DANCE WITH THE DEVIL
DANCE WITH THE DEVIL
The Saga of Doc Holliday
Book Two
A Novel
VICTORIA WILCOX
For Ronald Carl Wilcox, D.D.S.
The real Doc in my life.
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Copyright © 2014 Victoria Wilcox
Previously published as Gone West
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Names: Wilcox, Victoria, author.
Title: Dance with the devil : the saga of Doc Holliday / Victoria Wilcox.
Other titles: Gone West | Saga of Doc Holliday
Description: Guilford, Connecticut ; Helena, Montana : TwoDot : Distributed by National Book Network, 2019. | Previously titled Gone West, published by Knox Robinson (London), 2014. The second volume in the Doc Holliday trilogy. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018108 (print) | LCCN 2019018841 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493044726 (e-book) | ISBN 9781493044719 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Holliday, John Henry, 1851-1887—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Western stories. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.I5327 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I5327 G66 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018108
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Author’s Note
About the Author
Chapter One
TEXAS, 1873
THE LAST THING ON HIS MIND WAS A TRAIN ROBBERY. ALTHOUGH HE knew about the $100,000 in gold rumored to be aboard, enough to make any outlaw eager, no one had ever robbed a moving train west of the Mississippi before. As long as the Rock Island Line’s passenger train No. 2, bound from Council Bluffs to Des Moines, kept up its dizzying speed of forty-miles an hour, horsed bandits would have a hard time catching up with her.
But as the train neared Adair, Iowa, it slowed for a grade and a curve, and the engineer hollered out that something was slung across the tracks. He slammed the engine into reverse and the train shuddered and groaned, then jumped the rails. The locomotive thundered down the muddy bank of Turkey Creek spewing smoke and cinders from the chimney and lolling to one side, twisting the couplers and throwing the passenger cars skyward. The ground shook with the impact as steam rose from the troubled creek bed. And waiting alongside the bridge to greet the terrified passengers as they struggled from the wreckage was a white-robed gang of train robbers brandishing pistols and rifles and shouting the Rebel yell . . .
“You gonna buy that paper, Mister, or just stand there readin’ all day?” the newsboy on the Galveston Strand complained as John Henry lost himself in the details of the West’s most daring train robbery. The engineer had been killed, thrown from the locomotive then crushed to death as it rolled over him. But the conductor had lived to testify against the James gang that had derailed the Rock Island Line and held up its passengers.
Until that summer, the gang had kept their outlawry to holding up banks in the Missouri back country. This enterprise with the railroads was a whole new kind of crime, and newspaper sales soared whenever there was a report on the search for the elusive Jesse James. Aside from the gruesome death of the train’s engineer, it would have been a perfect robbery had the money actually been on board and not delayed until later, leaving the gang only $6,000 in cash and jewelry taken from the express messenger and the passengers. But it was a thrilling attempt, even so, and folks took to the story like a dime novel come to life. Not since the long-ago legends of Robin Hood had there been such a popular outlaw, and ladies openly hoped that Jesse might show up in their own quiet towns, bringing adventure and his handsome gang with him. But that was the tenor of the times in 1873: the War was over and the new West was wild, and the country was ready for some entertainment.
But to John Henry Holliday, late of Georgia by way of a fast ride across Florida and a sailing ship to Galveston, the story of Jesse James was more of a relief than anything else. For with the newspapers filled with tales of the dashing outlaw, there was little chance that a shooting on a river in South Georgia would be reported. Not that there was all that much to report about such a commonplace crime: a young black man gunned down by a young white man. But it was John Henry’s crime, and though he had run from Lowndes County before the law could catch him, then spent a long night in anguished prayer repenting of his sin and begging for God’s forgiveness, he knew that repentance alone would not satisfy the State of Georgia. If the law decided to come after him, he could still hang for murder. So he anxiously read every newspaper he could get his hands on searching for any mention of violence on the Withlacoochee River, and was relieved to see the name of Jesse James, not John Henry Holliday, spelled out across the front page. Let the James Gang get the fame; he’d be happy if his own name never made the headlines.
There was certainly nothing else about him that would draw attention. He was of average height and average build, although a little on the lean side on account of a bout of pneumonia he’d had while spending two cold winters in dental school in Philadelphia. His coloring was fair, his eyes china blue, or so said the girls back home who’d called him handsome, though mostly it was his cousin Mattie Holliday calling him handsome that had meant something to him. And though there were other, less pleasing, things that Mattie had called him, as well—stubborn, selfish, arrogant—if those had been his only sins, he wouldn’t be in Texas now, reading the paper and watching for any mention of his name or what had happened on the Withlacoochee.
Truth was, he was running from more than just the law. His father had thrown him out of the house and ordered him never to return, the result of a disagreement over his plan to marry his cousin Mattie, though Mattie had already wrecked those plans herself by telling him through her tears that her Catholic faith would not allow first cousins to marry. She loved him but she could not be with him, not ever. And the pain of those two denials, his sweetheart’s love and his father’s affections, had driven him into a drunken stupor and an unthinking shooting that sent him west fleeing for his life.
Yet other than a few bad dreams, a haunting worry over the long reach of the law, and a still-healing heart, he was in hopeful spirits, having stepped off the ship at Galveston Island sunburned and wind-blown from the sea voyage, and feeling amazingly well. While most of the other passengers had spent their time onboard the tall ship Golden Dream leaning
over the rails and vomiting into the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the sailing had actually seemed to agree with him. The fresh sea air had cleared his lungs and the prospect of starting a new life in Texas enlivened his mind. And though he had only the vaguest of plans for his immediate future, his long-term goal was set: he would find his way to his Uncle Jonathan McKey’s plantation on the Brazos River and beg the family favor of a place in his Uncle’s household. For surely his mother’s eldest brother, a wealthy cotton planter, would welcome a long-lost nephew from back home in Georgia and be happy to offer him a home in Texas. And once he was settled, he would open his trunk-full of dental equipment and set up a profitable practice in some nearby town, and prove to his father and Mattie both that he was still a fine professional man and not someone to be sent away.
That was the plan anyhow, but first he had some obstacles to overcome. He had little money to pay for room and board in Galveston, having spent nearly all he had on the ocean voyage from Florida to Texas. He had no trunk-full of dental tools with which to practice his paying profession, having left Georgia in too much of a hurry to arrange for its shipment. And he had no idea of where his Uncle Jonathan McKey lived, other than the recollection that his property was somewhere in Washington County. Still he was glad to be in Texas at last, the place he had heard about and dreamed of since he was a child—though Galveston looked little like the rough and wild Texas of his childhood imaginings.
Galveston glittered at the edge of the ocean like some fancy-dressed lady decked out in jewels. This was no frontier town where cavalry soldiers fought wild Indians, but the richest city on the Gulf of Mexico and the second richest port in the whole United States. The streets were paved with crushed oyster shells that sparkled in the summer sun and gleamed at night under the glow of gaslights. The mansions of the leading men of Texas society lined Broadway Street, surrounded by gardens of flowering Oleander and fragrant groves of orange and lemon trees. The Strand, on the north side of the island where the wide harbor faced the mainland, was crowded with brick business houses and the traffic of port commerce, while the sand beach on the south of the island was filled with the carriages of pleasure-seekers enjoying the balm of the Gulf breezes. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the lingering legend of the Karankawas, civilized Galveston wouldn’t have seemed like wild Texas at all.
The Karankawa Indians were cannibals, so the story went, roaming the Gulf islands long before the shipping trade had turned Galveston into the leading port city of the West, and even before the legendary pirate Jean Lafitte had stopped by to bury his stolen booty. When the fishing wasn’t good, the Karankawas turned to eating human flesh, and it was rumored that their campfires were heaped with the bones of their supper guests. The fact that they had stalked around the island stark naked, their bronzed bodies glistening in alligator grease to ward off mosquitoes, only added to the allure of their legend. Galveston was, after all, a beach and bathing resort where even very proper Victorians went nude into the waves.
John Henry learned about that surprising island custom on one of his first nights in Galveston when a drink in a Strand saloon led to an invitation to join an outing of men and ladies for a swim in the ocean.
“Though I don’t have any bathing clothes with me,” he remarked, and one of the other men answered with a laugh.
“Don’t need ‘em! City Ordinance says you can swim in the altogether between ten at night and four in the morning. They figure all the children are asleep by then.”
“You mean you swim naked with ladies along?” John Henry asked in amazement. While he’d grown up going skinny-dipping in the green waters of the Withlacoochee, he’d never gone undressed in open public view—and certainly not with ladies.
“Well, I wouldn’t call ‘em ladies, exactly!” the gent replied. “It’s usually only these saloon girls who are bold enough to accept the invitation. But once they’ve got their pantaloons off, the barmaids and the ladies all look pretty much alike, anyway. Care to come along?”
And that was how John Henry Holliday found himself in the company of several young sports and a few of their female friends, riding out in a hired dray toward the sand beach on the south side of Galveston Island. They could have walked the two miles to the shore, as it was a warm and brightly moonlit night, but the dray would be a convenient place to stow their clothing while they did their bathing in the surf.
The other young men seemed accustomed to watching women dis-robing at a hardly discreet distance, although with the moon shining down so bright no distance would have been quite discreet enough. But John Henry was not accustomed to such a sight and had a hard time averting his eyes, as a gentleman should. The spectacle of those laughing young women loosing their hair and shedding shoes and stockings, skirts and bodices, petticoats and corsets and shimmies and pantaloons until they were standing bare-skinned under the summer moon took away all his mannerly reserve—though it wasn’t just the eroticism of the scene that compelled him to shed his own clothes and join them in the waves. It was the freedom of the night, the wild abandonment of the life he’d left behind and the thrill of the world that lay ahead, that made him dive naked into the warm waters of the Gulf. It was Texas that made him do it, not the girls, and he felt not the slightest bit of remorse because of it.
No remorse, but a little regret later on when morning neared and the party tired of the ocean frolic, and found that the dray had disappeared with all of their clothing in it. There was momentary laughter over the missing horse and buggy until they all realized that they would have to make their way back into town on foot—and wearing nothing but their sandy, salty nakedness. Next time, John Henry vowed, he’d leave his own clothing somewhere more reliable than in the back of a rented dray. But in spite of the embarrassing early morning walk back to the livery stable where the horse had taken itself and the dray full of discarded attire, he wouldn’t have traded away that night of emancipation for a lifetime of proper memories.
He was in Texas at last, and glad of it.
The rest of his days in Galveston were less romantic as he turned his attention to the more mundane matter of finding employment, which turned out to be a harder task than he’d thought it would be. Although he had a fine education as a graduate of the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery and professional experience with one of the most respected dentists in Atlanta, he had no way of proving it. And at one Galveston dental practice after another, the conversation was always the same:
“I’d be happy to have some extra help, busy as things are these days. Could use another trained man in the office, if you did indeed have the credentials . . .”
“Too bad about the diploma, and all. I’ve been thinking of advertising for a qualified partner . . .”
“One can’t be too careful in our line, of course. My patients would want to know the background of someone new to town. It’s all about trust, in our profession . . .”
Then would come the polite apologies, adding that when the doctor received his diploma that had been mistakenly left behind in Georgia, along with a letter of recommendation from his former employer, he’d be welcome to come by and inquire after a position again. . .
But John Henry couldn’t afford to wait on the arrival of his diploma or anything else, short on money as he was. So he took the first job that seemed at all suitable: working for a Market Street barber who advertised bloodletting, leeching, and tooth extractions “promptly attended to” on the side of a hairstyling business, and who had a room to rent in the back of his shop, as well. John Henry did the work, took the money, and consoled himself that he wasn’t planning on staying in town long, anyhow. As soon as he made enough to outfit himself properly for the journey to come, dressing like a gentleman instead of a ragged refugee from the law, he would leave the barber business and travel on to the Brazos River plantation of his wealthy Uncle Jonathan McKey, where he could live a life more befitting his station.
Of course, along with the new clothes, he’d need to
have a new scabbard made for his Uncle Tom McKey’s big knife that had come to Texas with him. Since the Hell-Bitch had started out as a plowshare on the McKey plantation before being forged into a sidearm, his Uncle Jonathan might recognize it and wonder how John Henry had come to carry it unholstered—and begin to ask questions about why his nephew had left home in such a hurry. In spite of the family connection, his uncle would be under no obligation to take in a man on the run, and might even turn him away if he knew the circumstances of John Henry’s hasty departure from Georgia.
His earnings from the barbershop were slow in adding up, however. What he needed was some seed money, just a little loan to get himself started—and he knew just the person to ask. His Uncle John Holliday, a doctor in Atlanta, was the most well-off man he knew and could certainly afford to share something with his favorite nephew, if John Henry could just find the right words to say in asking him.
It took all the skills of composition he had learned in his school days at the Valdosta Institute to craft a letter that said just enough without saying too much, asking for the loan without explaining why he couldn’t ask his own father for the money. But he must have done well in writing it, for within two weeks he received a reply—the small loan he had requested, along with a letter of introduction to a dentist living in the north Texas town of Dallas.
The dentist was a Dr. John Seegar, a former Georgian and old friend of the family. Dr. Seegar had married a girl from Campbell County, just over the line from Fayette County, and had made his home for a while in the Holliday’s hometown of Fayetteville. Uncle John was well acquainted with him and was pleased to offer a letter of introduction which John Henry might want to use should he ever find himself in Dallas. But John Henry had no intention of using the recommendation, having heard enough about Dallas to know that he wasn’t much interested in presenting himself there. Dallas was just another upstart farm town enjoying a little boom from the arrival of the railroads, but nothing much to brag about beyond that, and he had another kind of life in mind for himself— one of ease and comfort on his Uncle Jonathan’s big cotton plantation on the Brazos River. So he put the letter away in his traveling bag and spent the loan money buying a new wardrobe for his trip: a vested wool suit and two white linen shirts, two stiff collars and two pairs of paper cuffs, a pair of soft leather ankle boots and a new felt hat, promising himself that he would repay the loan just as soon as he got settled again. And by the time he stepped aboard the Houston & Texas Central Railroad headed northwest toward Washington County, he almost believed that he really was just a young gentleman traveler off to see the world.
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