This encounter might have been as commonplace as any other gunfight around Hell’s Half-Acre were it not for the identity of the driver. But he would live, unlike the Shell Oil executive lying nearby with a bullet wound to the chest. Amid a hail of bullets from his pair of adversaries, the painter finally shouted, “Don’t shoot, Sanders! You’ve killed me!” The dusty roadside shootout fell silent, and indeed the former painter was bleeding from his shoulder and hip.
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The driver picked up his fallen comrade’s pistol and returned fire. One of the driver’s two companions collapsed to the ground. Stewart leapt from his ladder, firing his pistol wildly as he dove for cover behind the railroad wall. “Well, you son of a bitch!” the driver shouted at the painter, “I see you done it again.” The driver of the car had been using this particular railroad wall to advertise his service station in town, and this was not the first time that the painter-the manager of a competing station-had installed an ad blocker. But it was not an armed man that emerged-it was three armed men. Stewart set down his paint brush and picked up his pistol. He probably knew that the driver would be armed, angry, and about to skid to a stop nearby. Stewart probably squinted through the dust at the approaching car, and he probably wiped sweat from his brow with the back of a paint-flecked wrist. The neighborhood was also commonly referred to as “the asshole of creation.” It was coming from the north-from the swath of backcountry known among locals as “Hell’s Half-Acre.” The area was so named for its primary exports: bootleg booze, bullets, and bodies. Stewart paused when he heard an automobile approaching at high speed-or what counted for high speed in 1931.
His application of a fresh coat of paint was gradually obscuring the sign that had been painted there previously. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall.
The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in the mountain town of Corbin, Kentucky.
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