West of the Big River: Boxed Set of Eight Western Novels

by James Reasoner

  “Is it to steady your nerves, Doc?” someone asked.

  “No, you darned fool,” George replied dryly. “It’s to clean the blade.” With which, he poured the liquor over the scalpel blade.

  “Are you gonna cut his jaw muscles, Doc?” another asked in horror.

  “Nope!” George replied, as he squinted at the blade. “You four men, hold his arms and legs real firm. And you other two, hold his chest. I’m about to cut his damned throat.”

  Chapter 2

  GHOST TOWN

  Stanley C. Bagg had arrived and as befitted his prominence as the newspaperman par excellence in town, he was permitted a passage through the crowd to witness the impromptu operation being carried out by Dr. Goodfellow atop the pool table.

  The four men that Goodfellow had commandeered to assist him had their work cut out, for the bearded patient was bucking on the pool table. George himself had climbed up on the table and had one knee on the man’s chest while he felt the man’s throat with his left hand.

  “In case any of you are interested, or think I’ve gone plumb loco,” the surgeon boomed out, “I’m feeling just under his Adam’s apple. There’s an another cartilage below it called the cricoid cartilage and a gap between the two covered by the cricothyroid membrane.”

  He grunted with satisfaction. “Here it is! Now you men hold him tight. If I don’t get this done in the next few seconds we’ve got a dead man on the table.”

  Stanley looked on in wonder at the way George Goodfellow took command of a situation. He was also aware that George appreciated it when folks understood the drama of surgery, for so often when he was called to operate, there was a life hanging in the balance. Almost mechanically, Stanley whisked out his notebook and a stub of pencil and began making notes.

  Steadying the patient’s throat as best he could with his left hand George made a firm incision between the area he was holding and spreading apart with his index finger and thumb.

  Blood spurted upwards hitting him in the face. He ignored it as he widened the gap and a whooshing noise indicated that he had made a hole in the trachea.

  “Done it! I’ve given him an airway.”

  With his right hand he opened the other wooden box he had brought with him from his office in preparation. From it he took out a curved silver tube that had a flattened disc surrounding the top aperture. He immediately inserted it into the incision in the man’s throat and then, producing a silk suture and needles he dexterously stitched it in place.

  The patient’s color quickly turned from purple to a healthy pink and he stopped convulsing.

  “Now he’s just unconscious,” George announced, as if the clientele of the pool room were medical students watching a surgeon at work. “If anyone doesn’t like the sound of bones breaking, I suggest you clear out or cover your ears up now.”

  “Lord Almighty, Doc, what you gonna do to the poor guy now?”

  “Apart from saving the damned fool’s life, you mean?” George asked without looking at the questioner. “Actually, I’m just going to stretch his jaw a mite so I can get this ball out of his mouth. The tempero-mandibular joint only likes being stretched so far and there’s a good chance I’m going to break his jaw.”

  And indeed, several strong men in the audience winced, as there was a noise not unlike the cracking of a turkey wishbone.

  Stanley C. Bagg was not one of those who looked away. He watched Dr. Goodfellow perform the procedure then scoop the pool ball out of the patient’s mouth before nonchalantly rolling it backwards the length of the pool table to land in the pocket with a resounding thud.

  He noted that down. It would finish his article off very well.

  * * *

  Later, after admitting the patient to the Cochise County Hospital George returned to see the half dozen patients who had dutifully and patiently waited to consult him. Three of them had bad coughs, but none had any signs of inflammation on their chests, so he gave each of them a small bottle of demulcent of his own invention. Joe Nokes, a miner, had an inflamed thumb, for which George applied a small poultice of magnesium sulfate to draw out the pus. Mrs. Fiona Parker, the librarian who was also an assistant teacher at the school, had a mild case of conjunctivitis for which he prescribed a Borax eyewash, and Harold Marsh, one of the bartenders at the One-eyed King Saloon, complained of abdominal pain, which George was sure was caused by the gradually swelling liver that was the result of Marsh's daily intake of a bottle of whiskey. George gave him a lecture on excessive drinking before sending him off with some powders of powdered dandelion root to help detoxify his liver and settle his pain.

  Once he had seen Harold out George went on his daily round of home visits. Although he did his best to encourage patients to visit his office during his appointed consulting hours, yet there were still a good number of cases that he decided to visit at home. The miners’ cabins south of Toughnut Street were regular places to visit to check on the progress of miners with broken legs, crushed feet and hands. And of course there were always babies to be delivered in all parts of town and new mothers who had to be watched to ensure they didn’t hemorrhage or get puerperal fever, or some other complication that could see their young one orphaned.

  Thank the Lord that science was giving doctors a helping hand, he thought as he completed his examination of a newborn baby and then trimmed the umbilical cord stump.

  There had been too many mothers who had died from infections and too many babies who had died in the past, after uneducated folk had cut their umbilical cords with anything sharp at hand, like a sickle or a knife that had been used for cutting meat or scraping mud off boots. It had been ignorance that had killed all of those babes and young mothers. Not just ignorance on the part of ordinary folk, but ignorance on the part of the medical profession about the microbes that caused all of those infections.

  “Now Martha, I’m going to leave this bottle that I want you to use to keep little Billy’s birth cord stump clean. Just apply some to a clean flannel cloth and dab it like this,” he said, as he demonstrated.

  As he continued his rounds he mentally thanked people like Joseph Lister, the Scottish professor of surgery who had introduced carbolic acid into medical and surgical practice, and Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch who had developed the Germ Theory and given doctors an understanding about the tiny organisms that caused all manner of infections.

  George was glad that he lived in these exciting times with discoveries being made in laboratories around the world. He kept up to date with all the medical journals and tried to use each new advance in his Tombstone practice. And where he could, he tried his best to add to the advances of medicine and science in general.

  Surgery was his main skill. He had been as successful in his surgical practice as anyone he had known and had contributed many papers to local, national and even international medical journals. Yet he found it amusing to think that so many of these discoveries had occurred in the short time since 1877 when silver prospector Ed Schieffelin had found silver where a friend had told him: “instead of a mine you’ll find a tombstone.”

  That was how Tombstone had started, as a joke. Yet it was hardly a humorous place to life. It was a town that took itself deadly seriously on all levels. Fueled by silver mining, and the area was surrounded by mines, in the space of a mere decade it had grown to a population of more than 14,000. It had amenities aplenty as one would expect for such a fast-growing community. It had the Schieffelin Hall Opera House, four churches, a couple of banks, the growing newspaper empire of Stanley C. Bagg in the form of the Tombstone Prospector and the Tombstone Epitaph, the Library, school and several clubs and societies for the gentler folk of the town. And for the less gentle, there were more than a hundred saloons, thirteen or fourteen gambling houses, a pool hall, a bowling alley, and the infamous Bird Cage Theater, which was reported in the New York Times in 1881 to be the wildest and wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast.

  Apart from that there were many oth
er places of entertainment of an even less salubrious nature, but which did a roaring trade and kept George and the other twelve doctors in Tombstone busy treating the diseases of Venus.

  And it was certainly a serious place to live if you were intent on staying alive. The nature of mining towns was such that they attracted folks set upon enjoying the fruits of their toil. The town was like a magnet to scores of miners, cowboys and soldiers from nearby Fort Huachuca. Folks could get rowdy, drink themselves into ill tempers so that arguments or simple wanton behavior could be the result. Shootings were not uncommon, as was swift justice.

  George knew this only too well and was reminded of it every time he passed a certain telegraph pole, which had been the scene of one particularly unpleasant act of rough justice in 1884, following what became known as the Bisbee Massacre. In December of 1883 five armed men attempted to rob the Goldwater & Castenada store in nearby Bisbee, where four bystanders were killed. The authorities eventually tracked the gang of five down, together with John Heath, the man who masterminded it, but hadn’t participated in the actual robbery, and put them in the Tombstone jail. At the trial the five men were sentenced to hang, but Heath was given a life sentence, a verdict that incensed the good folk of Tombstone and Bisbee. The result was that the jailor was overpowered by a mob and Heath was manhandled out of the jail and dragged to Toughnut Street where he was lynched on the telegraph pole and a placard was hung around his neck.

  George had actually been a member of the posse that had gone in search of the gang when news of the massacre had reached Tombstone, so he was not entirely in sympathy with the victim of the necktie party. He was duly called as an expert medical witness at the subsequent inquest and opined that:

  “He came to his death from emphysema of the lungs, a disease very common at high altitudes. In this case the disease was superinduced by strangulation, self-inflicted or otherwise.”

  As he walked up Second Street onto Allen Street he reflected on the other ghost-like memories of violent days in Tombstone. Many of them had occurred because the times were wild and the law was upheld in as forceful a manner as was deemed necessary. There was, of course, the Gunfight at the OK Corral back in 1881, the bloody debacle that everyone in town knew was bound to happen at some stage.

  Virgil Earp was the Marshal of Tombstone at the time and he had deputized Morgan and Wyatt, his two brothers. Bad blood had developed between the Earps and two families, the Clantons and the McLaurys. The Earps believed the Clantons and McLaurys had rustled livestock out of Mexico. Not only that, but Wyatt was convinced that the Clantons had stolen a horse of his.

  And of course, George remembered with a fond smile, there was Doc John Holliday, a good friend of Wyatt Earp, a dentist, gambler and consumptive rogue.

  That fateful day in October had seen the deaths of Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury. Although his sympathies were with those of the Earps, George had attended once the shooting was over and tended the wounded of both factions. Young Billy Clanton, just 19 years old, had been shot in the wrist, chest and abdomen and was in mortal agony. George pulled the young cowboy’s boots off because Billy had promised his mother that he would die with his boots off. It was about the only thing he could do for him.

  Sheriff John Behan, who was no friend of the Earps, arrested them and Doc Holliday for murder, but after a trial that lasted thirty days, and included George’s reports on the autopsies on Clanton and the two McLaury brothers, Judge Wells Spicer, who happened to be kin to the Earps concluded that they had been justified in their actions and they were freed.

  Then just after Christmas, Virgil had been gunned down on Fifth Street, between the Oriental Saloon and the Golden Eagle Brewery. Three men had blasted at him with shotguns from the cover of the adobe Huachuca Water Company building that was being erected. Virgil was badly wounded in the back and the upper left arm. It was a reprisal shooting for the OK Corral gunfight, that was clear.

  George Parsons, George’s best friend had heard the shooting and gone to investigate, before dashing to the hospital to summon George to see him. Together they ran back to the Cosmopolitan Hotel where the wounded man had been taken, and where heavily armed Earp supporters were guarding his room. There they found Virgil covered in buckshot and with blood streaming from his arm wound and a lesser flesh wound on his left thigh. After examining him George had advised immediate amputation, but Virgil refused, saying he wanted to go to his grave with both arms.

  With a wry smile George recalled Virgil stoically saying to his wife, who had been brought to him, that she must not worry, for he would still have one good arm to hug her with.

  He was a stout fellow, Dr. Goodfellow thought, recalling the operation the next day, when his fellow physician Doctor Henry Matthews had assisted him. He removed four inches of Virgil Earp’s humerus to save the arm.

  As he walked along the boardwalk in front of Campbell and Hatch’s Saloon and Billiard Parlor, where he had earlier that morning operated on Red Douglas, the big Scottish immigrant miner, he reflected on how much drama that place had seen. And again, it was a place that had been heavily stained by the blood of one of the Earp family. In March 1882 he had been called urgently to minister to Morgan Earp who had been shot in the back through a back window of the parlor while he was playing pool with Bob Hatch himself.

  George had felt bad that he couldn’t do anything to help him, since Morgan was in a state of collapse from his wound by the time he saw him. His examination suggested that the bullet had entered his trunk to the left of the spinal cord, close to his kidney and exited from the front right side near his gall bladder. He died within three quarters of an hour.

  Apart from the blood that was pumping out of the wounds he knew that death had been caused by the torrential hemorrhage inside Morgan's abdomen from the major vessels that had been damaged.

  George had liked all of the Earp brothers, especially Wyatt, although he sometimes had reservations about Wyatt’s methods. Three days after Morgan’s death the body of Frank Stillwell, who had been rumored to be seen running from the scene of the crime, was found near the railroad tracks.

  He also recalled having to examine the body of Florentino Cruz, better known as Indian Charley, some months after Morgan’s death, after he had been brought in by Wyatt and a posse after Wyatt had been appointed as a U.S. Deputy Marshal. He had four wounds on his body, one in the right temple, one in the right shoulder and two on the left. At least two of them were consistent with him having been shot when he was on his back. George suspected that Wyatt had taken no chance of him escaping justice.

  George paid a visit to a guest at the Noble Hotel on Fremont Street. The man, a drummer of some sort, had been vomiting throughout the night causing Jackson Connors, the owner, some anxiety in case the man was going to complain that it was something to do with the dinner he had consumed in the restaurant the night before. George suspected that could well be the case, but so could an acute bout of drinking. There was an empty bottle of un-identifiable red eye whiskey on a table, which meant that he could have consumed any number of poisons in sufficient quantity to erode the lining of his stomach. He diagnosed acute gastritis and left a small bottle of bismuth to settle the man’s stomach.

  As he walked down Third Street he passed Camillus Fly’s boarding house and picture studio. It was there that Doc John Holliday had stayed while he was living in Tombstone.

  Holliday had been a real enigma, George mused. He was a cultured man yet when drunk he could be mean, spiteful and vicious. He was a dental surgeon by training, but a gambler by choice. And although slowly dying from tuberculosis he had come to the dry air of Tombstone to keep himself alive for as long as possible.

  But now the Earps and Doc Holliday had all left Tombstone. Doc Holliday, like Morgan Earp, had shrugged off his mortal coil and had become merely another ghost memory. George had heard that he had died of his tuberculosis in Colorado in 1887 at the tender age of 36 years.

  Holliday had actually consulted
George about his tuberculosis months before the OK Corral gunfight. At the time George had believed as most of the medical profession had, that it was an inherited condition and that apart from living in a healthy climate and eating well, there wasn’t a whole lot that could be done. Holliday had concurred with that view, since his own mother had suffered from the condition and died from it when he was just fifteen. George had realized that the cause was really very different when he read a paper written by Robert Koch in 1882, after Holliday had left for Colorado, in which the German doctor revealed that he had discovered the microbe that caused the condition.

  Not that the knowledge would have done Holliday any good. There was knowing about something and there was being able to do something about it. George suspected that Holliday had been bent on living fast instead of dying slow.

  * * *

  George struck a light to his curly pipe and smoked it as he made his way to his last visit of the day at the Cochise County Hospital, where he had admitted Red Douglas the miner after his tracheotomy.

  He had some knowledge of the big Scottish miner from past encounters with him in the Sonora minefields. George had interests in the Providencia Gold Mine, which he visited a couple of times a year. Red Douglas worked a claim in the vicinity and had a reputation as a fighter, having broken a fellow miner’s jaw in an altercation fueled by poker and whiskey in one of the local cantinas.

  George had been called upon to treat the man’s jaw.

  He intended to remind him about it if the big miner complained of his treatment when he saw him. He also intended to berate him for his foolish trick of putting a pool ball in his mouth.

  “Doctor Goodfellow, I am afraid that you have had a wasted journey if you’ve come to see that big brute of a miner,” said Sister Mary, who met him at the door. “He came around after a good two hours deep sleep. He was like a bear with a sore head, which in a manner of speaking he was. He found the tracheotomy tube and ripped the stitches off and pulled the tube out.” She held up a bowl containing the silver tube. “I’ve had it cleaned and soaked in carbolic acid, as you always insist.”