It’s a Christmas giveaway featuring some very badly-behaved women.
Enter now to win five books about women of the Old West who were
wicked to the core.
The stage driver slammed his foot against the brake lever and hauled back on the reins, yanking the team to a jerking, but quick halt. He stared, jaw agape, into the steady barrels of a Navy .36 and a Colt .45.
Behind the guns stood a hefty man twirling a black handlebar mustache and another figure partially hidden under a large white sombrero. A figure who the driver thought was pretty small built for a man.
“Raise ‘em,” barked the mustached man.
“Higher up,” echoed the strange figure under the sombrero. It was the voice that did it. The driver instantly recognized Pearl Hart, who had become widely known for her carryings on in those parts around Florence, Arizona in 1899.
Before the day was out, she would be known throughout Arizona and much of the country as “the daring lady bandit,” object of a great posse chase in a West that had almost forgotten how.
Unfortunately for young but hardened Pearl, then about twenty-seven-years-old, she and her sidekick, a hardly successful miner named Joe Boot, never knew how to make it as outlaws.
The holdup itself was a vast success, mainly because stages had long before decided shotgun guards were unnecessary.
Three passengers untangled themselves from the heap in which the lurching stop had thrown them and climbed fearfully from the stage. A short fat man who surrendered $390 into a sack held by the lady road agent, a “dude with his hair parted in the middle (worth $36) and a pigtailed Chinese man,” who had just $5 to contribute when Pearl demanded, “Shell out!”
Then Pearl put on the first of her “road agent” performances that in subsequent months were to make her name famous across the land: She swaggered back and forth in front of the trembling passengers, glaring and sneering at them.
