Mary Russell - Doc

Wyatt asked, “Does it get easier?”

“No.”

That was Doc. He didn’t sugar things.

“The law can relieve a man of guilt,” Doc told him quietly, “but not of his remorse.”

The next day, before work, Wyatt went back to the jail to check on Hoyt again. By then the boy had been moved to the doctor’s clinic, so Wyatt walked over there and sat with him awhile. Most of the time Hoyt babbled, but once he seemed lucid. He looked at Wyatt—right at him, like before—and said, “You seem like a nice fella. I don’t know why they want you dead.”

“Who?” Wyatt asked. “Who wants me dead?”

“They was gonna pay me a thousand dollars, and get the charges dropped, after.”

“ Who? ” Wyatt asked. He never got an answer. The boy kept talking, but didn’t make any sense after that.

Wyatt went to work, like usual, but for the next two days he had a strange feeling of not hearing things quite right, like there was cotton in his ears, or water or something. And thoughts kept coming to him.

I could be dead instead of walking down this street.

Morg could be standing at my grave instead of joshing me about the hole in my hat.

I could be in the ground instead of drinking this coffee.

Somebody wants me dead, he’d think, and maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was, for he was just an ordinary man doing his job, and it struck him as unreasonable that anyone would pay so much to get him killed.

Hell, he thought. Give me the grand! I’ll leave.

Finally he realized he had to snap out of it before he made a mistake and let some other fool thing happen. Somebody else might get hurt.

The wire came back the day before George Hoyt died. He was wanted for cattle rustling, down near Amarillo.

Nobody in Dodge knew Hoyt personally, but the Texans in town that week clubbed together and gave the kid a big send-off. Wyatt watched the funeral procession from a small remove. A lot of the drovers looked at him like they might try something but nobody did, possibly because Morgan had rounded up Dog Kelley and Bat and Doc Holliday to stand right behind Wyatt, just in case. Even Eddie Foy stood with them.

It was Eddie’s idea to go over to the Iowa House for breakfast after the burial, when the crowd had dispersed. Wyatt had been broody since the night he shot the kid, so Eddie spent the whole meal trying to make the event into a funny story, telling Dog Kelley about how he thought he was pretty agile, don’t you know, until he saw Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday pancake onto the dance floor when the bullets started flying. Then Eddie told about how his brand-new eleven-dollar suit had sustained a mortal wound. When he went back to his dressing room after the shoot-out, he found three bullet holes in the suit and claimed that one was still burning.

Everyone but Eddie knew that wasn’t really possible. You’d have to fire close enough to have the muzzle flare touch the cloth to make it burn, the way it did when Bat’s brother Ed got shot. Still, nobody was inclined to argue the point—certainly not Bat, who appreciated that changing a few details could make for a better story.

Eddie’s tale would get even better when he wrote his autobiography, in 1928. By then the theater looked like a giant block of Swiss cheese, holed by a thousand bullets fired by a dozen men. Wyatt himself never found humor in the affair. His version of the incident was grimly laconic decades later, even after his account had passed through the imagination of a biographer who often preferred well-dressed drama to bare-naked fact.

On the day of George Hoyt’s funeral, Wyatt pushed his plate away, the eggs cold and his toast uneaten, and waited for Eddie to shut up. Then he told the others what young Hoyt had said about being promised $1,000 to kill him, and how Hoyt expected that the Texas warrant against him would be quashed once Wyatt was dead.

Everybody got real quiet.

“Well, that narrows it some,” Morgan pointed out, after a while. “Has to be someone with a lot of cash.”

“Or someone who could give that impression,” Doc said.

“And clout,” Eddie said, serious now, for he was a Chicago boy familiar with cutthroat politics. “You need a hell of a reach to pull strings in another state.”

“Jesse Driskill, maybe?” Bat suggested. “Word is, he was plenty hot after you arrested his nephew, Wyatt.”

Dog Kelley stared at Bat, giving him a chance to add a name.

Bat looked away.

He’s bought, Dog thought. I wonder how …

“Some men never look hot, but they never forget a slight,” Dog said, leaning back to dig fifty cents out of his pocket.

“Bob Wright,” Morgan said.

Morg was always about two steps quicker than his brother.

Dog stood and left the change on the table to pay for his breakfast.

“Watch your back,” he told Wyatt. “Next time, you won’t see it comin’.”

“This’s a terrible hard country for women,” Eddie Foy had told Alexander von Angensperg at the end of May. And it was none too easy on men, judging by recent events.

One by one, the Jesuits at St. Francis were succumbing to the toil and privation of life on the prairie. Decades of labor in the Kansas wilderness had at last weakened Father Schoenmakers’ heart to such an extent that he laid down the burden of running the mission in June, and could now serve only as chaplain to the Sisters of Loretto at the Indian girls’ school nearby. The loss of Schoenmakers to St. Francis was not unexpected, for his debility had steadily worsened over the years, but when a measles epidemic carried off Father Bax, along with fifteen hundred Osage on the reservation, the brawny Belgian’s death was a great shock. By late June, even the vivacious and indefatigable little Italian Paul Ponziglione had been leveled by exhaustion and illness.

Which is why, in July of 1878, it had fallen to Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg, S.J., to assume the summer mission circuit that Father Paul ordinarily rode, and to do so atop Alphonsus, the mule that ordinarily carried Father Paul.

Both of these experiences were humbling.

Paul Ponziglione was one of those bewildering creatures born with an extraordinary facility for languages. Since coming to Kansas from Italy a quarter century earlier, Father Paul had added English and German to his native Italian and to the French, Latin, and Greek of any educated person. He also spoke five Indian tongues fluently, and had mastered the nearly universal sign language of the plains as well.

The transparent joy with which Paul conveyed his own faith—and the Italian’s personal charm—had done much to bring souls to Christ from among the Osage, the Sauk, the Pawnee, the Cherokee, and the Fox.

Even nearing sixty, the spry little priest traveled relentlessly across Kansas and southward into the Indian Territory as far as the Texas line. Like that of the saint for whom he was named, Father Paul’s missionary work encompassed nascent congregations scattered throughout vast lands peopled largely by those hostile to the Faith. He had begun to reap a small but significant harvest from seeds patiently sown in his youth, and it was his policy to visit every church three times a year.

In each village, Father Paul baptized catechumens and infants or those in danger of death. He joined young couples in holy (and monogamous) matrimony, heard confessions, and celebrated the Mass. He doctored wounds as well, and danced with merrymakers, and he settled individual and public disputes. When disease and injuries took their toll, he sat by the dying and wept with the grieving.

Baptized or Wilden , many Indians had come to consider Paul Ponziglione a friend and a brother, or son, or uncle, or cousin, or—indeed—a father. And in the summer of ’78, Alexander von Angensperg was able to take the exact measure of the reverence and affection with which Father Paul was regarded by noting the degree of distress and open dismay that greeted his own arrival.