“Your office? But I were ten times closer’n that, and—”
So Turkey was gawking in consternation, even beginning to itch from it symptomatically, when a girl suddenly cut them off with a scream from somewhere beyond his vision. “Belie! I don’t see Belle! Oh, glory be! And it must of commenced up there in her private boudoir likewise. You don’t think—”
“Aw, Belle ain’t in there neither. I seed her go tearing off in a surrey, jest a short spell after all that gun fracas took place—”
“Yair, her and one of the girls, whipping them mares like the tax collector hisself were right back of ‘em, too—”
“But where—?”
Turkey lost the rest of it in the swell of the crowd, but he could not have been less interested anyway, still dumbly confronting the doctor. “But what come then?” he cried finally. “All right, let’s jest skip the durned shooting part of it fer now, I mean after. Who got—?”
“Well, that’s the only aspect ain’t too definite,” the doctor admitted. “But the way I calculate it, it looks like they both must of got punctured pretty severe, since—”
“What? Both? Dingus got—”
“Well, that’s jest theory for the moment, son, because ain’t nobody seen ass nor elbow of ‘em since. But what they done, they both sort of faded away, into these convenient alleys after the actual disagreement come to a halt, you see. So I don’t doubt but where they was headed, they was crawling off somewhere to hunt up separate holes to die in, which a wounded feller’ll do, ‘times, if’n he comprehends it’s hopeless.”
“But—” Turkey had to struggle to keep from shouting at the man now, clutching at his nightshirt again. “Now lissen,” he sobbed, “jest lissen. How come you don’t know no more’n that about it, if’n you claim you saw so durned much of the rest? You ask me, I think you’re plumb so full of bullshit your eyes are brown, is what I think, because—”
“Now what reason would I have fer telling fibs?” the doctor asked reasonably. “Of course, ain’t neither one of’em dead in any except the ordinary sense, on the other hand. What I mean, this were their mortal demises, nacherly, but in another way, a brace of gallant, romantic figures like that, especially that Dingus, why he’s gonter live on in folks’s recollections for just years and years. You might even put it that he belongs to the ages now, like that Henry Wadsworth Longfeller feller, died last year, or General Custer hisself, or—”
Turkey’s jaw hung as if ill-hinged. “Doc, lissen, you feel all right?”
“Why not, son? Truth is, it ain’t every day in a impoverished old man’s career he gets to shed hisself of one unsuccessful line of work and enter into a whole new occupation altogether, I reckon.”
“A whole new—”
“Yep. Gonter start me up a Wild West traveling show, sort of like that one of Will Cody’s I were mentioning. Because you take yourself now, you’re jest a average sort of citizen, wouldn’t you claim? And you would of paid, oh, maybe a cash dollar or two to get the true facts of such a historical occasion, wouldn’t you? Matter of fact that’s how the whole thing come to me, jest after you skedaddled on out’n my office, from when I got to cogitating on how you was so all-fired anxious and all. Now of course it’s jest downright fool’s luck I happen to be the only living soul’s got the gen-u-ine, authentic, eyewitness details, but since it done befell that way I reckon I might as well get me a flat-bottom wagon, and a couple o’ actor fellers, and—” The doctor interrupted himself, glancing beyond Turkey. “Why, howdy there, Miss Pfeffer, glad to see you’re all recuperated again. You heard tell of all the deathless goings-on, I reckon—”
So Turkey saw her again then too, abruptly forgetting not only the doctor for the moment but even his despair over Dingus himself, itching more violently than ever. She approached quite decorously, however, almost sedate now. “Good evening again yourself, Doctor Fell,” she remarked pleasantly. “Yes, a wretched conflagration, isn’t it? By the way, I wonder if perchance you’ve spied the preacher anywhere in the throng?”
“Spied the—” Turkey swallowed dismally. “Oh, now look, ma’am, I already done informed you at least ten times, I ain’t but only nineteen years old. And on top of which I—”
So it was a moment before he noticed the gun. It was tiny, a Derringer, but more than adequately persuasive, and he realized too that his own body concealed it from the doctor, or from anyone else. It did not waver, did not falter once as she pressed it cold against his navel where a button was long since missing from his woolens.
“Oh, we was right fond chums fer years,” the doctor’s voice came obliquely then, from where he had accosted someone else in the crowd. “Real misunderstood lad he were too, sort of a modern nineteenth-century Prince Robin Hood, if’n the facts were knowed. But say, you don’t happen to call to mind nobody looking for employment maybe, say some feller round about Hoke Birdsill’s heft and build?”
All of which left Turkey Doolan no solace but to further indulge his infested scalp where he stood, wondering in considerably more bewilderment than ever now, just what, after all, had happened, and precisely how, since a good deal unquestionably had, or so it most certainly seemed, while the main roof of Belle’s place collapsed in a roar across the street behind them.
“Call me Agnes, why don’t you?” the woman suggested.
7
“A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?”
Meanwhile, back at the bordello, for some time before the fire Hoke Birdsill had been remarkably confused himself. He had not heard the early shotgun blast which indicated that Dingus was escaping from jail, nor did he hear the preacher, Rowbottom, verifying the accomplishment. Once he had been confronted by Belle’s protestations of abiding devotion, and her proposal of marriage, sense of the inescapable had clouded Hoke’s mind like mist.
So he probably did not realize either, when he finally awoke, that he had fainted. He was still in Belle’s bedroom, but he had no notion whatsoever of the time. And why was he undressed, stripped to his woolens? What made his jaw ache is it did?
Hoke could only moan, feeding upon his own malaise. And it was about to get worse, since there remained the rest of it to be remembered now also, the incredible climax of his visit to Miss Pfeffer’s, his subsequent meeting with Anna Hot Water in the street. “Three?”he asked himself miserably. “Three separate catastrophes all scheduled for the same solitary hour?”
Like some wet, furred beast, Hoke shuddered, burrowing more deeply into Belle’s blankets. He lay with his angular knees drawn up against his chest, his eyes closed. “But maybe I’ll jest up and die,” he speculated hopefully. “Maybe that initial doctor back there in Santa Fe were right that time, and all of them others made a error, and I ain’t got but a few months left. A man could face that much, I reckon.”
Hoke had ventured only one glance about the room, through a single, heavy-lidded eye, bothered by the lamplight. He had thought himself alone. But gradually now he became aware of sounds behind him, although he did not turn. “Three?” he asked himself again.
But when the sounds increased, almost as if some heavy object of furniture were being disturbed, Hoke at last rolled from the wall. The light remained insupportable, but one of the girls was in fact moving something, dragging an enormous wardrobe trunk toward Belle’s rear door, or trying to. She was new to the house, or moderately so, since Hoke scarcely recognized her. “Well, howdy do,” she greeted him. “You sure did have yourself a snooze, dint you? Why, you was jest snoring to beat a brass band.”