six o'clock
Perhaps he did not want to be a witness , or possibly he desired to be out of the way of stray lead flying about . So the only known witness to what happened , other than the parties engaged in it , was a negro woman . She , at least , was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood . When six o'clock came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike . One gets a picture of the scene : The thin and deficient shadows stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid down behind the trees of Eden 's swamp lot ; the heat waves of a blistering hot day still dancing their devil 's dance down the road like wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there in the distance ; the ominous emptiness of the landscape ; the brooding quiet , cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for their evening concert ; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds with her hoe blade inside the rail fence ; and , half sheltered within the lintels of the office doorway of his mill , Dudley Stackpole , a slim , still figure , watching up the crossroad for the coming of his adversaries . But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised they would . That declaration on their part had been a trick and device , cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear .