Lone Star Tabernacle where the old church once stood / Mel W Rhodes
32
younger boys] Fremont and Tommy
were preventing their escape,” wrote
local author Doyle Marshall in A Cry
Unheard. “In a desperate attempt to,
at least, save themselves, Harvey and
Joe released the hands of their little
brothers and, in spite of their serious
wounds, doubled their speed toward
the thicket and plunged headfirst into
the cane patch, where they quickly
disappeared from view.”
From the cover of the cane, the
older boys watched as two of the
marauders jerked their young broth-
ers up onto their horses and shot off
like rockets. For some time Harvey
and Joe could hear their brothers’
heart-rending cries for help.
After a time, the wounded boys
heard voices and feared they too
were about to be captured, but it was
the boys’ fathers — Thomas Sullivan
and Upton O. Blackwell — searching
the brake. After tending Harvey’s and
Joe’s wounds back at the house, their
fathers drummed up a search party
to give chase and hopefully retrieve
the stolen children. They soon came
across a small cowbell, something
Tommy Sullivan generally kept close.
No doubt its ringing proved inconve-
nient for the child stealers.
“After following the raiders for
about twenty miles to a point south
of Weatherford, the horse of the lead
rider suddenly snorted and shied
at the smell of blood,” Marshall
wrote. “At the edge of the timber lay
Tommy’s body, ‘bruised and mangled
almost beyond recognition.’ Tommy’s
younger brother, John Wright Sulli-
van, tearfully recalled to his children
in later years the heartache experi-
enced by his family at finding that the
Indians had taken the little boy’s life
and mutilated his body and that the
crows had pecked out his eyes.”
Continued on page 76