Blood Wedding

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.”