Chapter 15

Even though Fire Bringer and Shadow had subdued the major hate groups, they were unable to do much to control the actions of individuals. Negroes were still casually persecuted by many people who didn't even realize what they were doing. Often, what they did was simply a case of unconscious habit—they were treating Negroes the same way they had done when these people were slaves, and skin color overrode everything else. It was a damned stupid way to act, but all people are like that.

The two heroes now took on the problem of the scam artists and the profiteers. Usually, these people took advantage of the locals by buying up property at much less than its actual value. Delinquent tax auctions were the most common places for these people to make their presence known. The auctions were held in public places with plenty of notice, so there was no problem with these people finding the next site of an auction. Cash was very hard to come by at this time, between the nearly complete collapse of the Southern economy and the financial panics running rampant throughout the country.

In order to buy property at a tax auction, you had to pay the full price you bid in cash at the time of the sale. Only the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags had the kind of cash needed to make a purchase, so they had little or no competition for the choice properties. Normally, these were county taxes that were delinquent, so the sheriff was in charge of the auction, and he was often paid off by the speculators. He would stop the bidding as soon as the legal requirements were met by the bid, and not give anyone else a chance to bid, biasing the sale heavily toward his "friends."

Fire Bringer had access to enough hard cash to buy every farm and ranch that came up for auction, and he and Shadow set out to foil the crooks by furnishing money to the legitimate owners so that they could buy their own property back at the auction. It was easy to find out what the bid had to be, and they gave the hard pressed owners of the property 125% of the minimum money that they would need to insure that they were the ones with the winning bid.

Sometimes, they had to convince a sheriff or other official that it just was not smart to try to run an auction in an unfair manner. They made a point of having one or both of them observing an auction held by a sheriff known to be on the take. If the sheriff started to cheat, they simply shut off his air supply so that he could not speak. This usually distracted him enough that an honest bid could be entered. No official was ever actually suffocated by this little ploy, but a few came very damned close to it. It usually didn't take long for the sheriff to realize that it was his shady dealing that was causing his breathing problem, so most quit trying after three or four shots of no air. It took them almost six months to get this operation going all over the South, but the number of grifters getting rich over the misfortunes of others was sharply cut, though never completely eliminated.

Shit! While Fire Bringer was working on other things, the white slavery traffic picked up again. Girls, and a few boys, were being kidnapped and sold as sex slaves to brothels, mostly in Mexico, but some in the USA. Fire Bringer found out about this somewhat by accident: his danger signal was tripped by a case in Tucson. An effort was made to kidnap twin 9-year-old girls and the whole operation was botched at the first moment.

The two girls were sleeping in their ground-floor room in a poorer part of town. Two rather stupid men had been hired as temporary help by a regular participant in the sex slave trade. Their first mistake was in making too much noise in breaking into the house through the girls' bedroom window. This woke the girls, but the men tried to go through with the kidnapping, anyway. The noise attracted the girls' mother, who came to investigate. One of the inexperienced men panicked and shot the woman dead. Her husband heard the shot and ran to her aid, taking his shotgun with him. He managed to get off one shot, killing the man who had killed his wife, but getting fatally shot by the pro.

The two girls reacted with a tremendous blast of fear that woke Fire Bringer and Shadow. They recognized trouble and TPed to the site without bothering to dress—their costumes would serve the requirements of modesty. They arrived as the father was falling to the floor, beyond help and dying. Fire Bringer froze the two remaining kidnappers in place with TK and left to search the house for the other child. He found the 4-year-old brother in another bedroom, quailing in fear and hiding under the covers. Meanwhile, Shadow had been busy comforting the girls.

Fire Bringer pushed the two kidnappers into his poke, as he was now calling his special storage compartment, for safe keeping. He and Shadow scanned the girls' minds to try to find someone to take them in, but there wasn't anybody. This looked like another set of orphans for them to adopt. They went through the house collecting anything of value or that the children might later want; when that was done, they TPed back to the ranch with the children and the two corpses.

Juanita was awakened and informed that she now had three more "grandchildren." Juanita was somewhat taken aback by the news, but recovered quickly and found beds for the children. The next morning, a small funeral was held and the parents were buried in the small cemetery on the ranch.

Now that five children had been dumped into her lap, Juanita was becoming overloaded with work; simply put, she needed help. The three adults held a meeting to discuss the situation. Juanita opened with, "I love the children, but I am only one person, and I am getting old and a bit stiff. And knowing you two, these are not the last children y'all will want to help. Frankly, y'all need to admit that you have started an orphanage, and an orphanage needs a staff. I can be the supervisor, but we need at least one more worker right now, and we will need one worker for every five children. I'd like to see that at three children, but I doubt that would be physically possible without a much larger house."

"Juanita, I can see your point, but where would we find somebody we could trust? Anybody who helped take care of the children would have to live here, and anybody who lived here would soon find out about Shadow and me."

"How about one of those girls you rescued from the brothels a few years ago and had to stash in a convent because there was no other place for her. Maybe, one of them would be willing to help mother the children?"

"That's a great idea. I'll start checking on them, today. Surely, one of them is sick of convent life. Maybe we'll be lucky."

Fire Bringer that day visited the convents that had taken in the girls, and found that one of them would love to escape the somewhat stifling life in a convent. That was how Helena joined the staff of the Flying M Orphanage. Helena was a nice enough looking girl, but no raving beauty. On the other hand, her former "employers" couldn't have cared less, because how many customers of a whore look above her tits. Helena had never gotten that far in the business, since she had been 11 years old and none of her customers ever looked above her crotch. Fire Bringer could never express how glad he was to have rescued her from that fate, and Helena could never tire of telling him how much she appreciated what he had done. Naturally, this only served to reinforce his hatred of the sex slavery business.