ad and a clean shirt and socks. Little did she dream when
she got on the train to return to Morehead that night that her husband
sat handcuffed in the baggage coach ahead. Around the prisoner stood his
five captors: Alvin Bowling, Edward and Milt Evans, a man named Hall,
and another by the name of Eastman.

When the train was within five miles of the county seat of Rowan, at a
village called Farmers, it was boarded by several masked men who rushed
into the baggage car and shot John Martin, helpless and handcuffed, to
death.

"They've killed him!" Lucy Trumbo Martin screamed at the sound of the
first shot, though until that moment she had not known her husband was
on the train. "I knew they had killed John," she told her friends at the
time and often afterward.

When the train bearing John Martin's bullet-torn body reached Morehead
he was carried, still breathing, into the old Central Hotel where he
died that night. In the meantime his distracted wife had sent for their
children and her mother who was staying with the family on the farm on
Christy Creek. An old darky who had long lived at the county seat
mounted his half-blind mule and rode out along the lonely creek that
cold winter night to carry the sad tidings to the Martin household. He
also rode ahead of them on the journey back with the corpse of John
Martin later that same night.

"Hesh!" Granny Trumbo warned the children huddled in the bed of the
wagon as it rumbled along the creek bed road, "Hesh! no telling who's
hid in the bresh to kill us." The children sobbed fearfully. Ben, the
older of the two small boys, sat dry-eyed. His small hands sought those
of his father cold in death and still in irons. "Pa, they didn't give
you no chance," he murmured bitterly. "You were helpless as a trapped
deer. They didn't give you no chance."

It wasn't a cry of revenge but of heartbreak, one that the mother and
the other children would remember always. And Granny Trumbo, sitting
bravely erect on the board seat of the wagon beside her widowed
daughter, gripped the reins and urged the weary team onward along the
frozen road, keeping close behind the silent horseman ahead.

In March of the following year another of the Martin side, Stewart
Bumgartner, a deputy sheriff of Cook Humphrey, was shot from ambush as
he rode along the road some six miles from Morehead.

A month later Taylor Young, county attorney of Rowan, was shot in the
shoulder as he rode along another lone