Claude Allen leveled his gun at District Attorney Foster. Foster saw it and grabbed for his own weapon. Claude Allen’s gun barked. Foster whirled, threw his head back, cried insanely once, and then dropped heavily across a chair and slipped to the floor.
Now Sheriff Webb and Floyd Allen were shooting it out. Three spots of blood showed on the courageous little sheriff’s white shirt, but he kept advancing.
Now he was within two feet of the giant. Floyd Allen reeled, but fired again and again.
Webb’s eyes were glassy. His legs were buckling. But he continued to fire.
Then his knees gave way. He sank down. His last shot, fired from bloodless hands, went into the floor. He was beaten down, but he was still firing.
Floyd Allen turned, staggered. He tripped over the body of Webb, plunged to the floor and lay still.
Dexter Goad was firing at Sidna Allen. Sidna Allen and Claude bolted for the door, firing back as they ran.
Nancy Elizabeth Ayres attempted to run after them. In the aisle she staggered, screamed hideously, clutched at her abdomen, and slumped down. As she slumped her head jerked back. A second bullet had struck her in the temple.
The Allens were running toward the exit. Both were firing at Goad. Another took up the fusillade, firing point blank at the little gamecock. No one ever knew definitely whether it was Friel Allen, youngest of the clan, or Wesley or Sidna Edwards.
Sidna and Claude Allen ran onto the porch. Goad still followed them. Friel Allen raised his gun, pointed it at Goad’s head, from behind. Something whisked him off the porch, left him kicking and struggling in a flower bed. The high school daughter of Dexter Goad had saved her father’s life.
Goad fell on the porch, still tugging at the trigger of his empty gun. He pulled himself to a sitting posture and hurled the empty weapon after the fleeing Allens. Then he tumbled over.
They found eight bullet wounds in his body. But, iron of soul and iron of body, he lived.
Sidna Allen ran across the street to an ammunition store, seeking more cartridges. The store was closed. Seeing this, Sidna Allen ran, shouting for his relatives, to his horse. Although badly wounded, he managed to flee the town with the remnants of the clan at his heels.
The patriarch was abandoned. He lay in a pool of blood half over the body of Sheriff Webb, his leg broken and two other bullet wounds in his giant form.
Massie and Foster were dead. Elizabeth Ayres was dead. Goad was near death. Five jurors, who had been called to hear the decision and sentencing, were wounded. Three spectators were in hospitals with bullets in their bodies. Fifteen casualties.
VII
Ensued now the hunt for the fugitives. Governor William Mann of Virginia took a hand. He ordered the militia into Hillsville. He sent twenty plainclothes men from Roanoke, sent Judge Staples of Roanoke to take charge, ordered Attorney General Williams to the scene.
These reinforcements went by train to Galaxy. Then, because no one knew they were coming, they had to walk through nine miles of mud and slime to Hillsville. There is no railroad in Hillsville.
The hunt spread over Carroll County. Then word came that one of the Allens had robbed an ammunition store in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Floyd Allen, hearing of this while flat on his back with his broken leg, exclaimed:
“Good. Us Allens is all fighters!”
A week later Sidna Edwards was captured while asleep in an abandoned hut sixteen miles from Hillsville. Five days later the seventeen-year-old Friel Allen was taken in a carriage shed near his father’s home. He was sick and whimpering. The bravado of the fighting Allens had been drowned in the homesickness of a scared boy.
Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards still were at large. In spite of this, the state insisted upon bringing the captured four to trial, Floyd Allen, his son, Claude, and his nephews, Friel and Sidna Edwards.
Carroll County was in a state of chaos. Every citizen was an armed man, a self constituted avenger of a wrong, either against the commonwealth or the Allens. Thought of conducting the trial there was madness.
The hearings were transferred to Wytheville, county seat of a neighboring county. Militiamen were thrown about the courthouse. Plainclothes men from Richmond and Roanoke and Norfolk guarded the courtroom, watched everyone who came in.
No one was admitted to the hearings without first being searched for weapons. No known Allenites, not witnesses in the trial, were permitted in the town. Extra policemen from half a dozen towns patrolled the streets. Militiamen in their stuffy uniforms patrolled the main streets and checked up the hotels and train arrivals.
The county line of Carroll County was patrolled like an international border in war time.
No single juryman who ever had heard of the Allens was accepted.
Thus the trial started and thus it ended, in spectacular time. Friel Allen and Sidna Edwards pleaded guilty and were sentenced to fifteen and eighteen years, respectively.
Claude Allen and his father were found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang.
Then Wesley Edwards and Sidna Allen were captured in Des Moines. Sidna Allen charged that Wesley Edwards’ sweetheart, with whom they were living in the Des Moines town, had betrayed them for a reward.
They were given prison sentences, Sidna’s totalling thirty-five years, Wesley’s twenty-seven.
Then they took Floyd Allen and Claude to the state penitentiary. Half a dozen deputies rode with them. Militiamen guarded the procession. Plainclothes men moved among those who watched the start of the hegira. But there was no disturbance in Wytheville. Only in incendiary Carroll County, where Allenites burned farmhouses and some houses in the city in protest against the sentence.
Then began the appeals for mercy. There were more than a dozen of them. Finally, as a last hope, the case went to the United States supreme court. The plea was denied.
On the night of March 27, 1913, one year after the tragedy of Hillsville courthouse, the warden of the state penitentiary pushed his way into Floyd Alien’s cell.
The great, gray mane was unbowed. The huge head was held erect and the beady eyes were as fierce and defiant as ever.
“Your last appeal has been denied,” said the warden, gravely. “This means that we must execute sentence on you and your son at sunrise. Are you prepared?”
The giant patriarch stood up. He looked the warden square in the eye.
“The Allens is fighters,” he said. “They know how to die — if they have to die.”
The last was said with a startling significance. The warden looked apprehensive, then quickly left the cell to take the news to Claude Allen.
The warden called for a military guard. It was thrown about the prison walls that night. Every guard was ordered to be on duty throughout the night.
The next morning, amid an ominous silence outside the walls, the old man walked from his cell with his head high and a smile on his face. His shaggy mane looked whiter than ever in the spring sunlight.
He mounted the steps quickly. He seemed to be looking about him. There was hope, some trust in an omnipotence he still believed, in his fiery eyes.
Even as they placed the hood over his gray locks, he asked, in a firm voice:
“Do you really mean to hang an Allen?”
No one replied. The warden reached for the trigger. Just before the rattle of the trap broke the words, the giant patriarch bellowed, as he had bellowed two years before, to his eternal tragedy:
“Thank God, the Allens is all fighters!”
Then the rope muffled his cry into a crackling scream.
Claude Allen died without a word. Ten years later Governor Trinkle pardoned Friel Allen and Sidna Edwards. Then, in 1926, Governor Harry Byrd, brother of the noted polar explorer, pardoned Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards.