§ 3 Enough for Wilkins
From the lowlands a special judge was sent up to the Kentucky mountains to try some murder cases growing out of a desperate and bloody feud. He took with him as his official stenographer a young man from Louisville, who dressed smartly and, in strong contrast to the silent mountaineers, did considerable talking. For convenience let us call him Wilkins.
On his first Sunday morning in the mountain hamlet Wilkins felt the need of a shave. He had no razor and there was no regular barber in the town; but he learned from the hotel-keeper that there was an old cobbler living a few doors away who sometimes shaved transients.
In a tiny shop Wilkins found an elderly native with straggly chin whiskers and a gentle blue eye. The old chap got out an ancient razor and was soon scraping away on the patron’s jowls. Wilkins felt the desire for conversation stealing over him.
“This is a mighty lawless country up here, ain’t it?” he began.
“I don’t know,” said the old chap mildly. “Things is purty quiet jist at present.”
He paused to put a keener edge on his blade.
“Well,” said Wilkins, “you won’t deny, I suppose, that you have a lot of murders in this town?”
“We don’t gin’rally speak of ’em as murders,” said the old man in a tone of gentle reproof. “Up here we jest calls ’em killin’s.”
“I’d call ’em murders, all right,” said Wilkins briskly. “If shooting a man down in cold blood from ambush isn’t murder, then I don’t know a murder when I see one, that’s all. When was the last man killed, as you call it, here in this town?”
“Why, last week,” said the patriarch.
“Whereabouts was he killed?” continued Wilkins.
“Right out yonder in the street in front of this here shop,” stated the old man, with the air of one desiring to turn the conversation. “Razor hurt you much?”
“The razor’s all right,” said Wilkins snappily. “What I want to know are the facts about the killing of this last man. Who killed him?”
The cobbler let the edge of the razor linger right over the Adam’s apple of the stranger for a moment.
“I done so,” he said gently.
There was where the conversation seemed to begin to languish.