Mary Russell - Doc

“But not this evening,” Grier said. “Full house, kings over jacks.”

Big George groaned good-naturedly. Bob Wright smiled, ever so slightly, eyes satisfied. No question. He knew he was going to lose that hand, but … It was tuition! Bob didn’t mind paying it, either, for he had just learned precisely how much money Grier had, and he knew now how the captain reacted, going that close to the edge.

Which made Bob Wright a very interesting man.

“Peach of a hand,” Doc remarked as Grier took the pot. “Your mare is Baghdad stock, is she not? Crockett’s Arabian and May Queen, is my guess.”

Grier looked up. “That’s her line, all right. By Pasha, out of April Princess. You have a good eye, Mr.—?”

“Dr. John Holliday,” he said, watching Grier’s eyes. There was no flicker of recognition. “I trust you enjoyed your stay in Georgia?”

Grier looked puzzled. “Have we met, sir?”

“No, though you may recall an uncle of mine by the same name.”

“Goddammit, Grier, you gonna talk or play?”

Doc bowed slightly, hand on his heart. “My apologies, gentlemen. I will let y’all get on with your game,” he said, but he stayed to watch a while longer. Grier’s tells were obvious. He tended to lean forward slightly when he was bluffing, and often sat back when he had the goods. Big George was more difficult to read, but one thing was certain. The bar girls didn’t like him. They got a percentage of every drink they sold, and there was no profit in a customer who didn’t drink. And Bob Wright was a puzzle. If you watched carefully, you’d swear he was throwing money in Grier’s direction—betting when Grier had a good hand, folding a little late.

Across the room, Kate beckoned. Doc strolled to her side.

“Dealer’s a Chicago meatpacker,” she told him, voice low and intimate. “On the dealer’s right: Estes Turner. From Charleston, touchy about the war. Owns a ranch in Texas now. To his right, a banker from Topeka. Then two more cattlemen. Both flush. Banker’ll drop out in a hand or two.”

“Thank you, darlin’. Find out what the girls have to say about George Hoover. And what is Eli Grier to Bob Wright?”

It was easy enough to put Grier out of his mind. Ignoring the piano was harder. He studied the action at Turner’s table, waiting for the banker to go all in and lose. It wouldn’t take long. Five-card stud is a fast game, and there was a $20 ante. The meatpacker was almost sober and very good. The two cattlemen were dulled by drink. Turner was loud, and reckless.

When the banker left the game, Doc stepped up. “Gentlemen,” he inquired, “may I join you?”

Kate returned to the table, sitting behind Doc so nobody could accuse her of signaling an opponent’s cards to him. Her job was to roll cigarettes and keep his shot glass filled with tea from the bar girls’ “bourbon” bottle, occasionally substituting the real thing if he started to cough.

For a couple of hours, Doc stayed small, playing quietly, folding a good hand now and then, to see how Turner would react. With every win, the man sat easier, talked more, and had another drink. Money was tossed into the center of the table with an insouciant flip of the wrist— cito acquiritur, cito perit —but it was a carelessness as yet untested by any significant loss. Turner was drunk on winning. He was drunk, period.

In the fourth hour of play, one of the cattlemen dropped out, leaving nearly all his money in front of the meatpacker, Doc, and Turner.

Doc began to work his man. It was nothing flashy, just playing hands he’d have quit earlier. He took three big pots in a row, betting heavily. Then, when he had Turner on his back foot, Doc let him win with a sudden fold. Kate held her face still, but it was hard not to smile. Turner couldn’t make out what was going on: suspicious when he lost, bewildered when he won.

“Goddammit, Holliday,” Turner complained. “You don’t make any sense at all!”

“ It is wrong to have a ruthless, iron heart ,” Doc recited, squinting through smoke at his cards. “ Even the gods can bend and change … Your five hundred. A thousand more.”

A crowd began to gather. Side bets were being made. Doc took the pot and turned the talk to war. Tinder for Turner’s spark. A few hands later, he drew the spade he needed and gave a sign to Kate, who left to get Bat Masterson.

This was when things could go all wrong. After what happened in Denison, Doc wanted a witness with a badge. “There’s trouble at Doc’s table,” Kate would tell Bat, knowing that there would be soon and trusting that Bat would leave his own game, for she’d been priming him for weeks with tales of Doc’s bad temper and readiness to attack.

“Why, ten minutes after I got off the train in Philadelphia, I knew why we had lost,” Doc was saying in his laziest drawl. “The North had iron mines. Foundries. Shipyards. Munitions factories, mills … Your grand and another.”

The meatpacker and the cattleman folded. It was just him and Turner now.

“The South?” he continued. “We knew how to produce two things, my friend. Cotton and aristocrats. Only thing left is the cotton, and the weevils are gettin’ half of that. What’ve you got?”

Turner had a king-high straight. When Doc caught sight of Kate and Bat, he laid out his flush and took the pot, letting the sweep of his arm go a little wide, as though drink had made him sloppy.

“The cause was lost,” he said, pulling the money in, “before you ignorant goddam Carolina crackers fired the first shot at Sumter.”

For years afterward, Bat Masterson would tell people about that night.

“I arrived too late to hear exactly what Doc said to set the fracas off, but there was no question about what happened next. Turner hollered that Doc was a goddam liar and reached for his gun.”

Along with everyone else in the saloon, the South Carolinian went motionless a heartbeat later, paralyzed by the sight of a short-barreled, nickel-plated Colt .38 leveled at his chest.

“Think about how much practice a move like that takes! Hours and hours,” Bat would say. “I never saw a hand quicker than Holliday’s. And I’ll tell you something else,” he would continue. “A serious gunman was always a little deaf in one ear—pistol practice, you follow? Doc always turned his right ear toward you when you talked. He was left-handed, y’see?”

“I step aside to no man in my love for the Southland,” Doc said softly in the sudden silence, “but I speak the truth. You will do well to apologize for suggestin’ differently, sir.”

“Doc’s voice never rose much above a whisper,” Bat would tell people. “Course, his lungs were so bad, I doubt he could’ve shouted if he wanted to, but that man could put a by-God whiplash into his words.”

“Say it , you white trash chickenshit sonofabitch. John Holliday speaks the truth, or I am a lyin’, Yankee-lovin’ yellow dog.”

Eyes wide, Turner swallowed hard. “John Holliday speaks the truth.”

Doc waited.

“Anyone says different is a yellow dog,” Turner finished.

The gun was holstered as quickly as it had appeared.

“I accept your apology, sir,” Doc said graciously. He rose to address the room. “And I offer my own for the unpleasantness, gentlemen.”

Nobody moved, not even Turner, who was white beneath his drunken flush. Doc and Kate were heard to speak briefly in a foreign language. Doc ambled out into the night, leaning on his cane. Kate swept their winnings into her carpetbag. Turner looked down. He still had some money left and he wasn’t dead. He shook his head and started to laugh: half nerves, half relief.

“No harm done,” Bat said with a shrug. Holliday was all talk, he decided, though he would not have said so aloud.