Chapter 6

I told the women what I had done, and we all laughed at the antics of the town marshal. Now that this business was settled, I was ready to go to the county seat to collect my $125 bounty money and to pick up a set of wanted posters. That was planned for tomorrow. However, I still had an appointment with Helen that night.

The next morning, I left for Arbuckle, the county seat. That was a three-hour ride at a fast lope, but I wanted to get there and back all in one day. I really hated to leave the women alone for a whole day. In my mind, I knew that the two of them were a match for any gang that Jake Holbein could send against them as long as they were inside that fort of a house, but, emotionally, I hated to leave them "unprotected."

One thing I had them do was to remove the curtains and other easily flammable stuff what was near the windows. I was afraid of another case of trying to poke a flaming torch through a broken window to set something on fire like the curtains that would be easy to reach. I knew as well as the next guy that no defense was perfect, but I wanted to make it as hard as possible for an attacker to do some damage to the house while the women were inside.

I made it to Arbuckle before lunch, so I was doing a good job of keeping to my schedule. I got my money and picked up the wanted posters before I went to a restaurant for lunch. During lunch, I thumbed through the posters and found two faces that I recognized as working for Jake Holbein. That was another $75 if I could catch them, so I was well on my way to fulfilling my target of $300 in reward money.

I already had the $125 in gold coin in my money belt, so I felt pretty good as I left for home. Again, there was no problem until I got very damned close to the house. That was when I heard gunfire! I heard what sounded like two different shotguns go off, so it did sound like I was in time, but I pushed my horse as fast as possible as soon as I heard the shots.

When I got there, I headed for the barn. I figured to put my horse in a safe place before I joined the fight, and that adobe barn was the best place I could think of. I grabbed my shotgun and ran toward the house. All of the shooting seemed to be coming from the front, so that was where I aimed myself.

I dropped behind a convenient tree and tried to see what was going on. What I saw was two bodies lying in front of the house, with one of them actually on the veranda. Six more men were shooting pistols from behind trees, and they were aiming at the front of the house, specifically the front parlor windows. My guess was that the two dead men had been caught at the very first of the battle as they tried to throw torches past the bars and through the windows.

Them bars on the windows was giving the women a problem when they tried to shift from one aiming point to another, but it was certain that the bars had saved their lives so far. Them bars was too close together for a man to get past them, and that was why they had been installed during the Indian wars. I did not know if they ever saw any action back then, but they were sure as hell doing their job right now!

I was behind the attackers, so I had clean shots at everyone of them. They was at the extreme limit of the range of the women's shotguns with the short barrels, but the pistols were no better, so that was no big problem. Had the men the sense to use rifles, the story would have been different, but they had not seemed to have planned this attack very well.

Anyway, I lined up on the nearest man and gave him a dose of buckshot in the backside. I only fired one barrel, so I had another shot left for the next man in line before I had to reload. I could see that I had hit the first man with a few pellets because I could see the splashes of blood where the pellets hit. That first man was lying on the ground and not doing no more shooting by the time I was ready to take my next shot.

This second shot was not quite as effective because the second man was moving when I fired at him. He had tried to turn toward me at the sound of my first shot, so I caught him in the right side with some of my buckshot. I hit him well enough to break his arm, judging from the way his gun went flying. I figured that he, too, was out of the fight, as I paused to reload my shotgun from the pouch of loose shells that I was wearing at my belt.

The three or four seconds that it took me to reload was enough for the other four men to realize that they were in deep shit up to their necks. They all took off at a dead run for their horses. One of the women fired from the house and clipped a man, but not enough to keep him from getting to his horse. I also fired both barrels at the fleeing men, but I must of missed, because none of them slowed down as they climbed on their horses.

I called out to the women not to shoot me as I walked toward the two men that I had shot. I never got a voice answer, but both women came running out of the house toward me as I walked toward their general direction. Helen was a bit more nimble than her mother, so she got to me first. I was nearly smothered by her hugs and kisses, and her mother was right behind her with the same kind of hugs and kisses! Both women were talking and crying non-stop, so I just waited them out. They ran down after about five minutes, and I congratulated them on the stand that they had put up against the attackers. Helen was the first one able to talk, and she said that Martha had killed the first one what was on the veranda, but she (Helen) had killed the other one out in the front yard. We hugged and kissed some more, but I finally got the women calmed down enough so that I could look at the two men what I had shot.

The second man had been shot in the neck as well as his arm, and he had bled to death in a few minutes. Damned if he was not one of the men on the wanted posters. He was worth $45, and was wanted for kidnapping and rape. Hell, I was delighted to have shot him.

The first man I shot had died of being hit in the back with eight of the 12 pellets that I fired at him. I guessed that the pellets had gone into his lungs, but one might of hit his heart. I could not tell without cutting him open, and I did not care enough to do that! It turned out that this one was not on a poster, so he was a total loss, unless he had something on him worth looting.

The man not on the wanted poster did have $21.63 in his pockets and money belt, so I sure could not complain about him. With the shotgun shell costing 4¢, we turned a nice profit on him. On the other hand the other two dead men were on posters to the tune of $60, so they were going to make my $300 goal a sure thing. I still had at least four more men that could add to the total, and Jake had once bragged to me that he was wanted in NMT (New Mexico Territory) for $100 for rustling. He was going to be a pain to deliver, but the prospect of $100 reward made it worth the effort!

It was too near dark to make the trip into Bloody Gulch today, but I planned to take in the three wanted men tomorrow to get receipts from the marshal. We dragged the three bodies into the barn and dumped the fourth one in a ditch far enough away from the house so that the scavengers would not be scared away.

I left the next morning for town with the bodies draped over their horses. We kept the tack, so I led the horses with a single lead rope. My plan was to sell the horses at the livery stable after making the delivery. I had no trouble finding the marshal, and he actually looked happy to see me. I guess that the prospect of getting rid of Jake Holbein was lifting a lot of spirits.