Support Your Local Deputy - By William W. Johnstone Page 0,1
puddles. The waiting was hard on Rusty.
“Hey, Rusty, you got a two-holer, or are they gonna take turns?” some brat yelled.
I went after the freckled punk, got an ear, and twisted it.
“Cut that out or I’ll throw you down a hole and you’ll stink for a week.”
“Aw, sheriff, this is the best thing hit Doubtful in a long time.”
“You’re Willie Dickens, and your ma didn’t raise you right. I let go of your ear, you promise to respect people?”
“Anything you say,” Willie said, and yanked loose, smirking.
I let him go. This was turning into an ordeal for my deputy sheriff, instead of a moment of joy. It wasn’t hard to tell what all of them good folks of Doubtful were thinking. This marriage would have a threesome in the bedroom.
And still no coach.
Then, about the time I was ready to head back to the sheriff office and look over the mail, we spotted the coach rounding the hill south of Doubtful, coming along at a smart clip, maybe faster than usual because them drays looked pretty lathered.
Jonas Quill, the jehu, pulled back the lines slightly, and the sweated horses gladly quit on him, while the coach rocked gently.
“Well, Rusty, here it comes,” I said.
But Quill yelled at me, “We got held up, man.”
“Held up?”
“Four armed men, masked.”
By then the maroon door of the coach swung open, and six passengers emerged: four rumpled males, mostly whiskey drummers, and two frightened women, both gray-haired, in bonnets.
No Ukrainian Siamese identical female twins.
Rusty seemed to leak gas.
“Clear away from here,” I yelled at the mob. “We got trouble.”
“Where are they?” Rusty asked.
“Don’t know, but we got business,” I said. “Sheriff business.”
“You passengers, stick close here. I’ll want statements from all of you.”
One woman looked annoyed and started off.
“You, too, Mrs. Throckmorton.”
“I surrender to my fate,” she said.
Rusty looked shell-shocked, so it’d be up to me. “Quill, tell me. What happened and what got took?”
“Nothing got took. Just the twins.”
“My mind isn’t quite biting this cookie, Quill.”
“Three masked men on saddle horses, another in a chariot.”
“A what?”
“A two-wheel chariot hung on two trotters. Man there was masked, too.”
“A chariot like them gladiators used?”
“A two-wheel stand-up cart, with a lot of gold gilt and enameled red on it. They stop my coach, one has a scattergun aimed at me, and they open the door, and point at the twins, and say, ‘Ladies, get out,’ but the twins, they don’t speak a word of English, so they prod the ladies out with their revolvers. That takes some doing, four legs, one skirt, but they get the Siamese twins out, get them into the chariot, and the man with the whip smacks the butts of those trotters and away they go, the three of them standing in that chariot.”
“That’s it?”
“The others wanted the twins’ luggage, and they loaded it on a packhorse.”
“And you didn’t fight it?”
“They made us drop our weapons,” one of the drummers said.
“What else did they take? The mail? Anything in a lockbox?”
“Nope,” said Quill. “The foreign women and their bags.”
“Did they give any reasons?”
“They said, ‘Don’t shoot,’ we’d hit the women, and that was true. They headed due west, over some off-road route.”
“Good, we’ll have some tracks to follow,” I said.
“Them were my brides,” Rusty said.
“Real purty, they were,” Quill said. “But sure hobbled up. I can see the direction your steamy little brain’s taking, Irons,” the jehu said.
This was getting a little out of hand.
“Rusty, you interview the male passengers, and I’ll interview these women. Meanwhile, you people, clear out of here.”
But no one moved. Half the town, it seemed, had flooded in.
Rusty and I got what we could from all those passengers. Nothing was taken except the Ukrainians. No one was forced to empty pockets. No valuables ended up in bandit pockets. The robbers were young, well masked, rode easily, wore wide-brimmed hats and jeans and dirty boots.
They were all polite; no apparent accents. None of them offered reasons. The Ukrainian twins went peaceably, not understanding a bit of it. They were even smiling. They were treated courteously by the bandits.
“Were they hostages? Would they be returned for a reward?” Rusty asked the drummers.
“Nope, no sign of it,” said one in a black bowler.
“Who’d want female Siamese twins?” Rusty asked.
“They were real lookers,” another salesman ventured.
Rusty whipped out his tintype. “These the ones?”
They studied the black-and-white a while. “Not sure, but seems so,” one said.