Anyone mislead enough to have taken “Captain” Brown to court became the abolitionist’s enemy, and a German settler, “Dutch” Henry Sherman, had accused him of stealing 24 head of cattle and two horses. Tonight, the radical anti-slaver would wreak vengeance against the accuser—his personal enemy.

God’s enemies lived along the creek, near the German. Pro slavery, these men wanted Kansas to join the Union as a slave state, and for holding such a design, they, too, must die. Slavery, as sin, sent a stench to the nostrils of a wrathful God. The Lord God Almighty, in His Holy Writ said, “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins—” a fact that he reminded his family of twelve living children from two wives.

Through the night, the killers came, a party of righteous avengers, with death drumming in every step and without a shred of mercy in their souls.

Jeremiah Wilcox, farmer and recent settler on Pottawatomie Creek, groaned but when his son shook him again, woke up, and reached to the gun rack nailed on the wall above the bed for his .40 steel-mounted Lancaster rifle, with the 45-inch barrel and a full stock made of black walnut.

Growling for his son to “keep it dark,” he waved Hy away from the oil lamp and allowed his vision to accommodate the darkness. Faint shimmers of moonlight wiggled between the unchinked logs and through the tiny open hole in the cabin wall that served as a window.

As the farmer pulled on his boots and canvas work pants, he saw that his son shouldered a 28-gauge squirrel rifle and crouched by the open window. A premonition made him order the boy to: “Run off the stock into the woods so’s they kin get theirselves lost, and you do the same. Git yourself hid in them woods, yonder, an’ don’ let me ketch you out, ’til what ere happens, happens, and is done for. And be quiet about it. You hear?”

A pistol shot broke the stillness. It sounded like it came from down the creek, over by the Doyle cabin. One shriek—then all was silent again, except for the terrifying hacking noises, of flesh and bone being ripped apart by something heavy and sharp, a similar sound heard when a man butchered an animal.

Hy had not obeyed. “Din’t you hear me, Boy?”

“But, Pa, I’m man enough—”

Jeremiah’s reflex, a backhand across the face, cut off the boy. “I said move! Now! You heard them screams!”

Holding his jaw, Hy left through the lone door. Jeremiah listened to the soft sounds of his son clicking to the team of oxen and the two saddle horses they had brought with them from Missouri, heard the animals and boy move through the undergrowth behind the cabin into the woods. When he heard just the dogs going crazy, he breathed a sigh of relief. Hy would most likely live out the night. But would he?

Wilcox listened. Presently, over the barking, he heard a shout, a gun shot, and the strange, butchering sounds again at the cabin of the Franklin County prosecuting attorney, Allen Wilkinson. Before long, he heard men whooping and laughing and walking his way.

The southerner from Missouri decided that defending his home and castle would probably only get him dead. So he obeyed his own order, fled to the woods, and ran as far as he could. But before he left, he let his beagle hunting dogs, Dugan and Molly, out of their pen so they could run ahead of him into the black, terrifying night.

A rustle in the bushes alerted Wilcox and he cradled his Lancaster, but it was only Dugan. The dog saw his master awake, ran up wagging a white tail, and tried to lick his face, but the beagle’s white muzzle dripped with blood. The dog shied away from Wilcox’s outstretched hand and ran back into the bushes. With head held high, Dugan soon returned and dropped his find at the farmer’s feet.

“What you got there, boy?” Wilcox demanded, but the dog sat back on his haunches, watching his master bend over the savaged flesh.

In the early dawn light, Wilcox couldn’t be sure of what he saw, so he poked at it with a stick and bent closer. Then, he recognized it.

“A thumb!” he screamed, jerking backwards, almost tripping over a tree root. “Done come from somebody’s hand!” At that moment, the tan bitch, Molly, sauntered out of the brambles carrying a half-chewed human armbone.

Insane with fear and shouting oaths to the heavens, Wilcox drove the yelping dogs into the bushes. The hideous things on the ground lay silent and bloody at the toe of his boot, and he was afraid to take his eyes off of them.

When Hy walked from behind the maples and into the clearing, swinging two, plump squirrels over his shoulder, he found his father, standing stock still, barely breathing, and staring transfixed at the objects before him. “Want some squirrel breakfast, Pa?” He spoke before he realized what had captured his father’s attention. But after the young hunter got a gander at the bloodied flesh, he didn’t want breakfast either.

Praying the danger had passed, afraid of what they would find, the two walked back to the nascent community on the creek, alive with buzzing insects and bird-song, but eerily silent to the sounds of human life. By now, with the sun poking into the sky, the men-folk should have been outside, harnessing teams to the plow. The women-folk should have been calling for wood or water as they prepared breakfast. The Doyle boys, close to Hy’s age, should have been outside at their chores and helping their father.

But at the Doyle’s they heard only weeping. Mrs. Doyle stood in her yard, staring at the clump of woods behind her cabin and wringing her hands while tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks. Beside her stood ten-year-old Johnny, her youngest son.

When Mahala Doyle saw them, she nearly collapsed from relief and her words often lapsed into guttural moans. Nevertheless, the Wilcoxes understood that late in the night several men claiming to be from the United States Army—one of them John Brown—had knocked at her door. After learning that her husband didn’t care one way or the other about slavery, the men had taken Doyle and his two oldest sons “prisoner,” they said, and even had tried to hussle little Johnny outside. But upon hearing Mrs. Doyle plead for the child, Brown relented and allowed him to stay with his mother. He warned her, however, to stay inside. After the intruders led her husband and sons into the woods, she never saw them again.

Following her pointing finger, Wilcox and Hy hurried to the thickets that lay several yards to the rear of the cabin. Carnage, Wilcox decided, did not begin to describe what they found. James Doyle, Mahala’s husband, had been shot in the head, his hands and manhood cut off. Beside him lay the dismembered bodies of this two sons, William, aged 17, and Drury, aged 15—their bodies hacked to bits. In the warm May morning, blow flies assaulted the putrefying flesh strewn around the bloody clearing.

Hy immediately bent over and vomited behind the blood-spattered trunk of an oak. To keep down his own bile, Wilcox gulped air with so much force that he made himself dizzy and sat on a miraculously unbloodied stump.

Then, behind them, came a wrenching cry from Mahala who had followed them with Johnny to the killing scene. Somehow, with promises of immediate Christian burial and vowing to avenge this savage crime, Wilcox managed to get the hysterical widow and her sobbing child into the Doyle cabin.

The frantic barking of the dogs had awakened her. She heard footsteps and saw a man’s figure walk past the window. Then, came a knock at the door and someone wanted directions to “Dutch Henry’s.” Her husband, told them the way, but they demanded that he come out and show them. His wife dissuaded him from going and the men then forced their way into the cabin. When asked, Allen Wilkinson stated that he opposed the Northern Free-Soil party, upon which Brown ordered him to “get dressed,” and added that he was their “prisoner.” Louise begged Brown to allow her husband to stay because she couldn’t care for herself. But the old man had replied that she could call upon the neighbors, and if she couldn’t, then, “It matters not.”

The Free-Soilers had refused to allow the attorney, a member of the Territorial Legislature and local postmaster, time to put on his boots before leading him outside in the wet grass. Later, one of them came back and stole two saddles, and told her they were taking her husband to prison camp. When the men had left, she thought she heard Allen calling out to her, but when Louise stepped to the door and listened to the night, it was silent.

Later, Wilcox and Hy walked a mile south and forded Pottawatomie Creek at “Dutch Henry’s” crossing to check on the James Harris family. They found Harris alive, but only because he had claimed to be a Free Soiler, like Brown.

The zealot and his gang hadn’t bothered to knock; they had broken into the cabin, brandished sabres, and pistols, and by standing over the bed, had awakened Harris, his wife, and child. From him they commandeered two rifles and a Bowie knife and then tore the place apart looking for ammunition.

Harris’s houseguest wasn’t so lucky. They found “Dutch Bill” Sherman’s body with the same barbarisms as the others, only it appeared that he had put up a fight. His skull had been split open, his chest ripped apart, and one hand cut off. His two brothers, Peter and Henry, away from home on business, had missed the raid and John Brown had missed “Dutch Henry,” the brother he had come purposely to kill.

Weeks later, after the burials, after the women had been given over to the care of their respective families called in from Missouri and Tennessee, and after the captain and a company of the newly formed First Cavalry from Fort Leavenworth had come and gone, Jeremiah and Hy hitched up the team of oxen to the Conestoga wagon, tied the two saddle horses to the rear and, with Molly and Dugan roaming along behind, drove over “Dutch Henry’s Crossing.”

As they rode past, Henry stepped to the door of his cabin and called to them. “Vell, goot-bye. Vhere you go?” he asked.

“Back to Missouri. To Cole County outside of Jefferson City. My wife—his mother” —Wilcox jerked a thumb at the pale, skinny boy beside him—“ is buried there. ’Tain’t nothin’ short of hell itself could make me stay here.”

“Don’t blame you.” Henry frowned, as if sorry to see them go.

“You ain’t leavin’?” Wilcox squinted into the morning sun, anxious to be on his way. If it hadn’t been for the damned Dutchman, shooting off his mouth about Brown, none of this probably would have happened. Hell, everybody knew Old Brown was crazy, just like the rest of his kin who had gone and died raving lunatics.

“ Nein. Been here since ’47. Too long here to leave.”

Wilcox smiled, nodded, then clicked to the team of oxen and set off for their journey back to Missouri—back to the peace of home.