Lost Man's River (19 page)

As I remember Leslie Cox, he was five foot and eleven, maybe six. He wasn't extremely tall but he was muscular, weighed a hundred eighty or one ninety
pounds, would be my guess. He was only about nineteen back then, but looked much older, and I guess young May Collins was just crazy about him.

The Collinses were a very good old family around here, had a fine house, had a big land grant cause they fought the Injuns and settled this section back in the 1830s. Them were the days when Alligator and his Seminoles was raiding our outlying homesteads, murdered and scalped all around these parts for seven years! Had to run them redskins all the way south to the Peace River!

Seems to me there was always some kind of fighting going on around north Florida. Spanish, Injuns, British, then the Yankees. And after the War, them Radical Republicans and coloreds tried to take us over. My granddad, he rode with the Regulators, Young Men's Democratic Club. That started up after Reconstruction set in—Tallahassee, 1868—and later it become the Ku Klux Klan. Had to lynch sixteen nigras in the next three years, my granddad said, to get this county straightened out and running smooth again. The KKK kept going strong, and they're
still
going, cause they got all the sheriffs and state cops right in there with 'em. Them boys had things pretty much the way they wanted, and they do today.

Anyways, May Collins's daddy never liked the Coxes, and he wouldn't have Leslie in the house, but Billy Collins died about 1907, so he was gone before the trouble started. With her father dead and her mother sick most of the time, Les come after May, he hung around the Collins house, and that's probably how he got to know Ed Watson.

Now Sam drank heavy, and when he was drinking, he didn't have no friends. Sam owned a lot of cattle, and they roamed all through these woods, because all this country here was open range. He would find some of his big herd near your place, and if he couldn't spot one or two, he'd gallop that big bay horse of his up to your cabin, riding him just as hard as he could go. He'd accuse you straight out of stealing his cattle, and cuss you out, and threaten to run you off the Tolen Plantation for good. He could do that, too, because the fields and cabins was all leased to sharecropper families such as Coxes. We owned our place, but all the same, he done the same to us one time, he cussed our family something terrible. My dad was off somewheres and my brother Brooks was hardly growed, but Brooks took a rifle and went out anyways and stood right there on the front porch, set to protect us. And Sam Tolen just sneered at him and rode away.

Well, one day Old Sam tried that on Will Cox. This man Cox leased a couple hundred acres from Sam Tolen, had a log house right here on the southwest corner of this crossing, there where I'm pointing at. Old Robarts house. Ed Watson was the one who fixed it up. Watson lived in the Robarts house awhile, then lent it to his brother-in-law when he went away to Oklahoma.
When Billy Collins moved to Centerville, Watson let Will Cox have it. Them two men were friends.

Now like I say, Les was big for his young years, and he had some spirit. Hearing Sam talk so rough to his dad, he went inside and got Will's gun and come out again onto the stoop and hoisted up that gun without one word. He was fixing to shoot Sam Tolen dead and would of done it, only his daddy seen him first and knocked the gun up.

When Old Man Sam seen Leslie with that gun, he turned that big bay horse around, he just departed, but he purely hated being run off by a boy. Folks heard tell of it and laughed, and from then on, Sam was spoiling for a showdown, never mind that this young feller was his own star pitcher.

Railroad was here where these two lanes cross, you can still see that old railbed shadow through the trees. Train come south from Lake City in the morning, come back north from Fort White in the afternoon. And right here, there was cross ties piled that an old nigra named Calvin Banks cut for the railroad company. And a few days later, Leslie Cox was setting on those ties when Tolen rode up drunk on his bay horse and started cussing him. He was threatening to kill that boy, which ain't a very good idea around cracker people.

Sam Tolen never lived long after that. He was riding along on an old road that used to cut across the woods from Herlong Lane to Ichetucknee Springs—it's all growed over now—and the killers was hid in a fence corner, behind the jamb where the fence rails come together. Sam rode that bay most of the time, but the day he died he had his horse hitched up to a buggy, headed for the Ichetucknee store for his supplies. He was shot maybe half a mile west of the schoolhouse, and the horse, too. Didn't want that horse to run off home, I guess, let people know that Sam Tolen was killed before the killers had the evidence cleaned up and got away.

Watson was in on it, they say. I ain't sure what Watson's quarrel with him was, but Sam's wife being a Watson, there might been some trouble over that plantation. Or maybe Les wanted an experienced man beside him, who is to say? But it sure looks like Cox and Watson got together and waylaid Old Man Sam. They say Watson got suspected in the Belle Starr case because Belle's horse run off, and people follered back along the road to where they found her body before he got his boot tracks all scratched out, so he swore that next time he would shoot the horse, make a good job of it.

His neighbors generally were not afraid of Edgar Watson, not unless he had something agin 'em, and nobody except Mike Tolen grieved for Sam. There was no evidence, and no one looked for none. We never knew for sure who pulled the trigger, but his own family always said that it was Leslie.

Some say Les's mother was there with him. Found small boot prints behind
that fence corner, looked like a woman. Never heard nothing bad about Will Cox, but we heard some rough things said about the mother's family—all mixed up with Injuns, some said. And it sure looked like Leslie had some Injun from his mother's side, that dark straight hair and the high cheekbones, too. Maybe that revengeful streak come from the half-breed in him.

Before he got suspected in the Tolen case, Leslie and his cousin Oscar Sanford used to come courting our sisters, Kate and Eva, just set and talk with 'em in the front parlor. Oh yes, Leslie was in our house many's the time, we knew him well, we was good friends with him. He come to our house once or twice even after the Sam Tolen killing, but my mother and dad and older brother had withdrawed from him by then, he weren't welcome around our girls no more. Didn't arrest him till the following year, but everybody in these woods knew who had done it.

That's generally the character of Sam Tolen and the reason he was killed. Sam Tolen loved baseball more'n he loved people, and he weren't a saint by any means. Supposed to killed a couple nigras back up toward Columbia City, and they say Les Cox was with him when he done it. Anyway, that was the end of the Tolen Team. We had to ride over to Fort White to see a ball game!

Nosir, Sam Tolen was not popular, not popular at all. I don't say people hated him or nothing, but being so afraid of Sam when he was drinking, nobody was sad to see him go. Even Mike had trouble with him, but blood is thicker than water, so they say. At Sam's funeral up in Lake City, Mike Tolen finished shoveling and mopped his brow, then announced right there over the grave that he knew who killed his brother and would take care of it. In those days, with our kind of people, you might not like your brother much but you took care of family business all the same.

Watson and Cox had nothing against Mike, they probably liked him, everybody did, but making that threat because he was upset cost him his life. There weren't nothing the killers could do straight off, it wouldn't look right, so they laid low awhile, that's what we figured. Sam Tolen was killed in May, nineteen-ought-seven, and Mike Tolen was killed in March of the following year.

Mike's killers was hid in a big live oak used to stand here at the southwest corner of the crossing. There was an old shack all sagged down, vines crawling in the windows, and one of those fellers might been hiding back in there. Coxes lived not one hundred yards from where we are this minute, but their old cabin is lost today back in that tangle.

They shot Mike Tolen square in the face when he come to his mailbox on this corner. Our mailman Mills Winn from Fort White came down Herlong
Lane in his horse and buggy, and he found Mike laying in his own life's blood right where I'm pointing at. Must been about eleven in the morning. Mike never got to mail his letter, he still had it in his hand, that's what Mills said.

Down here a little on the west side of the lane is a very old and dark log cabin in a grove of big ol' oaks—see it yonder? That is Mike Tolen's place. Them live oaks is the heaviest I know of, around here. Probably them oaks was pretty big when William Myers built this house when he first come down from South Carolina in the War. Then his young widow and her mother lived here, and then Tolens. When the Watson women had the big house built, late 1880s, Sam Tolen had already married the Widow Laura, and he let his brother Mike have this house here. It was us Kinards took it over from Mike's widow. She was a Myers, I believe, come visiting her uncle, married up with Mike against her family's wishes, wound up back home in South Carolina with nothing much to show for it besides four little ones.

When we moved here from across the Fort White Road, there was nothing left in Mike Tolen's cabin but some old broke cedar buckets and bent pots, a couple of cane chairs, and some torn mattresses that the field rats had got into. Them old mattresses was stuffed with Spanish moss right off these oaks, but most people used chicken feather down or straw or cotton, sewed up in their own homespun. Made their own clothes so everything was scratchy, didn't have none of this slick factory stuff like I got on here today. Wool in winter, cotton in summer—that was all we wore.

My dad burned Mike Tolen's mattresses, and us kids was glad about it, cause with so much blood on 'em, they drawed the ghosts. There's blood spots on the wall right now that's been there since the day they brought Mike home. That's how bad they shot him up, that's how much blood there was.

Rat smell everywhere, that's what I remember. House dead silent and so empty, only bat chitterin and cheep of crickets, and the snap of rats' teeth in them old mattresses. A house can have bloody rape and murder, or it can have folks who live good churchly lives, but rats don't pay that no attention, do they? Gnaw a hole in your Bible or your daddy's body, just depending.

Anyway, Mills Winn drove all around putting the news out, his old horse was overdrove that day. Sam Tolen's death never stirred folks up, but down deep I reckon we was worried about having them two ambushers in our community. In killing Mike Tolen, they had went too far. Mike was a county commissioner and a well-estimated man, and when word spread, this whole section was buzzing like a swarm of hornets.

Old Man Edmunds, ran the store at Centerville, he was the most religious man we ever knew about, we never heard a cussword from his mouth. But when he heard about Mike's death, Mr. Edmunds hollered, “All right, boys,
let's lynch them sonsabitches!” And my brother Luther was in the store, and he was so shocked that he turned to young Paul Edmunds, to make sure what Paul's daddy had just said. And young Paul being so excited hollers, “Sonsabitches! That's what Pa said, all right! Heard it myself!” And his daddy was so riled to hear that word that he run right over and twisted up Paul's ear and whapped him one!

So the people gathering, and the men carried their firearms, ready to go. Besides being riled up, they was scared, and I believe they was more a-scared of Leslie than they was of Edgar, because Edgar was good company and a pretty good neighbor till you crossed him, whilst Cox was a lazy kind of feller with a very very ugly disposition. They figured Cox was the real killer, but they also knew Watson's reputation, and reckoned both had took a part. Cox and Watson weren't afraid of anything this side of hell. All the same, they bushwhacked them two brothers, shot 'em down like hogs.

The Sheriff's men knew before they come here that they was after the same fellers that was already suspected in Sam Tolen's death. Leslie had took off quick as a weasel, no one could find him, but they found hoofprints in the woods, and them bloodhounds went south a mile or so to Watson's place. And Edgar Watson was at home, he come right to the door, though he surely knew they would be coming for him. Either he was innocent or he had some kind of alibi he thought would hold.

Come time to step up and arrest Ed Watson, there weren't no volunteers, nobody was as riled up as they thought, So Joe Burdett—that's Herkie's daddy—he said, “I'll go get him.” My brother Brooks was there, he heard him say it. Nobody asked Joe to volunteer, he just upped and done it. Small fella, y'know, very soft-spoken and shy, seemed to hide behind that bushy beard that come all the way down to his belt buckle, like a bib. He never joined in all the yelling, but when he said he would go get Watson, well, they knew he meant it. So Deputy Nance called for another volunteer, and Brooks was so impressed by Joe Burdett's courage that he piped up and said he would go, too.

Them two went up the hill to Watson's fence, went to the gate, and Joe called, “Edgar, ye'd best come on out here!” When Watson came out, they had their guns on him. Burdett pulled out the warrant, saying, “Edgar J. Watson, you are hereby under arrest, by order of the Columbia County Sheriff.”

Ed Watson took that very calm, never protested, but Edna busted right out crying, and her babies, too. Edna sings out, “Uncle Joe, Mr. Watson ain't done nothing wrong! He been home here right along!” But Joe Burdett only shook his head, so Watson said kind of ironical, “Well, then, Joe, I will change to my Sunday clothes, cause I don't want to give our community a
bad name by going up to town in these soiled overalls.” That's how Brooks Kinard described what Mr. Watson said and the way he said it.