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71 Before he left Arizona late in 1896, Will Carver told Leonard Alverson that he was going to put a monument over the grave of his wife and did not know what he would do afterwards.1 It would have chafed him that Viana’s parents had already marked her resting place with a stone from which his family name was conspicuously absent. Perhaps, therefore, he really intended to plant his own token of remembrance at the graveside, though nothing survives to show that he did it. He also intended to visit his mother and her family in Bandera County, and did.2 But Carver’s homeward journey was more than a sentimental one. Before he pulled out of the Chiricahuas, he struck a deal with Tom Ketchum. He would sit through the winter in Texas and wait for Tom to join him. When spring came they, with the help of one or two other fortune-hunters, would rob a train. Through choice or circumstance, Sam Ketchum took no part in the episode that set the pattern for the remainder of all their lives. The two brothers left Arizona together in February 1897, but parted in southern New Mexico, where Sam remained for at least some of the spring and summer. Tom went on to his fateful meeting with Carver at some unknown point in southwest Texas. Tom and Will may have drawn their inspiration from an event oft talked about in the bleak and lonesome sageland along the Rio Grande, beyond the great dip which is the eastern sweep of the Big Bend. Four former cowboys, led by Jack Wellington, had stirred up much excitement by exacting a heavy toll from the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway (once an independent company, but now only the operating title of the Texas division of the Southern Pacific Railroad) at Samuels station, in western Val Verde County, on September 2, 1891. The victim was that perennial target of highwaymen, westbound train Number 20, and the incident noteworthy in its own context as marking the very first instance where train robbers opened an express safe by blasting it with dynamite. That was the through safe, which the messenger could not unlock because the combination was unknown to him. He had already opened the local safe, or way safe.3 + 6 ∂ EASY MONEY AND HARD RIDING 72 The Deadliest Outlaws Less well remembered by campfire raconteurs and would-be emulators was the robbers’ undoing—but it has always been thus. They were caught seven weeks later through the skill and tenacity of the famous trailer, Joe Sitter. John Flynt (or Flint) evaded capture only by shooting himself. The others—Wellington, Tom Strouts (alias Fields), and Jim Lansford (or Langford)—were dealt with at Del Rio, Lansford turning State’s evidence.4 Bud Newman, whose father John B.“Bee” Newman owned a ranch twenty miles north of Comstock, near the base of the Devil’s River valley, was one local cowboy with ambitions to outshine the Samuels robbers. Gathering three kindred lights, professedly ordinary cowhands forced into crime by the prospect of a winter’s unemployment , he held up No. 20 on Sunday night, December 20, 1896, near Comstock.5 The four wishful thinkers could not open the through safe and had to be satisfied with the contents of the way safe, said to have been one gold watch and seventy dollars in cash. Their failure to secure the intended prize excited much public derision ; meager as their takings were, officials and onlookers laughingly depreciated them to zero. The whole masterful exploit seemed to have been fittingly sealed a few days later: Rangers swooped down on the Newman ranch and took away the four miscreants, all of whom, chortled one press correspondent, “wanted to confess at once” when presented with “circumstantial evidence of their guilt.”6 Conviction of the men proved to be much harder to accomplish than their capture. Prosecution of the case was beset with troubles; in the end, only two of the four went to prison, and Bud Newman, the leader, was not one of them.7 And, beneath the laughter, the Southern Pacific system and the Wells, Fargo Express Company were badly rattled by the ease with which the so called“Comstock Kids”had captured the train and kept it under control.They feared that more experienced and capable practitioners would soon seek to improve upon the performance of the Newman quartet. Worse; in March they were tipped off in...

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