Murphy returned to Denton, but learned that Jackson was hiding in the elm bottoms awaiting a chance to slay him. He thereupon asked permission of the sheriff to remain about the jail for protection. While skulking about the prison one of his eyes became infected. A physician gave him some medicine to drop into the diseased eye, at the same time cautioning him to be careful as the fluid was a deadly poison. Murphy drank the entire contents of the bottle and was dead in a few hours. Remorse, no doubt, caused him to end his life. Of the four men that fought the Round Rock battle with Sam Bass and his gang all are dead: General J.B. Jones, and Rangers R.C. Ware, Chris Connor, and George Harold. Of the ten men that made the long ride from San Saba to Round Rock only two are now alive--Lieutenant N.O. Reynolds and myself. CHAPTER X A WINTER OF QUIET AND A TRANSFER In the fall of 1878 a man named Dowdy moved from South Texas and settled on the headwaters of the Johnson Fork of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County. His family consisted of himself, wife, three grown daughters, a grown son, and a young son twelve or fourteen years old. Mr. Dowdy owned two or three thousand sheep and was grazing them on some fine upland pasture just above his home. He contracted for his winter supply of corn, and when the first load of grain arrived at the ranch the three girls walked out half a mile to where the sheep were grazing to stay with their younger brother while the elder returned to the ranch to measure and receive the corn. When young Mr. Dowdy returned to the sheep an hour later he was horrified to find that his three sisters and his little brother had been massacred by a band of roving Indians. From the signs on a high bluff nearby the sheep and their herders had been under observation by the redskins for some time and, seeing the only man leave, the Indians descended upon the defenseless girls and boy and killed them. As there was no ranger company within one hundred miles of Kerr County at the time, a party of frontiersmen quickly gathered and followed the murderers, but after pursuing them for nearly two hundred miles the posse lost the trail in the rough Devil's River country.