Chapter 16

I shouted to my deputies, "THE BROTHERHOOD IS ATTACKIN' IN FORCE. I'D BE OBLIGED TA ANY OF Y'ALL WHO ARE WILLIN' TA STAY AN' HE'P FIGHT, BUT I'LL UNDERSTAND IF ANY OF Y'ALL WANT TA LEAVE. IF YA DO LEAVE, YA BETTER DO IT IN A HURRY, CUZ YA ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES TA GIT AWAY!" I was delighted to see that nobody wanted to leave!

I sent one of the hands to ring the alarm bell, and Juan rounded up all of the women and children and sent them to the main house. I told Juan to take 8 men and go defend the stable; I would take the defense of the main house. I asked 3 of my deputies to go with Juan, and to obey his orders. He knew what I had in mind. They ran to git their weapons and ammunition and to hurry to the stable.

Meanwhile, the rest of us ran to the main house and took up places at various windows, both downstairs and upstairs. The women remembered what to do; they grabbed their shotguns and ammunition, and ran to their same positions from when we were attacked the last time. I sent my deputies to the upstairs windows, thinking that their experience in fighting would better let them take advantage of the opportunity for plunging fire.

We still had a few minutes, so I reminded the women to shoot the horses if the attackers started riding around the house shooting at us from horseback. I hoped that they would use that foolish tactic again this time. Then I heard a shout from upstairs, "HERE THEY COME!"

The initial attack was that same tactic of riding around the house as fast as they could, shooting at the windows with their pistols and hoping to score a hit. This played into our hands like nothing else. The women used their shotguns to good advantage, wounding and killing both men and horses. Added to this, the men in the upper windows fired down on the riders, who were at a serious disadvantage as they tried to aim upward at the second story windows.

On top of this, the attackers had no idea that we had shooters in the stable, so that when they rode between the stable and the house, they were caught in a withering cross fire. I have never heard of such an incompetently led attack since some of the stupidities of the recent Yankee invasion of the South. I guess that it was more the case of amateurs trying to be generals!

I will say this for them: they were fast learners. It didn't take long for them to get off their horses and take cover. We had reduced their number to something like 35 men by this time, so we were getting down to being more evenly matched. And when we were evenly matched, I knew that we would win. It might take more than one day, but we would win!

Juanita was busy patching up the minor wounds taken by our people. These wounds were exclusively from wooden splinters thrown about by the bullets impacting the walls of the house. Most of the attackers were using black powder, so their bullets simply didn't have the penetrating power they would have had with smokeless powder. As a result, the thick walls of our house were stopping most of the bullets, though a few were coming, uninhibited, through the open windows.

I couldn't tell any detail of what was happening in the stable, but I had confidence that Juan could hold up his end of the battle. I couldn't see much fire from the stable because our crossfire had completely wiped out any of the enemy foolish enough to try to take cover between us. I was able to reduce my forces on that side of the house down to one woman whose main duty was to sing out if she saw any of the enemy trying to sneak in there.

Meanwhile, since there wasn't enough cover close to the house to hold all of the enemy, they had retreated to where the cover was. The result was that most of the enemy were out of effective range of pistols and shotguns. Most of the firing was now coming from the upstairs windows where the men had switched to rifles. They were now sniping at targets of opportunity presented as the enemy moved around and occasionally tried to get a shot off at us.

We were confined to the house and stable, but the attackers were now the ones trapped! They could keep us bottled up in the house, but that's all they could accomplish. On the other hand, they couldn't attack us because we would mow them down with our shotguns if they tried to cross the open ground to get to the house. Furthermore, any one of them who tried to back away from his cover was sure to draw a bullet from a rifleman in an upstairs window, maybe even more than one bullet.