Back Home by Irvin S. Cobb

We had a feud once down in our country, not one of those sanguinary feuds of the mountains involving a whole district and forcing constant enlargements of hillside burying grounds, nor yet a feud handed down as a deadly legacy from one generation to another until its origin is forgotten and its legatees only know how they hate without knowing why, but a shabby, small neighborhood vendetta affecting but two families only, and those in a far corner of the county -- the Flemings and the Faxons.

Nevertheless, this feud, such as it was, persisted in a sluggish intermittent kind of a way for twenty years or so. It started in a dispute over a line boundary away back in War Times when a Faxon shot a Fleming and was in turn shot by another Fleming; and it lasted until the Faxons tired of fence-corner, briar-patch warfare and moved down into Tennessee, all but one branch of them, who came into town and settled there, leaving the Flemings dominant in the Gum Spring precinct. So the feud ceased to be an institution after that and became a memory, living only in certain smouldering animosities which manifested themselves at local elections and the like, until it flared up momentarily in the taking-off of old Ranee Fleming at the hands of young Jim Faxon; and then it died, and died for good.