Chapter 9: The Kidnapping

We received a telegram from a man in Emporia, Kansas. His twin fourteen year old identical twin daughters had been kidnapped. They had been on a stage going to Emporia when six men robbed the stage they were on and carried them away. It had just happened an hour before. It would take us three hours to get to where they had been taken. He wanted us to kill or apprehend the men, get back the bank’s money, and make sure that if his daughters had been raped, that they were dead!

He was the President and founder of the bank and of course a leading citizen and socialite. Having daughters who were not virgins, even though they had been raped, was evidently socially unacceptable! We took the case, but not on his behalf, we took on the case for the daughters!

It took a couple of hours to get everything ready to go! We left on the train as quickly as we could after gathering everything we needed and the scheduled train arrived. Three hours later we arrived in the college town of Emporia. It was a Normal College, one that primarily taught teachers. After getting our gear and horses out of the cattle car we rode to the Sheriff’s office.

Sheriff Bob Denver gave us the story he had been told by the survivor just before she too had passed away. There were six bandits, they didn’t have their faces covered. They stopped the stage by running it down and shooting both the shotgun guard and the driver. They killed the men passengers right away and then shot the woman, she had been an older and somewhat fat woman. They had taken the strongbox and the beautiful identical twins with them. The girls were young, sixteen or seventeen. They had been on their way to the college to become teachers. The woman also had recognized the bandits as being the Cooper brothers gang. It was their fourth confirmed robbery of a stage. They always had killed everyone but the beautiful women. Those they took and one could only imagine what awful things those women would be forced into doing. Probably better to be killed than subjected to the indignities they would be made to suffer! At least that’s what most women thought!

We rode out to the site of the robbery and picked up the trail of the robbers. We were able to follow it for three hours before the sun went down. We made a cold camp, taking turns on guard for three hours each. I took the three to six shift, the graveyard shift, it was quiet except for the frogs and crickets. An occasional bat would fly by, sometimes coming close in pursuit of a moth or mosquitoes. The moon had set over an hour ago. The stars shone bright and the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon. An occasional streak of light, of what they called a shooting star, would quickly burn out, though some lasted longer than others. They were often different colors, red, white, green, and sometimes blue. The blue ones lasted a long time.

The sun came up in the east as usual, as soon as it did I had a fire of dry wood going. I had breakfast in the pan and coffee in the pot when the girls woke up. We ate quickly and were on the trail before an hour had passed. The trail was too obvious! Why?

There could be only one answer, an ambush! I left the girls and swung out a mile to the right and went in search of the likely spot for it. I kept the trail in sight as best as I could with a spy glass that had a sunshade over the lens to keep from making a reflection. Five miles later I found the place. It wasn’t hard! There were five men waiting behind some rocks at the beginning of the entrance to a canyon, no doubt a box canyon!

I rode toward their open right flank for some target practice. The girls would close in from their left side. I rode to within half a mile then tied off the horse and walked closer, keeping out of sight. I found a good place to look down at them with plenty of cover to change positions and still give the hell. They were patiently waiting on us or whoever was on their trail to show up. The girls knew better to advance very fast and to look out for the ambush. My first shot would open the dance.

My first shot took the man farthest to my right down. My aim had been middle back but it practically took his head off. I adjusted the elevation on the sights and fired again at the next one to the left of the first. This time the bullet hit where I had aimed it. I didn’t stop as I levered the next round into the breech, and fired again. Then repeated the action four more times in succession. The last man had started to move away, but he was too late! My sixth shot was a deflection shot and the fifth man fell from his horse with a hole in his left side, just under his armpit. I missed with one shot but got all five within a minute.

I rode down from the plateau and joined my sisters and Mai, then we all approached the mouth of the canyon. We checked the bodies and collected almost five hundred dollars in gold, bank notes, and Federal Reserve notes. We also rounded up the horses and tied them on a picket line. We would wait to check the saddle bags.

We rode into the canyon, the twins had to be in here somewhere along with the sixth man and the stolen strongbox. As I had just demonstrated, a man with a Winchester or a Henry lever action rifle could pick off several men in a short amount of time. So we advanced slowly, spread apart as we looked everywhere for a sniper.

I saw the movement of a black hat more than anything else, I didn’t see the rifle at all! I bailed from the horse just as he fired. The bullet would have hit me in my chest if I had stayed in the saddle. As I fell off the horse the bullet creased my shoulder. All three girls returned fire a split second later and we heard a scream of pain.

Whether that had been a real and genuine scream of pain or not, was the question as we approached where it had come from. Once more we spread out so we could cover one another if it had been a ruse. I was in the center as we approached the rock that the shooter had been behind. I slowly peeked over it and saw a body on the ground writhing in pain from a shoulder wound that was bleeding profusely.

As I covered her, Gail stepped around the rock and up to the body then quickly threw the rifle and a pistol away from him. She knelt by him and started rendering first aid. She ripped his shirt from his chest and exposed a decidedly female breast. It was small and had a small dark nipple centered in an equally dark areola. After looking at her breast in surprise she got to work staunching the bleeding by putting pressure on both the entry and exit wounds. The entry wound was small, but the exit was much larger as the bullet had expanded on hitting her flesh.

Once the blood flow was under control, we moved her out from behind the rock so we could work on her easier. First we had to clean out the wound by rinsing it with some whiskey., she passed out from the pain. After cutting a branch from a willow, I cleaned off the bark to make a painkiller tea. And used the stick with a clean whiskey soaked cloth tied to its end to run through the wound. If the piece of her shirt that had been punched out stayed in her wound there was a much greater chance of infection. As luck would have it the piece came out right away. We ran the stick through a couple of more times before we put a couple of stitches with whisky soaked thread in the front and five stitches in the exit wound. They would both leave a scar, but she should heal quickly.