when you got right down to it nobody really cared how Sheriff George and Bob Baker got rid of criminals, just so they did.
John Ashley hadnt been in Raiford but about six months when Bob Baker and his gang raided one of Old Joe’s whiskey camps set in a clearing in the Hungryland Slough about twelve miles into the Devil’s Garden west of Juno Beach. Old Joe himself was there and got caught redhanded along with two nigger helpers and a big old cracker boy named Albert Miller. They later on admitted they got took by such surprise they didnt even try to fight nor make a run for it. Bobby and his boys used axes to ruin the boiling kettles and bust up all the other whiskey equipment at the camp. They confiscated two of Joe’s trucks and every weapon they found and all the cash money Joe had with him at the time which was said to be several thousand dollars. Bob Baker had wanted the judge to give them jail time but the judge—who some said was a friend of Joe’s—made Bobby give back Joe’s money and his trucks and then made Joe pay a fifty-dollar fine for himself and the same for Albert Miller and let them go.
Bob Baker was hopping mad but Old Joe was plenty put out himself. He even went to George Baker’s office to complain about Bobby busting up his camp but Sheriff George told him he’d authorized Bobby to deal with moonshiners any way he saw fit and Joe would have to settle the problem with him. Old Joe told Sheriff George he could unauthorize Bobby just as easy as he’d authorized him and the sheriff said he didnt need anybody telling him how to do his job. They say you could hear the two of them a half a block away, they was hollering at each other so loud. When Joe Ashley came out of the office he looked ready to spit bullets and people just jumped out of his way.
That raid was the talk of the county for a month after. It was hard to believe anybody could find any of Joe’s whiskey camps in the first place, never mind be able to sneak up on them if they even knew where they were at. Old Joe had about eight or nine camps by then—four or five round about Palm Beach County, the others strung out from south of Lake Okeechobee to just west of Miami—and it was common knowledge he had eyes working for him everywhere in the Devil’s Garden, a whole grapevine of lookouts to send warning if the law ever started closing in on any the camps. The lookouts were said to be posted a good ways from the camps so that even if you caught one you still might never find the camp he was watching out for.
Bob Baker said he’d been able to find the Hungryland Slough camp because Heck Runyon knew his way in Devil’s Garden as well as anybody. Maybe so—but not real likely. There was hardly a fullblood Indian who could find John Ashley’s whiskey camps, never mind some halfbreed who’d lived way off in DeSoto County for seven years of his young life. More likely, at least one of the lookouts ratted. The talk was that Bobby had somehow found out who Joe’s lookouts were for the Hungryland still and he’d run them down and made them tell where the camp was. Then ruther than put them in jail, he let Heck Runyon deal with them.
Mind you now, there aint never been a bit of proof put out in public that Bobby Baker was responsible for the death or disappearance of any of Joe Ashley’s lookouts—but there
Most of the lookouts who vanished never turned up anywhere at all. But it’s a true fact that a week or so after the Hungryland raid a nekkid dead man come floating up to the Jupiter docks with his throat cut. The men who first spotted him thought it was a fat nigger but it turned out to be a white man all swole up and rotted black. His name was Seth Thomason and he owned a house in Jupiter and he had a wife and baby girl. Nobody ever found out who done him in but the word quick got around that he’d been one of Joe’s lookouts for the camp Bobby Baker had busted up. There’d been another lookout for that camp too—a swamp rat named Dog Scratchley who lived in a shack somewhere in the Loxahatchee Slough—and he just flat vanished is what he did. His shack was found burnt to the ground but there wasnt a sign of him nowhere and never has been. Most of us couldnt but wonder what-all was going on. Joe Ashley was said to be wondering too—wondering how Bobby Baker had found out that Scratchley and Seth Thomason were his Hungryland lookouts.
That Hungryland raid was just the first of more to come. Sometimes Bob Baker hit a couple of camps within just a few weeks of each other but more often months would go by between raids. Every time there was a raid, though, it turned out that the lookouts for the camp to get raided had disappeared a day or two before Bobby came popping out of the sawgrass or the pine trees to tear up the still.
Bob Baker never did catch anybody except now and then a few more of Joe’s niggers. But he ever time busted up or burned all the equipment and stuff Joe and his boys were forced to leave behind in camp—boilers and kettles and barrels and tubing and jugs and sugar and mash and whatnot. He even burned up the vehicles the Ashleys had to abandon. He was tearing down Joe’s whiskey camps faster than Joe could afford to rebuild them. We heard Old Joe was going crazy trying to figure out how Bobby was finding out who his lookouts were. It was a war going on is what it was, and Bobby was starting to win because he was making it so damn expensive for Old Joe to keep at it.
While all this was going on, John Ashley was doing his time at Raiford. He was kept in the main prison for a little over a year and while he was in there he worked in the laundry and got himself fitted with a glass eye. His natural eye color was brown, but for some reason the only color glass eye they could get for him in prison was blue. Some say they could of got him the right color but they just wanted to devil him some more by giving him different color eyes. The joke was on them though because John Ashley liked having one eye blue and one brown. He always did say the state had done him a favor and made him even more interesting to women.
Then he got transferred to a road camp not too fat from Palatka there on the St. Johns River. And not three months later he escaped. The story has it that he was out with his road gang fixing up the ferry road north of Palatka one afternoon and two men wearing flour-sack masks stepped out of the bushes with shotguns and got the drop on the guards and manacled them to a magnolia tree. There’s always been stories about somebody at Raiford being paid off to assign John Ashley to a road gang but it’s just one more thing you hear that there aint never been no proof of one way or the other. Most stories say it was Frank and Ed who broke him out but there’s never been no proof of that neither. For certain sure the Ashley was behind the break—had to be. And they had to of planned the break real careful for it to work so smooth as it did. They freed all twelve cons on the chain but took only one with them, a fella named Tom Maddox who was a bank robber out of North Florida and had got to be good friends with John Ashley in the road camp but who nobody never heard nothing about ever again.
Right after word of John Ashley’s escape reached Palm Beach County, Bobby and Freddie Baker were seen sitting at a corner table in the Oleander Grocery in West Palm Beach drinking out of paper bags and talking low and glaring like they’d like to shoot the whole damn world.
TWELVE
July 1918—December 1919
THEY RAN THROUGH THE PINE SCRUBS TO WHERE ED AND FRANK had left the Dodge and they all four scrambled into the car and sped away jouncing and swaying on an old logging trail. They threw the flour sack masks out into the palmetto scrub a few miles farther on and just before the trail merged into a wider backroad. They drove north from Palatka and made their way to the ferry and were rope-pullied across the coppery St. Johns. They excitedly pointed out to each other a bald eagle wheeling from the sky with a fullgrown cat in its talons to alight at its nest atop a tall live oak overlooking the river. They pitched pennies at turtles sunning themselves on floating driftwood. They told the ferryman their name was Horton and they were headed for their uncle’s funeral in Daytona. But when they reached the crossroad at Molasses Junction they turned the car north for Jacksonville.
His brothers admired his blue glass eye and asked him what it was like being half-blind and made jokes about how he truly could sleep with one eye open now. John Ashley asked about Kid Lowe and they told him the Kid had flat vanished and nobody had heard a word about where he might be. They talked then about their brother Bob and told Tom Maddox about some of the funny things Bob had done when they were boys and when they ran out of
