main trouble is that we can't make him understand he ought to
be more afraid of them. If he'd lived here all his life he would be.
You know there's an old-time feud between the Cross-Roads and our folks;
goes way back into pioneer history and mighty few know anything of it.
Old William Platt and the forefathers of the Bardlocks and Tibbses and
Briscoes and Schofields moved up here from North Carolina a good
deal just to get away from some bad neighbors, mostly Skilletts and
Johnsons--one of the Skilletts had killed old William Platt's two sons.
But the Skilletts and Johnsons followed all the way to Indiana to join
in making the new settlement, and they shot Platt at his cabin door
one night, right where the court-house stands to-day. Then the other
settlers drove them out for good, and they went seven miles west and set
up a still. A band of Indians, on the way to join the Shawnee Prophet at
Tippecanoe, came down on the Cross-Roads, and the Cross-Roaders bought
them off with bad whiskey and sent them over to Plattville. Nearly all
the Plattville men were away, fighting under Harrison, and when they
came back there were only a few half-crazy women and children left.
They'd hid in the woods.

"The men stopped just long enough to hear how it was, and started for
the Cross-Roads; but the Cross-Roads people caught them in an ambush and
not many of our folks got back.

"We really never did get even with them, though all the early settlers
lived and died still expecting to see the day when Plattville would go
over and pay off the score. It's the same now as it was then, good stock
with us, bad stock over here; and all the country riff-raff in creation
come and live with 'em when other places get too hot to hold them. Only
one or two of us old folks know what the original trouble was about; but
you ask a Plattville man, to-day, what he thinks of the Cross-Roads and
he'll be mighty apt to say, 'I guess we'll all have to go over there
some time and wipe those hoodlums out.' It's been coming to that a long
time. The work the 'Herald' did has come nearer bringing us even with
Six-Cross-Roads than anything else ever has. Queer, too--a man that's
only lived in Plattville a few years to be settling such an old score
for us. They'll do their best to get him, and if they do there'll be
trouble of an illegal nature. I think our people would go over there
again, but I expect there wouldn't be any ambush this time; and the
pioneers, might