“I’m all right.” With each syllable, Caleb felt more pain stabbing through his face. At first he thought his jaw had been broken. Then he reached up to feel the spot with one hand and realized the pain was coming from a different source.
The barkeep was examining him as well. Although he wanted to help, he pulled his hands back before he did any more damage. “You need to see a doctor. It looks like you got some glass stuck in you.”
Caleb had already figured that much out for himself. While the barkeep was being cautious, Caleb was touching his fingertips against various points along his cheek and jaw. Every touch was slick with a mixture of blood and whiskey. The blood trickled out from the numerous places he’d been cut, and the whiskey trickled into those same wounds to make it feel like fire was being pumped straight beneath his skin.
“Watch you don’t pass out now,” the barkeep said. “I’m not sure I can catch you. Carrying you to the doctor is right out of the question.”
Seeing the genuine concern on the barkeep’s face brought a bit of a smirk to Caleb’s. The smaller man seemed just as concerned that Caleb might be hurt as he was concerned for himself if Caleb happened to fall on top of him. While they were close in height, Caleb outweighed the barkeep by at least sixty pounds of muscle.
“Don’t worry, Hank” Caleb said to the barkeep. “I should be able to stay awake long enough to keep from crushing you.”
“That’s not what I meant. Well, not entirely. I just figured that you should—”
“I know. I was just kidding.”
The relief on Hank’s face was just as evident to Caleb as it was to the few customers who’d made their way back to the bar in Mike’s wake. One of those customers was the old miner who’d only moved to make certain his drink didn’t get knocked over.
The miner grinned wide enough to display a set of teeth that looked like a crooked row of tombstones. His skin was weathered as an old saddle and sat just as comfortably over the frame of his face. “Take a lickin’ like that and still got it in ya to kid? That’s a hell of a thing.” Lifting his drink, he said, “Here’s to ya, boy!”
Caleb lowered his eyes and started to smile but found it too painful. His hands were busy picking pieces of the bottle out of his face. The pieces that were just stuck to his skin came off easily enough. Some of the others were wedged in like splinters, and the remaining chunks of glass were stuck in much deeper.
Even though Caleb was the actual owner of the Busted Flush, it was times like these that he truly felt like the kid everyone said he was. Fresh out of his teens, Caleb had been living a workingman’s life for so long that he felt twice his age.
“What do you think you’re doing, boy?” the miner asked. “You need to get to the doctor for that. You’re just makin’ it worse.”
Caleb rolled his eyes. Not only did doctors cost money that he didn’t have, but he saw it as a way of admitting that Mike Abel had won the fight.
“You ain’t any less of a man for going to a doctor,” the miner said as if reading Caleb’s mind. “Of course, if you want to put on a show, I’ll sure as hell watch. I ain’t never seen nobody tear their own face off before.”
Settling in against the bar, the miner took hold of his drink and fixed his gaze upon Caleb as though he was watching a song and dance revue.
Caleb looked back at him with his hand poised over the damaged side of his face until the old man’s words finally sank in.
“Can you watch the place for a while, Hank?” Caleb asked. “I guess I’ll be going to the doctor.”
Hank nodded and looked more than a little relieved. “Sure I can. If Mike comes anywhere near here, I’ll crack his head open like an egg.”
While the barkeep patted the club that still lay in arm’s reach, Caleb found himself glancing more toward the shotgun, which was a little farther under the bar. As if to pull his thoughts from where they were headed, Caleb felt a stab of pain from the side of his face.
“You able to walk, boy?” the miner asked.
Caleb nodded. “I can make it, Orville. Thanks.”
“Then you’d probably be better off going to a dentist. A doctor’d bandage up them cuts and maybe give you some tonic, but you’ll need something more than that unless you fancy losing more’n the glass from that jaw of yours. Trust me,” the old man added, leaning forward as if to draw more attention to his crooked smile. “I know what I’m talking about.”
“A dentist,” Caleb moaned. “This just keeps getting better.” Before he could protest more vehemently, Caleb realized his face was already swelling, and it was getting more difficult to form his words. “Where th dentis?” he asked, finding that it hurt a bit less if he kept his jaw still.
Hank walked behind Caleb to make sure he got around the bar and to the door. “There’s a few places I know of, but the closest one is on Elm Street between Market and Austin.”
“Wha his name?”
“It’d be Doctor Seegar you’re after. My aunt had to go to him a while back to get some teeth pulled, and he did a fine job. She’s been back to him since to get some false teeth made, and he did a fine job there, too.”
“I’ll be bag” Caleb mumbled.
Hank nodded at first, then furrowed his brow and then finally asked, “Huh.”
‘I’ll. . . be. . . back.” Caleb repeated, this time pronouncing each word painfully.
Nodding furiously, Hank all but pushed Caleb through the front door. “Take your time, take your time. I’ll make sure the Flush is here when you get back.”
As he stepped outside, Caleb took a moment to clear his head and pull in as much fresh air as he could comfortably manage. Even on the days when he didn’t get smashed in the face with a bottle, staying inside the saloon had a way of making him dizzy. Perhaps it was the combined scents of cigar smoke and liquor that sent his head to spinning. Then again, there was also the fact that when he looked at all those dented tables, battered chairs, chipped glasses, and rotting floorboards, he saw a pile of money that he would never get back again.
When he started thinking along those lines, it made the knock from the bottle a lot less painful.
As he started walking down the street, Caleb did his best to get his mind off the fact that his face looked like a porcupine’s backside. His mouth hung open a bit and he had to suck in the occasional strand of bloody saliva dangling from his lip. Even so, he still managed to try to nod at the people he passed along the way.
Dallas was a good place to be for someone like Caleb. It was also a good place to be for someone like Mike Abel or the gambler who’d hung him out to dry the night before. There were plenty of people who wanted to make fortunes and plenty more willing to take them.
For Caleb, Dallas had been one opportunity after another. It was the place he’d wanted to go ever since he was old enough to realize that the world stretched beyond the boundaries of his father’s ranch. It was the first place he’d gone when what had seemed like a small fortune had been dumped into his lap after a fever had culled some of the members of his family.
Dallas was alive and breathing. It teemed with folks who moved along its streets like blood pumping through a giant’s body. It had noises and sights all its own. But as much as Caleb loved it there, he wondered if there wasn’t even more that he was allowing to pass him by.
He got that way when the receipts for his saloon didn’t come out right or if a liquor salesman gouged him in a particularly creative way. Thoughts of selling the Busted Flush to the highest bidder or just burning it to the ground had entered his mind more than once. But thoughts like that came to any businessman every now and then, so Caleb just put his nose right back against the grindstone and kept pushing forward.
After all, he was a businessman now.
Right and proper.
Straight and narrow.
His father was proud of him, and the rest of his family loved to puff out their chests when they talked about how Caleb had made a name for himself as a prosperous businessman in the wilds of Dallas.
Then again, proper businessmen didn’t normally get their faces split apart and punctured by a liquor bottle.
It wasn’t a long walk to Elm Street. The journey took him into a busier section of town where it was easy to just keep his head down and blend into the churning crowd. There were folks of all shapes and sizes going about their business. Most of them seemed to be making a lot of noise as they haggled over the price of salt or made predictions for the date of the next thunderstorm.
Before too long, Caleb found himself staggering up to a narrow building that was just tall enough to blend in with most of its neighbors. The lower portion of it was marked as A. M. Cochrane’s Drug Store. Caleb walked around to a set of stairs leading to the upper floor marked by a simple painted sign that read J. A. Seegar and J. H. Holliday. Dentists. Satisfaction Guaranteed.
The door at the top of those stairs opened into a small yet comfortable waiting area. At the moment, however, the only place he truly would have been comfortable was somewhere about a hundred miles from the spot he was in.
“Can I help you?” asked a girl who was only slightly younger than Caleb. “Do you have an appointment?”
Before Caleb could make a noise or even attempt to put an answer together, he saw the girl’s eyes become wide as saucers as she covered her mouth with one hand.
“Oh my goodness” she said. “Of course you don’t have an appointment. Did you fall down?”
“No. I wa hi.” Even though it hadn’t been long since the last time he’d tried to speak out loud, Caleb felt as if his jaw had rusted shut. He winced partially from the pain and partially from the knowledge that he was going to have to repeat himself at least one more time.
“You were hit?” the girl asked. “That’s terrible. Is your jaw broken?”
Still a little stunned that he’d been understood at all, Caleb shook his head. “No. There jus the glass in—”
The girl stopped him with a quickly raised hand. “That’s good enough. You probably shouldn’t try talking anymore.”
“Id Docto Seegar in.” Caleb asked against the girl’s orders.
“Dr. Seegar is with a patient right now and he’ll probably be busy for a while. His partner is available, though.”
Caleb’s eyes wandered over to a nameplate propped up on the edge of the desk in the reception area. The words on it were the same as the ones painted upon the shingle hanging outside the office.
The girl stood up as one of the doors leading farther into the office was pulled open. “Dr. Holliday,” she said, “there’s someone here who needs to see you.”