Wilde-Fire: Wonder Women 0f The Old West (Half Breed Haven Book 1) Read online

  “I sure as sugar hope you are right about this, Cass. I know you don’t want to disappoint that fine-looking Mr. Boxhall!”

  Once again, Cassandra had to jolt out of her thoughts. She glanced sideways and watched briefly as Cattie tilted her head at her before finally figuring that Cattie had indeed said something about their destination.

  “You’re right about that,” she grinned at her young sibling. “I intend to bring him this cadre of outlaws and put an end to these brazen bank robberies once and for all.”

  Catalina nodded, assured of the plan as they rode on. They were close enough now to start making out individual buildings in the desolate town of Beacon. At the distance, its most notable feature was a large, old water tower rising high above everything else.

  Cassandra had begun to think about what Catalina had said. She couldn’t always control her silent thoughts. Now, she was thinking that when the mission started a couple weeks ago, and she accepted it, it had been all about ending the bank robberies. All that had changed, though, when her uncle had introduced her to Bennet W. Boxhall, whose family owned the banks that were being hit.

  Her mind journeyed back to the moment that she sat in the governor’s office with Nathanial Duvalier, who was her uncle through his marriage to Whip’s sister, Constance. They were awaiting the arrival of Boxhall, so he had taken that time to fill her in on his relationship to the people he wished to help by bringing Cassie aboard.

  Nate explained that he went back a long way with the Boxhall family. So far back that Bennet’s father, Lionel, had been the chief contributor to his campaign when he first ran for governor. Without his support, Nathaniel doubted he would have won his first term.

  Cassie had listened with polite interest on how the elder Boxhall had passed away a year before and left the banks under the control of his eldest son, Bennet. However, her mind was already leaping ahead thinking about how she was eager to get on the trail of the outlaws.

  Things quickly changed, however, when the knock came at the door and Nate’s secretary, Miss Rhodes, escorted a tall handsome man into the room. Cassie’s green eyes devoured him from head to toe. He had the same goldenrod hair that she herself had and he sported a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. His wide shoulders were not lost on her as she drank him in. What she noticed most were his eyes—though gray, they flashed with a warmth she found most appealing.

  It turned out Bennet W. Boxhall was a totally handsome man indeed; one she had now instantly decided she had an interest in. Cassie knew fully well she and her sisters had something of a reputation of aggressiveness when it came to men, and in Catalina’s case, women as well, that they found inviting. The four Wilde sisters had vowed never to be shrinking violets when it came to acting on their desires. The main reason they had all agreed to this was that life was too short. Not one of their mothers had lived to have the full lives they deserved, because of various tragedies, and the four half-sisters swore they would never end up like that. It was live for the moment for them. That was their mantra, and they had stuck to it.

  Now, at the moment of meeting Bennet W. Boxhall, Cassandra knew he had just fallen into her sights, and once she saw he fortuitously had no wedding band, it became cemented in her mind that she would have him. After the introduction, they had chatted with each other enthusiastically, especially on how happy Bennet was to have Cassandra brought in to help the situation. Her growing attraction was only stoked by what a genuinely nice gentleman Bennet was proving to be. Though not unexpected, she was pleased to see he appeared to be developing an interest in her as they spoke with subtle flirting passing between them. With humor, she had idly thought about what might be running through her uncle’s mind as they engaged in the flirtation.

  As much as she was enjoying the company of her future conquest, she was still a lawman at the end of the day, so she brought the conversation around to just what a dilemma the Boxhall Saving and Trust Banks had found themselves.

  Cassandra had been apprised that a week earlier, two of the four branches had been hit simultaneously. One in Corbin’s Creek, and the other in Sagebrush. In both cases, it was a team of four men and one woman. They had operated with precision. The woman was left to guard the door against anyone who might be attempting to enter the bank during the robbery, while two others held their guns on the patrons of the bank. The last pair of men did the actual robbing at the tellers’ stations and emptied out the vault.

  Unfortunately, in the Corbin’s Creek robbery, things had gotten out of hand when a teller had been uncooperative and had been shot dead for his refusal. Another man, a customer, had been severely wounded by the female guarding the door when he had grabbed his wife’s hand and tried to make a run for the exit while the teller was being shot to death. Despite the gunplay, they had gotten away as had the other five-person team in Sagebrush.

  The lawmen of Corbin’s Creek—there were only two of them—an old sheriff and a very young deputy, had followed the tracks southeast until they vanished in a rocky stretch of land in a desert known as Hell’s Kitchen. Unlike the famous one in New York City that Cassandra knew was densely populated, this Hell’s Kitchen was a barren wasteland.

  The posse from Sagebrush that had a few more men in number had fared no better as they followed the tracks northwest into that same wasteland, only to lose them when their tracks had apparently been obliterated by a pack of wild horses that passed through the area, no doubt in search of water.

  Boxhall was concerned that his two other banks might be the next targets because he believed his were being purposely targeted. Nate had asked him why he believed that, and he told him that both towns each had a second, smaller bank that had only one teller in them and likely fewer customers, which would have made robbing them a much safer bet.

  Cassie did see some merit in his argument, but she wasn’t wholly convinced as she suggested perhaps the robbers thought they would get a better haul at the bigger bank. Boxhall, somewhat dejected, admitted that was a possibility.

  Still, she had brightened his spirits by promising that she would protect the two remaining banks in Cloverfield and Stanton’s Gap, by enlisting the aid of her sisters back at Half Breed Haven. At the time, Cassandra didn’t realize that she had said the nickname bestowed upon Cedar Ledge years ago, and this had given Boxhall a puzzled look—the kind that she knew left her little choice but to explain.

  She told him the nickname at first had been an attempt to hurt the denizens of the ranch, by those who did not believe William Henry Wilde should have raised a family consisting of such different races and colors. As was their nature, the girls had turned the tables on their detractors and had instructed the ranch’s blacksmith to fashion a large metallic circle containing the letters HBH, which they promptly mounted atop the sign adorning the entrance to the ranch. More so, they had long ago enthusiastically embraced the moniker and thus owned it so it could never be used to hurt them.

  He gave her a smile upon her explanation, and they had quickly wrapped up their meeting with Cassandra swiftly getting in touch with her sisters. Upon receiving her telegram, as they always did, they came at once to her aid. The group of four left the governor’s office in Tucson immediately, with the plan for Honor and Lijuan to stake out the branch in the town of Stanton’s Gap, while she and Cattie would watch the home branch of the Boxhall Savings & Loan in Cloverfield.

  To their dismay, both sets of sisters had arrived too late by only a matter of hours. Both branches had been hit, and the same familiar teams had gotten away yet again.

  Cattie and Cassie were hot on the trail, riding to the southwest, following their tracks when the misfortune of having a powerful sandstorm came up. Cassandra reluctantly but wisely gave the storm a wide berth, as she had nearly lost her life in a similar storm five years back, when she had first returned to the west from the Pinkerton Agency, Philadelphia branch, where she had worked.

  She swore like a sailor when the storm had passed, erasing all traces of where the
bandits had made off to. Even the ever-cheerful Catalina had a look of dejection on her face at losing the trail.

  When they had rendezvoused with Lijuan and Honor Elizabeth, Cassie’s mood had blackened even further when they reported they too had lost the trail when a torrential rainstorm had swept over the trail of tracks they were following heading northeast. To the Wilde sisters, it seemed as if even Mother Nature was stepping in to protect the clever bandits. Making matters worse was the news from Lijuan that again, another teller had been shot and whether he would live or die had yet to be determined. This served only to fuel Cassie’s desire to catch the desperados once and for all.

  Cassandra suddenly held up her hand to stop everyone, her mind catapulting from the unfortunate incidents of the past few days to the present.

  “Girls, stop!” she hissed.

  Her sisters had seen it too, as their horses came to a perfect halt. Just ahead of them, a darkening mass of a sandstorm was blowing in from a northeasterly direction and it was heading right for Beacon.

  “Damn it!” Cassandra groaned.

  “What’s with you and sandstorms, anyway?” Catalina chuckled beside her. “I swear, Big Sis, you’re somethin’ akin to a human magnet when it comes to them!”

  “Forgive me for inquiring, but are we in danger?” Honor asked reasonably.

  “We’re safe as long as the wind keeps blowing from the northeast. If it shifts direction, then we’re going to have to outrun the thing,” Lijuan said, eyeing the trajectory of the tempest.

  “If it’s a race between us and a sandstorm, sorry, sisters, but I’m gonna place my bets on the storm!” Catalina rattled off.

  “We wait here until it passes over Beacon,” Cassandra said, already dropping down from her horse.

  With no choice, her sisters dismounted their horses too, using the opportunity to stretch their legs. The ride to Beacon had taken the four of them two days out from Cloverfield and that had meant spending two chilly nights, camping out on the desert.

  Honor, to no one’s surprise, had spent each night loudly whining about missing her feathered canopy bed back at Cedar Ledge, but none of the sisters had taken the bait, especially Lijuan who was known for an almost supernatural ability to curl up in a ball anywhere on any surface and fall asleep immediately. Honor had barely begun to complain, the first night when Lijuan was already softly snoring in her bedroll.

  Now, two days later, because of a raging sandstorm that impeded them from riding forward, Cassandra idly sat on a rock and used a stick to draw a crude representation of the map back in Cloverfield that had led them to their current location outside of Beacon.

  She made four “X” characters—each to the northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast. Under each one, she drew the first initial of the town containing one of the Boxhall banks that had been robbed. In the dead center, she wrote out the word “Beacon” with the stick and then proceeded to draw straight lines from each of the X’s that all led to the word “Beacon.”

  As she made each X connect to the town’s name, her mind once again drifted off, this time around to three days ago. They all were in their room in the Cloverfield Hotel and she had stood hunched over a map purchased earlier, studying it. Catalina and Lijuan were playing a spirited card game behind her, while Honor was busy trying out various colored ribbons in her hair in front of a mirror, saying she wanted to find just the right one to match the color of the choker adorned with a velvet rose she always wore about her neck.

  Cassandra had paid no mind to her sisters, her concentration intense. These were well-organized robbers, especially when striking banks at the same time and ensuring a considerable haul whenever the two teams reassembled wherever they were hiding, skillfully evading everyone.

  Getting an ink pen, Cassandra had drawn a line from the southeast that had Corbin’s Creek towards the area that the robbers’ trail was lost. She did the same with Sagebrush and began to draw a line heading northwest. At that point, she had conceived the theory that the thieves were always definitely heading somewhere to join up. Quickly, she calculatedly began to draw lines on the map from all the various robbery locations to all trails after the thieves had disappeared. If the robbers could be assumed to be heading in a straight line into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, she thought, eventually, they would perhaps meet in the dead center.

  Having drawn the lines heading to such a meeting point, Cassandra realized that there was nothing on the map to showcase where all her straight lines met. The map showed Hell’s Kitchen as a population dead zone. No one really inhabited the area, and if it was anything like the Los Mochis Flats bordering Alamieda, Cassandra considered, then it would be no surprise. Cassandra was aware that no one similarly lived in the Los Mochis except for some grizzled old desert rats. Even Castleton, the only town in the flats, was currently nothing but a ghost town after the silver mine had played out.

  As she compared it to the Los Mochis, the thoughts of Castleton sparked something within Cassandra’s mind and she began to stare intently at the map again. Her eyes darted around for long until she found what she was looking for. With flourish, she brought her index finger down on to the print on the map that proclaimed that it was published in 1870. To the astonishment of her sisters, Cassandra darted out of the room without saying a word.

  It took her only a few minutes, to get to the general store where she had bought the map in the first place. The shopkeeper, a robust man with cute chubby cheeks and an uneven moustache, smiled at her the same way he had when she first visited his store. This time around, there was a similarly robust woman with him who nudged his ribs with her elbow when it was obvious that he was quite taken by Cassandra’s curvaceous figure.

  “What can I get you again, Miss?” The storekeeper managed to ask, his previously sparkling eyes falling to the counter as soon as his wife—Cassandra already assumed who she was—scowled at him.

  “Do you have older maps of the area?” Cassandra went straight to the point, ignoring whatever dynamic was happening between the couple.

  “Older?” the storekeeper asked, seeming surprised. “I only sell the newest inventory in here. Besides, people always ask for updated ones.”

  He could brag all day about the kinds of things he sold and his customers, Cassandra thought, but what was only good for him was bad news for her, judging what she had in mind.

  “So, there aren’t any other maps in your store apart from the one you sold me earlier?”

  The storekeeper opened his mouth to reply to her, but no words came out of them. Cassandra noticed that his wife had stepped so close to him she probably choked him out of words. It was apparent, now, that she was totally threatened by Cassandra’s appearance. On a usual day, Cassandra would have been tempted to make her more jealous by flirting with her husband, but this wasn’t one of those days.

  His wife spoke eventually, turning to Cassandra with a growl that showed her intent to get Cassandra away from the shop and from her husband.

  “You could try Sam Peterson, you know?”

  “He has a store like this?” Cassandra asked her, still uninterested in whatever was going on between her and her husband.

  “No.” she said, her husband also shaking his head to affirm her response. “He’s down at Bleeker’s Saloon, which has one of those old maps on its walls as decoration.”

  Down at the Bleeker’s Saloon, Cassandra quickly noted in her head and said a quick thank you, obviously to the disappointment of the shopkeeper, as his face became crestfallen, and bolted out of the store.

  The Bleeker’s Saloon was a short walk from the store and finding the map on the wall wasn’t difficult in the least. Cassandra stood in front of it, minutes later, oblivious to the many hungry eyes in the saloon that stayed glued to her heart-shaped ass and curved hips. Nothing interested her save the map.

  At least, the storekeeper’s wife was right. The map was dated 1858 and at its dead center was the sole town of Beacon. Deciding that she needed to more inf
ormation on Beacon, she approached the bar and quickly stated her intent to speak with a Sam Peterson.

  “You are speaking to him,” the bartender told her, surprising her.

  He was tall, but swarthy with a cute small mole just beside his right eye and seemed friendly and very knowledgeable. Cassandra made these conclusions a few minutes after asking him about the map and if he knew much about Beacon’s history. What he had to say about the town proved it to have a very colorful history.

  “The town was initially founded in the early 1850’s by a woman known as the Cat Lady,” he told her. “Margaret Robeles was her name and she had shown up from California into the middle of Hell’s Kitchen, in search of a mother lode of gold. Her husband had died on the trip east, leaving her and their two teenage sons along with a passel of pet cats to follow up on the claim from an old prospector who, on his death bed, told of an incredible gold strike.”

  Cassandra listened attentively to Sam Peterson’s narration. According to him, years earlier, Margaret’s husband, Dr. Robeles had been a doctor with the US cavalry, whose troops had found the dying prospector and brought him back to the fort. Dr. Robeles did his best to save him, but in the end, there was nothing he could do. The old man appreciated Dr. Robeles’ help nonetheless and shared with him, before his death, the secrets location of gold in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.

  “After retiring from the army,” Sam Peterson narrated, “the Robeles family set out to find the gold, only to have the doctor succumb to typhoid before reaching Arizona. Still, his family soldiered on to discover the old prospector had been true to his word. A huge vein of gold did indeed lie where he said it would.”

  “Word got out quickly and people began staking their claims. Beacon seemed to rise out of the desert overnight as the town became overrun by gold seekers and with Mrs. Robeles’ cats, which quickly multiplied and became a fixture in the town. Like most boomtowns, however, once all the gold was gone, Beacon died a quick death and passed into lore as another ghost town of the West. Even that wasn’t enough to keep it on the maps, and now, few ever think of it anymore.”