Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
According to Pinkerton
detective Charles (“Charlie”) Siringo, a year after Dodge City's incorporation, 81 men had been buried in the town's graveyard.
Eighty of them had been killed, only one having experienced “a natural death”
(A
Cowboy Detective 315).
It
was in this wild West town that Siringo first encountered Bat Masterson,
the nighttime bartender at the Lone Star dance hall. Siringo,
attracted by the hall's good-looking women and the establishment's
“Texas flavor,” visited the place with a cowboy friend, “Wess”
Adams (315). Wess, complaining of having been insulted by Jim White,
a buffalo hunter, enlisted Siringo's assistance (315).
Bat Masterson
In
the ensuing barroom fight, Masterson intervened, tossing a handful of
“heavy beer glasses” at Siringo, one of which, breaking, drew
blood (135). A dozen men were involved in the fracas; Masterson
didn't differentiate between brawlers and bystanders, but struck
anyone in range of the ice mallet he'd taken from its
place behind the bar (135).
Jim White
Some
of the fighters clubbed others with their pistols. When Siringo saw
White “lying on the floor apparently dead, with blood flowing from
wounds in the head,” and witnessed Adams being stabbed “in the
back,” he beat a hasty retreat, Adams in tow, to their horses, hitched
out front, and threatened a police officer, Joe Mason, who barred their way, before riding
out of town (136-137).
Siringo
and Adams took refuge in a stock yard “shanty.” Examining Adams's
knife wound, Siringo saw that it was, indeed, “serious”:
.
. . The knife had been thrust in and then brought around in a
semi-circle in the shape of a large horseshoe. The open part of the
shoe was where the flesh was not cut, and the other part of the wound
[was where] the flesh stood out several inches from the body. The
clothing was saturated with blood (317).
Charles Siringo
There
was nothing to do but ride back into Dodge. Suspecting that the
police might be waiting to ambush him, should he return to town,
Siringo took a different route back to Dodge, where he bought
supplies at the local drug store: “needles and thread, sticking
plaster, and a candle” (318).
Returning
to the shanty by the same route he'd ridden back to town, Siringo
tried, unsuccessfully, to stitch his friend's wound, but found that
“the horseshoe[-] shaped protruding flesh could not be pushed back
into place on a level with the rest of the body” (318).
Siringo
had no alternative but to apply the sticking plaster, before the men
rode eighteen miles “to the Bates & Beals cattle camp,” as
Adams became progressively weaker “from loss of blood” (318).
Later,
Siringo learned that White, “the boss of a large gang of buffalo
hunters,” had survived; he ultimately “recovered” from his
“many wounds” and the multiple cracks in his skull (319). Siringo
also learned, years later, upon meeting Masterson, that he'd been
right to take a different route back into Dodge than the one he and
Adams had taken out of town, as Masterson “and a gang of officers”
had, indeed, been lying in wait to ambush him, had he ridden back to
Dodge by the same path he'd left town. “Armed with rifles and
shotguns,” the posse had “stood guard till morning,” intent
upon making “angels” of the suspects “if [they] returned” (318).
Siringo
ends his account of “how near” he'd come “to being put out of
business by Bat Masterson” (315) by drawing a moral for his story:
“This little scrape illustrates what fools cowboys were after long
drives over the rail” (319).
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