Outlaws

"In 1884 two cowboys, Zimmerman and Belmont, stole a sizeable bunch of horses in Kansas, near the Colorado border, and moved them rapidly across Nebraska to Kearney county, where they stopped for supper in the little town of Minden. Most of the horses belonged to Tom Wray, and among them was a spotted saddle horse Wray's wife liked to ride. A neighbor of Wray's in town with a load of freight, recognized the horse. A bit later he saw Jack Woods, sheriff of Hitchcock county, ride into town and told him about the horses.

...Tom Wray, for whom the town of Wray, Colorado was named, brought cattle to south west Nebraska in 1876...

Woods and the Kearney county sheriff then hurried to the Prairie Home restaurant, where the outlaws were seated at a table in the back of the room, their guns in their laps. Woods went in the front door and covered Belmont, the most dangerous of the two. The other sheriff, supposed to enter from the back and cover Zimmerman, lost his nerve and dived down a handy cellar stairway instead.

The outlaws, too quick for Woods alone, shot him down before he could fire. Then gunning down two innocent bystanders, R. B. Kelly and Charles Collins, who tried to run out of the restaurant, they jumped on their horses and headed for Kansas. At a ranch many miles to the south, they ate supper the next evening and went to bed - but got up and left in the night, riding the two best horses on the place.

A ranch hand, owner of one of the horses, and his sweetheart, the hired girl, tracked the rustlers to an old abandoned house and hid in some brush near the buildings. When Belmont sauntered out the next morning, the cowhand shot him down. Zimmerman came out next, his hands up and surrendered.

The Wray horses, returned to their owner, were afterward known as "the Belmont mares."

-- The Call of the Range, by Nellie Snyder Yost, p. 271, 272