Dave Tutt

Tutt moves in the saloon-and-card-table world where reputations were staked as readily as money, and his feud with Hickok turns a private grievance into public spectacle. He is the antagonist whose stubbornness and pride push a dispute past the point where either man can back down without losing face. His role matters because the showdown he provokes becomes a defining episode in the book's portrait of Hickok, showing how quickly frontier justice could turn lethal and how thin the line was between a gambling argument and a grave.