The Butcher of Baxter Pass Page 13

Her smile vanished and her eyes darkened. “I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s nothing more than a ghost town these days. Most people left for Cincinnati. Or just moved. There’s little left there today.”

  Except, Jess thought, a forgotten graveyard.

  “In 1870,” Caroline said, “Mr. Gatling sold his interest in his patents to Colt, but he’s still president of the Gatling Gun Company. The weapon we have now came from Colt, though. They used to send a new one every two years, but we’ve had that one for five years now.”

  She frowned. “People have forgotten about Father. Maybe that’s for the ...”

  She stopped. The waiter came to take away the plates. Good. Jess figured he wouldn’t be hungry for another week—if he lived that long. He made himself sip some wine and tried to think of something pleasant to talk about, but his mind kept focusing on Baxter Pass and the Butcher who was up in a room in the Trinity River Hotel.

  “How old is your father?” he asked.

  “He’ll be seventy-four if he lives to see June.” Her head dropped. “I doubt if that will happen.” He heard the click of her purse and saw her hand disappear, but it came up with a silk handkerchief and not a. 36-caliber Colt or a Remington over-and-under derringer. She dabbed her beautiful gray eyes and lowered the handkerchief.

  “It’s the carcinoma,” she said.

  “Ma’ am?”

  “Carcinoma. Cancer. The doctor in Dayton gave him six months. That was ten months ago. That’s Father, of course.” For a moment, she seemed cheerful, but then the gloom returned, and she said softly, “I really think he stopped living when Mother passed on.”

  Jess knew then why Caroline Dalton had invited him to supper. It wasn’t to thank him. It was to get out. To see someone other than Jedediah Clarke, Lee Bodeen, or even her own father, the Butcher of Baxter Pass. He felt flattered. Then ashamed of himself for bringing up those awful memories.

  He decided to tell her about Fort Worth ... maybe not the sordid dealings in Hell’s Half Acre ... but how the bluebonnets looked in spring. He’d tell her that as he walked her back to the hotel.

  Nope. Maybe now. Because the waiter had returned with a plateful of cheeses, grapes, and peaches.

  * * *

  Three and a half hours. Jess was used to eating supper in three minutes, but one of the church bells was sounding out ten o’clock as he walked back to the hotel. This part of town was dead—at least, this block on First Street was—but as soon as the church bells ceased, he could hear the noise, the laughter, the curses, and the pounding hoofs or pounding fists from inside Hell’s Half Acre.

  After the cheese and fruit, they had indulged in chocolate—white and black (Jess would never have believed that chocolate could be white)—with a demitasse of café, which tasted a lot like coffee, only better than anything Jess had ever consumed—which wasn’t saying that much.

  Despite the massive meal, Jess felt light. He was, naturally, a little lighter. Oh, Caroline Dalton had insisted on paying for the meal, but Jess said then he would have to leave the tip. That’s why she had showed him the bill. So he’d know how much money he should leave. He made sure she didn’t watch him and wondered if that nice little waiter would be mad at all those pennies he had deposited on his squash-soaked napkin.

  The coffee had helped. He didn’t feel quite so tired, and the temperature had dropped substantially over their three and a half hours inside Café Lavendou. The cold air made him alert.

  When they neared the Trinity River Hotel, Jess studied the shadows. The saloons here were noisy—just not quite as raucous—and a few horses lined the hitching rails. He recognized a few of the local drunks staggering down the boardwalk across the street, but Jess didn’t think of them as threats. Then again, he probably wouldn’t have given Pete Doolin a second thought after one glance, and Doolin was now in the jail with a hole that Jess had put in his thigh.

  When they reached the hotel, Caroline Dalton turned, pulling away from Jess’s loose grip. He figured she would send him on his way, but she said, “Would you like to meet Father?”

  He thought she’d say over breakfast, but she said, “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t sleep much.”

  Hell, Jess thought, General Dalton had slept through much of the gunfire earlier this afternoon, slept in his rocking chair.

  “He’ll be upstairs now,” she told him, “reading Dickens. He loves Dickens. Always has. And preparing his speech for tomorrow evening. You should meet him,” she said, her voice almost pleading.

  No screams were sounding from the tenderloin. The McNamara brothers were nowhere to be seen along Main Street. Hoot Newton could handle two prisoners in jail.

  “I’d love to meet the general,” Jess said, knowing love was the wrong word.

  She bounced up the steps into the hotel, and Jess followed, adjusting his eyes to the light, looking into the restaurant and saloon but finding no suspicious characters at the bar. He followed her up the stairs, and as soon as they had reached the second floor, the door opened.

  Lee Bodeen stepped out. The man probably had heard Jess’s spurs. He frowned, and then stepped aside as the Butcher himself, General Lincoln Everett Dalton, came out of the room, still in his fancy Union duds, wobbling on two canes, cursing at Bodeen when the gunman offered to help.

  As soon as he stepped out of the hallway and onto the balcony overlooking the lower lobby, Jess saw the movement on the street.

  “Get down!” he yelled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Monday, 10:10 p.m.

  The plate glass window in the lobby blew apart in a shower of glass shards and buckshot as Jess grabbed Caroline Dalton’s shoulder and pulled her to the floor while his right hand found the Colt and fired at the muzzle blast below. The balustrade would not offer much protection, but a shotgun like that had minimum range—and shooting through a window, uphill, was a tough shot for even the best sharpshooter.

  Below, people screamed. The shotgun roared again, but this time the shooter aimed at Jess, not General Dalton.

  The ornate woodwork splintered from the shot, and Jess felt something tug on the collar of his coat. He fired again and saw the killer take off toward the river.

  Jess was up, glancing only a second at the people on the second floor balcony. Lying prone, Caroline Dalton had pulled a Smith & Wesson pocket pistol from her purse, had it cocked, and was drawing a bead below, but holding her fire. Lee Bodeen lay atop the Butcher, who was cursing him as a fool, telling the gunman to get off him. Bodeen rolled over, a revolver in either hand. A couple of other people had poked their heads out of the doors to their rooms. That was all Jess had time to see, because he bounded down the staircase, taking the steps three at a time.

  “Stay back!” he yelled at some brave souls who started out of the restaurant. They obeyed. The clerk, his face whiter than the tablecloths at Café Lavendou, pulled himself up from behind the registration counter, his mouth agape.

  Jess stepped onto the boardwalk, his boots crunching glass. A man lifted his head from behind the water trough, recognized Jess, and pointed north. “Th-th-that w-w-w-way, She-she-riffff,” he managed to say, but Jess knew that already. Boot steps sounded behind him, but Jess didn’t look back. He knew it would be Lee Bodeen. Jess didn’t wait. He took off down Main Street.

  Past Second and First streets and toward Weatherford, where a reporter from the Fort Worth Standard came bolting out, pencil in his mouth as he hurriedly pulled on his coat. He raced down the boardwalk toward the sound of the gunfire, not even noticing the Colt in Jess’s hand, ever the diligent ink-slinger.

  He stood at the corner of Main and Weatherford, staring across at the big lawn and the Tarrant County Courthouse. To the west, yellow lights shined from the windows and open door of the saloon and billiard hall, but no one stepped outside. Two shotgun blasts and a shot or two from a revolver weren’t going to interrupt a game of pool. A wagon loaded with hay had been parked on the lawn, and behind that
the courthouse sat dark, looming.

  By then, Lee Bodeen had caught up to Jess.

  “You see him?”

  Before he had started shooting, yes, Jess Casey had seen the gunman. He had been leaning against a wooden column, rolling a cigarette, chatting with the man Jess had seen hiding behind the water trough. He wore a big black greatcoat, but now Jess realized that the coat had kept that shotgun concealed. A brown bowler hat. A silver mustache and underlip beard. Jess didn’t know the man by name, but he had seen him often enough in town.

  Jess’s office and jail lay over on the far side of Belknap Street, near Rusk Street a block to the east. He didn’t think the shooter would go that way. But he could have turned down Weatherford, moved west, toward Houston and Throckmorton, toward the saloons and billiard halls, dropped in there, and mingled with the crowd. Or he could have kept running toward Belknap, even Bluff Street.

  On a hunch, Jess crossed the street, stopping beside the wagon full of hay and looking at the courthouse.

  It was on this bluff that the original army post had been established by the 2nd Dragoons back in 1849. The first courthouse had gone up here in 1860, but had been destroyed by a fire back in ’76. The new courthouse had been completed in ’78, two stories, but a renovation four years later had added a third story for offices. The courthouse’s most famous feature was the clock tower but only because of all the bullet holes in the clock face, which was expected in a cow town like Fort Worth.

  Mayor Stout and other city big shots kept talking that it was high time for a new courthouse, maybe something made of pink granite, something that would rival the Capitol building down in Austin. After all, this city had water lines, some electric lights, hundreds of artesian wells, a telephone service that only a few people used, and Main and Houston Streets had been paved all the way from the courthouse to the Texas and Pacific depot on the other end of town. Of course, those paved streets were typically covered with dust, dung, dirt, or mud.

  “We are a civilized city,” Stout was fond of saying.

  Yet here stood Jess Casey, with a gun in his hand, and a gunman behind him, staring at the darkened courthouse.

  “What do you think?” Bodeen drawled.

  Jess motioned with his revolver barrel, and the killer with the Ranger badge understood. In a crouch, he angled his way across the lawn, heading toward Belknap and Houston. Jess went the other way.

  * * *

  Lee Bodeen found Jess across from the courthouse, halfway toward Bluff Street, kneeling. It was a new moon, and the streetlamps, electric or gas, did not reach this far. Jess struck a lucifer on his thumbnail, holding it down toward the ground.

  Bodeen saw what was lying in the dead grass.

  “He reloaded that shotgun,” he said. “Or tried to.”

  The remains of two drawn brass shells lay on the ground beside one shell that the man had apparently dropped and not tried to pick up. It was brass, too, with the overshot card wad and rolled edge. Stamped ten-gauge, Parker Brothers. A mean, well-made shotgun.

  Nodding, Jess pointed at the print of the heel of a boot. “Ran that way,” he said, nodding north.

  “Can he swim?”

  Jess grinned. Beyond Bluff Street flowed the Trinity River. He shook out the match and pushed himself up. “We’re civilized,” he said. “Bridges and everything now. Let’s go get our horses.”

  “What for?”

  Now Jess could place the man with the greatcoat and silver hair—and the shotgun.

  “Man who shot at the general works at the stockyards,” he said. “That’s more than two miles north of here, and I’m an old cowboy. I don’t walk when I can ride.”

  * * *

  When the railroad had finally arrived in Fort Worth back in 1876, things changed dramatically. Cattle didn’t have to be driven all the way to Kansas, although many Texas drovers had done that anyway until the shipping rates dropped and made things more reasonable. A few years back, plans to build massive stockyards north of the Trinity River began to be discussed. Plans were drawn up, construction of cattle pens began, and a rich Yankee from Boston named Greenleif Simpson had been invited to Fort Worth. That wealthy Yank saw more cattle than those pens could hold, so he decided to invest. Not only that, he had returned to Massachusetts and gotten a couple more rich Yanks to put their money in Fort Worth’s stockyards and a packing plant to go along with it. Simpson’s neighbor, Louville V. Niles, eagerly put up some money as he had made his fortune in meatpacking and saw a chance to make even more millions.

  Now, the practically brand-spanking-new Union Stockyards had become the talk of Texas.

  Before the Union Stockyards opened for business last summer, four stockyards had been used for shipping down south near the railroads, but the Union dwarfed those four rickety old pens. The Union spanned more than two hundred and fifty acres. It was a veritable maze of wood, cow dung, and bawling beeves—though not at this time of year.

  The stockyards were practically deserted, and only a few lights shined from the office buildings as Lee Bodeen and Jess Casey rode down Main Street, past the rickety buildings and huts, even a few tents that served as homes for the poorer side of Fort Worth, a picket house that served as a saloon, a ramshackle boardinghouse for some of the packinghouse workers, dugouts, and constructions that resembled lean-tos more than homes.

  A man yelled at a woman. The woman cursed the man. Somewhere, an infant wailed. Dogs barked. A cat screeched. The hoofs of the horses clopped, and then they were at the stockyards. The smell of cow droppings was pungent in the night air. A few lanterns glowed on posts near the entrances to the shipping pens, and yellow light shined out of a window. That was all the light there was at this time of night, this time of year.

  “This guy you saw works here?” Bodeen asked in a hoarse whisper after they had reined in their mounts.

  “Yeah. Night manager. Watchman. Something like that.”

  “You didn’t suspicion him while he was standing out in front of the hotel?”

  “No reason to. He had the shotgun hidden in his greatcoat.”

  Jess slid from his horse, tethering the reins around a hitching post. Lee Bodeen did the same.

  “I thought Yanks built this place. Why’d a Yank want to kill Dalton?”

  “Yankee money built the stockyards,” Jess said. “But it’s Texas muscle that keeps it running.” Texas. Black. Irish. Mexican.

  “You reckon that man’d come back here?”

  “Just long enough to pack his traps and skedaddle.” Jess pointed to the mule in front of the office. “He hasn’t skedaddled yet.”

  A shadow moved behind the window then disappeared.

  Jess motioned down the street. “Stay off the boardwalks,” he told the Ranger. “Go low, quiet, get a good position behind that water barrel. I’ll come up on this side, place myself in that little alley near his office. When he comes out of the office to throw his war bag on that mule, I’ll take him.” He stared hard at Lee Bodeen. “Alive.”

  “It’s your town,” Bodeen said. “Your play. Just remember ... that shotgun’ll blow you in half at close range.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Jess said, and knelt to unfasten his spurs.

  He let Bodeen go first, until the shadows covered him. Jess wiped his palms on his britches, pulled up the collar of his Mackinaw, and moved past the outer buildings, the feed shed, the privies, a couple of lean-tos. The mule’s ears jerked up, and the big molly mule pulled at the reins, turned her head, and brayed.

  Jess dropped, bringing up his revolver at the front door to the office. The shadow was back. Then the light went out.

  Again, the mule called out, but neither Jess’s horse nor the gelding Lee Bodeen had borrowed answered. Both animals had been trained not to.

  Jess hadn’t gotten into position yet, and from where he squatted, he’d be a sitting duck if the night man with the shotgun saw him. That wasn’t likely, because the assassin had blown out the lamp inside the office. Now the only ligh
ts came from those lanterns on the posts in front of the stockyards. But buckshot from a shotgun didn’t have eyes, didn’t need light. A lucky shot, as Bodeen had reminded Jess, could just blow him in half.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Monday, 10: 55 p.m.

  The door to the office squeaked open. Jess couldn’t see the door, just hear the hinges, and make out the vague outline of the office building. Silently, he managed to get down into a prone position, making himself as small of a target as possible. He brought up the .44-40 revolver, aiming it toward the noise of the door, fighting the urge to glance over at where Bodeen should be, but knowing not to take his eyes off the general direction of the office.

  A board squeaked and instantly stopped. The mule stamped one of its hoofs.

  Jess decided to give the would-be assassin a chance.

  “You missed Dalton!” he yelled, and heard the board squeak again, probably as the watchman jerked back inside the office. “Didn’t kill anyone. Didn’t wound anybody. Give it up, mister. No sense in anybody else getting hurt or killed.”

  He waited. Nothing. Which felt a whole lot better than having double-ought buckshot fly over his head in the middle of the night.

  After wetting his lips with his tongue, Jess tried it again. “I’ll talk to the solicitor. Get you charged with only unlawful discharge of a weapon. Plead guilty. Pay a fine. Replace the window at the hotel. Be free to go.” Not that Mort Thompson ever listened to him, but this time, Jess would make him. Mayor Stout might even go as far as backing Jess on this one and stand up to that carpetbagging lout Mort Thompson, because it meant easy money and no bad publicity for Fort Worth.

  A strong wind picked up, followed by a low rumbling of thunder. Which was not exactly what Jess Casey needed. Thunder didn’t happen often during the dead of winter, but that was the joke about weather in Texas. Stick around a minute, and it was bound to change.

  The door squeaked again, and the wind must have caught it because it slammed hard against the inner wall of the office. Instinctively, Jess lowered his head, holding his breath, his finger tightening on the trigger.