the throes of raw abandon.
“I’m almost there!”
So was Fargo. His throat was constricted and his skin tingled. A tight sensation in his groin heralded his impending eruption, but he gritted his teeth and held off, thinking of the wall, the ceiling, the house, anything and everything except his body, and the throbbing.
“Ahhhhhhh!” Darby was at the pinnacle. Her eyes grew wide. She dug her nails in, and crested. Up and down, up and down, her body a lever, his the fulcrum. She gushed and gushed, and he did the same.
After a while Darby slowly disentangled herself and wearily stepped back. Her robe and undergarments were in disarray, her hair a mess. “I would like to put a bullet in your brain.”
Fargo adjusted his pants and his belt, and stepped aside. “Stop by anytime,” he said, and motioned at the doorway. Her hand was a blur, but he caught her wrist and held fast. “I don’t deserve that. You got what you came for.”
Tugging futilely to be free, Darby hissed, “I hate you! You’re a crude lout! A buffoon in buckskins!”
“Yet you made love to me.”
Darby’s features twisted into rage. She started to swing her other hand but thought better of it and with a visible effort of will, slowly relaxed, her venom subsiding but still there, just under the surface. “Let go of me, please. I would like to go to my room.”
Fargo did as she requested, but she stood there rubbing her wrist. “Do you want me to carry you?”
A sly smile came over her. “If you only knew what is in store, you would appreciate my gift.”
“I’m grateful for what you’ve done,” Fargo said, but he was referring to the slip of her tongue that confirmed his hunch about Priscilla and her.
Darby sidled past. She traced a finger across his jaw, saying, “When you are out there in the deep woods, think of me.” She paused to smooth her robe and fuss with her hair. “I will say one thing in your favor. If you track like you make love, then the man you are after is as good as snared.” She blew him a kiss and walked off.
Fargo watched her until she came to another door. It was open a crack. As she reached out, the door opened, and there was shadowy movement. She smiled at whoever was inside, said something, and went in.
Fargo shut his own door and plopped onto his back on the bed. The long day in the saddle, the meal, the interlude with Darby, all conspired to fill him with lassitude. He succumbed, drifting into a deep sleep.
He was unsure of exactly how much time had passed when he suddenly found himself awake, his eyes wide open. Something had snapped him out of dreamland. He probed with his senses, trying to identify the cause, and heard sounds from the front of the house.
Rising, he padded to the hall. Other doors were opening. From one stepped Arthur Draypool in an ankle- length nightshirt. From another came Garvey, wearing pants and nothing else. Darby emerged next, stifling a yawn and blinking in the glow of the hall lamp.
“What’s all the ruckus?” Garvey asked. “It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“I was having the most marvelous dream,” Draypool said. “I was back in South Carolina, revisiting the haunts of my youth.”
A loud, gruff voice rose to the rafters from downstairs. “Bring him in!” Judge Harding bawled. “I will speak with him immediately.”
Fargo followed the rest to the landing. At the foot of the stairs stood the judge in a bulky robe, Winifred at his side. The butler, Akuda, was hurrying down the entryway to the front door. There was a subdued exchange, and Akuda reappeared, leading a tall man in garb that marked him as a backwoodsman: a hat made from a raccoon pelt, including the tail, a buckskin shirt, and jeans. He removed his hat out of deference to Winifred.
“Bill Layton?” Judge Harding said. “What is the meaning of this outrageous disturbance at such an ungodly hour?”
Layton wrung his hat. “My apologies, Your Honor. Word is that you wanted to be informed right away if the Sangamon River Monster struck again. Any time of the day or night.” The man talked strangely, in a stilted cadence that suggested he was speaking by rote.
Fargo was puzzled, until it occurred to him that the whole incident had been concocted for his benefit.
Judge Harding was playing his part. “There has been an attack?” he asked, much more loudly than was warranted.
“Yes, sir. Early this evening a family of four was butchered on a farm ten miles north of Springfield. It’s terrible. Just terrible. Like all the rest of the Sangamon River Monster’s handiwork.”
“I’m sorry for the family, but the timing could not be more perfect,” Judge Harding said. “At last that madman has made a mistake we can capitalize on.”
Winifred had a plump hand to her throat, holding her nightgown close. “You’re going after him, I take it, dearest?”
“I must,” Judge Harding declared, “but I’m not going alone, so set your mind at rest.” He stabbed a finger at the butler. “Akuda, go wake Arthur and Fargo. Garvey, too, while you are at it.”
Draypool leaned over the banister to holler, “We are already up, Oliver! Give us ten minutes and we will be ready to depart.” He beamed at Fargo. “Can you believe our luck? Your first night here and you will have a crack at the Monster.”
“It’s too good to be true,” Fargo said.
13
It was called Old Woman Creek. A tributary of the Sangamon River, it was so far into the forest that few whites had ever set eyes on it. In recent months, though, a handful of hardy settlers had established homesteads on its grassy banks and were struggling to eke out an existence.
The Sweeney family had been one of them. A burly father with features as rugged as the land he cleared, a mother stout of body and given to hanging crosses on every wall, a boy of fifteen, on the verge of manhood, and a girl of twelve, sweet and innocent and dressed in white.
Their bodies had been left where they fell. As near as Fargo could reconstruct the sequence of events, the father had been chopping wood with his back to the forest and someone had slunk up behind him and caved in his skull. In falling, the man had reached for a rifle he had leaned against the woodpile, the instinctive, last act of a father wanting to protect his loved ones.
The mother must have been watching out a window and seen her husband die. Her body lay a few yards outside the cabin, a pistol only inches from her right hand. She had been shot in the chest. Fargo picked up the pistol and examined it. None of the cartridges in the cylinder had been fired.
The boy had rushed out to help them and been killed in the doorway, the top of his head blown off. Fargo had to step over the body to go inside.
In a corner near the fireplace lay the girl. She had been stabbed, not shot. Stabbed repeatedly. Scarlet stains marked her white dress in front and in back, indicating the killer had continued to stab her after she fell. From the blood on her fingers and her torn fingernails, Fargo could determine that she had fought fiercely for her life.
All the bodies had been mutilated. Their ears had been sliced off, and were missing. Trophies, apparently, as were random missing fingers and thumbs, and in the case of the mother, her nose. The father’s face had been kicked in. The son’s genitals were gone. Fargo had to turn away from the things done to the girl. Hideous things inflicted by a hideous mind.
“What did I tell you?” Arthur Draypool said as Fargo walked toward the door. “The murderer is as vile a human being as ever existed.”
Judge Harding nudged the boy’s body with his polished boot. “How can you call someone who could do this human? He’s a monster, and aptly named.”
Fargo breathed deep of the humid air. It had taken them half a day to get there; the judge, Arthur Draypool, Avril and Zeck, the overseer, Garvey, the man called Layton who had brought word of the slaughter, and four others who had not said a single word the entire ride. Fargo had ridden near the front of the group, with Draypool and Harding, and had not had much of a chance to study the four who had been at the rear. He studied them now.
They were cut from the same coarse cloth. Backwoodsmen, homespun and buckskins their attire. All but one wore badly scuffed boots or shoes. The last wore knee-high moccasins and was further different from the others in
