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“Who does this here hornet’s nest put you fellers in mind of–this gray color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin’ back and forth and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now–it’s somebody you all know.”

And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he said:

“Why, ain’t it got percisely the same color and the same look about it as Mr. Dudley Stackpole’s face? Why, it’s a perfect imitation of him! That’s whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it bouncin’ on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the flats.”

“By gum, if you ain’t right!” exclaimed one of the audience. “Say, come to think about it, I wonder if spendin’ all his nights with bright lights burnin’ round him is whut’s give that old man that gray color he’s got, the same as this wasp’s nest has got it, and all them puckery lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin’ him! Well, they tell me he’s toler’ble well fixed in this world’s goods, but poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn’t trade places with him fur any amount of money. I’ve got my peace of mind if I ain’t got anything else to speak of. Say, you’d ‘a’ thought in all these years a man would get over broodin’ over havin’ killed another feller, and specially havin’ killed him in fair fight. Let’s see, now, whut was the name of the feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin’s? I actually disremember. I’ve heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if I’ve heard it oncet.”

For a fact, the memory of the man slain so long before only endured because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and nighttime assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its climactic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer–and his fashion of living afterwards–which made warp and woof for the fabric of the tragedy.

With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid. One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the two Tatums–Harve and Jess–for an account long overdue, and won judgment in the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair. Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other. By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.

Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late 80’s when the two Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o’clock of that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile away to Stackpole Brothers’ gristmill above the big riffle in Cache Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit enough–the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two, but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business and keeping bachelor’s hall, as the phrase goes, in the living room of the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.