heard of him? A little before your time, I'd guess.'
'Fraid so.'
'Well, sir, you'd like it. Your audience might see it as a novelty.
Real ' stuff, you know. Not fancy like it later became.'
'Yes, sir. Throw that in, too.'
A deal was struck. Earl bought the exclusive rights to exhibit a package of one hundred prewar Western movies, for less than five hundred dollars in an area of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. The films themselves were part of that deal and would be shipped to the address Earl specified. It was understood that if he wanted to show them on the television, he'd have to pay a further royalty.
'Doubt I'll be showing them on television,' he said, signing on the dotted line. 'Ain't no television yet where I operate.'
'Take advantage of that while you can, sir. The television will change the face of our business, I guarantee you.'
'I believe you are right.'
After the papers were dispatched, and the check written and handed over, his representative had a grand statement to sum it all up: 'Sir, you are the inheritor of the myth of the American West. You should be very proud.' 'I hope I can live up to it,' Earl said. sam sat in the medical school library at Fayetteville. He was completely puzzled. He was still studying the fabulous career of the fabulous David Stone, M. D.' MS.' Ph. D.' Maj.' U. S. A. M. C.' beloved humanitarian, disease battler the world over, and he was wondering: Where is the research?
Perhaps he had misunderstood. Perhaps Dr. Stone wasn't a researcher.
Perhaps Sam didn't quite connect with the protocols of a complex, high-level medical career such as the late or possibly late doctor had enjoyed.
But for whatever reason, the man simply had ceased to exist after 1936, at least on paper. Before then, as the mountain of books before him on the table of the reading room testified, he'd been everywhere, stunning the world with the brilliance of his research. He was in the Journal of the American Medical Association four times, he was twice in the New England Journal of Medicine, he was twice in Lancet, the British medical publication, and he was once each in a series of regional medical publications or publications devoted to specific diseases or specialties, such as blood, eyes, upper respiratory, virology and so forth and so on. Judging by the letters his pieces always generated, he was a brilliant researcher.
And then… silence.
And this was well before he entered the Army, before whatever happened to him or he happened to in Mississippi.
Well, it was not quite silence. It was the doctor who disappeared, that is to say, the research physician in desperate small countries the world over. That man vanished. The Dr. Stone everybody knew and loved did not disappear at all; if anything, he had flourished, and if anything, the glory wall in his widow's apartment only told the half of it.
In the popular press, he continued to thrive, and the Reader's Guide yielded citations in the Washington Times-Herald, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, P. M.' Collier's and Newsweek. He even got a 1938 spread in Life, where in his pith helmet, with his beautiful wife by his side, he was in the slums of Bangkok in a country called Siam surrounded by beautiful and not so beautiful little yellow people. The story described how he'd advised the Red Cross on a clinic and spent six months there working with the poorest of the poor, the most wretched of the wretched, all in the name of humanity and science. But details were scanty. And none of this, moreover, had a thing to do with some installation in the wilds of Maryland about which, in all his learnings, Sam had not uncovered a single thing. What was done at Ft.
Dietrich to have them so interested in what was done at Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored)? There was no evidence of a thing.
Sam had a headache and a dead end.
He couldn't call the widow who now hated and despised him, particularly since she'd blurted out her hideous secret (he knew how the human heart worked), and he'd exhaustively worked the War Department, the Medical Corps, the American Medical Association and the American Virology Association, having burned out those bridges, or having them burned out by those industrious boys from HUAC.
Where could he go?
He realized he had but one course open, and it was a tedious one. He had to try and find the names of Stone's 1928 Harvard Medical School graduating class. Then he had to call them. Every one of them. Sooner or later, he'd find one who had known Stone well, or so it seemed. Sooner or later, he'd find one who'd talk. Sooner or later. But he realized there were only a few weeks left till the dark of the moon, so he hoped it would be sooner rather than later.
He wished he believed in what he was doing a little more fervently.
The two men sat at the back table in the dark cavern known as Pablo's Cantino, in the city of El Paso, another long flight from the last destination.
Earl watched them. How they ate expressed their deep personalities.
One was feisty, quick, full of aggression, hungry for sensation. He devoured his food. To him, life was a picnic of Mexican vittles, a profusion of spices to be sampled for flavor, then devoured. More controlled, the other man sat glumly, picking at his plate, a giant of control and taciturnity; he looked like a minister at an orgy.
'Fellas,' said Earl.
'Well, goddamn, Sergeant Swagger, didn't know you'd be bringing my old friend Bill along,' said the feisty fellow, who was a former border patrol officer named Charlie Hatchison. He was wiry, peppery, loud, and couldn't sit still. His sharp eyes darted everywhere on constant patrol, and it was a problem for him to keep a smirk off his face, for what one sensed most immediately about Charlie Hatchison was the pleasure he took in being Charlie Hatchison.
'Bill's quite a feller,' he went on maniacally, 'and if it's action upcoming, damned if I don't want to stick close to old Bill, on account he'll git me through it, right, Bill?' Charlie was a needier. He liked to prick at people. Everybody was a challenge to him, and he was always looking for ways to bring people down a notch or two.
Bill Jennings was his opposite, lanky and solemn. His face was like a melted puddle of bronze, hardened, then tempered. It never changed expression, not even slightly. It was the dullest face anybody had ever seen. To most men, that epic mug with its message of violence contained was enough. People surrendered to him in legendary numbers, and that exactly was the bone of contention between the two men.
Charlie Hatchison, in a life on the border in the twenties and thirties, had killed seventeen men in gunfights, and had savored every one of them. Bill Jennings, an author and renowned fast gun, who'd performed revolver tricks on What's My Line?' had killed no one.
Charlie was not famous, though he'd won the national bull's-eye competition four times in the thirties, and Bill Jennings was, though he'd never won a thing.
'Yes, sir,' said Charlie, 'see heah, if'n I git in a jam, you know, why I just pull out a copy of Bill's book Second Place Is No Place, and I look up my situation in the index, flip to the pages listed, and damnation, hellfire and brimstone, it'll tell me what to do!'
It was quite a show. Charlie liked being noticed. He expected to be at the center of attention, and when he wasn't he grew surly and restless.
Finally, Bill spoke, though quite slowly.
'Y'all probably think I put that burr up Charlie's butt. Fact is, he's born that way. Passing strange, but that's how it is. Pay him no mind, and he'll quieten eventually.'
Charlie laughed.
'You can't git Bill's goat, ' he done strangled the goat some years back. You can call him anything and he just looks at you with them dead eyes and you feel the Lord's presence, beckoning you forward to them pearly gates.'
