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

by James Reasoner

  Dan knew better than to ask what George was up to himself. Hector MacLeod had told him that George had been acting cagey with him.

  “It will be an experiment,” Edith whispered to the foreman.

  “Ah, I see,” Dan whispered back. “I’m sure your father knows what he’s doing.”

  “He usually does.” Edith replied. “Especially about experiments and science. He’s going to take me fossil collecting tomorrow afternoon.”

  “And what would fossils be, Miss Edith. You’ll excuse me, but I didn’t have anywhere near as much learning as your father did.”

  “Animals and bugs and creatures that are so old they’ve turned into stone.”

  “Stone critters,” Dan said in amazement. Then he laughed. “Old Hector is pretty old. I guess I had better warn him he needs to move about a bit more instead of sitting around in that kitchen, or he’ll turn into stone some day.”

  Edith started to giggle and Dan joined in.

  “What are you two laughing about?” George asked, turning around in the saddle and grinning at them. “Nothing at my expense I hope.”

  “No sir,” replied Dan, winking at Edith. “Miss Edith was just telling me about the stone critters you’re going to show her. I was just wondering if they was what you were going to be shooting at? The thing is, maybe you won’t bring any of them down, because bullets just bounce off of stone.”

  They all caught the laughing habit right then.

  * * *

  Hector cooked up a great meal of roast pork for all of the hands, who ate it in the bunkhouse as usual. He prepared a separate meal in the ranch house for George, Stella, Edith and Dan.

  “I wish we came out here more often, Hector,” Stella said at the end of the meal when Hector came to clear everything away. “I cannot tell you how pleasant it is to have someone cook for me. And you have a way with food.”

  “He does indeed, ma’am,” Dan agreed. That’s the main reason that the boys at the Snake Ranch are so happy to keep working up here.”

  “That and the fact that they are well paid,” put in George.

  “That as well, Doctor Goodfellow,” said Hector, with plates and pots stacked on his tray. “But as a doctor I am sure that you agree that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

  George gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. “Well, the two organs are in fairly close proximity, the heart lying above the stomach, but the two are of course separated by the diaphragm. Now if you mean could…”

  “Oh Daddy, you know what Mister Hector means!” exclaimed Edith with a squeal of amusement.

  George gave a short laugh. “I know, Princess. He is talking metaphorically and I totally agree.” He gave his stomach a pat. “I for one have an entirely satisfied stomach and heart after that delicious pork.”

  “And I’ll be back with coffee and apple pie,” Hector beamed as he backed through the door. “And milk for Miss Edith.”

  “Seriously though, Doctor Goodfellow,” Dan said after he had gone. “Hector MacLeod’s cooking gives the boys something to look forward to every day. A good breakfast and a good dinner to look forward to will keep a cowboy grinning all day despite any amount of saddle sore or aching muscles. That and a good game of cards in the evening after he’s eaten.”

  George laughed. “A good game of cards goes down well with most folks. I enjoy a few hands at the Crystal Palace saloon myself.”

  Dan laughed. “But we don’t play for high stakes here, sir. I don’t allow that. If one hand started taking the other’s hard earned money it would be a recipe for bad feeling, and we know how that could end up, don’t we, sir?”

  “I do indeed, Dan. So I thank you. The last thing I’d want would be to have to come out here to treat a gunshot wound.”

  “It will never happen, sir. All I let the boys play for is matchsticks. They imagine it is money and get a kick out of that. Then Hector lets them use their matchstick money to buy cookies.”

  Stella laughed. “Good old Hector. It seems he is right in what he says, Doctor Goodfellow, sir. “He gets straight to the men’s hearts through their stomachs.”

  They were still laughing when Hector returned with apple pie, a pot of coffee and milk for Edith.

  But though he was outwardly laughing, George’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking of how many times he had performed autopsy examinations of men killed in shootings. And on at least two occasions a bullet had passed through the stomach and then through the heart.

  Both had been in saloon shootings when a man had been challenged at a card table and shot from underneath the table.

  “Can we play cards later, Daddy?” Edith asked.

  That broke his train of thought. He smiled and patted her hand. “Of course, my dear.”

  “Stella, too. And can we play for cookies?”

  “Cookies?” Hector asked. “Would you like me to bring some over, Doctor. I have a batch freshly baked.”

  Stella gave George a disapproving look. “I am not sure that teaching Edith to gamble would be very suitable.”

  George frowned, but he had to agree.

  “We’ll just play for fun, Princess.”

  Hector grinned. “But don’t worry, Miss Edith, I’ll bring over the cookies anyway.”

  * * *

  George found it hard to get to sleep that night, since he could not get the image of Dr. John Handy from his mind. Accordingly, he went through to his study and by the light of his desk lamp, poured a large whiskey and charged his pipe from the tobacco jar as he sat behind his desk to look through some of the papers and books he had brought with him from Tombstone.

  Topmost was a copy of the Southern California Practitioner, from March 1887. He opened it to page 95.

  Notes on the Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets By G.E Goodfellow, MD., Tombstone, Arizona.

  It was a relatively short article that he had written and which he thought would be one of those little curios that might pique the interest of his fellow physicians and surgeons. It certainly had, the result being numerous invitations from various medical societies for him to go and lecture.

  He settled back, his pipe clenched between his teeth and read.

  A somewhat extensive experience in the gunshot wounds of civil life, during the past few years, has brought to my attention the following instances illustrative of the remarkable tenacity of silk fiber and its resistance power of a bullet:

  He smiled as he read, for he always found reading his own words to be a strange experience, since he used the tone that he would use to deliver a lecture to his colleagues. He imagined that some would consider him a tad bombastic.

  Then as he read on he remembered the three cases as if they had occurred only days before.

  In the spring of 1881 I was a few feet distant from a couple of individuals who were quarreling. They began shooting. The first shot took effect, as was afterwards ascertained, in the left breast of one of them, who, after being shot, and while staggering back some twelve feet, cocked and fired his pistol twice, his second shot going into the air, for by that time he was on his back. He never made a motion after pulling the trigger the second time, the pistol dropping to the ground with his hands.

  He puffed his pipe and pictured the scene. It could almost have been the sort of sensational stuff that people like Ned Buntline would use in their dime novels. But of course, apart from a need to be scientifically rigorous, he had to maintain the confidentiality of the case, according to his Hippocratic Oath, so he wrote the simple bare facts.

  He recalled it so well. Luke Short was a professional gambler who was at that time the Faro dealer at the Oriental Saloon. He was a real dandy who was fastidious in his dress, always sporting a tailored suit and more often than not, wore a top hat and silver topped cane. At a mere five foot six he looked relatively innocuous, which was the complete opposite of what he really was. His right pants pocket was tailored especially long and lined with leather to contain his six-gun. His unfortunate opponent was a gu
nfighter called Charlie Storms who had lost his temper over a game and threatened him.

  Bat Masterton, one of Wyatt Earp’s friends was also working as a house dealer and he intervened and defused the situation, albeit only temporarily.

  Later that day, Storms pulled Short off the sidewalk and went for his gun. George happened to be on the street at the time and saw the whole thing. It was to be Storm’s last mistake, for Luke Short was the faster and he fired twice. Storms was dead before he hit the ground.

  George read on.

  Half an hour afterward I made an examination of the body. Upon stripping it, found not a drop of blood had come from either of the two wounds received. From the wound in his left breast a silk handkerchief protruded, which I presumed had been stuffed in by some of his friends to prevent bleeding. I withdrew it and with it came the bullet. It was then seen that it had been carried in by the ball.

  He took a sip of whiskey as he read and recalled the autopsy.

  Upon opening the body, the track of the ball was found to be as follows: through the left ventricle, thence through the descending aorta; thence into and through the body of either the second or third dorsal vertebra into the spinal canal, fracturing the lamina. The ball came from a cut-off Colt.45caliber revolver, fired at a distance of six feet, the cartridge of which contains thirty grains of powder and two hundred and sixty grains of lead. The man had on a light summer suit, the handkerchief being in the breast pocket of the coat.

  Examination of the handkerchief showed only two slight tears or cuts in it, they being on the outside of the fold containing the bullet, where it had struck the bones of the vertebral column, no ribs having been touched. There were two thicknesses of silk covering the bullet.

  This attracted my attention, but in a short time a still more remarkable case was observed.

  George drained his whiskey and poured another as he read his report of the second shooting.

  During a fight a man was wounded at a distance of thirty feet by a load from a shotgun. The cartridge contained four drams of powder and twelve buckshot. Four of the buckshot penetrated the frontal bone, and, as shown by the autopsy, flattening themselves against the posterior wall of the skull; more entered the face, piercing the facial bones, and some passed through the upper thoracic wall, thence into the lungs. At the same time he was shot he had loosely tied about his neck a red silk Chinese handkerchief. In the folds of this I found two buckshot, neither of which had so much as cut a fiber of the silk. There were four or six folds of the silk between the balls and the skin. The uncertainty as to the number of layers arises from the fact that not wishing to damage the specimen, I never unfolded the handkerchief to ascertain exactly.

  He swirled the whiskey in his glass as he pictured the gunshot man involved. In fact, once again the story had been more complex than his medical paper had needed; hence he had stuck to the salient medical and forensic details. The death had been the result of a shootout at the Chandler Ranch a few miles out of town. Deputy Sheriff Billy Breakenridge had led a posse to surprise and apprehend a couple of rustlers by the names of Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds. The ensuing gunfight left John Gillespie, one of the possemen dead and two other possemen wounded. Zwing Hunt was shot through the chest, but survived. Billy Grounds, the other rustler took a charge of buckshot full in the face, from Billy Breakenridge.

  News of the shootout reached Tombstone and Police Chief Dave Neagle got hold of George and together they rode out in an ambulance. It took George several hours patching up the living. Among them was Billy Grounds, but he didn’t last too many hours.

  To fully appreciate this case, it is necessary to understand that the shot which went into the forehead passed through a thick Mexican white felt hat weighing, untrimmed, twelve ounces, heavily embroidered with silver, and a silver wire snake an inch thick for a band. The thickness and weight of these hats can only be realized by those who have seen and worn them. Two of the balls penetrated the band, then entered the skull. The shots entering the chest, one of which went though the sternum into the depths of the chest, had to pass through two heavy wool shirts and a blanket-lined canvas coat and vest, such as are worn in the West. A few layers of light silk, however, were enough to stop bullets that could pass through all the tissues mentioned.

  His pipe had gone cold so he tapped out the ashes and the dottle and refilled it. When he had lit it to his satisfaction he read on:

  The third case was that of a man wounded at a distance not exceeding three feet, by a ball from a full-length.45 caliber Colt revolver. The ball entered the right side of the neck two inches below the angle of the jaw at the posterior border of the sterno-cleido-mastoid muscle and emerged on the left side at the angle of the jaw. The head was turned slightly to the right at the time the bullet struck him. Around his neck was loosely tied a red silk handkerchief, as in the preceding case. The ball catching this carried a portion of it through to the wound, then slipped off, leaving the handkerchief in the wound uncut. This man recovered, though the carotid artery of the right side could be felt bared and pulsating in the wound.

  He subsequently told me, for I never saw him to speak to but twice, that all the liquids he took passed out of the wound of entrance for some weeks. He is now, I presume, pursuing his trade (cattle-stealing) on the border – if not in peace, at least in prosperity.

  The life of this man was, presumably, saved by the handkerchief; for had it not been dragged into the wound I doubt not that the great vessels of the right side would have been irreparably injured.

  The ball that killed the first man, above mentioned, fired from the distance at which he was shot, ordinarily goes through the body, bones or no bones, as I have seen illustrated many times. Fired into a four-inch plank of pine or redwood it readily passed through, and sinks into another a foot behind. At fourteen feet the same caliber ball penetrated a six-inch pine joist, and struck the ground some twenty feet beyond, with force to flatten the ball. No experiments have been made with the shotgun; but in two cases, now called to mind, where the distance was greater and the charge of the powder less by one dram. In one case, at a distance of 120 feet, the humerus and one of the lumbar vertebral spinous processes were fractured’ the balls passing respectively through an overcoat and two shirts, and the same with the addition of the waistband of the trousers. In the other, with the same charge of powder, at a distance of sixty feet, one of the shot entered the head of the tibia, some two inches below the knee joint, passed through and buried itself in the lower end of the femur an inch: this, after piercing leather boot-top, canvas overall and drawers. Had the handkerchief not been in the way in the first case, the bullet would have gone entirely through the body. The second case is the test. Balls propelled from the same barrels, and by the same amount of powder, penetrated the tissues described, yet failed to go through four or six folds of thin silk.

  George sat back and tapped the paper with his fingers. He had always meant to follow up on the paper with another one. He smiled to himself as he laid his pipe in the ashtray and placed the journal in a paper basket on the corner of the desk.

  “We shall see,” he said to himself as he stood up. “But first thing in the morning, it will be time to show Edith a little of the wonders of the earth.”

  Chapter 7

  FOSSILS AND EXPERIMENTS

  After a good breakfast George and Edith rode out towards the mountains to the west. Edith had learned to ride when she was about four years old and loved the little cowpony that George kept at the Snake Ranch for her. In his saddlebags he had hammers, a map that he had drawn himself after he had surveyed the area when he first bought the ranch. Teaching her about geography and geology while having fun was his idea of education.

  And she absorbed it all with alacrity, for spending time with her father, now that her mother had died, was in her mind the best thing one could do.

  “Will it be far, Daddy?”

  “Just to the edge of the mountains, then we’ll need to scramble up into the
hills. That’s why you’re wearing those range clothes. We don’t want to get those precious little knees of yours grazed on rocks or cactus, do we?”

  “And will we really find fossils, Daddy?”

  “We will indeed. I know just the place.”

  He grinned at her as she beamed with pleasure and enthusiasm.

  It took them about half an hour to reach the foothills which were covered in a mix of oak, ponderosa and Apache pines with thickets of whitethorn scrub. They tethered their mounts and George pulled off his saddlebag and drew out a map.

  “You see where we’re heading, Princess,” he said, tracing a route up the hills. “Each of these contour lines represent –”

  “Different altitudes. I know, Daddy. I’m not a little girl.”

  “George laughed as he folded the map away and then with the saddlebags over his shoulder he led the way up through the trees.

  “Keep a close watch and you should see lots of different birds up here, Edith. We’ve got hummingbirds, tyrant flycatchers and if you’re lucky, maybe a red crossbill or two.”

  “I love all the different types of butterflies,” Edith enthused.

  “Yes, this is God’s land, Princess. You’ll find many of his wonderful creatures up here.”

  “It’s so beautiful, Daddy. Just like the Garden of Eden.”

  George smiled ruefully as he kept on walking upwards. He knew that her mother had liked to inculcate her own beliefs into his daughter. As a man with a scientific leaning he wanted to use the trip to give her more of an understanding about evolution. He planned to do it slowly, letting her absorb the things he was going to teach her about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. In his library in Tombstone he had a copy of Darwin’s On Origin of the Species, as well as Alfred Russel Wallace’s book, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection.

  He felt that both scientists had pushed back the frontiers of knowledge and understanding to arrive at a theory of evolution, albeit coming at it from different directions. Darwin had postulated that it was all about the survival of the fittest, whereas Wallace considered that creatures evolved by adapting to their geographical home.