Free Doc: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell

treeless prairie, and at the empty sky beyond. The cattle season had only just begun, but already the air was heavy with the odor of manure, monotonous with the buzz of swarming flies, loud with cowpunchers’ shouted curses and the bellowing protests of cattle being run up wooden planks into the railway cars that would haul them off to Chicago for slaughter.
    “Doc just stood there,” Bob Wright would recall, “looking outside, you know? And then he said—real soft, his voice was always real soft—he said, ‘I am in hell, but my Beatrice has sent me Vergil to be my guide.’ ”

    When Doc Holliday left the store, Bob’s daughter Belle emerged from the back room, where she had listened to all that passed between the dentist and her father.
    “Oh, honey,” Bob said when he saw that she’d been weeping. “Don’t cry!”
    “Why not? Somebody ought to cry!” she snarled, glaring at him with angry, red-rimmed eyes. “Johnnie deserves that much, at least!”
    At fifteen, Isabelle Wright was a small, slender, dark-haired girl who ordinarily carried herself with the grace and dignity of a young woman. The Belle of Dodge, people called her, and she was as justly celebrated for her beauty as for the charity work she did among impoverished Ford County farmers. In form and face, Belle was fortunate to have taken after her pretty little mother and not her gangling, chinless, homely father. Bob never ceased to marvel that he had sired such a pretty child, but now her lovely lips were swollen and her porcelain skin was spoiled by the purple blotches that had always spread across her face when she cried, ever since she was a baby.
    “ ‘A fine young man,’ ” she mimicked sarcastically. “You didn’t even like for me to talk to him, Daddy!”
    Bob Wright prized this daughter above all else on earth, but lately nothing he did was right in Belle’s eyes. Sometimes it seemed that she held him personally responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in Kansas.
    “Odd, wouldn’t you say, Daddy?” Belle remarked in a voice far too cold for a girl so young. “Why, there must have been two dozen drunken drovers asleep in that barn last night. They all woke up and got the horses out. Johnnie Sanders didn’t drink, but he was the only one to die.”
    “Honey, it’s not—”
    “It’s not your fault,” she finished for him, though that wasn’t what he’d meant to say. “It’s never your fault!” she sobbed. “Nothing is ever your fault!”
    Three blocks away, catching his breath in the lobby of the Dodge House Hotel, John Henry Holliday rejected the notion of leaving The Aeneid behind the front desk, having concluded that such an act of cowardice would only postpone Kate’s reaction.
    Arriving in their second-floor room, he tossed the book, his shirts, and the other mail on the bed. Kate glanced at Martha Anne’s gift before returning her gaze to the game of solitaire she had laid out on the small table in the corner.
    “That girl again,” she observed. “You said you’d break it off.”
    He didn’t deny it.
    Kate’s Magyar accent was noticeable only when she spoke English. Her Latin was elegant when she continued. “Your behavior is dishonorable. I consider it an injustice to her.”
    “Red jack on the black queen,” he said.
    She went back to her game. This was a considerable relief to him.
    “So,” she said, in English again, “was it someone you worked on, that body?”
    “Johnnie Sanders.”
    Her hand stopped, a seven of spades hovering above the table. “You’re sure?”
    “I never forget a smile, darlin’.”
    “Oh, Doc.” She set the deck aside. “I’m sorry.”
    Kate could be kind. It always caught him off guard.
    He stepped to the open window, bracing his right hand high against the frame while he recovered from the stairs. The posture opened up his intercostals and gave his diaphragm more leverage with which to work. Anyone out in the street who happened to look up