Chapter 4

I settled back into my routine and things went along their quiet way until fall came around. I had been on the job for 15 months, and I was well adjusted to the unsettled hours and moments of pure panic that went with this job. Mostly, though, living was pretty easy, as we all used to say. I spent most of my time being social with the merchants and other townsfolk, and taking care of the occasional fight in a saloon. I hadn't had any real dust up in about six months, so I expected something interesting to come along any time soon.

I sure didn't expect it in the form of Bob Newsome! There was a big rash of cattle rustling in our county, and the folks in Austin thought it might be connected to the rustling gangs located over in Mexico. They were over a hundred miles away, but the Mexican rustlers had been getting mighty bold, lately.

Harmony Junction was on the western side of the county, so we were the obvious place for rustling to concentrate if it really was the Mexicans doing the job. Bob said that he didn't think that it really was the Mexicans. He figured that it was Anglos just trying to divert suspicion by making it look like the Mexicans were doing it.

Whatever the reason, I was right happy to see Bob again, and he acted the same way about me. We usually ate supper together at the hotel restaurant whenever he was in town, which seemed to be most of the time. I asked him how his bosses in Austin were taking him spending so much time with me, and he said that they were all in favor of "building good relations with local law enforcement." We both laughed at that, but he said that my capture of the Copperhead Gang had really caught the attention of the people in Austin. He said that I had a good chance of being the first female Texas Ranger from the way some of them were talking! Well, now, I wasn't sure I wanted the job, but it was nice to be considered. Bob warned me not to hold my breath waiting for them to act.

Well, Bob was no slouch when it came to earning his pay. He went out every day investigating this and that, and he said that the more he worked on the case, the more he was convinced that the Mexicans had nothing to do with the rustling, at least in this county.

Then, one day, Bob seemed to disappear! He was gone for four days, and the next thing I knew, he came straggling into town half dead. He had a broken leg and a hand that was busted up pretty bad. He said that he had been chasing a galoot when he ran between two trees and was caught in the chest by a rope that knocked him out of the saddle.

His left leg, the one that was broken, had caught in the stirrup. He had been dragged for about 50 feet until his horse realized that something was wrong and had stopped running. He didn't know how he had smashed his left hand so bad, and it was probably just as well that he didn't remember. Anyway, he had taken a couple of hours of struggling before he could remount his horse from the wrong side.

He only managed to travel at a slow walk, which was why he took so long getting back to Harmony Junction. Yes, he knew that there were a couple of towns closer to where he was hurt, but he wanted to get to Harmony Junction so he could see me while he was laid up! Knowing how much it hurts to ride with a broken leg, I really appreciated his actions.

The first thing I did was to get him to his room in the hotel, and call the doctor to fix the broken bones. The upshot was that he was going to be in good shape with his leg, though he might have a slight limp. However, he was in big trouble with that left hand. He had smashed it up so badly in places that he was going to lose the function of his little finger and have only partial function in his ring finger. Well, that didn't make any difference to me, but it might make a lot of difference to the Rangers. Only time would tell.

Ten weeks later, Bob was finally up on his feet and walking, albeit with a cane. He was still very weak, so he spent as much time as he could walking and otherwise exercising to build up his strength and stamina.

Bob's left hand was a different story. He had regained complete motion in his thumb and first two fingers. His ring finger was freely movable, but had very little strength. Nobody had any way to know whether or not it would ever gain significant strength. His little finger was essentially useless. As a compromise, the doctor had shaped it in a curve which fit the forestock on my shotgun. I thought that this was a joke until Bob showed me how it helped him to hold the shotgun, even though his hand was still weak.

As a present to celebrate him being able to leave the bed, I bought him a lever-action shotgun just like mine. The damned thing was expensive, but I thought he deserved it, based on how much good my shotgun had done for me.

It was another four weeks before Bob could dispense with the cane, though, as expected, he did walk with a slight limp. His left leg was now a shade shorter than the right leg, but no self-respecting Texas man did much walking anyway! The slightly shorter leg had no effect on his riding, so it was pretty much nothing to worry about.

Bob felt that he had been so long without using his revolver that he practically needed to start over learning to draw. With that in mind, he thought that he would give my crossdraw style a try. He also got Mr. Schmidt to make him a modified S&W Schofield .45 revolver like mine. He planned to keep his .45 Colt on his right thigh as a decoy and a spare pistol if he needed one. Since most people kept their pistol on the right thigh, he figured that he would have an edge if his opponent was looking for motion toward the wrong pistol.

Both pistols could use the same ammunition, so Bob didn't have to worry about carrying two types of ammunition for his two pistols. The final question was what Bob was going to do for a rifle. He was going to have problems using a Henry which didn't have a forestock. Unfortunately, Winchester didn't make a rifle in .45 caliber, so he had to decide what he was going to do. Mr. Schmidt said that he could make Bob a .45 caliber modification to the .44-40 Winchester, but it wasn't going to be cheap. At nearly $100 for a rifle, Bob was going to have to do a lot of soul searching before he invested that much money.

I wished that I could get him the modified rifle, but I didn't have that kind of money. No marshal was ever going to get rich on his salary, so I was going to have to save for a long time to get that much free cash. For the first time, I began to regret the fact that a marshal couldn't collect on bounties.

The 14 weeks that I spent with Bob were the best I've experienced since John was killed. He and I spent a lot of time holding hands and staring into each other's eyes. By the end of the 14 weeks, we knew that we loved each other, and we wanted to get married. The question was in the mechanics. With Bob as a Ranger who traveled all over the state of Texas and me as a town marshal who never went anywhere, there was no way we were going to be able to spend much time together. That simply was not acceptable! We talked about it a lot and concluded that he would have to quit the Rangers.

Even if I quit my job, I still would have trouble traveling with Bob, so that was no solution. We wanted a home life, so we needed to figure out a way to make that work. Actually, the best solution, it seemed to us, was for Bob to become a marshal in some town and I would be a housewife. I was certain that I would not miss the "excitement and adventure" of being a town marshal, but it was hard to make enough money as a marshal.

What we needed was to make a stake some way, then settle down to a home in one place. We didn't think that going after gold or silver was a likely alternative, and we really wanted to stick to something that we knew. The solution came to Bob and me at almost exactly the same time: bounty hunting. We could use that to build up a stake, then we could "retire" to living in one place.

Well, I needed to give notice to the mayor and city council of Harmony Junction to let them find a replacement for me. Bob needed to see what he needed to do to resign from the Rangers without any hard feelings. I thought I needed to give Harmony Junction six months, but I don't know how much time Bob would need to settle with the Rangers.