Mary Russell - Doc

It was truly remarkable that Wyatt had decided to go all in. Aside from the expense and the anxiety of extensive dental work, there was the plain trust required to believe that a dentist wouldn’t recommend procedures simply to jack up his fees. In Wyatt’s case, it was easier to list the teeth that didn’t need care, and John Henry was gratified that the deputy believed in his professional integrity—

“Why ain’t you in bed?”

He looked up.

Kate was standing in the office doorway, small fists on her hips, ready to do battle. “You said you was tired. You said you was going to bed.”

“No …” Doc said slowly. “I believe what I said was—”

She stalked in and put her hand on his forehead. “You’re hot,” she told him.

“It’s July, darlin’.”

“You look like shit.”

“Miss Kate, I declare!” he cried, fluttering his eyelashes. “You are such a flirt!”

“China Joe took in seams again,” she said, daring him to deny it.

“Jau Dong-Sing is a reprehensible gossip,” he muttered, lowering his eyes to the papers on his desk, “and I shall speak to him about—”

“You’re losing weight—I can feel it! I don’t need no goddam Chinaman to tell me that. We lost money last night. Your game’s off,” she told him. She dug a hand into her purse and held up ninety dollars. “Do you understand how hard I work to make this much?”

“I have never asked you to—”

“No, but you keep eating—”

“Not much, I don’t.”

“Goddammit, Doc! One of us has to have some business sense, or we’ll both be out in the street!”

He sat back in his chair, arms folded across his chest: a tall, thin, offended version of her small, round, furious self.

“What’s the best a dentist can make in a year?” she demanded. “In a real city, with a big practice! Sixteen hundred? Two grand? Doc, you can win that in an hour ! When you’re rested, when you pay attention—”

“Darlin’, if my income is insufficient to satisfy you, you are free to depart at your earliest convenience!”

“Damn you, I don’t want to leave! I just want to understand why in hell you bother with this!”

“ Why? ”

“Yes! Why?” She grabbed the papers on his desk and waved the crumpled notes at the chair, and the drill, and the cabinet of instruments. “This office, all this equipment—it ain’t never going to pay! Why do you keep spending money and trying to be a goddam dentist when you could—”

“Because,” he said, astonished that he had to say it, “I can relieve sufferin’.”

She stared at him, mouth open.

He stared back, dumbfounded by her surprise.

“Kate … People die in misery for want of a dentist’s care! I bother with all this because I can relieve sufferin’. I can improve lives. Sometimes I can even save them.” He stood and reached over to take the treatment plan out of her hand, flattening the notes against the surface of his desk. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and tense. “There is nobody for five hundred miles able to do what I can for patients who trust me enough to let me treat them. I am good at my work. I am proud of my profession. And I will thank you not to belittle it.”

For the moment, the argument was suspended, the two of them glaring at each other. In the silence, they became aware again of the noise outside. Gunfire. Strings of small firecrackers crackling. The cheers of drunken spectators egging on a fight.

Kate dropped her eyes first. Seeing his notes, with their careful drawings and orderly numbered paragraphs, she asked, “Who’s that for?”

“Wyatt.”

“He’ll never pay you,” she said dismissively.

“He already is,” Doc said tightly. “Two dollars a week.”

“For crissakes, Doc, that ain’t even ante!”

“Kate, the discussion is closed.”

“You know he bet everything he’s got on that race this afternoon?”

Doc looked up warily and saw the smug expression of a handicapper with inside information. He had money on that race himself. So did Morg. The odds on Dick Naylor were twenty-seven to one, last time he checked.

“He’s going to forfeit,” Kate said with satisfaction.

This was news, and she could see it.

“That big stupid hick didn’t think it out,” she said. “The whole town is filled with Texans trying to kill each other. Listen to them out there! He ain’t never going to get away from work long enough to ride—Dammit, Doc, where are you going?”

Things happened. He reacted. He didn’t intend to defy Kate or shake off her angry solicitude. In quieter moments, he was touched when she nagged him about taking better care of himself, even if her motives were a good deal less than pure. That said, by the time he left the hotel and plunged into the roiling crowd outside, he had forgotten her.

Dick Naylor was entered in the quarter mile.

Post to post, no more than thirty seconds.

The entire population of Ford County appeared to be in town for the festivities, and those nine hundred locals had been joined by upwards of three thousand cowboys. Temperance ladies from Wichita were marching through this throng, holding up neatly lettered placards meant to warn illiterate drovers of the dangers of Demon Rum, while an unknown number of freelance pickpockets and sneak thieves, exported by the City of St. Louis, worked the crowd. Farm families made their way through the crush in open wagons driven by stiff-faced German fathers trying not to provoke an anti-immigrant riot by running over singing, shouting, belligerent Texans. Scandalized German mothers did their inadequate best to shield the eyes of gleefully curious German children from the spectacle of Irish streetwalkers hawking their commodities as shamelessly as the Jewish drummers who offered notions and patent medicines at makeshift tables along the teeming length of Front Street. And all the while, Mr. Jau’s two assistant laundrymen busily sold Chinese firecrackers to idiots who lit the fuses and tossed them under the bellies of horses, just to see the animals go berserk and bolt through town, scattering the citizenry.

Battling through the swarm, Doc scanned faces, hoping to spot Wyatt or Morgan. When ten minutes failed to yield sight of a single lawman, he decided to put the von Angensperg Principle into effect: skip permission and ask forgiveness later. He had to get to the barn, saddle Dick, and ride to the racetrack by three, and he was running out of time. If anyone at the track argued, he’d say Wyatt sent him, and deal with the consequences later.

Tired of the buffeting and shoving, he decided to try for one of the alleys and moved to the edge of the street. He had just reached the boardwalk when a chair crashed through the Comique Theater’s front window.

Ducking low, off balance, he raised his arms against the shower of glass. A moment later, he was spun around and knocked to the ground when thirty-some wild-eyed Texas boys boiled out of the building. He was still struggling to find his footing when he heard Eddie Foy shout, “Doc! I’m coming!”

Minnowing through the mob with lithe acrobatic dispatch, Eddie arrived at his side, hauled him onto his feet, and pulled him backward until the two of them were flattened against the wall of the theater. Once there, they had no thought except to stay out of the brawl.

The Texans were screaming for blood, a quantity of which was already streaming from the head of a limp German fiddler—and if he wasn’t already dead, he would be soon, for the cowboy on top of him was pretty clearly set on opening the fiddler’s throat. “When I tell you to play ‘Yaller Rose,’ ” the kid was yelling, “you by God play ‘Yaller Rose,’ you damn Dutch sonofabitch!”