She made a clicking noise to get the tabby’s attention, and when he saw her, he excitedly began to run in her direction. Lijuan hated doing it, but she suddenly seized her hammer and threw it so it struck the ground an inch before Mister Muffins. The scared cat stopped abruptly and began to run towards the opposite direction, sending a stab of guilt through her heart.
“Now we see where he runs off to!” Catalina whispered excitedly, momentarily forgetting Cassandra’s ban on speaking unless absolutely necessary.
Honor Elizabeth brought her finger to her lips to silence her and they all followed the cat as it ran into the bar. They snuck around carefully, hiding behind the bar and watched as Mister Muffins stopped dead center in the room and began scratching the floor and meowing. Catalina’s mouth fell open in delight, as accompanied by a creaking sound, a trap door in the floor suddenly opened and bright light shone upward as a hand was flipping it open. Cassandra also grinned in satisfaction.
A man came out, his plain brown hair and narrowly long face being his first feature that they saw. He was lanky and had hair sticking out of his chest because of his half-undone shirt buttons. As the cat bolted down whatever stairs he had climbed out of, his back was to the bar and Catalina, the youngest and strongest of the Wilde sisters slipped around, and in one deft move, yanked his six-shooter out of his holster and cupped her hand over his mouth. She firmly held his arms as the other three sisters stepped before him with their guns drawn.
The man struggled to make sense of the women standing in a pool of moonlight. Not only was he being held by women, but even more bewilderingly one was white, the other colored and even an oriental! If he could have seen behind him, his astonishment would have been complete to find he was being held by a Mexican woman. If it weren’t for the pain the fourth unseen woman behind him was exerting on his arms that she had twisted behind him, he would have thought he was in some sort of bizarre dream.
“Not a sound, skinny,” Lijuan said, poking her gun into the side of his nose.
Just then, a voice from below called up.
“Tosh! Why did that damn fool cat you been lookin’ after scurry down here like that?!”
“Tell him you don’t know what spooked him. Maybe a coyote or something, but everything is fine and you’re going to have a look around,” Cassandra instructed him immediately, warning him with a serious look of the danger he was to face if he did differently.
Sweat began to drip from the man’s brow, but repeated what he was told. Honor gently lowered the trap door back immediately, closing it.
“Honor, Cattie…you keep watch of that door. We’ll see to our new friend here.” Cassandra said.
Honor and Cattie nodded while Cassandra and Lijuan quickly hustled the man away through the entranceway and into the nearby shed beneath the water tower.
Inside, Cassandra took out a small folding knife and began to cut a length of rope off from the one used to raise and lower the water bucket. She used the cut piece to tie the man afterwards.
“We got nearly a dozen men and women below. Every one of them handy with a gun. You four bitches haven’t got a chance. Guaranteed you’ll be stopping lead before the night is through. You’re done! You got that? D.o.n.e.!” He ranted at them.
“Got it…and I’ll be sure they inscribe D.O.N.E. on your tombstone because friend, if this goes bottoms up, it’s you that’s going to boot hill,” Lijuan smirked.
“If you want to increase your chances of getting out of this alive, then you best give us a little information,” Cassandra added.
“Nothin’ to say to you,” he said, turning his face from them.
Lijuan nodded, indicating her will to not argue with him. She, however, took out her hammer and knelt in front of him. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” she said. “Because you were nice to the kitty cat, I’m only going to pulverize one of your feet.”
She didn’t wait to see his eyes go wide with fright. She raised her hammer above her head, preparing to bring it down on his left foot. Tosh’s eyes shot to Cassie for help and she merely shrugged in indifference.
“Stop, you Chinese bitch!” She heard him cry out. “Shit, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. It ain’t gonna help you up against Fox Darrow!”
“This Darrow? He’s your leader?” Cassandra asked, stepping towards him.
“That’s right,” he said, spitting at her.
“Why the Boxhall banks? Why did he pick them?” Cassandra asked.
“Years ago, his ma and pa couldn’t get a loan from them. Lost the farm, everything. Darrow grew up poor and bitter, listenin’ to his pa badmouth the Boxhalls.”
“Awwww…so his solution is to become a petty bank robber?” Lijuan hissed.
“Aint nothin’ petty about Darrow. Look what he’s pulled off. We got horses down below, with their saddle bags stuffed with cash from those banks. In the morning, we’re pullin’ up stakes. Headin’ out of Beacon for good.”
“…to spend your ill-gotten gains,” Lijuan hissed again.
“No way, Lijuan. People like this are made of greed. You’re simply moving your operation somewhere else, aren’t you? You’d never quit when you are ahead, correct?” Cassandra asked pointedly.
“A looker with big tits mixed with some brains,” their prisoner whistled admiringly. “Rare combination for a woman.
With no warning, Lijuan shoved him and using her left forearm across his chest to pin him against the wallbegan pressing the side of her hammer hard against his throat with extreme force. Immediately he began gasping for breath and for a second time, he cast his eyes wildly towards Cassandra for help only to be met by a disinterested look. However, after a moment or two, Cassie laid her hand on Lijuan’s shoulder and she gently eased off, removing the hammer as he fought to catch his breath. When he could at last breathe again, he looked at the women, knowing it was in his best interest to answer.
“Yeah, one of our crew, Ned Beck and his wife just got back from Nevada earlier, just before the storm. They found another ghost town with a great location within a cluster of banks in Nevada. Lucky bastard. Darrow is givin’ him and his missus an extra cut for locating it.”
“Like we give a damn,” Lijuan said. “None of you are going to spend it.”
“Enough of this!” Cassandra screeched, moving close to the outlaw. “If you’ve managed to get horses underground, I want to know where the main entrance is!”
He looked like he was going to go silent again, but Lijuan menacingly raised her hammer up again and his lips began to move once more. He told them everything, fearing for his life. Once Cassandra learned what she needed, she turned to Lijuan and told her they would go and fill the others in on her plan. Before they left, however, Lijuan snatched an old dirty rag hanging on the wall that she had noticed earlier in the day when Catalina had lit the match. With satisfaction, she shoved it in the outlaw’s mouth as a gag.
“Don’t even move an inch,” she warned him with a scowl.
*****
After filling Honor and Catalina in, they all stood behind the general store a few minutes later. In the moonlight, they could see just what their captive had described. There were two large doors built into an embankment that resembled a typical entrance to a storm cellar, but they were far larger. Cassandra knelt and began to clear away some of the sand on the ground until she felt the metal that she was searching for.
Clearing some more of it away, she looked up at her trio of sisters with a grin. Hidden underneath the sands was a piece of railroad track leading right up to the twin doors. During the boom years in Beacon, apparently, the townsfolk had installed it to help convey the excavated rock along the back of the buildings to be dumped into what had grown into the immense pile of rocks where their horses were now tied near.
Catalina walked a short way away from Cassandra and pointed to a rusting metal object lying on its side as further evidence. It was one of the ore carts the gold miners of Beacon used to push the debris along to the
pile.
Cassandra proceeded to study the doors. It was as Tosh said the way the bandits would lead their horses below ground and out of sight. She edged her sisters on with a wave of her hand and together, they went into the general store. Earlier, she had cautioned them to tread lightly lest any creaking of the floor boards above the men alert them that they were no longer alone. Her sisters had listened. They all moved cautiously, the only audible sound being the night’s soft breeze.
The outlaw they had captured said that the main entrance to the shaft had been located beneath the store…two buildings down from the salon where they had captured him at. They were there now and as the others watched, Cassie dropped to the floor and began probing until she at last, found the seam in the floor for the trap door. Wasting no time, she beckoned Lijuan over, asking for her help. Her Asian sister was the most petite of all of them and her small fingers would come in handy here. As expected, she easily fit them in the seam and began lifting it up a crack so Cassandra could have a look around. If luck was with them, no one would be looking towards the exit at that moment.
Their luck did indeed hold and Cassie saw immediately they hadn’t need to worry about being heard creeping about above. Below, more than enough feet from the exit, she spied six men and one woman gathered around a card table where a raucous game of five card stud was unfolding. Those who weren’t playing could be seen watching the game, some drinking, others smoking cigarettes, one of them even strummed a guitar. Not bad, could be better Cassandra unconsciously critiqued.
The outlaws had done up the hideout nicely, she thought. Several kerosene lanterns had been affixed to cross beams in the large mine shaft and they had apparently been busy scavenging boards from the ghost town and had fashioned a nice floor to keep them off the damp rocky ground of the shaft. She could just make out some bunks. To her left, she heard the whinnying of horses, but she could not see them as they were corralled out of her line of sight.
Having seen enough, she pulled back from looking and signaled Lijuan to let the trap door close again.
“Well?” Honor asked behind them in a low voice.
“Quite the set up they got down there,” Cassandra told her expectant sisters, in an equally low voice. “I imagine if they applied themselves towards honest business, they might do well for themselves…at least, this Darrow, if he’s responsible for their hideout.”
“You can sing his praises to him directly once he’s on the other side of a set of bars or standing on a gallows. Are we going to take them now?” Lijuan asked.
“Yeah, how many of those polecats are stinkin’ up the place down there?” Catalina chuckled, already eager to be done with the outlaws.
“That’s what I don’t like. I could only see seven including one woman,” Cassandra noted, seeming thoughtful. “The bandits we know operated in teams of five. We’ve got one of them but a man and a woman are unaccounted for. It’s possible they were down there because I couldn’t see the whole shaft, but I don’t like it.”
“Well, nothing’s ever perfect,” Lijuan opined. “We can handle whatever comes up. We always do, right?”
“Indeed, we do! Once more into the breach, Cassie?” Honor grinned, eager as well.
Smiling at their determination, Cassandra spent two seconds scanning each of their faces. “Let’s do this. It’s time to rain a little Wilde-fire!” she grinned, her hands impulsively reaching for her twin guns, unaware just how true her declaration was about to become.
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The Wildes of the West 1_The Daughters of Half Breed Haven_Old west fiction of action adventure, romance & western family drama Page 28