Weird West 04 - The Doctor and the Dinosaurs by Mike Resnick

species, or there may simply be an enormous variation of size within one species. Same with the carnosaurs. I've got one I've tentatively called a Utahraptor that we found a few hundred miles from here, but until I can get back to Yale and really go to work, I can't be sure that it's not simply an undersized version of another carnosaur species.”
    “So you really have no idea how many species you've discovered?” suggested Holliday.
    “Of course I have an idea,” said Marsh irritably. “Somewhere between six hundred and six hundred fifty. How many does that Pennsylvania liar claim?”
    Holliday shrugged. “I don't know. But I know he's written and submitted more than a thousand scientific papers.”
    “Hah!” snapped Marsh contemptuously. “If he killed an ant by stepping on it, he'd publish a paper on squashed ants.”
    “It's too bad the two of you can't work together,” said Roosevelt.
    Marsh stared coldly at him for a full minute. Finally he spoke. “If you suggest that again, I shall have to ask you to leave my camp.”
    Cody flashed an I-told-you-so grin at Holliday.
    “So, Doctor Holliday,” said Marsh, “tell me about the O.K. Corral.”
    “Not much to tell,” replied Holliday. “It's maybe ten yards by twenty, nothing much to recommend it. And please call me Doc.”
    “I meant the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” said Marsh, trying to hide his irritation.
    Holliday resisted the urge to explain, for maybe the hundredth time, that it took place in an alley behind the corral. “It was over pretty fast,” he said. “There was me and the Earps on one side, and two Clantons, two McLaurys, and a kid called Billy Claiborne on the other. Someone fired the first shot—it could even have been me, but things happened so fast I can't be sure—and in maybe thirty seconds both McLaurys and Billy Clanton were dead, Morgan and Virgil Earp were shot up, and Ike Clanton and the Claiborne kid were running for their lives.”
    “Details,” said Cody. “How about some details?”
    “Bill, you've fired guns,” said Holliday. “You know how much smoke just one gun makes. Imagine maybe a dozen of them firing again and again, all within twenty feet of each other, with buildings on each side so the smoke couldn't float away.”
    “Shit!” said Cody with a grin. “How'd you know when it was over.”
    “When we didn't hear any more shots on the other side of the smoke,” answered Holliday truthfully.
    “It sounds terribly inefficient,” opined Marsh.
    “We didn't choose the fight or the venue,” said Holliday. “Besides, I'd have said picking one spot instead of another to dig for something that lived a million years ago was inefficient.”
    Marsh chuckled. “I study the terrain and try to reconstruct what it was like, not a million, but many millions of years ago. Were those always cliffs, or were they once the bed or bank of a huge river ten or thirty million years ago? You try to get a picture of what the land looked like when the dinosaurs lived, and then you pick the likeliest place to dig. You estimate where the ground was softest, where a corpse would sink in a few days, because if it didn't, then the ancestors of ants and scavengers like hyenas and vultures would eventually consume it, bones and all.” He stared at Holliday. “You look dubious. Let me suggest that my record—and even that Pennsylvania bastard's record—gives proof that it works.”
    “Can't argue with that,” replied Holliday, who was fast losing interest. He let Roosevelt continue questioning Marsh on the basics of paleontology long after most of the men had left the table, and, as usual, was impressed by the New Yorker's seemingly endless thirst for knowledge of any kind.
    Suddenly there was a commotion at the edge of the camp, and then a familiar voice called out, “Damn it, Doc! Tell these assholes that I ain't a Comanche!”
    Holliday got up and, joined by Cody and Roosevelt, walked over to see the cause of the