Free Doctor Who: The Gunfighters by Donald Cotton

apology fer a ring-tailed, downright rabid racoon?’
    ‘I know; I know right well, Kate – I read your note. I have already registered your sentiments; an’ that’s why I come a-runnin’...’
    ‘So’s you could shack up with someone else, before sun-down caught you lonely? Didn’t take you long, did it?’
    ‘Kate, I came so’s I could protect you from your ill-advised an’ head-strong ways! Know what them Clantons is likely to do to a defenceless woman?’
    She didn’t recognise the description.
    ‘Seems to me like it was them as needed protectin’! I took care of the whole thing; whilst you was a-canoodlin’
    with your fancy piece of small-time, low-tone, high-falutin’
    jail-bait here! Makes me puke!’ she added, to explain her attitude.
    Dodo was about to object to this character summary with some heat, when Holliday forestalled her. He didn’t want a war of the wild-cats on his hands, on top of everything else...
    ‘So who was it took care of Seth Harper, then, since you’re so all-fired smart?’
    He let the question float in the air; where Kate gave it her grudging attention.
    ‘That was you?’
    ‘Not only a privilege, but a pleasure,’ said Doc modestly.
    ‘S’pose you was too busy conductin’ the Ragtime Four to notice?’
    ‘Then, for Pete’s sake, why didn’t you get him between the eyes, like a feller should?’
    ‘Oh, come on, Kate – be fair! I mean, have you seen his eyes? There just ain’t rightly room for a bullet between
    ’em. They kind of overlap,’ he explained to Dodo. "Sides, if I’d truly killed him, what would’ve happened to the old guy you’re so dad-blasted fond of? He’d have been deader’n a prime hog came Thanksgivin’! The Clantons may be slow, but they’re accurate...’
    ‘Which old guy?’ asked Dodo, who had been out of the swim of events for some time.
    ‘Why, Honey,’ said the somewhat ameliorated Kate, ‘a real nice old guy, who came in to get a tooth fixed.’
     
    Dodo blanched. ‘But that must have been my friend, the Doctor!’ she deduced. ‘Why would they want to kill him ?’
    ‘On account they took him fer Sir Galahad over there,’
    explained Kate, nodding towards Holliday with her bosom,
    ‘who had the kindness to set him up for it, the bastard!’ she added.
    ‘Then where is he now? I must go to him!’
    ‘I’d not advise it, Sugar,’ said Kate, her heart of brass now more or less won over, ‘seein’ as how Wyatt Earp’s jest got through arrestin’ him.’
    ‘Arrested? But what on earth for?’
    "Cause Wyatt didn’t see fit to disabuse ’em of the notion that he was Holliday.’
    ‘But why?’
    ‘God knows, Molasses,’ Kate admitted, ‘but I’d say it was a fair bet that, like always, he was lookin’ out for his fine friend, here. Kind of drawin’ the Clantons’ fire.’
    ‘Onto the Doctor? But that’s awful!’
    ‘Now don’t you go worryin’ none, little lady,’ interjected Holliday. ‘If he’s with Wyatt, he couldn’t be no safer. Only man as I ever respected,’ he explained.
    Now that was a strange friendship: born of favours more or less accidentally received in the course of mayhem and general carnage, he supposed. But there it was. And, oddly, though they were, as you might say, on the opposite sides of the law, it had lasted through a score of cow-towns they had tamed together.
    So now... ‘What do you ladies say to a little three-handed game of chance?’ he enquired.
    After all, he didn’t want to waste the entire evening...
     
    13

The Red Hand of Tradition
    Meanwhile, the Doctor, still spluttering with inexorable indignation at his captors, was having it firmly and forcibly explained to him that if he so much as put his interfering snout outside the gaol-house before Holliday could be persuaded to leave town – when the matter of mistaken identity could safely be resolved to universal rejoicing and jocular back-slapping – then, certain as a possum goes with cold potatoes, he would