“Don’t fret, Pa,” Mrs. Hargis pleaded with her husband. “He’s young. He’ll mend his ways. Don’t forsake him.”
That was the day before the homicide.
Next day Beach was still drunk. He swaggered into the store, leered about for his father, and not seeing him stumbled on past the racks where the guns lay, past the shelves laden with cartridges and shells, on into the rear room where coffins were lined in a somber row. Judge Hargis kept a general store that carried in stock most anything you could call for from baking soda and beeswax to plows, guns and coffins. Beach didn’t notice the black-covered coffins or the guns. He stumbled along to a corner of the wareroom where he slumped on a keg of nails. There he sat a while mumbling to himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his face swollen from a fall or a fight. “The old man punched me in the jaw,” he kept repeating, “and I’ll—I’ll—”
Frightened clerks hurried past him in waiting upon customers. No one tried to listen or understand. Beach kept on mumbling. After awhile he staggered out again. Later that same day he went to a barber shop for a shave and haircut. Suddenly he raised up from the chair and leering toward the street muttered at a man passing, “I thought that was the old man going yonder.” It was not Judge Hargis, the barber assured Beach, so the drunken fellow settled back in the chair and the barber proceeded to lather his face.
Beach’s sister, who was married to Dr. Hogg, often took her drunken brother in.
“Evylee’s got no right to harbor Beach,” Judge Hargis complained to his wife. “He’s tore up our home and he will do the same for Evylee and her husband and for Dr. Hogg’s business too. He’s a plum vagabond and spoiled. And put on top of that whiskey, and a gun in his hand, the Lord only knows what that boy will do.”
Out of one scrape into another, in jail and out, Beach Hargis went his way. The mother pleading with the father to forgive him and let him have another chance. The sister pleaded with Beach to quit drinking and carousing.
On the 17th day of February, 1908, Beach, still maudlin drunk, went again into his father’s store. He didn’t look at the guns in the racks this time. He glanced toward the wareroom where the black coffins stood in a row on wooden horses. “I’m looking for the old man,” he muttered to a clerk. Then he reeled toward the counter and asked the clerk to give him a pistol. The clerk refused, saying he could not take a pistol out of stock, but added, “Your Pa’s pistol is yonder in his desk drawer. You can take that.”
Beach helped himself.
In the meantime Judge Hargis had come into the store just as Beach, with the pistol concealed in his shirt, went out.