After Centralia came hard knocks. In one of the fights immediately succeeding the Centralia holocaust, Dick Kinney, a noted Guerrilla, received his death wound. He was Frank James' comrade, and he fell heir to the pistol which Kinney had worn. On the handle of this weapon were fifty notches, each notch signifying one. He had killed fifty men. Frank James probably has the pistol yet.
In a corner of Clay county lived an old man named Banes. He was a staunch Union man, and blessed the Guerrillas with the same kind of blessing that Balak desired Balaam to bestow upon Israel. Banes was particularly severe in his condemnation of Jesse and Frank James. One night the boys went to Bane's house under the guise of Colorado troopers. The old man received them gladly, and at once unbosomed himself freely in regard to the Guerrillas. In the course of his remarks he animadverted on Mrs. Samuels, the mother of the boys, in bitter terms. He denounced her as being "the mother of two devils, Jesse and Frank James." The boys secured his confidence, and then a promise of immediate assistance in hunting up the desperadoes. Banes got his gun and pistols and saddled his horse, mounted and rode out to his death, for when the trio had gone about half a mile away from the house, the pretended soldiers announced themselves as the James boys, and gave him no space for repentance. Two pistol shots rang out on the still night, a heavy body fell to the earth, and then the living men rode away, leaving a cold form of mortality out under the stars.
With difficulty the Guerrillas made their way to their haunts on the Blackwater. Fighting was going on constantly. The shadow of death was gathering over many a bold rider of the Guerrilla band. Moving out from their camp on the Blackwater, one day, the Guerrillas fell into an ambuscade, and several received wounds. Among those thus wounded was Jesse James, who had his horse killed and received a shot through the leg.
Todd was sent out to skirmish with the advance guard of the Federal army then following the retiring army of General Price. At every creek there was a battle, and at every encounter there was bloodshed. In one of these fights, when the leaves were all falling on the brown earth, George Todd was killed. In the night time his followers came to pay the last tribute of respect to his remains. There were not many who gathered there in the gloom of the midnight to gaze for the last time on the face of the courageous Guerrilla, but among them were Jesse and Frank James, and they pointed their pistols toward the cloud-veiled, teary sky, and swore to avenge his death.
But the old band was broken up. Late in October, 1864, Jesse and Frank parted, the former with Shepherd went to Texas, the latter with Quantrell to Kentucky.
It proved to be the final dissolution of Quantrell's once formidable force of partisans. George Todd, the Paladine of the command, the leader who was persistent and daring, slept quietly after the fierce turmoil of life's battlefield had ended. John Poole, another hard rider, desperate fighter and dauntless leader, mouldered in a gory grave. John Jarrette and Cole Younger had sometime before separated from the band, and were operating in the far South where the magnolias grow and the moss-bearded live-oaks stand sentinels in the fever-haunted swamps. Fernando Scott was dead. Bill Anderson had fallen in a terrible combat while endeavoring to effect a crossing of the Missouri river in Howard county. As he had lived for some years, grimly fighting, so in the last extremity when the odds were all against him and unseen messengers of death burdened the air with their low-hummed dirges, his life went out while he still fought in the very shades of despair. Kinney was dead, and many more had surrendered life in the hot simoon of battle.
And what a band it had been, which was now broken! Its deeds must ever remain a part of the history of Missouri, and the chapter wherein the record is made will always be read with a shudder, and in years to come men will remember the mournful story of devastation and death with feelings of painful regret that human beings could so revel in the miseries and misfortunes of whole communities.
To those who can calmly sit and look down the vista of the dead years and recall without prejudice the history of men who were authors of deeds so notable—actions which, performed under other circumstances, would have made heroes of deathless fame, there must come a feeling of regret that such men should have been the victims of a baleful destiny.