Free Days of Darkness by John Ed Ed Pearce Page A

several times made fun of the younger Callahan when they met at political functions.
    Like the Callahans, the Deatons were a large and powerful family, but not all the Deatons were allied with James Deaton against Ed Callahan, partly because they regarded Captain Strong, Deaton’s chief ally, as their primary enemy and didn’t want anything to do with anyone, even a Deaton, who was in league with him. James Deaton was not very fond of Strong, either, and while he accepted his support, he didn’t invite it and did not often consult with Strong.
    Callahan and Deaton were always on the verge of conflict, partly because they owned adjoining land from which they both cut valuable timber which they rafted or floated from the same sandbar on the Kentucky. Usually a logger would fell his trees, cut them into uniform lengths, and burn or notch his brand into the butt end of each; he would then tie his logs, usually a hundred, into a raft. The raft would be put together on a bar or a flat place along the riverbank where it would be floated when the river rose with spring floods and carried downstream to the sawmill. Sometimes one logger would buy logs from another; he would then “dehorn” or cut off the brand of the original logger, put on his own brand, and incorporate the log into his raft. This could lead to friction because log theives were common along the river. They would snag logs, dehorn them, put on their own brand, and sell them as their own. Both Ed Callahan and James Deaton had accused the other of dehorning logs, and both were rumored to have gone out on moonless nights and cut the lines holding the other’s rafts. Both stationed guards at their rafting sites, and their clashes were the basis for a stream of lawsuits.
    The Callahan-Deaton rivalry burst into open battle one day when Ed Callahan happened to go by the sandbar where both his men and a Deaton crew were rafting logs. Spotting a peavy or canthook, a tool used for turning logs, Callahan walked over, picked it up, and announced that it was his, in effect accusing the Deaton crew of stealingit. Deaton, standing nearby, flew into a rage and, according to the Callahan forces, reached for his rifle. As soon as he touched it, a dozen shots rang out and Deaton fell, dead on the spot.
    In court, the Deaton men swore that Callahan had fired the first shot. The Callahan men swore the opposite and said that they had fired only to save Callahan’s life. Strangely enough, Bob Deaton, a cousin of the dead man but a Callahan employee, admitted that he had fired the fatal shot. The jury was fed a mass of totally conflicting testimony.
    Captain Strong had employed his nephew James B. Marcum, one of the best known and most highly respected attorneys in Kentucky, to prosecute the Callahans, and in the following years this fact turned out to be more important than the outcome of the trial, marking as it did the beginning of the hostility between Marcum and the Callahans.
    As the trial progressed, it began to appear that Marcum was getting the better of the argument and that Callahan would not get off scot free. But one night while the trial was in session, a friendly guard let Callahan out of jail, and he proceeded to the boardinghouse where the jury members were housed. The husband of the woman who ran the boardinghouse was a member of the jury, and Callahan persuaded her (reportedly with a hundred dollars) to let him speak directly to the jury members. The majority of the jury were Ku Kluxers and for acquittal at any rate, but Callahan took no chances. Within an hour he was back in jail and sleeping soundly. The verdict of not guilty is said to have cost him less than $500.
    But then someone, probably Captain Strong, overreached. It was rumored that Hen Kilburn, Strong’s chief gunman, had been waiting for months for a chance to kill William Tharp, a prominent farmer said to have been condemned to death by Strong’s court. Hen’s chance came