The Butcher of Baxter Pass Read online

  A bell chimed over the door and both men turned.

  “Kann ich dir helfen?” the bigger of the two men asked. He wore green-striped britches, sable tip boots, and a yellow-striped cotton shirt, the paper collar removed, the sleeves held up by gold garters and sleeve stockings pulled up over his forearms. The stockings were black. So were his fingertips, and Jess couldn’t tell where the ink ended and the cotton began.

  Jess looked at him blankly. The man repeated the question and then removed his glasses, which he handed to his smaller assistant.

  “May I help you?” he said, speaking English, although his accent remained thick.

  “Ummmm.” Jess felt like an idiot. He had stepped inside the office of the Fort Worth German Gazette. German. Of course. For Germans living in the cow town, many of whom had proven quite handy at the stockyards. German. The paper was printed in German.

  “Ya are da Wachtmeister, ja? The ...” He shrugged, and gestured at Jess’s gold badge.

  “Sheriff,” Jess guessed. “Lawman. Yeah.”

  “Vat do ya vant?”

  The big man went through the swinging gate, leaving the thinner man with his eyeglasses and the printing press. He wiped his hands on a towel and bowed slightly. “I am Aldabert Armbrüster, editor.”

  “Jess Casey, Tarrant County sheriff.” They shook. The German’s grip almost crushed every bone in Jess’s hand. “Listen,” Jess said, “I don’t know if you can help me or not, but ...”

  So he explained about the various stories he had heard about the murder of those Texas prisoners at Baxter Pass, Ohio, about the arrival of General Dalton in town.

  “Ya need not tell us dat,” Armbrüster said with a laugh that led the other German printer to laugh, as well. “Ve are da press. Ve know ever-thing.”

  “Right,” Jess said, and went on talking.

  Turned out that Armbrüster and his assistant, a tramp printer, Markus Gloeckne, had been working on their story for Wednesday’s edition—the paper was a weekly—about the arrival of the Butcher, so they had already been digging in their files about General Dalton’s history. Armbrüster was a native of Burnet County, down in Texas’s hill country west of Austin, which also had been predominantly Unionists during the vote for secession.

  They had pulled big folders filled with newspapers, not only papers from Texas but across the country. As a tramp printer, Markus Gloeckne had made his rounds, working at papers from New York and Oregon to California and Louisiana. They had found stories about Dalton’s lectures, a few profiles of his life... .

  “What I’m curious about,” Jess said, “is what actually happened at Baxter Pass.”

  Which stopped the two Germans.

  Gloeckne blurted out something in German, and he and the editor carried on a conversation for about three minutes. Finally the editor said, returning the spectacles to his face. “Ven vas dat?” he asked.

  “May,” Jess said. “Of’65. I can’t give you the exact date. But I remember a story in the Dallas Mercury.”

  Which caused the two Germans, now loyal Fort Worth promoters, to curse Dallas, Dallas newspapers, and anyone who was foolish enough to live in that wretched city.

  Gloeckne pulled out a few more binders of papers, paused, and asked something in German.

  Armbrüster looked at Jess. “Do ya remember dat ...” He held up his hand, snapping his fingers, trying to find the word. “Name of da ship?”

  Snapping one’s fingers must be like yawning. See one person do it, you do it yourself. Jess’s fingers snapped. “Filly ... no Belknap ... no ... no ... no ... Fancy. Fancy something!”

  “Phantasie,” Armbrüster told the printer.

  “The Fancy Beltre! No, Fancy Belpre. That’s it. The Fancy Belpre.” Jess said at last, wondering how in the blazes he had managed to pull that name from his memory after all those years.

  Which stopped Aldabert Armbrüster, who removed his glasses, began muttering something in German, and moved to his desk, opening a drawer, closing it, then moving to a cabinet on the wall.

  Jess glanced at Gloeckne, who shrugged. Both men watched the editor as he pulled out one big binder, cursed, said something that sounded like, “Nicht, nicht, nicht.”

  Slamming the cover to that binder, he went back to the cabinet, tossed one aside, found another, looked at it, cursed, found another, and finally brought out one, laid it on his desk, overturning a pencil holder, and knocking a book of some kind onto the floor. Armbrüster did not care. He was so focused, so absorbed with this task that he turned page after page, until at last, he stood erect and bellowed: “Ich habe festgestellt! Kommen Sie schnell.”

  The printer was hurrying across the floor, so Jess followed.

  “Dere!” The editor pointed a thick finger at the left side of the page. “Read. Please. Read.”

  Jess squinted. He couldn’t read German, but he moved over to the desk, and his eyes widened. He saw the title of the newspaper: Kokomo Commercial.

  In smaller type: “All the News of Indiana and the World.”

  He saw Armbrüster’s finger on a small article in the lower right-hand corner, just above an advertisement about Kokomo Liver Pills.

  Steamboat Tragedy

  Jess sucked in a breath and looked back at the top of the paper. He found the date: June 2, 1865.

  That would have been just about right. Leaning forward, welcoming the moment when the German editor moved his massive finger off the small type, Jess read:

  BAXTER PASS, OHIO (MAY 31)—The storied old stern-wheeler Fancy Belpre, with able master Penrod Ebersbacher at the helm, burned and sank shortly after departing for New Orleans here tonight.

  The veteran packet, a trusty transporter of cargo and passengers for a number of years, had just backed out from the landing near Cincinnati when the boiler exploded. Among the passengers were several recently paroled Rebels from the prison camp near town.

  Eyewitnesses report that the ship went up like a tinderbox and was blown in half. She sank quickly. Only a handful of passengers and crew appear to have survived.

  Among the dead, we sadly report, was Captain Ebersbacher himself, who had been steering down the Ohio River since the waters first opened to steamboat travel.

  We are reminded of the Sultana disaster.

  And that was all there was to it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Monday, 5:20 p.m.

  Jess sat at another table in the Gazette office, one clear of binders filled with old newspapers but with a few copies of last week’s edition, and, more important, a bottle the printer had fetched from his lunch pail. Sipping the strongest coffee he had ever tasted, chatting with Aldabert Armbrüster, editor of the Fort Worth German Gazette, and even managing to converse with Markus Gloeckne, tramp printer from Niagara Falls, New York—as long as Armbrüster translated—Jess tried to figure out what the Indiana newspaper story meant.

  “There’s no mention of General Dalton,” Jess said, stating the obvious.

  With a shrug, Armbrüster said, “Conspiracy?”

  Jess cocked his head. The editor grinned. “Dat be vat ya Rebels vud think.”

  He didn’t believe that, of course, but he figured more than half of the population in Fort Worth would likely agree. The Kokomo Commercial was a Yankee newspaper, so the editor would automatically cut out any facts that might be damaging to the Union cause—even if the war had ended.

  The printer started speaking in that harsh language, and Jess freshened up his coffee with a splash of the whiskey. He wasn’t sure what it was—the label was in German—but it was brown and malty. Not Scotch. Maybe something like bourbon. The coffee cut out most of the taste. Jess glanced outside the window. It was getting dark, and when the sun set, that’s when Hell’s Half Acre truly came to life. He told himself: No more whiskey.

  With the Butcher of Baxter Pass in town, this could be a long, long night.

  Aldabert Armbrüster turned from his printer and began to explain to Jess about their conversation. “Markus
vork at Commercial dat time.”

  And Markus Gloeckne, tramp printer with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of miles behind him, had an iron-trap memory.

  A Kokomo salesman, advertiser in the newspaper, and stringer had been bound for Cincinnati and had stopped to make a few sales calls in Baxter Pass. He had witnessed the Fancy Belpre disaster, talked to a few locals, hurried to the telegraph office, and sent a wire straight to Kokomo. That’s how the Commercial was the first newspaper in Indiana to get the story.

  Not that many people living in the middle of the state would have cared about something that had happened on the Ohio River, but ... it was news.

  “What was the reference to the Sultana?” Jess asked.

  Armbrüster removed his eyeglasses, amazed at the Tarrant County sheriff ’s ignorance. “Ya never heard of da Sultana?”

  Jess could only shrug. “I was only a kid back in ’65. I didn’t read newspapers often back then.”

  “No vunder,” the editor said, smiling. “Booth ... da assassin ... he vas killed vun day before. End of da var, da murder of our president, Booth’s death ... many people have forgotten da Sultana.”

  She was a side-wheeler on the Mississippi River, usually hauling cotton from St. Louis to New Orleans but often carrying federal troops since New Orleans had fallen into Union hands early in the war. She was steaming south toward New Orleans when word reached the captain of Lincoln’s assassination, so the captain bought every newspaper he could find and continued his journey, bringing news to all the stops he made. She made it to New Orleans, then steamed north, stopping at Vicksburg for its biggest load.

  Fourteen hundred Union soldiers, recently freed from prisoner-of-war camps, were to be loaded onto the Sultana. That was the deal the ship’s captain had made with a Union officer in charge of getting those soldiers home. Many of those men were half-dead already, having spent an eternity in the hellholes of the prison camps at Cahaba, Alabama, and Andersonville, Georgia.

  Fourteen hundred. To be loaded on a steamboat that could carry, safely, fewer than four hundred. But that was the deal, and both the Yankee in charge of the prisoners and the captain of the Sultana figured they could get rich. The federal government promised to pay the Sultana’s captain five dollars for each enlisted man and ten dollars for each officer carried home. Naturally, the Sultana captain would give a little bit of that cash back to the Union officer in charge of the paroled prisoners.

  Only instead of fourteen hundred, more than twenty-one hundred boys in blue had been loaded onto the ship. A deckhand could hardly make his way from bow to stern without stepping on one of those poor boys. Decks sagged so much that supports had to be constructed. The entire ship stank of human waste and rot.

  But the Sultana steamed north, on a river flooding from recent rains. On the night of April 26, she reached Memphis, Tennessee, unloaded a load of sugar, added some coal, and pulled out around midnight. Two hours later, seven miles north of Memphis, three of her four boilers exploded. Fire raced across the deck. Men leaped into the water, but most of them were too weak to stay afloat long.

  The Sultana burned and sank.

  A southbound steamboat came upon the scene, and the crew began pulling what they could onto her decks. Hours later, men floated past Memphis, calling out for help. Union warships and others quickly steamed out to save what they could, but few—very few—managed to live through the night. By most accounts, eighteen hundred people died that night in the Mississippi River.

  For a long while, Jess stared at the cup of coffee in his hand, but he did not feel like drinking. What a waste. Finally, he looked at the Gazette editor.

  “The Sultana’s captain?”

  “Ach. He died, too.”

  “And the Yank in charge of getting those boys home?”

  Armbrüster shook his head. “He resigned. Da army could do nothing. No vun vas ever charged.”

  Shaking his head, Jess put the coffee cup on the table.

  “Dere is vun more thing ya should know,” Armbrüster said.

  He waited.

  “Last year, a man in St. Louis ... on his deathbed... he said he sank da Sultana vith a coal torpedo. He vus a Rebel spy, a ... how do ya say ... saboteur?”

  “Why would he have done that?” Jess asked.

  “Vhy vould Booth kill Lincoln?”

  “Do you believe him?”

  The editor shrugged. The printer said something. Armbrüster smiled a grim smile and nodded at Gloeckne, before turning back to Jess Casey.

  “Markus,” Armbrüster said, “he say da var never ends.”

  Jess could only agree as he rose, shook both men’s hands, and walked out of the newspaper office.

  * * *

  The sun had set, and the gas street lamps were being lighted as Jess walked down the boardwalk. Most towns would be rolling up their streets by now, but not Fort Worth. The business district would be closing shop, but Hell’s Half Acre would be springing to life. Five hundred people had called Fort Worth home back in 1870, the town had boomed with the cattle drives but might have faded into oblivion by 1880. Instead, she had blossomed and boomed. These days, more than twenty thousand people lived here—and more were coming every day.

  And Jess was alone this night, unless he counted Hoot Newton. One man ... and the most hated man in the South was spending the night in the Trinity River Hotel.

  First, he stopped at Dean’s meat wagon and bought a sausage, and then he went inside a bakery for a dozen day-old doughnuts, a fresh loaf of bread, and a cherry pie to bring to Hoot and the prisoners for supper. He made sure to get a receipt from the street vendor and the clerk at the bakery, because he was fed up feeding prisoners on his own dime—especially seeing how he would have kicked both men free and run them out of town had he gotten his way.

  When he stepped inside his office, nothing had changed. Dirty dishes remained on his desk along with the gun belt and revolver belonging to the new prisoner, Pete Doolin. Leaning back in a chair, feet propped up on the edge of the gun case, snoring as loud as a braying mule, Hoot Newton woke at the smell of sausage and fresh bread.

  “Good, Jess,” he said, yawning and bringing his boots to the floor. “I was gettin’ hungry.”

  Jess tossed him the sack of grub. “Before you fill your belly,” Jess said, “how about cleaning these dishes and seeing that our prisoners get fed?”

  “Sure thing, Jess.” He wasn’t hurrying, though, now stretching his big arms over his back and head.

  “Anything happen here?”

  Hoot’s head shook. “How’s town?” he asked.

  Jess sat behind his desk. Well, he thought, there’s another dead man, a regular citizen, with a sword—rapier—through his body. An ominous night about to begin. Two gunmen in the lobby of the Trinity River Hotel that Jess couldn’t do anything about. A gambler that gave Jesse a queasy feeling, a beautiful woman with a brace of Navy Colts, and her father, the most despised man in the South, in town ... dying ... and Jess hoped he wouldn’t die here, on his watch. Not to mention three brothers of one of his prisoners maybe in town, maybe on their way home to Stephenville.

  Jess opened the bottom drawer of the desk and started to slide Pete Doolin’s holster, shell belt, and massive horse pistol into it but stopped and looked up at his deputy, who was still yawning.

  “Hoot,” he said. “What happened to the gun rigs that were in here?” He looked beyond Hoot Newton at the gun case. The Winchester carbine belonging to the McNamara boys was missing.

  “They took ’em,” Hoot said.

  “They?”

  “That fella’s brothers. Big one and the two not big ones.” Big Dan, Tom, and Neils.

  “They were here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Carrying on a conversation with Hoot Newton wasn’t the easiest job.

  “They can’t carry firearms in the city limits,” Jess told him. “That’s why their guns were here.”

  “But they said they was goin’ home.”

>   For a moment, Jess felt a little relief. Then he asked: “Did they see their brother?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Relief left Jess at that moment. Burt McNamara would have been certain to have informed Tom and his siblings that the Butcher of Baxter Pass had arrived. Well, hell, Jess decided, all twenty-something-thousand people in town by now knew that General Dalton was staying at the Trinity River Hotel. Burt could have confirmed that, but seeing a circus wagon on Main Street with a Gatling gun on the top would have been proof enough.

  “You sure they left town?” Jess asked.

  Hoot had at last risen from the chair. “They said they was,” he said.

  Sighing, Jess dropped Doolin’s revolver and gun leather into the empty drawer. The McNamara brothers had even taken brother Burt’s weapons with them.

  “They say anything else?” Jess slammed the drawer closed.

  “Just that they was goin’.” Hoot stopped, went back to the gun case, and picked up an envelope. “This come for you whilst you was out.”

  Jess waited as the big man crossed the room. Hoot extended the envelope, which looked tiny in those meat paws he called hands, and then brought it back to his side.

  “Well ... one of ’em boys did says somethin’. Not the big cuss, but one of ’em other ones. The one who ain’t called Tom.”

  “Neils,” Jess said.

  “I reckon. We didn’t bother with no introductions. But the one who is called Tom, he said, as they was bucklin’ on their belts and the big one was gettin’ that carbine. Tom, he says, ‘Tell the law we’ll be goin’ home.’ And that one, the one that you call Neils, he says, ‘As soon as we pay a Yankee-lovin’ cur dog opery house owner a visit and deliver him a reminder ’bout folks he shouldn’t be bookin’.’ Or somethin’ like that.”

  Jess had to smile.

  “Now I know who took a shot at me in that hallway,” he said.

  Hoot said. “Huh?”

  Jess said. “The note, Hoot.” And pointed at that tiny envelope.