Doc: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell Page A

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.
    “Bartender!” Kate called, holding up a fan of cash and tossing it into the air. “Doc says the drinks are on him!”
    The tension broke and there was a cheer as Kate sailed like royalty through the crowd. She stopped at the bar before she left, dropping five dollars on the polished walnut.
    “Bourbon. A bottle,” she ordered. “The good stuff, too, not that piss you sell cowboys.”
    There was one last stop, this time at the piano. It was foolish, but Doc had insisted. Kate pulled a gold piece from the carpetbag and offered it. When the startled player reached for the coin, she whipped it away, holding it just beyond his grasp. “Doc says bring somebody in from St. Louis and get this goddam piano tuned. Savvy?”
    The piano player nodded. He’ll be gone on the morning train, she thought, but she handed him Doc’s money.
    She found Doc out behind Dodge House. To anyone else, he would have looked a picture of nonchalance, leaning against the clapboards.
    “Bravo,” she said when she was close. “They won’t forget that, Doc!”
    He was rolling a cigarette in the starlight, or trying to. Kate took the makings from him and tapped the tobacco into line.
    “We tripled the stake,” she told him, “and the story’ll be all over town by morning. You wait and see. Nobody’s gonna bother you from now on.”
    She licked the edge of the paper cylinder, lit the cigarette for him, placed it between his lips. There was the usual little choking cough on the first puff. Nothing to worry about. It was the cheap tobacco they’d been reduced to lately. She’d stop by George Hoover’s shop tomorrow. If he didn’t have any decent North Carolina leaf in stock, she’d order some, special. They had plenty of cash now.
    “Let’s go to the Comique,” she suggested in French, pronouncing the theater’s name properly, not the way the locals did. Commie-Q, they called it. Ignorant louts. “We can catch Eddie Foy’s last show.”
    He shook his head and went on smoking. For a time, they stood together silently, listening to the night sounds. Clanging pianos. Accordions and fiddles. Inebriated shouts of laughter. The hollow clatter of horns in a cattle pen south of the tracks.
    Kate took the cigarette back, pulled the last long drag on it, and flicked the butt into the dirt.
    Doc was a tall man. She liked that about him. She liked the feel of stretching up to put her hand on the