“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 passed by the name of Wright, and an Osceola boy named Ed. Daniels, who was a deputy sheriff with an ambition to shine as a sleuth, rode out to find Jim and Bob at the Springs.