all happened around ought-eight, a couple of years before Joe Ashley started up his whiskey business and Runyon and Aho vanished.
It wasnt till seven years later that Heck Runyon showed up again on this side of the state. At the time he come back he was still wanted for stealing the horse but the farmer dropped the charge a few days after Heck went to live in a hut out behind the Baker place. Some said Sheriff George made a deal with the farmer. A story went around that Heck had been working the last couple of years as a regulator for a rich DeSoto County rancher. A regulator was somebody paid to stop rustlers, and they say Heck Runyon stopped a bunch of them as stopped as they could get by shooting them graveyard dead. Then he got in a saloon fight with a cowhunter and cut the fella up pretty bad. Ruther than stick around and see what the law might say about it, he’d come back to his old stomping grounds. He’d been back about six months when Sheriff George made him a Palm Beach County deputy.
Not too long later he killed a prisoner. He was bringing the man back to the county jail in West Palm Beach after the fella was convicted in a trial in Stuart and they were sitting in the coach while the train made a whistle stop in Jupiter. Witnesses said the prisoner called him a mongrel dog and spit in his face and Heck Runyon clubbed him to death with his revolver right then and there. Women and children saw it and was screaming and running off the train. They say it was a bloody mess. There was talk that Heck Runyon ought be charged with murder since the prisoner had his hands cuffed at the time. The newspaper said he ought for sure at least be fired, that the county didnt need any deputies who thought they were judge, jury and executioner. Sheriff George argued that Deputy Runyon had been strongly provoked and had just cause, but he was enough of a politician to know when to give in to popular opinion and so he fired him.
Heck Runyon hardly ever showed himself in town after that but it was said he was still living out on the Baker property and that Sheriff George was still using him to track down fugitives who made off into the Devil’s Garden.
The bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker started over a girl, which aint such an uncommon story. Leastways thats how most tell it. John Ashley was fifteen at the time and Bobby about nineteen. They’d knowed each other since the Ashleys moved to Pompano. They werent never exactly friends, but during those first few years they’d been friendly enough. They say Bobby Baker was the one showed John Ashley all the best fishing spots in the Indian River and John taught Bobby plenty about tracking game in the Glades. Their daddies got along all right too—at least in the years before John’s trouble over the Indian. Old Joe and Sheriff George would take a cup of coffee together in Lucy’s Cafe in West Palm sometimes or buy each other a drink at Blue’s store at Lake Towhee and talk about mules and dogs and fishing. Like with their boys, nobody’d go so far as to say they were friends, but Old Joe made it plain he appreciated that the high sheriff was one to live and let live when it came to whiskeymaking. The way. Sheriff George saw it, if the federal government wanted to tax the whiskey a man made, it could damn well send its own men to collect it. Sheriff George was anyway known to take a drink ever now and then and was said to be pretty fond of Joe Ashley’s product his ownself.
Anyhow, there used to be a dance every Saturday night in a big auction barn a few miles south of West Palm and the Ashley boys would usually come up from Pompano to dance and meet girls. Even Bill Ashley would come up sometimes just to play his banjo with the band and have a dance or two with his wife Bertha, who everybody liked. They were lively affairs with good string bands and plenty of food and punch and of course every man brought his own jug. One Saturday evening Bobby Baker showed up with a girl named Julie Morrell, a pretty sixteen-year-old who had long honey-colored hair and freckles and a smile to melt a grown man’s heart. Bobby was crazy in love with her and didnt make any secret of it. He’d met her just a few weeks earlier and was telling people he was by God going to marry her one day or know the reason why. The Ashleys were there that night as usual and the brothers took turns dancing with every girl in the place. Frank and Ed and Bob cut in on Bobby one after another but he didnt seem to mind all that much. He was proud of his pretty sweetheart and they say he liked being envied by the other fellas. Then John Ashley cut in on him, and while Julie was spinning around in John Ashley’s arms Bob Ashley sidled up to Bobby and started up a conversation and the next time Bobby looked out to the dance floor neither Julie Morrell nor John Ashley was anywhere in sight.
Everybody knows John Ashley always did have a way with the ladies—with proper ones as well as them not so proper. Just exactly how much of a way he had with Julie Morrell in the darkness of the pines beyond the barn that evening is something nobody but him and her would ever know for certain. But it aint hard to imagine what Bobby Baker thought when he saw they were gone from the barn.
He went running out to look for her and the Ashley boys followed him outside and watched him run around yelling Julie’s name to make himself heard over the music from the barn. When they started laughing at him, Bobby went at Bob Ashley with both fists swinging. Maybe he picked out Bob because he was the one who’d distracted him long enough for John to make off with Julie, or maybe just because Bob was the Ashley standing closest to him at the moment. He was older and bigger than Bob, but Bob had a reputation as a vicious scrapper who even a lot of the older fellas were afraid of. They punched and kicked and bit and scratched and gouged and pulled each other’s hair and rolled around on the ground all locked up like a couple of pit dogs. A small bunch of spectators gathered round to root for one or the other but most people at the dance never even knew the fight took place. It was fairly even going for about five minutes and then Bobby got astraddle of Bob Ashley and got both hands on his throat and try as he might Bob Ashley couldnt buck him off. When it was pretty clear that Bobby was going to kill him if somebody didnt stop him, Frank and Ed finally stepped in and pulled them apart. They say Bob Ashley was black in the face by then and likely wouldnt of lasted another half-minute. They said his eyes were bloodshot for a week after. They said both them boys looked like they’d been hit by a train.
A deputy sheriff showed up about then and Frank and Ed were explaining things to him when here comes John Ashley and Julie Morrell out of the pines. Julie was blushing and her hair was all messy and with leaves in it and she never said a word nor looked anybody in the eye but just went right on by them all and into the barn. They say John Ashley was grinning like a keyboard and said, “What’s goin on, boys?” Bobby Baker was so beat up and wore out he couldnt hardly stand by himself but he tried to go at John anyway and had to be held back by the deputy. They say if looks could kill, Bobby Baker would’ve put John Ashley in his grave right then and there.
The way the story goes, when Julie Morrell’s daddy who was a grocer heard what happened he wanted to charge John Ashley with rape, only Julie insisted to him it had been no such a thing and swore she’d never lie to the contrary in court. They say he whipped her bare ass bloody with a razor strap. Supposedly he made threats against John Ashley and against Bobby Baker too because he was the one he’d entrusted with his daughter’s safekeeping that night—but it’s probly not true. Like most folk he was too afraid of the Ashley and the Bakers both to of said anything so reckless. Nobody was surprised when he finally never did anything except pack up his family and move away. Some said they went to the panhandle, some said out to Arkansas where he had kin. Nobody knew for sure. A few years later during the war, one of the boys come home on leave from and army aviation school in Alabama and swore up and down he’d had the pleasure of sweet Julie Morrell in a Birmingham whorehouse. Whether it was true or not, it’s what most people come to believe became of her.
As for the Ashleys and Bakers, well, Old Joe and Sheriff George were seen having a drink together in a Pompano saloon not a week after the fight and joking about how a pretty girl could sure make the bucks lock horns. And about a month later a dozen witnesses saw John Ashley meet up with Bobby Baker on the New River trading docks. John poled up in a skiff and was pulling a second one loaded with plumes. Bobby was there helping his cousin Freddie to patch the bottom of his fishing boat and was still carrying scars from the fight with Bob Ashley. They say John Ashley greeted him as friendly as you please although nobody made to shake hands. John had a round of beers brought out to the dock from the trading store and told about his plume hunt in the rookeries southwest of Okeechobee. He told Bobby they ought to go fishing together in the Indian River again sometime like they used to. If anybody had Julie Morrell on his mind nobody said so. Neither Bobby nor Freddie hardly said a word the whole time. Then John Ashley said so long and got in his skiff and poled away. They say the Baker boys watched him go and then poured out the bottles of beer they neither one had taken the first sip of. Far as anybody knows, Bobby Baker and John Ashley never did go fishing together again.
In nineteen and eleven the Ashleys made theirselfs a new homestead in the piney swamps a few miles southwest of Gomez. Old Joe bought sixty acres set about midway between Peck’s Lake and the south fork of the St. Lucie River. Not a neighbor for miles around. About three-quarters of the place was nothing but pine swamp, but there was a wide high clearing in the middle of the property and him and his boys built a good-sized house on it. It was a dogtrot—had a breezeway between the two halfs of the house—with a full wide porch both front and back and a steep-pitched roof and a chimney at either one of the gable sides. Had a big kitchen out back. They built the thing of Dade County pine and shingled it with cypress to let the heat out through the roof. That Dade pine’s about
