"The living did some excellent killing, and the dead also are entitled to the thanks of the community for dying."
Transcribed below.
In Allendale, S.C.,the other day, two O’Bryans were going home from a family dance and were roughly accosted by two Stranges in the street. They resented this proceeding by flogging the Stranges with canes end buggy whips in default of other weapons. The Stranges naturally resisted and one of the O’Bryans, as a precautionary measure, ran and got his pistol. On his return to the scene of action, he found that the Stranges had received aid from a quarter from which aid seldom comes to men engaged in mortal combat, namely, their grandfather, Mr. Hewlett, the City Marshal, who began to use his pistol freely on the O’Bryans. He was assisted by his two sons, so that there were then three generations of the Hewletts actively engaged. The O’Bryens could not have made head against such odds had they, too, not received a reinforcement in the person of their kinsman, Gus Allen. After a brief action at very close range Tom Hewlett and Evan Strange were slain, and some of the others wounded. The Coroner’s jury declared that the deed fell “under pistol shots fired by hands unknown.” The Charleston News and Courier pronounced this a failure of justice, and asked for an indictment, but the citizens of Allendale have resented this interference at a public meeting, in which they declared that the observations of the News and Courier “deeply grated upon the sensibilities of every law abiding person in Barnwell County,” and that “they felt grateful to God for having overshadowed the lives of three brave men while defending themselves from death,” while praying to God “to have mercy on the souls of the unfortunate men. shriven through the baptism of blood so unavoidable.” It thus seems that everybody came out of the affair creditably. The living did some excellent killing, and the dead also are entitled to the thanks of the community for dying.
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