Free For Sale —American Paradise by Willie Drye

all over the country, Ashley told Chaffin. Killing one more man won’t make any difference to me.
    Chaffin protested, telling the brothers that he was not a lawman. But it didn’t matter to them. John Ashley hit the engineer with the butt of his shotgun several times, and then Bob pistol- whipped him. But instead of killing Chaffin, they left him lying in the road, injured but alive.
    After the attack on the engineer, every cop and sheriff in the area knew John Ashley was back. On February 21, Palm Beach County Sheriff George Baker sent two deputies, S. A. Barfield and Rob Hanlon, to arrest him. The deputies were walking along the Dixie Highway, looking for a break in the jungle-like undergrowth, when John Ashley and brother Bob appeared before them, guns drawn.
    The brothers disarmed the deputies and told them to go back to West Palm Beach. But Ashley couldn’t resist taunting the lawmen. Tell Sheriff Baker not to send any more “chicken-hearted men” after him, he said.
    It was hard for the Ashley clan to understand why the law was going to so much trouble to arrest John. The dead man was a Seminole Indian. What was all the fuss about?
    Finally, the family made a cynical calculation. John would turn himself in and stand trial for the murder of Desoto Tiger. The way the Ashleys figured, there weren’t twelve men—women couldn’t serve on juries at the time—in Palm Beach County who would convict an Ashley for shooting a Seminole. No one who was a friend of the family would vote for a conviction. And anyone who wasn’t a friend knew they’d face the furious wrath of the clan if they voted to convict John Ashley of a crime that could send him to the gallows.
    Ashley made arrangements through an attorney to surrender to Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies. He promised to behave himself under two conditions: He didn’t have to submit to being handcuffed when he was moved from the jail to the courtroom during the trial, and his father could bring his supper every night to the Palm Beach County Jail. Sheriff Baker agreed, and Ashley turned himself in on April 27, 1914.
    Ashley’s trial began in West Palm Beach a couple of months later. The Ashleys’ gamble was shrewd, but not quite shrewd enough. On July 1, the jury retired to deliberate. When they returned, they told the judge they were deadlocked. Nine of their twelve members had voted, as the Ashleys figured they would, for acquittal. But three had dared to vote to convict John Ashley of murder.
    It wasn’t quite enough to get John Ashley off the hook. He’d have to stand trial again. Still, he continued to behave as a model prisoner. And undoubtedly he still believed, with good reason, that there weren’t twelve men in Palm Beach County who’d be crazy enough to convict him.

    In the closing days of John Ashley’s trial in West Palm Beach, while the jury of twelve listened to attorneys sparring over how a man was killed in the wilds of the Everglades more than two years earlier, another man was killed in Europe.
    On June 28, 1914, an angry young man with a gun killed a member of the ruling family of Austria-Hungary and his wife, who were visiting Sarajevo, Austria. The young gunman’s name was Gavrilo Princip. Like countless assassins throughout history, Princip, a Serbian, believed that by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, he was striking a blow against a monstrous evil. What he’d actually done, however, was tip the first domino in a sequence of events that would ignite four years of slaughter in Europe.
    The carnage that followed the deaths of two people in Sarajevo would change the world almost beyond recognition.
    Before the war ended in 1918, more than sixty- five million servicemen from the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and many other countries around the world would be engaged in the conflict. More than eight million of them would