Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

streak, and by the time they had his moonshine polished off, Chevelier and Carey could shoot pretty good, too, so it sure looked like this deadly bunch would bring Watson to justice. Only trouble was, Ebe Carey had no heart for the job. Maybe he seen that one of his partners was a drunk outlaw with an eye on Watson’s property and the other a loco old foreigner so angered up with life he couldn’t see straight let alone shoot. Every little while, Ebe described Ed Watson cutting loose down in Key West, shooting out lights in the saloons, never known to miss. Drunk or sober, he said, Mister Watson was no man to fool with. His partners was too liquored up to listen. First light, they fell into the skiff and pushed off for Chatham Bend, figuring to float downriver with the tide, and Cap’n Ebe never had the guts not to go with ’em.

    Come Sunday, I snuck off to Chatham Bend, where Erskine and me fished up some snappers while we swapped our stories. I told Erskine how them three deputies was up all night getting their courage up and he told me what happened the next morning. Maybe the posse was bad hung over and nerves wobbly, he said, because all they done was stand off on the river and holler at the house. Chatham River is pretty broad there at the Bend, and being they was way over toward the farther bank, they had to shout their heads off to be heard at all.
    Mister Watson got up out of bed and poked his shooting iron through the window. He knowed Tom Brewer from the saloons at Key West, knowed him for a polecat east coast moonshiner, and he also knowed that the Key West sheriff would never appoint no such a man to be his deputy. So when Brewer hollered, Mister Watson fired, and his bullet clipped most of his handlebar mustache on the left side. Brewer yelped and them other citizens near fell out of the skiff, putting their backs into them oars too hard, too quick. What he
should
have done, his boss told Erskine, after he cooled off some and got to laughing, was give them varmints a bullet at the waterline, sink their skiff and let ’em swim for it, cause there weren’t nowhere but the Watson place for them to swim to.
    When that citizens’ posse slunk back to Possum Key, Ed Brewer shaved off what was left of his mustache, cussing real ugly when the razor bit on his burned lip: took it out on that squaw girl of his, knocked her down right on the dock. Before noon he headed east for Lemon City on the Miami River, where he accused E. J. Watson of attempted murder and told all about his shoot-out with the worstest outlaw as ever took a life around south Florida. Cap’n Carey spread his version in Key West—that’s how Watson got that name “the Barber.” A few years later they were calling him “the Emperor”—the Frenchman said that first—because of his grand ambitions for the Islands. It was only when he was safe under the ground that anyone dared to call him Bloody Watson.
    After that morning Mrs. Watson made up her mind to leave the Bend. She didn’t want her children risked in a dangerous place where men might come gunning for her husband—Erskine himself heard her say that. A few days later, Mister Watson took his family to Fort Myers, put his kids in school. In Fort Myers, Dr. Langford told him Mrs. Watson was looking too darn old for a woman only in her thirties. Said life in our Islands was too rough for a lady gently reared and he rented her rooms in his own house until she recovered. Miss Carrie stayed there, too, to help take care of her, and the two younger boys were put in school and lodged nearby.

SHERIFF FRANK B. TIPPINS

    I was born in Arcadia in De Soto County and went back there on a cattle drive at the time of the range wars in the early nineties, heard all about how a stranger named Watson wiped out a local gunslinger named Quinn Bass. This Quinn was a killer and a fugitive from justice but when the stranger came by the jail to pick up