One morning (July, 1890) Cornett, in company of his little brother, started to the field to cut oats. Finding the grain not ripe enough, he abandoned the field work and proceeded to the woods to peel logs. A tree, which he had cut, fell across a narrow ravine, elevating portions of the trunk several feet above the ground. He leaped upon it, ax in hand, when shots from the near bushes accomplished another foul assassination. Cornett sank dead upon the log, while his little brother ran for life and escaped.
There can be no doubt that Cornett’s doom had been sealed the instant he returned home. The murder had been planned and was executed with cruel cunning and occupies a front rank among the many infamous assassinations, which have given this feud such notoriety.
At the special term of the Circuit Court, Judge Lilly appeared, accompanied by a detachment of State Guards, commanded by Adjutant-General Gaithers of Louisville, Ky. The court house had not been rebuilt and a large tent served the purpose. It soon became evident that the court meant business. A large number of deputy sheriffs were sworn in to supplant the inefficient Home Guards. These were at once disbanded and ordered to return the accoutrements they had received, but the few articles turned over were hardly worth the shipping expenses, many of the guns being broken.
Within a few days after court had begun, prisoners were brought into court as fast as indictments were found. The jail became so crowded that many prisoners were kept in a strongly guarded tent. As rapidly as the cases were called up and the accused were presented in court, they were transferred to the Clark County Circuit Court for trial. It was a wise and necessary step indeed. Not only would it have been impossible to secure qualified jurors in Perry County, but the attendance of the accused, their friends and witnesses would most probably have invited a clash between the contending factions.
The last days of the term of court, commonly called the “Blanket Court” had come and gone without the least disturbance, and the removal of the prisoners to the Winchester jail was also effected without mishap. The backbone of the war was at last broken. A strange, but welcome, calm succeeded turbulence, bloodshed, and anarchy.
A great change had come over the caged warriors. Disarmed and crowded in the narrow confines of a prison, they faced each other but the deadly Winchesters were no longer in reach. Fast in the clutches of the law, the law which for so long they had disregarded, evaded, shamefully violated, they now had ample opportunity for reflection and sober reasoning. The absorbing and very pertinent question: How to escape the punishment of the law worried them. It was a knotty problem indeed. The lions, made captives, were now tame and submissive. For the first few days after these foes met in prison, hatred and bitter feeling found vent in abusive epithets and fistic encounters, but the realization of helplessness reminded them of the need of making friends out of enemies. They realized their power to destroy each other in the courts, but would not the destroyer himself be destroyed? Revenge could only open more cell doors, or furnish culprits for the gallows. It was this prospect of conviction, of punishment, which effected at last what bloodshed could never have accomplished—it reconciled in a measure the enemies of old, some of them actually becoming friends, and thus again effectually clogging the legal machinery. The necessity of self-preservation brought matters around in such shape that we find men who had opposed each other in deadly combat, fighting side by side the legal battles in court. None of the prisoners was allowed bail, but after removal to Clark County, one after another of the accused demanded examining trials and upon being allowed bail, readily executed bonds and returned to their homes and families, which many of them had not seen for months.
With the removal of French, Judge Combs and others of the feudists returned an era of peace which continued uninterrupted until 1894, with the exception of a street fight in the town of Hazard between some of the Eversole faction and Jesse Fields, a French follower.
In this battle some of the Eversoles and Fields were wounded, and a colored bystander was killed by a stray bullet.
In 1894 occurred the last assassination as the direct outcome of the feud.
Tired with a life that now separated old Judge Combs from his family and friends, he determined to and did return to Hazard to round out the declining years of his life.