Later years, Old Man Willie Brown would tell how he tried to stop them men that day, tried to see Justice Storter about what to do, get a warrant for Mister Watson's arrest. But Willie's boat was still at Smallwood's landing after the shooting, right there alongside of the Brave, so I don't know if he recollects things right or not.
My uncle George Washington Storter Junior was justice of the peace for the Chokoloskee Bay country, closest thing to law we had in them days. But Uncle George was in Fort Myers, summoned to jury duty, him and C.G. McKinney both. They was the two most solid citizens on Chokoloskee Bay, I guess, along with Smallwood. They was there in the courthouse when Sheriff Tippins brought them men from Chokoloskee for a hearing and ended up deputizing 'em instead. Appointed deputies to arrest a man that was already stone-cold dead by their own hand, stretched out in the bloody sand on Rabbit Key.
Before he deputized 'em, Sheriff Tippins took some depositions on the death, and the court clerk who wrote all of it down was Eddie Watson. After their mother died, back in 1901, Eddie and Lucius had lived awhile with their sister, Mrs. Langford, but pretty soon Young Ed went to live with his daddy in north Florida, never came back again until 1909. Walter Langford and Tippins was good friends-Tippins named his second son Walter Tippins-and Tippins seen to it that Eddie Watson got a job down at the court when he come back.
Well, Uncle George never got over seeing Eddie Watson on that day. Uncle George's own children done their schooling at Fort Myers, and he knew them older Watson children pretty good and liked 'em fine. That day in court, Uncle George told us, young Eddie Watson looked like he'd been bent by lightning. Never cracked during the hearing, but he never got unbended neither. Done his duty in life as a husband and provider, he was a ardent churchgoer, always up in a front pew where it was hard to miss him. He run a nice insurance business, slapped a back or two, and told some jokes. But there was something stiffened up in Eddie Watson, like a tree dead at the heart, like if he fell down he might split in two.
James Hamiltons and Henry Thompson and their families left Lost Man's River for good, and so did almost everybody else. Their houses were all swept away and their gardens spoiled by four foot of salt water. They had to make a fresh start somewheres else, cause that storm left nothing they could work with. So there was a lot of Islanders in Chokoloskee by the time Mister Watson come back from the Bend.
Folks hung on in the Islands after bad hurricanes in 1873 and '94 and 1909, but that hurricane of 1910 cleaned 'em right out. In my opinion, Watson and Cox was a big part of it. Them dark mangrove walls closing out the world, with the empty Everglades to eastward where the sun rose, and that empty Gulf out to the west where the sun set, the silence and miskeeters and the loneliness, the heavy gray of land and sea during the rains, the knowing that all you hoed and built, so much hard work and discouragement for years and years, could be washed away by storm in a single night-put that together with the fear that any stranger glimpsed around some point of river might be the man who called himself John Smith, come to take your life. All that dread had wore 'em out, never mind the blood in them black rivers.