“Who sent you after me?” he asked, slowly moving towards the bedposts on Miss Antoinette’s fancy canopy bed, where he had hung up his gun belt before their tryst.
“My uncle. The governor of this here territory. Now, I can see you’re eyeing that gun.” she nodded at him, giving him her fierce look. It was better to warn him first before she blew his knee or brains out with a single shot. “Don’t think you are going to be faster than me. I can guarantee you a date with a pine box if you reach for it.”
“You would be far from the first man I’ve sent to the Grim Reaper, Clay!” she continued yelling when she noticed that he wasn’t listening to her. “From the day, I killed my first man at a crooked poker game on the Philadelphia waterfront, I think I’ve lost count. So, don’t!”
Clay Travers still wasn’t listening. He was getting closer to the gun every passing second.
“Well, one of them men that I’ve killed was a teller in Baxter Creek. He had a gun underneath his station. Thought he was quick on the draw too. His widow would disagree.”
Cassandra warned again, “Don’t try me, Clay. It’d be the last mistake you ever make. Allan Pinkerton himself was one of the folks that trained me.”
“Smith and Wesson both could have trained you, but it ain’t gonna ma …”
Strikingly like a snake, he went for his gun and even managed to get his fingers around the handle, but her gun roared in protest. Three nicely placed shots stitched his chest and sent him flying backwards and out the window before he could breathe his last. Cassandra cursed under her breath as screams instantly erupted from the street below, hating it that she couldn’t eventually avoid the fuss.
She quickly wrapped herself in a sheet and went to the window to make damn sure that his lifeless body was in the mud. A crowd had gathered around him too and some were staring up at the height at which his body had come careening down from.
“It’s okay, folks. That’s … that right there was Clay Travers. Someone get the sheriff!” Cassandra said, trying to calm them all down.
“I’ll be down to meet him shortly,” she instructed. “Oh, and you best get an undertaker over here, too, and he better bring his measuring tape!” she called out as she finally turned away from the sight of the gathering crowd that included a few swooning women.
Cassandra was not sure if it was the sight of a dead body or the killer’s nakedness that was felling the fine ladies of McClatchy Bluff.
*****
The scene downstairs had suddenly become intense. A few men and women hurried out to join the crowd outside, wondering why a dead naked man was in the middle of the street.
The three men that Cassandra had noticed earlier sprung to their feet immediately, though, as soon as they discovered the cause of the chaos outside the whorehouse. The always-watchful one, a six-foot-tall man with gray moustache, was the first to notice that the three women nearby had lunged to their feet as well. All three women stood unmoving, while their hooded faces fixated on the men.
While the rest of the gang began to prepare themselves to hurry up the stairs and catch up with the assassin that had done away with their boss, the watchful one slowly began to move his hand towards the knife he, like the other two men, kept strapped to his waist.
Something just wasn’t right about the women. He had originally dismissed them as some type of religious order based on their cloaks, Mormons or Quakers or another one of those sects he knew nothing about. Only now did he realize such women would unlikely to be found anywhere near a saloon. Especially one featuring a whorehouse.
“I wouldn’t bother climbing the stairs, hombres!” one of the women yelled, making sure that her imposing voice got to all three of them.
The other men paused in their steps, joining the third with a bewildered stare. For a moment, the trio of bandits gazed at the women, wondering why each of them seemed so confident and intimidating. When the women finally moved, two reached for their hoods, revealing their faces, while the short one in the middle stepped forward and did the same too. She apparently was the one that yelled at them earlier. All three let their cloaks fall to the floor revealing them all to be armed with gun belts. Two of them were clad in denim and the third wore a brightly colored dress but that was far from the only distinction … very far.
“I will break it down for you,” she continued with a grimace. “No one has to get hurt if you “gentlemen” just step away from the stairs, hurry along out of the bar, and let the hot breeze ferry you off until you’re just a bad memory.” Her hand was resting on the head of what appeared to be a twelve-inch blacksmith’s hammer hooked on to the opposite side of her gun belt.
All three men stared at them for another few seconds, exchanging blank glances. It was obvious that her suggestion sounded ridiculous to them. The cautious one among them took an especially long stare at the woman speaking, taking in her Asian look—long black hair framing a narrow face, brown eyes, and lush thin lips. Going lower he took in her well-endowed breasts hanging above her tapered waist that widened into curvy hips giving her petite body an hourglass shape.
The other women looked totally different from her. In fact, the trio was a different breed of races altogether. One of them had ringlets of shoulder length curly black hair, creamy mocha skin with hazel eyes that made her look unquestionably mulatto. Like them a knife rested on her waist. The third one was Mexican. With a bullwhip cinched to her hip, she was shorter than the mulatto, but taller than the Oriental, with wavy black hair, brown eyes, and a marvelous shape that often walked the streets. Truly, their remarkable bodies with their figure eight look to them was the only thing the three women seemed to have in common.
“And what if we don’t?” one of the men finally asked, grinning mockingly.
“Well, let’s just say things might really get ugly, really quick!” the Asian grinned back.
One of the men stepped forward, trying to prove that he was unafraid of them. The other two, including the one with the moustache, stayed rooted behind him, having their fingers slowly reaching for the hilts of their knives, while their eyes glared with anxiety and bits of fear.
“You men sure you wanna do this?” The Mexican interrupted the building tension with a raise of an eyebrow and a voice that despite its mirthful tone, warned the men again of the looming danger if they didn’t heed their advice.
“Perhaps we got started off here on the wrong foot,” the mulatto woman said, speaking for the first time, attempting to calm everyone. “A brief introduction would do. I’m Honor Elizabeth Wilde, and my sisters here, Lijuan, Catalina, and the beauty upstairs, Cassandra, have come here to collect a bounty.”
The Asian’s eyes trailed to the crowd that could be seen through the window and she shook her head haughtily. “As it is, I guess the bounty will have to be carted to the governor as a dead body.” Lijuan sneered. Her words antagonizing the men as Honor shot her a frustrated look as all three of them stepped forward at the same time, grunting like rabid wolves.
“Your ugly mugs might not be on wanted posters in this town but I just bet there is one or two in other towns from here to Texas.” the Mexican insulted while laughing. “You best take this opportunity to skedaddle while you still can.”
“Uninjured.” Honor said.
“Or better yet for you … still breathing.” Lijuan finished, her hand now slipping to the handle of her hammer.
The women’s words served only to taunt the men. Their last words were to warn them for the final time that they had no intention to hurt them unless one of them forced their hands. The desperados however were having none of it.
“How about you witches shut up?”
Everything happened fast. The mustached one among them reached for his knife and hadn’t even taken two steps towards the women before the small blacksmith’s hammer came flying towards him. The weapon knocked off his ten-gallon hat, while the surprise of the attack stunned him a little. He stepped back, feeling lightheaded and watched as the Mexican drew
out the bullwhip while his partners yanked out their knives.
Catalina, the Mexican, whirled her bullwhip around and snapped off the hat of the first man that had advanced forward earlier. He stepped back, the knife in his hand dropping to the saloon’s floor with a metallic clinking sound. The third man was disarmed by Honor Elizabeth, the colored sister, who swiftly reached for her own much larger knife in the sheath that hugged her waist, and sent it flying at him. The sharp blade missed the side of his head by less than an inch and set his body to shaking.
The mustached man found himself unable to move for a while. Lijuan, the Asian, had been so swift with her hammer he was still stunned by it. She gave him a cocky look as he blinked at all three of them.
“We coulda done this the easy way!” Catalina, who was also grinning at them now, said. “Just like we could have used our weapons an inch or two lower than we used them on you and done you all some real harm!”
The man with the mustache was seriously rethinking the whole affair, but he along with the other men were too proud to quit in the face of women no matter how surprising they had been thus far. There was one way to put a stop to this sideshow instantly and one of the men went for it.
“I don’t care if ya’ll witches are women. This ends now!” one of them yelled before drawing his gun.
The women as always were swift with action. Honor and Lijuan glanced at each other only for a second before uniformly reaching for the edges of the nearest table and flipping it over, knocking the first two men underneath it. Catalina, lashed out with her whip and snapped the gun out of the third man’s hands. She quickly cracked the whip again, making sure that it slashed across his face this time around. The outlaw staggered backward, hitting his ass on the floor as sharp pain obviously accompanied the pale straight line that the whip had left on his face.
It wasn’t over yet, though.
The bar suddenly echoed with gunshots as the mustached man began to shoot holes from beneath a table, hoping to get a lucky shot at one of the sisters. Lijuan and Honor drew out their pistols at the same time, scrambling out of target. He rolled out from under the table but couldn’t get to his knees before Honor pointed her pistol at him and warned him to stay put.
“Fuck you!” he yelled, disobeying her.
Before he could rise to his feet and shoot at her, Honor targeted his shoulder with a single shot and sent him flying backwards in a flash.
The roaring of the gunshot escalated the chaos outside immediately. Screams winded from the crowd, just as the injured man held his bleeding shoulder with one hand and begged Honor to spare him with the other.
“The hell with this!” came a cry, as the third man rose to his feet impulsively, his palm covering his hurting face. Obviously, Catalina had done good damage to it with her whip that might take weeks to heal. “I’ve only known Clay for two days,” he groused. “He ain’t worth this!”
Still grumbling, he turned on his heels and hurried towards the batwing doors. He was only a few steps from the exit before Lijuan quickly holstered her pistol, scooped up her hammer from where it had fallen earlier and launched it at him. The cold metal hit him on the back, thrusting his body forward. His head briskly hit the frame of the door while his body fell back lazily into the room. Nearby, the man Honor shot was curled up in a ball, clutching his bleeding shoulder, rocking from side to side in pain
“Hot diggity dog! That went well!” Catalina laughed when it seemed that the men were down for the count and unlikely to attempt anymore bold moves.
She flipped the bullet-riddled table that they had toppled earlier over, shaking her head when she found the last man underneath totally unconscious.
“He is out cold with a lump on his noggin’ the size of an eagle’s egg!” she hissed in laughter.
“I guess our work here is done, then. Which is fine by me so we can get back to Cedar Ledge. I do have a ranch to run after all.” Lijuan announced, her short legs already carrying her towards the stairs.
To the patrons that remained in the bar during the scuffle, the fearless trio obviously wasn’t new at handling outlaws.
*****
Cassandra was fully dressed and sitting behind the desk, abutting a wall on which a mirror hung, by the time her sisters joined her in the room. She was scribbling words into a journal, as she caught sight of them in the mirror stepping into the room behind her. Turning to her siblings, she flashed them a smile.
Her younger sisters were amazing, right from Lijuan to Catalina, the youngest. The noises she had heard coming through the floor boards had told her they had professionally handled Clay Travers’ men. They had been running down bad guys for a while and even though she was thirty-two now, Cassandra felt as if the fun they had enjoyed—putting bad men on their way to the gallows—had been going on for ages rather than the four years it had truly been.
“Well, Catalina … girls!” Cassandra greeted them cheerfully, “Did Clay’s new would-be-gang give you much of a run for your money?” she asked.
Catalina was laughing as she stepped towards her to squeeze her hand.
“They doggone didn’t!” she said. “Two of them have got some nice lumps to remember the Wilde sisters by.”
“And let us not forget that bandit number three is nursing a shoulder wound courtesy of yours truly.” Honor Elizabeth interrupted with a giggle and a funny courteous bow.
Lijuan rolled her eyes at Honor as the others laughed, while she walked around the room behind the two, glancing at the rumpled sheets and the shattered window that faced the McClatchy Bluff Street. She nodded towards the window.
“Anyway, we let them live.” Lijuan said dryly as Cassandra thought inwardly that when it came to Lijuan, when she got going with that hammer, such an outcome was usually the exception to the rule. As if she knew exactly what Cassie was thinking, Lijuan crossed her arms as she leaned on the wall the mirror was hanging on and looked down at Cassandra.
“Which is more than I can say for Clay Travers who appears to have landed in the dead column of the dead or alive posters. And to think there was ever a day where you actually questioned yourself whether you had to put a bad guy six feet under!” she chuckled.
Cassandra glanced at her first before her gaze lowered to what she had written so far in her journal.
“He tried to draw on me, Lijuan,” she explained humorously. “What could I have done? He might have gone to his death through that window … like they always seem to do … but I can guarantee you this … he died with a smile on his face.”
Cassandra didn’t have to give all the details before her sisters knew what she meant. They all shared a few comical glances before Honor Elizabeth looked out the destroyed window again and noticed that the crowd was getting thinner. There were new arrivals who were putting the order back in place.
“I see the sheriff and his deputies have at last arrived. It is with a certainty in my mind he is going to have a lot of questions for us,” Honor Elizabeth gave the rest a heads up.
Cassandra heaved a long sigh and went back to scribbling in her journal. “You’re right, Honor Elizabeth, but before we head down, I just want to finish getting this down for my journal while it’s still fresh in my mind,” was her unhurried response continuing writing as she spoke.
“Damn! Girls, that was a waste,” Cassandra groaned as she kept writing. She jerked her pen towards the window, indicating that she was talking about the same dead man who was still lying in the middle of the street.
“If he’d been a man on the straight and narrow, with what he was carrying, he would have made some wife a very happy woman,” she grimaced.
She didn’t mind that her sisters just kept staring at her as if she had lost her mind.
CHAPTER 1
* * *
Cedar Ledge Ranch
Alamieda
State of Arizona
May 1913
It was a true pity the late Mr. Travers couldn’t walk the path of the righteous because with what he wa
s carrying south of the border, he would have made some woman a happy wife.
With eyes wide open and mouth fully agape, Allie Mastluehr closed the leather-bound journal and stared in disbelief at the woman with a mane of cascading silver hair sitting across from her.
“Your sister actually committed these words to paper?” Allie asked, just to be sure she had just read an entire sexual encounter written by the partaker herself.
Catalina Wilde leaned back in the wing tip chair of the warm and cozy former bunkhouse with her customary chuckle and said, “Miss Mastluehr, we ALL did. What you were readin’ there was kind of tame compared to some of our …”
She paused for a while, obviously thinking of the right word to use.
“Ah! … Compared to our dalliances, if I might borrow one of Honor’s ten dollar words she liked throw our way."
Allie shook her head, unable to fix a smile on her face. The old woman apparently had a run at countless pleasures, too, during her time.
“Please, it is Allie. You should call me that,” Allie invited. “Still, ma’am, these are writings of the most intimate nature,” she remarked.
Again, Catalina gave a brief chuckle and cleared her throat. “Honey, it was our life in those days. The best days of our lives, really.”
“The entire Arizona territory was our playground,” she explained. “However, I will assure you, while we had our play, we were deadly serious when it came to standin’ between what’s right and what’s wrong. Alamieda’s version of Boot Hill will attest to that with the number of rustlers, bank robbers, claim jumpers—you name it—that we, the Daughters of Half Breed Haven, planted there.”
Allie was only just being introduced to the whole history of the Wilde sisters. She couldn’t put all the pieces together yet, getting them from various lips since her arrival. So, her brow furrowed as she said, “The clerk at the hotel used those exact words—Half Breed Haven—and not in a friendly manner.”
She expected the old woman to interrupt her, but Catalina didn’t. Her eyes just kept staring at her, as if she wanted to make it clear that she had all the time and patience in the world to listen to her opinion.
The Wildes of the West 1_The Daughters of Half Breed Haven_Old west fiction of action adventure, romance & western family drama Page 2