The Free Republic of Texas 2015 (17 page)

She wanted to pick out her own hand guns (yes with an “S”) and picked a Colt commander in 45 acp for her main gun and a Ruger LCP for her carry gun, the long heavy trigger on the little LCP bothered her a bit but she came to grips with it just as she did with the Commander grip, John did put thinner grip panels on for her and that helped, she was getting better and better with it.

It was a nice quiet week but we were happy to see the newly weds roll in, Ellen had fit in like an extra pea in a pod; she was very good for Jody too.

Toward the middle of fall we got a call from Miss Ellie asking Jody and I to come to the café after the usual coffee clutchers were gone, we arrived at 10:00 to find the place empty except for Miss Ellie and an old gentleman I had never seen before, He stood up kind of slowly but stood straight and his hand shake was firm, Ellie introduced him to us as Ely Stone, who it turned out owned about 300 acres next to our place, After we were settled and had our coffee and some pie , Ely got right to it, saying he wanted to sell us his place ! He said he was 90 years old and was born on the place and had never left except for the War years, his wife was dead as was all his kin folks, and they had never had any kids so it was time to do something before the state got involved. He was aware of what we were doing in the area and had even seen some of the clan hunters in the forest near his property line but they never came on his land and waved when they saw him, nice folks he said, bit strange and wild looking but nice and polite.

We had thought about that place in the past few months but didn’t have a clue it might be for sale or even who owned it and after 10 years in the town I should have known.., Jody said well I think Sam will agree with me that we want your place so you name your price and if we can afford it we will close the deal with a shake how’s that?

Ely smiled and said well sir I think that’s a good way to do business, as to the price, well I want you to take me into your plans and let me and Ellie have a place in your fort when the time comes.

He then explained that he had been asking Ellie to marry him for 25 years since after his wife died, Ely had gone off to the same war Ellie’s intended had got killed in and they were best of friends, so when he came home and married his sweetheart the three of them had stayed life long friends,

Ellie spoke up and said as yawl know I never married after Ben didn’t make it home and I think it’s time to share my life with somebody and Ely is my best and oldest friend, so we intend to get hitched and live here in the café till things go to hell as yawl seem to think it will.

Ely spoke up again and said, boys I have nobody to leave the place to and in truth the old house is gonna fall down one day, but the hay fields are prime and the woods have a lot of game, and there’s still a bunch of cattle in there, wild as can be but they are still good to eat! So yawl take care of us when we get too old to do for ourselves and it’s yours, I have the deed and we can head to the county to sign it over.

Jody smiled and shook his head and said well Ely, you drive a hard bargain but I guess we can handle it.

Hands were shook, hugs for Miss Ellie and they agreed to head over to get the paper work done right then and get back in time to meet the girls for lunch because when they heard the wedding news it was gonna be a wild time!

When they got to the County offices they were surprised to find that Jim had moved his office to the Court house. When asked, he said he felt that folks would be more apt to stop in a visit there then in the “cop shop” he had an older lady as a secretary and “Guardian of the gate” to keep the traffic down, Jim said it was working real well because folks were stopping by with information. Some of which was very useful and was helping resolve several ongoing cases, nothing big but the small stuff that kept the Sheriffs Dept busy.

We didn’t stay long with him as we had to get the land business done and get Ely home; he said he didn’t want to miss the 4:00 farm report.

After the deed transfer was done we did have lunch with Jim and headed home, Ely talking about all the changes he had seen in his long life and Jody filled him in on the Ranch things that Miss Ellie hadn’t told him about.

He surprised both men by saying he wanted to do some handgun shooting as he used to be real good, and also that he’d love to work in the gun store to be around the young guns as he called them, we thought that was a wonderful idea, he would be busy and feel useful and god knows he had more information about farming and related issues in his head then any of us.

We stopped by the “Gun Shop” as the sign informed the world and introduced Ely to John who was delighted to have him, and when John learned of the up and coming wedding he was really happy for the two oldest members of our extended families.

John said he needed to speak with us later so we returned Ely to the care of his bride to be and headed back to the shop, John said he had been thinking about the idea of having the Jonas brothers look at rebuilding a few heavy duty diesel trucks and “up armor” them for “later” as he put it, his idea was to make them like patrol rigs that could take hits from most anything that would be in the hands of BG’s.

It sounded like a good idea to me and Jody so the three of us went to see the brothers who were really happy in their new garage which they had designed as their dream place, they had several high school boys working as apprentices which was really going well as all of them were also in Auto Shop class in school and were getting extra credits for their work here plus earning wages and as a added bonus were allowed to use the shop to work on their own vehicles on the weekends.

It was decided to buy some older Ford diesel one ton trucks with dual wheels and then rebuild them from the ground up John drew out a sketch of what he had in mind which looked more like a military patrol rig which got us to thinking about military surplus, which led to the internet which led to Government auctions, where we discovered just what we needed could be bid on, the biggest problem was finding a small lot of what we wanted to work with, John said he would handle the research on that end, in the mean time we decided to go ahead with the Ford project as it was being called because we felt having a fleet of big work trucks that wouldn’t be effected by an EMP would be very smart and we could use them every day on the place because they wouldn’t look like military rigs, but would still be lightly armored in understated ways.

After acquiring Ely’s land we had a meeting with the Clan leaders and told them they could now spread out into that area and the new comers could have room to expand their living areas, the hunters were delighted with the addition although most had been on the land already in their own patrols but none had hunted it and the game was getting thin on the ranch, this made everybody happy and we left them working on their new found wealth…

I told Jody that things were coming together way to easy and fast and the other shoe had to drop sooner or later but he just smiled that Jody smile and said Sam, everything is moving into place in it’s own time and way, all we do is provide the path and get out of the way.

I had to admit that was true, in truth he and I had nothing to do but make new ideas and needs a reality.

We had a very unexpected but much welcome visitor this week, Song dropped in out of the blue surprising even Jody, after all the hand shaking and back slapping and the girls off planning a feast for the whole ranch we guys settled down on the porch with ice tea and some conversation.

Song said things were getting even worse then last report and he decided to take some time off and come see us in person to report on it.

He said the Dollar was getting ready to take a major hit due to a under the table deal cooked up between the Chinese and OPEC, their plan was to switch to the Euro and dump their dollars before they did also they would sell the treasury bills they were holding taking a loss didn’t bother them at all, mostly it was a plan designed to cripple the dollar and cause as much damage to the US as possible, Songs advice was to convert all our dollars to gold and silver and real metals not paper certificates .

After talking it over Jody and I agreed that we could convert most of our assets but would need to keep a goodly bit of cash in accounts to handle the expenses we would have on a day to day basis, but then we decided to convert that cash to gold certificates which were growing at a good rate with the value of metals moving as it was.

One phone call to our brokers and bankers did the job but of course they tried their best to talk us out of it or to at least just convert it all into stock market numbers in a computer, but in the end they did as told, then asked how the metals were to be bought, after more talk with Song we told them we wanted small denominations of coins for the most part, American and Canadian, and a goodly amount of junk silver coins.

We were told to expect a private security delivery in a couple of weeks. When we figured out the volume we had to buy several large gun safes to store it all in and we put them in the new big bunker near the clan village, who better to guard it all?

Song also told us there was a delivery coming that would require payment in gold at the time of the delivery and he would be here for that. Both of us had an idea what this was about but we never spoke about it aloud.

The day the Gold arrived it was in a non descript truck that had rental markings on it, but when it was backed into place behind the mall which was as close as we wanted the delivery crew to get to the ranch it was very obvious it was an armored unit after the doors were opened there was a crew of 5 all heavily armed men involved in security for the shipment, and with Jody and John and Bob and myself it still took us almost an hour to unload the crates into the back of the gun shop, the crates were sealed and after checking it all out Jody and I signed for it and the truck and crew left.

Now using the store help we loaded it in 3 pick ups and headed for the bunker where we stacked the boxes and the store crew left except for John and Bob who helped open and inventory the contents, I can attest that gold fever is a real, very real thing, we all just stood stunned looking at the first box we opened, we then decided that if the count was off so be it and just loaded the rest of the boxes into the safes. It was very heavy tiring work! But we felt maybe we had done a smart thing and had no regrets and what the hell we could  always just load a sack into a car and drive  to the bank and convert it to cash, well we thought we could, gold once gotten is not all that easy to handle, it seems you have to go though a metals broker who buys and sells actual metals and issues a check from their bank which can then be cashed or taken as cashiers checks which was fine with us as we weren’t planning to do any converting very soon if ever, we still had enough to handle the ranch business and the mall businesses were making a profit so we were fine for now.

In the last days of fall we got a call from a man who only said he had a shipment for us and that it was C.O.D. were we prepared to accept it?

We said we would meet him at the gun shop and headed that way with a sack of gold coins, the truck was parked behind the shop with John and Bob standing with the driver, he had a bill of lading that showed a truck load or “Crates of farm equipment” the price alone was enough to raise any eyebrows but the required payment in Gold was even more so.

We took the driver into the store and counted out the required amount based on the day’s spot price for Gold. After he counted it we tossed in another $1000.00 in coins with the advice to disremember where he delivered the load. He smiled big and said what load?   We took him over to my old house where he could bunk down while we unloaded the truck, after driving it back to the bunker it took the four of us and 10 of the clans men 4 hours to unload it and get it stored. After taking the truck back and parking it at the  house we headed home to bed but come morning all four of us and the ladies went to the bunker and started looking over the shipment, there was more 7.62x39 ammo then we could count and crate after crate of new   AK-47’s from the 60’s and 70’s…

Five of the crates were marked with red X’s and looked different; opening them produced even a yelp out of me! Inside was 5 good old American made M-60 belt fed machine guns!!! I had not seen one since my Army days and had only fired one once in training, these baby’s were the cat’s ass! Somebody someplace was missing some goodies! I looked at Song who was smiling like a cat with a mouse.

When I asked about them Song replied with a smile… and we all said “If I tell ya I gotta kill ya!” and laughed, so there sitting on the floor was 25 brand new US Military 7.62 x 51 Machine guns and enough belted ammo to fight a large war and nobody was talking… we closed the crate and lugged them away and out of sight for now..

We opened a crate of the AK-47’s and they looked brand new, still in protective grease like they had just left the factory, there was a lot of cleaning here to do…

Jody said we would clean enough to arm everybody who lived on the ranch and worked in the shops, after that the rest would stay protected until we needed to issue them.

After closing the bunker heavy blast door we headed for the house and breakfast, While the girls were fixing it I asked Jody where this stuff had come from, he just shook his head and shrugged, Song smiled

Jody and I along with Jade, Sally, Bob and John was now the Committee; Ellen was offered a seat but was just too busy to take the time. We held meeting every Friday evening to discuss the week and plan for the coming week. Most of the place was doing just fine with the people who were in charge; mostly Jody and I were the ones to deal with expenditures above the day to day dealings the store managers handled, which left us free time to wonder what we were forgetting.