On a green and blue day, Lucius headed south to Arcadia on the Peace River. In his father’s day, as the new capital of Manatee County, Arcadia had claimed such frontier comforts as hard drink, whores, and gambling, knife fights, shootings, and common brawling: according to a local account, as many as four men had been killed in a single fight and fifty fights might occur in a single day. Untended stock on the county’s unfenced range had encouraged a spirit of free enterprise in which cattle were stolen by the herd, and in 1890, four luckless strangers, denying to the end that they were rustlers, were hanged without formalities from the nearest oak. Inevitably the range wars attracted desperadoes from the West, and death by knife and bullet was a commonplace when a fugitive from Arkansas named E. J. Watson turned up in Arcadia and, according to later memoirs by friend Ted Smallwood, slew “a bad actor” named Quinn Bass:
Watson said Bass had a fellow down whittling on him with his knife and Watson told Bass… he had worked on the man enough. And Bass got loose and came towards him and he begin putting the.38 S & W bullets into Bass and shot him down.
The date of Watson’s arrival in Arcadia, his livelihood and length of stay-Smallwood set down no such details, only that Watson had paid his way out of his scrape before leaving town.
At the county clerk’s office at the courthouse, a stately edifice on the main square, the town’s earliest Criminal Docket Book, exhumed from the basement, made no mention of a Watson. However, a LeQuinn Bass had been arrested on September 19, 1890, for carrying concealed weapons, and again on October 23 of the next year, this time for murder. Bass had been acquitted on November 6, 1893-his last appearance in the docket book. Since his surname was otherwise absent from this record of every felony committed in the new county between 1890 and 1905, only LeQuinn could have been the Quinn Bass of Smallwood’s account, yet his demise at the hands of E. J. Watson was nowhere recorded.