The Ballad of Dingus Magee by David Markson Read Free Book Online

scream.
    “It’s stopped!” he cried. “The dripping’s stopped! All my blood is dripped out! I’m kilt, I’m kilt!”
    People were kneeling near him. “Easy now, easy,” someone told him. “Hold him down, somebody!”
    “Well, he sure ain’t dead, anyways,” Hoke said.
    “I am dead!” Turkey screamed. “My blood is all dripped out! I could hear it dripping and now I can’t!”
    “Does look like he’s lost a intolerable amount at that,” a cowboy remarked. Hoke could see it now also. “Lying in a whole flood of it there—”
    “I told you!” Turkey wailed. “And now there ain’t no more to drip!”
    “Can’t be from this here wound in his side. This ain’t nothing but a harmless crease.”
    “I doubt if’n I hit more than the once,” Hoke said. “Durned forty-fours jest ain’t no account fer accuracy.”
    “You think maybe he jest done peed in his pants with the fright of it?”
    “I dint never pee!” Turkey cried. “I’m murdered!”
    “Oh, thunderation, ain’t blood. Ain’t pee neither.” A man had lifted something from beneath him. “Ain’t nothing but his canteen been dripping here. It got punctured.”
    Turkey fainted on the spot.
    “Somebody lug him down to the doc’s,” Hoke said. He did not assist them. He had lost his derby while shooting and he went to retrieve it now. Then, still outraged, he was striding toward the main street when someone called to him.
    “Hey, Sheriff, look here—”
    “I got work to do,” Hoke snarled. “If that diaper-bottomed damn desperado thinks he can keep getting away with riding in here and making me shoot up innocent folks he’s got another think coming. And I don’t give a whorehouse hoot if’n he does face up to Wyatt Earp and the rest of them. I got to git back to my office and ponder what sort of mischief he’s most likely got in mind. Because this time I’m gonter—”
    “You better look at this here blood first, I reckon—”
    “I already seen it. I been hearing enough about it too. All that commotion over a little bullet hole in the belly—”
    “Not this. This ain’t his’n.”
    “This ain’t whose’n?”
    “Here, where the second horse skittered afore it run off. Bring a lamp, somebody. This is too far aside to be that Turkey feller’s.”
    Hoke gazed at the stains in the dim light. He ran his tongue across his mustache, which tasted faintly of gunpowder at the moment.
    “What do you think, Hoke? You think maybe one of the five bullets that didn’t hit the one you thought was Dingus and was aiming at might of hit the one you didn’t think was, and wasn’t?”
    “Unless it’s horse blood,” someone else speculated.
    “Ain’t horse blood neither,” Hoke said, “but either way he ain’t going far, and that’s the Lord’s truth of it.” He started off once more, then whirled anew. “And you’re all witnesses to that blood now too,” he said, “jest in case he crawls into a dung pile somewheres and dies, and somebody else goes picking up the remains and claiming them rewards. Because he’s worked hisself all the way back up to nine thousand and five hundred dollars last I were informed, even without no train, and that money’s mine!”

3

    “When I play poker, a six-gun beats four aces.”
Attributed to Johnny Ringo

    Dingus, on the other hand, was mostly amused.
    He had spurred his mount through a back trail to the far end of the town, and then he had almost fallen from the saddle, but even this failed to disturb him. “That Hoke,” he told himself merely. “He gets into the habit of shooting folks he ain’t pointing at and I’m gonter have to commence wearing that vest again myself.”
    He rested beneath a cottonwood tree while waiting for the blood to stop, which it did. It was lull dark now, and not far away he could see a lamp burning within the doorway of a makeshift clapboard miner’s shack. There was an odor of woodsmoke in the air, faintly tinged with kerosene and