Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [49]
It sounds like some sort of schoolyard squabble, not the behavior of two of the most respected attorneys in the Mississippi valley. And yet they were now bound by honor to return to their dueling ground. In the second duel, Foote missed again. Prentiss shot him in the hip. The wound was so bad that Foote almost died. He took months to recuperate; he was still on crutches when he came into the courtroom for the first time afterward to contend with Prentiss again.
They met over the case of one of the most notorious thieves and murderers in the river valley. Prentiss was prosecuting; Foote was defending pro bono—he may have volunteered just to spite Prentiss. The defendant was a man named Alonzo Phelps. Phelps was a mysterious and sinister figure: a highwayman who had long been haunting the wilderness along the river north of Vicksburg. This was inaccessible country, a region of steep, lushly overgrown hills and countless winding ravines; even locals got lost in it. Despite frequent manhunts by large groups of regulators, Phelps had remained hidden in its depths for more than a decade. It was said that he never set foot in a human habitation and lived off squirrels and other small animals caught and eaten raw—because a campfire would have given away his position.
Phelps was a rare sort of highwayman: he almost always let his victims go alive. He reserved his murderous rage for the vigilance committees and the regulators. He is supposed to have killed eight regulators who tried to bring him in. He was also notorious for his stream of abusive and threatening letters to members of the local vigilance committees, demanding that they leave him alone. No one knew how the letters were sent—they would simply show up in mailboxes out of thin air. One of Vicksburg’s leading committee members got a long succession of these letters, and they grew to be so menacing that he at last hired, on his own dime, an unusually large band of regulators and trackers to find and bring in Phelps, no matter what the cost. It took them weeks of systematic searching, but they finally cornered him in the remotest interior of the wilderness region, and they brought him into Vicksburg in chains.
At his trial the courtroom was packed. Everybody wanted to see the strange apparition who had terrorized them for so long. Seated in the courtroom under armed guard, Phelps proved to be tall, handsome, tanned, and muscular; but he had peculiar, snake-curling bloodred hair and a perpetually ferocious expression. Foote found him a brilliant man, “a ripe and accurate scholar,” well versed in classical literature, which he read in the original—“when taken prisoner,” Foote wrote, “a few weeks subsequent to the perpetration of his last murder, [he] had, as I personally know, a much-worn pocket-copy of Horace in his possession.”
Prentiss presented an ironclad case at the trial. In his summation he spoke at great length, conjuring up Phelps’s decade of terror with his grandest sallies of vividness, scorn, and impassioned eloquence. (At one point he called Phelps “the Rob Roy of the Mississippi.”) The longer Prentiss went on, the more Phelps’s face swelled and empurpled into a mask of rage. Foote recalled:
Seeming presently to grow desperate, he bent forward a little and whispered in my ear: “Tell me whether I stand any chance of acquittal, and tell me frankly; for if my case is hopeless, I will snatch a gun from the guard nearest me and send Mr. Prentiss to hell before I shall myself go there.”
It was a bad moment for Foote. He later wrote, “Never was I more embarrassed in my life.” What would happen if he told Phelps the truth—that conviction was an absolute certainty? Phelps would grab for the gun, Prentiss would most likely be killed, and Phelps would then be shot dead by the guards. But was that such a bad outcome? Foote would have had his revenge on Prentiss for the two duels without lifting a finger. And yet, Foote hesitated. “If he should slay him, he would deprive of life one whom I could not help loving and admiring much,