gain
showed his skill in the saddle, killing two men as he fled. Count up all
his known victims to this time, and the tally would be at least
sixty-two men; and Bill was then but twenty-five.

A third time Curtis sent Bill back into the Confederate lines, this time
into another part of Price's army. Here he was detected and arrested as
a spy. Bound hand and foot in his death watch, he killed his captor
after he had torn his hands free, and once more escaped. After that, he
dared not go back again, for he was too well known and too difficult to
disguise. He could not keep out of the fighting, however, and went as a
scout and free lance with General Davis, during Price's second invasion
of Missouri. He was not an enlisted man, and seems to have done pretty
much as he liked. One day he rode out on his own hook, and was stopped
by three men, who ordered him to halt and dismount. All three men had
their hands on their revolvers; but, to show the difference between
average men and a specialist, Bill killed two of them and fatally shot
the other before they could get into action. His tally was now sixty-six
men at least.

Curtis now sent Bill out into Kansas to look into a report that some
Indians were about to join the Confederate forces. Bill got the news,
and also engaged in a knife duel with the Sioux, Conquering Bear, whom
he accused of trying to ambush him. It was a fair and desperate fight,
with knives, and although Bill finally killed his man, he himself was so
badly cut up that he came near dying, his arm being ripped from shoulder
to elbow, a wound which it took years to mend. It is doubtful if any man
ever survived such injuries as he did, for by this time he was a mass of
scars from pistol and knife wounds. He had probably been in danger of
his life more than a hundred times in personal difficulties; for the man
with a reputation as a bad man has a reputation which needs continual
defending.

After the war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier
dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long
list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a
man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town
square by appointment. Bill killed his man and wheeled so quickly on
Tutt's followers that Tutt had not had time to fall before Bill's
six-shooter was turned the opposite way, and he was asking Tutt's
friends if they wanted any of it themselves. They