Chapter 11

Giving up that horseback riding has made a real difference in my life! I'm knocked up, again. Billy is only two years old, and I have to start thinking about what to do for a second kid. Our combined income of $100 per month is holding us pretty good right now, but I wonder what it will do for a couple with two children.

To complicate matters, Bob and I have had a real scare. We were breaking up a bar fight last night, and I didn't get out of the way of a swinging bowie knife fast enough. That damned knife blade caught me in my left arm pretty deeply, but not enough to do permanent damage. It was on the backswing, and only the first recurved part of the blade was sharp. It dragged a bit before cutting me, which was damned lucky. If it had been the full cutting edge the full length of the blade, I would probably have lost my arm!

Bob went berserk when he saw the galoot try to cut me that way and started shooting. Bob put five bullets into the knife wielder's chest and would have put in more if he hadn't emptied his gun. As it was, he started to reload and shoot some more, but Omar stopped him before he had a chance to shoot any more.

My arm hurt like hell, and the doctor had to sew me up after washing out the wound with some of that vile rotgut whiskey. That was the first time I ever got any good from whiskey, and it had to be wasted on my arm. I was in considerable pain, but I was afraid to take any laudanum, since I didn't want to hurt the baby.

Omar calmed Bob down enough to help get me home and into bed. The only thing for me to do was to stay in bed as much as possible and drink willow bark tea. God, I began to hate the taste of that stuff!

Fortunately, I healed fast, so there was not many days that I had to stay on my back in the bed, but that did it for me as a Deputy Marshal. Bob fired me that first night and threatened to quit, himself, if I gave him any noise about it. Well, that dropped us back to $60 per month income, but we did have our big bank account if we really got pinched. I thought that we could get by with that, especially since we had a place to live that didn't cost us nothing.

I still acted like a sort of assistant deputy and ran the jail for Bob and Omar, but the work load picked up for them as Eagle Pass continued to grow. Bob wrote to the Ranger headquarters in Austin about hiring another retiring Ranger, if there was one what wanted the job, but there wasn't nobody available at the moment.

Well, in due time, I had the baby, a girl this time, and we were all real happy. I was, especially, because the labor ran only six hours and didn't hurt nearly as much as the first time. Bob said that I was just improving with practice, and it would be easy by the time I got to 15 kids. That statement might have got him shot if I didn't love him so much and know that he was just teasing me.

I named the baby, Mary Ann, after our mothers, and figured that we would call her that. The name just rolled off our tongues, so we stuck with it. I nursed Mary Ann just the way I had Billy, but I did have a mite of trouble holding her with my left arm unless I was sitting down. I guess that cut to my arm muscle was worse than I had thought at first.

Things went along pretty well for the next year, especially after Bob was able to find a new deputy. He was an ex-Ranger, too, and was named Abner Snodgrass. He was a nice fellow, much like Omar, but just not a family-member type. Omar stayed at the jail in his familiar cell, but Abner found himself a room and board in town. He had a little money saved up, so his $40 per month and his savings kept him in good stead.

Business in Eagle Pass had grown over the last five years, and we now had six saloons and a bordello, all of which stayed open 24 hours, seven days a week. This meant that Bob needed a new deputy to keep up with the work load, so he was back at the Rangers, looking for one. He hired one, but the man didn't work out. He missed the Rangers and took to drink, and there was no way that Bob would tolerate a drunk deputy.

That's when a young fellow showed up in town. He was a down-on-his-luck bounty hunter and looking for a job to hold him until he could get back on his feet. Well, Ed Harvey seemed like a good man, so Bob hired him. He took to marshaling right off, and soon became the head man on the night shift. He and Abner worked the 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM shift, while Bob and Omar took the day shift.

Bob had been Marshal at Eagle Pass for nine years when his luck finally ran out, or seemed to. There was a bank robbery in broad daylight, something we hadn't seen in Eagle Pass in years. Five robbers hit the largest bank in town and stole $17,000 dollars in gold, silver, and paper. Nobody could really figure out why they took the paper, but they were just greedy, I guess.

They killed the teller and wounded a patron during the robbery. All of the gunfire attracted a lot of attention, and Bob was there real quick-like to try to break up the robbery. His new deputy, Jimmy Jones, showed up a minute later and got involved in the gunfight in front of the bank.

Several of the townsfolk joined in to form an impromptu posse and helped to fight the bank robbers. As soon as the bank robbers ran out the front door, somebody on the inside of the bank alertly slammed and barred the door so that the robbers were kind of trapped on the sidewalk in front of the bank. Once the dust up started, the sixth robber they had left outside to hold the horses panicked and rode away, hell for leather, leaving the horses standing somewhat in the line of fire. Well, those horses must of had more sense than most, because they ran away as soon as they had the chance.

This meant that the robbers were stuck, crouched behind two watering troughs with no choice but to fight and lose, or give up and be hanged. Hell, with a choice like that, I am sure that I would have fought, too. The shooting went on for over 20 minutes with both sides well protected by those troughs of water. Finally, both sides began to run out of ammunition, but the people of the town had no trouble restocking, while the bandits were out of luck.

A couple of times, Bob called for the bandits to surrender, but they wouldn't do that. There was a general store just across the street and down two places that was full of ammunition, so the robbers tried to get there. They must have figured that they could restock their ammunition there and steal some horses for a getaway by ducking out the back door into the alley.