will be leaving town, so I might as well collect that now too. That’ll be two dollars apiece.”
“Mister, you done got into my craw somethin’ fierce,” Billy said. “We ain’t givin’ you one cent.”
“Billy, I don’t know,” Jeff said.
“I ain’t takin’ nothin’ more offen this little turd,” Billy said. “Now if you ain’t with me on this, get the hell out of the way and I’ll kill him my ownself. Which is it?”
“I’m with you,” Jeff said reluctantly.
“Draw!” Billy shouted as his hand dipped toward his pistol.
Billy had often practiced the quick draw, and he considered himself pretty good, but aside from taking a few shots at some cattle rustlers one night, he had never actually shot at a man before. Now he was less than ten feet away from someone who, though Billy didn’t know this, had killed several men.
Even before he had the pistol out of his holster, Butrum fired, and Billy felt a heavy blow in the middle of his chest, then nothing. He fell back, the unfired pistol still in his hand.
Because Butrum had gone after Billy first, Jeff did manage to get off one shot, but his bullet hit the door frame in front of the saloon. Butrum’s second shot hit Jeff between the eyes and he joined his friend in the dirt.
One block away from the confrontation, a farmer named Fowler pulled his team to a halt and sat in his wagon as he watched the drama play out before him. He had come into town for supplies, and his wife and young son were in the wagon with him.
“Wow! Pa, did you see that?” the boy asked.
“Yeah,” Fowler answered. “I saw it.”
“I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that before,” the boy said excitedly.
“And I pray you never have to see it again,” the boy’s mother said. “E.B., let’s get out of here. Let’s go back home.”
“No sense in doin’ that, Sue,” E.B. said. “We need the supplies, and we’ve already paid to come through the toll gate. We’d be foolish to go back home now.”
The Fowlers sat in their wagon for a moment longer as a crowd began to gather around the bodies of the two men Butrum had killed.
“Let’s go to the store, get our goods, and then go home while everyone is distracted,” E.B. said.
“He sure was fast,” the boy said. “I bet there ain’t nobody in the world faster’n him.”
“I’ll not hear another word about it,” Sue said.
“But Ma …”
“You heard me. Not another word.”
“John, what was the shooting about? Did you find out?” Millie asked when the editor came back into the newspaper office.
“Yes,” John said. “Two young men were killed. Apparently they did not pay the toll when they came into town and Butrum was collecting it for Denbigh.”
“Who were they?”
“Nobody knows who they were. From what I understand they were both strangers, never been here before. I imagine they were just cowboys come up from the States to look for work.”
“Oh, how awful. They came into a town that is strange for them, and they are shot down in the street. You know they both have a mother somewhere who is worrying about them.”
As E.B. Fowler started back home with the supplies in the back of the buckboard, he and his family were startled when they passed by the kiosk that stood in the middle of Monroe Avenue on the south end of town. There, they saw the two cowboys who had been killed earlier. They were standing upright by virtue of each of them having been tied to a six-foot-long one-by-six-inch plank that had been stuck into the ground. Each of the men had their arms folded across their chest, held that way by the same rope that tied them to the plank. One of the dead men had both eyes closed. The other had one eye closed and one open, the open eye bulging almost out of its socket. There were red splashes of blood on the first man’s shirt, showing the entry wound of the bullet. The other had a hole, the blood almost black now, between his eyes.
Covering the sign that had been posted to invite all to the barn dance on Saturday night was another sign. This one, much more crudely lettered, read:
DO YOU KNOW THESE MEN?
“Pa! Look!” young Green called. “That’s the two men that was killed, ain’t it?”
“Oh, those poor men. Nobody even knows who they are,” Sue said. “No, Green, don’t look.” Sue wrapped her arm around her son’s head and pulled her to him.
“Ma, that ain’t fair! Let me look!” Green protested.
“E.B., hurry on by.”
E.B. slapped the reins against the back of his team, causing them to move more quickly, but he stared long and hard at the bodies of the two men as he drove by.
“They said in the mercantile store that Butrum shot those two men because they didn’t have the coupon that showed they paid their toll,” Sue said. “How can that be? Denbigh can’t kill people just because they haven’t paid the toll.”
“That may have been what caused it,” E.B. said, “but Marshal Tipton has already said there won’t be any charges against Butrum.”
“What? Why not? Butrum killed those poor men. We saw it ourselves,” Sue protested.
“There were too many witnesses who saw the two cowboys draw against Butrum. Heck, we saw that, if you
