"I'll have your guts for guitar strings, Jeremy Six!"
If you've ever seen a she-bear defend her cub against a pack of wolves, you'll know what Ma Marriner was like, only maybe she was bigger and meaner and the wolves were on her side.
What the marshal of Spanish Flat had done was to shoot Ma's husband, Buel, while he was going about his business of robbing the town's bank. And neither Ma nor her ornery son Cleve were going to let that go unavenged. Especially when Jeremy Six had added insult to injury by tossing Cleve into the calaboose.
So Ma gathered up the clan and all their thirty or more border-rider friends, and the whole pack of them set out for Spanish Flat to skin Jeremy's hide once and for all.