When the Gillan wagon passed through the gap, horsemen quickly surrounded the wagon and ordered Deputy Sheriff Dufran to relinquish the reins and surrender the wagon and its occupants. Gillan and Dufran were ordered to walk up the trail about a quarter of a mile to an adobe house and to wait there for further directions.

At this point Olive revealed himself to the manacled and helpless homesteaders and ordered one of his men to drive the wagon under a tree with a big limb—the tree designated earlier by Print. A prosecutor of ordinary skills could easily have made the case for premeditation. At Print’s direction, ropes were strung around the necks of Ketchum and Mitchell and looped over the limb. Just as it appeared that he was ready to give the order to drive the wagon from under the two men, Print suddenly spurred his horse to the rear of the wagon, pulled his rifle from its scabbard, and fired point blank into Luther Mitchell’s back. “That one’s for Bob,” one can imagine he shouted.

For Baldwin and Green, the expedition had suddenly lost all aspects of fun or adventure. The word ‘accomplice’ quickly entered their minds. Print gave the signal to bolt the wagon forward and in an instant the homesteaders were swinging in the winter wind.

In one version of events, the source of the fire was the gun blast that ignited Mitchell’s heavy gray overcoat. In a much more colorful version, and one that suits this writer’s sense of irony, the two onlooking businessmen, shocked into recognition of what they had witnessed, steadily consumed the whiskey on board. In their drunkenness they decided to offer Mitchell one last tug on the bottle.

“Son of a bitch was too good to drink with us when we offered it before. There’ll be no refusin’ us now.” With that one of the men poured liquor into Mitchell’s open mouth, spilling the liquid onto his heavy woolen coat. A careless ember from one of the men’s cigarettes ignited the flammable coat and it was instantly ablaze. The fire spread to Ketchum’s body, which was still bound to Mitchell by handcuffs, and both were consumed in flames, burned beyond recognition.

A third version has it that the two men Print sent to bury the bodies started a bonfire to thaw the frozen bodies, making them easier to bury, and inadvertently set the bodies on fire. For pure color, I prefer version number two, but the truth will always be elusive.

Radical Winds ~ by Steve Buttress, posted by Chuck Peek