Mary Russell - Doc

Nights, he was content to deal faro, building up a stake for the next big poker game. Kate was relieved to see easy money accumulating, and her mood brightened as well. She kept a couple of special clients, but when she went over to James and Bessie’s now, it was usually a social call. That made Doc happier.

Less anxious about his health and its consequences for her own life, Kate was able to think more clearly about his day work. It was she who suggested that Doc have the Eberhardt boy keep an eye on the office in the mornings. It wasn’t necessary for Doc to sit around waiting for patients, she pointed out. If someone showed up first thing in the morning, Wilfred could run down to China Joe’s and let Doc know that he should go straight to No. 24 after he cleaned up from his ride. If nobody was waiting, Doc could come home and be on call instead of sitting around in the office.

And Kate made sure that they found a better use for his time.

Mabel Riney wasn’t taking any excuses on the morning of August 14, 1878. “It’s your job, John,” she told her husband, rousting him out of bed. “Get up and do it.” And if his head pounded with every hoofbeat as drovers crossed the bridge and went back to their herds after their own long night, well, that was just too bad.

Doc Holliday rode up to the tollgate on Wyatt Earp’s two-dollar horse a little past dawn. Wincing into the sun, John held out his palm and parts of some fingers to collect the toll.

Handing over two bits, the dentist looked out across the river and said in a singing kind of way, “ Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away .” Then, in a regular voice, he said, “I’ll be followin’ the cattle trail south for a couple of hours, Mr. Riney. If I don’t come back across the bridge by eight, you should probably ask Morgan Earp to ride out and collect my corpse for shipment back to Georgia.”

Years later, after Mabel Riney was dead, when John Riney was old and toothless and a hopeless drunkard, he would let punks buy him beers while he told about the day the infamous Doc Holliday spoke of his bones whitening on the prairie.

“Doc got off his horse about halfway over the toll bridge, see? And he stood there at the railing, watching the river. I reckoned he was about to drown hisself because he was so sick,” John would tell anybody who’d pay for a drink. “Don’t do it, Doc! That’s what I hollered, and I guess I saved his life that day. But y’see, that’s why Doc was so fearless down there in Tombstone! Because he was going to die soon anyways, so he might as well get it over with.”

The funny thing was, nobody really believed that John Riney had ever met Doc Holliday, but they all believed what he said about the dentist hoping to die sooner than later. Of course, John Riney did know Doc—not well, but they had a nodding acquaintance. And Doc did speak of the possibility of dying out on the prairie south of Dodge, but it was a joke that John didn’t get because he tended to take things at face value even when he hadn’t been drinking most of the week, and in John’s defense, Doc did make the remark straight-faced.

So John nodded solemnly and said, “Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

Head throbbing, he watched the dentist start across the bridge and then dismount halfway across. John came to his own conclusions about that, for there was no way he could have known that it was Doc’s birthday, or that the dentist was in fact feeling remarkably cheerful.

“Twenty-seven years old and not dead yet!” John Henry Holliday had marvelled while saddling Dick Naylor that morning. “Let’s go see what’s south of that bridge this mornin’,” he suggested, flipping the stirrup leathers down.

Responding to his rider’s high spirits, Dick was prancing and full of himself coming out of the Elephant Barn into the cool of early morning, but the roadbed of the toll bridge was unfamiliar and Dick didn’t like it much. Rather than get bucked off by a skittish horse, John Henry dismounted and spoke soothingly to the animal, letting Dick come to terms with the situation. In the meantime, the arch of the bridge provided a slight rise in perspective he enjoyed.

“Dick, if you want a hill in Kansas, you have to by-God build it yourself,” he remarked.

It was a pretty morning. A thunderstorm the night before had cleared the air. Graceful in the breeze, bluestem grass rippled under a sky the color of Kate’s eyes. Phlox and mallow and goldenrod added lavender and pink and yellow to the scene. Red-winged blackbirds trilled in the cattails along the river.

It was a wonder to him now that he’d once failed to appreciate the beauty of this land. The trick of it, he’d lately realized, was to pay attention to the sky as part of the landscape. The rising sun was gilding high cottony clouds from below. In a few hours, as the light shifted upward, those clouds would send amethyst and turquoise shadows racing over the emerald ground, and their sweep across the land would reveal subtle undulations in terrain that only appeared flat to the careless observer.

His own quiet contentment calmed Dick. Soon the horse felt ready to walk over the scary, hollow-sounding surface with the noisy, glittery water below, and to let his rider remount when they reached the solid ground beyond. Swinging easily onto the saddle, sitting comfortably fifteen and a half hands above the earth, gazing at the country south of the Arkansas, John Henry found himself engulfed by a sense of his own well-being. He was grateful to Kate for insisting that they come to Dodge and glad the two of them were working things out. He was pleased that he had made friends here and elated to have returned at last to a useful profession that provided him with so much satisfaction.

And—God a’mighty—to be riding again!

Since coming West, he had been neither well enough nor prosperous enough for long enough to consider keeping a horse to ride for pleasure. Now, with Dick Naylor beneath him, he felt himself a joyful boy once more: privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being.

It came to him then that if things worked out the way he hoped, he might just buy a colt from Wyatt Earp one day. By Dick Naylor out of Roxana.

For the first time since he’d begun his practice in Atlanta at the age of twenty-one, John Henry Holliday was beginning to think of the future as though he had a right to it. And why not? Outside, in the growing warmth and the brilliant sunshine, rocking in the rhythm of a ground-eating lope, he was aware of his body from his head to his heels and he felt fine .

Thirteen and a half months had passed since Henry Kahn had tried to kill him. His hip had healed slowly but fully; the scarring gave him trouble with some movements, but most days now his cane was more fashionable than functional. The pain beneath his left scapula was probably muscular; he just needed to get used to stooping over patients again. The cough was bad occasionally; he should be more careful about the things that set it off. Granted, breathing was sometimes difficult, but he expected to do better after the cattle season ended, absent the dust.

He could ride now for a good two hours at a stretch, and he felt fortunate to have lived long enough to learn that the cure for his illness might be as simple as “Go on outside and enjoy yourself, son.” He wasn’t so certain he’d enjoy cold baths when the weather cooled off, but for now, they were remarkably refreshing after exertion. China Joe charged less for unheated water, so that part of the therapy even saved money, which pleased Miss Kate. He was tired after the rides, but that was the whole point of the exercise, and he was sleeping so much better! He awoke restored, feeling far more rested than he had during the enforced idleness imposed by Tom McCarty after the fall on the Fourth of July.