Doc: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell

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