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By Root 1301 0

On the third-and-a-half level, they were inching along a catwalk when suddenly two of them tripped—or were pushed—and plummeted all the way back to the first level, where they broke several bones and began howling in pain. The remaining four men decided that Isaac was not to be found in the ceiling of the mill, and began to descend; by the time they got to the first level they discovered that they were not four but two: Jesse and Frank alone. They called for their comrades but received no answer. “Luke? Bob? Cole?” Jesse called to the men he had left posted at the doors, but he received no answer.

One may imagine that at this point the intrepid Jesse James felt an involuntary shudder; none of the biographies mention it, although an unfavorable biography of Frank James declares that at this point Frank “spontaneously defecated into one leg of his trousers.” “Let’s get out of here,” Frank suggested to his brother, and his brother wisely agreed. The two men quickly left the mill, remounted their horses and rode off. They had not ridden far, however, when Jesse said, “Frank, I wonder if we should jist ride off and leave ’em behind like that. Frank? FRANK??” He discovered the horse beside him was riderless, and he spurred his own horse as hard as he could, and did not even slow down until he was outside of Newton County. It would be weeks later before all of his gang would rejoin him; none of them killed, but each with various bones broken, and it would be years before the James gang went back into criminal action…never again in the state of Arkansas. Working in the mill the next day, one of Isaac’s helpers asked him, “Have any trouble last night, Colonel?” “Some,” Isaac replied, but, being taciturn, did not elaborate.

There really wasn’t much need for light after dark during the First Spell of Darkness, since no one could read, except Jacob (and, now, his ladyfriend—and they used candles). The only need for light after dark was to find one’s way to “go out.” That was a problem on a dark night. But the problem was solved when Eli Willard, making his usual timely reappearance, brought a wagon-load of chamberpots, which he facetiously called “thundermugs” and which the people of Stay More eventually referred to as “slop jars.” Ownership of a chamberpot, they felt, was not “puttin on airs” like the construction of a privy, nor was it necessarily PROG RESS; it was merely a convenient way to remain in while going out, or to go out without going out. Children were given the task of emptying and cleaning the chamberpots each morning, and were warned not to empty them into a path, lest the pots become permanently stuck to the child’s fingers. Nobody ever knew of any child whose pot stuck to his fingers, but no child was ever known to empty a pot into a path, so the superstition was just as efficacious as all their other superstitions.

Eli Willard, while selling the chamberpots to every house, happened to hear of the shortage of bear’s oil which had caused a shortage of light which had caused the boom in chamberpots, and, having sold his last chamberpot, he promised to bring relief for the fuel shortage on his next trip. True to his word, when he came again, a year later, he was driving a large wagon filled with barrels. The barrels, he said, contained “whale” oil. Since no one in Stay More had ever seen the ocean or could even imagine it, Eli Willard had to explain to them that a “whale” is a kind of big fish that lived in the ocean. Had they never read about Jonah in the Bible? Apparently not, because they did not read. They were suspicious of fish oil; they thought it would smell fishy. It did, but not like any of the fish of Stay More. Eli Willard used his pitchmanship to promote his product, and made a killing. He was also offering a line of special new lamps to burn the whale oil in, and made a further killing with these. Verily, Eli Willard made so much money selling whale oil and lamps that he retired from the game, and was not seen in Stay More again for ten years.

Those ten years were called the Decade of Light. There