The Butcher of Baxter Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  Professor Mitchell Vogt. Jess didn’t know the man, and he knew little about that Christian college that had been founded, originally here in Fort Worth, but now about forty miles south at Thorp Spring near Granbury.

  The way Jess had heard the story, brothers Addison and Randolph Scott from somewhere over in East Texas had established the Male & Female Seminary of Fort Worth here in town back in ’69. The brothers had been part of that Second Great Awakening and the Restoration Movement and really wanted to educate the day’s youth. So they bought five blocks in Fort Worth and started to teach the students. The problem was ... where they’d set up their college.

  That’s where Luke Flint would be by this time. The original site of the Male & Female Seminary of Fort Worth would soon be crowded with dance halls, bawdy houses, saloons, cribs, brothels, and plenty of drunken cowboys in Hell’s Half Acre.

  Therefore, in 1873, the Scott brothers headed south, to Thorp Spring, where they had established AddRan Male & Female College—Add for Addison and Ran for Randolph, the brothers apparently wanting their names branded on the sheepskins of the youth they’d educate.

  Now, Jeff Casey was a stove-up ex-cowhand who’d found himself a lawman. He could read and write, do his own ciphering if you gave him enough time, and even form a complete sentence or two—sometimes making sense—but he did not know much about colleges and universities. From what he had heard, however, AddRan brought in the best professors and taught some two hundred to four hundred kids. Boys and girls. Together. Jeff had never heard that a college could teach both boys and girls. Now for kids, sure, that was a given. Jess had stepped inside enough of those schools and could remember the schoolmarm asking him and Lisa Davis to do their readings—Lisa always could read better and clearer than Jess. But they’d been not even in their teens. That was one thing, to have nine-year-old boys mingle with eight-year-old girls and risk getting cooties. But colleges? Those were practically grown men and women. Together. Jess’s ma would have frowned on such commingling.

  Coeducational, folks called it, and AddRan was the first of its kind in the great state of Texas and one of the first established west of the Mississippi River.

  * * *

  He had broken his arm when a chuckleheaded horse had tossed him after they’d crossed the Brazos River with a herd of twelve hundred longhorns some years back, and Jess remembered the cook setting the arm. Pretty country down that way. Jess wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Granbury had started as nothing more than a log courthouse, but these days folks from the Brazos to the Red bragged about the big opera house in town.

  It would be a good excuse, he told himself. Ride south. See this Professor Vogt. He had cowboyed for the Rafter J, and that would be maybe fifteen or twenty miles south of Granbury. Maybe the boss man there was hiring.

  He sighed. A nice dream. But he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t leave Fort Worth, not with Luke Flint dealing stud in some bucket of blood over in Hell’s Half Acre, and not with Burt McNamara sitting in jail, guarded by only Hoot Newton, and Burt’s three brothers somewhere in town. And not with the Butcher of Baxter Pass heading straight for the Panther City.

  Stepping inside the telegraph office, Jess realized that he didn’t have to ride forty miles southwest.

  Bald-headed Clint Stowe sat in his chair, his stocking feet propped up on the desk, head back, mouth open, snoring like a dog.

  “Clint!”

  He jerked up, pulling his feet off the table, dropping them to the floor, hitting the spittoon and turning it over, sending the brass cuspidor rolling toward the sidewall, which confirmed Jess’s suspicion that the telegraph office did in fact lean toward the north.

  “Marshal,” Clint blinked.

  “Sheriff,” Jess corrected.

  “Do somethin’ fer ya?”

  “Need to send two telegrams.” As Clint yawned and scratched his bald head, Jess tore one of the blank slips from a pad, found a pencil that didn’t need sharpening—the fourth he picked out of the dried bull scrotum Clint Stowe used as a pencil holder—and went to work.

  He filled out the date, wrote Professor Mitchell Vogt, AddRan, Thorp Spring, and wrote:

  Requesting any information you might have on Baxter Pass and General Lincoln E. Dalton.

  He signed his name and title, slid the paper across the counter to the still-yawning Clint Stowe, and ripped off another sheet from the blank pad.

  This one he sent to Paul Parkin, the Dallas city constable.

  It read:

  What can you tell me about a gambler named Luke Flint? Got off the stage this AM from Dallas. Did you send him our way, too?

  P.S.: No sign of Dalton yet. Guess he went back your way. Enjoy his company.

  Jess grinned, dropped the pencil in the scrotum, and handed the second flimsy piece of paper to Clint, who took it.

  “You want me to send these two telegrams?” Clint asked.

  “This is a telegraph office,” Jess said. “Isn’t it?”

  Clint had to think for a moment.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Send it ... like ... today ... now ... muy pronto.”

  First Clint nodded. Then he lifted his arms over his head and behind him and stretched long and hard. Finally he turned in his seat, laid the first telegram in front of him, and started making the telegraph wires sing.

  Jess dropped some coins on the counter.

  “When you get a reply, Clint,” he said. “Come tell me. Just me. Not Stout. Not your grandmother. Just me.”

  Clint had moved to the second telegram now, and he tapped a few keys to make sure the line was still open and nodded. Then he frowned and said: “Grandma Stowe died when I was twelve. Grandma Parker ...” He looked out the window. “Don’t know whatever become of her after she taken off with that drummer ... Like to broke Ma’s heart, it did, as the drummer was an Eye-talian.”

  The keys started tapping again, and rolling his eyes, Jess Casey stepped outside.

  He stopped for dinner two blocks down at the café that had no name. Grover Wyatt ran it, never closed it, and never slept. It catered to schoolmarms and whores, gamblers and cowhands, bankers and lawyers. It served the best chopped beef in North Texas, with slices of toast cut three inches thick and beans seasoned with fatback and beer. You washed down the grub with bottled beer. Some folks never wanted to leave, and as far as Jess Casey could tell, a few hadn’t since he had first arrived in the cow town.

  Jess was lucky. There was a spot just vacated by a fat Mexican vaquero at the counter, and Jess slid onto the stool as Grover Wyatt swiped away the plate and empty brown bottle, wiped down the spot in front of Jess with a greasy rag, lifted the rag, blew his nose, then wiped the spot next to Jess as another patron left. A drummer quickly filled that seat, unaware of how unclean the area was in front of him.

  You did not order at the café with no name. You sat down. Wyatt brought a plate and a beer. You ate. You paid. You left. Round the clock.

  When Grover Wyatt came by moments later and dumped two plates on the counter, then opened two bottles of beer, Jess, remembering something, said, “Grover?”

  Wyatt was a sour-faced man with close-cropped hair, arms the size of cottonwood limbs, no neck to speak of, and a gut and a face that said he had been living off his own food for some time now. He scowled. Jess figured the man hadn’t washed that apron tied around his fat belly in six months.

  “Could you bring me a couple of plates to go?”

  The big man leaned forward. “You feedin’ jailbirds my chow, Sheriff ?” he growled.

  Which gave Jess a moment’s pause. He hadn’t even thought about feeding Burt McNamara. He was buying two plates for Hoot Newton. “Better make it three,” Jess said, then, upon further reflection and recalling Hoot’s appetite, corrected himself. “Four.”

  Grover Wyatt left with a curse and a fart. Jess took a swig of beer. About one-quarter of the people filling the café without a name had been in Jess’s jail cells before at one time or another.

 
He ate in silence. Few people dared to speak in Grover Wyatt’s place, probably afraid that one of the thousands of flies buzzing inside would be digested in their bellies along with the chopped beef and beans. Jess had been in nastier places to eat than the café without a name—several cookhouses on the ranches where he had cowboyed came quickly to mind—but Jess couldn’t recall ever going back to any of those places.

  Grover Wyatt’s joint, however, was different.

  The place was hell, but the food was pure Texas heaven.

  As soon as Jess swallowed the last bite, Grover Wyatt was there, ripping away the empty plate and bottle of beer, heading back to the kitchen, then returning. He deposited a brown sack already dripping with grease in front of Jess, and then turned toward the man sitting beside him.

  The drummer was picking his teeth with a toothpick.

  “Folks eat here, mister.” Grover bellowed. “There’s a tooth-puller four doors down.” Unceremoniously, Grover Wyatt ripped the plate from underneath the drummer’s nose and went back to the kitchen. At least he hadn’t taken the man’s beer, which the drummer quickly downed, dropped a quarter on the countertop, and hurried outside.

  Jess took a final swallow of his own beer, found the dirtiest, grimiest, chewed-up dollar bill he had in his pants pocket, and left it atop the warped pine countertop. With a greasy sack of dinner for his jailer and his prisoner, Jess Casey stepped out of the café without a name and headed back to his office.

  The bells at the St. Stanislaus Catholic Church pealed. It was noon.

  That’s when another sound reached his ears. He wasn’t sure at first if he had actually heard it, but then he was turning, staring down Main Street, watching. One woman with a yellow parasol who was crossing the street at the corner had heard the noise, too. It stopped her dead in her tracks and she turned, lowering the parasol, watching.

  A merchant in sleeve garters and a sweaty face pushed through the batwing doors of his mercantile, staring.

  Two men stood up from the cracker barrel where they were playing checkers.

  A cowboy had to rein in his horse, which was turning, ornery, scared, doing a little sidestep in the middle of the street.

  “What in the blazes is that infernal racket?” the merchant said, now wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “It’s a song,” Jess heard himself answering, more to himself than to the mercantile’s clerk.

  But he had never heard anything so strange. Loud, but far away. Musical, yet jarring. It took him a moment before he recognized the tune, a song no one in Fort Worth, Texas, would sing. The lyrics came to him, slowly, and he remembered the last time he had heard the song had been back in 1880, when someone had the audacity to campaign for James Garfield for president of the United States.

  The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

  Down with the traitors, up with the stars;

  While we rally round the flag, boys,

  We rally once again,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  The clerk in the mercantile doorway spit, cursed, and said, “A damn Yankee song.”

  Which is when Jess Casey dropped Grover Wyatt’s chow in the street, the sack missing the edge of the boardwalk and landing in horse droppings and dirt. Because Jess Casey knew what that song meant, who it meant, even before the obnoxious wagon came around the bend and into view.

  He remembered that steam piano, the one Hank Joseph had been talking about, the one “a body could hear ten miles outta town.”

  Brigadier General Lincoln Everett Dalton, the Butcher of Baxter Pass, had arrived in Fort Worth.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Monday, 12:03 p.m.

  The cowboy had to dismount. Otherwise that claybank gelding would have pitched him and taken off for parts unknown.

  A team of four speckled gray Percherons—the smallest just shy of seventeen hands and every one of them deep-chested and bulging with muscles—pulled the damnedest wagon Jess Casey had ever laid his eyes on.

  Two small, wide wheels on the front, and two slightly larger and a wee bit wider wheels on the back, the boxing, hub, and hub band painted red; the spokes alternating red, white, and blue; and the felloes red with white stars, though now caked with dirt and grime. Only the flat steel tire had been untouched by paint. The brake pads were white.

  A black-mustached man, resplendent in a uniform of the Army of the Potomac, sat atop the high wagon, feet propped against a blue box, holding the lines to the Percherons with one hand and a red steering wheel that came up on a blue pole from the bottom of the wagon.

  The wagon itself was ornate, with bas-relief moldings along the sides of Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and William T. Sherman near the front wheels, their names underneath the sculptures in big gold letters. Toward the rear wheels were two other sculptures of a cannon and a Gatling gun. In the middle of the wagon was an ornate American flag made out of wood trim. Thirty-five stars, after West Virginia had been added to the Union. Above that was the name, trimmed in some Oriental design, the background white, the first letter of each word in scarlet, the other smaller letters in blue. All capitalized.

  GENERAL LINCOLN E. DALTON, U.S.A.

  Behind that were more wild designs of red, gold, and black, above blue trim, while in the front of the wagon, in red trim, were carvings of crossed sabers, the cover of a Holy Bible, a few stars, and crosses in a rainbow of colors. A lantern hung on each side of the front of the wagon, and at the top, in more colors, were other gilded designs and the words in a floral script:

  The Union Forever

  Red, white, and blue bunting draped the side of the wagon, or that had been the intention. The winds on the North Texas prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth had kind of destroyed much of that look, but unless someone was really studying that it would not be noticed. Probably because every eye on Main Street looked above the bunting and behind the driver at the Gatling gun mounted atop the wagon.

  Hank Joseph had said Dalton himself had stood on that roof, cranking the Gatling gun, but that had been ten or twelve years ago. General Lincoln Everett Dalton did not stand. He sat in a rocking chair, his white beard flowing, his shoulder-length white hair tangled by the wind. Jess Casey couldn’t tell if the old man was even alive.

  Then there was the music, and as the wagon rolled past Jess, he saw something else even more spectacular than the garish contraption pulled by four giant draft horses.

  Recessed inside the back of the wagon, sheltered from the wind and dust, was a calliope, its pipes rising behind the player, coming out at the roof, along with a circular chimney pipe, also painted red and blue with white stars. There had to be a boiler somewhere inside the wagon, burning coal or some fuel to provide the steam needed for the calliope. The tune—sounding like a bunch of train whistles blowing out the notes—was still the Battle Cry of Freedom, but Jess Casey no longer paid that much attention to the song. He stared at the woman playing the keyboard.

  Her hair was blacker than a raven’s wing, hanging in curls well past her shoulder. A silver necklace, adorned with turquoise and coral, hung around her thin neck. The wagon was so close to the boardwalk that Jess could even see her eyes, the lightest gray he had ever seen, highlighted by those perfect black eyebrows and an unblemished, peachy face. The lips, unpainted, were perfect, her neck thin. Her dress—which was all Jess could make out—was a blue French sateen, decorated with white dove patterns and a stand-up collar. Anywhere else she would be freezing, but the wagon served as a wind block, and Jess could only imagine how hot it must be with the calliope’s boiler somewhere behind her. Every now and then she would look up and smile, but then return her focus to the organ’s keys.

  “Excuse me.”

  Mesmerized, Jess pushed through the crowd that had emerged and stepped off the crowded boardwalk. He started to follow afoot but then remembered the sack of food he had dropped. So he picked it up. The dirt had soaked up much of the grease leaking through the sack. With the sack swinging at his s
ide, Jess followed Brigadier General Lincoln E. Dalton’s circus wagon.

  There was one other man aboard the wagon. His legs dangled over the back. His pants were kersey blue wool with red stripes—identifying him as a member of the artillery—but his boots weren’t army, but black with white corded stripes up the sides and blue stars inlaid in the uppers. He wore a wide-brimmed, low-crowned black hat and a gray greatcoat covered with brass buttons. He held a Centennial Winchester model 1876—one of those massive repeaters that fired a .45-75 cartridge, and since the greatcoat wasn’t buttoned, Jess could make out a couple of belts strapped across his waist. Each belt, Jess figured, held a holstered revolver.

  The blond-headed man wore a walrus mustache and had pale eyes that missed nothing. He’d be the protector, because from the looks of the old man in the rocking chair with a feeble hand on the Gatling gun, the Butcher of Baxter Pass couldn’t protect himself anymore.

  The gunman’s eyes lighted on Jess, saw the star, then searched the crowd, the rooftops, and the streets. He was a professional. That much was clear.

  When the wagon reached the Trinity River Hotel, the driver pulled on the lines, stopped the team, and set the brake. Immediately, the woman playing the calliope stopped and went through the back door, disappearing inside. A door on the side of the wagon Jess hadn’t seen, but equally decorated in brassy colors and grotesque gild, ornate carvings, and windblown bunting, opened, while the gunman pulled himself up, holding the big Winchester, still searching the crowd for trouble.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” the driver of the conveyance was saying, speaking through a megaphone and sounding just like all those hawkers Jess had heard at probably a dozen dog-and-pony shows that were, literally, dog-and-pony shows he had seen as a kid. “General Lincoln E. Dalton, the Butcher of Baxter Pass, is here to entertain and enlighten you. Tickets will go on sale this evening, right here in the lobby of this grand old hotel. The general’s lecture will be tomorrow night—”