“I got astride him and looked, and finally way off through the trees and the branches and leaves, I saw six men riding through the woods on horseback. I took the guns away from the boys and put the pistol and shotgun under the leaves at my feet. I made the boys separate and hide in the brush at a good distance from me and from each other. I made the dog lie down beside me. Then I waited.
“When the men came near me and were about to pass on looking for me, I hailed them. I told them to stop right where they were or I’d drop them in their tracks. It was Colonel Troutman and five other of the old men from town out hunting me.
“Colonel Troutman said, ‘We just wanted to talk to you Holloway.’
“I said, ‘Stand right where you are and talk.’
“After some talk, I let them come up slowly to a short distance from me. The upshot of the whole thing was that they wanted me to go back to town with them to ‘talk’ over the matter. They allowed I hadn’t done nothin’ wrong. But Colonel Troutman’s man was hurt bad, and some of the young men in the mob had had their legs broke. And they were all young men from the town, boys that knew me and were friendly to me in the daytime. Still they wanted me to go to town in their charge, and I knew I wouldn’t have a chance if I did that. Finally I told Colonel Troutman, that I was going home to see my wife that evening, and that if he wanted to talk to me, he could come over there and talk.
“When they left, I sent the boys along home and told them to tell my wife. That night when I got home, Colonel Troutman was in the house talking to my wife. I went in quietly. He said that they said I had forty Niggers hid in the house that night. I told him that there wasn’t anybody there but me and my family, and that all the damage that was done I done myself. He said that well he didn’t blame me; that even if it was his son, they broke in on me and I had a right to defend my family, and that none of the old heads was going to do anything about it. He said I was a good man and had never given anybody any trouble and that there wasn’t any excuse for anybody comin’ stirrin’ up trouble with me. And that was the end of it.”
Hoodoo
“My wife was sick, down, couldn’t do nothin’. Someone got to telling her about Cain Robertson. Cain Robertson was a hoodoo doctor in Georgia. They there wasn’t nothin’ Cain couldn’t do. She says, ‘Go and see Cain and have him come up here.’
“I says, ‘There ain’t no use to send for Cain. Cain ain’t coming up here because they say he is a “two-head” Nigger.’ (They called all them hoodoo men ‘two-head’ Niggers; I don’t know why they called them two-head.) ‘And you know he knows the white folks will put him in jail if he comes to town.’
“But she says, ‘You go and get him.’