Everyone likes a good fight, and the family that fights together stays together. Judge O’Neall recounts the story of one such family in Newberry.
A warlike family of many years back, perhaps the Jess Dorvis one, of which I’ve heard my father tell, often had family battles, the father leading one side, the mother on the other and the children dividing. One day, after a set-to in which, as usual, they were only bruised and blood-stained, the chivalrous husband proposed that they finish after the manner of ‘the honorable code.’ ‘You take this gun,’ said he, ‘and I’ll take that; you get behind this post; I will get behind that yonder, and wo will shoot whenever one of us can see enough of the other.’ The wife agreed; they took their places, and when she peeped around the post her husband fired and she fell. He and the boys promptly dug a grave, but when they went to take her to it they found she had risen and gone into the house. To ease their disappointment the father said, ‘Never mind, boys; I’ll fetch her sure next time.’ She was wounded near the eye, but not fatally.