Read Days of Darkness for Free Online Page A

fast as the first train can carry us. Judging from the papers, you may imagine that we have 40 or fifty men with us. This is not so. We are alone, living as best we can. About three weeks ago Mr. Sam Kash, of Clay County, the deputy collector for this district, was up here on business and … he saw the majority of people in this county and … if you refer to him to tell you the sentiment of the people on this feud trouble. In closing we beg your excellency to consider and inquire well into this matter, and you will soon find where the blame lies.
    Yours to command,
    Will Jennings,
    Wilson R. Howard

The Trap that Didn’t Spring
    Wilson Lewis should have felt fairly secure. The Turners owned much of Harlan Town, the county seat. Lewis was county judge, Mose Turner was sheriff. Furthermore, Lewis knew, though Wilse Howard did not, that the detective Imboden, who was trailing Wilse for the murder of the deaf-mute in Missouri, was closing in. Yet all Wilse Howard had to do was send word that he was going to burn down the town and Lewis fired off another letter to Governor Buckner, pleading for the protection of troops. Apparently Buckner finally got tired of the routine and on March 17, 1890, sent a company of militia under Captain Gaither of Harrodsburg and, to show his concern, sent General Sam Hill to report on the situation.
    Lewis was delighted, but his joy was short-lived. General Hill interviewed as many people as he could persuade to talk and sent word to Wilse and Hezekiah Jennings that he wanted to see them. (Why he asked to meet with Hezekiah Jennings instead of Will is hard to understand. Perhaps it was because Hezekiah was older and had no charges against him.) At any rate, they met, “twelve miles out in the mountains,” according to the Courier-Journal story from “Harlan Courthouse,” which also reported the escape of three moonshiners and one murderer from the jail. “The jail,” added the report, “is not as secure as it might be.”
    General Hill told Wilse that he had not come to Harlan to assess guilt but to find ways to bring about peace. He said he had read Lewis’s letters to the newspapers and to the governor but had also talked to a lot of people in Harlan, many of whom had spoken well of the Howards. He was convinced, he said, that there was blame on both sides, and he urged Wilse to get the Howards and their allies to lay down their arms.
    â€œGeneral,” Wilse said coldly, “if I put down my guns before Lewis and his bunch do, I’ll be dead by night. I guess we’re all sick of this; if you get the other side to put down their guns, we’ll put down ours. But we want Lewis to enforce the law the same for all, not onekind for us, another for the Turners. If he’ll do that, we’ll keep the peace. Not till then. I’d rather be in prison for killing them than in the graveyard for them killing me.”
    General Hill agreed to talk with Lewis and later told Wilse that the Turners had assured him they would use their influence to see that everyone, Lewis included, kept the peace. Wilse promised him that the Howards would not be the first to break the truce, and the militia turned south for the trip down the valley to Pineville, where they caught the train for Frankfort.
    Several weeks later, Wilse and Will hatched a plot that they thought would put an end to the Lewis threat. Will rode through the county and brought about twenty Howard sympathizers to Bud Spur-lock’s cave, where Wilse explained his plan to station them in an ambush on either side of the road through the narrow gap to Hagan, Virginia. Wilse then wrote a letter to Wilson Lewis, which he signed with the name of the county judge of Rogersville, Tennessee. According to the letter, the judge had in his jail two men, one claiming to be Wilson Howard of Harlan, Kentucky, whom he was holding awaiting identification. Lewis, wildly excited, quickly raised a posse and