Synopsis

Jacob Cotter survives the Civil War to finish Yale Medical School and confront two more battlefronts–one in Connecticut as a medical student and one in Texas as a surgeon. In 1868 Cotter is financially solvent for Yale from banking two-year’s worth of bounty hunter money. Post-Civil War medicine is exciting. Cotter experiences advances in anesthesia and antisepsis enabling surgery and medicine truly saving lives. He finds pseudoscience–phrenology–laughable. However, he must confront his siblings who disowned him after his father was killed in the war alongside him in 1864. His brother and sister want him dead.

After graduating Yale, Cotter finds private practice in Endura Texas with a colleague as also being under fire trying to establish the first hospital in the area. Cotter faces a ruthless land baron extorting and killing opposing citizenry. He also finds his father’s murderer part of the lethal lot. Dr. Cotter is forced to combine his stethoscope and his sixguns. 

Excerpt

Cotter always wore the same clothes when confronting his opponents. He wore tan buckskin from head-to-toe. The sweatband on his hat had a single polished silver concho off center to the right but clearly sparkling to the person facing him. His buckskin blouse had bib buttons forming an upside down “L”. The buttons on the down stroke of the L on the right side of his chest were also highly polished silver conchos. The horizontal buttons were tan buckskin and almost invisible. His two Colt revolvers were the same models but his right gun was highly polished nickel. It glinted like the hat’s concho. His left hand gun had an unobtrusive matte gun-metal finish. Cotter’s tan buckskin pants had a row of polished conchos on the outer right leg seam only. His tan buckskin boots gave him almost silent under-footing. He had his photograph taken to help get the outfit just right. To anyone confronting Cotter, the man was off center. The bib buttons and the shiny silver conchos directed an opponent’s vision to the right. When Cotter drew his guns he moved slightly to the left. Even if his adversary was faster than he, the bullet usually missed and went off to the right. Usually, on two occasions he was shot superficially, once in the in the right shoulder and once in the right thigh. Every man who drew on him had died.

Cotter adjusted his hat and checked for the weight and balance of his two-gun holster. He went into the saloon.

“Morely.” Cotter spoke the name with a penetrating tone. He didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. Cotter’s baritone voice caromed around the saloon and could be heard above the voices at the bar and over the dialogue from the two card game tables. Cotter’s back was to the swinging saloon doors and the dirt street.

The suddenness of the silence was a shock to the Saturday night crowd. Within a second of the lack of noise all eyes turned toward Cotter and then focused on Morely.

“Yes, you Morely.” Cotter stood with hands on his waist. He reached into his bib top and removed a large sheet of paper and waved it at Morely and the general audience. “I’m taking you to the sheriff’s office–‘dead or alive’–just like this poster says.” Cotter was 6-foot-5-inches of fine-tuned muscle. His two-gun holster rig was three-inches below his beltline. Both buckskin-gloved hands went to his sides after he slid the poster back into his bib shirt.

“I don’t know you. Go away and you’ll go alive. The last three bounty hunters are under the dirt.” Morely pushed his slight beer-bellied form away from the bar to face Cotter. The rest of the men at the bar ran away from