Chapter 7

About 10:20 PM, Saul showed up with 6 more men, all wanting to be part of the posse going after Lubbock. Caleb swore them in, and they planned their attack. They now had 10 men so they decided to hit the 5 sentry posts all at the same time. Caleb and Jess Wilkerson would go after the sentry on the front veranda, and the rest would pair up to hit the other sentry posts. Caleb left them to sort themselves out while he and Jess went after the man at the house. They wanted to keep their various attacks as quiet as possible so as not to alert any guards prematurely. All of these men had some experience fighting Indians, so Caleb hoped for the best.

Caleb and Jess approached the house from the left rear quarter, as far as they could manage away from the two nearest sentry posts. They managed to get right up to the corner of the house without being seen, so they split up there and each one went around the house, staying as close to the side of the house as they could. Caleb sent Jess to make the longer trip so that he could be sure that Jess would not attack too soon. The guard was sitting on the step in front of the house, smoking a cigar and relaxing. Both men hoped to sneak up quietly and attack with their bowie knives; they wanted to avoid alerting those inside the house with the sound of a pistol shot.

Sneaking up was difficult because of the brightness of the moon. A few clouds would occasionally obscure the moon enough to drop the light level to less than half its maximum intensity, and Caleb hoped that they could time their attack for just such an event. The two men got lucky as a relatively large cloud floated into the right position and dimmed the light significantly. Caleb and Jess had managed to get quite close by now, and they both rushed to the attack.

The guard heard them approaching, but suffered a moment of indecision as to which way to defend, first. This hesitation was all the two lawmen needed to close with the guard and cut his throat before he could shout a warning. Caleb and Jess nearly cut each other, they were so anxious to eliminate the guard before he could make any noise, but neither one was hurt, though it was a close thing. They dragged the guard to one side and went quietly up on the veranda where they waited for the others to join them.

It took nearly 30 minutes for the last pair of lawmen to show up, but they had all been successful in eliminating the guards without making any noise. The front door was unlocked, so the men were able to enter the house without hindrance. They had already removed their spurs and any thing else that might jingle and give them away, so they were ready to sneak in as soon as the way was clear.

The front door opened onto a long hall that ran the length of the house; it looked like the house had started out as a "shotgun" cabin and had been added onto as the need arose. There was only one storey, so they didn't have to worry about being surprised by somebody stumbling onto them from another floor.

They could see light showing from under the door of a room near the back of the house, and they assumed that was where Lubbock was hiding. They were certain that there would be only one man in the room with Lubbock, so they approached his door with considerable confidence. Every man had his pistol drawn and at full cock when they burst into the room.

Inside the room, there was a bed with a man lying on it and a rocking chair beside a table with a kerosene lamp turned low. A man was sitting, dozing, in the chair with a shotgun lying across his lap. He was slow to react when the posse burst into the room and was easily shot when he tried to raise his shotgun. The man had no chance as 4 or 5 bullets plowed into his chest at about the same time.

The man lying on the bed only moved a little bit at the tremendous crash of gunshots. He was lying on his belly, naked, with a nasty looking wound in his left ass cheek. The bullet must have tumbled as it passed through the muscles and flesh, because there was only a small entry wound, but a massive chunk of meat was missing where the exit wound might have been. The whole area looked like gangrene had set in, and the infected area was too high to fix by amputation. In essence, the man on the bed was already dead, his body just didn't know it, yet.

Three of the men of the posse verified that Lubbock was the man on the bed. Caleb had seen enough wounds infected by gangrene during his time in the Army and, particularly, in the POW camp to have a pretty good idea that the gangrene had progressed far enough that the victim was going to be lucky enough to die within two days. There was an outside chance that he would be unlucky enough to live 3 more days. The whole posse agreed that this was a fitting end for Lubbock after all of the pain and trouble he had caused around the county.

The men of the posse decided to wait until daylight before returning to Colter City, so Jess and Sam retrieved the horses and put them in the corral while the rest of the men relaxed and some of them dozed. Caleb and Jake remained awake and on watch for unpleasant surprises, but all the others slept the couple of hours until dawn.

Eight men came riding up to the house just as the sun showed itself. These were the relief guards for the day shift and the last remaining men of Lubbock's band. They had spent the night in Colter City, and more than one was nursing a beer hangover. What was the shit they put in the beer to make the next day so godawful?

One or two of the men wondered why they had not been challenged when they rode up, but decided that they had been recognized by the sentry who was too sleepy to make an issue out of it. They knew that there was a problem when they spotted more than 6 horses in the corral and got ready for trouble.

Caleb and Jake had seen them ride into the back yard, and Caleb tried to preempt the action by calling for the riders to surrender to the posse. Without giving the matter any thought, the riders pulled their pistols and began shooting at the house. This was foolish, but typical of the reaction of this type of individual. Caleb and Jake shot back, while the rest of the posse stationed themselves at windows and also began to shoot.

There were a lot of bullets flying, but none hitting during the first few minutes of the battle. The renegades were outnumbered 10 to 8, but this meant little at this stage of the battle. Luckily for the posse, their rifles had been brought in when the horses were turned loose in the corral, so they were well armed, mostly with Henry repeating rifles. The renegades also had Henrys, so the two sides were equal that way, too.

The renegades rushed to surround the house, though they would have been better served if they had charged immediately before the posse had a chance to get set. There followed a gun battle which raged on for about 2 hours, until both sides began to run low on ammunition. Both sides realized that neither side could win the fight if it continued as it was presently going, but neither side could come up with a good alternative.

There was some thought among the renegades that they might set fire to the house and force the lawmen to expose themselves as they tried to escape the fire, but some clear thinker reminded them that their leader, Lubbock, was still inside and in no condition to escape on his own. That quenched the thought of fire among the attackers.

The defenders thought of trying to draw the attackers to one side of the house while one or more lawmen slipped out through the other side of the house and attacked the renegades from the rear. Since nobody could come up with any better suggestions, they tried out this ruse. Sam and Avril placed themselves near the front door while everybody else began firing at the renegades on the back side of the house.

This sudden increase in shooting on the back side of the house drew all of the attackers to what appeared to be a major effort by the defenders to escape. The shooting had been going on about 5 minutes when Sam and Avril dashed out of the front door and into hiding in some bushes about 260 feet from the house. The wild shooting at the rear of the house calmed down before the ammunition store got too low, and the fight shifted back to people taking pot-shots at each other as the opportunity arose, or seemed to.