“Well, he was. He was more than six feet tall and built like a catamount, and all the whiskey he'd drunk--you could get a gallon then for what a dram'll cost you now--hadn't burnt him out yet. He fought seemingly just for the pure love of fighting. Come a muster or a barn raising or an election or anything, Harve Allen fought somebody--and licked him. Before he had been here a year he had beat up half the men in this settlement, and the other half were pretty careful to leave him alone, even those that weren't afraid of him. He never used anything though except his fists, and his feet and his teeth--he never needed anything else. So far as was known, he'd never been licked in his whole life. “You see, there was nobody to stop him. The sheriff lived away down at the other end of the county, and the county was five times as big as it is now. There were some town trustees--three of them--and they'd appointed a long, gangling, jimpy-jawed fellow named Catlett to be the first town constable, but even half grown boys laughed at Catlett, let alone Harve Allen. Harve would just look at Catlett sort of contemptously and Catlett would slide off backwards like a crawfish. And when Harve got a few drams aboard and began churning up his war medicine, Catlett would hurry right straight home, and be taken down sick in bed and stay there until Harve had eased himself, beating up people. “So Harve Allen ran a wood yard for the river people and had things pretty much his own way. Mainly people gave him the whole road. There was a story out that he'd belonged to the Ford's Ferry gang before they broke up the gang. That's a yarn I'll have to tell this boy here some of these days when I get the time--how they caught the gang hiding in Cave-In-Rock and shot some of them and drowned the rest, all but the two head devils--Big Harp and Little Harp who were brothers--and how they got back across the river in a dug out and were run down with dogs and killed too; and the men that killed them cut off their heads and salted them and packed them in a piggin of brine and sent the piggin by a man on horseback up to Frankfort to collect the reward. Yes, that's what they did, and it makes a tale that ought to be written out some time.”