The doctor considered all that with an expression which eluded Turkey completely, finally returning to his coffee. But Turkey had no more time to discuss the matter anyhow. Because if he himself had waited all these years for something to happen, and then had been under the illusion it had finally come to pass when Hoke Birdsill shot him, Turkey knew now that he had been sorely mistaken. Because that had been prelude merely, had been but the first rude intimation of what lay ahead. “Because now is really when it’s gonter happen, all right,” he told himself, “and if this misbelieving old fud don’t know it, well that’s jest his poor dumb luck.”
So he not only disregarded the doctor entirely but forgot to ask about the vest also, striding rapidly toward the door. “Jest don’t come weeping to me when you wanter know the facts of it later,” he declared in dismissal.
“Oh, I’ll hear ‘em somewheres soon enough, I don’t doubt,” the doctor sighed. “Feller’d almost get the notion it were worth minted money or some such, the way folks is so quick to rush around telling each other about—”
But Turkey had already drawn the door after himself. “Money,” he muttered contemptuously. “Don’t he know there’s jest some experiences in this life you can’t never buy?”
The street was actually darker than he had anticipated, despite lights that glimmered here and there in houses and saloons, since the moon was lost amid racing shards of clouds. Turkey started to his right, moving furtively and keeping clear of the roadway itself, although peering into its profound, reaching shadows. Unconsciously, he was licking his lips as he went. “Were I there?” he enunciated smugly, already practicing, already in preparation for all the long, fecund years ahead, “—why, where else would I of been? You think Dingus would of made a move without he had Turkey Doolan close to hand?”
Deep in the blackness at the corner of a wooden frame house he chose his spot. He was diagonally across from the adobe jail itself, close enough to discern a single hanging lamp beyond a high barred window. Somewhere a coyote howled as if in presentiment, with foreboding and yet expectantly at once, although P. Strom’s watch informed him dimly there were perhaps five minutes yet. Turkey decided to slip behind a post on the porch then, an even finer vantage point, since another lamp in a window behind him cast a shallow but precious glow across this immediate section of the street.
Then, abruptly, that lamp moved, terrifying him for a fraction of a second before he realized it had simply been lifted, carried away by someone inside the house. He saw no one, however, glancing rearward too late. So he had just returned to his vigil, shifting to peer into the grim, ominous shadows once again, when the door opened and the woman emerged.
Turkey cried out in genuine concern. “Oh, ma’am, you sure better get back on inside there—”
Startled herself, the woman shuddered as Turkey arose quickly to reassure her. “Begging your pardon for being on your premises,” he explained. “But there’s about to be this immortal gun duel, you see, involving that famous desperado, Dingus Billy Magee, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, and—”
Something happened to the woman at mention of the name. In fact for a moment Turkey thought she might drop the lamp. Still alarmed anyway, he snatched it from her, deciding at the same time to extinguish it as a precautionary measure (if pausing for the briefest moment to consider the woman herself first, her face striking him as unengagingly long and marelike, her hair twisted into curl papers for some reason decidedly the worse for wear). “Please now, ma’am,” he insisted, “and you’d best hasten, too. Not that Dingus hisself won’t shoot straight as a arrow, but that Hoke Birdsill, why he’s apt to be fusillading in nine different directions at once out’n sheer terror, afore he finally gets kilt, so—”
“What?” the woman demanded then, seeming to scowl in the darkness. “Sheriff Birdsill will be what? Why, I’m just on my way to the jail myself. What are you—?”
“He’s gonter get hisself deceased in this pistol battle with Dingus Billy Magee, yes’m. Smack out in the street here, any instant now, which is why I were suggesting you oughter get youself to—”
“Deceased? Sheriff Birdsill—” She continued to hesitate. “But I’m afraid I still don’t understand. Because he and I are scheduled to be — a fight? With actual weapons? In which it is possible that — that Mr. Birdsill might be — might—?”
“Ma’am,” Turkey proclaimed gravely, “you can take my solemn true oath on it. That feller Birdsill, he’s as good as worm-eaten already. Because when Dingus gets his dander up, well there jest ain’t no—”
But then it was too late for explanation. Suddenly— magnificently, gloriously — a revolver shot shattered the night. Turkey Doolan’s heart leaped, even as he was instinctively whirling to fling himself behind the post again. “Protect yourself, ma’am!” he cried.
But then just as quickly the exultation, the ecstasy, melted for an instant into panic. Because when he searched the street now, when his eyes strained to penetrate the sprawling, interlaced shadows, he saw nothing at all. Horrified that it might be over even before it seemed to have begun, Turkey could have cursed the woman’s interruption, the moment’s distraction.
Then a new shot exploded, allowing Turkey to sigh with relief even as he made out the sheriff, Hoke Birdsill himself, in the flash of powder, as he recognized the frock coat which had hovered above him near the livery stable earlier, the derby hat as well. Darkness enveloped the figure again before the sound ceased reverberating, however. Turkey caught his breath, waiting once more.
The next shot came too swiftly, and from too far off, for Turkey to discern anything in its flash. But with this one he did not have to. “Git ‘im, Dingus!” he cried. “Git the wick-dipping polecat where it hurts!”
Then he actually did see him after all, saw Dingus, and this time it seemed to Turkey Doolan that not only his breath, not only his heart, but the world itself had stopped for the fleeting, immemorial moment. Because it was the vest that Turkey recognized now, the gaudy red-and-yellow fringed Mexican vest that he himself, he, Millard Fillmore Doolan, had worn that very day and which Dingus had somehow retrieved, which like some charmed protective talisman Dingus had felt indispensable for this ultimate deadly confrontation with his eternal nemesis. Turkey recognized it beyond any doubting as the shadowy, sprinting figure darted through the spillage of light from the doorway of a saloon, as the colors flashed in apotheosis to name the headlong dashing presence of Dingus Billy Magee! Turkey trembled with the thrill, with the consciousness of history itself in the making.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” he cried, although oblivious of his own exclamations now, “that dopey old Doc! This’ll learn him what a feller kin believe in, I reckon!”
Then Dingus was gone (Turkey had seen him for half a second actually, perhaps less) and silence again flooded the night. There was no visible movement now, Dingus could be anywhere, Hoke Birdsill similarly. So when the next shot came, and no mere revolver’s crack this time but the unmistakable boom of a shotgun instead, flashing behind a hooded wagon toward which Turkey was not looking at all, he had no idea who had fired, no way of determining shooter or intended victim. The echo rocked and clattered across the town, a dog yelped in disapprobation — and then the stillness settled again like doom. Turkey’s heartbeat ceased one further time. “Dingus?” he whispered. “Aw, come on, git ‘im, git’im!”
Then a sickening, an impossible idea crossed Turkey Doolan’s mind, one that he could not have conceived of even a moment before. “Dingus?” he said again. Turkey dared not move.