The Butcher of Baxter Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  “You talkin’ to yerself ?” Hoot Newton asked, closing the door to the cells and heading to the wreck pan to deposit Pete Doolin’s plate.

  “Wash those two plates, Hoot, and take them back to the Trinity River Hotel,” he said.

  “You say something, Jess?”

  “No. I’m talking to myself.”

  “Whiskey’ll fix that.”

  It might at that. Jess remembered the satchel he had placed in the cabinet beneath the gun case. He slid over to the case, opened the door, and pulled the bag out, which he then set on the desk. Damn, but it was heavy. He had to wonder how he had managed to lug it back from way down in Hell’s Half Acre with everything else he had been hauling.

  He pulled out the bottle he had picked up and set it on the desk.

  “It’s bourbon,” he told Hoot. “Not rye. Not Old Overholt.”

  “Don’t matter none to me.” Hoot found two glasses, relatively clean, and sat across the desk as Jess filled one for Hoot and poured about a finger in his own.

  He coughed as the liquor burned like coal oil on the way down and ignited his stomach. Hoot Newton sucked his down as if it were water. With a groan, Jess turned the bottle around and read the label. It did say Pure Kentucky Bourbon, but Jess knew it was forty-rod, likely seasoned with snakeheads and tobacco juice, that had been refilled into an empty bourbon bottle.

  “That all?” Newton smacked his lips.

  “I need you sober today, Hoot,” Jess told him, and corked the bottle.

  “That’s a hell of a thing for you to tell me, Jess.”

  But he didn’t argue. He even washed the two plates and said he would take them to the hotel. Jess wondered if Hoot would return, before his thoughts turned to the McNamara brothers and Gary Custer.

  Not that the brothers had been the ones to have killed the theater manager. Jess figured there were probably twenty thousand or more folks in town who would have done the job. But how many would use a sword—er, rapier—to kill a man? Gun. Knife. Two-by-four. Sledgehammer. Fists. Those were more in line for murderers in Fort Worth.

  He glanced at the telegram lying facedown on the desk again and reluctantly picked it up and read. The more he read, the closer he leaned, and the longer he held his breath.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Tuesday, Noon

  DID SOME CHECKING ON YOUR BOY FLINT STOP HE WAS IN DALLAS TWO DAYS STOP PLAYED POKER AT THE BANKERS SALOON STOP LOST BIG TO GARY CUSTER STOP CUSTER IS A FORT WORTH BOY RIGHT STOP CUSTER TOOK TRAIN BACK TO YOUR DULL TOWN STOP FLINT TOOK STAGE STOP PARKIN CONSTABLE DALLAS

  “Well, I’ll be a suck-egged mule.” Jess leaned back in his chair, still holding the telegram, and checking the time that it had arrived this morning. Not only had the Dallas constable done some actual work, Paul Parkin had even helped out someone in Fort Worth.

  “Maybe the war is over,” Jess said aloud. “Maybe both wars can be over.”

  The Fort Worth – Dallas feud. And the Civil War/War Between the States/War of the Rebellion/War for the Southern Confederacy/War to Preserve the Union and/or Free the Slaves/War of Northern Aggression.

  A thought struck him, and he again opened the grip setting atop the desk. At first, he rifled through the cash, coins, and other items with his hands, but then gave up and simply dumped the bag’s contents onto the desktop. He shoved aside the watches and greenbacks and looked through the silver dollars, golden eagles, and half-eagles, and then he whistled and picked up what he had hoped to find.

  A hand-carved bone fob. You could not mistake the Federal eagle icon, and Jess wondered if the National Police Gazette might write about him and his investigative prowess. He even found a diamond stickpin.

  Not that he could ever prove it officially, not unless he found an eyewitness who saw Luke Flint, or maybe his brother, sneaking into the Fort Worth Opera House, or maybe one of the poker players might remember Luke Flint betting the fob, stickpin, or the watch he had taken off Gary Custer’s body. He glanced at the pocket watches, wondering if perhaps someone might identify Gary Custer’s out of the three he had collected.

  Luke Flint had been an idiot. Betting plunder he had taken off the man he, or his brother, had murdered—in the same town where Gary Custer had lived.

  Not that it really mattered, but it made sense. Everything fit. The McNamara boys had not run Gary Custer through with the rapier. It had been Luke or, possibly, Ira Flint.

  He deposited the fob into an envelope, which he stuck in his top desk drawer. Next, he swept the contents back into the satchel, quickly, before someone came into the office and jumped to the conclusion that he was stealing from what he had confiscated at Gabe’s Place. He did not, however, return the bottle of rotgut to the satchel, but slipped it back into the cabinet under the gun case.

  He drank coffee, mostly to remove the awful taste of the whiskey that had burned his mouth and throat and done no telling what kind of damage to his innards. In a moment of charity, or maybe something completely the opposite, he brought the rotgut into the cells and let a grateful Pete Doolin take the bottle.

  “When you’re done,” he told his prisoner, “toss it through the window out back. And don’t let Hoot Newton have any.”

  “That’d never happen, Sheriff,” Doolin said.

  As Jess headed back to the office, the prisoner called out happily, “Appreciate it.”

  Not after you drink that, Jess thought before closing the door.

  When Hoot Newton returned, Jess pulled on his coat, grabbed his hat and a Winchester repeater, and told his new deputy that he would likely spend the rest of the day at the Trinity River Hotel.

  “When will you come back?” Hoot asked.

  Jess pushed three more cartridges into the Winchester, thinking, The question should be “Will I come back?” “After the show this evening,” he answered.

  “What show?” Hoot asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  His hand was on the doorknob when Hoot whined, “Yeah, but what am me and Pete s’posed to do fer our dinner? And supper?”

  Jess looked at the big lug. “You just ate ...” Yet he leaned the Winchester against the wall and returned to the grip in the cabinet, pulled out one of the gold pieces, thinking of it as a loan, if he remembered to pay it back, and went back to the rifle.

  “I’ll send over some dinner right now and have supper delivered to you and the prisoner, too.”

  With a beaming look, Hoot Newton nodded and settled into Jess’s chair.

  Closing the door and pulling up the collar to fight the sinking temperature, Jess moved down the road, headed for the Trinity River Hotel.

  He stopped at a Chinese restaurant and bought cheap dinners for Hoot and the prisoner, although Jess figured he splurged by adding a pitcher of hot tea for the two boys, and also tipped the owner of the place for agreeing to send two specials of something that sounded like fried rice and some noodle dish with beef to the jail around suppertime. He did not splurge on tea for supper, though.

  When he reached Main Street, he jumped aboard the mule-drawn trolley and settled onto a seat with a drummer and a lady in a green dress. Jess settled into the seat right behind the driver.

  “Cold, ain’t it,” said the driver, an old man bundled up in a Mackinaw and woolen blanket.

  Jess agreed.

  “Gettin’ colder, too,” the driver said.

  This time, Jess only nodded. He had taken the streetcar because his feet ached. Jess didn’t know if he would ever get used to all the walking a sheriff had to do in Fort Worth. He was a cowboy. In his day, you would ride across the street from the saloon to the next saloon, rather than walk. Yet in a town with more than twenty thousand people, Jess found it getting harder and harder to find room at a hitching rail to tether his horse.

  He studied the rooftops, the brick and stone buildings, and the wooden façades. Good places to put a man with a Winchester. Jess would have to consider every rooftop when General Dalton decided to make his way to the opera house
for his final public appearance.

  Jess was trying to figure out the most likely place an assassin would hide when he heard the rifle shot.

  The old driver yelled out a curse while pulling hard on the lines to stop the mule. The woman in the green dress screamed—no, that was the drummer, who leaped over the back railing and bolted toward the courthouse.

  “Get down!” Jess had wasted his breath. Both the woman and the driver had ducked as Jess stepped out of the trolley, levering a .44-40 shell into the Winchester, as he moved cautiously beside the mule.

  Another shot boomed, and Jess heard the smashing of glass. He spotted shards of glass falling like rain from the third floor of the Trinity River Hotel. Across the street, standing on the boardwalk in front of the Cattleman’s Bank, a kid—he could not be out of his teens—butted the rifle on the pine planks and struggled to cock his Winchester. A bottle of redeye, uncorked and only a quarter full, sat on the edge of the water trough in front of the kid.

  The boy was dressed in worn-out brogans, duck trousers, a muslin shirt, and a floppy hat. He had curly blond hair. Probably fresh from the cotton fields. Utterly harmless.

  Except for the Winchester that he brought to his shoulder again, aimed, and fired. Another window smashed on the third floor of the hotel.

  Down along both sides of the street, people huddled behind wooden columns, barrels, troughs, corners of buildings, or in the doorways of businesses. Jess glanced at the hotel, the tarps over the windows flapping in the wind. A curtain moved from the second floor on the opposite end from where the kid was shooting.

  That would be General Dalton’s room. Jess figured the man who had moved the curtain would be Lee Bodeen.

  Sighing, Jess stepped away from the mule and walked down the center of the street. He had to work fast. Before Bodeen decided to take action.

  “Ya low-down Yankee dawg!” the kid shouted, slurring his words. “C’mon an’ show yer yeller face. Afore I sends ya to yer maker!”

  Again, the boy struggled to work the lever. This time he needed to fortify himself with another pull from the bottle. After slaking his thirst, he jacked the lever—and saw Jess Casey standing in the street.

  “What ya wants?” the kid asked.

  “You’re shooting at the wrong room,” Jess said, and tilted his head toward the hotel. “The Butcher of Baxter Pass isn’t in that room.”

  The kid seemed to have trouble understanding the words. He swayed, and it took the column near the trough to keep him upright.

  “He’s not even staying on that floor,” Jess said.

  Wetting his lips, the boy shot a quick glance at the third-floor window he had pockmarked with rifle shots. His eyes struggled to focus on Jess.

  “Why don’t you put the rifle away, son,” Jess said. “Before you hurt yourself. Or some paying customer in the hotel.”

  Jess wondered if the hotel had any customers after all that had happened over the past two days. He expected everyone had checked out for safer places—except for the Butcher, Major Clarke, Lee Bodeen, and Caroline Dalton.

  The wind picked up. It practically blew the kid into the water trough, but he managed to keep his feet. He nodded at the circus wagon still parked out front.

  “He’s got that cannon.”

  “Gatling gun,” Jess corrected.

  “If he wasn’t no low-down blue-belly dawg, he’d come out an’ ... an’ ... I’d gives him a chance. His cannon ... ag’in my ri-rifle.”

  “But he’s a low-down Yankee dog,” Jess said. He chanced a step toward the boy, who didn’t seem to notice, so he took a few more steps. He kept walking, slowly, cautiously, never taking his eyes off the kid and never letting his smile fade.

  The rifle came up. Only now it aimed at Jess’s stomach, only twenty feet away.

  Jess stopped.

  “Ya stop right thar, mistah.” He was sweating. Even from twenty feet away, Jess could smell the sour stink of whiskey sweat—despite the cold.

  “I have stopped.” Jess widened his grin. “My name’s Casey. Jess Casey.”

  He waited. The kid didn’t introduce himself.

  “Now,” Jess said, “I told you my name.” Cowboy etiquette didn’t allow you to ask a person’s name, or where he hailed from. You told him your name and expected him to do the same, but if he didn’t, well, you didn’t push matters.

  “He’s a low-down Yankee dawg,” the boy slurred. “And I’s a mind to kills him.”

  “But he’s not in the room you’ve been shooting at,” Jess said, and watched the words register. By now, at least, if anyone were staying in that room, he or she would have been able to crawl to the hallway.

  If, Jess understood, he or she weren’t already dead.

  “Son ...” Jess began, but then he knew. He read the boy’s eyes.

  Turning and diving to his left, Jess felt the warming blast as the bullet tore through the air. Even before he hit the ground, he saw Lee Bodeen stepping from the main entrance of the hotel, big Centennial rifle in his hands. Jess’s rifle was cocked, and he squeezed the trigger. That’s all he could do. The Winchester’s barrel Jess held had been pointed, more or less, in the general direction of the hotel. He had no chance of hitting Lee Bodeen—didn’t even want to—but the shot might jolt the gunman with the Texas Ranger badge.

  It did. Lee spun, half-thinking another farm boy with a rifle might be shooting.

  By then, Jess was on the ground, rolling over the dirt and mud-covered paved street, letting go of the Winchester and coming up to his knees with the Colt revolver in his right hand.

  He came up to find himself staring down the barrel of the boy’s own big rifle.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Tuesday, 12:40 p.m.

  Jess had no choice. He pulled the trigger.

  The Colt bucked in his hand, and the boy screamed, dropping the rifle and grabbing his thigh as he fell into the water trough just as another bullet splintered the column behind the boy. The Winchester bounced off the street, and Jess sprang to his feet, leveling the .44-40 toward the Trinity River Hotel.

  “It’s over, Bodeen!” he shouted.

  Bodeen had a rifle. Holding a revolver, Jess knew he lacked the advantage at this distance, and if Bodeen decided to shoot, they would likely be burying Jess Casey tomorrow morning. But Caroline Dalton stepped out of the hotel behind Bodeen, and she sported one of her own pistols that was conveniently aimed at Lee Bodeen’s back.

  The gunman felt her presence, and her pistol, and butted the rifle on the boardwalk in front of the hotel. He grinned.

  “Like I said, Sheriff,” Bodeen called out. “You’re fast.” He turned, tipped his hat at Caroline Dalton, and stepped back inside the hotel, but not before he paused, turned, and yelled back. “But, Casey ... you’re also soft.”

  The farm kid Casey had shot emerged from the freezing water, shivering, pale, and cussing Jess Casey. That brought a warm smile to Casey’s face as he walked to the trough, picked up the boy’s rifle, and, after holstering his Colt, extended his hand to pull the boy out of the horse trough.

  * * *

  “Do I send you the bill?” Amanda Wilson asked when she closed the door to the cells and dropped her satchel on Jess’s desk.

  “Give it to the mayor.” Jess filled two cups with steaming black coffee. He handed one to Doc Wilson, and sat on the side of the desk. “How is he?”

  “He should live,” she said. “Unless he catches pneumonia.”

  Jess had put a tourniquet over the boy’s leg and made the trolley driver haul his prisoner back to the jail. The jail, Jess figured, might be a safer place for the farm kid. Now, the local citizens might want to give that boy a medal, but Lee Bodeen and maybe even Jedediah Clarke might be inclined to some form of lethal punishment. So might the owner of the Trinity River Hotel, who was going to be paying a lot of money to replace various windows in his establishment.

  Doc Wilson had jumped aboard the trolley as the mule headed down the street and was already at wor
k on the latest wounded prisoner before the wagon had turned at the courthouse.

  “He could use a couple of blankets,” Doc Wilson said, and sipped some coffee.

  “Hoot,” Jess said.

  Hoot Newton stood in the corner, finishing his plate of food the Chinese kid had brought a few minutes earlier. He licked his fingers and picked up the cup of tea, frowning at the taste. “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Bring the prisoner a couple of blankets. And let him have the tea. It’ll do him some good.”

  “Sure, Jess. I’d rather have coffee anyhow.”

  “You’d rather have rye,” Jess said, but the big cowboy didn’t hear him. Hoot, moving spry with a full belly, had picked up a couple of blankets and was already heading toward the jail cells with his hands full.

  “How many more men must be killed by the Butcher?” Amanda Wilson said without trying to conceal her animosity.

  Jess set his cup on the desk. “Well, Dalton hasn’t killed anyone in Fort Worth since he arrived.” She turned, ready to bark back, although Jess had kept his tone pleasant enough, but Jess jerked his thumb toward the open door to the cells. “That boy in there’s lucky he didn’t kill anyone himself. You know how Mort Thompson is. He’d have that kid lined up for a necktie party. And I couldn’t do anything to stop that had the kid shot anyone.”

  She started to say something, but Hoot Newton was back, empty-handed. Amanda Wilson bit her tongue and drank more coffee.

  “Did he tell you his name?” Jess asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Have you seen that boy before?” he asked Hoot.

  “What boy?”

  Jess motioned toward the cells.

  “Pete Doolin?” the big lug asked.

  “No,” Jess said, rolling his eyes. “The kid.”

  “Oh. No, Jess. Ain’t never laid eyes on him till you brung him in.”

  The door opened, and the newspaper boys entered. Amanda Wilson finished her coffee, grabbed her black bag, and left while the journalists hovered over Jess like horseflies. This time, though, Jess wasn’t sorry to see them or answer their questions. He even let them go into the jail, though not inside the cells, and interview both prisoners. He hoped the kid might mention his name, or at least where he hailed from, but that didn’t happen. Still, the boys would write up their articles, and maybe the prisoner’s ma and pa might read it and come to fetch their son.