Part 10 (1/2)

One day, while they were all in a gay mood, John shot the pipe out of the mouth of a fellow named Russell. Russell jumped up and ran out of the room.

”Don't kill him,” shouted the crowd in ridicule, and John fired several random shots to keep up the scare.

Russell swore out a warrant for John's arrest, and next morning, Jan. 17, 1871, Capt. S. W. Nichols, the sheriff, and John McMahon came up to the house to arrest him. John made no resistance and invited the officers to breakfast, but they declined and went back down town. Thompson McDaniels called John's attention to the fact that a guard had been stationed over his horses, and they walked down town together. Tom and John drank some whisky, and while they were waiting Nichols and his party had taken on some too.

”What did you put a guard over my horses for?” asked John, when he entered the room where Nichols was.

”I did not put any guard over your horses,” replied Nichols.

”You're a--liar,” continued John, ”I saw them there myself.”

At this another Russell, a brother of the one whose pipe had been shot out of his mouth, opened fire on John and wounded him in the arm. Thomp.

McDaniels shot Capt. Nichols, and in the melee McMahon was shot, as far as I have ever been able to learn, by my brother.

John and McDaniels went out, took the officers' horses and rode to Missouri.

It developed after the shooting that the same Russell who had opened fire on John had placed the guard over the horses, and that Capt. Nichols had not known of it.

I was away in Louisiana at the time, but on my return several attorneys offered to defend John if he would return for trial, but after a visit at the home of our uncle in California he returned to Missouri in the winter of 1873 and 1874, just in time to be suspected of the train robbery at Gad's Hill, on the Iron Mountain road.

John and Jim were visiting at the home of our friend, Theodoric Snuffer, at Monegaw Springs, St. Clair county.

Man-hunters had sought us there on a previous occasion when we were all four there. We had come upon the party of 15 suddenly, and I covered them with a shot-gun, demanded their surrender, and explaining that we had not robbed anybody, and wanted to be treated as decent citizens, approached by officers of the law in the regular manner if we were accused, restored their arms to them, and they went back to Osceola.

March 11, 1874, J. W. Whicher, a Pinkerton detective from Chicago, who had been sent out to arrest Frank and Jesse James at Kearney, was found dead in the road near Independence, and W. J. Allen, otherwise known as Capt.

Lull, a St. Louis plain-clothes cop who pa.s.sed by the name of Wright, and an Osceola boy named Ed. Daniels, who was a deputy sheriff with an ambition to s.h.i.+ne as a sleuth, rode out to find Jim and Bob at the Springs.

The boys, advised of their coming by a negro servant, sought to convince them, as we had the earlier posse, that they could not have had anything to do with the affair at Gad's Hill. But Allen, remembering the recent fate of Whicher, drew his pistol and shot John in the neck. John returned the fire and killed Daniels and took after Allen. Side by side the horses galloped, John firing at the detective till he fell from the saddle mortally wounded. John turned to ride back to where Jim was, when he toppled from his saddle and was dead in a few minutes.

The St. Louis detective had fled at the first fire, and lived to tell graphic stories of how it all happened, although he was really too busy getting out to know anything about it.

22. AMNESTY BILL FAILS

The killing of Lull, Daniels and Whicher within a single week was undoubtedly exasperating to the head of the Pinkerton agency, and had he not been personally embittered thereby he probably would not have avenged it so terribly.

In the next January, 1875, a posse of Pinkerton men and others, guided by Daniel H. Asker, a neighbor of the James boys, proceeded to their home near Kearney and threw a bomb into the house where the family was seated.

An eight-year-old half-brother of Frank and Jesse was killed, their mother, Mrs. Samuels, had one arm torn off, and other members of the family were more or less injured. But Frank and Jesse were not taken.

There had been a feeling among many people in the state even before that these detectives were unjustly pursuing some of the Confederate soldiers, and I have been told since that Gov. Silas Woodson was on the eve of interfering with Pinkerton's men when news came that two of them had been killed in an encounter with John and Jim Younger.

At any rate the death of the innocent little Samuels boy made still more p.r.o.nounced this feeling against the operations of the detectives, and in favor of the members of the Confederate army who had been outlawed by Fremont, Halleck, Ewing and the Drake const.i.tution, ungenerously, to say the least.

This feeling found definite expression shortly after the raid on the Samuels home in the introduction of a bill in the Missouri legislature offering amnesty to the Younger and James brothers by name, and others who had been outlawed with them by proclamation, from all their acts during the war, and promising them a fair trial on any charge against them arising after the war.