Blood Wedding

18

“One thing we have to do,” Lem said when he and Fargo talked things over that night, “is find out where Murray is. We can’t do anything else until we do that.”

“We’ll let Rip tell us,” Fargo said.

“Rip won’t tell you the truth about anything. He’s always been able to look a man in the eye and tell the biggest whopper you ever heard. You’ll never even get him to admit what he’s been doing. If he’s been doing it. I still can’t believe it of him.”

“I could be wrong about him,” Fargo said, “but I don’t think so. The way I lay it out, everything points to him.”

“I know that. You make a good case. But I’ve known Rip for five or six years, lived here beside him, and worked with him all that time. I hate to think he’d turned on his neighbors like that.”

“You don’t seem too interested in having him as a son-in-law, no matter how long you’ve known him.”

“Well, that’s a different story. He’s a little lazy, he let his place get run down, and he’s not the man for Abby. Jed was more what I had in mind. He had backbone, and he didn’t mind a little hard work. I was hoping Abby could find somebody like that. Or maybe somebody like you.”

“I’m not cut out for farming, as much as I admire Abby. She’s a fine woman, and she deserves better than me.”

“Be hard to find anybody like that around here. Be hard to find anybody at all if we don’t stop Murray. But Rip’s not going to help with that.”

“He is,” Fargo said. “He’s just not going to know he’s doing it.”

And he told Lem what he wanted him to do.

Early the next morning, while the dew was still on the fields, Lem rode to Rip’s house and called him outside.

“We’ll be riding out to get Murray tomorrow,” Lem said, sitting easy and relaxed in the saddle.

Rip stood on his little front porch and looked up at him, squinting his eyes against the bright morning sun.

“Who’s going to be in the posse?” he asked.

“You will be, I hope,” Lem said.

“I’ll go. I’ve already told you that. But who else? How many?”

“Just about everybody living around here said they’d be willing to ride, but I wanted to let you know first. We can for sure count on Cass and Bob. Molly Doyle. Fargo. Me and Abby. And Angel Murray.”

“Good Lord. Are you telling me she’s on our side now? That she’d ride against her own daddy?”

“She probably wouldn’t be doing it if he hadn’t tried to kill her,” Lem said. “There’s something about having your pa shoot at you that has a way of changing your mind about him.”

Rip nodded his agreement. “I can see that, I guess. You sure you want Abby along? It’s going to be plenty dangerous if you find Murray. He’s not going to give up just because you ask him to. There’ll be shooting.”

“Abby says she won’t stay behind, danger or not. And we’ll find Murray, all right. Fargo says he knows where he’s hiding.”

Rip frowned at the mention of Fargo’s name.

“I don’t think Fargo’s as smart as he thinks he is. Where does he say Murray’s located?”

“He’s in a cave over by the big river. He had Fargo prisoner there for a while, before he got away.”

“And Fargo thinks Murray’s still there?”

“That’s what he says. It’ll take us a while to get there, and Fargo better be right about it. If he’s not, we could be in big trouble. What with most of the able-bodied men riding out, all our homes will be left wide open. Murray could just sneak in and take ’em over.”

Rip seemed to think about that for a second or two before saying, “Now, why would Murray want to do that?”

“I don’t have the least idea. It was just something that worried me.”

“You don’t have to worry about it.” Rip’s voice was confident. “We’ll catch him in that cave and bottle him up. That’ll be the end of him.”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Lem said.

“Did he take the bait?” Fargo asked.

“You bet,” Lem said. “Like the biggest catfish in the Missouri. Swallowed it hook, line, sinker and all. You sure you can follow him?”

“I can follow anybody.”

Lem looked skeptical. “He might spot you.”

Fargo grinned. “He’ll never know I’m within fifty miles of him.”

Angel had known he was following her, he thought. Or she’d guessed he was. But she was expecting him to follow her. Rip didn’t know anybody was onto him, and he was probably confident that they hadn’t figured out about him and Murray yet.

“I hope you’re right,” Lem said. “If he catches you, we’ll never find out where Murray’s hiding.”

“You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Fargo said. “I’ll find out, and then we’ll get him.”

Lem shook his head doubtfully. “I sure hope you’re right about that.”

Fargo hoped so, too.

There had been a little rain the day before, not much, but enough to soften the ground. And the shoe on the left front hoof of Rip’s horse had a big nick in it. Fargo was able to stay well back and follow the tracks, which were so plain that it didn’t take a man of Fargo’s skills to see them. A kid could have done it.

The trail led to the creek and turned into the trees not far from the marshy area where Paul Murray and the others who had died with him had been buried. Fargo wondered if Rip was going to try the same trick Angel had used when she was toying with Fargo, but the tracks never got within ten feet of the stream. Rip had gone into the trees for concealment, not because he thought he was being followed, but just so that nobody who happened to be out riding the countryside would see him by accident. He didn’t think anyone was behind him. Why would he? He didn’t know that Fargo was onto him.

He had left his house within fifteen minutes of Lem’s visit. Fargo had given him a good lead and then gone after him. He was sure Rip would want to tell Murray of the big opportunity he was going to have.

There were two ways Murray could go when he heard the news. He could do as Lem had suggested to Rip and try to take over the farmhouses. Or he could go about setting up an ambush on the way to the cave, hoping to wipe out all the farmers at once. He hadn’t had much luck against them so far when you thought about it, picking off one at a time. He was losing more men than he was killing. But now he’d have a chance to get the whole bunch of farmers in one place.

Or so he thought. Fargo had no intention of letting anything like that happen. He had a couple of ideas of his own. Either the farmers would set up their own ambush or they’d attack Murray where he was hiding, probably the latter. It would be a complete surprise, since Murray would think they had other plans.

After he’d ridden in the trees along the creek for several miles, Fargo saw that the tracks turned to leave the cover. He thought it was time to be careful, so he dismounted and looped the reins over a tree limb, preferring to travel on foot.

When he came to the edge of the trees, he saw a dilapidated building that rose up from the ground like something out of a crazy dream. It didn’t look like any house that Fargo had ever seen. It was built up off the ground, unlike all the farmhouses Fargo had been in, and there was a skirting around it. It was three stories tall and had balconies on the second and third floors. There were lightning rods sticking up from all but one of the several cupolas that sat atop the third floor. The cupola that lacked a lightning rod had a weather vane that was bent over to one side.

Fargo had no idea how such a house had come to be there in the middle of nowhere. Some madman must have built it, he thought, a madman with a lot of money, but no one, mad or otherwise, had lived there for a long time. The house sagged to one side as if it were tired and about to lie down. The doors were missing.

But Murray was there. Fargo saw the gang’s horses, and Rip’s tracks led right up to it. The only guard was a man sitting on the porch that appeared to run all around the house. He was smoking a cigarette and not looking at anything in particular. It was plain that he didn’t expect to be bothered.

Fargo faded back into the trees and walked to the Ovaro. It was time to get a little surprise ready for Murray. And for Rip, too.

“We’ll go tonight,” Fargo told the small group gathered in the front of Lem’s house.

There were ten of them, the ones whose names Lem had called out to Rip and five others whom Fargo didn’t know. The last five lived a bit farther away than the other farmers, but they had been at the wedding party, and they were just as eager to get rid of Murray as anybody else. Fargo thought ten might be enough. Although he had fifteen or sixteen men, Murray wouldn’t be ready for any kind of attack. And his men hadn’t shown themselves to be especially good fighters in any of the other encounters Fargo had seen them in. Besides, if the plan he had come up with worked out, Murray might not have fifteen men left when the fighting started, at least not able-bodied men.

“Murray’s hiding at the Bigelow House,” Lem told the group.

He had explained to Fargo earlier that the house had been built about twenty years earlier by a former sea captain from back east. The story was that he’d had a bad experience on his last voyage out and vowed to move as far from the sea as he could get.

“When he found this place, he figured he’d made it,” Lem had explained. “You can’t get much farther from the ocean than this.”

But the sea captain hadn’t had any better luck in his new house than he’d had on his final voyage. His wife got sick and died within the first year of their move. The captain himself had died of a fever not long afterward. His only child, a son about fifteen years old, had disappeared after the funeral and never been seen again. The only things that remained of the captain and his family were the house and some vague memories.

“Nobody ever wanted to live there after the captain died,” Lem had told Fargo. “The house was like something you’d find in Maine, maybe, or someplace like that. Not here. Nobody who farms has time to take care of a house like that. And anyway the land wasn’t fertile around there. Nobody knows why, but things just wouldn’t grow. The house is just about falling down now, and nobody ever goes by there. Murray could stay there for a year, and nobody would ever know.”

The people who were gathered at Lem’s all knew where the Bigelow House was, though they never went near it. All of them also had ideas about what to do about Murray. And they all wanted to talk about them at once.

Lem quieted them down. “We’re going to leave that up to Fargo. He’s had more experience with men like Murray than we have.”

There was a little mumbling, but it died down quickly as people realized the truth of what Lem was telling them.

“We’ll leave here at about midnight,” Fargo told them. “We’ll stop on the way and get Rip. We’ll have to take him with us to be sure he doesn’t warn Murray.”

“Why don’t we just kill him?” Bob Tabor asked. “He’s got enough of us killed, the son of a bitch.”

“Why not give him a trial?” Fargo asked. “The sheriff might not want any part of this fight, but he’d have to keep Rip in his jail if you told him what’s been going on. Then you could see to it that Rip gets a legal hanging.”

There was some more mumbling and grumbling about that, but Lem calmed everybody down.

“Listen here,” he said, “Fargo’s got a plan about how to do this, and we don’t have to kill Rip to do it. If we want to stay on the side of the law, such law as there is here, we ought to try not to hang people just for the hell of it. Rip’s done us wrong, but he’s still our neighbor. We ought to give him a chance to defend himself.”

“I guess you’re right about it,” Cass Ellis said. “A man’s got a right to have his side of the story heard before he gets hung.”

“All right, then,” Lem said. “Now let Fargo tell you what we’re gong to do.”