When he came back he hunted up his partner in crime to know what luck they had had. He told him the sheep had eat all the saltpeter and hadn’t killed one of them. He said, “I’ll be damned! I give up. Those sheep are too much for me.”
The range war got to be very bitter in that locality and I was very glad to get out. Whenever anyone lost a cow or horse, he blamed someone for killing it and the feeling got so bitter that it looked like it was leading up to where someone would get killed, and they did.
Charlie and I sold out to a man by name of Peter Wagner, and we had a neighbor by name of Al Pratt. He was very quarrelsome with everybody. Wagner was quite an old man. Pratt was a young man. He had chased the old man on horseback several times and once had beat him over the head with a wet frozen rope, another time had knocked him off his horse and run over him.
The surveyed road to town went between our house and barn, and in wintertime the snow drifted so deep it was impassable, and I had left about an acre of ground open where people went around the snowdrift.
About six months after Charlie and I had sold out to Wagner, one morning Pratt started to town on this road with a team and buckboard. When he came to this spot, the old man was there on horseback, standing on the detour. Pratt started to drive on Wagner’s land and he told him to follow the county road. Pratt said the road was impassable and tried to force his team past the old man, but he grabbed one of the bridles of the team. Pratt struck Wagner in the face with his buggy whip. Wagner jerked out his gun and shot Pratt once in the neck, once in the back and three shots hit the buckboard. Pratt fell out dead.
At the trial I was called as a character witness. The prosecuting attorney asked Wagner how many shots he fired. Wagner said, “One, to save my own life.” When he asked him to account for the other four shots, he said he was riding a hardmouth horse and he tried to run away at the first shot, and in pulling on his bridle reins with his left hand he forgot what his right hand was doing, and thought he must have kept pulling the trigger on his gun. It was an automatic and, of course, as long as he kept pulling the trigger it kept shooting, but he couldn’t explain how the gun kept pointing towards Pratt’s body.
The corpse laid there in the snow for twenty-four hours before the sheriff and coroner arrived and there was a gun found by the body. Wagner claimed self-defense. I testified that Pratt had pulled a Winchester on me once and threatened to kill me—which I think helped some.
Wagner was quite wealthy when this happened. He got free but he was flat broke when he got out.
He had told me several times prior to this incident that he was deathly afraid of Pratt, which I believe makes a very dangerous man when he is afraid of another man.
One thing about our neighborhood I never could understand was as long as the people were very poor they were peaceable and neighborly but when they got a little prosperous some of them were in court the year around.