“Fokink!” Brewer repeated, trying out some French. Said the news was out in Lemon City how this skunk Watson were a wanted man in two-three states. Here was our chance to do our duty as good citizens, says he, and a good turn to ourselves while we was at it. So us good citizens sat forward, put our heads together, while Brewer laid his cards upon the table or maybe some of ’em. His plan was that him and Carey and the Frenchman would get the drop on Watson, claim they had a warrant, hogtie that sumbitch, Brewer said, and get his fancy ass sent back to Arkansas, leaving the plume birds to upright citizens such as ourselves. Tom Brewer figured that bringing in a famous desperader would improve his reputation with the sheriff on top of earning the reward.
I tried to warn him there was just no way of coming up on Watson by surprise. His small clearing on the river was the only break in a thick wall of jungle a greased Injun couldn’t slip through, and when the water rose in time of storm and flood, the high ground on the Bend was the worst place for rattlers and cottonmouths in all the Islands.
“We’ll come downriver in the dark,” Brewer decided, “and take him when he comes out in the mornin.”
Cap’n Carey’s chuckle didn’t sound so good. “Mister Watson never goes unarmed and he is a dead shot,” Ebe says, his voice real tight. Brewer takes his rifle, steps to the door, and shoots the head clean off a snake bird that’s craning down from the top of a dead snag over the creek. He let that bird slap on the water and spin a little upside down, legs kicking. Then he comes in, sets his gun back by the door. “We got three guns to his one,” he says.
I sing out, “Make it four!” I ain’t got one thing in the world against Mister Watson, I just don’t want to miss out. I shoot pretty good for a young youth, better’n most, and I aimed to make sure none of these drunks shot my friend Erskine, who was down in the mouth enough already without that. But the Frenchman called me whippaire-snappaire, shooed me away, so I never got to join that Watson posse. Had to wait another fifteen years.
In Cap’n Ebe’s opinion, which me and the Frenchman got to hear nightly, we gentlemen was sick and tired of bloodshed in south Florida. What with desperaders hiding out here in our swamps like dregs in the bottom of a jug of moonshine, violence on the Everglades frontiers was worse than out in the Wild West where men was men.
There was no law in the Islands, I reminded ’em (though the Islands was kind of like them Hardens, Isaac Yeomans used to say, they never was as black as they was painted). Of course Key West was trying out some law so Watson paid Santini not to take the case to court. Most folks concluded that Dolphus was right to accept Ed Watson’s money but Cap’n Ebe said Ebe P. Carey disagreed and didn’t care who knew it, he slapped his hand down on the table, spilling drinks. “Watson had that money on him! Nine hundred dollars in blood money right there in his pocket! And every red cent of it illgotten, you may be sure!” A wrong done to a wealthy citizen should never go unpunished, Cap’n Carey told us.
Nine hundred dollars was stiff punishment, it seemed to me: that’s what Santini got from Smallwood for his whole darned claim when he cleared out of Chokoloskee. Ebe Carey never knew Santini, never knew how he got to be so rich back in the first place: you show Dolphus nine hundred dollars, his eyes would glaze over like a rattler. But he earned every penny and I guess you could say he earned Ed Watson’s money, too.
Anyways, he took it. Maybe he thought the prosecutor might bring a poor attitude to the case just because he drank with Watson at Joe’s Bar. More likely, Watson had him scared. Having no choice about the scar, he decided he would take the money. This way, next time they met, there’d be no hard feelings. How’s that ol’ throat coming, Dolphus? And Dolphus says, Thanks for asking, Ed! Nice little scar and she’s coming along fine!
“Mr. Santini accepted a bare-faced bribe instead of putting that villain behind bars where he belonged,” Ebe Carey complained. “I was astonished!”
“Ass-toneesh!” The Frenchman inched a little more of Brewer’s lightning into his glass like it was medicine. “I am ass-toneesh from first fokink day I set my foots in fokink Amerique!”
To make a long story somewhat shorter, Tom Brewer could shoot him a blue 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 the reward, a mob of rowdies and Bass kinsmen tried to storm the jailhouse, set to lynch him. Rather than see his new jail torched, the sheriff concluded no injustice would be done by unlocking the cell and encouraging the prisoner to get out of
town while the getting was good. The prisoner took one look through the window, then went into a cell and lay down on his bunk. “The getting don’t look so good to me,” he said. “I’ll sleep better behind bars.” Toward daybreak, with the crowd distracted, the sheriff rode him to the edge of town.
“Yessir. E. Jack Watson. Got it wrote right in my ledger. That darn Jack Watson was the friendliest sonofagun I ever met,” the sheriff told me.
At that time, I was working for the Hendrys as a cow hunter, rounding up the long-horned cattle scattered out through the Big Cypress. I did the hunting for the cow camp. I was content with my simple sun-warmed tools of wood and iron, the creak of saddle leather and the stomp and bawl of cattle, the wind whisper in the pines pierced by the woodpecker’s wild cry or the dry sizzle of a diamondback, and always the soft blowing of my woods pony, a stumpy roan. Had me a fine cow dog for turning cattle, became a fair hand with the lariat and cracker whip, and packed a rifle in a scabbard for big rattlers and rustlers, too. The Indians, forever watching, would gather when we moved our cow pens and a family would move in and plant new gardens on that manured ground, sweet potatoes the first year, then corn and peanuts.
The lonely day was Saturday when most of the riders yipped and slapped off through the trees to spend their pay in the Fort Myers saloons. Old Doc Langford’s boy was also a cow hunter for Hendrys, a hard rider and a hard drinker, too. Walt Langford wanted to be liked as a regular feller, not some rich cattleman’s spoiled son, so he led in all the galloping and gunfire that kept nice people shuttered up at home when the riders came to town. Fort Myers was never as uproarious as Arcadia, no cattle wars or hired guns, but that Saturday pandemonium reminded the upset citizens that our new Lee County capital was still a cow town, cut off from the nation’s progress by the broad slow Calusa River and falling farther behind, our businessmen complained, with every passing year.
Walt Langford was the one who told me that E. J. Watson, a new planter in the Islands, was supposed to be the Jack Watson who killed Quinn Bass; the lovely young girl boarding at Walt’s father’s house was Watson’s daughter. The first time I saw her, Carrie Watson was skipping rope and laughing with other girls down at Miss Flossie’s store. I knew right then that when the time came, I would ask her desperado daddy for her hand, but as life turned out, Walt Langford beat me to it.
Cattlemen had run Fort Myers before it was a town at all, starting way back with Jake Summerlin at Punta Rassa. Old Jake was ruthless, people said, but at least he had cow dung on his boots. This newer breed, Jim Cole especially, worked mostly with paper, brokering stock they had never seen, let alone smelled. (With Doc Langford and the Hendrys, who bought out the Summerlins at Punta Rassa, Cole would make a fortune provisioning the Rough Riders. One July day of 1899, according to the Press, these patriotic profiteers shipped three thousand head from Punta Rassa to their Key West slaughterhouse for butchering and delivery to Cuba.)
When I opened my livery stable that same year, I had an idea I might run for sheriff in the next elections. Some way Jim Cole got wind of this, and one day he came and offered help, having already figured what I hadn’t understood, that I was pretty sure to win with or without him. Folks resented the cattle kings and their pet sheriff, T. O. Langford, who ignored our town ordinance against cattle in the streets.
One Saturday Walt Langford and some other drunken riders caught a nigra in Doc Winkler’s yard and told him he would have to dance or have his toes shot off. This old man must have been close to eighty, white-haired, crippled up, bent over. He cried out, “No, suh, Boss, ah jes’ cain’t dance, ah is too old!” And they said, “Well, old man, you better dance,” then started shooting at the earth around his shoes.
Doc Winkler came running with a rifle. “Now you boys clear out of here,” he hollered, “let that old man be!” He ordered the nigra to go behind the house but the cowhands shot into the ground right at his heels. Doc Winkler fired over their heads just as a horse reared and Doc’s bullet drilled a cowboy through the head.
At Cole’s request, Sheriff T. O. Langford called the episode an accident. Walt Langford and his friends were not arrested and there was no inquest; Doc Winkler was left alone with his remorse. But the flying bullets and the senseless death brought new resentment of the cattlemen as well as a new temperance campaign to make Lee County dry. Because Cole was making another fortune on the Cuban rum he smuggled in as a return cargo on his cattle schooner, he led the fight against liquor prohibition, knowing the “drys” had only won thanks to that shooting death in Doc Winkler’s yard.
The Langfords took Jim Cole’s advice to marry off young Walter, get him simmered down. Of the town’s eligible young women, the only one Walt really liked was a pretty Miss Hendry whose parents forbade her to associate with “that young hellion.” This caused the stiff feelings in both families that led to the bust-up of the Langford & Hendry store which was the biggest business in our town.
Because she lived under his own roof, Walt couldn’t help but notice Watson’s daughter. Her mother was a lady by Fort Myers standards, but the husband of the refined and delicate Mrs. Jane Watson was the man identified in a book passed around town as the slayer of the outlaw queen, Belle Starr. The lucky few who had met Mr. Watson had been thrilled to find that this “dangerous” man was handsome and presentable, a devout churchgoer when in Fort Myers, and a prospering planter whose credit was excellent among the merchants. In regard to Carrie, it was said he had met privately with Cole in the hotel salon at Hendry House, though what those two discussed was only rumor.
Knowing Walt Langford, I feared the marriage was inevitable. Her father’s dark past made Carrie Watson all the more attractive to rambunctious Walt. When her engagement was suddenly announced, a rumor spread that “the desperado’s daughter” was in a family way. Hearing loose talk about a shotgun wedding, I spoke up, furious, although I’d hardly met her, defending her chastity so passionately that folks began to look at me in a queer way.
Walt and Carrie were married in July. At the wedding, stricken by her big deer eyes, I mourned for my lost bride, this creature so different from the horse-haired women of the backcountry. When the minister asked if anybody present knew why Carrie and Walter should not be united in holy matrimony, my heart cried, Yes! Because she is too young! But what I meant was, Yes! Because I love her!
Love, love, love. Who knows a thing about it? Not me, not me. I never got over Carrie Watson skipping rope at age thirteen, that’s all I know. I only put myself through the ordeal of her wedding for the chance to see what her father might look like, but the notorious Mr. E. J. Watson never appeared.
RICHARD HARDEN
What took the fight out of the Frenchman was the news that come from Marco Key in the spring of ’95. Bill Collier was digging swamp muck for his tomato vines when his spade hit what turned out to be Calusa war clubs, cordage, and a conch-shell dipper, also some kind of wood carving. Cap’n Bill just had the luck to stumble on what Old Jean had searched for all his life.
Collier weren’t much interested in old Calusa stuff but he showed his find to some tarpon-fishing Yankees. Next thing you know, them sports was in there shoveling for fun and what they didn’t bust they took for souvenirs. Folks up in Philadelphia heard about it, and a famous bone digger Frank H. Cushing made two expeditions paid for by that Mr. Disston whose money paid for dredging the Calusa Hatchee. Collected bone jewelry and shell cups, wood masks and ladles, a deer head, a carved fish with bits of turtle shell stuck into it for scales, then lugged all this stuff north to Pennsylvania. Them Yankees had went and stole the Frenchman’s glory.
What really twisted Jean Chevelier was a wood carving of a cat kneeled like a man. A drawing of that cat made the front page of the Fort Myers paper. When Eben Carey brought that paper to Possum Key, Msyoo give it one look and begun to weep. He never went back to Gopher Key, he just give up on life. He didn’t last the year.
I always liked that cantankerous old devil. He spoke too sharp but h
e knew some things and give me a education. Jean Chevelier was the first to see that E. J. Watson would mean trouble and begged us to shoot him like a dog first chance we got.
Bill House had been gone awhile from Possum Key and Eben Carey only came and went. Toward the end, as lonely as he was, the old man got tired of Cap’n Carey. “I am alone,” he would complain, “no matter he speak or not. Silence is better.”
Ebe Carey was a man who needed talk, he couldn’t put up with no damn solitude. He was getting so crazy back in the scrub jungle that he could hear the sun roar in the day and the trees moan in the night, is what he told us. He was listening to his Creator as any redskin could have told him and what he heard put a bad scare in him. Besides that he was always scared that Watson might recall him from that Brewer posse and come put a stop to him.
When Chevelier never answered him, only glared up at the sun, Ebe Carey gave fine speeches to the wild men hid in those green walls. Red devils was spying on him night and day, they was up to no good, in the captain’s estimation. Got so he’d feel ’em, whip around, and see ’em standing there. Tried to laugh real loud and friendly like they’d played a joke to fool him, but they never give him back so much as a blink. Swapped their plumes and pelts for his cheap trade trash and some moonshine, went away as deaf as ghosts.
When he got desperate, Cap’n Ebe would call on Hardens, still hurt because that mean old foreign feller wouldn’t talk to him. We didn’t have nothing to say to that, and anyway nobody spoke much in the Islands. Nothing to talk about. That river silence closed over empty words like rain filling a fresh coon print in the mud. We simmered him down with fish or grits but he would not go home. He’d want to stay up talking half the night even though he was uneasy in our company.