Meeting down at the old mill one day, Pres Huff and "Willie" Brooks
engaged in an excited argument. Between the dark-browed, sullen
mountaineer and the slender, gay young man a contest seemed uneven, and
was prevented. Huff told Brooks that the next time they met he would
kill him.
They met next day, on the mountainside, on the road that leads by the
Brooks home, on across the spring-branch, up beside the York home and
then up the mountain. Huff's riderless horse galloped on and stopped in
front of a mountain cabin; his body lay dead in the road.
There was a hurried consultation at the home of Elijah Pile. Huff's
friends, it was realized, would not be long in coming. Young Brooks went
out of the house, down by the spring, and up the mountain back of it. He
was never seen in the valley again.
Huff's friends waited.
Weeks afterward, Nancy Brooks, carrying her baby, went to visit a
friend. She evaded the watchfulness of her husband's enemies, succeeded
in crossing the Kentucky line and disappeared in the mountains to the
north of it.
The friends of Pres Huff knew she would write home. Months elapsed, but
finally a letter came, and was intercepted. She and her husband were at
a logging-camp in the northern woods of Michigan.
Secretly, extradition papers for Brooks were secured, and Huff's former
partner in a mercantile business, fully equipped with warrant appeared
with a sheriff before the door of the cabin in the Michigan woods,
Brooks was brought back to Jamestown, and put into the log-ribbed jail
that John M.
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