KITTY
The only man she truly loved was not her first lover. Nor would he be her last. According to the Dodge rumor mill she had scores of lovers, among them a fistful bad as rotgut whiskey. A sharp woman not known for biting her tongue—hotblooded, spirited and gracious with a smile that lit up a room like a sunbeam—Kitty was fair and exquisite. She wore frills, feathers and flowers, lace and seductive silks bright as a tropical bird's plumage.
Her lawman had roving eyes yet no use for conquests. He guarded his freedom. Women chased him, and while he bedded as many as any vigorous man, he never pursued a one. Kitty was the sole woman who held out hope for long and she did most of the courting.
Matt rescued her from lecherous ruffians, though at times he was nowhere near when the brutes beat and violated her. Not that they escaped. The marshal hunted them down. He spared their vile lives unless he had to kill. On occasion he wouldn't even trounce a man who ravaged his woman, which infuriated Kitty. "Matt, why didn't you kill that beast? And don't tell me it's cuz he surrendered."
"Kitty, I couldn't kill a man with his hands in the air, much as I wanted to. I was hankering to beat 'im half to death, but he passed out cold from the first punch. You don't wallop a man when he's senseless. He'll serve at least six months behind bars if that makes you feel any better."
"It does not make me feel better," Kitty growled. "If I was a lady instead of who I am, that animal would get locked up two years or more. I've had enough of this, Matt." She refilled her glass to the brim and tossed back the whiskey in two gulps. "I'd of killed 'im myself, only the coward took me by surprise and smacked my head with his gun butt."
"I talked the judge into moving his court date to the docket head," said Matt. "If he stays in jail here much longer, Chester will kill him. Or if Chester doesn't I'm afraid I will."
Kitty splashed more whiskey in his glass and poured herself a last short shot. "Next man who attacks me is dead meat," she vowed. She and Matt clinked glasses.
True to her word, Kitty had no gun and no need of one. She lassoed her next assailant's waist with her bare legs as he ripped at her skirt. Shrieking curses, she jerked him forward and he fell on top of her in the abandoned back street livery where he'd dragged and flung her in the dirt. He tried to grind his mouth against hers and she almost bit his lips off. The man hollered in pain and swore back at her. "I'm gonna kill you and stuff your harlot's hide in the trash barrel," he hissed. She wrapped her arms round his scrawny neck and strangled him to death as his fingers frantically clawed the dirt to grab his gun belt, which he'd carelessly tossed just out of reach on a rotting hay bale. Word got out that Kitty Russell was not to be trifled with.
If tough when needful, she was by nature generous and tenderhearted. Kitty once freed from jail a bandit condemned to the gallows for shooting to death a bounty hunter who shot and killed the outlaw's law-abiding twin brother, mistaking him for his bandit kin. When the bounty hunter drew on the innocent twin without a word of explanation, the twin thought he meant to pull the trigger and went for his own gun. His brother rode up in time to witness his twin's death as the bounty hunter's bullet blasted his chest.
The bandit brother swore he'd never killed another man, only held them up in banks, trains and stages. Kitty believed him, aided in her sentiment by his youth, handsomeness and gentlemanly manner. She waited until Matt and Chester went to dinner at Delmonico's so the bandit could flee under cover of night.
Moss had been busy that day and luckily gone to bed early on his straw-tick mattress at the stable, where he slept the deep sleep of an aged man wearied with work. Kitty saddled and bridled the bandit's horse, rode to the jailhouse, unlocked the cell door and let the man out. He retrieved his gun belt and revolver from the desk drawer, and she gave him sixty dollars along with jerky, biscuits, coffee and a goodbye kiss.
She then joined Matt and Chester at Delmonico's, kept them talking two hours and asked them to walk her to the Long Branch and stop in for a beer. Matt said sure, and Chester said he'd come by after he went to check on the prisoner and see if he needed anything.
Kitty invited Matt to her Long Branch room and asked him to go upstairs ahead of her, she needed to tell Sam something and would carry their beers up shortly. Matt hesitated. "Chester doesn't like drinkin' alone," said the marshal. "He'll wonder why we didn't wait for 'im."
"Don't worry about him. He can chat with Sam," Kitty said.
Matt went on up to her room, and Kitty moved to the bar. "Sam, when Chester comes in askin' where Matt is, say you haven't seen him tonight."
"Alright, Miss Kitty." A devoted employee and friend, Sam would lie for her just because she asked him to. She didn't give a reason, nor did he ask why.
In bed with Matt, she prolonged her coquetries until he grew impatient and demanded to know what was wrong. "Oh nothing," Kitty said playfully. "I thought we'd go slow for a change, but if you're ready."
"Kitty, I've been ready since we got in bed."
"Well ride 'em Cowboy."
When Matt came down the Long Branch stairs and headed out for his nightly patrol, Chester had left the saloon for the marshal's office, where he waited to tell Mr. Dillon about his escaped prisoner. Matt suspected Kitty turned the man loose. She'd pitied him from the time Matt related to her how the bandit killed the bounty hunter.
"I did it," she said without a bit of regret, gazing boldly up at her beau. "Matt, you know hanging Judge Flintridge was wrong to sentence him to the noose, so I just made up my mind to help him."
Her daring unexpectedly tickled Matt and he grinned, then felt a sudden urge to make love to her for the second time that night. "Too late to start tracking him now. Chester and I will hit the trail first light."
Matt swept Kitty up in his arms and kissed her. He spent the night in her room and was too tired as a result to get out of bed before sunrise. Chester had worn himself frazzled over the escape and needed to sleep even longer, so it was midmorning by the time they rode out in search of the fugitive. They didn't find him.
Two months later Kitty received a letter from Costa Rica, where the escaped man had settled, gone straight and was working as a fisherman. She told Matt the man was doing well and had given up his life of crime, but never revealed where he was.
DOC
Doc Adams rarely overindulged in the bottle. He conquered the craving for the most part when he started studying medicine in his youth. While he drank beer with Kitty, Chester and Matt at the Long Branch, brandy was Doc's liquor of choice on a toot.
At sixteen years old, young Galen was delighted when he ventured into a saloon and the barkeep didn't tell him to scamper on out or his pa would find what he was about. He ordered a double whiskey, and though the barkeep gave him a doubtful eye, the man uncorked a bottle and filled a glass.
Bouts of crabbiness had always troubled Galen. He discovered as he sipped the whiskey a soothing easement of the jangling knot squeezing his temples. Booze muted the irritants of life.
Adams found a consuming purpose in doctoring which nearly made him forget the thirst ever plagued him. Much more than a vocation, even more than a calling, the healing arts saved him from he knew not what fate—likely the early death of a drunkard. He realized he was born to be a physician, and through the many years he practiced, he never set aside who he was a moment, any more than he would his name. When Doc took down his shingle and retired in 1896 at the age of seventy-two, the infrequent craving—which declined as he grew older—disappeared. He was content to spend his last three years at leisure.
Devoted though he was to saving lives, healing and tending, Doc could kill when the need arose, much as he hated it. When a widowed farmer's son and only child—a man less than thirty years old—died of infection after Doc amputated his leg, crushed by a wolf trap the man himself had hidden in the grass and forgotten, the embittered old tater grubber, known by all who knew him as Devil Jack, hired a gunman to shoot Doc dead and told him his days were numbered.
"Dillon and Chester ain't nowheres roun' to rescue you, Doc," Farmer Jack snarled. "You're a goner and ain't nothin' you can do."
"Don't threaten me, you old devil," Doc snapped.
Unless Jack was lying about hiring a gunman to kill him, Doc knew he was on his own. Matt and Chester had ridden out yesterday to a range war on the Jetmore settlement outskirts, thirty miles north of Dodge. Matt did not deputize a man to run things in his absence, as it was offseason and the Texas trail-herders weren't in town to kick up a fracas.
When the killer hired by Devil Jack crept with drawn gun up the stairs to Doc's office, Doc was ready. He aimed his rifle at the door as it inched open, cocked the weapon and called to the gunman to hold it. The man whirled on Doc, raising his gun. Doc pulled the trigger before the killer could thumb the hammer. The shot tore through the man's lung and out his back.
He fought for air, wheezing and gurgling as blood gushed from his mouth. Small and thin, he was some two inches shorter than Doc, so Doc picked him up and put him on the table without much effort. The man looked sick aside from the gunshot wounds and would likely die any second, but as long as he breathed Doc had to try and save him. Doc covered his face with a cloth soaked in ether, cut him open, removed the mangled lung and sewed him up.
He clung to life, so Doc treated him for intestinal grippe and jaundice, and two days after the surgery, sepsis. He stayed three months at Doc's, and when Matt moved him to a jail cell he'd fully recovered from the bullet wounds, the operation removing his lung and his illnesses, and gained twenty pounds.
Devil Jack, the old farmer who paid the man to kill Doc, drank two bottles of corn whiskey and dropped dead the day the man went gunning for Doc. The gunman wasn't wanted by the law, although Matt sensed in his gut that he'd committed murder before. A cooperative prisoner who spoke as little as possible, he had stony eyes and a hard expressionless face.
"He won't get more than three, four years prison time," said Matt. "At least he won't come after you again, Doc. He said he already had a foot in the grave when Devil Jack hired him to kill you, and you did him a big favor shootin' him on account of you brought 'im back from the edge of Boot Hill and made him a healthy man for the first time in his life. Says he's beholden to you."
"By golly, Matt," said Doc. "You just gave me a grand idea. I hope I can hold him to his promise."
Doc asked the gunman not to kill for pay ever again, and he swore he never would. On his release from prison, word spread that he'd taken up cattle rustling in Montana Territory. "Be that as it may," Doc declared, "he survived after I shot him for a reason. I wager he'll end up saving someone's life. Someday. If ranch hands don't pump him full of buckshot first."
MATT
He could be hard now and then, though not with friends and close acquaintances. Although he believed women had the right to think, talk and act freely as men, Matt sternly disapproved certain behaviors in women, things that fell in the hazy void between right and wrong. When a woman transgressed Matt's code he let her know, and while he never laid a rough finger on a woman, he wasn't always gentle in his condemnation.
Matt accused Long Branch gals more than once of pitting men against each other. One spirited lady of the night called Vixen threw his judgment back in his face. "You turned Kitty against me, Marshal," she said, "and I'm not the only one. You busted up the friendliness between Kitty and a few of us girls on account of men. Ya know what I think, Marshal?" Matt made no reply, regarding her despite her beauty with a potent mix of disgust and a dark forceful look which she later told Kitty was hatred.
"Oh but you're wrong, Katie," Kitty said with conviction. She refused to call the young woman Vixen. The girl stubbornly declined to reveal her real name, so Kitty chose to call her Katie. "Matt's a good man, he never hated a woman in his life. I don't know that he even hated the worst of men, not really. He just figured some of 'em had to be got rid of."
"Well maybe he don't hate me, but he despises what he blames me for. He glares at me so, Kitty. Marshal Dillon's a tolerable looking man 'til that shadow comes over his face. Then his looks fly right out the window."
Matt could usually stare women like Vixen to silence. They weren't afraid of him. They knew he wouldn't hurt them, would protect or take care of them in a minute if they needed him. It was the censure he radiated that made women who strongly displeased him shrivel inside. Vixen however went right on telling Matt what she thought of him even when he didn't answer.
"Kitty ain't sure where she stands with you or where she will stand down the road, so kind as she is otherwise, she gives in to the temptation to turn on one of her poor girls just to get that warm sure feeling of you and her together thinking the same ill of a girl. A body can't help feeling she's raised in her man's eyes when she backs him in badmouthing a woman. Were it not for you, Marshal, Kitty would never think ill of any of us just cuz two fellers fight over us."
Vixen jutted her hip and smacked her palm on it. Matt's harsh look melted in a moment of stunned blankness—a boyish look which made the woman sorry she'd lit into him. Her face softened as her anger faded. She wore a lot of paint and powder and her beauty was the sultry type, her features irregular yet somehow bewitching.
"I'm sorry Vix— Katie." Matt gave her bare shoulder a light quick touch and she smiled.
"You called me Katie."
"That's what Kitty calls you."
"Katie'll do just fine," she said. "I like it better than Vixen."
Matt let himself grin a little. "So do I."
She kissed him, a long tender kiss right there at the Long Branch bar. Clem was the bartender then, and he did not look askance at either of them. It wasn't uncommon for the girls to kiss the marshal when Miss Kitty was out. Not that their attentions were unwelcome.
Unlike women who fell afoul of Matt's disfavor, when a man gravely erred in the lawman's eyes the offense was generally much worse, the condemnation more severe and lasting. When a drifter set upon and forced himself on a saloon worker as she walked to her rooming house at about three o'clock one morning, she reported the incident to the marshal, who jailed the fellow and took him to court for a hearing. His accuser had no cuts or bruises, and when the judge asked if her attacker struck her, she said no. She didn't scream or fight him. She figured he'd beat or kill her if she did.
"We made love is all we done, Judge," said the man. "On the prairie in the moonlight. She got mad afterward on account of me telling her I got what I courted her for and wanted to get shet of 'er." The woman called him a liar, said she'd seen him drinking in the barroom where she worked but they'd never spoken a word to each other, that he'd taken hold on her and made her walk with him into the grass where he forcibly took her. The judge said it was her word against that of the accused with no witnesses. His Honor dismissed the charges.
News of the case rushed like wildfire through Dodge, and the next day two dance hall women visited the marshal's office along with the saloon worker who'd been set upon by the drifter. The dance hall gals said the man attacked them, and unlike the saloon worker, they fought and paid dearly for their courage. They bore the marks of his savagery on their faces and necks—scabs and fading bruises—and assured Matt the bruises were scattered over their bodies as well.
Matt locked the drifter up again and once more took him to court. He stood before a different judge this time, but the outcome was the same despite the women's healing injuries. No one witnessed the attacks, and the judge set the man free.
The drifter leered at his victims, then gave Matt a taunting look and brayed laughter. Matt backhanded him sufficient to shut him up, though not hard enough to knock him down. He clutched his face and shrank back.
"Marshal, I do not permit bodily punishment in this courtroom," the judge scolded. "You know better than that."
"Judge, if the women Dugan attacked didn't work in a dance hall and barroom, he'd be on his way to prison now instead of turned loose to hurt other women," the marshal retorted.
Matt followed Dugan out of the courthouse and trailed at his heels. The drifter stopped walking and turned to face the marshal. The man looked up at Matt, opened his mouth to say somewhat, then closed it and gulped when the words failed to form in his head and caught in his throat. Dugan wet his lips. "My gun," he said hoarsely.
"I'll give you your gun, Dugan. And you'll get out of Dodge soon as you strap on the belt."
The drifter sneered. "Judge said I'm innocent of what them lying strumpets said I done. So you got no grounds to make me leave town, Dillon. I'm stayin'."
"The judge didn't say you were innocent, Dugan. He said there were no witnesses to prove you guilty."
"Same thing legally speakin'. Either way you ain't runnin' me out."
"You want your gun get movin'," Matt said. When they reached the jailhouse, Dugan made to open the door and Matt clamped a hand on his wrist.
"Hey what the sam hill," said the drifter.
Matt released his wrist, took hold of his arm and dragged him to the stretch of dirt behind the jail. "Now you listen good, Dugan. You're leavin' town or I'll beat you bloody."
The drifter was scared but he was even more proud and mulish. He had his rights, he said, and he wouldn't leave Dodge 'til he got ready, not even if Dillon killed him.
"Dugan, you pigheaded fool." Matt let go of him. The drifter lunged away and Matt grabbed him again. Dugan bucked, kicked and swung in the lawman's grip, too panicked for his blows to strike his captor.
Matt faced a dilemma. His knuckles itched to pound the man's face, but Dugan was neither big or solid enough to stand the beating he deserved, nor was he a fighter. He flailed in Matt's grasp like a schoolgirl.
With a height and build in the mid range, to most men the drifter appeared average in size. To the lawman he looked small, and while Matt did not hesitate to backhand a man of Dugan's size or knock him out to subdue him, the marshal wouldn't whale on him.
"I won't hurt you, Dugan," said Matt. "Quit fightin'."
"Then turn me loose," Dugan ordered.
"Nope. You're under arrest."
"For what? I ain't done nothin'. The judge said let me go!"
"This is a different charge," said Matt. "I'm locking you up for being a public menace. Three women accused you of forcible carnal knowledge. They were a sight distressed and afraid of you."
"But the judge dismissed those charges!"
"Doesn't matter. You're still a menace to women and I'm throwin' your hide in jail. Get inside." Matt shoved him and he fell. "Get up."
"Can't. You knocked the wind outa me. Gimme a second."
Matt pulled him upright, and Dugan gave the marshal a crafty look. "If I leave town right now will you let me go?"
Matt gave the drifter his gun belt. "If I catch you prowling round here again I'll cage you like the cur you are."
A knot of frustration twisted Matt's gut as he watched the man hurry away. Though the women of Dodge were safe from him, Dugan would just prey on the women in the next town he wandered to, and because he targeted saloon workers and dance hall gals, he'd likely get by with it.
Folks heard tell of Kitty Russell, Doc Adams and Marshal Dillon. Those who by chance came to know them found out things not spread through word of mouth. It surely was true, folks said, that you never discovered who a body really was until you knew them. That was true of Chester Goode, too, the very same. The marshal's meek, devoted assistant who wore no six-gun had another side. There was more to Chester than met the eye. A lot more.