se none compared with this unique
specimen. He was generous, too, as he was deadly, for even yet he was
supporting a McCandlas widow, and he always furnished funerals for his
corpses. He had one more to furnish soon. Enemies down the range among
the cow men made up a purse of five thousand dollars, and hired eight
men to kill the town marshal and bring his heart back South. Bill heard
of it, and literally made all of them jump off the railroad train where
he met them. One was killed in the jump. His list of homicides was now
eighty-one. He had never yet been arrested for murder, and his killing
was in fair open fight, his life usually against large odds. He was a
strange favorite of fortune, who seemed certainly to shield him
round-about.

Bill now went East for another try at theatricals, in which, happily, he
was unsuccessful, and for which he felt a strong distaste. He was
scared--on the stage; and when he saw what was expected of him he quit
and went back once more to the West. He appeared at Cheyenne, in the
Black Hills, wandering thus from one point to another after the fashion
of the frontier, where a man did many things and in many places. He had
a little brush with a band of Indians, and killed four of them with four
shots from his six-shooter, bringing his list in red and white to
eighty-five men. He got away alive from the Black Hills with difficulty;
but in 1876 he was back again at Deadwood, married now, and, one would
have thought, ready to settle down.

But the life of turbulence ends in turbulence. He who lives by the sword
dies by the sword. Deadwood was as bad a place as any that could be
found in the mining regions, and Bill was not an officer here, as he had
been in Kansas towns. As marshal of Hays and Abilene and United States
marshal later at Hays City, he had been a national character. He was at
Deadwood for the time only plain Wild Bill, handsome, quiet, but ready
for anything.

Ready for anything but treachery! He himself had always fought fair and
in the open. His men were shot in front. Not such was to be his fate. On
the day of August 2, 1876, while he was sitting at a game of cards in a
saloon, a hard citizen by name of Jack McCall slipped up behind him,
placed a pistol to the back of his head, and shot him dead before he
knew he had an enemy near. The ball passed through Bill's head and out
at the cheek, lodging in the arm of a man across the table.

Bill had won a little money from McC