Now like I say, Les was big for his young years, and he had some spirit. Hearing Sam talk so rough to his dad, he went inside and got Will’s gun and come out again onto the stoop and hoisted up that gun without one word. He was fixing to shoot Sam Tolen dead and would of done it, only his daddy seen him first and knocked the gun up.
When Old Man Sam seen Leslie with that gun, he turned that big bay horse around, he just departed, but he purely hated being run off by a boy. Folks heard tell of it and laughed, and from then on, Sam was spoiling for a showdown, never mind that this young feller was his own star pitcher.
Railroad was here where these two lanes cross, you can still see that old railbed shadow through the trees. Train come south from Lake City in the morning, come back north from Fort White in the afternoon. And right here, there was cross ties piled that an old nigra named Calvin Banks cut for the railroad company. And a few days later, Leslie Cox was setting on those ties when Tolen rode up drunk on his bay horse and started cussing him. He was threatening to kill that boy, which ain’t a very good idea around cracker people.
Sam Tolen never lived long after that. He was riding along on an old road that used to cut across the woods from Herlong Lane to Ichetucknee Springs—it’s all growed over now—and the killers was hid in a fence corner, behind the jamb where the fence rails come together. Sam rode that bay most of the time, but the day he died he had his horse hitched up to a buggy, headed for the Ichetucknee store for his supplies. He was shot maybe half a mile west of the schoolhouse, and the horse, too. Didn’t want that horse to run off home, I guess, let people know that Sam Tolen was killed before the killers had the evidence cleaned up and got away.
Watson was in on it, they say. I ain’t sure what Watson’s quarrel with him was, but Sam’s wife being a Watson, there might been some trouble over that plantation. Or maybe Les wanted an experienced man beside him, who is to say? But it sure looks like Cox and Watson got together and waylaid Old Man Sam. They say Watson got suspected in the Belle Starr case because Belle’s horse run off, and people follered back along the road to where they found her body before he got his boot tracks all scratched out, so he swore that next time he would shoot the horse, make a good job of it.
His neighbors generally were not afraid of Edgar Watson, not unless he had something agin ’em, and nobody except Mike Tolen grieved for Sam. There was no evidence, and no one looked for none. We never knew for sure who pulled the trigger, but his own family always said that it was Leslie.
Some say Les’s mother was there with him. Found small boot prints behind that fence corner, looked like a woman. Never heard nothing bad about Will Cox, but we heard some rough things said about the mother’s family—all mixed up with Injuns, some said. And it sure looked like Leslie had some Injun from his mother’s side, that dark straight hair and the high cheekbones, too. Maybe that revengeful streak come from the half-breed in him.
Before he got suspected in the Tolen case, Leslie and his cousin Oscar Sanford used to come courting our sisters, Kate and Eva, just set and talk with ’em in the front parlor. Oh yes, Leslie was in our house many’s the time, we knew him well, we was good friends with him. He come to our house once or twice even after the Sam Tolen killing, but my mother and dad and older brother had withdrawed from him by then, he weren’t welcome around our girls no more. Didn’t arrest him till the following year, but everybody in these woods knew who had done it.
That’s generally the character of Sam Tolen and the reason he was killed. Sam Tolen loved baseball more’n he loved people, and he weren’t a saint by any means. Supposed to killed a couple nigras back up toward Columbia City, and they say Les Cox was with him when he done it. Anyway, that was the end of the Tolen Team. We had to ride over to Fort White to see a ball game!
Nosir, Sam Tolen was not popular, not popular at all. I don’t say people hated him or nothing, but being so afraid of Sam when he was drinking, nobody was sad to see him go. Even Mike had trouble with him, but blood is thicker than water, so they say. At Sam’s funeral up in Lake City, Mike Tolen finished shoveling and mopped his brow, then announced right there over the grave that he knew who killed his brother and would take care of it. In those days, with our kind of people, you might not like your brother much but you took care of family business all the same.
Watson and Cox had nothing against Mike, they probably liked him, everybody did, but making that threat because he was upset cost him his life. There weren’t nothing the killers could do straight off, it wouldn’t look right, so they laid low awhile, that’s what we figured. Sam Tolen was killed in May, nineteen-ought-seven, and Mike Tolen was killed in March of the following year.