The dissapearance of Eli Powers

Eli Powers was born December of 1890 in Wayne County, W.Va. and disappeared around the year 1911 and has never been seen or heard of since.
He along with his family had packed up and moved to Callahan, Fla.
Wade H. Powers & wife, Ida Shuff, (parents of Eli) bought a piece of property there and had settled in.
That's when the trouble began. Well.. Ida kept house for a living and Wade would do odd jobs. One of the jobs that he was hired to do was to build a fence for this gentleman. So he and Eli started on this fence, and their " employer " interupted them by telling them that that's not the way to build a fence here in Florida, because the soil was different there, than it was in West Virginia and it would never hold up.
Well... Needless to say that made Wade mad. So He, Eli and their employer ended up in an awful big fight with Wade picking up a shovel and hitting their " employer " over the head with it.
Wade truly thought they had killed this poor fellow. So he and Eli went into hiding. They hid in the woods and in the swamps, but eventually the police found them, and of course hauled them off to jail. When Ida got wind of what had happened, she really got mad. So for the next few weeks she would go to the jailhouse everyday and beg the police to let Eli out, so that she could take him home. They got tired of her coming around so they let him out, in his mother's care.
When they got home from the police station, Ida had given Eli some train money to come back to Wayne,W.Va. on.
In the mean time, Ida and the rest of the family, (excluding Wade, who was still in jail) were packing up to move back to W.Va. also.
Well.. When she arrived in W.Va., Eli still had not shown up.
And he never did.
Ida passed away in August of 1947 never having seen her son since that day in Callahan.
It has always been suspected that he was robbed and murdered for his train fare, and that his body was probably dumped in the swamp.
Or that he could have moved elsewhere to start a new life.
Story has it that Wade Powers was awfully rough on his children. It could be that Eli just simply moved away, to avoid any more abuse or trouble from his father.