The Butcher of Baxter Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  No one who came to the Union Stockyards that night could say why the watchman would have wanted to kill General Lincoln Everett Dalton. As far as they knew, Bainbridge hadn’t fought in the War Between the States. Fact was, Bainbridge had likely just stepped off the boat from Ireland maybe ten years back. He had worked some in New York City before moving west. Wasn’t married. Kept to himself. No one at the stockyards would have called him a friend, but he hadn’t made many enemies. He drank a wee bit of Irish every day and more than a wee bit every night, though the liquor never seemed to hinder his work. On the other hand, what work did a watchman have to do at the stockyards? It wasn’t like he was guarding a bank or express car on a train.

  On the other hand, he often bragged that folks would be hearing about Banan Bainbridge one of these days, that this job would be only temporary, that he was going to be a big man.

  Maybe that’s why he had cut loose at General Dalton with the shotgun. He wanted to be a big name, and the man who killed the Butcher of Baxter Pass would likely be heard of across these United States.

  Big man. Instead, he was a dead man lying in the back of an alley with three slugs in his heart.

  Jess told the gatherers to leave the body where it was and that he would send the undertaker to fetch the corpse tonight as soon as they got back to town.

  * * *

  A quiet Mexican in duck trousers pulled up over his nightshirt agreed to carry Jess and Bodeen back. Jess thought about asking the man to bring the body back, as well, since he had a rickety old buckboard, but he didn’t want to push his luck. Banan Bainbridge wasn’t going anywhere, and none of the men in the crowd looked like they’d rob a corpse.

  No one spoke on the wagon ride south, until Jess found his horse grazing near the bridge across the Trinity River. He mounted it and rode along beside the wagon. They didn’t spot the mule that had belonged to Bainbridge, but Jess figured it would show up sometime—unless someone stole it, which was highly possible this close to the acre.

  They crossed the Trinity River to where Hell’s Half Acre had sprung to its wild, lust-filled life. They stopped at the undertaker’s place on Calhoun Street—Jess had to wake up the crotchety old goat and bribe him with two greenbacks—then cut down Fifth Street over to Main and worked their way back to the Trinity River Hotel.

  After hitching his horse to the rail, Jess paid the kindly driver a silver dollar for his troubles and watched him head back toward the stockyards.

  A tarp had been nailed up over the busted plate glass windows, and the newspaper reporters had given up on getting a story in time for the morning papers, had gotten as much information as they could, and had hurried back to their presses. Some had heard gunfire in the direction of the Union Stockyards, but none of them had the inclination or courage to head across the Trinity River at that time of night. News could wait till daylight.

  Lee Bodeen had already disappeared inside the hotel—Jess figured he would wait until morning, if at all, to inform the livery stable owner what had happened to his horse. The major, however, was standing beside the door smoking a cigar.

  “The general,” Major Jedediah Clarke said after withdrawing the potent, long black cigar from his mouth, “will see you now, Sheriff.”

  As if Jess Casey had been waiting for an appointment all day with that damned old Butcher.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tuesday, 12:45 a.m.

  “How many men do you reckon I’ve killed?”

  Jess stood in front of the dresser, hat in his hand, staring at Brigadier General Lincoln Everett Dalton, who sat rocking in the chair that had been atop that old gaudy circus wagon parked out on Main Street in front of the Trinity River Hotel.

  He thought: Well, you didn’t pull the trigger, but there are three dead men already with the undertaker waiting to get planted, and you haven’t been in town a full day.

  The Butcher of Baxter Pass didn’t look like he had when he had arrived. Gone were the flashy outfit and even the wig and makeup that made him look half alive. He wore a nightshirt that hung over his body like an ill-fitting shroud. The shirt was yellow cotton, which matched his jaundiced face.

  Now he sat in the rocking chair, an unlit cigar in his mouth, the end soggy from his drooling. His hair—what was left of it—was stark white, the top of his pate bald unless you counted the liver spots, and his brow knotted tight against his waxy skin. Sideburns ran down to his chin, which was covered with beard stubble. White hair sprouted out of both nostrils, and his eyebrows were thicker than anything Jess had ever seen, combed upwards, it appeared, and slicked back with bear grease, maybe half an inch up toward the first crease in his forehead.

  Just behind him sat his lovely daughter, Caroline, on the bed. She still wore the velvet outfit from the evening dinner, though now she looked much, much more tired. Jess couldn’t see her eyes, yet he had to wonder if she had been crying.

  Beside the armoire leaned Lee Bodeen, thumbs hooked in his gun belts, just standing there like the cock of the walk. Next to Jess, Major Clarke sat on a stool, poring over stacks of paper on a writing table, not making any noise and definitely not looking over at General Lincoln Dalton. Trying to keep a low profile, Jess figured, and he couldn’t blame Clarke for that.

  “Go on, boy. Guess.”

  His nose jutted out and down like a hawk’s beak, and his eyes were gold, heartless, soulless—unlike his lovely daughter’s stunningly beautiful gray eyes. The general’s fingers were long, bony, and his hands seemed like the only part of his body that had retained any muscle. The rest looked like dying skin with the bones about to poke through.

  Jess wished that the general would light that cigar, because the hotel room smelled like death, and Jess knew he was looking at a dead man.

  What was it that Caroline had told him? Carcinoma? The cancer? Eating away at what had once been a virile man. He didn’t know what kind of cancer and didn’t want to know. It was an ugly way to die, even for the Butcher of Baxter Pass.

  “Well?” Dalton repeated.

  Jess shrugged. “I don’t know, General.”

  Dalton ripped the cigar out of his mouth. “That’s another thing. I am no general, boy. My rank was major. Some fools in the War Department decided I should be brevetted a brigadier, and that’s what they done. But the money the army paid me was what they paid any major. General? Balderdash.”

  Jess turned the hat around in his hands in a circle, fingering the brim.

  “Two hundred men? That be your guess?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Dalton.” He figured that would pass muster, but it didn’t.

  “Don’t mister me, boy. In my day, I could have whupped the tarnation out of you. With one hand tied behind my back.”

  “Father ...” Caroline pleaded behind him. She started to rise from the bed, and now Jess could see that, yes, she had been crying—though he doubted if she would have let Bodeen or Clarke see her lose control. That’s how strong she was. She just wasn’t any match for her father.

  Few women, and few men, could hold up against that old codger. Jess wasn’t certain how long he could stand it.

  Lincoln Dalton raised his right hand. “Hush, child. This is between this Texas boy and me.” Caroline settled back onto the bed and stared at Jess, those gray eyes apologizing for that cantankerous man in the rocking chair at the foot of the bed.

  “Say two hundred, boy,” the Butcher barked, as if he were ordering his guards back at Baxter Pass. “Say that you think I killed two hundred men.”

  “You said it,” Jess said. He was growing tired of this game and had been pretty much since he had stepped into the room.

  Jess was bone tired and sick of having this lot—with the exception of the general’s daughter—in his town. Men were dead. Men were wounded. And instead of Marshal Kurt Koenig handling this, Jess had to. With no help from anyone in town, except another stove-up cowboy watching the jail.

  “But I want you to say it,” Dalton said.

  “I’m
a lawman,” Jess said, choosing his words with caution and speaking them carefully. “I’m supposed to find out the facts. I didn’t fight in the late war. I’ve never been to Ohio, never seen Baxter Pass. I’ve read articles, heard people talk, but I don’t have any proof that you ever killed anyone. Lawmen are supposed to deal with proof, with facts. And I’m not paid to judge. That’s for the courts to decide. Sir.”

  The man stared for the longest while, so long, in fact, that—as he did not blink—Jess Casey wondered if General—er, Major—Dalton had just died.

  At last, the unlit cigar returned to the Butcher’s mouth. Jess now realized that the old man had no teeth. He gummed the cigar. His wooden dentures sat on a plate by the washbasin.

  “I reckon that’s a fair answer, coming from a Texas Reb.”

  Jess considered correcting the old-timer, reminding the Butcher again that Jess had not fought in the war. Instead, he just stood there twisting his hat in his hands.

  “He saved your life, Father,” Caroline reminded him. “Twice.”

  “I know that, Daughter. I haven’t lost all of my faculties.”

  Major Clarke muttered something under his breath, which the Butcher heard and changed the direction of his attack.

  “The hotel, I imagine, will ask for us to pay for that window that fool shot out. Is that right, Clarke?”

  A few papers slid across the desk as Major Jedediah Clarke whirled around on the stool. “Sir? General? Um ...” He ran his hands through his hair and looked as if he were about to start sweating. “No ... no one ... it would be ...”

  Clarke’s frightened eyes found Jess. “It would be up to the man with the shotgun to pay for damages, isn’t that right, Sheriff ?”

  “Man’s dead,” Jess said, but this time he looked at Lee Bodeen. “Thanks to your Texas Ranger.”

  Bodeen no longer looked bored. He smiled a mirthless grin at Jess and nodded his head in appreciation.

  “Well,” Clarke said, stopping to wet his lips. “Still ... be that as it may ... it’s ... well ... it’s ...”

  The Butcher stopped him by raising his hand. “Don’t worry yourself sick, Clarke. I can afford to pay for a plate glass window in a hotel like this. Or maybe I’ll tell them I consider it a wash, considering the bedbugs that infest this wretched place. Go back to your financials, Clarke. Let us men discuss manly affairs.”

  Clarke sucked in a deep breath and looked as if he might even argue with the general, only to lose his resolve and return back to the writing table, gathering the papers.

  “You’d think,” Lincoln Dalton told Jess, “that a man with a double-barreled shotgun could have killed me. What kin of his did I put under?”

  “None that we’re aware of,” Jess told him. “Right now, it looks like he was just trying to make a name for himself.”

  “Like Bob Ford when he sent Jesse James to Hades?” The bony head bobbed in satisfaction. “That’s a good reason, I guess.”

  A brief respite of silence held for just a few seconds.

  “I just want to know ...” Dalton leaned forward, those cold eyes burning all the way through Jess. “... Why? Why’d a Texas boy like you save a damn Yankee like me?”

  “I’m paid to keep the peace in Tarrant County. And I don’t believe anyone has the right to commit murder.”

  The Butcher grinned his toothless grin. “Like how I committed murder all those years ago?”

  Jess didn’t answer.

  “You know why I came back to Texas after all these years,” Dalton said. “You likely think I figured a bullet would be an easier, less painful way to go to my maker than”—he tapped his chest with the soaked end of his cigar—“than rotting like I am.”

  At that, Caroline Dalton bowed her head, which the Butcher, his senses highly alert, must have realized. “Come on, Daughter. Remember you’re a Dalton. Daltons don’t cry. Don’t grieve.” The cigar returned, but only for a moment, as a sudden coughing fit sent the old man almost toppling out of the chair and catapulted the cigar toward Jess, landing and rolling to a stop just in front of his boots. Major Clarke started for the old man, as did Caroline, but the Butcher’s right hand went up, stopping them both. Lee Bodeen, Jess noticed, did not move a muscle. The gunman just stood there, looking bored.

  When Lincoln Dalton straightened a moment later, he turned and spit phlegm into the empty Folgers coffee can by his rocker that had been turned into a spittoon. After wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his nightshirt, he again looked up at Jess Casey.

  “So how many men have I killed, Sheriff ?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You glad you’ve saved my life?”

  “It’s my job. My duty.”

  “You hate my guts?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  That’s when Brevet Brigadier General Lincoln Everett Dalton slapped his thigh and cackled. The laugh—and even now the dying man’s eyes—seemed full of life. He shook his head, turned to spit again, and rocked contentedly in the chair.

  “I like you, Casey. You don’t rile. You’re good with a gun, but you aren’t keen on using it.” The rocker stopped, and the old man turned his head, glaring at Bodeen. “Unlike some rapscallions in this room.”

  Then, Dalton faced Casey again.

  “They say I killed two hundred Texans at Baxter Pass.”

  Jess nodded. “That’s what they say.”

  “Shot them down like the dirty rotten traitors to the flag that they were.”

  Jess twisted his hat.

  “Two hundred men.”

  Jess waited.

  “Nah.” Dalton pulled out his cigar, studied it, frowned, and dropped it into the spittoon. His fingers moved toward his mouth, but stopped, and he laughed once more, this time briefly, and shook his head as his hands folded across his lap. “Reflex. Was going to pick the flakes of tobacco from my teeth. But my teeth is over yonder.” His jaw tilted toward the dresser and the plate holding his dentures.

  “I didn’t kill two hundred men, Casey.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice into a whisper. “It was twelve hundred and seventy-four.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tuesday, 1:05 a.m.

  That’s when Lincoln Everett Dalton looked frail, regretful, even halfway human. His head dropped onto his bony chest, his hands clasped at his lap—not in prayer but as close as a butcher like Dalton could possibly come—and he repeated that number. Only this time the words did not come out in the creaking but forceful voice full of challenge and courage, but as a weak, dying whisper. He sounded remorseful.

  “Twelve hundred and seventy-four.”

  The room fell silent again. Even Jedediah Clarke stopped with his papers and turned respectfully, staring at the Butcher of Baxter Pass. Everyone in the room looked at the old man, except Caroline, whose head had also bowed, only the dying man’s daughter brought her hands up as if in prayer.

  After a lengthy pause, Lincoln Dalton looked up. “Twelve hundred and seventy-four,” he said again. “And that was before the two hundred shot down on the decks of the Fancy Belpre or swimming for the banks of the Ohio River.”

  Now Jess took an interest in what the Butcher was saying. He’d mentioned that steamboat, the one he had read about, had heard about. And, indeed, it sounded as if Brevet Brigadier General Lincoln Everett Dalton was admitting to what should have been considered a war crime.

  “May thirtieth,” Dalton said softly. “A day this nation should always remember.”

  May 30, 1865, when two hundred paroled prisoners had been shot down aboard a steamboat that was supposed to have been taking them home. Home. To Texas.

  Jess waited.

  “It’s the others ...” Dalton’s head shook. “It’s the twelve hundred and seventy-four ... it’s their deaths ... that haunt me.”

  “Father,” Caroline Dalton said, and now she left the bed, kneeling on the Butcher’s right, and taking one of his long, bony but strong hands in her own. She brought it to her lips and kissed the h
and that had killed so many. “You did all you could.”

  Anger fueled his voice. “I did nothing!”

  He stared up at Jess, who thought he might be imagining the tears that welled in the Butcher’s eyes.

  “God has damned me,” Dalton said. “He has cursed me. That’s why I have the cancer. To rot. Like those twelve hundred and seventy-four.”

  * * *

  Some died, eventually and slowly but surely, from the wounds they had sustained in battle. A few—no more than a dozen that could be confirmed, but no Yankee at Baxter Pass knew for certain—had been murdered in prison—by their fellow prisoners. Some of those, Lincoln Dalton said, were understandable. They were traitors, informing the Union guards of escape plans or where tunnels were being dug. Dalton did not regret those deaths. Traitors got what they deserved.

  But others had been murdered for money or the brass buttons that could be used as money or the bone carvings—which reminded Jess of the hand-carved fob the late Gary Custer, manager of the opera house, had most likely carved at the prison camp in Salisbury. Or they had been murdered for a blanket, an ounce of cornmeal, a rat to be roasted for supper, or the wax of a candle many prisoners had to eat to survive.

  Maybe a dozen more had been killed trying to escape. A few drowned, trying to swim across the Ohio and touch ground on Kentucky soil, then make their way back to Confederate lines. But far too many others had been shot by trigger-happy guards for the best men, the best soldiers, they were fighting to preserve the Union and/or free the slaves. Good soldiers were not sent to guard prison camps. Major Lincoln Everett Dalton commanded the dregs of society.

  “He would have made a fine guard,” Dalton said, and hooked a thumb back toward Lee Bodeen.

  Most of the prisoners, however, died. Scurvy. Smallpox. Dysentery. Consumption. Influenza. Typhoid.

  “They starved to death,” Dalton said. “Because we could not feed them.”

  That had been the story in the South, at Andersonville, Cahaba, and Salisbury and those other horrible pestholes. Yet the South, even when the war was fresh, new, and long before the war was lost, could barely feed its own troops. Civilians left behind starved. Prison camps had little enough food for the guards.