Matthew Corbett 03 - Mister Slaughter

'Mother!' Lark said, but the woman just stared blankly at her. 'Faith,' she corrected, her mouth tasting of ashes. 'Come in here! Hurry!' Her mother, an obedient child, got up and entered the barn.

The man rushed to a knothole facing the road and peered out; within seconds he turned to his haversack and took from it a spyglass, which he opened to its fullest extent and put to the knothole. Lark reasoned that the approaching visitor was still distant. There followed a silence, as Faith stood beside Lark, grasped her hand and kicked idly at the straw.

The man grunted. 'I am impressed,' he said. 'Found himself an Indian guide, as well.' He lowered the spyglass, closed it and returned it to the haversack. He stood rubbing his bare chin, his cold eyes moving back and forth between the woman, the girl and the wagon. Then he walked to an axe leaning against the wall, and when he picked it up Lark caught her breath.

He chopped out two of the spokes from one of the wagon's wheels. Then, with quick and powerful blows, he began to destroy the wheel, until the wood splintered and broke and the wagon sagged. He threw the axe aside, reached again into the haversack and brought out two items that he offered to Lark.

'Here,' he said. 'Go on, take them!' There was impatience in his voice. Lark accepted the gold coins, and once they were in her hand they were visible to Faith, who made a cooing noise and wanted to hold them.

'The young man's name is Matthew Corbett,' said the man, and Lark noted that small beads of sweat had bloomed on his clean upper lip. 'I want you to give those to him. Tell him we're square, as far as I'm concerned. Tell him to go home.' He strode to the rear of the barn, where he kicked enough boards loose to crouch down and get through into the orchard beyond. 'But tell him,' he said when his way of escape had been made, 'that if he wishes to find death, I will be glad to give that to him, also.' He took his tricorn in his hand and knelt down.

'You aren't going to kill us?' Lark asked, as her mother rolled the gold coins between her palms.

The man paused. He gave her a slight smile that contained in equal measures both disdain and mockery, but not a whisker's weight of pity.

'Dear Lark,' he said, 'I have already killed you.'

And with that, the man pushed his shoulders through, and was gone.

PART FOUR: Rattlesnake Country

Twenty-One

After Lark had told her story, Matthew walked for the second time into the blood-stained kitchen, not to further test his stomach but to reaffirm that this hideous, unbelievable sight was inconvertibly true.

The scene of carnage had not changed. He put his hand to his mouth once again, but it was only a reflex action; he had not yet lost his breakfast of cattail roots nor the midday meal of dried meat and a handful of berries, which meant that he was either toughening up or that the food was too precious to expel. He thought the latter was more likely, for he never wished to be tough enough to take a sight like this without feeling sick.

He walked around the kitchen, avoiding the blood and in the case of Peter Lindsay, the brains that had been blown out the back of the head. He was looking for details, as the sunlight through the window shimmered in the gore and the flies buzzed back and forth on their industrious journeys.

No boots on the man's corpse. Slaughter's old boots, taken of course from Reverend Burton, were lying on the floor. Couldn't Slaughter just ask for a damned pair of boots? Matthew wondered. Or at the very least take them without stealing someone's life? God damn the man! Steady, steady, he told himself. There was no use in losing control. He was shaking a little bit, and he had to get a grip. Slaughter would not be Slaughter, if he asked for things he desired. No, Slaughter's way was to take, and to kill, and however senseless it seemed to Matthew it must make some kind of sense to the killer. Or not. Matthew thought that Slaughter was a breed apart; a human being who detested the very air that other humans breathed, who hated people right down to their shadows. But to kill children

Matthew picked up a green marble from the table. No, it was not altogether green. It had within it a swirl of blue. It was a beautiful thing, polished and smooth. He had it in mind that he should put two or three of these marbles in his pocket, to rub between his fingers, to remind himself that beyond the ugliness and evil of what had happened here there still remained beauty in the world. But he had no wish to rob the dead and, besides, marbles were for boys. He was far from boyhood now. Getting older, he thought, by the minute.

He put the marble back where it was, looked at all the food on the table and knew that Greathouse might be able to cast the corpses out of his mind and feast on the leftovers, but Matthew would rather have eaten cattail roots and dried meat for a week rather than touch any of this tainted groaning board. Or perhaps, he suspected, he wasn't hungry enough.

The pot of soapy water on the table drew his attention. In it he saw floating hair of many colors. Slaughter had gotten his shave; one more step toward his presentation as an earl, a duke, or a marquis, the better to cut the throat of some wealthy widow and throw her in a pauper's grave.

God damn the man.

Walker In Two Worlds came into the room. This was also his second visit here; his face was impassive, his eyes fixed only on Matthew. But he looked tired and drawn, and even his feathers seemed to have wilted like the petals of a dying flower.

'Slaughter went up the hillside,' he reported. 'I caught sight of him, moving among some boulders. He got into the woods before I could draw my bow.'

Matthew nodded, knowing Walker had chosen the better part of valor-and shown good sense-not to continue the pursuit without having the little bullpup pistol covering his back.

'It's very thick up in there,' Walker said. 'Many places to set a trap.'

'He'll keep going.' Matthew opened his left hand and looked at the two gold coins Lark had given him. They were both five-guinea pieces, the same type as he'd taken from the lockbox in Chapel's house. Some well-to-do traveler or merchant had come to grief on the Philadelphia Pike, and coughed these up for Slaughter and Rattison. 'I wonder if he really thinks I'll give up.'

Now Walker did turn his gaze away from Matthew and with hooded eyes regarded the dead man and the two children. 'Will you?'

Matthew saw a small blood-splattered pillow on the floor, next to one of the chairs. It displayed an embroided picture of a robin sitting on a tree branch.

'I don't understand your god,' said Walker, in a toneless voice. 'Our spirits created the world and the heavens and all that we are, but they never promised to keep their eye upon every little bird. I thought your god showed more ' He searched his memory for the word. 'Compassion.'

Matthew couldn't reply. Rain fell equally on the just and unjust, he thought. The Bible surely contained more verses and lessons about misery and untimely death. But how could God turn a blind eye to something like this? The question begged for an answer. More than that; it screamed for an answer. But there was no answer, and Matthew put the two gold coins into his waistcoat pocket along with the other items of jewelry and got out of the kitchen before his sense of dark despair crushed him to his knees.

Walker followed him. Outside, the girl and her mother sat in the shade of a brilliant yellow elm tree. The girl's back was pressed hard against the trunk, her glazed eyes staring straight ahead, while the mother was chattering with a strange childlike abandon and playing with the hem of her daughter's light blue dress.

Faith looked up at Matthew as he approached. 'Are you Mr. Shayne?'

Her voice was high-pitched and childlike. Matthew thought it was nearer to the voice of a girl seven years old. The sound of it was unsettling, coming from the throat of a woman in her early thirties. But Matthew had already seen the emptiness of the woman's eyes, the scorched shock where a mind used to be, and he thought that here was a patient for the doctors in Westerwicke.

'No,' Matthew said. Lark had previously given him their names and the names of the dead. The girl had come out of the barn like a sleepwalker, her face devoid of expression but for the tear tracks on her cheeks and the grim set of her mouth, and she'd opened her hand to show him the gold coins.

He says you're square as far as he's concerned, she'd said. Her eyes had rolled