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chapter one Three Killed in Black Jack October 11, 1902 finally, the heat of summer was gone. In Deep East Texas, summer is the longest season. From May until early October the hot air hovers, thick with humidity and mosquitoes. This year had been no exception, though in late June a freak storm had dropped fourteen inches of rain in twenty hours, causing a flood that washed out all the bridges over the Attoyac River, which divides Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties, and wreaking widespread damage in the old Spanish town of Nacogdoches, the county seat.1 By October the leaves were just starting to turn in the thick woods that ran along the rivers and creeks, although it would be November before the crescendo of color was at its peak. Eight days earlier a thunderstorm had swept through, dropping more than four inches of rain in a twelvehour period, causing more flooding, and slowing efforts to rebuild the bridges across the Attoyac. Once again, the red-dirt streets of Nacogdoches turned into an ochre slop that clung to everything. Since then, the weather had been sunny and the mercury moderate, with highs in the upper 70s and lows dropping into the 50s at night.2 It is likely that Duncan Hicks, his wife, Nerva, and their daughter, Allie, had spent the previous evening enjoying the cool air on the front porch. Before air conditioning, families tended to gather on the porch as the sun began to set, the day’s work done. Hicks, forty-eight, was a farmer, as were most folks living in Black Jack, a small community four miles west of the Attoyac and an equal distance north of Chireno, the closest town of any size.3 The Hicks family farm was no more than a few hundred yards east of the river. Duncan likely grew cotton and vegetables, maybe some tobacco—a crop the county’s boosters hoped would help fuel a cigar-making factory recently established in Nacogdoches, twenty-four miles to the west. 4 } A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution Black Jack in 1902 wasn’t exactly booming. A correspondent for the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches earlier that year had described the community as having two mercantile stores; a doctor’s office; a blacksmith and wood shop; a single church building, which looked “more like an old barn than a house of worship” and which was shared by the Baptists and the Methodists; and an “old eye sore of a school building.” Careful not to be too critical, the anonymous correspondent praised the residents of Black Jack, saying that “all they need is a little hustling up.”4 The same correspondent complained that the condition of the “road leading out of this place towards Nacogdoches is almost impassible in wet weather.” That road was El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, hacked out of the forest in the seventeenth century all the way from Louisiana to San Antonio and from there down to Mexico. Duncan Hicks was from Mississippi, and the red-dirt roads, rolling hills, cotton fields, and thick forests of East Texas no doubt reminded him of his birthplace. Nerva, fifty-eight, was a Texas native whose father was of German descent. They had been married nearly twenty-four years and had two children, one of whom, Lizzie, was married and lived in Hooker Bend, Louisiana, just across the Sabine River (completion of Toledo Bend Reservoir in 1969 would send Hooker Bend underwater). Allie, who had turned twenty-one in July, still lived with her parents.5 Neighbors considered the Hicks family prosperous and respected. Sheriff A. J. Spradley, for two decades the chief lawman of Nacogdoches County, described them as “peaceable, quiet, unassuming citizens who attended to their own business and bothered nobody.”6 A modern invention, the telephone, had made its appearance in the city of Nacogdoches in the 1890s. The first daily newspaper in the county, the Daily Phone, was started in 1899. Readers were encouraged to phone in news items. The paper’s name was changed a year later to the Daily Sentinel. The news on October 10, a fine autumn day, was a bit slow for editor Bill Haltom’s tastes. He published the Sentinel six afternoons a week, taking off Sunday. Haltom wrote: It is quite dull about the courthouse today. The grand jury has adjourned, the judge and all the visiting lawyers have gone home, and even the sheriff has gone...

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