IT DIDN'T BOTHER THEM.
"QUANTRELL" MEN AND WOMEN
KEEP UP THE MERRY MAKING.
other, After a Three-Cornered
Struggle, Looked Upon as
a Sort of Joke.
It was scarcely an hour after David Edwards had shot at Jim Cummings yesterday noon, and "shot to kill" to use Edwards' own words, as he lay in jail, that Miss Feta Parmer, one of the hundred women at the Quantrell raiders' reunion at Wallace grove, who saw the shooting at close range, said:
"Oh, it's nothing! I turned around to see who was fighting and then went on about my business."
"It didn't amount to anything," another woman said. "The old men just had a quarrel."
The shooting truly did not terminate fatally, because Edwards missed Cummings and the stray bullet merely grazed the feet of two other men, but it would have broken up almost any other picnic. But the veterans of the Quantrell raids, their wives and daughters, forgot all about it in fifteen minutes and resumed their merrymaking. Even Cummings, the man shot at, treated the matter as a joke. Cummings was with the James brothers during their bloody days and has seen some real fighting. The only person who seemed excited was Jack Noland, a negro, who was Quantrell's hostler. When Edwards fired, Noland got behind a tree.
"I won't prosecute Edwards," Cummings said. "I understand that he has called me a thief and all that, but I'll let it pass. I'm not afraid of him. He was standing less than three feet from me when he pointed the revolver at my head and fired, and all he did was to hit the other men on the feet. He'll never have a better chance to kill me again, and if he couldn't succeed this time he can't do it later."
MARSHALL PREVENTS BLOODSHED
Joseph Stewart, deputy marshal and bailiff of the criminal court, helped prevent bloodshed. He was standing beside Cummings, talking over old times, when Edwards caame up and got into a quarrel with Cummings. Edwards pulled a revolver out of his pocket and fired a shot. Cummings stepped forward and grabbed his hand. Edwards jerked the imprisoned hand free and threw it around Cummings' neck, pointing the barrel of the pistol down Cummings' spine. Stewart grasped the pistol, sticking his thumb through the aperture back of the trigger to keep Edwards from shooting Cummings in the back, and tried to wrest the weapon from his hand. In the struggle the three men fell. Edwards still holding the weapon and pulling on the trigger, which wouldn't work with Stewart's thumb caught in it.
Kit Rose, a brother-in-law of Cole Younger, intervened. He searched Cummings to see if he, too, had a gun, and then Rose and Cummings jerked Edwards' revolver from his hand. Stewart's thumb was badly bruised in the struggle.
BULLET STRUCK BYSTANDER.
The bullet was afterwards found. It had struck the toe of W. H. Perkins' shoe, glanced hit the rung of a chair and athen stuck in the sole of Dr. Oliver C. Sheley's foot, but did not have force enough left to break the skin. Dr. Sheley lives in Independence. Mr. Perkins is from Oak Grove. Perkins has the bullet as a souvenir of the occasion.
Edwards was detained at the county jail last night, and slept in the deputy marshal's bedroom. He will be sent to the Confederate Veterans' home in Higginsville today.
There are four or five stories of how the trouble between him and Cummings arose. Edwards says Cummings had been threatening him ever since a year ago last Halloween night, when a pet raccoon was stolen from his room at the Confederate home. He accuesed Cummings of the theft and Cummings became sore.
They have had quarrels since. Both men are inmates of the Higginsville Confederate home. Edwards was with Quantrall a year, and assisted in the burning of Lawrence, Kas. He is 73 years old, while Cummings is but 56. Cummings was one of the followers of the James boys.
