on Tavern embraced in their
gesture the shiny tables, booths, chromium-trimmed chairs, and the gaudy
juke box in the corner.

In September, 1940, Tennis Hatfield's son, Tennis, Jr., joined the army.
He was nineteen at the time.

The Hatfields and McCoys have married. Charles D. Hatfield, who joined
the army at Detroit's United States Army recruiting office, is the son
of Tolbert McCoy Hatfield of Pike County and is friend to his kin on
both sides.

The two families held a picnic reunion in the month of August, 1941, on
Blackberry Creek where the blood of both had been shed during the feud,
and at the gathering a good time was had by all with plenty of fried
chicken and no shooting.

Today on the eve of another war things are still quiet up in Breathitt
County so far as the Hargises are concerned. Elbert Hargis, brother of
Judge Jim Hargis who was slain by his son Beach, has passed on. They
buried him, the last of Granny Hargis's boys, in the family burying
ground behind the old homestead on Pan Bowl, so called because it is
almost completely encircled by the North Fork of the Kentucky River.

To his last hour, almost, Elbert Hargis sat in the shadow of the
courthouse looking sadly toward Judge Jim Hargis's store where Beach had
killed his father, the store in front of which Dr. Cox had been
assassinated. His eyes shifted occasionally toward the courthouse steps
down which the lifeless body of J. B. Marcum plunged when Curt Jett shot
him from the back. Again Elbert's gaze turned to the second-story
windows of the courthouse from which Jim Cockrell had been shot to death
one sunny summer day.

Ever alert and never once permitting anyone to stand behind him, with a
gun in its holster thumping on his hip every step he took, Elbert Hargis
must have lived again and again the days when his brother Jim directed
the carryings-on of the Hargis clan. But if you'd ask him if he ever
thought of the old times, there would be a quick and sharp No!, followed
by abrupt silence.

Elbert Hargis is dead now. And a natural death was his from a sudden
ailment of the lungs. He died in a hospital down in the Blue Grass where
white-clad nurses and grave-faced doctors with a knowing of the miracles
of modern surgery and medicine could not prolong the life of the aged
feudist for one short second. The last of Granny Evaline Hargis's sons
rests beside his mother, alongside the three brothers John, Jr., Ben,
and Jim, and the half-brother W