She went about explaining that so fast that Allie couldn’t understand a bit of her concerns. She looked at her quizzically, expecting Cattie to elaborate what she meant, but the old timer had closed her mouth in a tight grimace and didn’t look like she had more to say on the matter.
“You said that’s the north pasture?” Allie asked, pointing to a passage at another part of the large unruly field in front of them. “Then that bridge down there is …”
“It’s the replacement for the one that nearly cost Papa his life,” Cattie explained. “Cassandra, well at Lijuan’s insistence, had it replaced with one of iron.”
Oh, the tampered bridge. Bringing that up reminded Allie of the distressing characters in Cattie’s tale.
“Those men, Everett and Johnson … Was it oil they were after?” Allie questioned quickly.
“No, sweetheart. It’s true that long before those mechanical beasts folks call automobiles, people sought after oil to make kerosene, it put a whole heap of whalers out of business from what I understand. That snake, Everett was after somethin’ just as valuable, though.”
Cattie was smiling mysteriously now. She stared at the men who were still busy inspecting the oil well and shook her head. “Reminds me a lot of that Barthalomeau down there. Look at those fools! That’s the third place they’ve set up their drill and they still haven’t found nothin’! The funny thing is, Miss Allie, I actually know a place where there is oil sitting right in the ground ready for pumpin’!”
“What? Where?” Allie asked, genuinely surprised.
“I’ll tell you about that some time. Right now, I imagine ya’ll wanna know more about what I’ve already told you.”
Allie could have sworn that Cattie was deliberately taunting her with so much incomplete details at once. The goal was to confuse her, always wanting her to choose the tale that interested her the most. There was so much to know and she positively couldn’t get it all.
“For certain!” Allie cheered, always ready to choose Cattie’s sisters over everything else. “I remember you saying something about a difficult trip home for your sisters.”
Cattie looked at her with a tight frown before she reconsidered her words, “That may have been me understatin’ things a might.”
*****
Telegraph Office
Godspell, Arizona
June 1868
“My word! I think I have been away from Arizona a might too long. One gets used to those nice cool breezes blowing down that big ol’ Hudson River, bouncing off those Palisades right onto Manhattan.”
Honor Elizabeth whistled long as she spoke, holding her parasol with one hand and fanning herself with the other.
“Manhattan is an eyesore!” a pacing Lijuan argued. She had been walking the porch of the telegraph office back and forth for minutes and didn’t look like she was about to stop. “When the Dutch first arrived, they were homesteading a lush island. Now, two centuries gone by, look at it.”
Honor stared at her sister for a second, her eyes trailing her pacing feet. “What about Central Park? They keep expanding it up the island towards the north,” she argued back.
“Too little, too late,” Lijuan laughed. “What’s one sheep’s meadow compared to that?!”
To prove her point, Lijuan pointed to the distant extensive landscape that spread as far wide—and farther—beyond the edges of Godspell.
“There is nothing like the West,” she affirmed. “The land here … it’s without equal anywhere in this world, I think. How I’ve missed riding the range with Father!”
Honor had been sitting on one of her suitcases the entire time. She stood up now and passed her sister a cheerful look. “You will be making that ride again with him soon. It is as Cassandra says. We have to believe this won’t be the end.” she encouraged. Lijuan wondered if her sister was saying it more for herself than anyone.
However, the words finally put a stop to Lijuan’s pacing. She nodded at Honor in agreement just as Cassandra stepped out of the telegraph office with a more encouraging smile.
“What is the news on Daddy?” Honor asked immediately.
“Catalina says that after he had some type of fit, he started to fade, but he has started to rally somewhat. His heartbeat is strong, but he’s still yet to wake up.”
The good news put a wider smile on everyone’s faces. Honor patted Cassandra’s shoulder appreciatively as she said, “Thank goodness. There is cause for hope! By the way, that was so smart of you to wire Cattie before we left Philadelphia for her to leave messages along the way so we can know how Daddy is doing.”
“Cassandra thinks of everything, after all!” Lijuan interrupted with a sarcastic tone.
Cassandra, understanding fully well that she was being mocked, stepped instantly towards Lijuan, but Honor quickly inserted herself between them.
“All that matters is he is still alive.” She pulled a rebuking face at both of them.
It did the trick. Cassandra sighed and turned to glance at the telegraph office behind them.
“We were lucky to get this last message. The operator said not long after it came in the lines went down. They think they were cut again by Black Hawk and his Omegas. A man claims he saw them beyond Selby Flats.”
“Black Hawk!” Lijuan burst out behind Honor. “You would think that Indian would have some other way to spend his days than roaming the territory practicing his brand of mayhem.”
“Come on, Lijuan, nobody knows better than our family that Black Hawk’s whole reason to live is to make as much trouble for the white settlers of Arizona,” Cassandra grumbled.
“And anyone else who gets in his way!” Honor included.
“I noticed you said a man claims as if you don’t believe it.” Lijuan probed, referring to Cassandra’s report from the telegraph office operative.
“Something doesn’t add up,” Cassandra responded with a curve of her lips. “When we got on our last stage at Victoryville, I heard a man say the Omegas raided a trading post yesterday clear down by Santa Gabriel. That’s a hundred miles or so from here. I don’t think Black Hawk could have made it up this way that fast.”
“At least this time, Black Hawk isn’t OUR problem. We need to be getting back to Daddy, Cassie,” Honor admonished.
Her sisters seemed to agree with her. They both nodded their heads and stepped towards their bags as honor closed her parasol.
“Come on, let’s grab our bags and get over to the stagecoach office,” Cassandra directed as she picked hers up and strode off.
Lijuan easily lifted hers in the air and pulled a face at a hapless Honor, who was struggling with not one, but two bags, her arms straining under their weight. The situation not helped by the umbrella tucked under her arm.
“Don’t look at me. You’re the one who had to pack as much stuff as you possibly could into those two bags!” she shrugged.
Honor somehow let go of the bags in a flash, frowning as she grabbed Lijuan’s arm.
“What is with you?! You can pick on me all day long, but not Cassie,” she warned. “You poke a bear, then you are going to get bit but good. You are just inviting Cassie to give you a good thrashing, Lannie.”
“She can try.” Lijuan rolled her eyes.
“Come on, guys, hurry along!” Cassandra yelled in front of them, stopping Honor from chiding her sister once more.
She grabbed her bags, shaking her head as they both shuffled off to the stagecoach office. By the time they got there, Cassandra was standing stock still with a frown on her face.
“This is going to be the third stage company we’ve had to switch to since we got off the train back in... what is wrong, Cassandra?” Honor whined, dropping her bags.
“We’ve got a problem. It’s not open!” Cassandra announced. A closed sign had been hung in the window next to the schedule board and that was enough information to know that they might not be going out of town quite yet.
Lijuan pushed her way between them, preferring to see things with
her own eyes. She stared at the schedule for a while and shook her head.
“This can’t be right. Look … the next stage for Carlyle Springs should be leaving in an hour!”
She went over to the door of the stagecoach office and tried the knob. “Locked!” she spat.
“Oh, no, no, no!” Honor whined again. “We simply cannot have this! Daddy is lying unconscious in that bed, and for all we know, the only thing that might bring him back to us is the sound of my voice.”
For a brief moment, Lijuan and Cassandra bonded by sharing an empathetic smile and uniformly rolling their eyes.
“Honor, calm down.” Cassandra reached out to sooth her, but Honor shook her off.
“He needs me!” she, was shouting now. “He needs all of us and what about Cattie, Dutch, and Blue River?! They need us there too! We should be with them. Now come on, you two, let’s go around back! That, I imagine, is where they keep the horses and the coaches in these places right?”
She didn’t bother to get a response from her sisters. Honor charged off around the side of the building immediately, dragging her luggage with her. Lijuan and Cassandra stared at her for a while before uniformly sighing and heading off after her.
*****
“Hurry up! She’s gettin’ harder to hold than a sack of wildcats!”
The scene inside the large stable behind the office was entirely different from the calm front porch that the girls had left behind. Inside, a burly man with a mask on his face was gradually finding it hard to hold down a young black woman who kept struggling in his arms. Despite that he had hit her face several times, the stubborn woman had kept breaking free, sometimes falling to the stable floor but he always recaptured her.
“Just hold her still!”
The burly man’s partner gnashed his teeth unwaveringly. He was taller and his voice wasn’t as gruff as his partner’s. Despite the mask on his face, it was obvious that he had a wide face, pointy hair, and a hawk-like nose that left a comic swell at the middle of his mask. He swiftly moved towards an anvil at the middle of the stable, dragging an unconscious black man with him.
“Hold your horses!” he told his partner who kept grunting every time the woman tried to escape his grasp. “We gotta do this job right for the boss. When I get through with this boy’s hands, he ain’t gonna be drivin’ no stage today, maybe never again, dependin’ on how hard I cripple them!”
Under his mask was a grin born of maliciousness as he spoke, finally positioning the black man so that he could place his hands atop the anvil. He grabbed his pistol, gripping it by the barrel preparing to break the unconscious man’s fingers with the handgrip.
“No, please don’t! No! No! Please!” the black woman was gasping the words out as a whisper instead of screaming.
The double doors into the stable swung open before the burly man could hit her one more time.
“Who is the owner of this stage? Oh, my word!!” Honor froze as soon as she realized that she had just pushed her way into trouble.
The masked men also froze, totally unprepared for her entrance. They spun around and stared at her for a moment before the pointy-haired man turned to his partner with a loud sigh.
“You idiot! You were supposed to latch that door!”
“I thought you were gonna! You turn around right now, girl, and get yourself outta here. This ain’t none of your concern!” the burly man pointed to Honor, harshly nodding at the door.
It would have appeared quite easy to dismiss one wandering woman, had two more not appeared behind her afterwards. The pointy-haired man immediately reoriented his pistol into a firing position as Lijuan and Cassandra stepped into the room, exchanged a look, and sprang into action.
Lijuan spotted a foot-long hammer with two blunt ends for blacksmithing lying on a workbench. She wasted no time snatching it and hurling it at the masked man with the gun, hitting him square in the chest. A grin blossomed on her face as she watched the man stagger back immediately, his gun flying out of his hand towards a nearby forge that had a branding iron sticking out of it. The gun hit the branding iron before dropping into the fires of the forge.
Not bad! She complimented inwardly to herself. Growing up she had played countless games of throw and catch with her older brother until she had developed quite a throwing arm. She was pleased to see she had not lost her skills.
The other man thought it was high time he let go of the woman in his grip who instinctively ran into Honor’s arms for comfort. Before he could reach for his gun and pull the trigger, Cassandra was right in front of him with her fist slamming right into his face, while she knocked his legs out from under him with a swipe of her right leg. His gun went flying from his hand too, disappearing out of reach under another workbench. He however managed to grapple with Cassandra, getting a punch onto her shoulder that temporarily staggered her. He quickly wrapped his hands around her neck, tightening them, dropping her to her knees as Lijuan was charging towards them from behind like a juggernaut.
“Hands off my sister!”
Lijuan leaped up to wrap her flexible legs around his waist as she snaked her right arm around his neck and engaged in a little choking of her own. Cassandra staggered to her feet gasping for breath as he released her and focused on the hellcat that was suddenly all over him. He tried to push her off as she began pummeling the side of his head with her left fist, but Lijuan wouldn’t budge until he gradually began to lose his balance as well as control of his breath.
Honor, meanwhile, kept the youthful woman out of harm’s way by keeping her behind her. The pointy-haired man had regained his senses, despite that his chest still hurt from the impact of the hammer. He grabbed a pitchfork from the nearby wall and charged towards a still-breathless Cassandra. Honor pushed the woman aside instantly, going for the branding iron in the fire. She got to it before the man could close in on Cassandra.
“Oh, no. You are not going to harm one hair on her head!” Honor screamed.
She planted the hot iron in the center of his back and stepped back to allow his body roll back in pain. He landed on his burned back before flipping himself over. His scream reverberated loudly through the entire stable. His partner stopped resisting Lijuan’s attack at the same time that she stopped choking him. It was as if his partner’s shriek froze everyone in time.
Cassandra finally regained her stance and was lurching towards the shrieking man when suddenly shots started ringing everywhere, and a few holes appeared in the roof. Everyone instinctively crouched down for cover. Lijuan and the burly man fell level immediately too, finally separated from each other.
“Back on your feet, hombre! We gotta leave this here place!” The man that Honor had hurt earlier with the branding iron pitched to his feet, holding his seared back while he held on tight to the arm of his partner. He gazed at the face of each sister, and if they could have seen underneath his mask they would have been treated to a visage made up of equal parts pain and hatred … and a little touch of fear.
“They must have reinforcement too. We gotta go now!”
The girls watched as the battered men raced out of the stable, the burly one still trying to catch his breath after Lijuan had almost had it squeezed out of him. The gunshots had long since stopped as abruptly as they had begun,
“Thank you.” Cassandra said eying Lijuan. She surprisingly was no longer crouching on the floor and neither was Lijuan.
“Any time, big sister.” Lijuan answered as Cassandra momentarily enjoyed the sudden warmth in her sister’s voice.
“Don’t just stand there! Get down! Someone is shooting at us!” Honor yelled at both of them.
Cassandra shook her head, heading over to pull Honor to her feet. “Relax.” she said, “It was six shots. The contents of his side iron. The fire set them off.”
Honor was confused for a while until Cassandra used a pair of tongs to pluck the ruined, smoldering pistol from the forge.
“I see,” Honor muttered haughtily, dusting her clothes.
Her sisters wrapped their arms around her afterwards, grinning proudly.
“You wield a mean branding iron!” Lijuan commended.
“Well done, Honor Elizabeth,” Cassandra applauded too.
“That was exhilarating, wasn’t it?” Honor stated more than questioned excitedly. “Cattie is going to be so mad she missed out on being a part of that.” She glanced around for a while, finally resting her eyes on the black woman who had crawled over to the once unconscious man. The man had come to and was rubbing the back of his head now, staring around as if he was still trying to figure out where he was.
“But we have some people to help, do we not?” Honor said, her focus now on the man.
Cassandra nodded, watching as Honor slowly knelt beside the bewildered black man and asked him, “Are you alright, sir?”
He shook his head and stared into Honor’s eyes admiringly. “If that polecat’s blow to the back of my head killed me, I couldn’t ask for a better angel to be greetin’ me at them pearly gates,” he happily admitted.
At this, Honor chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. “I assure you that you are quite alive. Can you stand?” She asked, helping him to his feet after he nodded to her question.
“Who are you ladies?” he questioned, glancing round the faces of Lijuan and Cassandra.
“Quillan, they just saved us from a pair of thugs that coulda only been Wendell’s boys. They were gonna smash your hands so you couldn’t drive.”
The black woman was beaming as she pointed to the trio of Wildes. Honor smiled back at her, remembering how gravely sad she had been as the man—unconscious then—almost lost his hand to their attackers.
Cassandra approached the man and shook his hand. “I’m Cassandra Wilde from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency,” she said. “These are my sisters, Honor Elizabeth and Lijuan.”
The Wildes of the West 1_The Daughters of Half Breed Haven_Old west fiction of action adventure, romance & western family drama Page 11