“I wish you two would either eat or shoot,” he said. “It’s hard to get comfortable if you know you might have to be ducking lead spit at any minute.”

“Mind your own affairs, little Bill, or take the consequences,” Pleasant Burnell said, without even glancing at Billy.

Billy shrugged and made a move toward the bar, but he had his new 10-gauge shotgun in one hand, and the minute he got behind Pleasant Burnell he turned and walloped him in the head with it as hard as he could.

It was hard enough, too—Pleasant Burnell was out so cold it made the comatose Hill Coe look almost alert.

“That damn bastard has little Bill’d me once too often,” Billy said.

“Yes, and he might try to do worse than that when he wakes up,” Happy Jack observed. He was evidently somewhat perplexed by the new turn of events, and he kept his pistol trained on the prostrate man as if suspecting that he might only be playing possum in the hope of gaining an advantage.

“Why, the manners here on the Pecos are a shock to me,” Doc Holliday said. “In Tombstone, cracking a man on the head with a goose gun would not be considered the correct etiquette at all.”

“I could have cut him in two with it,” Billy observed. “What’s the Tombstone line on that?”

He faced the shooting dentist with a bit of bristle in his manner—like all the gunfighters, he was sensitive to even the slightest disparagement.

“It’s a practical line,” Doc Holliday said with a cold smile. “In Arizona, when somebody gets their gizzard shot out, we line up and draw cards—low card means you have to dig the grave, which can be a sweaty task in that rocky old state.”

“That’s one reason me and Henry tried Dakota,” Barbecue Campbell observed. “Up there the ground’s softer, at least in the summertime, and all the burying don’t sweat you so. Of course, in winter, once the freeze comes, all you can do with kilt people is stack them in a shed and hope nothing don’t drag them off.”

It seemed the man had a keen interest in mortuary practices; he went on to discourse about them for some time, displaying an admirable power of observation.

I was so grateful for his discourse: not only was it interesting in itself but it prevented the wordplay between Billy and Doc Holliday from turning into gunplay, for before Barbecue Campbell was through describing the scores of burials he had had a hand in, Hill Coe had roused himself from his stupor and he and the shooting dentist were rolling dice.