Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would
be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general
store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to
shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not
want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of
stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened,
other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least,
was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been
spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o'clock
came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just
north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.

One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows
stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid
down behind the trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a
blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like
wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there
in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding
quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for
their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds
with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and, half sheltered within the
lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim,
still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his
adversaries.

But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised
they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device,
cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear.
In a canvas-covered wagon--moving wagons, we used to call them in Red
Gravel County--they left their house half an hour or so before the time
set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which
met the pike south of Foster's store; and then very slowly they rode up
the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the
added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.

Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive
dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it
happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to standstill just
beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from under
the overhanging hood of t