“I will not,” she said defiantly. “If you cowards are going to gun down a seventeen-year-old boy, you may as well shoot his mother along with him.”

“Mama!” Idelle cried out, and joined her mother and brother.

“Get that child away from there,” Sheriff Foster demanded. “I don’t want to shoot a woman and child, but if I have to, I will.”

“Like hell, you will,” a voice from the crowd called out. Two dozen rifles and pistols were instantly directed at Sheriff Foster, Marshal Stacy, and their men.

“I don’t know if what the boy says is true,” a different man’s voice said, “but either way, nobody is gonna shoot no woman or child.”

“Damned straight!” another man said. “Hell no!” still another said.

Observing from the hotel porch, Burnell Shipley realized things were rapidly getting out of control. The arrival of Samuel Pritchard, towing the bodies of two of the men he’d dispatched to eliminate Thomas Pritchard, was a wild card he didn’t even know was in the deck.

Shipley’s false-flag operation, carried out with help from the marshal and sheriff, and the martial law he’d declared as a result, were supposed to get him custody of the sawmill and further cement Union sentiment within the county. The Pritchard Lumber Company was the only utility he didn’t have control of, and he needed to gain possession of it quickly. Only a week before, during a business trip to Jefferson City, his connections within the government informed him that a huge lumber contract was soon to be awarded.

Eliminating Thomas Pritchard was potentially going to benefit Shipley in ways other than financial. Shipley always had his eye on Dovie Pritchard, one of the comeliest women in Jackson County. Making her a widow at the same time he commandeered her dead husband’s lumber business was killing two birds with one stone.

Shipley’s wife had died under what some called “unusual” circumstances a couple of winters back. According to her husband, she sustained a fatal injury when she fell, drunk, down the icy back steps of the Atherton Hotel and fractured her skull. Except Miranda Shipley was known to be a teetotaler, only hotel employees used the back stairs, and there were no witnesses besides her husband. Regardless of what actually befell the hapless woman, the sheriff and town marshal summarily declared her death an accident. Dr. Mauldin had no choice but to sign the death certificate, listing “accidental” as the cause of her demise. That’s where the matter ended.