Doc

a woman—

He never finished the thought, suddenly aware that he’d just been surrounded, disarmed, and was about to be killed with his own pistol by a heavyset, middle-aged man with eyes like stones.

“I guess things’re different when you’re not up against a kid half your age and half your size, eh, Earp?”

I’m dead, Wyatt thought, weirdly calm, but certain this was no bluff.

“He don’t look so tough now, do he, boys?” the man was saying.

There was a murmur of grinning agreement, and one of the cowboys said, “He sure don’t, Mr. Driskill!”

“Are you Jesse Driskill, sir?” Wyatt asked.

There was a chorus of hoots.

“Oh, it’s sir now! Ain’t that sweet, boys? Ain’t that nice and polite? No, you sonofabitch, I ain’t Jesse. I’m his brother. I’m Tobias Driskill, and that was my boy you bashed, peckerhead.”

A few paces behind him, a wooden chair scraped against the floor. Everyone backed off a little and left Wyatt standing alone.

Hell, he thought. Shot in the back, like Bill Hickok, and dime novelists will have the good of it.

“Think you’ve got enough friends to stand with you here, Tobie?” asked a honeyed Georgia voice. “Or is Achilles—alone—too many?”

“Doc? Doc Holliday?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“This ain’t your fight, Doc,” Driskill told him.

“I beg to differ, Tobie. Deputy Earp is a patient of mine. He still owes me four dollars.”

“He’s worth a lot more to me dead! Hell, I’ll pay you the four bucks—”

Nobody even noticed that Doc had a gun in his hand until he fired both barrels of a two-shot Deringer into the floor.

Wyatt got over the shock soonest. It was three steps to the bar. An instant later he had the shotgun in his hands.

Doc murmured, “Well, now, there’s a surprise …”

And everyone thought he meant that he’d made them all jump, or that Wyatt Earp had just evened up the odds some, pulling a scattergun out. In point of fact, John Henry Holliday was discovering that excitement could temporarily inhibit the need to cough and make his chest pain simply … disappear. And in that astounding adrenaline-fueled state of grace, he spoke again, softly but fluently, his voice musical and gentle and clear.

“That is a very generous offer, Tobie, and frankly, I could use the money, but I think you’ll find that Mr. Earp will decline your kindness. He is unusually scrupulous in such matters … Now, as it happens, I was a witness to your boy’s arrest, Tobe. The youngster was in his cups, and rowdy, and in that condition he did considerable damage not only to a theater but to a German fiddler widely held to be a tolerable musician. Such persons are rare in Kansas and tend to be valued beyond what a Texan might reckon. Deputy Earp subdued your son with only as much force as was necessary to book him for assault. The young man was fined by a judge and released before midnight—”

By that time they could hear boots pounding toward them as city policemen converged on the saloon from bars all over town.

“Ah! Morgan!” Doc cried genially. “And Sheriff Masterson! Evenin’, Chuck. I was just explainin’ the fine points of Dodge City law enforcement to Mr. Tobias Driskill here, after he tried to jump Wyatt with this contemptible collection of illiterate, bean-eating white trash—”

With a brilliant smile, Bat stepped between Doc and the Driskill men.

“Don’t mind him! He’s just drunk,” Bat said smoothly. “How ’bout you boys hang up your guns right over there and have a drink on me? Wyatt, I think I can straighten this out for you. Mr. Driskill, may I have a word?”

In years to come, after the gunfight in Tombstone, when the myths and lies began to accumulate, the story of that evening in Dodge would be repeated with Shakespearean advantages.

Several bars were confidently put forward as the location of the confrontation, and at least three bartenders claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the event. The man who was actually working that night never talked about it, being in no hurry to tell anyone that Tobias Driskill shoved a gun in his nose and told him to go take a piss. Which he did.

Several men later claimed to be the faro dealer Doc bucked, but only one of them admitted that he was too scared to move when the Driskill gang ordered everybody to get out. “They might be trouble,” Doc told the dealer quietly, “but I will shoot you if you shut this game down while I’m ahead.” And don’t think Doc didn’t pocket his winnings before he stepped up on Wyatt’s behalf.

Eventually Tobias Driskill had not six cowhands with him but twenty-five Texas desperadoes, all taunting Wyatt Earp with guns drawn and about to mow him down in a hail of lead when—at the last possible moment—the ferocious killer Doc Holliday jumped up, a chromed Colt in each hand, cursing the Texans for white-livered cowards, intimidating them just long enough for Wyatt to draw his entirely legendary Ned Buntline Special. Routinely promoted to full marshal in these tales, Wyatt pistol-whipped Driskill and commanded the other Texans to “shed their hardware.” A foolish cowboy raised his piece. Doc Holliday instantly shot him dead. Terrified despite overwhelming odds in their favor, the remaining two dozen Texans complied with the order to drop their weapons. Fifty revolvers were said to have been picked up from the street after Wyatt and Doc had arrested the entire gang and marched them off to the Dodge City hoosegow.

Nothing remotely like that was reported in either the Dodge City Times or the Ford County Globe, nor is there any court record of such a large number of cowboys being arrested and booked all at once—before, during, or after 1878. And yet, for the next fifty years, whenever anyone asked why he stuck with Doc Holliday long after the dentist was far more trouble than he was worth, Wyatt Earp would always give the same unadorned answer. “Doc saved my life in Dodge.”

At the time, however, the whole thing was over so quickly that Wyatt only came to understand its significance during the long hours of silence he would soon spend waiting for the dentist to die, listening to a clock tick Doc’s life away.

I shoulda thanked him, Wyatt would think.

Too late, too late, too late …

For instead of expressing gratitude as soon as he and Morg and Doc left the saloon, Wyatt asked, “Where’d you get that gun, Doc?”

The eastern sky was beginning to lighten. The day was going to be gray and rainy, but between the approaching dawn and the lamplight from the saloon, Morgan could see that Doc was trembling. “Come on, Wyatt. Let it go!”

“Where’d you get that gun, Doc?” Wyatt repeated.

“Morgan, you may correct me if I am wrong,” Doc said, his eyes on Wyatt’s, “but I believe I just saved your brother’s miserable Republican hide, and he is about to arrest me for it. You have anything to say about that?”

Wyatt was right, and Morgan backed him. “It’s illegal to carry firearms in town, Doc.”

The dentist’s hand was shaking when he offered the Deringer. “I told you before, Wyatt: I am never entirely unarmed. And a damn good thing, tonight.”

Wyatt took the little pistol Doc held in the palm of his hand. “I’m sorry, Doc, but you’re under—”

Before he could finish, the dentist busted out laughing—

And shouted, “Oh!” and doubled over, and staggered backward with both hands to his chest, where … something had just broken loose inside him, and he could feel a sharp clear focus of pain and pressure … but he honestly didn’t care. He was still flying: still feeling the magical effects of that moment when seven men had backed away in fear. And it wasn’t Wyatt Earp they’d feared. It was little ole John Henry Holliday, a sick, skinny dentist from Griffin by-God Georgia!

For those few enchanted minutes, he had felt strong and unafraid. And now this! This was the capper!

Straightening, throwing an arm around Wyatt, he declared, “Nemo supra leges! That’s what I love about you, Wyatt! One law for everyone!”

“You’re drunk, Doc,” Wyatt said shortly, for he was embarrassed by the gesture, and Doc was starting to cough again. The sound of that right in your ear was kind of disgusting. Doc seemed to understand and moved away some, but he looked kind of strange.

“An accurate observation,” he agreed, beginning to choke, “though not—not germane to our discussion