Late one October night, I rolled into Harts on the bus. I was full of excitement, having just read an article from Smithsonian magazine about Doug Owsley, one of the top forensic anthropologists in the country. According to the article, Doug had worked with the mass graves in Bosnia, identified some of David Koresh’s charred cult members at Waco, and helped to break the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Wisconsin. He was very interested in historical graves, having exhumed western outlaws, Indians, Civil War soldiers and no telling what else. He was known in some circles as “the Sherlock Holmes of Bones.”

The next morning, I told Brandon I had this idea of contacting Owsley to see if he would exhume the Haley-McCoy grave. He thought for a few seconds, then said it was risky. While he was as curious as I in wanting to know what was “down there,” he wasn’t really sure what we would gain by it. Besides, he said, people might think we were taking things a little too far. He could picture us sitting down to interview someone and all of a sudden they say, “Oh, you’re the guys going around digging people up.” He had a point: I wasn’t even sure what we might gain by exhuming the grave. We tabled the notion until later.

Turning our minds to more pressing thoughts, we decided to visit Stump Dalton at Ferrellsburg. Stump had popped onto my bus during my last trip to Harts and, looking very much like a thin-haired George Jones, said, “My family and Ed Haley was close. If he was in Ohio or somewhere and he come here the first place he come was our house. I knowed of Ed to stay as high as two months around there. We had him a bed all the time.”

Stump was a son of Dood Dalton, Ed’s fiddler-friend on the Big Branch of Harts Creek, as well as a former mandolin player for the Starlight Rambers, a local group featured on Logan radio many years ago. He was 66 years old.

“I’ve actually played with Ed Haley,” Stump had told me.

Brandon and I made the short drive to Ferrellsburg where we pulled the car into a wide spot near the railroad tracks. We walked across Route 10 to Stump’s turquoise-colored house. “Come on in, boys,” Stump said at the door. “I’ll tell you what I can about Ed Haley.” Immediately, as we sat down on couches inside, I asked Stump about his father, who was reportedly a great old-time fiddler and a good friend to Ed Haley.

“They called him Dood Dalton,” Stump said. “His real name was Moses. My dad used to play for a lot of them old-time square dances. Music follows the Daltons. Dad could play anything that had strings on it. He was a number one harp player. He could play anything on the French harp.”

Brandon asked Stump if he remembered any of his father’s tunes and he said, “‘Hell Amongst the Yearlings’, ‘Sally Goodin’, ‘Old Joe Clark’, and all that. See, when they would first start playing, Ed would say, ‘Now Dood, I want you to tune that fiddle up and play that ‘Lost Indian’.’ Now they used to take and clamp a little knife on the bridge. It softens that down. Then they would take two little sticks — about the size of straws, you know — and play that ‘Hell Amongst the Yearlings’ and beat on that and man you talk about a tune. Dad would either beat or play it or vice-versa, him or Ed would. That was a favorite tune for them two — that and the ‘Blackberry Blossom’. You know, they revised that ‘Blackberry Blossom’.”

Right away, it sounded a lot like the kind of relationship Ed shared with Laury Hicks, the fiddling veterinarian in Calhoun County.

I told Stump I thought Ed Haley was a master of improvisation and he agreed, saying, “They would play a tune and they’d put their own thing into it, you know. I’ve seen Ed Haley sit down and say, ‘Now Dood, what do you think of this?’ and vice-versa. And they’d sit there all day, all night. They could do about anything they wanted to do with a fiddle, both of them. When they was into fiddle playing, they was into fiddle playing. You didn’t come in there and start a conversation with them.”

I asked Stump if Ed and Dood played at the same time, as he had supposedly done with Hicks, and he said, “Not too much.”