Nothing Daunted (26 page)

Sam doted on Marjorie, his firstborn, treating her like a son. Every year she accompanied him on a weeks-long hunting expedition. As one newspaper account described her, “
Wearing a heavy flannel shirt and chaps
, like a cowboy of the plains, she has ridden through the wildest regions of the state, shooting deer and bear and even an occasional mountain lion.”
One year she returned
with a bear cub she named Perrywinkle and kept in her parents’ backyard in Denver. (
As an older woman, when her two favorite dogs died
, she skinned them and used their pelts as rugs.)

The
Denver Post,
always alert to the exploits of the Perry family, reported that Marjorie, the “
Denver society girl and experienced bear hunter
, is leading one of the posses that is hunting thru the mountains of Routt county for the surviving one of the two Greeks who kidnapped her brother. . . . [S]he knows the ground to be traversed as well as any of the men and better than most of them. The young woman is heavily armed.” Bob Perry told the
Post
in an interview on October 8, “I think they were amateurs in the brigand business, but they were thoroly in earnest about what they were doing, and I guess I was lucky to get away with a whole skin.”

Once Bob had time to eat and rest, he led his group through the hills to the spot where he had shot the kidnapper. The newspapers didn’t hold back. “Oak Creek,” the
Rocky Mountain News
reported, was “a scene of the wildest excitement, the streets teeming with aroused Americans.” At around eight
P.M.
on Friday, they found the tall man lying on his side in Little Middle Creek Gulch. The moon was shining under a light cloud, and they could see a revolver on the ground next to his hand. His clothing was in disarray, and there were two bullet holes, one through the chest and another through his right temple.

On Sunday morning, the coroner of Routt County impaneled a jury of six and held an inquest at Oak Creek. The dead man was identified as George Katsegahnis, a Greek miner who had worked briefly for Perry in the mine. Ferry served as Bob’s lawyer, and after various witnesses had been called, it was determined that the bullet through the temple was the one that had killed Katsegahnis, and that his partner was Jim Karagounis, who worked with him in the mine. The matter of who fired the fatal shot was not resolved, but “County authorities,” the
Oak Creek Times
reported on October 9, “have accepted the explanation that George Katsegohnis [
sic
] the younger and brainier of the two kidnappers, who was injured by young Perry when the latter was forced to shoot in making his escape, killed himself.” The owner of the Oak Creek Cemetery refused to allow him to be buried there, arguing,
as an item in the
Oak Creek Times
put it, “We, as a people, do not want this class of citizens, dead or alive, in our midst.”

The Greeks in Oak Hills were fearful about retaliatory attacks. One man wrote a long letter to Perry on October 11, telling him that none of the other Greek miners was complicit in the crime, and that if they had a chance to capture the kidnapper, they would kill him. He said that some of his friends at the Moffat mine had quit already
and went on, “I presume you know it, that the town is against to me
, and not having any protection of yours, is no use for me to stay here at all, anyway I ain’t forgetting your past favors. . . .”
The next day the
Oak Creek Times
reported the “wholesale arrest of local Greeks . . . on slender clues or no grounds at all, but later they were released.”

A wanted poster went up in the nearby towns, with a detailed description of the fugitive based on information provided by Bob: “Nationality Greek, age 40 to 50 years, height 5 ft. 7 in. weight 170 lbs., complexion dark, eyes peculiar, had heavy moustache, nose broad and flat, right thumb nail with spot from bruise. Was bareheaded when last seen: grey brown check shirt, eight hob nails in sole of each shoe.” The poster offered a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspect, half to be paid by Sam Perry, the other half by the Routt County commissioners.

On Sunday morning, two sisters named Leota and Loretta Crosswhite, who owned a confectionery store in Steamboat Springs, were taking a walk to the springs and spotted a man by the railroad tracks fitting the description of the fugitive. They hurried back to town to tell the deputy sheriff. Karagounis surrendered without resistance and readily admitted his part in the kidnapping. He denied killing his partner, saying that the man was too badly wounded to move and that he had been forced to leave him in the creek bed. The reward was split between the Crosswhite sisters.

Bob Perry, accompanied by Ferry Carpenter, went to the jail in Steamboat Springs on Monday to identify Karagounis. “
The Greek greeted Bob with a smile
,” Carpenter wrote in his autobiography. “In turn, Bob shook hands with him and called him Jim.” On January 12, 1917, James Karagounis was tried in the district court in Steamboat Springs—the building where Dorothy and Ros had taken their
teachers’ examinations the previous August. He was convicted of kidnapping and “assault with deadly weapons with a confederate.” He was sentenced to life plus six and a half years in the state penitentiary. Two years later, he was
knifed to death
by another inmate.

—————————

On Friday, October 13, Ros began a prosaic letter to her mother about exercises they had conducted at the school to celebrate Columbus Day. The children had performed a play, songs, and recitations before an audience of mothers and babies. Ros and Dorothy had made costumes out of some of Mrs. Harrison’s old tablecloths and a few wisps of cheesecloth, and the children made paper crowns and ruffs. Ros joked about her growing ease at the piano, pounding out the pieces after a week or two of practice—“even Papa wouldn’t recognize my touch!”

“Now I have a long story to tell,” she began in a seamless segue. She wrote how Everette Adair had inquired about Bob Perry, either with poorly concealed spite or an unfortunate choice of tense: “You girls knew him, didn’t you?” She noted exultantly, “We both felt at that—that he’d been killed and was no more. He had
almost
been killed—but had a marvelous escape. It’s the most extraordinary tale in the century, and in this country I didn’t know such things happened.” She said she would send the newspaper accounts, “that you may read a thriller!”

Indeed, newspapers around the country carried the story, with descriptions of Perry’s athleticism and college credentials, his father’s prominence in the Denver business world, maps of the route Bob took with his captors, illustrations of him shooting Katsegahnis, and copies of his “Dear Pop” ransom letter. Reporters added their own flourishes: “Unarmed and defenseless, dressed only in his pajamas,” the
Denver Post
initially reported, Perry “was completely at the mercy of his assailants who with knives and guns threatened him continually, and frequently beat him when he failed to obey promptly the commands given him.” On October 8, after an interview with Bob, the
Post
declared in its headline on October 8, “
I HATED TO SHOOT KIDNAPER
”
SAYS PERRY. SON OF MINE MAGNATE TELLS VIVID STORY OF DEATH BATTLE WITH POLITE PAIR OF BRIGANDS
. The
Los Angeles Morning Tribune
published the story on its front page.

Back in Elkhead, Ros informed her mother, “Everyone seems to feel that Mr. Perry is perfectly safe now. The Greeks are scared to death of him, and he’s very well liked at the mine. These men were notably ‘no good.’ . . . Don’t think that kidnapping is customary out here or worry! It’s as unusual here as in Auburn.”

On an October Sunday afternoon a few weeks later, just as Ros and Dorothy had given up on seeing their friends, the two men showed up to take them on a long ride. Bob brought with him from the Oak Hills company store two mackinaws (brown for Ros, green for Dorothy) and some heavy woolen gloves they had asked for. Ferry, lacking presents and a story of courageous struggle with two desperadoes, fussed over the women’s failure to bring woolen underwear for the winter.

Dorothy wrote of “Mr. Perry,” he “looks thinner & worn; and of course it was thrilling to hear his account of the kidnapping.” He showed them the Luger he now carried in his coat pocket, and demonstrated its accuracy on their ride home by shooting a porcupine. At his family’s insistence, he had hired a bodyguard, but he asked the man to stay at Ferry’s cabin while they visited the teachers, and Dorothy noticed that he didn’t seem remotely concerned about his safety.

In Rosamond’s Elkhead photo album, under a picture of Bob posing on horseback in white shirt, jacket, necktie, and fedora, loosely holding his rifle, she wrote “Hero No. 1.” Pasted next to him is “Hero No. 2”—a candid shot of Ferry on skis, caught with his head thrown back in a moment of unrestrained laughter. She wrote underneath, “A very good likeness.”

Ros was discreet about her deepening affection for Bob, but Ferry knew that he had lost the competition.

“T
HE DARK DAYS ARE VERY FEW
”

O
n an unseasonably warm Saturday at the end of October, the teachers got up at six, took their cold sponge baths, cleaned their room, mended some clothes, washed Ros’s hair, and worked on their lessons. They had made most of the home visits already, but they had a few left in the farthest hills. That afternoon, they rode up into Little Arkansas, the area of heavy aspens Carpenter had described in his letter to them before they left Auburn. It turned out that people there really did eat bear cabbage and porcupine. Dorothy commented, “I
don’t
see how these people make a living—with just a tiny log cabin in a clearing—& a potato patch! Think of living in the country & not having a cow
or chickens—everyone is ‘pulling Taters’ now and burying them for the winter.”

One place about two and a half miles north of the schoolhouse was particularly forlorn, a tiny cabin on the peak of a mountain, surrounded by aspens. It was the home of a family of “poor whites” from Kentucky who had five children, three of whom had joined Dorothy’s class. “I was positively terrified by the mother’s appearance,” she wrote. “She is tall & gaunt with a wisp of bright red hair—and 2 horrible tusks of teeth.” The cabin was “dreadfully dirty . . . and for furniture she had a stove, three double beds and two stools—for seven people! I felt
so
sorry for the poor creature.” Attempting to start a conversation, Dorothy asked her if she liked the country. The woman replied, “ ‘Naw—’pears like me & Chris don’t care about nothin’ any more!’ What can life mean, but mere existence to people like that? The children are neat & clean at school & no wonder they love it.”

Now the students’ frayed clothes were less picturesque than they had seemed in August. Tommy Jones wore a torn shirt, a ragged coat, and a duster around his neck. Six-year-old Robin Robinson was bare-legged in cutoff overalls and practically disappeared inside Jimmy’s coat, which was in shreds and so big on him that his hands dangled inside the sleeves. Their mother, a cultured woman from France whose family disowned her when she married a cowboy, had died during childbirth, when Robin was three. Nine-year-old Jesse Morsbach, who informed Dorothy that the biblical Abraham came from Kansas, wept because his shoes, which he tied together with string, constantly flapped open and tripped him; he started wearing old rubber boots instead. Even children from some of the relatively well-off families were in rags, because the “freight” hadn’t come—their annual shipments from Sears Roebuck.

With no warning one afternoon, the temperature dropped and a snowstorm descended. Few of the children had worn coats to school, and they set off for home at a dead run. The teachers were moved by the students’ attempts to cope, and by their good cheer in the face of such adversity. Jesse’s brother Rudolph, Dorothy wrote to her father,
“said he always ate radishes to keep him warm!” She asked her sisters for help, suggesting that they collect some old scarves, sweaters, and coats for the children: “They are hard working, self respecting people—very proud, but I am sure we could manage to give them some clothing.”
Dr. D. L. Whittaker, the new doctor in Hayden
, came up to examine the students and found several cases of enlarged tonsils and poor eyesight, among them Lewis Harrison, who needed glasses. Lewis was also told that he would have to go to Denver to have his adenoids removed. Tommy Jones had an ulcer inside his right nostril, causing nosebleeds.