“Tell him he needn’t worry any about the killing—we’ll take them away to a safe place and keep them a while, and then if the weather gets too thick we’ll cut them loose and skedaddle.”
“I see. Well, I’ll have to talk it over with Fatty, so I’ll be going, but I’ll let you know to-night.”
Price had adopted another scheme because Bloody Ike seemed to have vanished since the night the hotel was blown up. He would have their food drugged, and if the dose proved fatal so much the better. “Horsey Al,” a local horse doctor of shady reputation, had suggested the plot and guaranteed to “lay out” the man who swallowed his “medicine,” and he said he could prepare it so no one could distinguish any peculiarity in the taste of food with which it was mixed.
It seemed the best plot thus far, and Price became quite enthusiastic. The Willow Inn was a large, low, rambling structure that was almost surrounded by trees and shrubbery. In no place was the building more than two stories high, and from any of the windows a drugged man could be removed in the night without discovery or causing suspicion.
If the victims were “doped” at their evening meal, they could be taken away in the early part of the night, and securely hidden before daylight, and every man taking part in it back in town as usual next day.
To detail the carrying out of the plot would occupy space and time, so we will jump to the period where Fatty Joe had followed instructions in the use of a package from Horsey Al, and had served the orders of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill that night, the food heavily laden with a powerful drug.
Both men were hungry, and ate heartily, then went to their room for a smoke, planning later in the night to slip out of their window and look about town a bit for the missing Cayuse.
But an overpowering drowsiness caught them and held them to their chairs, where Price and his knaves found them an hour later, when they were admitted by the clerk.
Both men were bound and rebound and heavy towels tied over their mouths to guard against any slip if the victims regained their senses.
In this condition Buffalo Bill and his famous pard were taken from a rear window in the darkness, lashed to horses, and carried away into the night.