“They say those darn old robber barons made this country great, and made great fortunes, but they never let too much stand in their way.”
“Human life, for one thing. Uncle Edgar—”
“Well, not all men who resorted to violence were unscrupulous,” Hettie warned her daughter. “In Reconstruction, the union soldiers and carpetbaggers and uppity colored people all around made life bitter and miserable, that’s all. There were many men who felt they had no choice but to take the law in their own hands. They weren’t all crazy, April dear!” Hettie went pink in the face. “My own grandfather,” she confessed. “There was this bold darkie who gave insult to his mother. Grandfather killed that man. Furthermore, he would not submit to trial for having done what he thought was right. They promised him the judge would let him off, they warned him he would be worse off as a fugitive than if he stayed. No, he said, what it came down to was his honor. He knew he would get off, of course, but he refused to be put on trial by ‘those damned radical scalawags,’ whom he despised! He came to Florida and changed his name, called himself Ben Scroggins!”
Cousin Ellie sighed. “No, Uncle Edgar was not the only one who resorted to violence back in those days, no, far from it. He had fine qualities, but because of his bad reputation, he was accused of a lot of things he didn’t do, which made him bitter. Anyway, that’s what came down in the family.”
Because of his feud with the Tolens, Edgar Watson left the Myers plantation to sharecrop a piece of land for Captain Getzen, but he used the Collins store at Ichetucknee, and was good friends with Lem and Billy Collins. Hettie showed Lucius the yellowed cashbooks salvaged from the store, where Edgar Watson was one of six customers (out of twenty-two) who were identified as “good” prospects to pay their bills. In the late 1870s, his purchases included tobacco, schnapps and bitters, and a pocketknife. On different dates in 1878, he bought ceiling and weather boarding, apparently to patch his cabin on the Junction Road. “Uncle Edgar was fixing that old Robarts cabin for his bride-to-be,” Hettie told Lucius.
“That same year, Minnie Watson married Billy Collins, and both couples lived there after their marriage,” Ellie added. “We have a courtship letter from Granddad Billy that turned up in her things: ‘Dear Miss Minnie, I would very much like you to accompany me on a buggy ride this Sunday.…’ Then Uncle Edgar married Ann Mary Collins, whose nickname was Charlie. We believe it was Edgar who gave her that odd name. Even on the marriage record, she is Charlie.”
Lucius glanced quickly through these documents. Papa had used the pet name Mandy for his second wife, Kate for his third, exchanging the staid Ann Mary, Jane, and Edna for more “wanton” names. He considered using this esoteric theory as a deft first step in introducing himself as the long-lost cousin Lucius, but before he could do so, Ellie boasted, “I have already told him about poor Charlie, even where to go to find her grave!” She avoided referring to him as Professor Collins, lest that name prove spurious.
Hettie said that Great-Grandfather Collins died in the same year as Charlie Watson, and they had his will. Edgar Watson had bought a double-barrel shotgun and a horse from that estate, paying $10.50 for the gun and $55.00 for the horse. She passed a scrawled receipt. “Far as we know, that was the double-barrel he would use till the day he died.”
“Probably used it on Belle Starr, she was the first one,” Mr. Edmunds said. “I knowed a feller who read all about it in a book.”
“After his darling Charlie died, Uncle Edgar went hog wild. It was five or six years, at least, before he calmed down and married that young schoolteacher from Deland. Still lived in the log cabin by the Junction, the same one he rented later to his friend Will Cox. That’s where our cousin Carrie was born, and Cousin Ed, who was still a baby when the family left for Oklahoma later that year. We know that was in ’87, because Julian was born to Minnie and Billy just a few months later.”
Grandpa Billy’s brother Lem had killed a man in the Collins blacksmith shop behind the store. It seemed this man was angry because Lem Collins had been fooling with his wife. The Collins family put up hundreds of acres for a $4000 bond posted mainly by Laura Myers, and when Lem jumped his bond and ran away to Georgia, the family sold off most of its land to repay the debt. There was a Sheriff’s sale of more Collins property in 1886, but Laura Myers never recouped her loan, and the fortunes of the Collins clan never recovered. Grandpa Billy always said that Uncle Edgar had been a bad influence on Lem and might even have been involved in the killing, and other people were suspicious, too.