“Hell yes, he’ll die!” (Part 1 of 4)

Doc Wells had been up and down the alley checking who was still alive, who was not.  Three were dead, no use wasting precious minutes on them.  The other two were alive, but barely.  He ordered some of his fellow townspeople to carry them to his office above Slossen’s Drug Store.  It wasn’t far, no more than twenty yards, but he implored those helping to be gentle even as they tried to hurry the pair up the stairs.  No sense in causing either man undue suffering.  In the few short minutes it took, Marshal Connelly died.  The Doc turned his attention to the other man.

He didn’t think there was much he could do for him either.  If he counted correctly, there were twenty-three bullet wounds, though it wasn’t clear how many were from rifle fire and how many were from the buckshot delivered from both barrels of a shotgun.  It was the shotgun blast that finally brought the man tumbling to the ground.

Working feverishly to stanch the flow of blood that seemed to ooze from everywhere, he couldn’t help but hear the commotion from the crowd gathering in the alley below his office window.  These were angry men, and as the minutes ticked by their talk intensified to shouts, the mob growing more agitated.  Someone produced a rope, and a rough plan quickly took shape.  They would tie one end of the rope to the top of a pole near the stairs while a few of the men marched into Doc Wells’ office.  The other end of the rope would be tossed to someone waiting at the window, and it would be tied around the wounded man’s neck.  He would then be flung out the window and hung to finish the job the bullets hadn’t.

The Doc understood their rage.  The town’s marshal lay dead in his office, and several other townspeople had been killed in the gunfight.  His patient and the men he rode in with were to blame.  He deserved to hang.  But the Doc had taken the Hippocratic oath, had sworn to care for the sick, the injured, the wounded to the best of his ability.  A man of strong ethics, he could not allow himself to surrender his patient to the mob.

He paused a moment to address the crowd.  There was no need to lynch the man, he told them, he would die anyway.  That didn’t quite satisfy the mob.  Someone shouted back, asking if the Doc was certain the man would die.  “Hell yes, he’ll die.  Did you ever hear of a patient of mine getting well?”  The ensuing laughter seemed to take the edge off the anger, his response to mollify the crowd.  The rope was put away.  The Doc returned to his patient.

Despite the many wounds his patient had sustained, despite what Doc had told the mob, the man would survive.  His companions weren’t as fortunate.  What had started as a typical peaceful Wednesday morning in Coffeyville, Kansas, had turned into a tumultuous affair reminiscent of the wild west, a time that the town’s residents thought long past.

(To be continued...)