Chapter 26: Portia

Unfortunately, a half day later, I was back in the soup.

I heard the noise before I saw the problem, and the problem turned out to be a sight larger than I first thought it was. Two good-sized men were wrestling with a women in an open-sided shed, and their intentions were clear since one had his foreflap ajar and his long member dangling in the breeze. I dismounted quickly and ran at them, obviously unseen. I pulled one off and tossed him aside and then got the would-be rapist's arm up in the middle of his back and rammed him head first into the frame post. The first one came running at me, and I met him with a kick in the belly. He went down and rolled in the dirt, squawking.

"Help my girls," the woman cried at me as she got to her knees and pulled down her skirt. "Inside, there's three more of these bastards."

So I went dashing off and did not see the lady get her pitchfork and skewer the two men I had left sprawled in her yard although I heard their cries. When I yanked open the door, it was a regular melee, nothing but skirts and elbows, shifts and knees, grunting and squealing. I started throwing men out the door and finally had to draw my big knife and drive it through one of them since he fumbled out a pistol from his waistband.

Then one I had thrown out jumped on my back, and I tossed him over, slicing upward as I did. He screamed and sprayed blood over his partner who was just getting to his feet. That man had run only twenty feet before I got the big pistol cocked, rested it on my forearm and nearly blew his head off.

While the girls comforted each other and then ridded up their house some, setting the furniture back on its feet and sweeping the broken crockery out the door, the woman and I dragged the bodies down to the creek, which was fortunately about as full as it ever got judging from its banks. We rifled the corpses' clothes and rolled them in, barely looking at each other. They bobbled out of sight, and we washed our hands and got introduced.

She was Mrs. Johnson, Portia Johnson she said, and her girls were Juliet, who was fifteen, and Bianca, who was a year or so older. "We jus' made 'em widows, we did," the woman said proudly.

I looked at her in wonder.

"Actually, them two I stuck was their husbands, filthy buggers."

"They were," I said, dumbfounded.

She nodded. "Man I married, he made 'em marry up with them two. Didn't give 'em no choice really."

We walked back toward the house where the girls waited in the doorway.

"They's bof' dead, Jim and Knobby, ' she said to the young women and all three smiled. "This big feller pulled 'em off me, an' I got 'em with our pitchfork. They hurt you?"

The girls shook their heads, looking up at me in wonder. They were pretty little things, neither much more than five feet high, but both surely nubile and very loosely dressed. Their mother, who might have been all of thirty, was a few sizes bigger and had a shift as well as a dress on her hard body.

While the girls fixed some hoe cakes, their mother said she expected more trouble. "Fred," she said sourly, "that's my so-called husband, he's captain a'this rag-tag bunch. He'll likely be along soon to see how his rape went. The girls, they come home day 'fore yestidday when they found out he wanted them to roger the whole bunch, not jus' the two they wed."

So we ate quickly and then I loaded my musket and the four others left behind by the men who were getting wet in the creek. Fred's outfit, Portia said, usually had twelve or fifteen men in it.

"Loyal?" I asked.

She nodded. "They don' really care."

Bianca showed that she knew how to load so I put her behind her mother at one window and quickly showed Juliet how to ram home a charge. We had barely got that lesson done when someone hallooed the house.

"It's him," the girls' mother said with a smile. "Won' he be surprised." She closed the shutters on her side of the door.

We had five guns ready with buck and ball, double loads of buckshot. "Let me shoot first," I said. Portia nodded and the two girls sat on the floor, backs to the log wall, worn skirts well up on their bare legs. Their mother put her musket's butt on the floor and looked at me, her mouth a thin line.

Here they came, a half-dozen men on foot, looking around but not really ready for trouble. All of them were armed, as far as I could tell, but their guns were on their backs or just held across their bodies.

At about ten paces, as we had agreed, Portia pulled open the front door and faced her husband.

"Where's ole Knobby?" the obvious leader asked, a wide grin on his unshaved face. "An' Jimbo?"