“Say! Did you hear the news?” Seegar asked as they pulled up to a large frame house on a treeless lane called Elm Street. “Jay Cooke’s bank went bust!”
“Oh, now, don’t you go botherin’ the poor boy with all that money nonsense,” Mrs. Seegar said breezily. She led the way up a boardwalk, waited for her husband to open the door, and hung her hat by its ribbons on a hook in the center hall. “Tote his bags upstairs for him, darlin’. Dr. Holliday, you sit right there, honey. Ella, bring Dr. Holliday something to drink! Just tea, honey? You sure you don’t want something stronger? Children! Y’all come and meet Dr. Holliday!”
There were four ambulatory Seegar offspring and a two-month-old babe in the arms of the oldest, a girl who looked to be about twelve. All of them were excited, vying for the attention of the newcomer. Dr. Seegar begged pardon for the uproar his children made, but John Henry waved the apology off and hoarsely conveyed to the flattered parents that the sound of their children’s voices was music to him, so much did he miss his own young cousins.
Ella, tall and dark, approached shyly with a cup and saucer. He accepted the tea, swallowed carefully, and, clearly as he could, told her how much he regretted that his throat was too sore for anything more, promising that he would do justice to her cooking after he had some rest.
He allowed himself to be put to bed in a state very near prostration.
As awful as the trip had been, he fell asleep believing he’d made the right decision to come to Texas. In a few days, when he felt strong enough to sit up and write, his first note to Martha Anne would tell her that the Seegars could not have been more welcoming. To Robert, he reported that if the Seegar home and its furnishings were any measure, business in Dallas was good.
Otherwise, he hardly stirred and certainly never gave “all that money nonsense” a second thought. Dr. Seegar provided a bottle of good bourbon and prescribed small doses to quiet the cough. Mrs. Seegar and Ella carried light meals up to him: tepid soups, and applesauce, and custards to soothe his throat. When he awoke on the morning of September 19, he had the energy to look at the newspaper Ella brought upstairs with his breakfast.
Later on, he would be grimly amused by his naive bewilderment upon reading the headline that morning, for it made no sense to him at all.
How can a
The economic collapse began in Europe, but financial markets were intertwined around the world; when Jay Cooke’s bank crumbled, America’s postwar railroad bubble burst. Fortunes quickly made were even more quickly lost in the Panic of 1873. Sham prosperity—built on debt—disappeared with shocking suddenness. The resulting depression dragged on year after year, crushing dreams and wrecking lives, John Henry Holliday’s among them.
Robert and Martha Anne continued to write faithfully, their letters full of family news and encouragement. Martha Anne did her best to provide perspective when Dr. Seegar let John Henry go, just a few months after he arrived in Dallas.
She was right, of course. It certainly wasn’t John Henry’s fault that he couldn’t make a living at his profession. No reasonable person would have thought so, but who is reasonable at twenty-two? What prideful Southern boy could acknowledge his own frailty and admit that his prospects of employment in a place like Texas were severely limited?
Gradually his livelihood came to rest entirely upon lessons learned at a cookhouse table from that little mulatto card sharp Sophie Walton. By the end of 1874, John Henry Holliday was dealing faro and playing poker professionally.
He was also drinking heavily.
A conviction of his own disgrace had taken hold of him. He had begun to live down to his opinion of himself. His mother’s devotion, his aunts’ faith, his uncles’ money, his professors’ respect—all that had come to nothing. Worse than nothing, really. There wasn’t a family in Georgia that didn’t own up to at least one male who’d gambled away money, houses, land, and slaves, but John Henry Holliday had done the unforgivable. “A man could gamble himself to poverty and still be a gentleman,” his second cousin Margaret would one day write in her famous book about the war, “but a professional gambler could never be anything but an outcast.”
In letters home, John Henry made comical stories of occasional arrests and fines for gambling, as though these were the result of informal Saturday night card games, but there were hints of his frightening new life.
Had John Henry been more forthcoming about the sporting life, Martha Anne’s concern for his safety would have increased, but she might not have been quite as scandalized as he feared. Standards of conduct had loosened some, after the war. Martha Anne had learned to play poker from little Sophie Walton at John Henry’s side, and she herself could be ruthless at the table. The Hollidays had always maintained a fairly cavalier attitude toward weapons, liquor, and high-stakes gambling.
A murder indictment, on the other hand …
Well, John Henry never mentioned that, not even indirectly. Several witnesses agreed: the other man drew first. The charges were dropped. John Henry was badly shaken by the event, but he never would have worried the folks at home about such a thing.
When the Fates took their next shot at him, it was in the guise of a bad-tempered gambler named Henry Kahn who sat down at John Henry’s faro table in July of 1877.
Coughing and irritable, young Dr. Holliday caught Mr. Kahn monkeying with the discards and suggested twice that he quit it. Sweating and belligerent in the Texas heat, Mr. Kahn was disinclined to do as he was told. Dr. Holliday, perhaps unwisely, widened the scope of his remarks.
Mr. Kahn left the table, apparently chastened. Ten minutes later, he returned with a pistol. Someone shouted, “Holliday! Behind you!” Before the dentist could fully rise to face his assailant, a shot was fired, and John Henry lay bleeding on the floor. Kahn walked out of the saloon without a word and left town before he could be arrested.
A friend in Dallas telegraphed word of the assault to the Atlanta Hollidays, informing them that newspaper reports of John Henry’s death were inaccurate but that the wound was very serious and might yet prove fatal. John Stiles Holliday wanted to travel west immediately to attend his nephew, but the aging physician was talked out of it by his son George, whom the distraught family sent to John Henry’s bedside in Texas.
George was shocked by his cousin’s pallor and thinness; these he put down to the terrible wound until John Henry admitted that he’d rarely seen the curative western sunlight or breathed the fresh dry western air since leaving Atlanta four years earlier. Far from home, living among uncongenial strangers on the rawest edge of the American frontier, John Henry had allowed his habits to deteriorate. He had become accustomed to playing cards all night in smoky gambling halls. In lieu of the nutritious meals and healthful wine his uncle had prescribed, he lived on saloon snacks like boiled eggs, and tried to calm his worsening cough with immoderate amounts of bourbon. He was not well even before Henry Kahn tried to kill him.
The howling Fates were sure they had him this time.
By December, however, after five long months of rest under Cousin George’s watchful eye, John Henry was back on his feet, though he would need a walking stick, off and on, for the rest of his life. He was not robust—never had been, never would be—but the leaden tubercular fatigue had lifted. His appetite returned. He put on a little weight and had more energy. The chest pain had eased and his cough was drier, not so deep or exhausting.
The economy, too, was showing signs of recovery, the cousins noted. The idea of a part-time dental practice no longer seemed unrealistic. If John Henry were not quite so dependent on dealing faro and playing poker, he could at least diminish the dangers and debilitation of the sporting life.
He recognized that he’d been given another chance and resolved to change his ways. When the New Year turned, 1878 seemed as good a time as any to reform. He’d already given up tobacco, almost, and was hardly drinking at all. He would continue to eat decently. Get out in the sunshine more.
