But while Books's attention was concentrated on this work of mercy, Jack Pulford took advantage of the opportunity.
Standing at his table in the front, he slipped the Smith & Wesson rapidly from his hip and shot the gun man in the left shoulder.
Books reeled backward, steadied himself with a left hand behind him on a shelf. His pistol was already leveled over the bar, at the fallen Cobb. It turned on his wrist and fired. The bullet struck Jack Pulford in the heart.
He was staggered by the impact, driven against the wall, and slumping down it, continued to fire randomly at Books, emptying the Smith & Wesson into the bar instead. This firing was reflexive, an act of tendon spasm rather than conceived assault. The gambler was dead before he attained a seated position, back to the wall. Books had fired from sixteen feet. His round had entered Jack Pulford's white silk shirt near a diamond stud slightly to the left of the sternum, or breastplate, and torn through the atrioventricular groove. The heart was literally cleaved in two. Yet there was no exit wound in his back, for the heart muscle, tough and fibrous, poses a real impediment, even to a bullet.
Simultaneously, as Pulford and Books began their exchange, Serrano took his Peacemaker from the table, stood, and fired all six rounds in Books's general direction. Not one was accurate, for Books had been hit in the left shoulder, and his left hand on a shelf would not sustain him. It gave way, and as he sank backward, a moving, diminishing target, he shot four times at Serrano. His slugs chipped plaster, ripped tables, screamed away into corners. Cross-eye's spiderwebbed the mirror behind the bar with cracks and disintegrated that glassware still intact.
One of Books's shots having plowed a furrow across the table top inches from his elbow, Koopmann plunged under the table at which he and El Tuerto had been seated, in this precipitous process knocking the derby hat from his head.
Through a sleet of glass Books disappeared behind the bar.
The door of the telephone booth opened. A man in a brown suit emerged, a salesman evidently, who had been trapped in the booth while calling a prospective customer, for he carried a leather sample case. Looking neither to left nor right, ignoring the combatants, stepping abstractedly over Jay Cobb's body, he tramped through the open doors of the saloon and took an incurious departure.
There was another intermission.
Had the salesman not guided on the daylight from the doors, he might have been unable to find his way out of the Constantinople. So many rounds had been fired, so much black powder burned, that the room was surcharged with smoke. It did not hang inert. The fans made it into veils and wreaths which turned and twisted and lifted and dropped as the blades revolved. In the midst of death, the black smoke was alive.
Jay Cobb lay on the tiles near the street end of the bar. Jack Pulford sat upright against the wall in an attitude of thought. Koopmann hunched on all fours under the protection of a table in the center of the room. Down on one knee beside the table, Serrano reloaded his pistol. J. B. Books sat in broken glass upon the wooden slatting behind the bar, bleeding only moderately. Pulford's soft-lead slug, fired from sixteen feet, had passed completely through his left shoulder, missing fortunately the subclavian artery but cracking the clavicle and tearing the deltoid muscle and the upper margin of the trapezius. His left arm was stunned and useless.
He put down his empty weapon. His back was to the wooden lockers. Leaning against them, by contorting his right forearm and wrist, he drew the other Remington from the right-side holster on his vest and laid it on his lap. He next removed his Stetson and placed it beside him, noting nearby the dollar bill he had put on the bar for his first glass of wine. Looking up, he saw something remarkable. The glass still stood on the bar, undamaged, and now and then, as the black smoke swirled, sunlight through the front doors of the saloon illumined the glass.
He waited. Koopmann he had seen go under a table. Serrano could not know if he, Books, were dead or alive behind the bar, but a man bent on killing would have to find out. Closing his fingers around the pearl handle of the second Remington in his lap, Books watched the wineglass on the bar top and waited.
Within a minute, when sunlight turned the glass translucent, it darkened suddenly, a darkening which passed from right to left. He could hear no footstep, but the movement of the dark meant to him that someone—it had to be Cross-eye—had skulked along the front of the bar toward the street end.
Books raised his left knee and, laying the barrel of the pistol over it, sighted on the edge of the street end of the bar, and waited. He could feel the wound in his shoulder drain, the slow seepage of blood upon his skin. It was like being leeched.
Then, three feet above the floor, around the edge of the bar, an eye appeared, the Mexican's good eye, and Books fired.
His bullet totally smashed Serrano's globe, or eyeball, spattering floor and bar and locker doors with the gelatinous substance of the eyeball. Slivers of bone were driven by the round through the brain, and a triangle of skull and hair was lifted out at the exit wound in the occipital area. Serrano tumbled backward to lie on his side near Jay Cobb.
There was another intermission.
A man strayed through the front doors of the Constantinople to have a drink. Gasping, he peered into the gunpowder haze. He saw a young man lying near him face down in the slime of his own brains, and a Mexican next to him with a gaping hole in his skull, and a third man seated on the floor against the left-hand wall wearing a white silk shirt soaked with blood, and a fourth man, alive, cowering under a table.
"Dear God," said the stray, and backed through the doors.
His were the first words spoken.
Koopmann crawled from under the table, retrieved his derby, and settled it on his head.
"Books!" he shouted.
There was no response from behind the bar.
"I am trowing to you my gun, Books!" His accent was German. "I vant oud of dis, Books, zo I am trowing to you my gun!"
Koopmann sailed his Navy Colt's over the bar.
"Dere!"
On the sly, he reached for, picked up the revolver Jay Cobb had dropped when first hit, and concealed it behind his back.
"I am standing now up, Books, and valking oud of here!"
Koopmann stood, kept the revolver behind his back in his right hand and, turning to keep the weapon out of sight, began to walk ponderously toward the doors.
"I am now going. I am braying to Gott you vill led me, Books."
He was a big man with round, red cheeks, and now, passing along the bar, passing what might be behind it, his eyes began to perspire tears which rolled down his round, red cheeks.
"I am braying to Gott, Books!" he shouted. "Dat you vill led me valk oud of dis place alife!"
Behind the bar, Books came to his knees, shoved the Remington into a coat pocket, extended his right arm to seize hold of the cold water tap over the sink, and pulled himself to his feet. Koopmann had passed Jay Cobb's body and moved the revolver around to his chest and was now near the doors.
Putting his weight against the bar to keep himself erect, Books drew the pistol from his coat pocket, leveled it, and shot Koopmann in the back.
The round was well placed. It entered the torso in the intercostal space between the ribs, missing the spine but mangling the paravertebral muscles, and exited by breaking out a wide swatch of the sternum, or breastbone. Koopmann dropped the Colt's, hugged his chest, and staggered several more steps toward the doors. But the aortic root had been transected, severed by the bullet. The pumping of the heart builds enormous pressure in the human vascular system, which was suddenly released. Blood sprayed from the outlet in his breast as though from the nozzle of a hose, drenching tables and chairs and tiles, so that by the time Koopmann hit the floor he splashed into a pool of his own blood, for he was practically exsanguinated.