Sims returned with Foster, and Thompson held out his hand.
“Joe,” he said, “I have come all the way from Austin to shake hands with you. Let’s make up, and call it off.”
“I can’t shake hands with you, Ben,” Foster said. “You killed my partner, and you know well enough I am not the sort to forget it. Now go, won’t you, and don’t make trouble.”
Thompson said he would leave in a minute, but they must drink together first. There was a bar in the gallery, which was by this time packed with men who had learned of Thompson’s presence in the theatre, but Fisher and Thompson stood quite alone beside the bar. The marshal of Austin looked up and saw Foster’s glass untouched before him, and said,
“Aren’t you drinking with me, Joe?”
Foster shook his head.
“Well, then,” cried Thompson, “the man who won’t drink with me, nor shake hands with me, fights me.”
He reached back for his pistol, and some one—a jury of twelve intelligent citizens decided it was not young Bill Sims—shot him three times in the forehead. They say you could have covered the three bullet-holes with a half-dollar. But so great was the desperate courage of this ruffian that even as he fell he fired, holding his revolver at his hip, and killing Foster, and then, as he lay on his back, with every nerve jerking in agony, he emptied his revolver into the floor, ripping great gashes in the boards about him. And so he died, as he would have elected to die, with his boots on, and with the report of his pistol the last sound to ring in his ears. King Fisher was killed at the same moment; and the Express spoke of it the next morning as “A Good Night’s Work.”
I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Sims at the gambling palace, which was once Harris’s, then Foster’s, and which is now his, and found him a jolly, bright-eyed young man of about thirty, with very fine teeth, and a most contagious laugh. He was just back from Dwight, and told us of a man who had been cured there, and who had gone away with his mother leaning on his arm, and what this man had said to them of his hopes for the future when he left; and as he told it the tears came to his eyes, and he coughed, and began to laugh over a less serious story. I tried all the time to imagine him, somewhat profanely, I am afraid, as a young David standing up before this English giant, who had sent twoscore of other men out of the world, and to picture the glaring, crowded gallery, with the hot air and smoke, and the voice of the comic singer rising from the stage below, and this boy and the marshal of Austin facing one another with drawn revolvers; but it was quite impossible.
