Chapter 13

Amos and I finished our meal and then headed back out to the barn. I asked him if he had anything out of the man he was questioning yet.

"He's a tough nut and I may not get anything out of him. I'm at least going to make him wish he'd talked though. I'm thinking about taking off a hand and then promising to take off the other one and let him live," Amos said, and when he did I told him about what I'd done to the one who'd cut old Skinny with his sword.

"That's a good idea. I'll remind him of it in case he's heard the tale. Even if we don't get anything out of him I'm sure the others will tell all they know once they see his hand come flying out of the stall without him attached to it," Amos said.

I decided to saddle up the big horse and take a ride into town. When I headed for him Ben asked where I was off to and I told him.

"Let me get a couple of the men to go with you. I have four hired mostly for fighting help. Most of the men can handle themselves, but Tom, Brad, James, and Conroe were real fighters one time. They've all settled down now and got married, but they still know how to watch themselves and take care of business," he said, but just then the most God awful scream yet came out of the stall Amos was in with the tough guy.

Ben and I both looked that way and sure enough a hand came flying over the front wall just then. Hell, it hit one of the two naked ones we'd brought back out into the hall so they could hear the screaming well. He puked and then the one beside him did too.

"Ben, can any of them handle a normal bow, not a crossbow?"

"All of them can and they all say the same thing about them. They like a normal bow because they know they can have more than one shot with it," he said.

"See if you can get 'em to mount up and bring their bows and swords then. I'm going riding into town. We're not going to start any trouble, but I want to be able to finish any that does start."

Thirty minutes later we were mounted and headed away from the house. When we left I saw two men looking around down where we'd caught the cattle thieves. I was able to turn out of the drive and head their way seeming like I'd intended to go toward them all along. The two men had been down trying to examine sign, but they got their asses mounted right away.

I called for my men to spread out across the road as we approached, effectively making it impossible for the others to miss the fact we had them blocked in. They could wait on us to get there, leave in the other direction, or take out through the trees.

"Nock an arrow," I said to the ones with me as I stopped us about forty feet from the two.

"Y'all down here looking for the cattle thieves we killed last night?" I asked the other two men.

One of them might have had some sense, but the other was stupid plumb to the bone. He started trying to get his crossbow from where it was hanging off the back of his saddle. I went ahead and shot him in the upper thigh and the other one showed he might have good sense by raising his arms.

The arrow didn't make the one I'd shot fall off his horse, but it did make him yell and quit trying to get the crossbow.

"Y'all ride on up ahead of us and turn down the lane toward the place. If you try to run you'll just die with your horses tired," I said, and we split up to let them through.

They didn't give us any trouble and there were plenty of armed men waiting for them to help them down by the time we got back to the big barn.

I saw right away why the one I'd shot in the leg didn't fall off his horse then. The arrow had gone thru his leg and also thru the saddle below it. Luckily it hadn't gone all the way into his horse. One of my men had to cut the saddle away to get him loose.

Amos must have been through with his questioning, because he came out of the barn to see what I'd brought him. After we got them stripped off naked we walked them into the barn. They stopped short when they saw old lefty tied up to the front stall.

"My God, what have you done to Clem?" the one who was smart enough not to try anything asked, while the other one lost his last meal.

"Amos questioned him. Lucky for me I caught you two so quick. It's my turn now and Amos babies the ones he questions," I said, going into the stall and picking up the brazier, tongs, and the knife he'd been keeping red hot.

"You ain't got to do nothing like that to me mister. I's 'bout ready to leave Blanksdale's bunch anyway. I'll tell you everything I know without none of that."

"Me too mister, me too. I lost my head when you five come riding down the road and I've done learnt fighting ain't no good way to make a living. Blanksdale don't even pay much. If I live over the arrow in my leg without it getting 'fected I've done signed on for my last fighting job."

I knew they were probably telling the truth, for right now anyway. Old Clem was tied up to the stall's wall with his right hand gone and his balls swelled up like a couple of grapefruits. If Amos did use the tongs on them he couldn't get 'em around them now.

"Let's take 'em into the house, Jack. We can write down everything they say then. If it turns out they lied after we go visit we'll torture 'em after, and then we'll kill 'em," Amos said, and I knew he'd said the right thing.

I went in to talk to Bill about it and he was agreeable. He said there was a dining room they almost never used anyway and he thought it would be a good place. Amos and I went back out to the barn and rounded up every live prisoner we had, still naked, and marched them out by the back door. We had six men stand around them with swords at the ready and then we took them inside, one at a time, where Bill, Amos, and I interviewed them.

We didn't use torture this time, we were going to count on the threat of our raid not succeeding preying on their minds. We promised every one of them if the raid fell through we'd be back to hang them by the neck until dead. They didn't have a bit of trouble understanding what it meant.

I also noticed every one of them watching Bill carefully as he made drawings of what they explained and as he wrote down their words as they spoke them. It was obvious they knew what he was doing, but just as obvious they couldn't read a word of what he put down. They could understand the drawings, or most of them could anyway, and in fact three of the boys looked the drawings over and corrected mistakes Bill had made or been told.

It also seemed we got much more out of them than we'd expected, and I considered the fact we were writing it down to be a partial cause of it too. Bill sketched out a crude map of Blanksdale's whole operation. Most of it was inside his large brick home, but we even learned about a secret way inside. We learned where the male slaves were held, the females, and we even had one youngster who told us where the cockburners were kept.

This threw me for a few minutes and I asked him again if there were more than one there. He told me there were two in there now. He said there had been three, but one had been taken away three nights ago, but he didn't know where she'd been taken.

I at least knew someone who knew where she'd been taken - Blanksdale - and he was going to tell me in a couple of days - whether he had a hand, or foot, or penis left after he told it would be up to him.

We also learned another two wagon loads of slaves would be coming in within a few days, or one was supposed to be coming in then anyway. I decided to post lookouts on both sides of town every night until we saw the wagons had arrived and then we'd hit the place the next night.

The questioning took so long Kala had to hold supper on us. Or at least she saved us some. Every one else ate and the kids were even all in bed asleep before we got done. Finally we finished up with the last two I'd brought in. The one I hadn't had to shoot in the leg tried to lie at first.

"Well let me see here. Four boys told us where the cockburners were kept and they all said there'd been three until a few days ago when one was carried away in the night. Remember you ain't going a damned place until we take the place over and we'll be counting noses when we do.

"If I find cockburners over there after you told me there were none ... Let's just say your cock will be burning when we get back over here. It'll be cut off and cooking, then I'll make you watch our dog Skinny, gobble it down," I told him, and he spilled his guts fully and finally then.

We pulled in our horns the next day and let Blanksdale have his way with the road and the town. I split up Tom, Brad, James, and Conroe as sneekabout watchmen - alternating them in two shifts and putting them covering both ends of town.

Meanwhile I let Amos get to the business of teaching his charges to make decent saddles, throw ropes, and I even asked him to show them how to plait a decent bosal. When I learned he knew how to tie the hackamore reins and lead rope knot I asked him to try and teach them how to tie it too. He said he would and he also intended to teach them to plait ropes from the horses' mane and tail hairs.

Blanksdale and his main helpers really made it too easy on us. They had two bunkhouses, one for the youngest hands and another for the older ones. The youngsters were shut and locked in at night and we'd learned there was a lock from the outside on the older hand's bunkhouse too - it was left over from when the bunch had been first hired.

The wagon didn't show up for six nights, but it did show up. It had six girls in it and one was another Damsel. I had Ben let everybody who was going on the raid sleep in most of the day and on into the night if they could sleep.

We woke them around midnight, had a meal, and then we got ourselves armed and headed off on foot. Blanksdale didn't have any kind of fence anywhere. Me and the thirty men with me didn't have any trouble slipping up without making any noise. There were two guards to deal with, but of course they were sleeping and they woke up dead.