• Once upon a time there were three children. A simpler life characterized their existance. Living together with their mother and father in a valley somewhere in the midwest of colonial 19th century America, they milked the cows and made bread, studied geometry and performed chores around town.
    A dear and sweet family it was, whose members were so full of devotion that their adoration towards God encompassed a very deep understanding of life.
    Obviously, their father Joshua had learned farming as a little boy. But also how to read. So, it came to pass that the family all read the bible every day to each other with his reading skills as a tutoring mechanism.
    Father Joshua gave his children the best of everything: love, reading skills and a good fatherly care. The mother was a good friend, a fine nurturer and a wonderful caretaker in every way imaginable. This family had a little library of books they had received from other people such as good friends and clerical workers. Historical books and novels were mostly in their own possession, but on their shelves were also many religious novels about saints and holy people and age old personalities borrowed or donated from other villagers.
    The children, therefore, had an exquisite knowledge of the ancient world as well as early Christianity. Greek history was as common to them as the Arabian knowledge of Algebra and the Roman treatment of slaves as opposed to recent slavery.
    It was unusual for a family to be so well taught even outside of school in 1871. This was short after the civil war and slavery had been abolished. The three children Molly, Eric and Rebecca, each three years apart starting with the youngest of six, all went to the village local school and even helped tutor the very youngest children in the area how to sing and read.
    Every day the father got up in the morning and tended to his animals, while the mother Sophia packaged the eggs and put the milk in pitchers. Around midday the father would go to his carpenter workshop and finish some carvings or mailboxes or birdhouses that people had ordered at his house.
    When the children came home from school they would eat and study. When all work was done they would then have some fun together. The evenings would usually start with the family gathered around the porch strumming the guitar and playing the flute. It was a fine way to grow up.
    The night was as cool as they day was warm, but due to the valley’s protected location the weather never really turned mean. The house lay in a valley and so they got the best of everything. The sun shone hot, but never too hot. The wind was strong, but not too strong. The rain was hard, but not too hard. It was perfection.
    Alas; it was a perfection endangered by harsh reality.
    This paradise was threatened the day a band of thieves arrived in the village. One day in June, the father of the children was on his way off to the post office of that small little town to send a little telegram. Accordingly with other small towns in the mid west, the little town had a mixed bank and post office and telegram service and many of the locals came there to pay their bills and chat with the clerk.
    Even so on this day. Maybe it was fate. Joshua hurt his knee rather badly that morning riding into town. He stopped at the doctor’s office and had it bandaged. Being the trooper he was, he jumped on the wagon again and took his horse into town.
    Joshua knew the clerk personally and that would prove fatal. His daughter was a good friend of his son’s and there was always something to talk about.
    The father had not been there for more than ten minutes dictating out the rather long telegram, when a band of thieves came in to the office. They were holding elongated guns.
    The rascals screamed at the two men to hand over the cash or get bullets in the kneecaps. The clerk began looking out onto the street for the sheriff, but to no avail. All he could see was dust. One of the men noticed this and jumped up on the counter knocking the worker unconscious.
    They were big men, so challenging them would have been rather foolish. Joshua was scared and it was soon clear that he would’ve attacked the bandits had it not been for a rather serious knee injury. He stayed put and still got shot in the knee caps, something that made the knee injury worse. The bandits stole the money and left in a hurry.
    Just as the gang of lawless bandits left, the local sheriff arrived. He had just returned from the saloon, where he had arrested a few drunks that had started fighting. The sheriff saw them leave just in time enough to saddle his horse and bring along his posse of five men in order to follow them.
    It was a very hard chase down a ravine and up a mountain slope. In the end, the sheriff was lucky enough to capture the crooks and brought them back to the village. They were thrown in jail, but the father was now incapacitated and could not do anything. Treated by a specialist, the bullets were removed from his knees. However, the result was that he walked with crutches and could not do anything standing up. A frustrating thing for an active man like Joshua.
    An old man named Jones had owned a hardware store in town that was now run by his son and daughter, both married to the teachers in the local school. The old man had died leaving two things: a fortune and a brand new patented wheelchair from 1869 with hollow rubber wheels. This wheelchair was now given to the incapacitated father and with this he went about his business on the farm in the valley.
    He stayed in the house mostly, playing guitar and reading books and building birdhouses. The mother and the children now had extra work. Mother Sophia Jennings, wife of Joshua Montgomery Jennings, started knitting and sowing clothes for money and after school the two older children performed chores for the doctor and the local blacksmith. It was now a much harder way to live, but the family in the valley still had love and they knew that working hard would pay off. Maybe soon enough, dad would feel better and be able to walk.
    The years went by and the family was able to save some money. This was due to the fact that all five family members worked hard.
    The children of the valley, as they were called in the village, were now famous for being hard working youngsters, who spent most
    of their time running errands, studying or performing tasks. Not only were they nice and kind, they were also becoming role models
    for all the other children in town.
    Now eight and eleven and fourteen of age, the children were just
    growing up quicker than is actually common for children to grow up.
    Molly, the oldest, was becoming a woman. She was now already
    seeing one of the boys in school and she called him his sweetheart. The middle child, Eric, was learning how to become a man and at the edge of puberty he was trying to be what the father had been: a very strong and active fellow with the greatest of physical capabilities. It sometimes was possible for father Joshua to walk without crutches, but his injuries in the kneecaps had left him with damages that actually would not heal so quickly.
    Time passed. As it did, the children grew older and the mother weaker. The father did his best to perform the chores he could, but all in all it was not easy for someone crippled in his movements.
    The day the parents disappeared was one that would remain strong in the children’s memory. The band of thieves broke out of jail the following year and rode down the path toward a little house in the valley. The children were off from school and the parents were in the barn that early morning milking the cows.
    Nothing forewarned the parents of the upcoming assessment.
    The lawless cowboys rode up to the barn and captured Josh and Sophia before anyone could notice anything. They rummaged the storage, stole the food and took the wagon out of the back of the barn. Sophia and Josh were thrown into the back of the wagon, the horses were saddled and the bandits went on their way.
    Unfortunately, the children noticed too late that their parents had left the farm and promptly a search for the parents began. The sheriff looked everywhere for them and it soon became a local priority to track down the kidnappers.
    Meanwhile, the oldest daughter Molly became a makeshift mother. She held everything together and stayed up late, got up early and worked harder than any fifteen year old should work. Eric and Rebecca tried hard to be strong, but cried themselves to sleep at night when the could not bare being alone any more.
    Often, they asked Molly if their parents were still alive and why the criminals had taken them away. Molly answered them that this probably was just revenge. Their father had been involved in their capture after the incident at the post office.
    The local shop was owned by friendly Danish immigrants named Hansen and it was actually the Hansens that convinced Molly to leave the village with her siblings and look for the parents on their own. Sheriff Wyatt Malone had taken over as justice defender in the village just last weekend and his attempts to send out a search party had been just as unsuccessful as his predecessor’s tries. The villagers were growing impatient. The parents had completely vanished.
    The fact of the matter was, Hansen said in his thick Danish accent, that the thieves were an infamous band who enjoyed robbing not only banks but also lives. No one had yet been killed by the gang, but the length of the torture they were responsible for was renown throughout the land.
    They were a nameless band of black clad robbers, captured for a year and escaped on the count of a sleeping sheriff more than once.
    Molly decided to take the matter into her own hands. Her friends in the village donated the children money and food and water. The school had a wagon and two horses that they could use. Mr. Hansen decided to leave his brother the responsibility for his shop and family and jumped on the band wagon to find the parents.
    So, on one warm April day the three children took off for what they had heard were the headquarters of this band of fools: a mountain cave many miles away. Many a time had the sheriff looked there and found nothing, but maybe the brave posse could now find a clue.
    The four brave friends, three kids and one grown man, stopped in four villages until they found one that actually had seen the gang gallop by in the band wagon more than a week ago.
    They had headed for the mountains. As far as the people in the saloon had seen, the five criminals had had a nice looking couple with them that were tied together with ropes, but very much alive.
    However, when the children and Mr. Hansen arrived at the mountain cave all that was left was a smouldering fire. Hansen believed that the gang could’ve left that morning to head for the railway station. There was a famous railway track in the nearby area that transported a money train once a week and often enough it was robbed by some lawless cowboy that wanted to get rich quickly. It didn’t seem like something that this band would do, but maybe they were careless just once.
    Right they were. That evening saw a train being robbed just as the three children had fallen asleep. Hansen made sure that the little ones could continue their naps in the wagon and headed for the wagon he saw by the railway station.
    The local sheriff was following the gang lorry containing several thousand dollars. Somehow, however, the squad managed to ride into a steep ravine with the wagon and park in a ditch. They left the wagon there, took the money with them and headed for one of the many caves that the ravine entailed.
    The parents were alive. They saw their children from a distance and screamed for them to take heed. The gang leader demanded to let his men ride away liberated with the money. In exchange, he would let the children’s parents go.
    The sheriff told them he would have nothing of it and promptly a shot was fired. Then a voice was heard saying that they next shot would be fired into someone’s head.
    There was another battle between the sheriff and the gang, unlike the earlier battle a year ago. This duel lasted a day and continued into the night. One of the sheriff’s men managed to slip into the cave from the back in order to see that they parents were still alive, but the father was bleeding badly due to a cut on his forehead.
    Well, now Molly decided again to take matter into her own hands. Climbing up the steep hill, she entered the cave and surprised the gang leader from the back. The sheriff followed her and shot two of the other men as a result. This lead to shots being fired into a man’s chest and killing a deputy.
    The confused rest were left in handcuffs and the parents were again in the custody of the children and the kids could again feel safe within the confines of parental stardom in a village known for its courageousness. Soon enough, though, the whole family was back in their house with all of the town’s inhabitants talking about how the family had narrowly escaped death.
    What they didn’t know was that one of the men had escaped and was now on the loose. Joshua had a rifle by his bed and it was with that rifle that he shot the man one night when he tried to enter the house. The trial showed that Joshua had shot the rifle only in defence.
    That summer, a black man named James began working on the farm and he helped the family with things that they could not do. Soon enough, the Jennings family were back in business.
    The children still studied hard, they still ate good food and they still sang songs in the evenings. They were now aided by James, an African man who taught them the songs from the cotton fields. Slavery was abolished by now, so James was paid in natural assets of food, drink and a place to rest. The fine thing was also that James was a fabulous story teller. He would re-tell his ancestors’ stories from Africa. One of them was about a cat who became holy and stopped eating rats after visiting a city’s temple. He still ate the rats in the end. Another one was about a tug of war between a tortoise, an elephant and a hippopotamus. These stories had been passed from generation to generation, ever since his great-grandfather arrived in American before the declaration of independence. They could not understand people who underestimated the Africans. Their culture was so fascinating and so marvellous.
    The children of the valley would never forget the lawless men that had threatened their existence. They thought about that every time they heard about a war in school or sang a sad song.
    They might’ve lost some peace in the process, but they knew that they could have lost much more. In those moments, they embraced their parents and hugged James. The knew that having rescued their family from the clutches of hell and returned the stolen money probably was the best thing that had ever happened.
    The children grew old enough to tell their grandchildren about life in the old west and how it wasn’t as romantic as it had seemed. By then, Charlie Chaplin was gracing the screens and airplanes were flying overhead.
    Automobiles were better than robbers on horseback.
    The mafia did rule the city, but the police at least could control the infrastructure. The old west had its’ charm, though.
    Back in the 1870’s, the family lived an ideal life on the farm. They sang songs until late at night and basked in the sunlight of the open fields of merry sunshine. They were far away from robbers with scarves around their faces and cowboys that possessed hate in their hearts. They were Christian and loving and faithful.
    That gift would last them an eternity.