"Evylee's got no right to harbor Beach," Judge Hargis complained to his wife. "He's tore up our home and he will do the same for Evylee and her husband and for Dr. Hogg's business too. He's a plum vagabond and spoiled. And put on top of that whiskey, and a gun in his hand, the Lord only knows what that boy will do." Out of one scrape into another, in jail and out, Beach Hargis went his way. The mother pleading with the father to forgive him and let him have another chance. The sister pleaded with Beach to quit drinking and carousing. On the 17th day of February, 1908, Beach, still maudlin drunk, went again into his father's store. He didn't look at the guns in the racks this time. He glanced toward the wareroom where the black coffins stood in a row on wooden horses. "I'm looking for the old man," he muttered to a clerk. Then he reeled toward the counter and asked the clerk to give him a pistol. The clerk refused, saying he could not take a pistol out of stock, but added, "Your Pa's pistol is yonder in his desk drawer. You can take that." Beach helped himself. In the meantime Judge Hargis had come into the store just as Beach, with the pistol concealed in his shirt, went out. In the drugstore of his brother-in-law, Dr. Hogg, Beach terrorized customers and the proprietor by pointing his pistol around promiscuously. He reeled out of the place without firing, however, and went back to his father's store. Someone later said all he had been drinking was a bottle of Brown's Bitters. From where Judge Hargis stood in one part of the double storeroom he could see Beach sitting cross-legged in a chair near the front door. Beach spat on his shoe and slowly whetted his pocket knife, scowling sullenly now and then in his father's direction. He clicked the blade of his knife shut and slipped it into his pocket and sat with his arms dangling at his sides, head slumped on his breast. A customer came in and asked Judge Hargis, "Where's Beach?" The father pointed to the son. "There he is. I have done all I can for him and I cannot go about him or have anything to do with him." Then Judge Hargis repeated that Beach was destroying his business and would do the same with Dr. Hogg's business if Evylee kept on harboring him. Not a word was spoken between father and son. But as Jim Hargis walked in his direction, Beach pulled himself up out of his chair, stepped around behind the spool case that stood on the end of the counter, leered at his father and moved toward him. Beach came within three feet of his father. The next thing they were grappling. Terrified bystanders and clerks heard the report of five pistol shots. All five of the shots lodged in Jim Hargis's body. By this time the two men were on the floor. The father holding the son down with one arm, lifted in his right the smoking pistol. "He has shot me all to pieces," gasped Judge Hargis as he handed the pistol to a bystander. He died in a few minutes.