what remained of the barn.
“Johnnie Sanders,” Doc told him quietly.
The mobile face crumpled. “No!” Eddie cried. “Ah, Christ … Now, that’s a pity.”
Hats off, they watched silently as the crisped and blackened body was carried past. A few yards away, Bat Masterson had returned to his earlier theme for the edification of the assembled citizens.
“I told Ham Bell this would happen! I said, One of these days, Ham, some drover’s going to pass out with a cigarette in his hand and set the whole damn barn alight. You just wait and see, I told him. Only a matter of time ’til that barn goes up in smoke!”
“Lucky it didn’t take the whole town with it,” Eddie muttered.
He had survived the Great Chicago Fire as a boy. Now twenty-two, Eddie Foy retained a morbid anxiety about such things. It was a concern John Henry Holliday shared, as would anyone who’d seen what Sherman did to Georgia. Like old Chicago and antebellum Atlanta, Dodge City was all wood. Wooden walls, shingle roofs, wooden floors. Plank sidewalks and galleries. Everywhere you looked: wood, waiting to burn.
“This burg could use a fire brigade,” said Eddie.
“Could’ve used one last night,” Doc agreed.
Morgan went back to the jail to make his report to Fat Larry. Bat headed for the newspaper offices to be sure his name got into the stories. Eddie stuck with Doc, though he had to slow down considerably to match the gimpy Georgian’s pace. Usually Doc contrived to give the impression that he was a gentleman in no particular hurry who enjoyed a leisurely stroll through town. Today he was winded and limping before they’d got to the corner of Bridge and Front.
Eddie had more sense than to rag the man about that. If you were going to be friends with Doc Holliday, there were things you did well not to notice. That raw Christ-awful cough. His weight, what there was of it. The lameness. Doc had accumulated a fair number of infirmities for a man so young, but insisted he was in better health than he’d enjoyed in some time. That told you a lot, right there.
The two of them were recent arrivals in Dodge. Eddie had just landed a good gig headlining a song-and- dance show at the Comique Theater, twice nightly during the cattle season. Doc Holliday sometimes ran a faro game there; it was a temporary arrangement—just something to tide him and his lady friend over until he could get a dental practice going. Doc enjoyed Eddie’s act. Eddie liked that Doc got all the jokes.
“Look at them, now, will you,” Eddie said, stopping so Doc could rest. “Shameless, I call it.”
Driven out of the barn by the fire, Hamilton Bell’s little rat terriers were roaming the town. One of them had taken a shine to Dog Kelley’s brindle greyhound bitch, who was standing in the middle of Front Street, bemused by the attention. The terrier tried several approaches without achieving much in the way of satisfaction.
“It would appear that his reach has exceeded his grasp,” Doc observed, keeping his breath shallow.
“Ah,” said Eddie, “but you have to admire the ambition, now, don’t you.”
The greyhound got bored and wandered away, leaving a deeply disappointed terrier to reconsider his aspirations.
“Don’t wait on me,” Doc told Eddie. “I’ve got errands.”
“See you tonight, will we?”
“Depends. I’ll have to see what Miss Kate has planned.”
Eddie grinned. “Give my love to herself, then, won’t you!” he called, and did a little jig step before he set off briskly, grateful as a child let out of school early.
To anyone watching for the next few moments, the town’s new dentist would have appeared to be enjoying the spectacle of Eddie Foy’s sprightly progress down Front Street. In point of fact, John Henry Holliday was absorbed by a kind of calculus that had become second nature to him: plotting the shortest route from where he stood to China Joe’s Laundry and Baths, the post office in Bob Wright’s store, and on to his hotel room at Dodge House.
The wind shifted, adding dust, blown ash, and lingering smoke to the equation. Laundry first, he decided.
It wasn’t far, objectively. Nothing was. Front Street was just a dirt road three blocks long, with a row of buildings on each side of the railroad tracks. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe ran straight west through the center of a town that consisted primarily of saloons, saloons with gambling, saloons with dance halls, and saloons with brothels. The saloons were mostly south of the rails, a district they shared with China Joe’s Laundry, the remains of the Famous Elephant Barn, and the lower class of girls who worked in the cribs out back. More respectable commerce took place on the other side of the tracks. Bob Wright’s General Outfitting Store. The barbershop and a pool hall. The hardware and gun shop. A few of the fancier bars and bordellos. George Hoover’s Cigar Shop and Wholesale Liquor Store. The Dodge House Hotel and the Delmonico Restaurant.
That was the sum total of the town. Naming this place Dodge City was pure bluff. It barely amounted to a village.
Back in April, there were more stray dogs than people on the street. In early May, the herds had begun arriving from Texas. Now Ford County’s nine hundred permanent residents were outnumbered three to one by the drovers who came into Dodge to enjoy themselves while their cattle fattened on the grassland south of the Arkansas River.
By midnight tonight, Front Street would teem with carousing cowboys but at the moment, the town was relatively quiet and small as Dodge was, everybody had seen the fire last night. The big news was that Morgan Earp had found a body in the ruins and the dentist said it was Johnnie Sanders. Word of that spread faster than Doc Holliday could walk.
Even Jau Dong-Sing had heard.
Most people thought Jau was Dong-Sing’s personal name. China Joe, they called him. Doc addressed him as Mr. Jau, and he had even tried to reproduce the rising tone in Sing correctly. “F to F-sharp,” Doc said, listening hard when Dong-Sing taught him how to say it. Dong-Sing had no idea what that meant, but the dentist came close to getting it right. Dong-Sing appreciated the courtesy. He always made a special effort for Doc, a good customer who had three baths a week and who liked his pastel shirts boiled, starched, and ironed after a single wearing. Dong- Sing had done some alterations for Kate. Taking up hems, adjusting darts. He did tailoring for Doc as well. It was a pleasure to work on the dentist’s suits. They were beautifully constructed of fine English broadcloth.
In Jau Dong-Sing’s opinion, Doc’s
“A man has no secrets from his tailor,” Doc would reply.
“You come by, I cook you noodles,” Dong-Sing always offered. “Make you fatter! Give you long life.”
“Mr. Jau, that is a handsome offer,” Doc always said. “I believe I’ll take you up on it one day.”
Today when Doc came in to pick up his shirts, Dong-Sing leaned over the counter to confide, “I know why that nigger boy dead.”
“Do you, now?” Doc said.
“Kill chicken. Scare wolf.”
“Well, now, Mr. Jau, that is an interestin’ theory,” Doc said, “though I shall have to think it over before I can subscribe to it. When do you suppose that pair of trousers might be ready?”
“Two day more. Very busy. Hotel trade pickin’ up.”
As always, Doc asked about Dong-Sing’s family back in Kwantung and about the business prospects of Dong-Sing’s nephew, who had recently opened a laundry in Wichita with Dong-Sing’s backing. Nobody else took the time to help Dong-Sing with his English, and he enjoyed these conversations.
They served John Henry Holliday as well, for listening to Dong-Sing’s news allowed him to rest up before he continued his journey. That accomplished, he bid Mr. Jau a good evening and walked on, stopping once to catch his breath and to watch the Kansas sunset for a while.
Spring was lovely back in Georgia this time of day. A thousand miles away, lilac and pine and honeysuckle scented the air in the stillness that followed short, soft afternoon rains. When the sun went down on an afternoon like this, it glowed scarlet in a pink-and-orange sky, turning the red clay fields coppery. Fresh green shoots of new cotton shone as though they were lit from within, and everywhere there were magnolia and dogwood and peach blossoms, delicate as angel wings …
Five years in September, he thought.
Five years since he’d seen home.
