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--****** 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;and as he swum along down stream,they followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him;and when he struck shore he was dead.
Windy Marshall told me about it.He saw it.He was captain of the boat.
'Years ago,the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two sons concluded they'd leave the country.They started to take steamboat just above No.10;but the Watsons got wind of it;and they arrived just as the two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their wives on their arms.The fight begun then,and they never got no further--both of them killed.
After that,old Darnell got into trouble with the man that run the ferry,and the ferry-man got the worst of it--and died.
But his friends shot old Darnell through and through--filled him full of bullets,and ended him.'
The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease and comfort,was a man of good parts,and was college bred.
His loose grammar was the fruit of careless habit,not ignorance.
This habit among educated men in the West is not universal,but it is prevalent--prevalent in the towns,certainly,if not in the cities;and to a degree which one cannot help noticing,and marveling at.
I heard a Westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country,say 'never mind,it DON'T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE,anyway.'