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They halted in the creek-bed and saw a rider go pasT, a dim figure
in the brush. Fifty yards beyond was the cabin and before it now
was a small wagon. Between house and wagon a cooking-fire crackled;
a saddled horse was tied to the wagon-wheel. To the rangers' xight,
twenty-five yards away, Old Man Potter and a son were unloading
hogs from a second wagon.
"Now, make a run for it!" Gillett whispered tensely. "We want to
interview that fellow who just rode up. But you'll have to streak
across the open space!"
They were hardly over the bank when Old Man Potter yelled shrilly:
nt~ir t-D , -exkoi --eom-e-Y-he dm'-ranage4: ]Rattle yo' hocks,
boy!"
Around the wagon burst Dick Dublin, a big, dark-faced man.
Gillett had hunted cattle with him. He knew that Dublin boasted that
he would never surrender.
Dublin had no time to unhitch his horse; he leaped into the brush.
Gillett shouted an order to surrender, punctuating it with a Winchester-bullet.
Dublin only ran the faster, with X;illett after him. He saw
Dublin sprinting up a ravine; stopped and drew a tead on his back;
again commanded hijm to halt. The fugitive's hand flashed beneath
his coat; Gillett fired and with the vicious crack of the carbine, Dublin
crashed flat upon his face.
When the others ran up, Gillett was bending over Dublin, ol)serving
the odd course of his bullet. Dublin had been running bent over
and the .44 ball, striking in the small of his back, had passed out rear
the right collar-bone, killing the murderer instantly.
"Hell, Jim!" remarked Ben Carter dolefully. "Why'nt you shoot
him in the laigs? That seven hundred dollars was for his arrest an'
conviction!"
'Y mid-February of '78, much to the surprise of Kionble and Menard
B) Counties, five prisoners of note were ready to be taken to Austin.
But Starke Reynolds, wanted for horse-theft and assault to kill,
was still annoyingly at large. So the start to Austin, with the
chained prisoners in a wagon, was made without the man Lieutenant
Reynolds particularly desired to capture.
On the Junction City and Mason Road, they almost ran into Starke.
He tossed down the sack of flour from his saddle, whirled his pretty
brown pony and raced for the Llano bottoms three miles away. For
a mile and a half it was as fast a race as ranger ever ran, with Starke
untouched by Lieutenant Reynolds' bullets. Gillett took the lead from
his commander. The others had all been distanced.
"Get him, Gillett! Stop him or kill him!" Reynolds roared furiously.The Llano bottoms were just ahead now, the brush was denser.
Within three hundred yards, the ranger and the horse-theif were
alone. Starke sprang off his pony and leveled a rifle at the lone
pursuer:
"Stop that pony! Stop, or I'll kill you!" he yelled.
But Gillett's horse had too much way on. Straight at Starke he
galloped for twenty-five yards before he could be halted. Gillett
slid off and jerked up his carbine. Starke lost his nerve and broke for
a thicket, afoot. A bullet whined past his ear and he jumped back
behind the pony. Then ranger Dave Ligon burst from the brush almost
beside him. As Starke's hands went up, the other rangers appeared.
"I wisht that dam' pony o' yours had busted his dam' laig!" Starke
snarled at Gillett. "I wisht he'd busted all four o' his laigs off, right
up to the shoulders. Hadn't been for you, I'd have got off."
"The last of the old brier-breakers!" grinned Lieutenant Reynolds,
personally supervising Starke's chaining in the wagon. "We can hightail
it, now."
lN June of '75, when Jim Gillett, a lean, adventurous cowboy of nineteen,
joined the rangers, their principal duty was the destruction
of marauding Comanches, Lipans, Kickapoos. By '77, the Indians
had been pretty well pushed back, so the rangers' chief work became
the capture of "bad men" whom local peace officers left discreetly alone.
This hard, dangerous duty was a veritable training school from
which the young ranger graduated into the ranks of sheriff and city
marshal. If Jim Gillett regarded the guarding, capturing, or killing,
of a notorious desperado as no more than part of a day's work, still,
RODEO CLOTHES ARE ALSO "FAMOUS IN THE WEST"
2
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Cunningham, Eugene. Famous in the West, book, 1925~; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth29618/m1/10/?rotate=270: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Denton Public Library.