“How do you want to play this, Cat?” Honor asked with a frown.
Catalina shook her head sadly.
“All we got is to try and draw their fire away! It ain’t much, but like I said, it’s all we got!”
Before they could move, Catalina found herself stunned by her six shooter, suddenly being yanked free of its holster. She spun around, as did Honor, to see Carver holding Catalina’s gun in his hand as well as his own. Honor’s gun which he had retrieved from her gun belt still on the ground at the far side of the hole was shoved into his waistband.
Catalina blinked twice with her heart racing and for the second time that night, her hand fell to her coiled bullwhip adorning her waist, and said, “You better have a good reason for doing that, amigo!
Honor nodded in agreement. “Yes, explain yourself, Carver Jackson!”
Carver shrugged. “That’s our group down there getting slaughtered! I’ve got to go help them!” he said.
Catalina almost smiled. “We all do! Give us our guns!”
Carver shook his head. “No! The middle of a gunfight is no place for women!”
Catalina was getting exasperated with the man. What he was doing would have been amusing if this were any other time. “Why do you think we have guns? It’s because we know how to use them! Believe me … we know how to use them.”
Honor had her temper in check far more than her hotheaded sister.
“It is very noble of you, Carter, to wish to see us safe, but you must trust me when I tell you that we are safer with our side arms.”
Carver shook his head clearly having made up his mind.
“No way I’m letting you go down into that gunfight, Miss Honor Elizabeth. You are a mighty fine woman, and I don’t want to be the one who lets you get killed.”
Catalina was at the end of her wits now and she swung her head around and glared at Honor.
“Didn’t you tell him a thing about us before you got down and dirty?”
Honor looked as exasperated as her sister.
“I absolutely did kiss and tell, thank you very much! I told him a number of our stories! There is no reason for him to doubt us now.”
“Aww, I knew you were just funnin’ me with those stories! Now, I ain’t got time! I gotta get down there with the men! You women stay here where it’s safe!”
He dashed off down the hill and Honor turned to look at her sister.
“You do know that he meant well?” she said with a worried smile.
Catalina nodded. “I know.”
Honor shrugged. “I thank you for not stopping him with your bullwhip. I know you could have.”
Catalina shook her head sadly. “Even in this light, I saw his back when I first got here. The man probably spent his entire life under a whip. Am I right? No way I was goin’ put him through that again.”
“You are right as to his enslavement. Again, thank you. But now, what are we going to do? All we have is your bull whip and my knife,” Honor said.
Before Catalina could answer, a voice called out from across the watering hole. They whipped around in unison to see three men with their guns drawn on them and one of the men with a rifle slung over his shoulder was waving Honor’s belt in the air.
“And shucks! Now, you don’t even have that!” he called out with a sneer.
Frustrated, the sisters looked at each other and then raised their hands as the man strutted over to them cockily, his two men following behind.
The man that had talked grinned and walked closer to them. “The name is Donnie. No need to introduce yourselves, ladies. I already know who you are. You’re the prisoners of the Fenwicks!”
Honor locked eyes with Donnie Fenwick, but Catalina turned her head and looked down in the clearing. The sound of gunfire was dwindling, and she feared the worst, with good reason.
“Keep your guns on them.” Fenwick ordered as he joined Catalina at the edge. He held a Winchester in his hand and he brought it to bear. “Mighty nice of them to have campfire’s going. It’s going to make helping my brother finish the job so much easier.”
***
Only eight men remained from the posse. The rest were either dead or missing. The group included four first timers, who were all young, in their late teens, and three older cowhands recruited from different ranches much as Carver had been. Having taken refuge behind the large cluster of boulders, they all stood around Newell. His badge and all the promise it once held shone in the light of the campfire only minutes earlier he had been calmly cleaning his gun around, to ready it for what lay ahead in the morning. All his plans had turned to ash just like that which smoldered in the circle of rocks. Cautiously, he peeked around the side of one of the boulders. In the twin illumination of the other campfires and the moonlight, he agonized as he saw all the dead men laying around the camp—a camp previously filled mostly of young men who dreamed of the glory of taking down the Fenwicks.
Newell felt as if all this blood of his friends and recruits was on him. It was a scene he thought he would never see when he became a lawman. He had proudly worn his star on his chest to make the west a better place, not a place of death and destruction. He looked to the heavens and thought of Sheriff Underwood. He thought of the man he revered, a man who had been like a father to him unlike the worthless drunk who actually held that title. His eyes, at last, turned to his remaining men who stared at his expectantly.
“Okay. I need three runners; two of you young guys and one of you ranchers,” he said, as he tried to make his voice strong.
Nobody budged. Newell knew then, he had no choice but to step up and choose. He looked at two of the young men, the two that looked the most scared. He pointed his finger at them.
“You and you.”
He then looked at an older man that had joined him from the Pepper Jack ranch where young Cindy Pepper lived. What a beauty she was with her strawberry blond hair! Funny he should think about that now, he thought, as he nodded at the man.
“Make a run for the horses and go for help. Find the Wilde girls! I saw Catalina heading in the direction of the watering hole a while back. Find anyone left who is on our side!”
They bolted towards the end of the clearing. One of the younger men and the man from the Pepper Jack were instantly cut down from a shot coming from the hill in the direction of the water hole. The third man actually managed to make it to a horse and mount up before a bullet catapulted his body right out of the saddle.
Newell and the remaining men turned and looked to where the gunfire came from, as the horses that were tied up were all rearing up on two legs, also frightened from the gunshots.
Before he could take any further action to save himself and the remaining men, they were surrounded, and a hail of gunfire began ripping the men to shreds. Newell fell behind one of the boulders and fired into the night. To his satisfaction, he heard the cries of at least two men who had been struck by his bullets. Newell hoped they were gut shot so they would die slowly and painfully. As he hunched down to reload, a blow struck him from behind.
He landed on his stomach and looked around to see all his companions dead or dying. Slowly, he rolled over on his back and saw the ugly face of a rustler with a red beard standing over him. Newell knew him to be one of the Fenwicks. Another of the brothers walked up to him with his dragoon pistol swinging in his hand.
Newell accepted these were his last minutes. He looked at these two despicable men standing over him, wishing there were some way to take them with him.
“Any last words, Johnny Law?” Chet asked, as he swung the barrel of his pistol up, pressing the cold steel of the sidearm into Newell’s forehead.
He felt surprisingly calm. His thoughts were many and fast. Mostly, they centered on his honest regret of having led so many good men to their deaths and perhaps, even the two women from Cedar Ledge. He closed his eyes.
“No words to you. My words are only to God.”
Foster, in his ignorant and un-godly ways grunted before saying,
“Tell Him I said hi.”
Above on the ridge, Donnie lowered the rifle he had earlier used to pick off the men desperately trying to reach the horse. From what he could see in the light of the fire by the boulders, his brothers were in the act of wrapping things up.
As Donnie Fenwick brushed past the two captive women motioning to his men that the time to get moving had come, he heard the sound of a single solitary gunshot shatter the quiet that had fallen over the scene of the ambush. Its melancholy echo rebounding all the way to the Twin Buttes themselves.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
Without a doubt, Cassie knew that she could not remember the last time she saw a more dejected-looking man. Blake was sitting on the edge of his bed, his hands clasped before him, with sagging shoulders and a bowed head.
“Thaddeus wants to kill me? Why should I believe any of this?” his head shaking in disbelief.
Cassandra shook her own head with an air of impatience, but then she softened. If she could have felt a flash of sympathy for the self-aggrandizing safe cracker earlier, then this man deserved far more than a flash.
Earlier, as they had gone up the stairs, the man had been fawning over her, throwing her compliments here and there. He had almost been trembling in anticipation about the prospect of bedding what he kept repeating as “the finest companion Clark has ever sent.” Companion? That was a new way to describe the world’s oldest profession? As they reached the top of the stairs, she noticed he had still failed to pick up on the cues that Cassie was not behaving as a “companion” should.
In a flash, he had thrown open two pocket doors and they entered the room that faced the front of the house with the veranda she had seen earlier. Despite the seriousness of the situation, even she had to pause and look around the room in wonder.
It was as if the man had his own whaling museum in his home. It was all there. Harpoons on the walls, tools and equipment used in dismembering captured whales inside glass cases. A ship’s wheel stood in one corner. Suspended horizontally from the ceiling just above where the door entered the room were two oars once used in a whale boat. Another corner featured a glass container on a pedestal of what she could only assume to be actual whale oil. A nearly 3-inch-long Great White shark tooth in one of the displays made her eyes widen. A placard next to it proclaimed it to have been taken from the body of a whale harpooned in the Flemish Cap. The walls featured maps of the world with notations of the best whaling grounds. Most astonishingly bracketing the French doors that led to the veranda were a twin set of massive rib bones of a long-vanquished quarry.
Unable to resist asking him about the room, she blurted out.
“What the hell is this place?” Her curiosity showed through her tone. How could she not be curious?
Convivially, he said that it was his father that had constructed the room. His had been a well-off whaling family from Nantucket. Having had one too many close calls between dangerous whales and savage storms, the elder Blake had decided to quit with a good bit of money in the bank. He sold the ship he captained and his entire business and moved his family west. Once they were there, the old sea dog spent his days tinkering, trying to improve whale guns that had come into vogue in the earlier part of the century. He had just completed a revolutionary design of one that used cartridges to fire instead of loading black powder in it when his wife had reminded him that they had a long overdue picnic scheduled out in a nearby valley. An outing that would prove to be a most fateful one indeed.
He swallowed and ran his hand over some equipment before continuing, with a little bit of a faraway look in his eyes.
The trip turned out to change the course of their lives and those of so many people. Ephraim had abandoned his inventing when a new grandiose idea had come to him. It had been his father’s eye that realized flooding that valley would make for an ideal lake and he had convinced other wealthy investors they should build a dam and add a precious lake to the arid Arizona landscape. On its shores would rise a prosperous town to be called Lake Bliss. Blake and his partners had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Cassie sighed deeply. She was impressed, but she wondered at whose expense Lake Bliss had come about. The valley she figured had probably been home to a few settlers and no doubt Indians. Had they been fairly compensated for the submerging of the valley, she highly doubted that. If this was any other time, she would have voiced her thoughts. But at the moment, she was undercover, in addition to not being in any mood to argue.
Pushing aside such moral considerations, she knew the man before her was not to blame for whatever his father had done; she was there to help him.
Corky Blake suddenly turned around and asked her with eagerness in his voice, “Would you like to see my father’s whaling gun out on the veranda in action?” Before she could respond, he added with a short laugh. “I always keep a shell in it to impress my lady visitors at a moment’s notice.” He added with a wink. It was then that it clicked in her mind that this was what she saw on the way in. The dark shapes sticking out of the target must have been harpoons.
Even though firearms were of great interest to her and she was tempted, there was serious business at hand. Cassie begged off on the offer. So, it was that when he finished his story about his father constructing this room in honor of what had allowed them to come to Arizona in the first place and opened the door for their success.
“Come.” he said and without missing a beat, he grabbed her hand and pulled her through a doorway that entered a grand bedroom off from the museum room. They were in the room in a flash and she knew then that it was time to get down to that serious business. Cassie used her foot to kick the door shut behind them, eliciting a look of pure ravenous lust from the man. His smile, however, quickly faded when he raised his hands to cup her face and she snatched his wrists and stared him in the eye.
“Your brother-in-law has a team of men on their way. Perhaps, they are here even at this moment. They are here to break into your safe to rob you blind. He alluded to the fact he would be willing to kill you if it came to that to get his hands on it,” she had said evenly.
A look of amusement had returned to his eye and he laughed.
“Is this some sort of jest? A most odd one, if it is I must say!” he said with the mirth still in his voice.
She shook her head. “This is no joke. I can assure you of that,” she insisted with a very somber face and chords tightening in her neck. Blake’s own face changed instantly. It was obvious to her that he did not believe her even before he said it. “Preposterous! What reason could he have to kill me?”
Cassie nearly laughed out loud at his naiveté. But this was no laughing matter and she was genuinely worried. “I can name fifty thousand of them if your safe really contains around that amount.”
He looked at her and saw that she meant every word. That had been when the man had collapsed down on the edge of the bed and had seemed to wilt. She had revealed something no whore out to play a joke could have known.
Finally, he looked up at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Who exactly are you and why are you here to warn me?” he asked dejectedly.
Cassie shook her head and dropped onto the bed beside him. “It’s complicated, but the bottom line is that he thinks I am helping him and wanted me to provide a distraction as your whore.”
“Companion!” he corrected her sharply.”
“Very well, companion, while your safe is being robbed. Now, we’ve spent enough time with me trying to convince you. I’ve got to get you out of here. I trust there is some sort of back way out of here,” she said with exasperation in her voice. Confused and nervous, Blake grabbed a cigar from a humidor and lighted it.
“Yes, of course,” he said as he blew the first few puffs into the air. His face had taken a darker crimson color. Cassie winced in discomfort at the sudden smoke as he looked at her.
“Sorry, this is the only thing that can calm me when I get a case of nerves,” he said with an apol
ogetic smile.
Cassie nodded, standing up. “I’m going to get you out of here and then deal with …”
She, however, stopped talking as she was suddenly distracted by the sound of hoof beats and a wagon surging up the driveway. “You weren’t expecting anyone else, were you?” she asked frantically.
Blake shook his head. “Not at all. Just my companion,” he said morosely as he got up.
She headed for the window, but stopped as it was stained glass and did not open. She then dashed out into the museum room and swung open the French doors and raced out onto the veranda. At the railing, she almost bumped into the object she had seen earlier. Up close, it had revealed itself to her as the experimental harpoon gun the elder Blake had mounted on the veranda as part of his whaling motif and Corky had volunteered to demonstrate.
It was on some type of swivel and she pushed it away from her and peered over the balcony just in time to see an open carriage driven by Connors pulling to a stop in front of the building. In the back sat Thaddeus and to Cassie’s great surprise, Miss Marla! The jig was clearly up!
***
It had been a mad dash for Thornway to Lakeview Terrace, the street upon which the wealthiest of the families of Lake Bliss lived. Once, he had lived there as well in the Blake family home shortly after his marriage to Betsy Rose. The living arrangement had been very short lived, as the old seadog, Ephraim Blake had not approved of Betsy’s choice of the man to spend her life with. He had grudgingly given his blessing in order for her happiness to be preserved.
Thornway and his bride had left on their own volition after the constant scathing remarks and veiled insults his father-in-law delighted in making towards him became unbearable. Betsy, of course, had been reluctant to leave the home she had spent so much of her life in. Her touch was everywhere with the stained glass that made up so many windows. Each creation was a part of her. However, she had eventually decided that since Thaddeus was her husband, and it was her duty to follow him.
Wilde-Fire: Wonder Women 0f The Old West (Half Breed Haven Book 1) Page 20
