THE GRAVEYARD MASSACRE
The three Hatfield men had crawfished back into a dense dewberry patch,
while the three in the shop had crawled into the loft and hidden among
the miscellaneous rubbish. As there was no more shooting, and as the
Hatfields could be seen in the moonshine fleeing down the white road,
the McGills decided to overtake them and wipe them from the earth, and
the Courthouse now quickly disgorged its mob of eager, infuriated
militants.
Regardless of ownership, men unhitched and mounted the first horse or
mule they came upon. Old Eversole dashed across the street and banged on
his store door for admittance. His women folks having barred and bolted
the doors, he called loudly for his clerk, but Plunkett had disappeared.
Presently a woman admitted him at the saloon door. He rushed into the
bar and gulped down a glass of liquor--then, gathering all the
cartridges he had in the place, he ran out and distributed them among
the men.
Sap McGill and Orlick were astride their own mounts, and McGill was
crying for the men to make greater haste. McGill rode a light dun
animal, and Orlick a powerful dappled gray with a bobbed tail. With
thirty-odd horsemen and twoscore or more rifle men afoot, they now
dashed after their fleeing opponents, who made a dark splotch in the
moonlit road far ahead.
This road ran straight until it reached the graveyard, where it made a
short, sharp turn to the left, looping around the base of a hill that
jutted outward. This abrupt turn in the road was directly opposite, and
midway of the front length of the graveyard, which was elevated some
fifteen feet above the road-bed and occupied the slope. Hatfield's
horses were hitched just around the bend in the road. When the sixteen
men were mounted, he ordered them back along the rail fence for a
distance of fifty yards.
Buddy Lutts, clinging to his ready rifle, was eternally at Hatfield's
heels. Johnse had ordered him back three times; now he took him by the
collar and fairly dragged the protesting boy back and told the men to
keep him there. Buddy's peaked face was flushed with a look that
partially expressed the wild exultation that obsessed him. Hatfield
mounted his piebald mare and, advancing, drew in close to the clay bank
that jutted into the road, and here he waited, tense and rigid.
When he heard the clattering hoofbeats thundering down toward the
graveyard, he urged his horse a few yards nearer the point, then with a
Colt gun in either hand, his habitually smiling lips broke into a brutal
grin, and his little reddish eyes snapped murderously.
The stillness was quickened again, on the brink of this Waterloo, with
the stuttering wail of a screech-owl watching from the dead yard. Always
wary, the McGill cavalcade drew up short at the bend and waited for
their panting horde behind. Then they pushed boldly around the bend.
It was just then that the indescribable, tragic scene took place that
stamped its grim memory ineffaceably in these mountains, and made a
crimson stain on feudal history, known ever afterward, as the "graveyard
massacre."
When Johnse Hatfield saw the noses of the McGill horses, he uttered a
wild yell of triumph that pierced the far-reaching hills, and called up
an invocation to the mute tombs above.
"Now drive 'em in, boys--drive th' wild hawgs in with th' old Scratch!"
he yelled.
And in a trice, Hatfield had turned that hillside graveyard into a
seething crucible, whose moulten maw opened and sucked the living in
with the impotent smothered dead. Seemingly, every soul tethered in the
confines of that silent dead-plot came to quick ghostly life, and pushed
up out of the ground into the moonlight, wielding a lance of darting,
destructive lightning. Up from a hundred sodden graves, a hundred human
forms sprang, and the tombstones belched out liquid death. And the May
night was ruptured with a deluge of gun-shots, and harried with a chaos
of curses, and death-groans, and the frenzied squealing of horses. And
the air was rife with a pungent odor, not unlike brimstone, as over this
seething disaster the powder vapor lifted and arose against the moon
mist, studded and starred with spurting tongues of alternate flame, and
twisted an ephemeral arch that, seemingly, framed the gates of hell.
The McGills afoot had some show at seeking cover and retreat, but not so
the horsemen. They became inextricably jammed into the narrow turn in
the road, and the harder they struggled to turn about, or go forward,
the more entangled they became. To jump from their mounts in this
instant of turmoil and surprise meant sure death.
Into this struggling, tangled mass of plunging, besmeared horses, and
fighting, snarling, bleeding men, Johnse Hatfield had plunged his own
horse, followed by his ferocious riders, now blind-mad with the lust of
battle. And all the while the lead rained down from the graveyard
without cessation.
Hatfield had only one object in view now. He knew that the old coward,
Eversole, was not there. He had seen the sheriff go down, and knew that
he was under the horses. In the rise and fall of the conflict, he could
not locate Sap McGill, but he did see Orlick, and Orlick saw him at the
same time, and tried vainly and frantically to force his horse out of
the melee.
As Hatfield forged his way nearer and nearer, Orlick raised his pistol
and fired at him. But at that instant a horse reared between them, and
the animal received the ball in the head and fell back against Johnse's
mount, knocking it to its knees. When Hatfield saw Orlick again, he was
on the outer edge of the combat, and would have been away had not a man
seized Orlick's bridle and held on. Johnse saw him fire in the man's
face, and saw the man's head disappear.
Free at last, Orlick turned and drove his horse up the road toward town
like the wind. Hatfield now stabbed his horse cruelly, and forced it up,
over and through the fighting mass, and followed Orlick, leaving the
battle behind. But Orlick's horse was a swift and powerful animal, and
Hatfield lost ground.
All this while Buddy Lutts had been busy. He had climbed to the top of a
clay bank, forty feet above, and was sharp-shooting with telling effect.
Looking down in the moon mist upon the struggle, it was hard for him to
distinguish the enemy from his own people, but every time he saw a man
break away and run back toward the town, he knew it to be a McGill and
he fired with careful aim.
It was while thus engaged that the boy discerned Orlick's big gray leap
out and gallop toward town. Buddy raised his rifle and pulled the
trigger, but there was no report. His gun was empty. While he was
fumbling nervously in his haste to reload, he saw the piebald break out
and dash up the road, and he knew that Johnse was after Orlick. When
Buddy had loaded the rifle, he crept along the brow of the hill and
started to run after Hatfield. He had not gone far when he came
unexpectedly upon four men. The boy, startled, jerked his rifle to his
shoulder, when the men in his path threw up their hands, one holding a
white handkerchief above his head and calling upon the boy not to shoot.
Ignoring their friendly overtures, Buddy circled around them and ran
onward at top speed toward town. The men were Logan and the three
newspaper reporters, following the progress of the fight at the risk of
their lives. Johnse Hatfield already had five bullets in his body and
was bleeding profusely, but he spurred ahead unmindful of his wounds,
keeping the fleeing gray in sight.
When Orlick turned the corner and vanished, Johnse called upon his mare
for all the speed that was in her. As he made the corner and swerved to
the right past Eversole's store, old Hank jumped out and fired upon him.
The ball broke Johnse's left arm and his pistol slipped from a nerveless
hand to the ground.
Undaunted, and without slacking his pace, Hatfield wheeled in the saddle
and fired two quick shots with his right. He saw old Eversole pitch
headlong into the horse-trough. Because of a line of trees that cast a
black shadow along the main street, he could not now see Orlick's gray,
but he could hear the tattoo of the horse's hoofs. Determined to
overtake this traitor, Hatfield urged his mare to her utmost. In a few
seconds the big gray came out into the moonlight again, and Hatfield saw
that Orlick was headed for the river.
As Hatfield divined Orlick's intentions, a savage joy stirred within him
and mitigated the torture of a shattered arm and other bodily wounds. He
knew that if Orlick attempted to ford that swift, roaring river that he
(Hatfield) would get the shot for which he thirsted and, as he spurred
his horse after Orlick and felt his strength fast failing him, he fought
this weakness off with a mighty will, buoyed up with the thought of how
he would at last take toll from this traitor for his part in the killing
of old Captain Lutts.
As Johnse flew along, he saw the gray disappear down the river bank. The
next minute he was surprised to see the horse plunging back up into
sight. Then the horse pivoted and went down again. Then back up the bank
he lunged a second time, and Hatfield could hear Orlick cursing the
animal, and he knew that for some reason the horse had balked and would
not take to the water.
A shock of delight instilled new strength into Hatfield, whose blood had
been ebbing away for the past three-quarters of an hour. At this
particular spot on the river bank there were no trees, and the rim of
the river was destitute of rocks sufficiently large to offer protection
for a man's form. But, standing back from the road and some four hundred
feet distant from the river bank, there was a deserted old shack with
sagging porch and dismantled windows. And just outside the broken picket
fence at the near corner of the yard there stood a huge chestnut tree
with a thick body.
While Orlick was wrangling with his refractory horse, his actions made
it plain to Hatfield that he had marked that tree. Then, evidently
despairing of controlling the stubborn animal, he slid to the ground,
obviously bent upon making the shelter of the chestnut. Hatfield now
bore down upon him, swerving to the right of the road to thwart Orlick's
attempt to reach the tree. Whereupon Orlick ran back and along the bank,
and dropped in the high weeds.
Hatfield, weak and totally exhausted from pain and loss of blood, now
stopped his horse and fell out of the saddle. He gripped his Colt and
tottered toward the spot where he had last seen Orlick, but he knew that
Orlick would not be on that exact spot. He knew that the man was
bellying away like a snake through the grass somewhere. Knowing that he
would not last much longer, and desperate in his eagerness to flush
Orlick, he stumbled recklessly about through high weeds with his gun out
before him and his eyes darting here and there.
Suddenly Orlick jumped up fifty feet to the right in the direction of
the chestnut tree and fired. Hatfield also fired at the same time. The
two reports seemed to consolidate and make a single echo that quivered
across the river. Hatfield pulled the trigger again, but it only clicked
emptily and did not respond. Orlick was still upright, but motionless.
Hatfield wondered why he did not shoot. Orlick's shot had struck him in
the arm that already hung useless and limp at his side. He stood
watching him curiously. Then he saw Orlick thrust his gun in its holster
and sit down on the ground, as if to rest. He held this position for
several seconds--then lay back slowly, flat on his back.
Hatfield suspected Orlick of treachery and hastily proceeded to break
his gun with his good hand. This he contrived to do, and while he was
fumbling for cartridges, of which he had a countless number, a blinding
faintness seized him and, thinking that he was falling backward into the
river, he threw up his good arm suddenly to catch his balance. The gun
flew out of his grasp and rolled down the embankment.
The next instant he fell forward and lay still on his face in the weeds.