One might expect such a man as Wild Bill Hickok to meet his nemesis in open battle with a murderous cutthroat seeking to pay off an old score. Western legend is filled with such fitting come-uppances. But in this rare case our hero was killed in a peaceful moment by a total stranger and for reasons which nobody was ever thereafter able to discern. On the fateful day of August 2, 1876, he entered Number Ten shortly after the lunch hour to take up his everlasting hand of cards. Normally, being a prudent man, he insisted on a seat with its back to a wall, from which vantage point he could keep his eye cocked for trouble; but on this day, for some reason, he arrived just too late to take his customary position and had to accept a chair with its back to the door. The game proceeded amiably enough for a while, and there was nothing in the afternoon air to suggest violence of any sort. At last a normally inoffensive deadbeat, one Jack McCall, turned from the bar where he had been enjoying a quiet drink and, passing the gaming table on his way to the door, suddenly and without a word pulled his revolver from his vest and put a shot through Wild Bill’s skull. The effect was instantaneous. When the news spread that Wild Bill had been killed, all work stopped in the city and men streamed in from every corner, expecting at the very least to find a major battle in progress. When finally the crowds were quieted down and it was learned that the killing was nothing more than a mere murder, the populace speedily hunted up the terrified McCall, whom they found huddled in a near-by stable, and arranged a formal trial. The facts that Deadwood was at that time still out of bounds to American citizens and therefore under no legitimate civil jurisdiction and that the judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney were elected on the spot by a show of hands, having therefore no official standing, did not dampen the ardor of the crowd. A trial was a trial, and its results would presumably be fair and honest. As a matter of fact, Jack McCall must have been the most surprised individual of all at the ultimate fairness of the legal machinery which had been set up in his honor. With the acceptance of his fumbling plea that Hickok had, at a place unnamed and at a time unnamed, killed his brother, McCall was acquitted and turned free, and Wild Bill was sorrowfully buried by the admiring populace.