Sanc closed the door on the absorbed poker players as softly as he had opened it, and “officed” me to follow him out. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing but this, Kid. Bat Masterson is sitting in the game. He has a reputation as a killer and he earned it. When he was marshal of Dodge City bad men rode from the Texas Panhandle and from Deadwood, Dakota, to shoot it out with him, and he dropped them all. Nobody knows how many; he probably don’t know himself. He beat them all to the ‘pull’ and even now, when he is not exactly young, he is the fastest human being with a gun. All he has left is his reputation, and he would die rather than lose it to a couple of ‘stick-ups.’ If I had him in a dark street I wouldn’t hesitate to ‘throw him up’ and he would ‘go up’ too, but he would never stand for it with others looking on. I could have put the gun on him, said: ‘Masterson, I know you; I’ll kill you if you bat an eye,’ and you could have started to gather up their coin. So far, so good; but if the brim of your hat or the tip of your shoulder had got between Mr. Masterson and my eye he would have ‘pulled’ on us and I would have had to let go at him. If I didn’t kill or disable him with the first shot, he’d have slaughtered the pair of us.
“I’m not afraid of him, but I am not knowingly going to put myself in the position of killing anybody for his money. When Masterson sits in a game, he lays a gun on his lap. His life is forfeit to any ambitious young bad man looking for a reputation. Anybody but a ‘stick-up’ could kill him and get away with it, if he were fast enough or dirty enough to shoot him in the back. He has the right to sit with a gun on his lap, and besides, it gives him just a slight psychological edge on the other players.
“In short, Kid, I don’t want any of Mr. Batterson Masterson’s money by the stick-up route. There are a lot of bad men here getting by on gall, but he has guts and I flatter myself that I’ve been around enough to know the difference. That’s my philosophy, Kid; you can take it or leave it,” he concluded.
That was the tribute Sanc, who killed one man and was hanged, paid Bat Masterson, who killed twenty and died peacefully in his bed at a ripe and respected old age.
Then came a night when the Sanctimonious Kid failed to show up at the room. I was worried and made the rounds of the gambling houses, joints, and hangouts, but failed to find him or anybody who had seen him. My fears were put to rest later when Soapy Smith, who won our bankroll, appeared in the “Missouri House” and told with the good grace of a man who had lost fortunes how he had been “taken” by a “stick-up” man for fifteen hundred dollars.
“It was the first time in a year I had been off Larimer Street, and it serves me right,” he laughed. “Anyway, I know him and told him so; and I’m going to kill him on sight.”
“Soapy,” Jefferson Smith, was a colorful character of the West, the educated, refined, renegade son of a distinguished Southern family who turned his wits to crooked ways. When his luck at the faro tables switched and left him broke, he mounted his box on a corner and sold nickel bars of soap for fifty cents and one dollar. The fifty-cent bars were guaranteed to contain a five-dollar bill and the dollar ones a ten. The bills were wrapped with the soap in plain view of the prospective purchasers, and when he finished his “spiel” the rush was on.
His “cappers,” “boosters,” and “shills” fought with the yokels for a chance to get something for nothing and always beat them to the pieces of soap containing the money.
As a sleight-of-hand man Soapy had no equal off the stage. When the Gentiles wrested the Salt Lake City government from the Mormons, Soapy was brought out from Denver and sat as an election judge in the busiest polling booth in the city. Equipped with a poker player’s “sleeve holdout” he “went out” with enough Mormon ballots to swing a close election in favor of a “clean city administration.”