Prescott, Arizona Territory, February 10th, 1886.

Dennis W. Dilda was born around 1860 in Gwynett County, Georgia, not far from Atlanta,

small in stature, pleasant enough in the face, if the newspaper men were to be believed,

the kind of fellow who could shake a man's hand on a Sunday and put him in the ground by Wednesday.

That last part was not a figure of speech. His people settled in a place called Raccoon Mills,

and it was there, somewhere in the red clay country of the post-war South that the

killing started. Dilda shot a black man dead. The details are thin on the ground, as they tended

to be in those days when the victim wasn't white. Dilda evaded arrest for two years. When they

finally dragged him before a judge, he walked.

That was Georgia in the 1870s. Justice had a particular complexion.

After the acquittal, another young man in the area vanished. No body, no trial.

Just an empty chair at somebody's table and the general consensus among the neighbors that Dilda had done it.

And Dilda did what Dilda always did when the ground got hot beneath his feet.

He moved, packed up and headed for Texas, married a woman named Georgia Ann Patterson in Lamar County.

Things may have been quiet for a spell, or maybe they weren't, and the land

was just big enough to keep its secrets. The Dildas drifted west, into the Salt River Valley

of Arizona Territory, and during the two years they lived there, Georgia Ann's own brother

disappeared, her own blood, gone, no explanation. No reckoning. Just another name on the

silent ledger that Dennis Dilda carried from state to territory to territory. By the summer of 1885,

the family rolled into the country around Prescott. Dilda, his wife, and two small children,

a girl named Fern, and a boy called John.

They were ragged. They were broke. And Dilda was, by all accounts, a brooding and unsociable man,

...