Chapter 3

I wrapped the gold in some heavy cloth and put it in the two pouches of my saddle bag. That much gold came close to 35 pounds, and that's a lot of dead weight to put on a horse. I had to find a bank that I could trust to keep the gold for me. It seemed to me that the most likely place would be in Austin, so I headed that way right off.

It took three weeks to get to Austin, and I spent another three weeks checking out different banks. I finally found one. It was recommended by a bartender I knew from the time we was in the Army—he said that he had his money deposited there and hadn't had no trouble with them. Well, that was the best recommendation I'd heard so far, so I put my money in that bank. My horse and I both welcomed the weight loss. Now I felt free again—free from a lot of worry.

I picked up a new set of wanted posters before I left town. For no good reason, I headed off toward the Red River and Indian Territory. I didn't care if I never made it to either one, I was just headed in that general direction. The word was that a lot of the valuable heads had moved to the Indian Territory because Texas law couldn't touch them up there. Of course, that didn't count for bounty hunters.

It was late that first afternoon out of Austin, and I was feeling like it sure was time to stop for the night. I could tell that my horse was agreeing with me. My concentration had wavered, and that's why I was caught less than full alert when the road agent showed up. He'd caught me dead-to-rights and I was going to be pushing up daisies unless I was damned lucky.

The damned fool rode up pretty close to me before he stopped and demanded my money. Well, there wasn't much I could do at that point, so I jammed my spurs into my horse and rode him straight at the bandit. That must have been the last thing the road agent expected, because he didn't shoot. Instead, he tried to haul his horse to one side out of the way. Well, I wasn't distracted, let me tell you. I whipped out my revolver and pumped two bullets into that idiot's chest. Lucky for me, the one bullet he did get off went over my head.

The bandit fell to the ground, and he broke his neck when he fell. I could hear the bones break. I kept an eye out for a second bandit, just in case, but I didn't see nobody. I went through the dead man's pockets and checked him for a moneybelt. He had $57.52 on him in gold and silver. I didn't pay no attention to the paper, since that was usually discounted so heavily. He wasn't on one of my posters, so I left him lying aside the road, but I did take his boots and hat, both of which looked fairly new. His guns, tack, and horse was worth something, though, and I did take them.

Not much farther on, I came to one of them combination places at a crossroads, so that's where my horses and I spent the night. I was too tired to spend much time in the saloon, so I did get a good night's sleep that night. The next morning, before leaving the place, I did sell the stuff I had gotten from the road agent. I didn't get what I would have if I had held on 'til I got to a decent size town, but I did get enough to make it worth while, so I just settled for what I could get.

Nothing much happened for the next three days, so I stopped in a fair sized town, must of been all of 450 souls living there. The town had three saloons, so I figured that something interesting might happen there if I gave it a chance. I visited all three of them saloons and asked the usual questions about strangers and such. There was no help there, but there was a likely looking poker game going on in one of them, so I joined in when a place opened up.

This seemed to be an honest game, and I had a good time. Over about four hours, I lost near $15, but the money was scattered around among all of the other gents in the game, so I didn't feel cheated. It was pushing midnight when I left the game, but it was still going strong even then. I went to my hotel room and slept like a baby, except for keeping a gun in one hand and the other one under my pillow.

After breakfast, I wandered back to that saloon where I'd played poker the previous night, and I wasn't too surprised to see the poker game still going on. Well, I don't know if you could say that it was the same game, but they was using the same table. I don't usually let that kind of detail bother me, so I just called it the same game. I even sat in on it for about 5 hours and won $22. I felt like I had just recovered what I had lost the previous night, plus a little bit more to make it worth my while.

Conversation naturally wanders from subject to subject among a group of men over this long a time, and it finally turned to a discussion of the rash of kidnappings that had been troubling the community. All of the victims was children under 10 years old, and most of them was girls, though there had been a few boys taken. The crazy thing was that there was no ransom demands. The speculation was that the children was being kidnapped and sold to whore houses as sex slaves.

Now that really grabbed me in the gut and twisted something fierce! I hate the idea of sex slaves, and most especially, I hate it when children are involved. I pressed for information and got a surprising amount of facts scattered in among the bull shit. Well, I began to stew about that, and my poker playing interest dropped to zero. I excused myself from the game and went to my hotel room to try to stock up on my sleep. I planned to do something about them kidnappings, starting first thing in the morning.

I had the name of the family what had the latest kidnapping, so I rode out to see them in hopes of getting some sort of clues to start out my search. When I got to the Rocking K ranch, I looked up Abe Kilgore, the owner and the father of the girl what was kidnapped eight days ago.

I explained to Kilgore what I wanted, and he practically fell all over me when he realized that I hoped to rescue his daughter. He told me all he knew about the kidnapping, and asked me to talk to his wife, Anne, about it. Maybe she could tell me something that I hadn't yet heard. They invited me to supper, and I met the rest of the family. We was talking about the kidnapping when Andy, a son, pipped up with the fact that there was three men what did the kidnapping, and the leader was wearing all black clothes.

When pressed about why he had not mentioned this before now, Andy admitted that he had snuck out of the house to visit the daughter of a cowhand, and he had been afraid to mention it. However, he couldn't hold back the information now, no matter how much trouble he got into, because somebody was actually going to try to find Mary Sue's kidnappers. Andy was forgiven, and I pressed him for as much as he could tell me about the kidnappers.

He did come up with the news that one of the kidnappers rode an Appaloosa, a very uncommon horse for this area. As best that he could tell in the dark of night, the other two horses appeared to be sorrels, but one had four white stockings. The man in black rode the horse what was all one color.

Andy didn't see the men 'til they was riding off, so he couldn't do much more for a description, but that was enough information to get me started. I spent the night at the Rocking K and rode into town the next morning. I started out my search by visiting the saloons and asking if anybody knew of an Appaloosa around town.

The bartender of the Lucky Peso knew of one Appaloosa, and it was ridden by a yahoo named Bob Smith. He couldn't tell me much about Smith, except that he didn't seem to hold a steady job, but he always had enough money for beer and an occasional poker game. He said that he hadn't seen Smith for about a week, but that happened every once in a while, so he hadn't thought nothing of it.

I also asked him about a man habitually dressed in black and riding a sorrel horse without no markings of any sort. The bartender opined that could be Jasper House, but he wasn't too sure about that. He did say that a couple of times he had seen Bob Smith and Jasper House come in together. Both times, Henry Young had been with them, for whatever that might be worth.