Paige McCullers. The fiercest Sheriff in the West. She was a legend. A myth. The mere whisper of her name was enough to cut a saloon game short.
A self-made woman. Born in a time when women were not much more than bargaining chips or trophies, she bucked the traditions and trends of her time by becoming the very first female Sheriff elected in Pennsylvania. H Heck, she was the first female sheriff in all of America! She got her start as a guard for goods and people. She took one of her daddy's horses; a Philly named "Justice" and with her grandpa's old musket she defended carriage after carriage on long trips across the West.
This was in the time before they built fancy locomotives to transport people across long distances. It was in times when people on long journeys used to have to make camps for the night on the way from one big city to another, because there was nowhere else for them to stop.
Back then, a trip like that was mighty scary. Even the biggest, boldest men would think twice about travelling somewhere too far. Apart from the critters and the bears and wolves and other animals, they ran the risk of getting scalped by them Indians, or being ambushed by bandits. It was a lawless, unforgiving land.
Paige spent many nights by the fire, maintaining her grand-pappy's musket, and reading her favorite book; Frankenstein. Folks around here believe she must have felt the monster's loneliness because she never married.
It was during one of those sleepless nights, transporting the Mayor's daughter to her new house, that her camp was sized up by some bandits. It was a quiet night, and they hadn't camped too close to the water. All you could hear was the cicadas and the distant howling of the wolves. Paige was sat on a log by the tent, whittling a bear, while everybody else was fast asleep. They must have looked like easy pickings.
Two bandits tried to sneak into camp through the woods. They got real close but as it turns out, Paige was cut from a sharper cloth. She'd strung up a couple empty tin cans in the perimeter, that knocked together and jingle-jangled when someone tripped over their wire. Paige was awake and alert the whole dang night. She heard them coming from a mile away and she was on them before they even knew what they'd done.
She blew the first guy away with her musket. She wouldn't have had time to load though so she came at the second thief with her whittling knife and cut him down from his nose to his chin. She told him he could run if he wanted to. That there would be no shame in living to fight another day. The old fool didn't listen. He charged but as he ran at her, she dove forward and pulled his legs out from under him. He tried to flip over onto his back so he could see about aiming his fish knife at her, but she was already standing over him, her skinning knife in her hand.
When she searched them boys she found out they were Copper Snakes. Them Copper Snakes were a dastardly gang of thieves that roamed up and down the East Coast and had a mean, nasty streak in them. Anyone crossed them, they wouldn't just gun for them, they would raze their whole town. Paige knew if she met them again there'd be trouble so she did her best to bury the men in the night, and hoped that none of their associates would ever catch up with them.
Sadly, nobody taught the mayor's daughter, Hanna, as much. The first thing she did when she reached home was tell her father the feat that had been done. Two Copper Snakes in one night, when most guards those days wound up getting their throats slashed by them? This was momentous enough to earn her a raise and a promotion. No longer was she a freelance guard. She was now a Deputy Sheriff!
Paige was torn. On the one hand, taking the praise and position meant she was surely making some enemies and painting a target on her back but on the other hand, the money was good, and she'd finally have some respect, for once in her life. She'd get to be treated fairly -or at least a little better than before- and she'd even get good money for it. When she worked for her father, in his homestead, he would give her about a dollar every other month. Now she would be making twenty-five, to thirty times that amount, every month.
Despite the risk, she took the job. No doubt, that girl had some balls on her.
Things were going smooth for a while down in ole Roseywood. That's what they used to call it before the 'y' fell off the town sign and everyone decided just to roll with it. It was the great depression, people couldn't afford to be installing more 'y's on the town sign so it became Rosewood after a while, but back then it was ole Roseywood. Things were smooth for a while. Paige McCullers worked hard under Sheriff Easton, and was set to inherit the title of Sheriff when he retired.
Things didn't go exactly as planned though. Back in the day, people didn't take kindly to strangers, and they didn't take too kindly to women strangers neither. Especially women strangers in charge. When it came time to vote for Sheriff, everyone in that rotten town voted for that Dunce, Dudley Taylor over Paige. And while the girl was understandably frustrated, she couldn't do not nothing 'bout it.
She was going to skip town and start over someplace else. Maybe find her folks' homestead or start her own. She had a lot of good work years left in her and she was sturdy like an Ox, they say. But before leaving town, she had to get some things together. Save up some of her money. And in that time, a new Sheriff came to town. This was no local yokel either, he was the county Sheriff, and he'd heard word that bandits were getting ready to ransack the town.
See, the Sheriff wasn't what made her stay. Rumor has it that when it came down to leaving, what kept Paige in town was the Sheriff's beautiful daughter, Emily-Anne. She used to extend her patrols to the Fields house, every night, to make sure the young lass was alright. It came to be expected of the young deputy. Why, the young Fields girl used to leave her light on every night, until the deputy strolled by to check in on her.
And the Fields were nice people. They even let the young deputy stay with them. She was so alike in age with their daughter, that they became great friends indeed. Their house was modestly sized, and when dignitaries visited, which was quite often these days, the young deputy lay with the County Sheriff's daughter. But neither girl seemed to mind. They would blush and smile at each other just as much after their little stays.
Nevertheless, the bandits came, and they swooped in but they were rounded up by Paige. She became a hero and all that, and was finally voted Sheriff. She accepted, and news spread of her feats and Sheriff Dudley's humiliation. Unfortunately the news spread as far as the Copper Snakes, who were still bitter over their earlier humiliation. Before dawn, they had gathered their forces and started to ride towards the small town.
Now Paige was no yellow bellied broad, she was a fighter, but these folks were no yacks. They were formidable fighters, and some of the quickest gunslingers in the West. They's shoot you as soon as soon as look at you. And they were all led by old Lead-foot. He looked like the hindquarters of a blind duck, and he was mean enough to steal a coin off a dead man's eyes. He was a cow-wrassler one morning, and a murderer by the same night and he was not a man to be trifled with.
Old man Cotter saw him coming a mile away, and he sent his missus with his son over to warn the town. The ole Marshall told Paige to get a horse and ride North with his daughter, to avoid them. Said he was gonna take care of them himself but the girl knew his hours were numbered if she did that so she chose to stay and fight.
She had his daughter sent up North with a friend. A good man by the name of Gottesman. He was no fighter but he was good with words. He managed to get some mounties sent down to assist with the fight but by the time they reached town, the whole fighting was already done. All they found was a bear carcass and a couple bandits in lockup.
Paige McCullers rode halfway up the Appalachian Mountains with the younger Miss Fields before leaving her to the care of her friend, and taking off back down the Mountains at great speed on the back of a grey ass. She rode the ass down to town, filling an entire satchel with as many as half a dozen American Copperheads she caught herself on the way down, and setting them loose on a group of bandits that set up a blockade right outside of town. She rode in on her ass and mowed down three men with her grand-pappy's Flintlock before burrowing into the Jailhouse with the Marshall.
The old man took a gutshot in her absence and had barricaded himself and some of the town's women, protecting them from raping and pillaging while waiting for help to arrive from the South. The messenger had been shot however, and no one was coming from the South. He had no way of knowing that though, and as he persisted in fighting the men off, he aggravated his bullet wound.
Lucky for the old man, the bandits were mostly new recruits and untrained with pistols. Therefore they were given revolvers that loaded quickly but only carried smaller magnitude bullets. The gutshot was bad, and he risked infection, for sure, but it could be survivable if her sought help soon. And thankfully, Paige strolled into town right before things got bad for him. She managed to break into the old doctor's clinic and fetch the man some medicine, knocking out the bandit guarding the door from behind and taking his place on the frontline.
She was able to scout the town from her location. There were still six men left for her to take out but she knew she had to isolate them and take them out one by one. Two men were ransacking the saloon, Paige figured from the screams, and another three were riding through town, scouting the area. The mayor and his daughter and son were tied up in the center square and stripped down to their underwear to humiliate them, and leadfoot was there somewhere too, but he was out of sight.
Wayne told Paige that before he'd been shot, he saw Leadfoot going from house to house, no doubt searching her out. There was no way of knowing just where he would be right now, but the old man gave her his spare Colt and a handfull of bullets, and bid her luck with a kiss on the forehead. She gave him a playful tap on the chin and assured everyone that it would be okay before she grabbed a rope out the stables, and used it to make a lasso.
The three men would circle the town and meet in the center every five to seven minutes so Paige had to act fast. She used her donkey as a distraction and got the first bandit to stop his horse as soon as he was out of sight of the other two men. He got down off his horse to investigate and as he did received a knock to the back of the head that knocked him flat on Paige's ass. She used the ass to move his body over to the stables where she tied him up before she took his bandanna, hat and horse and met up with the other two men.
They didn't really do much talking. The meet-up was just for visual confirmation and Paige passed the first test with very little scrutiny. When everyone started turning off to their new areas, she started going down the right lane, but instead of turning right like all the other men had done, she'd turned left, cantered down half the lane and dismounted her horse, leaving it standing in the middle of the road.
The second bandit was a little smarter than the first. He didn't dismount to investigate. Rather he called out from his perch on his horse. She'd left a door open to his right, and told the kids hiding inside the orphanage to make noise inside, as if there was a scuffle while she hid across the street, behind a tree on the footpath. The bandit stared off, and even started walking his horse over, and giving Paige the perfect opportunity to knock him off his horse with a brick. This one nearly got up in the time it took Paige to run across the street.
He actually managed to turn and face her before she reached him. She quickly knocked the gun out of his reach but that only made him madder than ever. He charged her and she dodged but he managed to grab her anyway, and throw her to the ground where he started to choke her with his bare hands. She tried pushing him off to no avail. Thankfully the orphans heard the scuffle and ran out, jumping on the bandit to subdue him while Paige got up and got her bearings.
She knew she could not afford to shoot her gun, because she still had not tracked Leadfoot down, and it would be giving her away, so when she caught her breath a little she ran back to the brick she threw, and brained him as he whaled on the orphans he managed to cast off of him. She smashed his head with the brick half a dozen times before he stopped shaking, and by the time she was done, half the orphans were covered in bits of his skull and brains. She would have stayed to check on them but time was running out, she had to make her way back to the center of the town before the hostages were slain.
She jumped on the second bandit's horse. Lord knows he wouldn't be using it anymore. She galloped her way to the intersection, and headed towards the town while the children disposed of the body. She met the last bandit by the gallows in the center of town, where he'd begun setting up nooses for the mayor and his kids..
She approached from the side. This time there were no pretenses but the man was so caught up in his work, he barely paid her any mind. She saw Hanna, the Mayor's daughter get dragged out of the stocks by another bandit and cursed under her breath, thinking there were only six of them including Leadfoot. The pock-faced slouch seemed to fancy her. He complained that he wouldn't get a minute alone with her before she died, as he grabbed at her over her underwear.
Paige was infuriated. Perhaps it was the anger that caused her to stop thinking with her brain because before she assessed the situation, she jumped up on the gallows, punching him in the nose so hard it broke, quickly wrapping the middle noose around his neck. She pushed Hanna off the platform as she stabbed the other man, throwing a noose over him too, tightening both in a fluid gesture, before lowering the false floor of the stage, hanging the creepy bastards by the throat. As they gasped and pleaded for help, she was in the stocks, freeing the mayor and his son when a bullet wizzed right past her head, so close she felt it scratch her ear before it ricocheted off the metal banding on the stocks and fell.
She ducked for cover, taking the mayor down with her. She knew a gun like that was built for distance and that reloading it would take a couple of seconds so she ushered the family into the nearest house while she distracted the shooter. She caused a scene, firing her Colt in every which way possible, making sure to save a bullet for Leadfoot, when she figured out where he was, before making a show of getting hit in the shoulder by a bullet he fired that just barely missed her torso.
She let out an agonizing scream as she fell, dropping her gun a foot away. She knew if she had let her guard down that Leadfoot might leave his hiding place. She kept her shoulder covered with the hand she used to check her ear -the hand that was covered in a little blood from the shot that barely missed her- and smeared the blood all around her shoulder front. If anyone were to look from a reasonable distance, it'd be safe to assume that she got shot.
And so it was that she tricked old LeadFoot into leaving his hiding spot in the library, and stomping over to her on his good leg. They called him old Leadfoot because he had one foot made of metal. He used that leg to kick his enemies to death, killing them slowly, once he had them subdued. Paige however was not subdued. She was only faking. And when he turned to kick her, she picked her gun up and shot him right through the metal foot, all the way up his leg.
"ARGH! YOU STUPID WHORE!" he screamed as the bullet hit. He didn't get a chance to finish that thought because she wrapped the lasso around his other leg, pulling it out from under him and knocking him down.
"Leadfoot. More like 'tin-ny-toes'" she joked as she hit him over the head with the butt of her grand-pappy's flintlock musket, knocking him out cold before hogtying him.
The bounty from bringing old Tin-Toes in alive was enough for her to buy a modest place in town, and from then on, nobody bothered her or Rosewood ever again. Things settled down after that. Marshal Fields was promoted, and Paige was as well, bringing in a mighty fifty dollars home now, where she lived with her good friend Emily, the Marshal's daughter, who doted on her so, and was so fond of her dear friend she chose to stay behind in Rosewood with her, rather than move with her family or marry.
And so goes the tale of the great Paige McCullers who brought peace to a little town on the edge of Pennsylvania, and ended the life and careers of many a gang and bandit in the East, back in 1860.