It was Wiley Pierce, who still lives out in the McGirk Community (in the hilly southwest corner of the county), who was sent to the penitentiary for two years in his old days for fence cutting. He served his time for in those days paroles were unknown. There had been quite a bit of fence cutting before that. Some who had their fences cut were Colonel Freeman, C. E. Horton, and several others. That was about the end of the fence cutting after Pierce was sent to the penitentiary.

There was a school teacher named Walter C. Linden, who read law here and possibly studied the detective business. It is said that he instigated the investigations that sent Pierce and a man named Jones  in the same community to prison, as understood the only ones ever sent up for cutting fences. Linden was later district attorney at the time of the San Saba County Feud. According to Roscoe Runge, attorney at Mason, he stood off the mob as he came out of the courthouse, telling them that they could get him, but some of them would go with him. Later he was Assistant District Attorney in San Antonio, always wearing a red geranium, and is said usually under the influence of liquor. His son, W. C. Linden, Jr., attorney at Orange, told me Lyndon Johnson was named after the family, but changed the spelling. Runge told me Linden told him the story of the San Saba County War in full years later.

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