The Ballad of Dingus Magee Read Free Page B

the dripping instead. There was little question, it had happened. Turkey was at ease.

2

    “No, by heaven!
I never killed a man without good cause”
    Wild Bill Hickok, quoted by Henry M. Stanley

    As a normal thing, SheriffC. L. Hoke Birdsill affected a cutaway frock coat, striped pants, and a vest with a chain from which the tiny gold star of his office was sported. He also wore a derby, usually brown.
    It had not always been so. Indeed, Hoke was thirty-one, and if he allowed himself the vanity of such sartorial excesses it was because until less than one year before he had never owned much more than the shirt on his back, which smelled generally of cow. Nor had he been a sheriff then either.
    But then one day he had awakened with a pain in his chest. He tried to ignore it, but when it persisted, and severely enough to keep him out of the saddle, meaning out of work as a trail hand, he visited a doctor in Santa Fe. The doctor diagnosed consumption and gave Hoke twelve months to live.
    This staggered him, less because he did not particularly care to die than because he had no notion how to cope with his time until then (he had never been especially burdened with imagination). He drifted to Fort Worth, for no particular reason. He had very little cash, but he took to gambling anyway. So then an incredible run of luck was to dumfound him all the more. Within short weeks he had won eleven hundred dollars, more money than he had ever seen at one time in his life and certainly far more than he would need to get through the remaining days of it.
    Perhaps he was conscious of the irony. In any case he decided he might as well live according to his new means, which was when he began buying the clothes. “At least I’ll be buried in style,” he told himself. He was a tall man with a long, leaden face who had always been rail-thin but now believed himself cadaverous, and he grew a mustache also, which came out orange (his hair was quite dark, almost black). He had sold his horse and saddle and virtually all the rest of his gear, save for a single Smith and Wesson .44-caliber revolver in its sheath that he infrequently wore. He took to strolling considerable distances about the town or sitting wordlessly on his hotel’s porch. Probably he looked thoughtful. Possibly he was. He wrote the projected date beneath his signature when he made arrangements with a bewildered local mortician and paid the man full cash in advance.
    Then one morning he sat bolt upright in his bed some hours before dawn, startled by a realization that should have come to him weeks earlier, even before he had arrived in Forth Worth. His room was chilly, but when he undid his long woolen underwear, clutching at his chest, he found he was sweating. By the time he reached the stairway beyond his door, wholly without regard for sartorial propriety now, he was running, sprinting down through the darkened lobby and into the street. The nearest signboard he could recall was two blocks away, on a quiet side road, and he achieved it in no more than a minute. It was a woman who finally opened, and had she not been the wife of a doctor for forty years she might reasonably have taken Hoke Birdsill for mad. “Yes,” she said, “all right, he’s dressing, he won’t be a moment, perhaps if you would tell me what it is—”
    But he had already sprung past her. The doctor was in his woolens, climbing into his trousers. “I ain’t got it,” Hoke said, or rather sobbed. Only the sight of a second turned-down bed, the woman’s, gave him pause. But if he hesitated long enough to catch his breath he made no move to back out again. “It’s a month and I ain’t,” he gasped. “I got so used to thinking about dying from it that I reckon I forgot all about having to live with it first, because—”
    The doctor had paused with one leg raised, gawking. “What? Live with—?”
    “Not for a month. More than that. I can’t remember when I had it last. Not when I sold my