Near midnight, Bat left the Lady Gay in company with Mollie Brennan and Charlie Norton and walked over to the dance hall. While Norton lit a lantern behind the bar, Bat and Mollie sat down near the front door and began talking. Apparently Corporal King, by now well-oiled and still angry over the night’s events, saw Bat and Mollie go into Norton’s and watched them through the window before he approached the locked door of the dance hall. He knocked on the door, and Bat got up to answer it. When he opened the door, King burst into the room with a drawn revolver and a flurry of profanity. Apparently, Mollie threw herself between the two men at the first shot, although whether she was trying to protect Bat or simply trying to get out of the way is unclear. The first shot narrowly missed her and struck Masterson in the abdomen, tearing through his body and shattering his hip. King’s second shot hit Mollie squarely, and she crumpled to the floor in a heap, even as Bat raised himself up and fired the shot that mortally wounded King.

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The burst of gunfire aroused the town, and within a matter of minutes a crowd converged on the dance hall. When Harry Fleming arrived, he quickly realized that he had a dangerous situation on his hands. Billy Thompson was holding a group of angry soldiers at bay, and the buffalo hunters were organizing to protect Bat. Someone, probably at Fleming’s instigation, roused young George Curry from his sleep at Rath’s store and sent him off to Cantonment Sweetwater to report what was happening to the camp commander. Soon a detachment of soldiers was en route to the town. According to Curry’s later recollections, the soldiers stopped at the edge of town, and he and the officer in charge proceeded to the scene of excitement alone, ‘fearing that if the troops entered as a body the buffalo hunters might open fire on them and a battle ensue.’ The officer conferred with Fleming and they quieted the crowd. Attention shifted to caring for the participants in the fight.

Mollie Brennan was already dead. Dr. Finley, the assistant surgeon from the post, examined King and prepared him for transport back to the post hospital, then turned his attention to Masterson. Frank Warren, a gambler, later recalled that he watched ‘the doctor run a silk handkerchief through Bat’s intestines….The doctor said if Bat had been eating anything he would have never recovered from the wound….’ Whatever the truth about that, and Warren was not always reliable, there is no evidence that Bat was taken to the hospital. Instead he was made as comfortable as possible at the dance hall. King reached the post, but died early on the morning of January 25, 1876.

The military handled the whole episode discreetly. Curry said that the commander held a ‘brief hearing…after which officers and civilians agreed that the killing of King was justified,’ but if there was an investigation, it was simple and unofficial. King’s company commander, Captain Sebastian Gunther, noted simply in the ‘Final Statement’ he was required to file on deceased soldiers that the ‘wound was not received in the line of duty.’ The most detailed contemporary account appeared in the ‘Medical History’ of Fort Sill for 1876, under the heading of ‘Deaths’: ‘Corpl. King, belonging to the escort which accompanied Col. Mackenzie to the Cantonment on the Sweet Water Texas received a gunshot wound through the body the evening of the 24th of January; he died on the 25th and was buried at the Cantonment on the 26th. Corpl. King was shot, it is said, by a citizen with whom he had a quarrel in a public house near the Cantonment.’

So far, no contemporary accounts of the Sweetwater gunfight have come to light beyond these terse statements and the mere reporting of the deaths of King and Brennan in several Texas papers, like the note in the Denison News of February 10, 1876: ‘It is reported that a shooting scrape occurred on Contonment [sic], on the Sweet Water, last Sunday, in which a citizen, name unknown, Corporal King, Co. ‘H’ 4th cavalry and Molly Brennan, formerly a Denison demimonde, were killed.’ So far, no contemporary reference to Bat Masterson as King’s killer has been found, although there is no doubt that he was the ‘citizen’ (wounded, not killed, of course) involved. Everything else known about the affair is in the form of reminiscences and the romantic tales of popular Western writers. And that poses some tricky problems.

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