«And so he brought the painting and the diamonds and the other stuff out here and put them in the car,» I yelled. I knew Chet. I knew how he would think.
«That way he figured we could guard them all,» said the man. «And we could have, but …»
I turned and started to walk away. I didn’t want to hear another word. If Chet had been there, I would have strangled him.
I was walking down the sidewalk, clear of the crowd, and there was someone walking close beside me, just a little ways behind. I looked around, it was the colonel.
His mouth shaped a single word as I looked around at him. «George,» he said.
We both of us must have had the same idea.
«Are the Yankees and Twins on TV tonight?» I asked.
He nodded.
«For the love of God,» I said, «let us get some beer.»
We made it in record time, each of us lugging a couple of six-packs.
George had beat us to it.
He was sitting in front of the TV set, in his stocking feet, watching the ball game with a can of beer in hand.
We didn’t say a word. We just put the beer down beside him so there’d be no danger of his running out of it and went into the dining room and waited in the dark, keeping very quiet.
In the sixth, the Yanks had two men on and Mantle up to bat and Mantle hit a double. But nothing happened. George just went on drinking beer, wriggling his toes and watching television.
«Maybe,» said the colonel, «it has to be the seventh.»
«And maybe,» I said, «a double doesn’t count. It may take a strike-out.»
We keep on trying, of course, but our hopes are fading. There are only four more Twin and Yankee games on television before the season ends.
And someone wrote the other day that next year, for sure, Mantle will retire.
The Fighting Doc of Bushwhack Basin
As was often the case with Clifford D. Simak’s Western stories, it appears that the title under which he sold this story was not the one under which it was published—but in this case it seems rather easy to conclude that the Simak story called, on submission, «Powdersmoke Prescription,» which strongly hinted at a medical element in the story, turned into «The Fighting Doc of Bushwhack Basin.» Moreover, Cliff’s journal shows that after he sent «Powdersmoke Prescription» off to Popular Publications in July of 1944, he received $150 for the story, and it subsequently appeared in the November 1944 issue of .44 Western Magazine, which was one of Popular Publications’ titles. (I have no idea why the magazine did not give the name of its editor, but that seems to have occurred now and then in the pulp magazines.)
Although the word was misspelled «Bushwack» on the cover, it was the longest story of the eight in the magazine, and it led off the issue (which carried a cover price of fifteen cents).
—dww
CHAPTER ONE: A TASTE OF LAW AND ORDER
Doctor Stephen Carter sat on a rickety chair beside the bed and watched Jake McCord die. There was nothing Carter could do about it. The bullet had struck the man in the chest and angled downward, lodging in his back, no more than an inch from the spinal column.
Just a little to one side, it would have struck the heart. And that, Carter told himself, would have been far more merciful, far better for everyone concerned, especially for Jake.
A smoky lantern on the table by the bed flickered in the gusty wind of dawn that crept coldly through a broken pane. A pane that had been stuffed with a gunny sack, but the sack had worked loose and now no one thought to fix it.
The face upon the pillow was a rugged face, like something chopped out of granite with a blunted axe. The high cheekbones stood out gauntly in the lantern light and the grizzled three day beard lent the man an age that must have been far beyond his years. The usually tight mouth was slack, gasping desperately for breath and the hair was tousled into an alarming salt and pepper rat’s nest.
Jake McCord was fighting for his life, fighting as he had fought through many years. As he had fought heartbreak and disappointment, drought and blizzard, insects, lack of water and the guns of those who coveted the few acres that he had held for a few years.
But this was his last fight. This was the one that he would not win. Carter closed his hands into fists and then relaxed them, spreading the fingers, telling himself there was nothing anyone might have done. There was no cure for a bullet that smashed into a man’s chest and coursed down through his body.
From somewhere outside, in the murky dawn, a lark awoke and sang and the song was a strange thing to be heard within the little cabin. A strange thing when a man lay dying.
In the dark corner by the foot of the bed, Mrs. McCord stirred in her chair and for a moment bent forward so the pale light from the window fell across her face … a face grey in the dawn, with eyes that were deep pools of black and a mouth strained tight against the hour.
«He ain’t sufferin’ none now, is he, doctor?»
Carter shook his head. «He probably never suffered, Mrs. McCord.»
Through the thin partition he heard Mary McCord poking up the fire, setting on the coffee pot. The door opened and footsteps went to the woodbox. The armload of wood thumped gently. One stick fell on the floor.
That, Carter knew, was Walker, the McCords’ oldest son.
«He was a good man,» said Mrs. McCord, speaking to no one in particular, probably not even realizing that she spoke of the man upon the bed as already dead. «He never asked a thing except a place to live. A place to make his home and raise his family and drive his plow. A place he could call his own. We went from place to place and it always was the same…»
Walker McCord came into the room, tiptoeing noisily, came to a halt behind Carter’s chair. In the silence, the doctor could hear the youth’s breath whistling in his nostrils.
Jake McCord’s breath faltered and stopped, took up again, stopped for a long moment and did not resume. Carter reached out for the man’s wrist, held it for a moment, fingers feeling for a pulse beat. None came and he slowly laid the hand back on the bed, rose and pulled up the quilt to cover the face.
Mrs. McCord was sobbing in her dark corner and Walker moved toward the end of the bed, stooping awkwardly to comfort her. Carter lifted his bag from the floor, put it on the chair, closed it.
Moments like this, he decided, were the worst part of being a doctor.
Doctors were supposed to heal, to make well, to save lives … not to sit by and watch life slip away, unable to raise a hand to stop it.
The McCords, he knew, had every right to hate him, every right to think that he had failed his duty, that he had failed in their faith of him. And yet, he knew equally as well, there had been nothing that he could have done, nothing that anyone could have done.
There wasn’t even anything that he could say. «I’m sorry» was about all and that wasn’t enough. It was at once inadequate and apologetic, as if anyone could apologize for death.
Heavily he paced out of the room and into the kitchen.
The morning light seeped through the windows and the fire in the stove threw a ruddy glow from the fire-box draft. Mary McCord stood in front of the stove, hands clasped in front of her, head bowed.
Carter set his bag on the lopsided table and moved slowly toward her. She lifted her head and in the glow of the fire he saw the shine of tears in her eyes.
«He’s gone, isn’t he?» she whispered, and he nodded.
Sobs shook her shoulders, but she still held up her head.
«I won’t cry,» she told Carter, fiercely. «I simply won’t. He wouldn’t have wanted me to cry. We have to go on living, the rest of us, no matter what the Plimptons do.»