Holliday John Henry - Dance with the devil: the saga of Doc Holliday

Victoria Wilcox is Founding Director of Georgias Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum (the antebellum home of the family of Doc Holliday, now a site on the National Register of Historic Places), where she learned the familys untold stories of their legendary cousin. Her work with the museum led to two decades of original research, making her a nationally recognized authority on the life of Doc Holliday. She is the author of the documentary film In Search of Doc Holliday and the award-winning historical novel trilogy The Saga of Doc Holliday, for which she twice received Georgia Author of the Year honors and in 2016 was named Best Historical Western Novelist by True West Magazine. She has lectured across the country, appeared in local and regional media, guested on NPR affiliates, and was featured in the Fox Network series Legends & Lies: The Real West. She is a member of the Western Writers of America, the Wild West History Association, Women Writing the West, and the Writers Guild of the Booth Museum of Western Art and has been a featured contributor to True West Magazine. In the summer of 2017, she joined actor Val Kilmer ( Tombstone ) as guest historian at the inaugural Doc HolliDays in Tomb-stone, Arizona, site of the legendary OK Corral gunfight.

D ANCE WITH THE D EVIL

For Ronald Carl Wilcox, D.D.S.
The real Doc in my life.

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Copyright 2014 Victoria Wilcox
Previously published as Gone West

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Names: Wilcox, Victoria, author.

Title: Dance with the devil : the saga of Doc Holliday / Victoria Wilcox.

Other titles: Gone West | Saga of Doc Holliday

Description: Guilford, Connecticut ; Helena, Montana : TwoDot : Distributed by National Book Network, 2019. | Previously titled Gone West, published by Knox Robinson (London), 2014. The second volume in the Doc Holliday trilogy. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018108 (print) | LCCN 2019018841 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493044726 (e-book) | ISBN 9781493044719 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Holliday, John Henry, 1851-1887Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Western stories. | Historical fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3623.I5327 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I5327 G66 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018108

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

T EXAS , 1873

T HE LAST THING ON HIS MIND WAS A TRAIN ROBBERY. A LTHOUGH HE knew about the $100,000 in gold rumored to be aboard, enough to make any outlaw eager, no one had ever robbed a moving train west of the Mississippi before. As long as the Rock Island Lines passenger train No. 2, bound from Council Bluffs to Des Moines, kept up its dizzying speed of forty-miles an hour, horsed bandits would have a hard time catching up with her.

But as the train neared Adair, Iowa, it slowed for a grade and a curve, and the engineer hollered out that something was slung across the tracks. He slammed the engine into reverse and the train shuddered and groaned, then jumped the rails. The locomotive thundered down the muddy bank of Turkey Creek spewing smoke and cinders from the chimney and lolling to one side, twisting the couplers and throwing the passenger cars skyward. The ground shook with the impact as steam rose from the troubled creek bed. And waiting alongside the bridge to greet the terrified passengers as they struggled from the wreckage was a white-robed gang of train robbers brandishing pistols and rifles and shouting the Rebel yell...

You gonna buy that paper, Mister, or just stand there readin all day? the newsboy on the Galveston Strand complained as John Henry lost himself in the details of the Wests most daring train robbery. The engineer had been killed, thrown from the locomotive then crushed to death as it rolled over him. But the conductor had lived to testify against the James gang that had derailed the Rock Island Line and held up its passengers.

Until that summer, the gang had kept their outlawry to holding up banks in the Missouri back country. This enterprise with the railroads was a whole new kind of crime, and newspaper sales soared whenever there was a report on the search for the elusive Jesse James. Aside from the gruesome death of the trains engineer, it would have been a perfect robbery had the money actually been on board and not delayed until later, leaving the gang only $6,000 in cash and jewelry taken from the express messenger and the passengers. But it was a thrilling attempt, even so, and folks took to the story like a dime novel come to life. Not since the long-ago legends of Robin Hood had there been such a popular outlaw, and ladies openly hoped that Jesse might show up in their own quiet towns, bringing adventure and his handsome gang with him. But that was the tenor of the times in 1873: the War was over and the new West was wild, and the country was ready for some entertainment.

But to John Henry Holliday, late of Georgia by way of a fast ride across Florida and a sailing ship to Galveston, the story of Jesse James was more of a relief than anything else. For with the newspapers filled with tales of the dashing outlaw, there was little chance that a shooting on a river in South Georgia would be reported. Not that there was all that much to report about such a commonplace crime: a young black man gunned down by a young white man. But it was John Henrys crime, and though he had run from Lowndes County before the law could catch him, then spent a long night in anguished prayer repenting of his sin and begging for Gods forgiveness, he knew that repentance alone would not satisfy the State of Georgia. If the law decided to come after him, he could still hang for murder. So he anxiously read every newspaper he could get his hands on searching for any mention of violence on the Withlacoochee River, and was relieved to see the name of Jesse James, not John Henry Holliday, spelled out across the front page. Let the James Gang get the fame; hed be happy if his own name never made the headlines.

There was certainly nothing else about him that would draw attention. He was of average height and average build, although a little on the lean side on account of a bout of pneumonia hed had while spending two cold winters in dental school in Philadelphia. His coloring was fair, his eyes china blue, or so said the girls back home whod called him handsome, though mostly it was his cousin Mattie Holliday calling him handsome that had meant something to him. And though there were other, less pleasing, things that Mattie had called him, as wellstubborn, selfish, arrogantif those had been his only sins, he wouldnt be in Texas now, reading the paper and watching for any mention of his name or what had happened on the Withlacoochee.