“Coming in!” Hans shouted from the boardwalk.
“Come on, partner,” Hardrock said, punching out empties and filling up his guns.
Hans stepped through the batwings and coughed as the arid smoke filled his nostrils. His eyes widened in shock at the human carnage on the floor. Widened further as he looked at the wounded men leaning up against the bar. “I vill get the doctor.” He backed out and ran for Doc Adair’s office.
While Charlie and Pistol kept their guns on the moaning gunslicks on the floor, Smoke and Lujan walked among them, silently determining which should first receive Adair’s attentions and who would never again need attention.
Not in this life.
Smoke knelt down beside a young man, perhaps twenty years old. The young man had been shot twice in the stomach, and already his dark eyes were glazing over as death hovered near.
“You got any folks, boy?” Smoke asked.
“Mother!” the young man gasped.
“Where is she?”
“Arkansas. Clay County. On the St. Francis. Name’s ... name’s Claire ... Shelby.”
“I’ll get word to her,” Smoke told him as that pale rider came galloping nearer.
“She always told me ... I was gonna turn out ... bad.” The words were very weak.
“I’ll write that your horse threw you and you broke your neck.”
“I’d ... ’preciate it. That’d make her ... feel a bunch better.” He closed his eyes and did not open them again.
“I thought you was gonna kiss him there for minute, Jensen,” a hard-eyed gunslick mocked Smoke. The lower front of the man’s shirt was covered with blood. He had taken several rounds in the gut.
“You got any folks you want me to write?” Smoke asked the dying man.
The gunslick spat at Smoke, the bloody spittle landing close to his boot.
“Suit yourself.” Smoke stood up, favoring his wounded leg. He limped back to the bar and leaned against it, just as the batwings pushed open and Doc Adair and the undertaker came in.
Both of them stopped short. “Jesus God!” Adair said, looking around him at the body-littered and blood- splattered saloon.
“Business got a little brisk today, Doc,” Smoke told him, accepting a shot glass of tequila from Lujan. “Check Cord here first.” He knocked back the strong mescal drink and shuddered as it hit the pit of his stomach.
The doctor, not as old as Smoke had first thought—of course he’d been sober now for several weeks, and was now wearing clean clothes and had gone back to shaving daity—knew his business. He cleaned out the shoulder wound and bandaged it, rigging a sling for Cord out of a couple of bar towels. He then turned his attention to Lujan, swiftly and expertly patching up the arm.
Smoke had cut open his jeans, exposing the ugly rip along the outside of his leg. “It ought to be stitched up, Adair said. ”It’ll leave a bad scar if I don’t.”
“Last time my wife Sally counted, Doc, I had seventeen bullet scars in my hide. So one more isn’t going to make any difference.”
“So young to have been hit so many times,” the doctor muttered as he swabbed out the gash with alcohol. Smoke almost lifted himself out of the chair as the alcohol cleaned the raw flesh. Adair grinned. “Sometimes the treatment hurts worse than the wound.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Smoke said as his eyes went misty, then went through the same sensation as Adair cleaned the wound in his ear.
“How ’bout us?” a gunfighter on floor bitched. “Ain’t we get no treatment?”
“Go ahead and die,” Adair told him. “I can see from here you’re not going to make it.”
Charlie and his friends had walked around the room, all the guns and gun belts, from both the dead and living.
“Always did want me a matched set of Remingtons,” Silver Jim said. “Now I got me some. Nice balance, too.”
“I want you to lookee here at this Colt double-action,” Charlie said. “I’ll just be hornswoggled. And she’s a .44 -.40,
Got a little ring on the butt so s a body could run some twine through it and not lose your gun. Ain t that something, now. Don’t have to cock it, neither. Just point it and pull the trigger.” He tried it one-handed and almost scared the doctor half to death when Charlie shot out a lamp. ”All that trigger-pullin’ -the-hammer-back does throw your aim off a mite, though. Take some gettin’ used to, I reckon.”
“Maybe you ’pposed to shoot it with both hands,” Hardrock suggested.
“That don’t make no sense atall. There ain’t no room on the for two hands. Where the hell would you put the other’n?”
“I don’t know. Was I you, I’d throw the damn thing away. They ain’t never gonna catch on.”
“I’m a hurtin’ something fierce!” a D-H gunhawk hollered.
“You want me to kick you in the head, boy?” Pistol asked him. “That’d put you out of your misery for a while.”
