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A Fistful of Thorns

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Synopsis

The Mexicans call him El Valiente and honor him as un hombre con alma grande y corazón de fuego -- a man with a large soul and a heart of fire. He kills his first man in personal combat when he is twenty three, close to past the prime for a pistolero. Most gunmen of the day have started killing careers in their mid teens.

Born with a hare lip and cleft pallet, he survives General Sherman's gratuitous destruction of his home. Like the rest of Georgia, he comes to loathe that murderous, red headed symbol of Yankee corruption and viciousness. After living through the rapacious carpetbag reconstruction, he attends Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery and becomes a popular and highly talented Atlanta dentist. But when tuberculosis exiles him to the far reaches of civilization, he is forced into the life of gunman-gambler. Ironically, he has contracted the disease from his mother who dies from it when she is thirty six. Underscoring the young man's belief that no good deed goes unpunished, his mother has acquired the bacillus from an orphan who the father brings home from Mexico at the end of America's war with that country. Holliday will follow his mother in death also at the age of thirty six.

The tabloids have named him the Deadly Dentist. His enemies refer to him as an "Arizona Tenor" or, simply, "that lunger son of a bitch." His friends call him "Doc." Whatever he's called, everyone agrees that he is one of the most lethal personalities to be found anywhere on the frontier. Like a coiled spring, he stands ready, at the drop of a hat or turn of the cards, to empty death into anyone who tries to turn the wolf loose on him or the Earps. For the Earps have replaced the family he was forced to abandon in Georgia. Even judged by the rigorous standards of the day for loyalty and bravery, he is a remarkable man. His given name is John Henry Holliday.

Doc lives with a woman who, as an adolescent, emigrates to America from Hungary by way of Mexico where her father serves as physician to Emperor Maximilian. After Maximilian's fall, her family narrowly escapes Benito Juarez's executioners and flees to America where both her parents die of typhoid. She is fifteen which by coincidence is John Henry's age when his own mother dies.

Before lashing up with Doc, big breasted Mary Katherine Harony plies her trade as a prostitute. She is as tough, intelligent and resilient as he. Her granite will is as unshakable as his. When she becomes Doc's companion he is twenty five and she twenty six. Her experience in one of life's toughest professions in some of the most violent places in America has given her insights needed to manage his fierce anger and cruel fatalism. As an added attribute, she is immune to his disease. Providence has cast her as Doc Holliday's lover, confidant and, ultimately, his nurse during the most explosive and violent decade on the western frontier.

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Contents

Chapter 1A Ferocious Few
Chapter 2 Un Hombre de Palabra
Chapter 3 Nothing In His Soul But Iron
Chapter 4 Death Was Always On The Edge Of His Dreams
Chapter 5 For Better Or Worse
Chapter 6 Beau Geste-The Gallant Gesture
Chapter 7 As Flint Bears Fire
Chapter 8 As Honest A Man As Money Could Buy
Chapter 9 Love And Hate, Horns On The Same Goat
Chapter 10 There Came A Spider Who Sat Down Beside Her
Chapter 11 A Savage Reality
Chapter 12 I Only Live Because I Cannot Die
Chapter 13 Virtuous People need Us But They Don't Like Us
Chapter 14 No Survival Without Victory
Chapter 15 Dumber Than A Stinkbug
Chapter 16 While There's Life There's Danger
Chapter 17 Ambush At OK Corral
Chapter 18 Like Satan's Maddest Dog
Chapter 19 Lighting In A Bottle
Chapter 20 A Wild Justice
Chapter 21 Trouble Rides A Fast Horse
Chapter 22 Holding A Wolf By The Ears
Chapter 23 Dying But Deadly
Chapter 24 Death Came Like A Picnic On A Cold Day

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