As a rule, Les Cox was kind of overbearing, and he had him a hard and raspy tongue would scrape the warts off you. Being such a fine ballplayer made it worse, because everybody bragged on him. My big brothers Brooks and Luther and them other players, they admired him so much that they copied the way Les hung his glove off his belt on his left side, kind of like a six-gun. Wore it that way even when he was at the plate. Course gloves was a lot smaller back in them days, never had all this webbing and padding that you see today.
Les Cox was lively, made some noise, but he never had too much of a sense of humor. Local hero when we won, but when we lost a game, he couldn’t handle it, so he blamed the loss on Brooks or one of the other players. Took razzing all wrong, and he done that on purpose cause he wanted to fight so bad, you know, same as Ty Cobb. Leslie always figured he weren’t getting a fair deal, no matter what, and that give him a real touchy disposition. Folks wanted to like him, pretended to like him, because he was a fine-looking feller and a star, but in their hearts nobody liked him much, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was kind of lonely.
I remember one time Brooks and Luther and our cousin Sam Kinard, they made these little popguns for us, shoot chinaberries, sting like anything. And Les came along, and me being the smallest one, he just grabbed my popgun and got into the game with ’em instead of me. Oh we was mad, all right, but there weren’t nothing we could do cause we was scared of him. Point of the game was to sting the other boys, not really hurt ’em, but when Les got stung, he got mad straight off, got too excited, and after that he was out to hurt someone and generally did. So that game broke up pretty darn quick, because Les Cox took the fun out of it, as usual.
As I remember Leslie Cox, he was five foot and eleven, maybe six. He wasn’t extremely tall but he was muscular, weighed a hundred eighty or one ninety pounds, would be my guess. He was only about nineteen back then, but looked much older, and I guess young May Collins was just crazy about him.
The Collinses were a very good old family around here, had a fine house, had a big land grant cause they fought the Injuns and settled this section back in the 1830s. Them were the days when Alligator and his Seminoles was raiding our outlying homesteads, murdered and scalped all around these parts for seven years! Had to run them redskins all the way south to the Peace River!
Seems to me there was always some kind of fighting going on around north Florida. Spanish, Injuns, British, then the Yankees. And after the War, them Radical Republicans and coloreds tried to take us over. My granddad, he rode with the Regulators, Young Men’s Democratic Club. That started up after Reconstruction set in—Tallahassee, 1868—and later it become the Ku Klux Klan. Had to lynch sixteen nigras in the next three years, my granddad said, to get this county straightened out and running smooth again. The KKK kept going strong, and they’re still going, cause they got all the sheriffs and state cops right in there with ’em. Them boys had things pretty much the way they wanted, and they do today.
Anyways, May Collins’s daddy never liked the Coxes, and he wouldn’t have Leslie in the house, but Billy Collins died about 1907, so he was gone before the trouble started. With her father dead and her mother sick most of the time, Les come after May, he hung around the Collins house, and that’s probably how he got to know Ed Watson.
Now Sam drank heavy, and when he was drinking, he didn’t have no friends. Sam owned a lot of cattle, and they roamed all through these woods, because all this country here was open range. He would find some of his big herd near your place, and if he couldn’t spot one or two, he’d gallop that big bay horse of his up to your cabin, riding him just as hard as he could go. He’d accuse you straight out of stealing his cattle, and cuss you out, and threaten to run you off the Tolen Plantation for good. He could do that, too, because the fields and cabins was all leased to sharecropper families such as Coxes. We owned our place, but all the same, he done the same to us one time, he cussed our family something terrible. My dad was off somewheres and my brother Brooks was hardly growed, but Brooks took a rifle and went out anyways and stood right there on the front porch, set to protect us. And Sam Tolen just sneered at him and rode away.
Well, one day Old Sam tried that on Will Cox. This man Cox leased a couple hundred acres from Sam Tolen, had a log house right here on the southwest corner of this crossing, there where I’m pointing at. Old Robarts house. Ed Watson was the one who fixed it up. Watson lived in the Robarts house awhile, then lent it to his brother-in-law when he went away to Oklahoma. When Billy Collins moved to Centerville, Watson let Will Cox have it. Them two men were friends.