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
night-time 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
climatic 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