The Butcher of Baxter Pass

by William W. Johnstone

  “He was one of the first men to settle in that county,” Caroline said.

  Which sounded right, too. The old rancher at the Rafter J said he had come to what had been Wise County back in the spring of ’38.

  Another bit of history rang true, too. Wise County bordered parts of Tarrant County and butted against Jack County to the west. Jack County had voted against secession. So had Wise County, as did most of the counties just north of there that bordered the Red River. Like Cooke County, where Hank Joseph had said he hailed from and had had to flee when things became unpleasant for anyone who was thought to favor the Union during the War Between the States.

  “Your father left during the war,” Jess said. “Wise County had a lot of pro-Union men.”

  Caroline Dalton stared at him, partially amazed. Sometimes Jess surprised himself. He did have a brain and could reason a few things out—unlike a lot of cowhands he had worked with.

  “That’s right,” she said. “When the war broke out, he said he could never fire against the Stars and Stripes.”

  “He wasn’t alone,” Jess said. “Sam Houston felt the same way.”

  “Which is why they kicked him out as governor,” she said.

  Jess nodded.

  “So Father returned to Memphis and then to Cincinnati. That’s where his brothers lived.”

  “And joined the Union army,” Jess said.

  She nodded. “But he never stopped loving Texas.”

  That, Jess might have to question. If he loved Texas, why had he murdered two hundred Texas soldiers after the war had ended?

  “So,” Jess said, “why return now?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Monday, 3:05 p.m.

  “Because,” Caroline Dalton said, “Father came home to die.”

  Jess Casey didn’t have time to react to that, because Mayor Harry Stout ran into the lobby of the hotel, sweating despite the coolness of the afternoon, laboring for breath, but just managing to choke out Jess’s name.

  Jess turned, half-expecting the mayor to drop dead from an apoplexy, but, alas, Jess had no luck that Monday. The mayor bent forward, hands on his knees, until he could finally straighten and manage to say between gasps:

  “Gary ... Custer ... he’s ... dead.”

  Gary Custer—no relation to the boy general who, as a Yankee killed by Indians years ago, wasn’t popular in Fort Worth, either—had managed the Fort Worth Opera House on Calhoun Street for the past seven years. He had brought the Jersey Lily, Miss Lily Langtry herself, to the cow town to wow the theater patrons with her dazzling performance as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, the play she had made her own in London. The Wild Duck ... Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ... The Pillars of Society ... An Enemy of the People ... Les Érinnyes ... Cinq-Mars ... The Battered Bride ... The Pirates of Penzance ... and just about everything Shakespeare had penned had been performed in that brick building. Jess knew that because of the placards that hung in the windows and on the walls of the opera house and from what he had read in the newspapers. He had only seen three or four plays himself, on a dare or a whim, but didn’t remember too much about Hamlet or As You Like It. A lot of John Barleycorn had led to those dares and whims.

  Still, Jess knew that countless thespians, locals, traveling troupes, and famed actors had treaded those boards. And now, if Harry Stout knew what he was talking about—and by the way he looked, Jess Casey figured he wasn’t exaggerating—Gary Custer was dead.

  “Mur-derrrrreed,” Stout said, before staggering to a chair and collapsing onto it.

  * * *

  It felt a little creepy, inside a dark theater in Hell’s Half Acre, alone except for Mayor Harry Stout, who had recovered thanks to some brandy poured by the desk clerk at the Trinity River Hotel, Major Clarke, and Lee Bodeen. Bodeen came as a duly appointed Texas Ranger. Jedediah Clarke said he had a significant investment and a letter from Governor Sul Ross.

  Stout pointed, and Jess led the way down the aisle and onto the stage, followed by three quiet men. Their boots echoed eerily as they crossed the theater stage and slipped between the curtains.

  “To be or not to be,” Lee Bodeen said, and laughed at himself.

  “Shut up,” Major Clarke said, expressing Jess Casey’s sentiments to a T.

  Only Caroline Dalton had not come. After hearing what Mayor Stout said had happened, she had gone back upstairs to her father’s room, but she had insisted that Clarke and Bodeen come along with Jess.

  “This could be a trap,” Bodeen had warned her. “To get us away from your father.”

  “I can protect my father,” she had said, and her tone let everyone know she would not tolerate any further argument. Jess figured Caroline Dalton would be more than a match for anyone who went upstairs with murder on their mind.

  “His office ...” Stout’s voice echoed in the cavernous theatre. “It’s ... back ... there.”

  They moved, past chairs, an old makeup case, sandbags, and other things Jess didn’t recognize, until they were heading down some steps and into a dark hallway; so dark, in fact, that Jess had to stop to light a candle. They walked past dressing rooms until they reached the end of the hallway and saw a door cracked open, a light shining from inside.

  “That’s his ... office ...” Stout said. “Where ... I ...”

  Jess pushed the door open and saw the Congress gaiters, the plaid britches, and the pool of drying blood.

  Gary Custer lay on his side, eyes and mouth open, skewered with a ...

  “Sword,” Jess said aloud.

  “Rapier,” Major Clarke corrected.

  Jess looked at the cramped office, the overturned chair, the gas lamp burning above the desk, and papers strewn about the top and floor. If he were a detective, Jess would have reasoned that the killer opened the door, having found a sword ... um, rapier ... in the room they had passed that had a PROPS sign painted on the door, and Gary Custer, who had been working, had risen quickly, sending papers and the chair every which way, and then felt the sword ... rapier!—pierce him right beneath the sternum.

  No footprints in the blood. If the killer had stayed after his crime, he had been careful. Only a small chain of some kind in the blood between the elbow of the dead man’s left arm and his torso.

  Behind him came the mayor’s moan, and Jess looked at Stout, usually a bellicose, arrogant, backstabbing fiend and liar but now a pale, sweating, haggard-looking politician. He leaned against the doorjamb, mopping his brow with an already soaking-wet calico rag.

  “What were you doing here, Mayor?” Jess asked.

  Harry Stout wet his lips and returned the wet rag into his coat pocket. “I came to talk to Custer about ... them.” He gestured to Clarke and Bodeen. “The performance.”

  Which sounded reasonable. And Jess didn’t think Stout had the gumption to run a man through with a little rapier. He turned his attention to Jedediah Clarke.

  “Did the general arrange this little engagement?” Jess asked. “Or did Custer contact you?”

  “It was General Dalton’s idea,” Clarke answered readily enough. “His last lecture and performance. Decatur, where he desires to rest till Judgment Day, has no opera house worth speaking of.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill Custer?” Stout said. “With ... that?”

  Oh, Jess had a pretty good idea. Anybody on the street when that circus freak show came parading down Main Street could have heard that Gary Custer was responsible for bringing the Butcher of Baxter Pass to Fort Worth. Somebody apparently had decided they didn’t want to hear General Dalton’s lecture.

  That was a motive, Jess reasoned. And why use the sword ... rapier? Well, that was a whole lot quieter than a revolver.

  “His watch is missing ... Sheriff.”

  Jess looked at the smiling Bodeen, and then down at the corpse. Again, Jess studied the broken chain, gold plated, lying in the tacky blood, which he had seen earlier. Only now, he examined the chain and the dead man a little more carefully. He could tell from the de
ad man’s vest that the watch had been snatched from it, likely after he had fallen. His coat pocket, Jesse now observed, was inside out. He knelt, reaching inside, then patting the dead man’s body. No wallet. No watch.

  “Robbery?” Major Clarke suggested.

  Jess pursed his lips, then sighed. “Or someone wanting us to think it was robbery.” He looked back at Harry Stout. “Do you know what kind of watch Custer carried?”

  “Just a watch,” he said. “Gold ... I think. But ...” He shrugged.

  Frowning, Jess looked at the body again. He fingered the blood, sticky, not even what he would call warm. Jess could only fathom a guess, but he figured that Gary Custer had been dead for an hour or so. Death had not been instantaneous, but he probably had bled out pretty quickly.

  “But he had a diamond stickpin,” Stout said.

  Jess looked. There was no stickpin in the dead man’s loose cravat.

  “Is there a safe here?” Jess asked. “Money box? Anything like that?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Stout said.

  Jess let out a long breath and pushed himself to his feet. He might as well leave, fetch the undertaker, and find out if Custer had any next of kin that should be notified.

  “I guess this cancels your show, gents,” he told Clarke and Bodeen.

  “Oh, no,” said Clarke, who had likely been waiting for someone to challenge that. “We rented the facility. Paid in advance. I can show you the contract.” He grinned like a man holding a full house. “And that letter from my dear old friend, Sul Ross.”

  Jess let it go because the mayor was pointing at the dead man.

  “But ...” Stout said. “I remember the watch fob.”

  He waited, listening as Stout told about the hand-carved bone fob. The killer must have taken it, too, along with the watch, leaving the chain, since it had fallen into the pooling blood. The piece of bone had been carved into a Federal eagle icon, the head of the bald eagle, and the stars—Stout couldn’t remember how many—and the red and white vertical stripes. Or course, on the bone, the stripes were just white, like everything else.

  “He said he carved it at Salisbury,” Stout said. “Prisoners could exchange carvings like that for food, privileges, money ... bribe the guards ... or keep for themselves. Custer had carved that one, but then the war ended, and he was free to go. Or something like that.”

  “Salisbury?” Jess asked.

  “Prison camp for Yanks,” Bodeen answered. “In one of the Carolinas, if I recollect right. Maybe Georgia.”

  “He fought for the Union?” Jess asked.

  Clarke snorted. “With the 22nd Iowa. Why else would he let General Dalton rent his opera house?”

  “Best send word to the undertaker,” Bodeen said. “We’d like to get this place cleaned up before tomorrow night.”

  Jess let the comment slide. Bodeen had said it merely to rankle him some more, and Jess wasn’t playing any games with this man-killer. Since the Butcher had arrived in Fort Worth, two men were dead and another wounded. He stepped out into the hallway, heard the blast of a small-caliber pistol, saw the muzzle flash and the silhouetted figure move down the darkened hallway, and felt the bullet tear a seam through the left side of the crown of his hat.

  Over the ringing in his ears, Jess heard some strange shout down the hallway.

  Next he heard Stout yelping like a struck puppy, and then heard, but did not see, as the mayor lost his balance and fell into the small office, landing in the blood and on the dead man who felt no pain. Jess had dropped to his knees, palmed his gun, bringing it up and cutting loose—though he had no memory of anything. He blinked away, trying to see something other than the orange, blue, and gold flashes pounding his eyeballs. Bodeen came to the open doorway, and one of his pistols roared three times.

  Jess knew better than to look at the gunman, knowing those muzzle blasts would just hurt his eyes more. Besides, now he could see, but he saw just an empty corridor.

  “The coward ran!” Bodeen said.

  Jess knew that because he was already running after him.

  Up the stairs and through the door, into the darkened stage of the theater. He swung his revolver barrel this way, then that, looked at the curtain, and heard a bottle crashing to his right, a curse, footsteps, and ... the jingling of spurs. Jesse ran toward the sound. Stage left. Or so he thought.

  He almost tripped over a rope, or wire, or something, then heard a door opening, closing, catching that brief glimpse of light. He leaped down the steps, not even touching one, landing on the floor, hearing his knees pop as he bent and came up. His left hand found the knob, and he jerked the door open, waited, then dived into the alleyway, looking toward the street. Nothing. He rolled over, bringing the Colt up, and saw a hat disappear behind a wall of wooden pickets. He fired ... once ... twice ... three times, seeing the wood splinter, but hearing no screams or grunts from behind the wall.

  Back to his feet, cocking the .44-40 as he ran, but now carefully removing his finger out of the trigger guard. He wasn’t about to shoot his own foot off. He leaped onto a trash bin, came up, and looked over the wall, gun at the ready. The alley ended ten feet away. He saw nothing, not even a passerby on the opposite boardwalk, but he climbed onto the top of the picket wall, dropped down, and moved to the intersection.

  He looked down the street one way, then the other. Nothing. Holstering his Colt, he moved back toward Main Street, stopping the first three people he saw, asking if they had seen anyone, but knowing the answer he would get even before they shook their heads.

  With a curse, Jess Casey walked back to the opera house.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Monday, 4:30 p.m.

  Here’s what Jess Casey knew about the latest killing in Fort Worth:

  Nobody had seen Gary Custer that day. The janitor had been sweeping up from the previous night, but Custer had not been around. In fact, the janitor said he thought his boss had said something about taking the train to Dallas to play some poker, and that had been Friday afternoon. Stout did say that Custer enjoyed a game of paste cards and frequented the mayor’s own saloon to try his hand at poker, sometimes Spanish monte, but usually faro. He loved to buck the tiger.

  At the depot, no one remembered seeing Gary Custer that weekend, but Fort Worth’s train station was one busy place, and, hell, who even knew what the owner, operator, and general manager of the Fort Worth Opera House even looked like? He wasn’t Lily Langtry or Edwin Booth.

  Stout said the front door to the theater had been open. That’s how he had entered. The back door, the one the person had entered who had come within a few inches of blowing Jess Casey’s head off, had been busted open from the outside. Jess figured the gent with the small-caliber pistol had come in that way.

  Which led to Major Jedediah Clarke’s theory that that was the killer, who had returned to the scene of the crime to make sure that Gary Custer, indeed, was dead.

  Jess dismissed that idea. Criminals did not return to the scene of their crimes except in sordid melodramas that often played at the Fort Worth Opera House, which was another reason the late Gary Custer probably tried his luck with the paste cards. Unless Lily Langtry or some fancy Shakespearian troupe was performing in the Panther City, the theater business didn’t quite rank up there with the White Elephant Saloon, the myriad cribs, the railroad, or the stockyards in drumming up a good, steady, profitable business. The killer had taken time to take a hand-carved bone fob, a golden pocket watch, a diamond stickpin, and a wallet that likely held some cash. Jess figured Gary Custer was dead by the time the killer had finished his robbery.

  “Did you see what the man who shot at you looked like?” Lee Bodeen had asked.

  Jess had shaken his head. “Too dark. But ...” He squinted, wondering if he had imagined that shout. “Didn’t he yell something after he pulled the trigger?”

  “Indeed,” Major Clarke had answered. “‘Sic semper tyrannis!’”

  Jess had pursed his lips. “I’ve heard that before
... I think,” he had said.

  “John Wilkes Booth,” Lee Bodeen had answered. “It’s what he yelled when he jumped off the balcony at Ford’s Theater in Washington City. After he’d put a bullet in Mr. Lincoln’s head.”

  “Followed by ‘The South is avenged,’” Major Clarke had said, “which that fellow might have shouted, too, but by then your and Bodeen’s guns were booming in that hallway.”

  “That’s Latin, right?” Jess had asked. “That sic something?”

  “Sic semper tyrannis?” Clarke had nodded. “Yeah. It means ‘Ever thus to tyrants.’” He had grinned, mentioning something about the irony, a murder in Fort Worth, an assassination in the nation’s capital. Both in theaters. Both with similar motives, perhaps, separated only by thirteen or fourteen hundred miles and pushing twenty-five years.

  Jess didn’t think much about irony, but that had led Jess to come up with a theory, and a pretty decent one to his way of thinking. Two men with murder on their minds had entered the Fort Worth Opera House that day. One had succeeded, killing and robbing Gary Custer. The other had failed, but it had been his intent to assassinate the man who had brought the Butcher of Baxter Pass to Fort Worth. He had seen Jess step out of the office into the darkened hallway and assumed that was Gary Custer. He had fired. Luckily, he had missed.

  By the time they had returned to the Trinity River Hotel, Caroline Dalton was upstairs with her father, the lobby and saloon were filled with people, and the eavesdropping desk clerk had said that Doctor Wilson had left an hour or more earlier, shortly after Mayor Stout had ran into the lobby with his cries of murder.

  Clarke and Bodeen invited Jess into the adjoining saloon for a beer or shot of whiskey, but Jess made that lame excuse that he was on duty and needed to get back to his office. Which is where he was headed when he passed the newspaper office, saw a couple of men with their sleeves rolled up and working on some printing press, and went inside.