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There is only one picture known with certainty to be of William Scott; a glass-plate picture taken at a town meeting in the city of Miracle, Kansas (pop 1,927) in 1875. The picture was perhaps a test or an accident, as much of the picture is blurred and indistinct due to most of the subjects not staying still as you would expect of a posed portrait of the time, but instead they are moving around as if in debate and conversation.
However, William Scott sits just off centre, still and clear and gazing with a calm passivity out of the frame and at you, the viewer, like he knows you’re looking and couldn’t give two figs for your thoughts. He wears a suit a little too large, as if he had been a bigger man when he bought it and was shrunken in his frame since. He sports a moustache which might have been neatly trimmed a week or so beforehand, and his wide brow is crowned by light hair slicked back with oil. A pair of spectacles hang from his breast pocket although no record ever suggests he was known for wearing them. An affectation, perhaps.
William had moved to Miracle from back East a year or two previous to the picture being taken. He wasn’t unusual in this – the West at the time was full of drifters like him. Men looking to make their fortunes, or on the run from the law or unhappy love affairs a thousand miles away, or just dreamers hoping that tomorrow would be better than yesterday. He rolled into town with two trunks and a heavy black doctors bag to his name that town gossip claimed was full of gold; if it were, and what became of it if so, none could later say, but in years to come it was not unknown for folk to try dredging up the river bend near what became his house in hope of finding it. Of course they never did turn up any treasure. Just more bones, and sometimes worse.
On his arrival he’d taken lodging with the widow Mrs Knight on West Street, just up from the Presbyterian chapel she attended every Sunday and insisted her lodgers did too. Unsurprisingly, many of her lodgers did not stay long and William Scott was no exception. He was quick to take a house down towards the river on Grant Street. Not the biggest, but by no means the smallest neither. A little secluded though. Set back from the street it was, in a large yard with a fence of middling height. Several trees stood in the yard, but after the hanging they were all cut down and burned by neighbours who said sometimes the wind made queer noises which they didn’t care for through their branches at night.
You couldn’t rightly say that William Scott made himself neighbourly from his new home, but nobody said he was a hermit. He had a head for numbers which he made use of, helping people with their taxes and their accounts and so forth, and got enough of a name for himself that after a time he was invited along to town council meetings to look over the figures and help with the consideration of any plans for developing the city the members might have. Maybe this was how he came to end up in that picture which was mentioned earlier.
He was also passing good at playing a flute, which in a place with as little entertainment as Miracle was enough to get him enough invitations to satisfy any social urges he might have, not that he took up that many of them. He did make himself as friendly as he might with a certain sort of woman – widows and unmarrieds, you understand – but there was no suggestion of anything improper or of him going what you might call a-wooing. Later some suggested that he’d just being acting a part by seeking their society, which didn’t seem unlikely.
Mostly, though, he kept himself to his home. He didn’t engage a maid or a cook, which some took to mean he was short of means but those with eyes in their heads didn’t believe that. He got enough packages; books, it seemed, from back East in New England and sometimes further afield, and his library got a good reputation about town for those who were lucky enough to be invited to visit. He didn’t drink himself but he kept some pretty good whisky for guests, and when word got around it wasn’t unusual for gentlemen of the town to find an excuse to pop by on an evening. Sometimes they’d be invited in, sometimes not.
He’d dine alone most nights, and cooked for himself too mostly, which was seen as unusual, and then the lamp from his study window would often be lit late and people with business to be up after midnight would sometimes say they’d seen the light moving around in his house at all sorts of hours and there’d be some idle speculation in both the temperance hall and the saloon bar as to what he was about.
As a rule, though, people left him be as much as he liked and he was as sociable as he liked, and everyone was happy with the arrangement. It was sometimes said he was queer in his manner but there was nothing unusual about that in a time and place when people moved about so much for their own reasons.
It was a few days after the picture was taken that George Fletcher, who was the law in Miracle at that time, took it on himself to have words with William Scott. George was a man of the old school. Some said too old for the job of upholding the law in a modern city with the twentieth century just around the corner, but he didn’t take to fools and wasn’t above breaking a head or two when things got rowdy which made him popular with the townsfolk so he kept his job. He’d had his own company in the War Between the States, so he knew how order and discipline worked and he knew when to look the other way too.
Anyhow, George had called on a few of his regular boys that afternoon, and asked them if they didn’t mind acting as his deputies for what he didn’t expect to be a difficult job, but there was a chance it would be an unhappy one.
So George and a few boys got together around five or maybe half past the hour and set off. He took his revolver along with him for security’s sake, and a length of wood which acted as a walking stick but which those who knew said had a wicked knob on the end which George had drilled out and filled with lead, just in case. The boys were surprised by the degree to which George was taking whatever it was he wanted to talk to Mister Scott about seriously, but he knew his business and they were just along for the ride. As it was, George just told the boys – Dutch Bradford, Sandy Johnson and a couple of others - he wanted them in case William didn’t get the message which, as things transpired, he didn’t.
The reason the law decided to have words with Scott was because a boy of the town, Louis Depelier, whose parents were good people notwithstanding their being French, had been missing a day after going out to do some fishing in the river and after asking about George Fletcher had heard from Mr and Mrs Franklin Boyson, who lived at the head of Grant Street, that they’d seen Scott and the boy talking the day before and thought something had passed between them.
Now, I don’t think that George was expecting any trouble from a tall drink of water like Scott to really believe he needed to take precautions, but on the other hand he hadn’t lived to see the other side of fifty through a war and a lawman’s job by taking risks, so along went the stick and the pistol and a few boys who on another day he might be just as busy sobering up as working with.
And that’s how it came to pass that not twenty minutes later Dutch Bradford came bursting through the door of the saloon all covered in blood and hollering fit to burst that George Fletcher was dead.
This was met as you’d expect; that moment of silence when something completely out of the ordinary happens followed by a frenzy of activity. Someone rustled up a drink which Dutch put down himself as fast as a man could and then out came some story which didn’t make much sense but the end was clear – George Fletcher was a dead man, as were all the other boys who had gone with him, and it was William Scott as had done it.
The tale went like this – no, wait. I’ll come on back to that. The pace picks up here so I’ll run with it and return to the telling of the longer yarn later. Once folks had got the idea that William Scott – yes, that William Scott – had somehow done to death four strong men in less than twenty minutes a commotion broke out like you wouldn’t believe. Whilst the good people of Miracle were all for the due process and the rights of man clearly laid out in the constitution, they were also not ones for standing for sudden death of one of their own and it wasn’t a few minutes more before there was a length of rope made available and a small crowd all armed; those who had firearms got them, those who didn’t took whatever they had to hand such as pick handles and I believe even an iron poker from the saloon stove.
By six twenty a crowd dozens strong was headed down Grant Street, every one of them looking for the barrel of a gun or listening for the ring of shot, because how else could a man like Scott have killed George Fletcher? Instead, what happened next none of them expected because up the street to meet them came the suspect himself, smiling and walking like it was a sunny Sunday afternoon and he’d just met his neighbours on a stroll. He was wearing some big coat – some said it had a hood, but nobody could properly remember later – which left his arms bare and those were smeared with gore like a man who’d just killed a pig. It was on his face and in his hair too, and there were cuts on his arms which looked regular like he’d done them himself instead of gotten them in a fight.
There was a pause, and then Scott apologised for not wearing his hat so as he could greet them properly, and then there was a roar and like a dam bursting the people of Miracle descended on William Scott and hanged him from his own tree.
He kicked for some time. Longer than would be considered normal for a man doing the dance and through it all he didn’t say a word or cry out. Just made some croaking noise over and again that sounded almost gloating. Like a laugh, if a frog could laugh. People threw things at him and some shot at him as he bobbed about, as the body of Sandy Johnson lay half out of the door of Scott’s house and it was clear that however he had been killed it had got him in the back. It was the shots stopped him kicking, in the end.
When the excitement was over, Jeb Halliwell from the livery took charge. He and a few others went into the house and came out with an expression I can’t describe. He’d found enough of Louis Depelier to be sure it was him, and of George Fletcher he said any funeral would have to be an empty casket for all the difference it would make. He wouldn’t let the Pastor in to take a look, and said what he’d seen showed Scott had been some kind of Satanist and the best thing to do would be burn the place to the ground with everything in it. They nailed up the door and windows and went to tell the town what had occurred leaving William Scott swaying in the breeze over his front yard.
Of course, in the morning his body had gone, and nobody could say where.
So for Dutch Bradford’s tale. He’d been shooting the breeze with Caleb Harris and the Guilfoyle twins when George Fletcher had come up and asked him for a hand, and he didn’t need to think much but to say yes. Dutch was the kind of man that the law being well-disposed to him would surely come in handy down the line and the chance to maybe throw a lawful punch or two at someone smaller than himself was not unwelcome neither.
The band of them had made their way down Grant Street with Fletcher all grim and quiet, and his little posse all ribbing each other about what the look on Scott’s face might be when they hoved up at his door. Sandy Johnson was even offering five dollars in silver that Scott would positively soil himself at the sight of them if anyone would take the wager.
At Scott’s door, Fletcher knocked and then banged with his stick, and after a moment they was met with a shout from an upstairs window to the effect that Mister Scott would be down presently if they’d be so kind as to wait awhile. Looking up to the cry, there was a light in the upstairs window all flickering as if there were a fire lit in the room, but not the warm light of a fire but of cold colors – blues and yellows and whites. Seeing this, and satisfying himself that that front door was bolted locked, George Fletcher put his shoulder to the hinges and had it open in a moment. Leading the boys in he started up the flight of stairs in the hall only for William Scott to appear at the top, and if anyone had taken Sandy Johnson’s bet they would have won it as he did not even slightly disconcerted to see them.
He was wearing nothing but that same coat garment and a pair of pants, and he had some sign cut into his chest, all bloody. What was worse – although none could check it later seeing as how the body vanished – was that his chest and belly were as white and pale and unhealthy as any man had ever seen and he had ribs all the way down to his hips. Like a fish or an eel, Dutch said.
So George the lawman raised up his stick and started to tell Scott he needed to answer a few questions, but he was dead before he’d finished speaking. Scott moved with an unearthly speed down the stairs and what he did to George when he hit him made a spray of liquid and fragments out of what had been a man a moment before which doused the hall and his boys like he’d turned on a hose.
It was Dutch’s good fortune, such as it was, that he’d been last in as he was the only one to come out as they all turned and ran in such fear as no man ought to feel. Sandy Johnson was got, like I said before, as he ran through the door a second after Bradford and Dutch said his death made a noise which he’d hear for the rest of his life when he woke in the night and with nothing but his fears and memories for company. More than anything I do believe that it was that noise in the cold hours of the night with only a bottle for company that did for him.
For upward of a dozen years until he died, Dutch was not the same man as he was before that afternoon. He would sometimes be found deep in his cups, muttering to himself ‘Like an eel’. Whatever the truth of what he had seen, it took its toll. He wasn’t forty when they buried him and it was drink did most of the work.
Why Scott didn’t pursue Dutch and finish him too, I do not know, but I surmise he had some unpleasant business of his own to finish as the cuts on his arms were to appear between the death of George Fletcher and the arrival of the townsfolk a short while later. Who can say what a man driven by the devil might do to himself if he’ll kill another?
Come the morning, Jeb Halliwell organised a bonfire and on it went everything he could pull from Scott’s house; all the books and odd trinkets and gewgaws he’d had sent from him from all over. A lot of the books were in foreign tongues and some had illustrations which it didn’t do anyone any good to see. On they went into the blaze, but the blaze itself was wrong, somehow, with the colours all blues and yellows and whites and it lacked the heat you’d expect. Instead of getting some sort of feeling of ending, folk who’d come to watch drifted away silently and alone and not looking at one another like that feeling of wrongness had been made worse rather than better by trying to fix it.
With Scott’s body vanishing and then the fire, the town was an unhappy place thereafter. The Depelier boy’s parents took to arguing and then one night the wife killed the husband in what she said was self-defence, and that hostile spirit was by no means unusual in Miracle.
That stretch of river got an ugly reputation too, from there all the way down to Kaw Lake. People said the fish dried up, and worse. Bones that weren’t from any fish, or any sheep or cow for that matter, would be dredged from the river or found on the shore, and sometimes a fisherman might not return, or a boat found drifting and empty on a clear day. By the time Dutch Bradford died the town of Miracle had a population of 443, and all the grand plans of the city fathers had come to nothing. The library was never finished and nor was the memorial for the War Between the States. Nobody ever really said anything specific, but whatever it was that William Scott did, or was, poisoned the air in those parts and none really wanted to stay. They drifted away to other towns, leaving boarded up houses and chapels to rot in the rain.
They say, almost thirty years later, that a boy out swimming was feared trapped underwater and drowned in the Arkansas River miles downstream and they fired cannon and threw dynamite into the flow to try and dislodge his body from whatever snag had caught it. Instead of a boy’s body though, one explosion caused a gout of thick slimy blood out of the stream. Whether that was the end of William Scott none can say, but then I truly do not know what else it might have been.
However, William Scott sits just off centre, still and clear and gazing with a calm passivity out of the frame and at you, the viewer, like he knows you’re looking and couldn’t give two figs for your thoughts. He wears a suit a little too large, as if he had been a bigger man when he bought it and was shrunken in his frame since. He sports a moustache which might have been neatly trimmed a week or so beforehand, and his wide brow is crowned by light hair slicked back with oil. A pair of spectacles hang from his breast pocket although no record ever suggests he was known for wearing them. An affectation, perhaps.
William had moved to Miracle from back East a year or two previous to the picture being taken. He wasn’t unusual in this – the West at the time was full of drifters like him. Men looking to make their fortunes, or on the run from the law or unhappy love affairs a thousand miles away, or just dreamers hoping that tomorrow would be better than yesterday. He rolled into town with two trunks and a heavy black doctors bag to his name that town gossip claimed was full of gold; if it were, and what became of it if so, none could later say, but in years to come it was not unknown for folk to try dredging up the river bend near what became his house in hope of finding it. Of course they never did turn up any treasure. Just more bones, and sometimes worse.
On his arrival he’d taken lodging with the widow Mrs Knight on West Street, just up from the Presbyterian chapel she attended every Sunday and insisted her lodgers did too. Unsurprisingly, many of her lodgers did not stay long and William Scott was no exception. He was quick to take a house down towards the river on Grant Street. Not the biggest, but by no means the smallest neither. A little secluded though. Set back from the street it was, in a large yard with a fence of middling height. Several trees stood in the yard, but after the hanging they were all cut down and burned by neighbours who said sometimes the wind made queer noises which they didn’t care for through their branches at night.
You couldn’t rightly say that William Scott made himself neighbourly from his new home, but nobody said he was a hermit. He had a head for numbers which he made use of, helping people with their taxes and their accounts and so forth, and got enough of a name for himself that after a time he was invited along to town council meetings to look over the figures and help with the consideration of any plans for developing the city the members might have. Maybe this was how he came to end up in that picture which was mentioned earlier.
He was also passing good at playing a flute, which in a place with as little entertainment as Miracle was enough to get him enough invitations to satisfy any social urges he might have, not that he took up that many of them. He did make himself as friendly as he might with a certain sort of woman – widows and unmarrieds, you understand – but there was no suggestion of anything improper or of him going what you might call a-wooing. Later some suggested that he’d just being acting a part by seeking their society, which didn’t seem unlikely.
Mostly, though, he kept himself to his home. He didn’t engage a maid or a cook, which some took to mean he was short of means but those with eyes in their heads didn’t believe that. He got enough packages; books, it seemed, from back East in New England and sometimes further afield, and his library got a good reputation about town for those who were lucky enough to be invited to visit. He didn’t drink himself but he kept some pretty good whisky for guests, and when word got around it wasn’t unusual for gentlemen of the town to find an excuse to pop by on an evening. Sometimes they’d be invited in, sometimes not.
He’d dine alone most nights, and cooked for himself too mostly, which was seen as unusual, and then the lamp from his study window would often be lit late and people with business to be up after midnight would sometimes say they’d seen the light moving around in his house at all sorts of hours and there’d be some idle speculation in both the temperance hall and the saloon bar as to what he was about.
As a rule, though, people left him be as much as he liked and he was as sociable as he liked, and everyone was happy with the arrangement. It was sometimes said he was queer in his manner but there was nothing unusual about that in a time and place when people moved about so much for their own reasons.
It was a few days after the picture was taken that George Fletcher, who was the law in Miracle at that time, took it on himself to have words with William Scott. George was a man of the old school. Some said too old for the job of upholding the law in a modern city with the twentieth century just around the corner, but he didn’t take to fools and wasn’t above breaking a head or two when things got rowdy which made him popular with the townsfolk so he kept his job. He’d had his own company in the War Between the States, so he knew how order and discipline worked and he knew when to look the other way too.
Anyhow, George had called on a few of his regular boys that afternoon, and asked them if they didn’t mind acting as his deputies for what he didn’t expect to be a difficult job, but there was a chance it would be an unhappy one.
So George and a few boys got together around five or maybe half past the hour and set off. He took his revolver along with him for security’s sake, and a length of wood which acted as a walking stick but which those who knew said had a wicked knob on the end which George had drilled out and filled with lead, just in case. The boys were surprised by the degree to which George was taking whatever it was he wanted to talk to Mister Scott about seriously, but he knew his business and they were just along for the ride. As it was, George just told the boys – Dutch Bradford, Sandy Johnson and a couple of others - he wanted them in case William didn’t get the message which, as things transpired, he didn’t.
The reason the law decided to have words with Scott was because a boy of the town, Louis Depelier, whose parents were good people notwithstanding their being French, had been missing a day after going out to do some fishing in the river and after asking about George Fletcher had heard from Mr and Mrs Franklin Boyson, who lived at the head of Grant Street, that they’d seen Scott and the boy talking the day before and thought something had passed between them.
Now, I don’t think that George was expecting any trouble from a tall drink of water like Scott to really believe he needed to take precautions, but on the other hand he hadn’t lived to see the other side of fifty through a war and a lawman’s job by taking risks, so along went the stick and the pistol and a few boys who on another day he might be just as busy sobering up as working with.
And that’s how it came to pass that not twenty minutes later Dutch Bradford came bursting through the door of the saloon all covered in blood and hollering fit to burst that George Fletcher was dead.
This was met as you’d expect; that moment of silence when something completely out of the ordinary happens followed by a frenzy of activity. Someone rustled up a drink which Dutch put down himself as fast as a man could and then out came some story which didn’t make much sense but the end was clear – George Fletcher was a dead man, as were all the other boys who had gone with him, and it was William Scott as had done it.
The tale went like this – no, wait. I’ll come on back to that. The pace picks up here so I’ll run with it and return to the telling of the longer yarn later. Once folks had got the idea that William Scott – yes, that William Scott – had somehow done to death four strong men in less than twenty minutes a commotion broke out like you wouldn’t believe. Whilst the good people of Miracle were all for the due process and the rights of man clearly laid out in the constitution, they were also not ones for standing for sudden death of one of their own and it wasn’t a few minutes more before there was a length of rope made available and a small crowd all armed; those who had firearms got them, those who didn’t took whatever they had to hand such as pick handles and I believe even an iron poker from the saloon stove.
By six twenty a crowd dozens strong was headed down Grant Street, every one of them looking for the barrel of a gun or listening for the ring of shot, because how else could a man like Scott have killed George Fletcher? Instead, what happened next none of them expected because up the street to meet them came the suspect himself, smiling and walking like it was a sunny Sunday afternoon and he’d just met his neighbours on a stroll. He was wearing some big coat – some said it had a hood, but nobody could properly remember later – which left his arms bare and those were smeared with gore like a man who’d just killed a pig. It was on his face and in his hair too, and there were cuts on his arms which looked regular like he’d done them himself instead of gotten them in a fight.
There was a pause, and then Scott apologised for not wearing his hat so as he could greet them properly, and then there was a roar and like a dam bursting the people of Miracle descended on William Scott and hanged him from his own tree.
He kicked for some time. Longer than would be considered normal for a man doing the dance and through it all he didn’t say a word or cry out. Just made some croaking noise over and again that sounded almost gloating. Like a laugh, if a frog could laugh. People threw things at him and some shot at him as he bobbed about, as the body of Sandy Johnson lay half out of the door of Scott’s house and it was clear that however he had been killed it had got him in the back. It was the shots stopped him kicking, in the end.
When the excitement was over, Jeb Halliwell from the livery took charge. He and a few others went into the house and came out with an expression I can’t describe. He’d found enough of Louis Depelier to be sure it was him, and of George Fletcher he said any funeral would have to be an empty casket for all the difference it would make. He wouldn’t let the Pastor in to take a look, and said what he’d seen showed Scott had been some kind of Satanist and the best thing to do would be burn the place to the ground with everything in it. They nailed up the door and windows and went to tell the town what had occurred leaving William Scott swaying in the breeze over his front yard.
Of course, in the morning his body had gone, and nobody could say where.
So for Dutch Bradford’s tale. He’d been shooting the breeze with Caleb Harris and the Guilfoyle twins when George Fletcher had come up and asked him for a hand, and he didn’t need to think much but to say yes. Dutch was the kind of man that the law being well-disposed to him would surely come in handy down the line and the chance to maybe throw a lawful punch or two at someone smaller than himself was not unwelcome neither.
The band of them had made their way down Grant Street with Fletcher all grim and quiet, and his little posse all ribbing each other about what the look on Scott’s face might be when they hoved up at his door. Sandy Johnson was even offering five dollars in silver that Scott would positively soil himself at the sight of them if anyone would take the wager.
At Scott’s door, Fletcher knocked and then banged with his stick, and after a moment they was met with a shout from an upstairs window to the effect that Mister Scott would be down presently if they’d be so kind as to wait awhile. Looking up to the cry, there was a light in the upstairs window all flickering as if there were a fire lit in the room, but not the warm light of a fire but of cold colors – blues and yellows and whites. Seeing this, and satisfying himself that that front door was bolted locked, George Fletcher put his shoulder to the hinges and had it open in a moment. Leading the boys in he started up the flight of stairs in the hall only for William Scott to appear at the top, and if anyone had taken Sandy Johnson’s bet they would have won it as he did not even slightly disconcerted to see them.
He was wearing nothing but that same coat garment and a pair of pants, and he had some sign cut into his chest, all bloody. What was worse – although none could check it later seeing as how the body vanished – was that his chest and belly were as white and pale and unhealthy as any man had ever seen and he had ribs all the way down to his hips. Like a fish or an eel, Dutch said.
So George the lawman raised up his stick and started to tell Scott he needed to answer a few questions, but he was dead before he’d finished speaking. Scott moved with an unearthly speed down the stairs and what he did to George when he hit him made a spray of liquid and fragments out of what had been a man a moment before which doused the hall and his boys like he’d turned on a hose.
It was Dutch’s good fortune, such as it was, that he’d been last in as he was the only one to come out as they all turned and ran in such fear as no man ought to feel. Sandy Johnson was got, like I said before, as he ran through the door a second after Bradford and Dutch said his death made a noise which he’d hear for the rest of his life when he woke in the night and with nothing but his fears and memories for company. More than anything I do believe that it was that noise in the cold hours of the night with only a bottle for company that did for him.
For upward of a dozen years until he died, Dutch was not the same man as he was before that afternoon. He would sometimes be found deep in his cups, muttering to himself ‘Like an eel’. Whatever the truth of what he had seen, it took its toll. He wasn’t forty when they buried him and it was drink did most of the work.
Why Scott didn’t pursue Dutch and finish him too, I do not know, but I surmise he had some unpleasant business of his own to finish as the cuts on his arms were to appear between the death of George Fletcher and the arrival of the townsfolk a short while later. Who can say what a man driven by the devil might do to himself if he’ll kill another?
Come the morning, Jeb Halliwell organised a bonfire and on it went everything he could pull from Scott’s house; all the books and odd trinkets and gewgaws he’d had sent from him from all over. A lot of the books were in foreign tongues and some had illustrations which it didn’t do anyone any good to see. On they went into the blaze, but the blaze itself was wrong, somehow, with the colours all blues and yellows and whites and it lacked the heat you’d expect. Instead of getting some sort of feeling of ending, folk who’d come to watch drifted away silently and alone and not looking at one another like that feeling of wrongness had been made worse rather than better by trying to fix it.
With Scott’s body vanishing and then the fire, the town was an unhappy place thereafter. The Depelier boy’s parents took to arguing and then one night the wife killed the husband in what she said was self-defence, and that hostile spirit was by no means unusual in Miracle.
That stretch of river got an ugly reputation too, from there all the way down to Kaw Lake. People said the fish dried up, and worse. Bones that weren’t from any fish, or any sheep or cow for that matter, would be dredged from the river or found on the shore, and sometimes a fisherman might not return, or a boat found drifting and empty on a clear day. By the time Dutch Bradford died the town of Miracle had a population of 443, and all the grand plans of the city fathers had come to nothing. The library was never finished and nor was the memorial for the War Between the States. Nobody ever really said anything specific, but whatever it was that William Scott did, or was, poisoned the air in those parts and none really wanted to stay. They drifted away to other towns, leaving boarded up houses and chapels to rot in the rain.
They say, almost thirty years later, that a boy out swimming was feared trapped underwater and drowned in the Arkansas River miles downstream and they fired cannon and threw dynamite into the flow to try and dislodge his body from whatever snag had caught it. Instead of a boy’s body though, one explosion caused a gout of thick slimy blood out of the stream. Whether that was the end of William Scott none can say, but then I truly do not know what else it might have been.
