did not. This fight
was forced on Bill, and his quiet attempts to avoid it and his stern way
of accepting it, when inevitable, won him high estimation on the border.
Indeed, he was now known all over the country, and his like has not
since been seen. He was still a splendid looking man, and as cool and
quiet and modest as ever he had been.

Bill now went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for
a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some
trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him
with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the
same--his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at
first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled in
his right arm. He killed two more with his left hand and badly wounded
the other. This was a fair fight also, and the only wonder is he was not
killed; but he seemed never to consider odds, and literally he knew
nothing but fight.

His score was now seventy-two men, not counting Indians. He himself
never reported how many Indians he and Buffalo Bill killed as scouts in
the Black Kettle campaign under Carr and Primrose, but the killing of
Black Kettle himself was sometimes attributed to Wild Bill. The latter
was badly wounded in the thigh with a lance, and it took a long time for
this wound to heal. To give this hurt and others better opportunity for
mending, Bill now took a trip back East to his home in Illinois. While
East he found that he had a reputation, and he undertook to use it. He
found no way of making a living, however, and he returned to the West,
where he could better market his qualifications.

At that time Hays City, Kansas, was one of the hardest towns on the
frontier. It had more than a hundred gambling dives and saloons to its
two thousand population, and murder was an ordinary thing. Hays needed a
town marshal, and one who could shoot. Wild Bill was unanimously
selected, and in six weeks he was obliged to kill Jack Strawhan for
trying to shoot him. This he did by reason of his superior quickness
with the six-shooter, for Strawhan was drawing first. Another bad man,
Mulvey, started to run Hays, in whose peace and dignity Bill now felt a
personal ownership. Covered by Mulvey's two revolvers, Bill found room
for the lightning flash of time, which is all that is needed by the
real revolver genius, and killed Mulvey on the spot. His tally was now
seve