“My brothers, Jim and Bob, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell and three men named Pitts, Woods and Howard, were those who decided to take up the expedition. This was in the middle of August, and we spent a week in Minneapolis picking up what information we could about Northfield and the bank and playing poker. Then we passed another week in St. Paul, also looking for information as to the amount of money [pg 129] [pg 130] [pg 131] and the precautions taken in the bank to take care of it.”
“Chadwell, Pitts, Bob and myself procured horses at St. Peter, where we stayed long enough to break them and to train them for the hard riding to which we knew they would be submitted later on. It was at St. Peter that I made the acquaintance of a little girl who afterwards was one of the most earnest workers for our parole.”
“A little tot then, she said she could ride a horse, too, and reaching down, I lifted her up before me, and we rode up and down. I asked her her name and she said it was ‘Horace Greeley Perry,’ and I replied:”
“ ‘No wonder you're such a little tot with such a great name.’ ”
“ ‘I won't always be little,’ she replied. ‘I'm going to be a great big girl and be a newspaper man like papa.’ ”
“Will you still be my sweetheart then, and be my friend?” I asked her, and she declared she would, a promise I was to remind her of years later under circumstances of which I did not dream then.
“Many years afterward with a party of visitors to the prison came a girl, perhaps 16, who registered in full, ‘Horace Greeley Perry.’ ”
“I knew there could not be two women with such a name in the world, and I reminded her of her promise, a promise which she did not remember, although she had been told how she had made friends with the bold, bad man who afterwards robbed the bank at Northfield.”
“Very soon afterward, at the age of 18, I believe, she became, as she had dreamed, in childhood, [pg 132] ‘a newspaper man’, editing the St. Peter Journal, and to the hour of my pardon she was one of the most indefatigable workers for us.”
“A few years ago failing health compelled her removal from Minnesota to Idaho, and Minnesota lost one of the brightest newspaper writers and staunchest friends that a man ever knew. Jim and I had a host of advocates during the latter years of our imprisonment, but none exceeded in devotion the young woman, who as a little tot, had ridden unknowingly with the bandit who was soon to be exiled for life from all his kin and friends.”