Chapter 25

“Eli, did you ever look them papers over good? Who is it we’re headin’ up here to get and what’ve they done to get in trouble with the law?” Moses asked.

“Looks like we got us another Hamp Noonan on our hands. Least wise, this’n is doin’ about the same things Hamp did back over yonder.”

“What’s his name, Eli?” Duncan asked.

“Says here it’s T.F. Miles and he’s wanted for harboring horse thieves and stealing land from folks in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. He’s supposed to have about ten men that do his dirty work, while he sits back and lives high on the hog. I reckon the horse thieves would be the men that work for him.

“I reckon we’ll have to be extra careful, if there’s ten of ‘em backin’ him up in all this. We need to stop and let Joe shoot my Sharps a few shots. He can take it and I’ll use my Winchester. I don’t doubt that we’ll get into a fine gun battle with that many men runnin’ wild up here,” Eli told them.

When they camped near the bank of Spring River for the night, they built a fire and Duncan boiled a pot of coffee. He’d found a bigger pot he could carry in his bedroll. One that made two quarts of coffee at a time.

Eli went to his saddle and removed the scabbard he carried his Sharps .50 caliber rifle in. He and Joe affixed it to Joe’s saddle and Eli gave him a box of cartridges.

Eli showed him the simple workings of the long, single-shot rifle and the scope. He set up a target about two hundred yards downriver, along the bank, and told Joe to sight through the scope. He took his forked pole he carried and showed Joe how to use it as a rest for the rifle as he sighted through the scope.

“Drop a shell in there and take a shot. Be careful and don’t pull off when you squeeze the trigger. Just rest the gun in the fork and hold the stick and rifle steady as you shoot. It’s gonna kick like hell, so get ready. It’ll take you a couple of shots to get the feel of this big gun.”

Joe sighted through the scope, centered his cross hairs in the middle of the mark Eli had made in the big tree trunk, and squeezed the trigger. Eli was looking through Moses’ spotting scope and saw the bullet strike just off center.

“Joe, can you see where you hit?”

“Yep and you were right, Eli. This thing shoots like a cannon, and kicks like a mule, don’t it?”

“Shoot that same hole. If you’re pulling off, you’ll shoot to the right of it. If the scope is on, you’ll hit the mark by squeezing the trigger slowly as you steady the rifle.”

Joe fired again and hit dead center of his first bullet hole.

“Whoooooweeee, this rifle is something else. How far will it shoot?”

“It’ll hit a target at a half mile, I know. I reckon it’d shoot a mile or more, if you could see that far and knew where it hit. What I learned to do, was use the setting it’s set on now, for four hundred yards, then click ten clicks up, to shoot a half mile.”

“You hit a target at a half mile?”

“All of us did, Joe. That’s some rifle, huh?” Moses said as he walked over.

“You can have that one, Joe. I told Perryman to get me one like it and a scope too,” Eli told him.

“Whoooooweeee, Eli. Are you sure?”

“Yup, I gotta look out for you. You’re my daughter’s man now.”

They warmed their food in a skillet and drank their coffee as the sun set. When the others had stretched out on top of their bedrolls, Eli walked downriver a ways and sat on a log with his elbows resting on his knees. His head was down, as he sat looking at the ground, his hands clasped. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get Mary out of his mind for more than a minute. It was just hard to believe she wasn’t here anymore. The hurt really came hard at him during the night and he could hardly sleep at all.

“Mary, you got to help me. I feel lost and I feel like I’m about to blow up. I do alright as long as I’m busy and with the others and the family back home. When I’m alone and when it gets quiet, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to keep on goin’. If you’re lookin’ down here right now, just help me get on with it. I know you’re gone, but my head won’t let you go and I feel like I just want to hit something and make it hurt like I do. I know I’m not the same as I was, I can feel myself changin’ and that makes me afraid too.

“I don’t know anything about God and heaven and all that stuff. I know you believed in all that, and I believed you and Rose when you told me there was a God. I reckon Pa believed in it too. I’m not sure if Ma did or not. She had her own beliefs and I know she’s up there somewhere, cause I’ve seen her. If you’re there with Him now, tell Him I need some help. Tell Him to let up on me a little so I can do my job and be the head of the family. I’m afraid I’m gonna mess up bad and I try harder than I ever did, to make the right plans for all of us.

“I guess you know, we might be about to drill for oil in the coming months. I know for sure we’ll drill by this time next year. If we do I hope you’ll be as happy as we are about it.

“Mary, if I can’t get my head back right, I may quit marshaling. The way I feel right now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do my job right. I hope I don’t do somethin’ to get the others shot.

“I sure wish I could see Little Deer like I used to. I know that would make me feel better, just knowin’ she was still lookin’ down on me. I reckon I’ll go back to camp now. I feel some better after talkin’ to you, but I still hurt. I hope you don’t hurt no more, Mary,” Eli was talking in his soft voice, not even realizing he was speaking aloud, as he thought about Mary. He looked around to see if any of the others had heard him.

He walked back to camp and lay on his bedroll, looking up at the clear night sky. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in a long time, he slept soundly.

When daylight came to the river, they were sitting by the fire, drinking coffee and waiting for their biscuits to warm up.

“How much further you reckon we got to go, Eli?” Duncan asked.

“Not too far accordin’ to this. They’re set up in a big place between the Spring River here and the Neosho River. We ought to be far enough south to cross over here and ride across a ways to see if we can find them. Just be watchful, this is their stompin’ grounds and they know it better ‘n we do.”

They broke camp and saddled up. Crossing the shallow river, they headed east-northeast.

They’d ridden for a little over two hours when they saw two saddle horses wandering along the narrow trail in front of them. Instantly, they broke apart and stepped to the ground, ready for anything. The horses turned around and walked right up to their horses. Moses grabbed one and Duncan got the other.

“Eli, there’s blood on this saddle,” Moses told him.

“Tie ‘em up here, we’ll come back and get ‘em later. We need to walk our horses a ways so our heads won’t be stickin’ up over these little trees. This may be a set-up, or somebody may have been shot from the saddle.”

They walked slowly, two abreast along the narrow brush lined trail, leading their horses. Hands on their guns, they watched all around to be sure they weren’t walking into a trap. Eli and Moses were in the lead, Joe was walking beside Duncan, right behind them.

Moses stopped and pointed off to the side of the trail. There were two girls lying head to head, tied together, with their arms stretched back over their heads. They were lying on their backs naked. The girls weren’t moving and the marshals couldn’t tell if they were even alive. Looking all around, they moved slowly over to take a better look.

Eli handed the reins of his horse to Joe and motioned for him to stop as Moses handed Duncan his reins. Duncan was facing back where they came from. Joe was facing the other direction, keeping an eye out, as Eli and Moses crept over to see if the girls were alive.

Before Eli even got close, he knew the girls had been raped. He could see the bruises on their legs and breasts where they’d been grabbed and struck with fists. Their faces were bruised and bloody and when they got close enough to see better, they saw the girls’ throats had been cut.

Moses looked quickly at Eli when he heard him make a sound in his throat. Eli’s face was hard and grim. His eyes were drawn tight and unblinking as he looked down at the girls. Moses touched Eli on his hand and pointed back in the brush. He looked and saw clothes scattered all over, blood on the long dresses the girls had been wearing.

Eli looked at Moses and Moses had to look away. He’d never seen Eli look like this. Not even down in the piney woods in that house with the black cats, nor over at Fort Supply, when he first met him. Not even when Eli caught Bear Sixkiller with Sissy. Not even when they’d buried Mary. This was a different Eli Crow and whatever it was that had come over him, he knew it wasn’t going to be good.

“Eli,” Moses whispered and Eli slowly turned to look at him.

“You alright?”

“Yeah. Let’s go find the ones who did this. We’ll come back and bury these girls later.”

Eli walked back to take the reins from Joe and without saying a word, he turned to walk the way they’d been going. Moses, Duncan and Joe looked at one another, then toward Eli as he walked away. They tugged on the reins of their horses and followed him quickly.

They walked nearly a mile before the narrow trail opened into a wide sandy road that turned south, lined on both sides by white board fences. They could see a big house and barn across the pasture in the distance. All the grounds were well kept and neatly groomed.

Not wanting to be caught with their horses out in the open, they led them back into the tall brush, directly behind the main barn and tied them so they couldn’t pull loose.

Taking their rifles and shotguns, they made their way back to the white board fence that surrounded the entire perimeter of the estate. Joe was first to bend and step between the boards on the fence, as the others watched. Then each of then quickly and quietly stepped into what was definitely a horse corral.

They made their way quickly to the back of the barn where the passageway was closed off with two big half-doors that were latched in the middle. Eli stood for a long time, peeping over the door, to see if anyone was in the barn. He saw ten horse stalls on each side down the wide passageway. Each of them looked to have a horse in them.

They needed to get inside and out of sight as quickly as they could. He lifted the latch slowly and the door nearest him swung open just a little with a slight squeak of the dry hinges. They all looked at Eli as he lifted the door to get the weight off the hinge, swinging it wide enough to let them slip inside. Once inside, he reached over the top of the half-door and closed the latch. Ducking down, they slipped along the row of stalls, all the way to the front of the barn. There was a tack room on the right, but they had to cross the open passageway, and the wide front door was open.

Eli looked toward the bunkhouse and then the main house. Seeing no one, he quickly ran across the opening. He turned to watch as he waved them over one at a time across the opening. They entered the tack room and saw many fancy saddles. Some were English riding saddles, but most were finely tooled western saddles with padded, high back seats.

There was an open window on the front side of the tack room. Moses knelt on a wooden box up close to the window and kept watch toward the house. The whole place looked like a southern mansion, with huge weeping willows, giant oaks, and large black walnut trees providing shade over the wide, neatly manicured lawn.

He ducked down as the back door opened on the big house and two black girls came out with large baskets of clothes and started toward the clotheslines. Before the door could close completely, an older black man walked out the door and headed toward the barn.

“Eli, we got company coming,” Moses whispered and Eli took a peek over the window sill.

“We may as well make our move now. Hold my rifle and scattergun, I’m gonna take him down as soon as he comes in the barn door,” he whispered and handed his guns to Duncan.

Eli was crouched against the front wall near the door when the man walked into the barn. He let him pass a few steps then sprang up to grab him with one hand over his mouth and his other hand on his throat.

“Rest easy and you won’t get hurt,” Eli said as he quickly pulled him backwards to the tack room door.

“Don’t yell and I’ll take my hand off your mouth, yell and I’ll cut your throat, you hear me?”

The old man nodded his head, his eyes wide in fear as he looked around at the men in the tack room.

He saw the U.S. Marshal’s badges and he felt relief.

“What’s your name?”

“Isaiah.”

“Mine’s Eli, tell me whose place this is.”

“It belongs to Mr. T. F. Miles.”

“Is he here?”

“Yas’suh, he in the house over yonder. Y’all aimin’ to arrest him?”

“We got a warrant for his arrest. Is any of his men here?”

“Y’all know about them too? They rode off this mornin’, ain’t seen ‘em since.”

“How many?”

“Ten of ‘em. They some bad men too, Marshal. They’ll kill all of you and never think a thought of it.”

“Anybody else in that house?”

“My woman and my two girls over yonder hangin’ out clothes.”

“Miles got a wife or a woman?”

“Naw ‘suh. He makes my girls lay with him tho’.”

“Will you help me and my friends?”

“I’m an old man, Marshal, ain’t nothin’ I can do. I’d help if I could tho’.”

“Can you get your woman and your girls out here, without them or anyone knowin’ anything?”

“I can do that, they always help me in the barn. Want me to go get ‘em now?”

“Yeah, before the others get back. There may be some shootin’, and I want you and your family to stay in this tack room.”

“Ain’t none of them men gonna shoot at this barn. These hosses are worth a ton of money.”

“What kind of horses are they?”

“They Tennessee Walkers and Saddlebreds. Got three studs and the rest are mares. All of ‘em the bossman paid lots and lots of money for so he could raise some of his own.”

“I’ve heard of them, smooth gaited are they?”

“Yas’suh.”

“Isaiah, go get your woman and your girls in here right away. Where will the men go first when they come back?”

“They’ll come here to the front of the barn and tie up at the water trough.”

“Hurry Isaiah, just don’t let on we’re here. If you tell ‘em we’re here, I’ll be the one that kills you and your women. Help me and my friends and we’ll give this whole place to you when we leave.”

“For real?”

“For real – now get gone.”

“Eli, you reckon he’ll do it?” Duncan whispered when Isaiah walked slowly toward the house, looking back once, before turning to enter the back door.

“He’ll do it. He don’t like his girls layin’ with that man in there. No tellin’ what else they’re made to do,” Eli said in a soft whisper, his face hard, his lips drawn down tight.

Moses looked at Duncan, then they looked at Joe. The three of them knew Eli was mad because the girls were being forced to lay with the man. He was already mad as hell about the other girls being raped and killed back out a ways from here.

Isaiah didn’t come right back out and after a nervous two or three minutes, Duncan whispered.

“Eli?”

“He’ll be here.”

“Here he comes, Eli, he’s got a woman and the two girls with him. They’re runnin’ now,” Moses said and the four of them ran into the barn. Isaiah shooed the women into the tack room and they jumped back when they saw the four lawmen squatted down.

“This is Marshal Eli. He gonna set us free and give us this whole place.”

“Marshal?” the woman said.

“Just get your girls down over here in the back corner. We’re gonna take the men when they come back and we don’t want any of you getting hit with bullets.”

“Like I said, Marshal, they won’t shoot at this barn. They’ll shoot it up outside tho’.”

“I hear horses, Eli,” Joe said and they listened.

“Here they come and they’re ridin hard,” Eli said as he listened.

Eight men rode hard, around the front of the big barn and right up to the water trough. Before they even dismounted, one hollered.

“Isaiah, where you at, you black-ass bastard?”

“Stay down,” Eli told them as he slipped into the passageway, followed by Moses.

“Isaiah, get your black-ass out here. I want to know who these horses belong to?”

Eli looked at Moses, then across to Duncan and Joe in the tack room.

“He’s got two of our horses, Eli,” Moses whispered.

“Isaiah, I’m gonna put a hoe-handle across your black-ass if you don’t get out here.

“By God, I’ll get somebody to come out,” he said and they heard a muffled gunshot.

Eli jerked his head and looked at Moses.

“He shot a horse,” Moses whispered.

They heard a loud thud and something fell against the front of the barn. Eli saw his horse’s head fall by the front door and lay there.

“Back me up, Moses.”

“Eli, you can’t go out there, they’ll kill you. Wait ... til they split up.”

Eli pulled his Colt and spun the cylinder.

“I got your back, Eli,” Moses said, but Eli was up and moving. He ran through the front door as Duncan stood in the window of the tack room with his shotgun.

Joe ran to the front door with his Colt ready as he stepped out behind Moses.

Eight men were standing by their horses. They were looking down at the big black stud their boss just shot. They looked up to see the tall Indian Marshal standing facing them.

“OH HELL!” One yelled and turned to run.

The others turned and pulled their guns as Duncan shot through the window, cutting two of them down with a load of double-aught buckshot to their chests. Eli fanned his single action Colt and cut three men down. Moses was running out past the horses to get a shot at the one who had ran. Joe moved past Eli and saw a man run around the corner of the barn and took off after him. When he peeped around the corner, a slug splintered the board off at the corner. There was another shot and Joe stepped out, killing the man with three fast shots to his head.

The man Moses was chasing turned and raised his gun with his hand shaking. Moses shot him in his throat as he fumbled with his gun.

Joe heard another shot and looked back to see Eli shoot another man twice more in the face. He watched as Eli turned and shot three more times in the head of the man that had killed his horse.

“There’s two more somewhere, Joe. Moses’ horse and your Paint horse ain’t here either,” Eli said.

“They kill my Paint and I’ll skin the hide off their asses,” Joe said and ran toward the back of the barn.

When he came to the half-door at the back, he leaped over it with his long legs. Joe cleared the high board fence and ran through the brush where they had tied their horses. He ran right face to face with a young man about his age. The boy put his hand on his gun and Joe killed him with a shot to his throat. He turned to see his big Paint and ran toward him. Another man jumped out at Joe as he ran by, knocking Joe to the ground.

Joe heard the click as the man backed his hammer. He rolled with his Colt up, the hammer back. He shot the man twice right through his belly. Joe rolled out of the way to keep the man from falling on him.

He jumped to his feet and the man was yelling and holding his belly where blood was pouring through his fingers.

“You sumbitch, I wasn’t gonna shoot you,” he cried.

Joe shot him between his eyes, then reached for his horse’s reins.

He swung to his saddle and grabbed the reins on Moses’ horse and rode through the gate to the back of the barn. He stepped off his horse, over the half-door and dropped to the ground inside the barn.

“I see you got the horses, you get the other two?” Eli asked when he walked to the front of the barn.

“I got ‘em,” was all Joe said.

“I reckon we can go get Mr. T.F. Miles now,” Eli said as they stood reloading.

“Marshal Eli, I never woulda believed y’all coulda took them ten men. They as bad as I ever saw, up til now that is,” Isaiah said as he helped his womenfolk out of the tack room.

“Where will Miles be?” Eli asked his voice soft, almost in a whisper.

“He’ll be hunkered down in his bedroom. He’s got lots of fine, fancy guns in there, Marshal, y’all best be watchful. He ain’t a fightin’ man, but he’ll shoot at anythin’ that scares him.”

“Let’s go,” was all Eli said, as he strode toward the back of the house. Moses and Joe ran toward the front as Duncan hurried to keep up with Eli.

“Lawd have mercy, Isaiah, y’all reckon this is really happenin?” his woman asked as they watched the four marshals enter the big house.

“I think maybe the Lawd has already had mercy on us – when He sent these marshals, Nellie.”

When Eli and Duncan entered through the kitchen, they saw Joe and Moses coming through the front door. They looked into different doorways to see where the bedrooms were.

“Over here, Eli,” Joe whispered and waved.

Standing to the side, Eli peeped around the open doorway, into the large bedroom. He looked the room over and saw no one. He leaned back and looked at the others.

“Eli Crow, United States Marshal out of Fort Smith, Arkansas. You’re under arrest Miles, come on out before we come in and kill you,” Eli yelled loudly.

There was no sound. Joe knelt on the floor and peeped into the room. He couldn’t see all the way under the bed, but he saw the bed covers move where they draped to the floor.

“He’s under the bed, Eli,” Joe said and raised his Colt.

“Come out from under that bed, or we’ll kill your cowardly ass where you lay,” Eli yelled into the bedroom.

They heard the loud blast of a shotgun and all four emptied their Colts into the bed covers between the floor and the high bed. There was no sound after they emptied their guns.

Blood ran from under the bed and across the floor to a braided rug, where it puddled.

Moses pointed the barrel of his Colt to the blood and they eased into the room. Joe knelt, and with the barrel of his pistol, he raked the covers back up over the side of the bed. T.F. Miles had put the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth and pulled both triggers. He had over twenty bullet holes in his body, and his face was nothing but a bloody mess.

The four marshals were still kneeling, looking under the bed at the dead man, when Isaiah and his women came in the room.

“Isaiah, can you and your women get this man taken care of, if we get him from under there?”

“Yas’suh Marshal, and we sho’ thank all y’all.”

“Where did he keep his important papers and valuables, Isaiah?”

“Over here,” he answered and walked to a small door and rapped on it.

“It leads down to a root cellar with a back door escape tunnel to the barn.”

The men pulled a thick quilt onto the floor, on top of the braided rug. They reached under the bed to grab hold of the Mile’s arms and legs. Pulling the body out, they rolled him onto the covers. Eli took the hand irons he carried, and hooked them on the man’s hands as the others looked at him like he was crazy. Eli knew what he was doing, he had a plan to make all this appear legal.

Isaiah and his women grabbed the rug and pulled the bloody body out through the doorway and on through the kitchen into the back yard.

Eli walked over to the small cellar door and shot through the lock, then jerked it open. There were two small lamps resting on a shelf at the top of the stairs and Eli lit one with the matches on the shelf.

“Duncan, you and Moses see if you can find all his guns and anything else that might be valuable. Lay it all out on the bed and we’ll go through it.

“Joe, get this other lamp and let’s check out this cellar and the tunnel Isaiah spoke of.”

When he turned, Duncan and Moses were already opening closets and drawers, searching for whatever they could find.

Eli and Joe walked down the narrow steps to the brick floor of the cellar. There were stacks of wooden crates along one wall, and shelves with small boxes and books along another wall. The other wall had three large, fancy gun cases lined up. Each held twenty guns of all sizes and calibers. The cabinet doors underneath the display were filled with shelves. There were antique pistols, new pistols, and there were boxes and boxes of ammunition of all sizes and calibers.

There was only one door and Eli opened it, after kicking the lock loose. It led into a long dark tunnel.

Eli turned back to the cellar and saw a larger lamp hanging from the ceiling and lit it. The room was well lit with the three lamps and they began to search through the man’s belongings.

Joe started with the boxes, lifting them to the floor as he went through them. After he moved the third one down and looked inside it, he turned to Eli and whistled.

“Looky here, Eli,” he said as he held up a bundle of paper money.

“Set that crate over near the steps and see what else you can find.” Eli smiled at this.

He didn’t like this man from the first time he read about him on the warrant, he liked him less after he saw the men who worked for him. He was going to be paid well for his big stud horse that got killed for no reason. He would love to have been the one who killed all the men himself, for that one thing alone.

Joe found two more boxes of paper money, all in neat bundles, tied and stacked tightly in the crates. He found a heavy wooden crate on the bottom of a stack that was too heavy to move. He pulled the top off and saw it was lined with tin. Inside was neatly stacked, octagonal shaped, fifty dollar gold coins minted in California in 1855. It must have weighed over five hundred pounds.

“We’ll have to take some of these gold coins and put them in another box or two, this one’s too heavy to even move,” Joe said as he pointed down to the full crate of gold coins. Eli walked over and looked down at the gold. This is what he liked to see, though the paper money was good too.

When they’d gone through all the boxes, they found one more box of paper money and a box of land deeds from Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri. Eli stacked that box on top of the paper money. He wanted to go through those deeds closely.

Eli walked through the tunnel with a lamp. He wanted to see where the opening was in the barn, since they hadn’t seen it when they were out there. He came to the end and there was a wide staircase, three times as wide as the one in the house. When he walked to the top, there was a cross bar made of iron across the double doors, with a padlock holding it down. In the corner of the top landing, there was a box of tools.

Eli pulled out a hammer and struck the lock six times before it fell open. When he’d lifted the heavy metal bar, he pushed the doors wide to walk out into the empty stall next to the tack room. He looked at the other side of the doors and they were made to look just like the outside wall of the tack room. He walked by his dead horse on his way back to the house, his anger boiling over once more as he looked down.

Stooping down, he pulled his knife and took the scalp of the man who’d shot his horse. With the scalp hooked over the end of his blade, he stepped out and flung the scalp back on top of the tin roof of the barn. He wiped his blade on the man’s shirt and walked to the back of the house.

“What did y’all find?” he asked Moses and Duncan when he came into the bedroom.

“We found a room over there with nothing but guns and bullets of all kinds. There must be over two hundred guns in there, Eli,” Moses said as they opened the door to show him.

Eli walked in and saw the walls lined with rifles and shotguns. On one wall were shelves from top to bottom, filled with fancy handguns of all makes and sizes.

“We’ll get a wagon up here and load all these guns and bullets too. There’s three more gun cases down in the cellar with fancy guns, pistols, with boxes and boxes of ammunition. The tunnel leads out to the barn and comes out in the stall next to the tack room. We’ll pull the wagon in the barn and load all the stuff from the cellar. The stairs and doorway in the barn are bigger. Joe found four boxes of money and a big box of fifty dollar gold coins. We’ll have to split them up to be able to carry them out. I’ll get Isaiah to hitch up a heavy wagon and bring it to the back door, then we’ll set it up in the barn to get all that other stuff. I’m gonna go and pick me a good horse out, since that sorry sumbitch killed mine.”

“I know how you feel, Eli. I still get mad when I think about that sorry ass Parkins boy killin’ my horse. Least ways we done killed both them cowardly horse killin’ bastards now,” Duncan told him.

Eli found Isaiah and his women out where they’d buried T.F. Miles without even a coffin. He didn’t blame them; he didn’t really deserve to be buried.

“Isaiah, get a heavy wagon and hitch a team of mules to it. I’m takin’ all them guns and some of the boxes of papers and stuff for evidence. I saw some land deeds down in the cellar. I’m gonna look them over and find the one to this place. I’m gonna make up a bill of sale and sign the deed over to you and your women for all you been through here.”