that that pilot had ‘gilded that scare of his, in spots;’
that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it.
We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below
and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man,
with easy carriage and an intelligent face. We were approaching
Island No. 10, a place so celebrated during the war.
This gentleman’s home was on the main shore in its neighborhood.
I had some talk with him about the war times; but presently
the discourse fell upon ‘feuds,’ for in no part of the South
has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer
between warring families, than in this particular region.
This gentleman said–
‘There’s been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I
reckon the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons.
Nobody don’t know now what the first quarrel was about, it’s so long ago;
the Darnells and the Watsons don’t know, if there’s any of them living,
which I don’t think there is. Some says it was about a horse or a cow–
anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn’t of no consequence–
none in the world–both families was rich. The thing could have been
fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn’t do. Rough words had been passed;
and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that. That horse
or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and crippling!
Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast
as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept
it a-going. And it’s just as I say; they went on shooting each other,
year in and year out–making a kind of a religion of it, you see–
till they’d done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Wherever a
Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of ’em was going
to get hurt–only question was, which of them got the drop on the other.
They’d shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family.
They didn’t hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet,
they puffed and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men.
A man shot a boy twelve years old–happened on him in the woods,
and didn’t give him no chance. If he HAD ‘a’ given him a chance,
the boy’d ‘a’ shot him. Both families belonged to the same church
(everybody around here is religious); through all this fifty or
sixty years’ fuss, both tribes was there every Sunday, to worship.
They lived each side of the line, and the church was at a landing
called Compromise. Half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky,
the other half in Tennessee. Sundays you’d see the families drive up,
all in their Sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up the aisle,
and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church
and the other on the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns
up against the wall, handy, and. then all hands would join in with the prayer
and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn’t kneel down,
along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. I don’t know;
never was at that church in my life; but I remember that that’s what used
to be said.
‘Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families
caught a young man of nineteen out and killed him.
Don’t remember whether it was the Darnells and Watsons,
or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this young man rode up–
steamboat laying there at the time–and the first thing
he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind
a wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back,
and they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away
with all their might. Think he wounded a couple of them;
but they closed in on him and chased him into the river;