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1.

Back in the 1889 when John R. Hughes was a private in the Texas Rangers, he was working alongside Sgt Ira Aten along the Nueces River near Barksdale, some ninety miles from Eagle Pass.
In the Spring of that year Aten got a message from Captain Jones that read thus:-

"The authorities seem to feel that we can do something toward clearing up the finding of four murder victims in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, so I want you and Hughes to take hold of the matter and stay with it, regardless of time and trouble, just as long as you believe there is hope of accomplishing anything toward identifying the murderer"

The message included a description of the victims; four corpses dressed in typical frontier clothing. Three women and a youth. The first woman was about fifty, the other about thirty, and a young girl about seventeen. The youth was in his early twenties. They had all been found in the Rio Grande weighed down with heavy stones tied to them with what seemed to be a new rope similar to the kind used by farmers for plough reins. They had all been killed in a similar fashion, namely had their skulls crushed by a heavy blunt instrument. There were no marks in the clothing and there was nothing in the youths pockets. The only identifying marks were that the thirty-year-old woman had false teeth and bunions, and the youth had teeth that were set wide apart.

Nobody in the area could identify them despite being put on display in an undertakers in Eagle Pass, so they had been buried at public expense.
When Sgt. Aten and Private Hughes arrived in Eagle Pass they reported to Sheriff Cooke who had written down a description of each victim and had also kept the rope and stones used to weigh the bodies down. This gave the Rangers something to go on. If they could find where the stones were from, they would possibly find the scene of the murders, and finding the place where the rope was purchased might find a clue to the murderer. Not much to go on when the victims had been buried for a while and nobody seemed to know who they were. So Aten and Hughes decided that the first thing they would do was to search the banks of the Rio Grande on the Texas side to see if they could find where the stones came from. This time consuming job took most of the first day they were there and in the evening, as they were preparing to rest before continuing their search the next day, Hughes remembered how several weeks earlier they had arrested a young cowboy for brandishing a pistol and creating a disturbance in Barksdale.

His name was Dick Duncan and he had been put under a peace bond, but despite his rough and shoddy appearance he had paid the sum demanded in cash. Sometime later he had arrived at the Ranger Camp, (which was near Barksdale), and spent most of the time there bragging about the gunfighters he had known. This hadn't gone down well with Hughes so when he came across him the following day on a road near the Nueces River, he took note of who he was with. Duncan was riding with another cowboy who identified himself as "Picnic" Jones, and they were riding escort to three women riding in a Mitchell wagon driven by a youth. He also recalled that the wagon was green, looked nearly new and had "J.S. Clark, San Saba" stamped on it. Hughes got the impression that Duncan and Jones were escorting the family somewhere.