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 lonely road in the county. Though Young heartily disclaimed any connection with either side, he was accused by the Martins of being a well-wisher of the Tollivers. Again, as in the Bumgartner case, no arrests were made. However, when Ed Pierce was convicted some time later of highway robbery and jailed in Montgomery County, he confessed to waylaying Taylor Young but put the blame of the actual shooting on Ben Rayburn. Pierce said it was plotted by Sheriff Humphrey who assured him and Rayburn of all the whiskey they could drink and two dollars a day while they were watching for Young; when they had killed him they were to receive two hundred and fifty dollars. After that, one Sunday morning, Craig Tolliver, who was town marshal of Morehead, accompanied by a half dozen men, went to the home of old Ben Martin, father of John. Craig told Mrs. Martin that he had warrants for the arrest of Cook Humphrey and Ben Rayburn. At first she said the two were not there, that only her daughters, Sue, Annie, little Rena, and a married daughter, Mrs. Richmond Tussey, were in the house. It was a fact; her husband and her two sons, Will and Dave, whose lives had been threatened, had gone to Kansas.