The Doctor and the Rough Rider (A Weird West Tale, Band 3) - Softcover

Resnick, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616146907 ISBN 13: 9781616146900

Verlag: Pyr, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

It’s August 19, 1884. The consumptive Doc Holliday is preparing to await his end in a sanitarium in Leadville, Colorado, when the medicine man Geronimo enlists him on a mission. The time the great chief has predicted has come, the one white man with whom he’s willing to treat has crossed the Mississippi and is heading to Tombstone—a young man named Theodore Roosevelt. The various tribes know that Geronimo is willing to end the spell that has kept the United States from expanding west of the Mississippi. In response, they have created a huge, monstrous medicine man named War Bonnet, whose function is to kill Roosevelt and Geronimo and keep the United States east of the river forever. And War Bonnet has enlisted the master shootist John Wesley Hardin.
 
So the battle lines are drawn: Roosevelt and Geronimo against the most powerful of the medicine men, a supernatural creature that seemingly nothing can harm; and Holliday against the man with more credited kills than any gunfighter in history. It does not promise to be a tranquil summer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Resnick (Cincinnati, OH) has won an impressive five Hugos and has been nominated for thirty-one more. The author of the Starship series, the John Justin Mallory series, and the Weird West Tales, he has published over seventy novels and more than two hundred fifty short stories and has edited over forty anthologies. His Kirinyaga series, with sixty-seven major and minor awards and nominations to date, is the most honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.

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The Doctor and the Rough Rider

By Mike Resnick

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2012 Mike Resnick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-690-0

Chapter One

"I expected this weather in Tombstone, but not up here in Leadville," said Texas Jack Vermillion as he fanned his face with his cards in the Monarch Saloon. "I do believe it's hotter than hell today."

"I expect I'll find out soon enough," replied Holliday. He pushed some cash to the middle of the table. "I'll open for fifty."

Three men matched his money. Vermillion looked at his cards once more, then laid them face down. "Too damned hot for me to think," he muttered. "I'm off to get another beer."

"Why?" asked Holliday. "The beer here's as warm as the water you shave in."

"Then I'll pretend it's cold. I just can't think straight in this heat." Vermillion got up and trudged over to the bar.

"Pity," remarked Holliday. "There goes some easy money. He's not much of a poker player even when he's thinking." Suddenly he reached into a pocket, withdrew a bloodstained handkerchief, held it to his mouth, and coughed into it, covering it with even more blood. It was such a common occurrence that no one paid any attention to it.

"Cards, gentlemen?" said the dealer.

"Three," said the man on Holliday's left.

The two others took two apiece, and then it was Holliday's turn.

"Just one, I think," he replied.

The cards were dealt, and Holliday took a tentative peek at the new addition to his hand.

"Up to you, Doc," said the dealer.

"Two hundred," announced Holliday, counting off the bills and tossing them in.

Two men immediately folded. The third studied his cards, frowned, stared long and hard at Holliday, and finally cursed and tossed his cards onto the table.

"Okay," he said unhappily. "It's yours."

"Thanks," replied Holliday.

"So did you pull your full house, or was it a bluff ?"

"Full house?" repeated Holliday. "Maybe I was drawing to an inside straight."

"Were you?"

Holliday shrugged. "Anything's possible."

"Aw, come on, Doc," persisted the man. "I'm tapped out. At least let me know what you had."

Holliday allowed himself the luxury of a small smile. "Tapped out? What were you going to bet with if you'd pulled whatever it is you'd hoped to pull?"

The man grinned. "I thought I'd borrow it from you."

Holliday laughed—or at least it began as a laugh, but ended as a bloody cough. "You've got a fine sense of humor, Mr. Richardson. I'll give you that."

"Show me your cards so I can see whether I had you beat or not," said Richardson. He reached his hand toward Holliday's cards, and an instant later Holliday jerked at the knife he wore on a string around his throat, broke the string, and brought the point of the knife down hard into the table, just between Richardson's index and middle fingers.

"After you pay to see them," said Holliday. His voice wasn't raised, his smile wasn't hostile, but there was something in the tone of his voice that said that this wasn't a party trick, that he was fully prepared to kill any man who tried to see his hand without paying the price.

Richardson pulled his hand back quickly.

"All right, Doc," he said quickly. "Whatever you say. No offense meant."

"None taken," replied Holliday, pulling his knife out of the table with an audible grunt.

"Maybe I'll see you at Kate's one of these days," said Richardson, getting to his feet.

"Better be soon," said Holliday. "I'll be moving into the sanitarium any day now." He grimaced. "And once I move in, I'd give mighty long odds on my ever moving back out."

"Soon, then," promised Richardson and headed out into the street.

"So he's too broke to call, but he's not too broke to rent one of Kate's metal chippies for the night," announced Holliday with an amused smile. "I'll offer three-to-one that he stops to make a few bets at the Silver Bullet along the way."

There was general laughter, and Vermillion returned to the table, carrying two beers and placing one of them in front of Holliday, who gingerly touched the glass.

"Hot," he remarked.

"I don't recall Tombstone ever being any hotter," agreed Vermillion.

"Not only that, but the air there was thick enough to breathe," added Holliday. "Up here in the mountains, even the birds have to walk."

"Maybe you should have stayed in Tombstone," said a man at the bar.

Holliday shook his head. "I should have stayed in Georgia."

"Why the hell didn't you?"

Holliday turned to see who was speaking to him, and his gaze fell on two young men in nondescript clothing, neither cowboys' nor miners' outfits.

"Do I know you?" asked Holliday.

"Indirectly," said the younger of the two men. "You knew some friends of mine."

"Oh?" said Holliday, refusing to ask who the friends were, since the young man seemed so eager that he should ask.

"That's right," said the other man. "At least we'd like to think you knew them. We'd hate to think you gun strangers down in cold blood."

Sounds pretty damned tempting, thought Holliday. Aloud he said, "I take it that whoever we're talking about were friends of yours?"

"Frank and Tom McLaury. You killed them at the O.K. Corral."

"May I suggest that you have very poor taste in friends?" said Holliday.

"We liked them well enough," said the younger man.

Holliday shrugged. "You were welcome to."

"I don't like your attitude, Holliday," said the younger man.

"A lot of people share your opinion of it," agreed Holliday with a pleasant smile. Suddenly the smile vanished. "And it's Doc Holliday to you."

The younger man tensed, and his fingers poised over the handle of his pistol.

"Don't do that, son," said Holliday, still not raising his voice.

"Or you'll make me regret it forever?" came the sarcastic reply.

"Try it, and your forever ends in about half a second."

The young man's friend grabbed him by the arm and tried to lead him away.

"Come on, Billy!" he urged. "Look at him, nothing but a skinny old lunger. He's not even worth a bullet."

"Listen to your friend," said Holliday. "He makes sense."

The young man pulled back for a moment, then uttered an obscenity and pointed his finger at Holliday. "I'll see you again!" he promised.

Holliday pointed back, and pretended that his finger was a gun and he was firing it. Most of the gamblers laughed, and finally the two men left the saloon.

"You know who they were, don't you?" asked Vermillion.

"Sure," answered Holliday. "But I wasn't going to give them the pleasure of saying I knew. The kid's Billy Allen, and the bigger kid is Johnny Taylor—and I'll lay fifty-to-one that neither of 'em ever saw either McLaury brother or got within two hundred miles of Tombstone."

"Then what was that all about?" asked one of the poker players.

"Just a couple of kids looking to make a reputation," said Holliday.

"Happens a lot," added Vermillion. Suddenly he grinned. "Never the same kid twice, though. Doc keeps his fair share of undertakers in business."

There was general laughter, and then Holliday announced that he was there to play poker, cards were dealt, and a moment later bets were made.

The game continued for another hour. Then Holliday was seized by another coughing fit, and it left him weak enough that he relinquished his seat and walked slowly to the bar, accompanied by Vermillion.

"I'd go outside for a bracing breath of cold, clear air," he muttered, "but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pyr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1616146907
• ISBN 13: 9781616146900
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 303
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande