zed off,
someone come shoutin' through the cornfield that the General had been
killed. We shouldered our muskets and stumbled off through the field,
grumbling and growling that we'd 'tend to the ones that had betrayed
him. But even if the woman had been found I reckon we'd a-shunned
killin' her. There's a heap that goes on in war that a man don't like to
think on."

Uncle Chunk was proud to own, however, that he saw hard fighting through
Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky and was glad enough when the war was
ended. He came back, married Polly Ann Caudill, and settled down in
Letcher. It wasn't long until another war started. This time between his
neighbors. But with all the carryings-on between John Wright and Clabe
Jones in the adjoining counties of Floyd and Knott, Enoch Craft managed
to stay friends with both sides. Whichever side happened to round in at
his home, hungry and footsore from scouting in the woods for the other
faction, found a welcome at Uncle Chunk's and plenty to eat. "Fill up
the kittle, Polly Ann," he'd call to his wife, as he went on digging
potatoes. "Here comes some of John Wright's crew." Or, "Put on the
beans, I see Clabe Jones's men comin'!"

And fill up the kettle Polly Ann did.

After the belligerents had eaten their fill, Uncle Chunk would try to
reason with them to let the troubles drop. "A man thinks better on a
full gut than a empty one," he argued. And at last, through his help,
the Clabe Jones-John Wright feud ended.

* * * * *

In Bloody Breathitt in 1886, Willie Sewell was shot from ambush while
making molasses on Frozen Creek. That started feeling, for Willie had
lots of kinfolks. He himself was not without sin, for he had killed
Jerry South. The Souths were related to the Cockrells. But when Willie
Sewell, who was a half-brother of Jim and Elbert Hargis, was shot the
trouble, which became the Hargis-Cockrell feud, really began.

A quarter of a century after one of the most famous of Kentucky mountain
trials--when Curt Jett was tried for the assassination of James B.
Marcum and James Cockrell--the trouble was revived with the killing of
Clay Watkins by Chester Fugate. This uprising, it was said, started when
Sewell Fugate was defeated by Clay Watkins for the office of chairman of
the county Board of Education. Chester quarreled with Clay over a petty
debt. Three years before that time Amos, cousin of Chester, had shot and
killed Deput