Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies: Authentic History of the World Renowned Vendettas of the Dark and Bloody GroundMutzenberg, Charles Gustavus
History
Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies: Authentic History of the World Renowned Vendettas of the Dark and Bloody Ground
Mutzenberg, Charles Gustavus
Crime -- Kentucky; Vendetta -- Kentucky
Years ago the prophecy was made that "Devil Anse" would inevitably die
with his boots on. But he has confounded the prophets. He still lives,
from last accounts. The daring feudist, who, with his sons, defied the
law and authorities of three States, for twenty years, the chieftain of
as daring a band of outlaws as ever trod American soil, has more than
lived his "allotted three score years and ten." He is approaching the
nineties. But a few days before the killing of Elias and Troy, just
mentioned, he was converted and baptized, declaring that henceforth
he would lead a Christian life. It was high time, a resolution
unfortunately long deferred.
Randolph McCoy also passed the four score mark. He seemed to have borne
a charmed life. Marked for assassination a hundred times, he had always
escaped bodily harm. But his heart almost broke when three of his sons
were slaughtered in one night; his spirit was crushed when another son
and a young daughter were foully slain, his aged wife was brutally
beaten and the home burned.
After all, he had the questionable satisfaction of assisting a few of
his tormentors to a temporary berth in the penitentiary. One and only
one was hanged, Ellison Mount, the slayer of Allifair, and he was the
gainer at last, for he went straight to heaven. So he said. Perhaps he
knew, perhaps he didn't.
Somehow, it seems difficult to believe that murderers should have a
monopoly of heaven. The murderers' band there must be very large. Let
a man be sentenced to death for a heinous crime, let his attempt to
obtain a commutation to imprisonment prove abortive, and straightway he
repents and away he goes--to heaven, so 'tis said. His victim, snatched
into eternity without the formal preparations which orthodox religion
prescribes for candidates for heaven, must suffer an eternity of hell.
They tell us "we shall know each other there." Will Randolph McCoy
and his wife thrill with pleasure and be overcome with ecstatic
spasms of happiness on beholding among the saints the slayers of four
sons and a daughter? Will they join in the anthems warbled by these
celestial birds, whose victims-- But let that be. We did not mean to
be irreverent. We simply cannot help differing from the approved and
established conception of God's justice.
THE TOLLIVER-MARTIN-LOGAN VENDETTA.
(ROWAN COUNTY)
The royal murder at Serajevo was the spark that set the world on
fire. It would be silly, however, to place the blame of the world war
upon it. To find the real causes of the appalling tragedy one must go
further back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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