his 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