“Are you about ready to go?” Arlene asked her husband, Bob.

“Is that the old guy?” Desmond Rutgo asked.

Paul Sims stood just inside his door, warm sunlight filtering in. At his right knee stood his three-year old son, Brandon and in the crook of his left arm one-year old Daniel.

The north wind blew early that winter. With the wind came the first snow of the season; wet and heavy. It clung to the branches of trees and gathered its individual opaque crystalline shapes on the grass. By morning, a blanket of white, several inches thick, covered the ground.

“Be sure and do a foot patrol of downtown tonight,” said Chief of police, Sid Stillweather.

“Come on, keep this line moving,” said the man dressed in Khaki and wearing a sidearm.

The house was small, a one-bedroom; not big enough for the six children and two adults who occupied it; but that was life for a migrant family in the Fifties.

Six year old Joshua Beldon threw the covers back and slid off the bed, his bare feet soundlessly striking the wood floor.

With her high cheek bones, jet-black hair, brown almond eyes and tanned skin she looked to have just stepped off the cover of a major modeling magazine.

The first bullet from the .44 Magnum struck the huge beast in its left pectoral, penetrating muscle and breaking underlying bone.