It was just then that the indescribable, tragic scene took place that stamped its grim memory ineffaceably in these mountains, and made a crimson stain on feudal history, known ever afterward, as the "graveyard massacre." When Johnse Hatfield saw the noses of the McGill horses, he uttered a wild yell of triumph that pierced the far-reaching hills, and called up an invocation to the mute tombs above. "Now drive 'em in, boys--drive th' wild hawgs in with th' old Scratch!" he yelled. And in a trice, Hatfield had turned that hillside graveyard into a seething crucible, whose moulten maw opened and sucked the living in with the impotent smothered dead. Seemingly, every soul tethered in the confines of that silent dead-plot came to quick ghostly life, and pushed up out of the ground into the moonlight, wielding a lance of darting, destructive lightning. Up from a hundred sodden graves, a hundred human forms sprang, and the tombstones belched out liquid death. And the May night was ruptured with a deluge of gun-shots, and harried with a chaos of curses, and death-groans, and the frenzied squealing of horses. And the air was rife with a pungent odor, not unlike brimstone, as over this seething disaster the powder vapor lifted and arose against the moon mist, studded and starred with spurting tongues of alternate flame, and twisted an ephemeral arch that, seemingly, framed the gates of hell. The McGills afoot had some show at seeking cover and retreat, but not so the horsemen. They became inextricably jammed into the narrow turn in the road, and the harder they struggled to turn about, or go forward, the more entangled they became. To jump from their mounts in this instant of turmoil and surprise meant sure death. Into this struggling, tangled mass of plunging, besmeared horses, and fighting, snarling, bleeding men, Johnse Hatfield had plunged his own horse, followed by his ferocious riders, now blind-mad with the lust of battle. And all the while the lead rained down from the graveyard without cessation. Hatfield had only one object in view now. He knew that the old coward, Eversole, was not there. He had seen the sheriff go down, and knew that he was under the horses. In the rise and fall of the conflict, he could not locate Sap McGill, but he did see Orlick, and Orlick saw him at the same time, and tried vainly and frantically to force his horse out of the melee. As Hatfield forged his way nearer and nearer, Orlick raised his pistol and fired at him. But at that instant a horse reared between them, and the animal received the ball in the head and fell back against Johnse's mount, knocking it to its knees. When Hatfield saw Orlick again, he was on the outer edge of the combat, and would have been away had not a man seized Orlick's bridle and held on. Johnse saw him fire in the man's face, and saw the man's head disappear.