Yet after a week of ever-deepening delirium, fever and excruciating pain, his death had been a merciful release. “He’s gone,” Dr. Logan Munro announced with a sigh. “And I didn’t even know his name.” The town doctor wound the tubes of his stethoscope into a neat bundle and stowed it away in his medical bag. The man’s death would be a release for Logan as well, since he had been visiting him three times a day to administer laudanum and check on the wound dressings. It had been a highly unsatisfactory case, since he had felt well nigh powerless to help. The man had been found lying on his side in an alley in Dogleg City a week before. He was unconscious, having been struck on the back of his head, and he was losing blood from an ugly knife wound to the abdomen. “I must say, Doc, it’ll be good to get him out of here,” said Declan O’Donnell, the stocky middle aged Irishman who owned the building that he fancifully called O’Donnell’s Lodging House. It was not the most salubrious flophouse in Dogleg City, but Logan had always liked the Irishman, for he seemed to have a heart and was not solely motivated by what he could get out of life.
