Unanimous For Murder, A Novel

Gavel Gamut
By Jim Redwine
(Week of 06 October 2014)

UNANIMOUS FOR MURDER, A NOVEL
CHAPTER FIVE

Ed Hill lay on a straw tick mat and stared at the cook shed ceiling only slightly out of reach of his outstretched arms. The rough sawed planks of green lumber were chinked with mud and long strands of dried prairie grass. Blackjack oak poles with their gnarled bark held up the planks and were embedded in the dirt floor. The cast iron cook stove sat a few inches from Ed’s bed that was beneath the lone window. Adobe walls enclosed the space and a ragged blanket served as a door. Everything Ed owned was in the shed. His homemade chaps and braided rope hack-a-more were beside his bed. And his only change of clothes served as a pillow. He had never felt freer.
At thirty-one years of age he had only one matter standing between himself and peace of mind. He still was under an indictment for rape in Posey County, Indiana. But since his alleged victim, Emma Davis, who had saved him from being lynched, depended upon Ed for her protection from drunken cowboys, he was able to suppress his fear of being returned to Indiana and probably suffering the same fate as the seven black men who were murdered by the white establishment in October 1878.
He did wonder what happened to Ajax Crider and his wife, Jane (Harrison) Crider. Jane’s father, Daniel Harrison, Sr., had been butchered like a hog. Her two brothers, John and Daniel Harrison, Jr., were murdered by the white night riders. Ajax had dispatched the leaders of the mob, William Combs and George Daniels. Had Henry Jones, Sarah’s husband, not committed suicide, Ajax would have also exacted revenge upon him before Ajax and Jane fled the pogrom.
What white man now claimed the property Daniel Harrison, Sr., had worked to accumulate? And was anyone ever held accountable for shooting John and burning young Daniel in the firebox of that steam locomotive?
Ed closed his eyes and watched his friends Jim Good, William Chambers, Ed Hopkins and Edward Warner dangle from the locust trees on the Posey County courthouse lawn. He felt the long knives and swords slicing and hacking Daniel Harrison, Sr., into pieces just before his body parts were dumped in the jail’s outhouse only a few yards from the lynched men. Ed wondered if Harrison’s bones were still mingled with the offal from years of defecating prisoners.
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