Chapter 2

Hell, yes, I would like to try it out. Like most men of the time, I was a border line gun-nut, so I relished every opportunity I had to see a new gun. He hung a sign on his door for customers to come around back to the shooting range. We went through his storeroom to pick up the new gun and some shells for it.

He said that he had to hold the gun with both hands, but he was not as strong as me, and I could probably get away with using only one hand. Okay, that was what I went for. As a safety measure, I only loaded one shell into the gun. Aaron showed me the order that the shells were fired in, and that was simple to remember—it was clockwise, starting at the upper left barrel.

I dropped in a shell and aimed at the target which was about 30 feet away. That was about right for the average pistol shot, so I chose it for the first test. Aaron had fastened a piece of newspaper to the target frame so that we could see the scatter of the pellets. I was a little contemptuous of the 20-gauge shell with its five #00 buckshot. My expectation was met when only one of the buckshot hit the target. Who knew where the other four shot went?

Okay, that was disappointment enough for me, but then it occurred to me to try a shell modified like a hog-load. This time, when I fired at the target, it tore a gaping hole in the middle of the paper. Oh, my God, even if the pellets did not separate when they hit a man, there would still be a terrible wound from all five of those pellets hitting in very nearly the same place. Now I was interested!

Aaron loaded a new sheet of paper onto the target, and I loaded all four chambers of the little gun with four modified shells. This time, I fired all four shells at the target as fast as I could register the gun on the target and pull the trigger. Damned if all four “bullets” did not seem to go through the same hole. Okay, that could have been beginner’s luck, but the gun was a hell of a lot easier to use than a conventional shotgun, and it was certainly accurate enough at the range for which I would normally use a pistol.

Now was the time for some serious testing. I went to a convenient store and bought four watermelons. While I was gone, Aaron set up a platform to hold the melons off the ground at about waist height on a normal man. We set the melons on the platform about four feet apart and I stepped off what I figured was 40 feet. That was surely the maximum range for such a short barrel. I loaded all four chambers and tried my rapid fire tactic again, except I shot only one round at each watermelon.

Three of the watermelons were blasted to smithereens, and the fourth one was grazed by the shot and had a section taken out of it. Since a watermelon was reputed to act just like an animal’s body, including human, when it was shot, I was convinced of the usefulness of the little shotgun. A gun battle using this shotgun was not very practical because of its weight and recoil, but it seemed perfect for the kind of shooting that I did. I had to have it right then!

Aaron was highly pleased at my reaction to his invention, so he came up with a price that I could afford. He wanted $80 for the gun, and that was an outrageous price for a normal gun, but this was anything but that. I asked him to hold the gun for me while I fetched the money to pay for it. I rushed to my strongbox and removed five double-eagles. I rushed back to Aaron, and the gun suddenly belonged to me. The fifth double-eagle was for shells.

I figured that he would patent the gun and try to find one of the big manufacturers to buy it from him. I cannot imagine why that did not happen.

In any case, what I needed was a holster for this monstrosity. I called it that because it was a fantastic weapon, but it was as ugly as Hell. Oh, well, I did not care, and I sure did not care if people laughed at me when they saw me wearing it. I figured that it was like me riding Ada, only the foolish and ignorant would laugh, and I did not care about their opinions anyway.

The next place I went was to a leather shop that had a good reputation. I showed the proprietor the gun and told him what I wanted. I wanted a holster to wear at my waist in the crossdraw position, but it was going to have to hang from my shoulder because of its weight. I already had a rig to hold my Starr DAs at my waist in that position, so I knew where I wanted the shotgun to wind up. I removed my gunbelt and the artisan worked for a while until we came up with what seemed like a solution.

He quoted me a price that was reasonable, so I told him to go ahead. He said that it was going to take him four days to make what I wanted. I was disappointed, but I could not argue with him. I gave him a down payment and said that I would check in every day to see how much progress he was making.

While I was waiting for the holster rig, I returned to the road. Ada needed the exercise even if I was too excited to think about it. Dammit, that attitude nearly got me killed. I almost ignored a warning from Ada, and it was only due to that famous mule stubbornness that I did not ride into a fatal gunshot wound.

I finally woke up to what she was telling me and took my sawed-off shotgun to investigate. As was the most common situation, there was only one road agent waiting to ambush me, but I plugged him first. He must have been just starting out, because he did not have much money on him, and he was not on one of the wanted posters. I still got enough money when I sold what I could to make a nice profit off the encounter, but it was not as much as I usually earned. Nevertheless, Ada earned an extra ration of oats that night, and she seemed to appreciate the treat. I also promised myself that I would pay more attention to the signals that Ada gave me.

The holster was ready as promised at the end of four days, and it was a work of art. The rig fit me perfectly and was not as awkward as I had feared. I was not going to win any fast-draw contests with the shotgun rig, but I could draw it quickly enough, I thought, to protect myself. I sure hoped that it would be as good an investment as Ada had been.

I went back to see Aaron and to show him my new rig. He was impressed, but he was also happy that I bought 100 shells from him so that I could get plenty of practice with my new tool. For the next two days, I rode out into the open country and practiced with my new gun. I was not going for accuracy because I figured that I already was good enough with that. What I was practicing was drawing the shotgun, registering it on a target, and firing. By the time I had shot up those 100 shells, I figured that I was as good as I needed to be.

My problem now was simply getting used to the rig. I put it on when I got dressed in the morning and did not take it off until I was ready to go to bed. Within a couple of weeks, I figured that I was as adjusted to the rig as I was going to get.

I had occasion to use the rig not long after I got it. As usual, I was riding Ada along a road that had dense brush and trees on both sides. We had been out “hunting” for nearly two hours, and I was beginning to wonder if this trip had been worth the effort. Suddenly, Ada jerked to a halt and went through her routine of signals about danger ahead.

Well, that one time when I had dismissed Ada’s warning had been enough, and I got ready to investigate. I moved us to the side of the road that Ada said was the one with the danger and dismounted. I was now confident enough in my ability with the new shotgun that I left it in its holster as I made my way through the brush.

There was a road agent waiting on his horse in a little clearing beside the road. This open area looked to me like a place for people to pull off to take a moment to relieve the bladder or the bowel; therefore, I was being careful where I stepped. That was almost my undoing. I was looking down at where I was stepping and not paying close attention to the road agent.

Somehow, I managed to make enough noise to attract the attention of the man I was approaching, and he did exactly what he should do: he swung around to see what had caused the noise and must of seen enough of me to become suspicious. He fired a quick shot from his pistol, and fortunately for me, it was too quick. He scored a clean miss, but that was enough to jerk me out of my preoccupation with not stepping on some old shit and messing up my boot.

The sound of the shot was enough to trigger all of my carefully ingrained habits on how to handle a situation like this. I drew my shotgun and fired, all in one smooth motion. The mass of shot hit the man in the side at an angle such that the shot hit him in the ribs and broke apart then. As far as the man was concerned, it was as if he had been kicked by a mule and had, at the same time, five .33 caliber pistol balls fired into his body at random angles.

The net result was that he fell from his horse quite dead. I suppose that one of the #00 pellets must of gone through his heart. I say that because being shot by a bullet that small rarely kills so quickly. In any case, he was no problem to deal with. I did the usual things and found that he was worth $20 to the county. I chopped off his head and put it into one of the cloth sacks I had brought with me. I had cleared it with the Dallas marshal, and he agreed with me that all he needed to see was the man’s head to give me the receipt that I wanted.

I tied the sack to the horse’s saddle and tied him to Ada. I have to admit that we must of looked kind of incongruous with a saddled mule leading a horse instead of the other way around. We certainly got some laughs in the next town we rode through. The marshal there did not quibble about giving me a receipt for the dead man, but he did not want the head left in his jail. Okay, I pitched it into the next patch of weeds we came to once we were out of town.

The next few weeks went that way in that some days I found a road agent and other days I came up empty. About what you would expect in this sort of job, but I must give credit to Ada: she never failed me once!

Normally, when I was in Dallas I stayed at the same boarding house. That was the address that I had given the whores who wanted to contact me to report something that I might be interested in. The lady who ran the boarding house knew of my profession and cooperated by taking the messages for me if I happened not to be there, which was most of the time.

One day, I got a message from one of the brothels that four men showed up and wanted to hire all of the whores for an orgy. Of course, that was not what they called it, but that was what it amounted to. One of the whores knew one of the men as a low class bounder who always tried to get out of paying his 25¢ fee for using one of the prostitutes. She did not know where he got the money for the “party,” but it was unusual enough that she thought that I might be able to use the information.

That got me to asking around among the bartenders, and this galoot had bought drinks for the house about three weeks ago. It also happened that there had been a kidnapping two weeks before that, and that was the kind of caper this galoot was likely to be involved in. The kidnapping had been of the 7 year old daughter of a prominent banker in Dallas. I had not heard of any resolution of the case, so I visited the banker to find out what the true story might be.