Chapter 8

"The Bignut Stage Line has asked for our he'p in guardin' a shipment of gold between Laredo and Austin, and y'all just volunteered to be the guards," Capt. Johnson grinned as he faced Ezra and Sean.

Ezra grumphed, "Hell, Cap'n, that'll take a week or more. Are ya sure we need to go all the way to Austin?"

"Yep, they asked fer y'all, especially."

"Well, OK. Ifen we gotta, we gotta."

"That's more like the Ezra I know and love," laughed the captain. "It ain't so bad. Y'all will have he'p. Two extra guards will ride inside the special coach and y'all will be outriders."

"Well... I guess that ain't too bad. At least we don't have to git our asses kicked by that there damned coach fer the whole trip! A 140-mile trip on a hoss ain't my idee of a vacation, though."

"Be at the stage office at 5:00 AM, tomorrow, ready to leave. Have fun, boys!"

The next morning, Sean and Ezra presented themselves at the stage office ready to assume their roles as guards. Acting in his usual role as spokesman for the pair, Ezra said, "Here we are. Where's the crew we're 'sposed to go with?"

"Mornin', men. The driver is Steve Pearson, and the guards are Joe Simpson, Beau Le Blank, and George Williams. Beau will ride "shotgun" beside Steve. Y'all know all them, so y'all should git along fine."

"Oh, yeah. No problem. Where are they?"

"Over there."

"Mornin', Steve, Beau, Joe, George. Y'all ready to go?"

"Yep, we're ready to roll."

"OK. Fer now, we'll foller along 'bout a hundred yards behind y'all. Steve, don't fergit that we can't keep up ifen you let them hosses run all out."

"Yep, I'll remember. Here we go!"

They stopped by the bank and loaded the treasure box into the coach and strapped it to the floor. Once the box was in place, they left town.

Ezra commented, as they left town, "I wonder how many yahoos know 'bout this gold shipment?"

Sean answered, "I 'spect over half the road agents in the state know more about this job than we do! It ain't a case of will bandits hit us, but when."

"Yeah! Well, they'll probably wait 'til we're outa sight of Laredo before they try anythin'. What cha say that ya ride point an' I ride drag to the first relay station. Then we kin swap off."

"Sounds good to me. I'll move on out, now," Sean replied as he galloped away; he waved to Steve as he went by the coach. Sean took his place as the point man and began his scan of the area as they progressed toward the relay station. The procession settled into a comfortable lope as they began their trek.

Nothing untoward happened until after they had passed the first relay station. They all got fresh horses and had gone about two miles when they caught up to a wagon with a broken wheel. The wagon had a tarp thrown over it and the lone driver was working at getting the wheel changed. Unfortunately for the stage, he had the road completely blocked. Ezra waved at Steve to halt while he talked to the man at the wagon.

The coach stopped and so did Sean. Ezra dismounted to help change the wheel. Just as he reached the side of the wagon, three men threw back the tarp and jumped to a standing position, pointing rifles at the coach. At the same time, the man who had been working on the wheel pulled his pistol.

Ezra had been looking for trouble, so he was not caught off guard. He dove under the wagon and drew his own gun. The bandit with the pistol shot first, but missed; Ezra shot a close second and didn't miss. The man dropped, as good as dead, with a bullet through his gut.

One of the men in the wagon tried to find Ezra by looking through the cracks between the boards in the wagon bed while the other two bandits shot at the coach, nearly 100 yards away. There ensued a fruitless gun battle between the two men standing in the wagon and Beau on the driver's seat of the stage. Neither of the two men inside the stage could see to get a shot off.

Sean drew his carbine and started to swing wide around the coach in hopes of getting a shot at the bandits in the wagon when he got closer.

Meanwhile, Ezra had scooted toward the front of the wagon to be out of the line of fire. He knew where the bandits were, because he could see their shadows. He reloaded his expended cartridge and added a sixth to the cylinder; now, he was ready to challenge the bandits in the wagon. Ezra was grateful that he was using a Smith and Wesson, instead of a Colt, because it was so much faster to reload; the .44-40 didn't care which pistol fired it, it was just as deadly from either gun.

Ezra was able to see from the shadows that nobody was looking toward the front of the wagon, so he popped up and began shooting. He killed the man looking for him with a shot to the head and fatally wounded the other two bandits with shots to the chest.

Sean never got a shot off; the battle was over before he even arrived. Ezra reloaded to 5 bullets in the cylinder and holstered his gun. He mounted and rode back to the coach to hold a conference with the driver and guards.

Steve said, "Man, Ezra, that was slick! I ain't never seen nothin' like it!"

"Thanks, Steve. I was lucky! What're we goin' to do now?"

There were several suggestions, then Beau came up with, "Why don't we fix that there wheel and drive the wagon to the station ahead of the coach. Ezra kin drive the wagon an' we kin toss all the bodies in the wagon bed."

That was the best idea offered, so that was what they did. Ezra hitched his horse behind the wagon and drove to the relay station. They left the station agent to cope with the corpses, while they went toward the next station, this time with Sean riding point.

They had gone about half way to the next relay station when Sean waved at Steve to stop the coach. There was a tree limb in the road and Sean moved toward it to pull it out of the way with his rope. Just as Sean had dropped his loop over the limb, a fusillade erupted from the trees to the right of the coach.

Beau was wounded before he could react, but Steve pulled him to to the protection of the floor of the driver's box. Joe and George opened up from inside the coach and did a good job of holding off the bandits.

Sean pulled the limb out of the road and Steve whipped up the team. They ran as fast as possible for about two miles and stopped for Ezra and Sean to catch up. The two Rangers arrived just as Steve was finishing with his bandaging of Beau's wounded right arm. They decided that their best course of action was to rush to the next station as quickly as possible so that Beau could get any more doctoring that he might need. The agent's wife was a competent battlefield surgeon; she could do further cleaning and sewing on the wound.

Sean and Ezra's horses were tired from the just completed hard run, so they rode at a gentle lope toward the next station. As they got close to the station, they heard gunshots! "Shit! Now what?"

When they got to within sight of the station, they saw a regular attack on a defended position. There must be Army veterans on both sides of this conflict, since it looked like a textbook situation. The coach, without horses, was off to one side, out of the main firing line. The attackers were well placed behind walls and trees and the defenders were firing through loopholes in the windows and door.

Sean said, "They must have got the treasure box inside the station, otherwise the bandits would be gone by now."

"Yeah, this was the scheduled lunch stop, so they would have taken the chest with 'em when they went in to eat."

"I'm hungry. What cha say we put a stop to this sos we kin eat?"

"I'm with ya. Lead on!"

They dismounted out of sight of the attackers and sneaked up on the first one they saw. Ezra nodded to Sean, who was in a little better position, to take the first shot. Sean fired and wounded the bandit, but did not kill him; Ezra's follow up shot did! They tried to work their away along the bandits' skirmish line, picking off one man at a time. This worked for the first three bandits, but then they were seen.

Every bandit who could see their position, opened up on them. They fired until they emptied their Winchesters and drew their pistols. Ezra complained, "Much more of this and I'll run out of cartridges."

"We better pull back to our hosses an' restock." They fired a few shots from their pistols, picked up their carbines, and ran back to their horses. They both picked up their saddlebags with their spare ammunition and ran to a different firing position. "It looks to be nearly 20 of 'em. We better stick together or we could be in trouble."