Our faithful negro servant, “Aunt Suse,” had been hung up in the barn in a
vain endeavor to make her reveal the whereabouts of my mother’s sons and
money; my dead father’s fortune had been stolen and scattered to the
winds; but our farms were left, and had I been given an opportunity to
till them in peace it would have saved four wasted lives.
In the summer of 1866 the governor of Kansas made a requisition on the
governor of Missouri for 300 men, naming them, who had taken part in the
attacks on Lawrence and other Kansas towns.
Attorneys in Independence had decided that they would defend, free of
charge, for any offense except murder, any of the Jackson county boys who
would give themselves up. No one did more than I to assemble the boys at
Blue Springs for a meeting to consider such course.
It was while at this that I saw Jesse James for the first time in my life,
so that sets at rest all the wild stories that have been told about our
meeting as boys and joining Quantrell. Frank James and I had seen service
together, and Frank was a good soldier, too. Jesse, however, did not
enter the service until after I had gone South in the fall of 1863, and
when I saw him early in the summer of 1866 he was still suffering from the
shot through the lung he had received in the last battle in Johnson county
in May, 1865.
[Illustration: Jesse James and Frank James]