A Southern man, well born and well educated, his speech was the soft slurring drawl of the South, and he could play the polished gentleman when he chose. No scruples of any kind handicapped the doctor in his busy life. Though square with his friends, who would have trusted him with their last dollar, his honesty had various shades and nuances. If honesty was convenient, he was honest; otherwise, he used a cold deck.
His courage was his one outstanding virtue. He was afraid of nothing. Despite his delicate appearance and his physical weakness, there was something in the calm, cold look of him which warned of danger. Men of gun-handle notches, whom everybody else feared, themselves feared Doc Holliday.
Holliday was born in Valdosta, Georgia, of a fine and very old Southern family, members of which still live in the little town just north of the Florida line. His ancestors had been cotton-planters and slaveholders for generations, and his father served through the Civil War as a major in the Confederate Army. The white boys of the town had reserved a swimming hole in the Withlacoochee River for their own exclusive use, and when they went to swim one day and found it filled with Negroes, young Holliday emptied his revolver among the darkies. One story says that he killed three and another that he only wounded that number. But as a result of this escapade, he disappeared from Valdosta and was never seen there again.
He was next heard of practising dentistry in Dallas. Having abandoned dentistry for gambling, he killed a man over a game of cards in Jacksboro. He killed a soldier a little later in another Texas town, and, to avoid capture by the military authorities, he rode alone across eight hundred miles of wild, unsettled country, swarming with hostile Indians, and arrived in Denver in . There, in a knife duel, he almost killed Bud Ryan. He shot and seriously wounded Kid Kolton in Trinidad. He quarrelled with Mike Gordon in Las Vegas and shot him dead. He drifted then into the Texas Panhandle, where he fell in with Wyatt Earp.
“I first met Doc Holliday in Fort Griffen, Texas, in ,” said Wyatt Earp. “I was down in that country from Dodge City after a bunch of cow thieves. There was a woman in town—well, you can call her Doc’s inamorata. Her name was Kate Fisher, but in that refined town they called her Big Nose Kate. A name like that might suggest a big, coarse female, but Kate wasn’t like that; she was what you might call handsome, in a way. I liked Doc; he was a witty fellow and good company; he asked me a lot of questions about Dodge and thought he and Kate might like to come there. I had to go to Fort Clark for a few days, and when I got back to Fort Griffin, I found the town buzzing with excitement over Doc and Kate.
“Doc had sat in a game of poker one night with a fellow named Ed Bailey. This Bailey was a crooked card man, and he was always monkeying with the deadwood, which is to say, the discards, and Doc admonished him once or twice to quit this and play poker. Finally, a pretty nice pot came along. Doc called and Bailey spread down three kings. Doc didn’t say a word but just quietly pulled down the pot and threw his hand away without showing what he held. Of course, Bailey started a big holler.
“ ‘I saw you palming one of those kings,’ said Doc.
“ ‘Give me that money,’ roared Bailey. ‘I won it and I’ll have it.’
“Doc was stacking the chips in front of him as Bailey reached for them. Doc knocked his hand away. Bailey went for his six-shooter and was coming up with it when Doc drew a long knife from under his coat collar—he had it hanging by a cord down his back—and with a sidewise swipe below the brisket ripped Bailey wide open.
“Doc was arrested. While he was being held in the hotel office under guard of the town marshal and two policemen, Bailey’s gambler and cowboy friends gathered in the street. The crowd kept growing and getting uglier. There was talk of getting a rope, and things began to look pretty bad for Doc. Big Nose Kate got word of what was going on and hurried to the hotel. The officers let her in, and she had a little talk with Doc and went away. Now a big nose generally means a strong, bold character—at least, so I’ve heard tell—and right now Big Nose Kate lived up to her nose.
“She ordered a couple of horses saddled at a livery and hitched them in an alley. Then she started a blaze in a shed back of the hotel and ran into the street yelling, ‘Fire!’ When, just as she had figured, the mob deserted the front of the hotel and rushed to the burning building, Kate walked into the hotel office. This time she had on a man’s pants, coat, boots, and hat. From a satchel she was carrying she jerked a pair of six-shooters. Doc grabbed them and ordered the marshal and the two deputies to throw up their hands. While Doc kept the marshals covered, Kate disarmed them, and, stowing their artillery in her bag, she and Doc backed out of the door.
“When the mob got back from the fire, madder than ever and still talking about a lynching, Doc and Kate were galloping hard across the prairies on a four-hundred-mile ride to Dodge City. I found them there on my return, living in style at a hotel, and they laughed as they told me about their adventure and seemed to regard it as a fine joke.”
Between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, as cold, deadly men, perhaps, as the frontier knew, existed a friendship classic in its loyalty. For his friend,
