The killing created intense feeling. Gambriel had many friends. He was a staunch French adherent and it was well within the course of reason for French to regard the killing of the man as a challenge. The Eversoles themselves believed that Gambriel’s friends would not pass lightly over the homicide and prepared to meet all danger. The clans, disbanded (?) but a short time before, reassembled and for several months roamed the ill-fated county at will, terrorizing its inhabitants and defying the law.
But little fighting was done. It seems that they contented themselves with manœuvering, marching and counter-marching. In such warfare, if warfare it was, the innocent were made to suffer more than the warriors.
Such an armed vagabondage was as useless as it was silly. It furnished material for the sensational newspaper, but even these failed to discover anything of the heroic about this campaign.
The leaders must have felt something of that themselves, for during the winter the armies were again disbanded. Permanent restoration of peace, however, was not to come to Perry County yet for a time.
The apparent calm through the winter was suddenly disturbed in the following April, when the news of the brutal assassination of Joseph C. Eversole and Nick Combs excited and horrified Hazard.
On the morning of April 15th, 1888, the valley of Big Creek, Perry County, became the scene of a tragedy which might well cause one’s blood to run cold with horror, one’s cheek to blush with shame.
On the Sabbath day, when human hearts should turn to God in prayer, when nature even seems to bow in reverence, the birds of the forests sing His praises with more than usual sweetness, two lives were hurled into eternity without warning, murdered, butchered from ambush.
When a man resents an insult, when passion clouds all reason, and in momentary frenzy, under the impulse of hot, red blood, he shoots his fellow man, there is yet some excuse. But when men with the savage instinct of beasts of prey fall upon their unsuspecting victims from ambush, like the tiger that glides noiselessly through the thick jungle and suddenly springs upon its prey, then the word man becomes a mock and devil is the proper epithet.
Nowhere in the valley of Big Creek could a more suitable spot have been selected from which to accomplish such a hellish crime as was committed on that fatal Sunday morning, than the one chosen by the red-handed demons.
The valley is narrow, the hills enclosing it are steep, rugged and covered with dense forest. The spot where the murderers were in hiding, commanded an uninterrupted view of the road up and down the valley. Nothing short of a lynx’s eyes could have penetrated the leafy, thicket-grown murderers’ retreat.