"All right," I answered, "stand out there where you will not be in the way of the other gentlemen, and I'll see what I can do." The old army officer looked at us with disgust and later with horror. I was a crack shot, and Jack knew he was safe. Taking careful aim, I fired just as close to his ear as I dared with safety. Jack dodged and scratched his ear as if a hornet had stung him. "You come pretty close. Try again," he said. I shot a second time, and Jack repeated his scratching performance, declaring that he was sure I barely missed breaking the skin. The old army officer scowled at us as if we were devils. He told the men at the next station that we were the toughest bunch he was ever with, and that we had been shooting at each other all day. When the corral master wanted the old officer to ride the rest of the way with us, he positively and emphatically, even profanely refused, saying that we were the wrong kind of roosters for him to be with. The rescue of the four Germain sisters who had been captured by the Indians was a romantic incident of the Miles expedition to subdue the hostile tribes in 1875. The circumstances surrounding their capture by the Indians shocked the whole country and inflamed the border settlements with a spirit of vengeance that would have wrought the destruction of every Indian west of the Mississippi had it been possible to attack the marauders at close quarters. From time to time news came from the Indian country that the girls were still alive, and mothers everywhere were praying for the restoration of the captives to their friends. The fate of the Germain family was not unlike that of others in those troubulous times. John Germain was a poverty-stricken farmer at Blue Ridge, Fannin County, Georgia, when he returned from service in the Confederate Army in the Civil War. Contending armies had pillaged and devastated his neighborhood. Germain decided that he would recruit his broken fortune by moving west. With a yoke of oxen and his wife and children, he set out in April, 1870, halting for a time in central Tennessee, where he remained until the following September. Southern Missouri invited him further westward, and he moved to that State, where he took a homestead and lived three years. He was sick and discouraged, and continued his way to Elgin, Kansas. Unrelenting misfortune met him at every turn. His children, as he believed, were predisposed to tuberculosis. On the other side of the Plains was Colorado with its mountain air and its pure water. Germain yoked his oxen and once more started for the promised land. Catherine Germain, the oldest of the four captured sisters, has related the incidents of that journey and its final catastrophe in these words: