Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/598

468 we had to go to reach the ranch was about twenty miles down grade and inclined to be sandy all the way. We were all well mounted, and we scarcely broke a gallop until we reached the Davis place.

A pitiful sight was there. The old lady and her three daughters had carried the old gentleman and two boys into the house and laid them out on benches in the best manner possible, and to say that it was a heart-rending scene does not begin to express it.

When I stepped into the house Mrs. Davis pointed to the dead bodies and said: "Captain, if you will avenge their death I will be a friend to you as long as I live." I told her that I would do all I could, that I was in a great hurry to get on the trail of the perpetrators, and I would like her to give me all the information she could relative to the matter.

She then led the way into a private room and related the whole circumstance, telling me how the Indians had come there, decoyed her husband and two sons to the barn and there shot them down, then rushed to the house, and before the inmate had time to shut and bar the door, came into the house, caught and tied her to the bed post, and then disgraced her three daughters in her presence. Then they gathered up all the horses and cattle about the ranch and drove them across the desert.

In the direction she said they had started it was eighty-four miles to water, but I did not believe for a moment that they would attempt to cross the desert in that direction.

After I had gained all the information I could, I said: "Mrs. Davis, those were not Indians, but Greasers or