The Cantaloupe Gambit
The town doctor's cramped office at 2 AM, lit by a single kerosene lamp, where Double sits with both aggressively purple cantaloupe-feet soaking in a tin basin while the doctor reads aloud from a veterinary textbook.
The town doctor says he can fix Double's swollen feet — but the only anti-inflammatory he has left is a single vial of horse liniment he won in a poker game, and he wants Double's last possession of value: the deed to a half-acre of scrubland Double inherited from a uncle he never met, approximately 200 yards west of the saloon he almost won two days ago. The doctor's offering a bet: if the horse liniment works by sunrise, Double keeps the deed AND gets the doctor's own pair of boots. If it doesn't work, the doctor gets the land, and Double's feet stay the exact circumference of a cantaloupe — 14.3 inches, which the doctor has already measured twice.
“Horse liniment was MADE for this — horses walk on gravel every day and you never see THEM crying about it.”
“You've now trusted a coin man, a tonic man, and a guy reading horse medicine out of a livestock manual — at what point do we admit your feet are just gone?”
The horse liniment worked. Not gradually — violently. At 5:47 AM, Double's feet deflated like two purple balloons with an audible hissing sound that woke up the doctor's cat, shrinking back to normal size with skin somehow tougher than before. The doctor, stunned into professional silence for the first time in thirty years, handed over a beautiful pair of size-10 cowhide boots and muttered that he was 'switching entirely to veterinary medicine.' Double walked out at sunrise — booted, landed, and grinning — past the saloon where the stranger who'd stolen his first pair of boots watched from the porch in visible disbelief.
I TOLD you horses know something we don't.
His feet made a sound — an actual sound — and he's calling it a victory.