The Butcher of Baxter Pass Read online

  “Now wait a dad-blasted minute!” Mayor Stout had stepped into the street. “That Texas man-killer ain’t welcome in Fort Worth. And you sure ain’t settin’ up no show in my fair city.”

  Jess had to turn, hold up his hands, and stop the crowd from coming any closer to the wagon. Behind him he heard the metallic ratcheting as the gunman worked the lever on the Centennial. That sound—more than Jess’s arms and his voice or badge—did the job.

  The barker wasn’t listening to Mayor Stout’s protest. By now he was lifting something from the rooftop, fastening a bolt, bringing up some rigging, which he swung over the side, and Jess realized it was a pulley system. In a matter of minutes, he had hooked the general’s rocking chair and began lowering the chair, with the white-haired old general still sitting in it below, turning the crank carefully.

  By then, the woman had come out of the side door. She was tall and wore a brace of Navy Colts, converted to take modern brass cartridges, around her slender waist. Reaching up, she grabbed the arms of the rocker, steered it to the ground, then freed the hooks and cable and helped the old man to his feet.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  The old man’s wind-chapped lips moved, but Jess couldn’t hear. The woman lifted the rocker and put it inside the coach, shut the door, and turned to face a crowd that likely wasn’t as friendly or interested as the one Hank Joseph had missed back in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  “Please give us room, ladies and gentlemen,” the driver was saying. “The general needs to rest after that arduous journey from Dallas. But this evening, while we sell tickets, he will perhaps be able to sign an autograph or two.”

  If he’s still breathing, Jess thought, and he moved to the side of the wagon. He held out his arm, gently nudged one cowhand back to the boardwalk, and started to stop another man from getting too close to Dalton, only to realize it was Mayor Harry Stout.

  “You take this carnival act and this butcher out of my town!” The mayor glared at the wagon driver, who had come down from the top and now stood on the other side of the general.

  “We have an engagement here ... I don’t believe I have your name,” the barker said.

  “Stout. Mayor Stout. I said—”

  “Ah, yes, Mayor Stout.” The man reached inside his tunic and pulled out a few papers. “We have rooms reserved at this grand old hotel. And here are the papers. We will be speaking tomorrow evening at your opera house.”

  He slid the papers into Stout’s hands, and Jess wasn’t that blind. He saw the thin greenbacks beneath the contracts and notices. He hoped that Mayor Stout wouldn’t take the bribe, but he knew he would. Stout’s fingers had always been sticky like honey.

  “Well, if it’s just for two nights, one show.” The mayor returned the papers after a glance and surreptitiously slid the cash into his coat pocket.

  “And I’m sure,” the driver said, “we can arrange a front-row seat for you, Mayor Stout. Complimentary, of course. And even for you.” The man grinned and held out his right hand toward Jess Casey. “We are law-abiding people, Sheriff. I see you have your hands full keeping this town safe and clean.”

  That prompted at least a couple of chuckles from the boardwalk, and Jess grimaced, wishing he had left the sack of chow for Hoot Newton and Burt McNamara on the street a few blocks up. The beautiful calliope player, Jess noticed from the corner of his eye, was also staring at the greasy, dirty sack in his left hand.

  That also reminded Jess of Burt’s three brothers—and the fact that, if he could believe the young punk in his jail cell, the McNamaras’ father had been killed by the Butcher of Baxter Pass.

  “My name is Clarke,” the driver and barker said, but Jess was only half-listening. “Jedediah Clarke. Major Clarke of the 75th Ohio Infantry.”

  Jess saw no signs of Big Dan, Tom, or Neils McNamara in the crowd, and, just a wee bit more relieved, looked at Major Clarke, saw the proffered hand but ignored it. Not to be rude, but he just thought he might need to keep his gun hand free, probably for the next two days.

  The hand lowered, but Clarke never lost his smile. The smile of a trained thespian, Jess figured.

  “We shall be checking in now, Mayor,” said Major Clarke, who Jess figured had never served in any army regiment and who looked far too young to be a major, especially a major more than twenty years ago during the War Between the States. “General Dalton needs his rest.”

  More likely an undertaker, Jess thought.

  “Make way for the Butcher!” the gunman with the Centennial Winchester yelled, and like Moses parting the Red Sea, the crowd cleared a path to the front door of the Trinity River Hotel.

  That’s when Jess saw the cowhand storm through the door, jerking an old Remington .44 from his waistband, and yell, “Die, you damned Yankee son-of-a—”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Monday, 12:21 p.m.

  In Fort Worth, everybody who knew him, and had seen him in action, said Jess Casey was faster than a prairie rattler with a six-shooter, yet even Jess knew he could never beat that cowhand. The .44 was up, cocked, and the man’s finger was tightening on the trigger.

  If anyone had asked him about it—and, later, someone would—Jess would not have been able to say exactly why he had done it. He just had. Hadn’t even thought about it, because he had not a moment’s time to spare to think. He just reacted.

  He dived to his left, felt his shoulder crash into the feeble-boned Brigadier General Lincoln E. Dalton, and fell toward the beautiful woman in the blue sateen dress as the bullet buzzed and burned a path across Jess’s neck. The general was falling, and Jess was rolling off him, as he pawed for his own gun. Even before he hit the dirt, he heard Dalton mutter a little groan, and Jess recognized the roar of the Winchester from atop the circus wagon. People screamed. Hoofs and boots sounded as men and women and mounts sought safer climes.

  His neck burned, but he felt no blood, and he could still move, because the Colt was in his right hand. He didn’t even remember drawing it, but as the big rifle roared again from above, Jess had found his knees and was leveling the .44-40 toward the doorway. He saw the cowboy, his white shirt now blossoming red, stagger down the boardwalk. The man’s hat had fallen off, and pain masked his tight face, but he still held the long-barreled Remington in his right hand. The finger tugged on the trigger once more, but all the dying waddy managed to do was blow a hole in his own right foot.

  Again, above Jess, the .45-75 repeater boomed, and this time the bullet struck the cowboy in the center of his forehead. His head slammed against the bulletin board nailed to the front of the hotel, staining the dinner and supper menus and the stagecoach and train schedules with blood and disgusting bits of bone, hair, and brain matter. That third shot, Jess thought, had been a waste, but so had the second. The first bullet the gunman had fired would have done the job.

  The cowhand slid down the wall and slumped over on his side in a pool of his own blood and urine.

  “That’s one!” the gunman atop the wagon bellowed. “How many more?”

  Jess saw at least one. An old man with a silver mustache and beard stubble had palmed a massive Colt—a dragoon by Jess’s best guess—and had stepped around a corner, holding the old horse pistol with both hands.

  The gunman atop the circus wagon hadn’t noticed him but Major Clarke did. Jess saw the Remington derringer in his right hand. Apparently, the man had the gun rigged up his sleeve for handy access.

  Jess fired quickly, and the old man dropped to his knees, an instant before the derringer roared. Jess’s shot had nicked the old-timer in his left thigh. Major Clarke’s bullet would have drilled the man plumb-center if Jess hadn’t fired first.

  The old man rolled over, gripping his bleeding leg with both hands, but his gun had skidded a good three or four feet down the boardwalk, well out of his reach. Nobody else in the crowd—those who hadn’t skedaddled into some building or dropped behind a water trough or rain or garbage barrel—showed any inclination to pick up the big old
cap-and-ball pistol.

  By that time, Jess had come to his feet, stepping toward the boardwalk, turning toward the wagon, and raising his revolver at the sound of the levering of the Winchester. Jess drew a bead on the gunman.

  “He’s down,” he yelled. “Leave him be, or you join him.”

  The man stopped the movement of the rifle, and his finger eased off the trigger, but his eyes glared with intense hatred. A man like that didn’t care much for a gun barrel trained on his stomach. Few men did.

  Jess didn’t lower his Colt. Nor did he take his eyes off the gunman.

  “That goes for you, too, Major,” he told Clarke.

  Still looking at the gunman on the wagon’s rooftop, he noticed the major slip the derringer up his sleeve. The girl, he saw through the corner of his eye, holstered the two Colts and lowered herself beside Brigadier General Dalton.

  Mayor Stout let out a few choice curse words and ordered Jess to “clean up this mess,” then rushed down the boardwalk toward his office.

  Jess lowered the hammer on the Colt but did not lower the barrel until the gunman butted the Winchester on the roof. He hooked one thumb inside one of the belts and used his left hand to hold the warm barrel of the big rifle.

  “You’re fast,” he complimented.

  “So are you,” Jess said.

  “I have to be.”

  “So do I.”

  “Name’s Bodeen. Lee Bodeen.”

  “I’ve heard of you,” Jess said. Bodeen was a man-killer who hired out, mostly up around Paris, Texas, but he’d range into the Indian Nations and Arkansas. Jess decided Bodeen was not a regular with the general’s traveling circus, but likely a local gunman Major Clarke had hired for this Texas tour.

  A tour that so far had left one man dead and another with a bullet in his thigh.

  Bodeen was waiting.

  “Jess Casey,” Jess told him.

  The man nodded. “I haven’t heard of you.”

  “You have now.”

  He holstered the gun and knelt beside the woman, who had helped the old general until he was sitting now, his eyes flashing this way and that, leaning against the colorful front rear wheel of the wagon.

  She had picked something from the dirt and was wiping it off with a rag.

  “Here you go,” the beautiful woman said, and held out a set of false teeth for General Dalton. Then she said something that caused Jess to lean back.

  “Father.”

  General Dalton took the teeth, but his hands shook so much the woman had to help him slip the teeth back into his mouth. They clicked and he smiled.

  His beard came down to the middle button on his coat and his hair hung down like Wild Bill Hickok’s or Buffalo Bill Cody’s. If he weighed a hundred pounds in his heavy coat and boots, Jess would have been surprised. The pale face was so tight, like a wet rag wrapped over a skeleton, but his eyes burned with an intense light.

  “Thank ... you ...” he said in an ancient whisper. “Do I ... know you, miss?”

  The head turned from the woman and locked on Jess.

  “Young man,” he said, and paused for breath. “You almost ... broke ... every bone ... in my ... body.”

  “Thank you,” the woman was saying, and Jess realized she was looking at him with those beautiful gray eyes, but the eyes had filled with tears. Perhaps because for a moment, the old man had not known her. “Thank you, Sheriff,” she repeated.

  “It’s my job,” Jess said, but nodded his thanks and pulled himself up. By then, Lee Bodeen was on the ground, and he and Major Clarke were helping the old Butcher to his feet. Caroline Dalton stood on her own and moved up the boardwalk, through the open door, making a beeline for the registration desk.

  “I assume,” Bodeen said as he followed Jess toward the dead cowman, “there will be an inquest.”

  “Imagine so,” Jess said, and looked up and down the street for Mort Thompson, the county solicitor, but that rapscallion was nowhere to be seen. “But it was self-defense. No doubt about that.”

  “Murder!” someone shouted.

  Jess sent a glare into the crowd but heard another hiss that stabbed him in his gut.

  “Low-down Yankee-lovin’ sheriff.”

  He ignored that, and moved down the boardwalk, loosening the bandana and kneeling beside the cowboy.

  Without speaking, he wrapped the bandana over the bullet wound, tightened it in a hard knot, while Bodeen picked up the .44-caliber dragoon.

  “You protected that damn Yankee cur, Sheriff,” the old trail hand said.

  Jess could have replied that he had actually saved the old cowboy from being blown apart with a .45-75 rifle slug or taking a .41-caliber derringer bullet in the heart.

  “I’m sworn to uphold the peace,” he said, “and you were breaking it.” He hooked his thumb toward the dead man. “So was he.”

  “Murderin’, mad-dog killer like him.” The old cowhand, his face weathered and covered with three days’ growth of whiskers, spit. “He don’t deserve to live. Not after what he done at Baxter Pass.”

  “That was twenty-five years ago,” Jess said.

  “Not to me. To me it was yestiday.”

  Jess sighed. A voice came from behind him, and he pushed himself up as Doctor Amanda Wilson hurried through the crowd, her black satchel at her side. She stopped by the dead man, her face paling at the ugly sight, but she quickly recovered and dropped to her knees, not even caring that the hem of her dress soaked up some of the blood. Her fingers found the man’s throat, and then she rose, wiping her bloody fingers on her dress.

  Major Clarke had helped General Dalton into the hotel. Amanda came to see the cowboy, and she did not speak or even look at Jess Casey or Lee Bodeen.

  “How bad are you hit, sir?” she asked.

  “Ask the sheriff. He done it.”

  “Didn’t hit the bone,” Jess said. He sighed again. “Send me the bill, Doc. County will take care of it.”

  It was a job for the town law and should be coming out of the town coffers and not Jess Casey’s billfold. He was moving away now, shedding his jacket, and covering the dead man’s face and upper torso. And that should have come off Lee Bodeen’s person, not Jess’s, but he knew a man like Lee Bodeen would not care one whit about protecting innocent eyes from an unholy sight.

  Jess glanced through the doorway. The woman, Caroline, was at the desk, signing the register. The general sat on a settee in the lobby, head on his chest, maybe asleep. Ever the protector, Major Clarke stood beside him.

  Jess stopped Willie Duncan as he left the hotel’s restaurant.

  “Fetch old Mr. Stokes, will you, Willie?” he said, and tilted his head to the corpse partly covered with Jess’s own Mackinaw. “Got a customer for him. Tell Mr. Stokes to bill Kurt Koenig.” He was done paying for burials on his own dime.

  “Will do, Jess,” Willie said, and went down the boardwalk at a fast clip.

  “Where’s a decent livery, Sheriff ?” Lee Bodeen asked.

  Jess motioned across the street.

  “I’ll hire some boy to take the horses there, then,” he said. “The wagon stays where it is ... if that’s all right with you.”

  “Is that Gatling gun loaded?” Jess asked.

  Bodeen laughed. “No.” He pushed back the tails of the greatcoat, revealing the two revolvers holstered and tied down on his hips. Ivory handled. Nickel plated. New model Remingtons. “But these are. No one will bother that Gatling. Or the general.”

  Two days, Jess thought. What were the chances that nobody else would get killed in two days?

  Jess picked up the sack of food and walked back to his office without another word.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Monday, 1:45 p.m.

  “He’s here, ain’t he?” Burt McNamara said as he accepted the plate of brisket and beans. “The Butcher of Baxter Pass ... the man who murdered my pa ... he’s in town, ain’t he? I know he’s here.”

  Without answering, Jess Casey left the jail, slamming the door
shut and cutting off the prisoner’s words: “When my brothers find out—”

  In his office, he moved to the coffeepot, and poured a cup. “Want a cup, Hoot?”

  At Jess’s desk, Hoot Newton spoke only a few snorts and grunts, and he devoured the three plates of food Jess had picked up at the café without a name. The old cowhand sounded like a hog or a hungry dog. Jess stood by the stove, holding the cup in his hand, watching Hoot Newton eat. It was not an appetizing thing to see. Two plates were now empty, and the third would be gone in a moment or two, with nothing but gravy. Nope. That’s what the thick slices of toast were for. Already, Hoot was mopping up the remnants, shoving the big chunks of bread into his mouth, chewing with his mouth open.

  When Hoot had finished, he wiped the palms of his hands on his thighs, belched, and noticed Jess for the first time.

  “You say something, Jess?” he asked.

  Jess sipped the coffee. “Nah. Get enough to eat?”

  Now, Hoot picked his teeth with his fingernails and shook his head. “Remember how the cookie at the Double 3 used to make that vinegar pie?”

  Jess sighed.

  “Always loved vinegar pie.”

  “I’ll remember that, Hoot,” and the door to the office opened.

  Clint Stowe came in, waving the flimsy piece of yellow paper as if it were on fire.

  “Professor Vogt?” Jess asked hopefully, which stopped Clint Stowe in his tracks. His brow knotted in puzzlement, and he frowned, and then looked at the telegram, back at Jess, over at Hoot Newton, and again at the telegram, as if he were reading it for the first time.

  “Uh ... no ... Marshal Casey ... uh ...” He held out the paper to Jess, who took it, and frowned.

  “Nothing from that college man at AddRan?”

  “No, suh. Not yet. Maybe I should go back to the office in case it comes in.”

  “Maybe,” Jess said, and glanced again at the reply from Paul Parkin, Dallas city constable.