The wheel mark was easy enough to see among the others. It had picked up a small nail somewhere along the way, the weight of the wagon sufficient to embed the nail into the wooden wheel.
When he got to the dusty, baking street, Fargo found that the tracks led north, just as the liveryman had said.
Getting out of town wasn’t easy. The main street was packed with people loading displays on flatbed wagons for the parade. The Tillman name was on virtually every one of them.
People were standing on some of the wagons. They were practicing for the parade tomorrow and were in costume. Their attire told the story of the great Tillman family, which Fargo found about as fascinating as watching ants scurry down a sidewalk for a couple of hours.
The pageant used six wagons for the entire boring story to be told. How the Tillmans—a fat man gussied up in fake mountain clothing—had first pioneered this land. How the Tillmans—a skinny man sporting a peace officer’s badge the size of a baseball mitt—had brought law and order to this place that had once been a roost for robbers. How the Tillmans—a pregnant woman surrounded by four screaming three-year-olds—had brought civilization to the local Indians, as depicted by a white man with a walleye and some kind of red goop on his face. He wore a headband and a single feather. And three other equally spellbinding floats. Maybe the locals would find this sort of event fun. Fargo would prefer a lady, a bottle, and a nice firm bed.
Liz Turner wiped a sleeve across her classically beautiful face and fed more sheets into her Washington Hand Press, the same printing machine that she and her late husband had lugged across three states and two territories while looking for the right place to settle.
Tillman, Arkansas wasn’t her ideal settling place but for the moment she didn’t have any choice. One wintry morning two years ago, her husband, Richard, had been shot in the back while coming to work. He had been working on a story about the place Noah Tillman owned—and would let nobody but a few of his gunnys on to—Skeleton Key. Not even Sheriff Tom Tillman had been on Skeleton Key. Liz was more than a little prejudiced where Tom was concerned. She’d been carrying on a very secret affair with him for more than eight months.
She wanted to find her husband’s killer, but for now, the day she needed to get the weekly Clarion out, there was no time to dote on her memories of Richard, or to follow up on the strange rumors about the island. There was just Henry, her fourteen-year-old apprentice, who alternated working the press and picking his nose, and herself. She spent the time feeding paper into the sturdy press and checking every fifth page as it was printed, making sure everything in the hand-set columns stayed where it belonged. The Clarion didn’t have any of the sparkle or sizzle of the bigger town newspapers, but she took pride in how neat it looked.
She inhaled deeply of the scent of printer’s ink. To her the odor was more satisfying than the sweetest perfume. She loved the newspaper business. She’d grown up an orphan on the streets of Baltimore, nothing more than an urchin. So many young ones like that died of disease or hunger or at the hands of perverts. Somehow, she had triumphed. Somehow.
She glanced at Henry. His finger was up his nose. He extricated it quickly and then wiped said finger on his corduroys.
“Henry,” she said, “I’m just afraid you’re going to get that finger permanently stuck up there someday.”
Henry grinned. “My whole family picks like I do.”
“Never invite me to one of your family reunions, Henry.”
They were both laughing about that one when the front door opened and Mike “Red” Grogan came to the long front desk where they took orders for printing (printing jobs earned them a lot more than the newspaper) and advertisements. Red was a spoiled rich kid but unlike most of the spoiled rich kids around here, he wasn’t a snob and he wasn’t mean. He used any excuse to come in here and see Liz. Lord, he had this terrible crush on her. She knew that she was still attractive at age thirty-two. She had that pretty face and a shape that had held its shapeliness and she laughed in such a soft, gentle way that she could charm a drunken grizzly bear.
She just wished Mike was about fifteen years older. For her sake and his.
“Hi,” he said, immediately blushing.
He almost never had a good excuse to visit the newspaper office. In fact, most of his excuses were embarrassingly bad, usually revolving around how we wanted to learn the newspaper business and be a journalist someday. Right. His father would send him east to school—his father had graduated from Dartmouth and never let you forget it—and then, like his old man, Mike would go into banking. The family owned fourteen banks in the state. By the time Mike took the reins, that number would probably be in the vicinity of twenty. Nobody sane would turn down a job like that to work and starve at a newspaper.
“I might have a story for you.”
She had to admit, this surprised her. This was the first time he’d ever offered her a story lead. But before she got too excited, she had to remember that this was a kid who practically swooned every time he saw her on the street. And who would say anything to justify stopping by the newspaper office.
“A story?”
He leaned forward to stage whisper his response. “Fella named Fargo over at the Royalton Hotel told me that two gunnys broke into his room and kidnapped a girl he was with.”
She looked at him skeptically. “Now, did this really happen, Red?”
“It sure did. And not very long ago, either.”
“And his name is Fargo.”
“That’s right. Big fella. Tough looking.”
“I’ve heard of him,” she said. “He’s tough all right.” Liz smiled. Couldn’t help it. By anybody’s standard, Mike here had brought her one hell of a good newspaper story. She reached over and patted his hand, knowing that he was probably going to faint if she held it there very long. “You may just become a reporter yet, Red.”
6
On a sunny day like this, it was hard to imagine a more beautiful land than the Ozark Plateau. Ragged mountain tops gleaming in the light, deep forests filled with game, and streams that gleamed clean and pure, perfect for the fishing the Trailsman wanted to do.
The tracks remained clear, the impression of the wheel with the nail in it clear as a beacon, no matter how many other tracks tried to obscure it.
He’d gone maybe a mile down the red clay road, the land falling away here and there on the plateau to reveal deep gorges, when his hat went sailing off thanks to a bullet.
Fargo acted instinctively, and just in time to avoid the second bullet that immediately followed the first. He dropped down on the side of his horse so the shooter couldn’t see his head or torso, reining the horse over to a copse of pine trees several yards off of the trail.
There he yanked his Sharps from its scabbard, rolled away from the horse to a point behind the pines, and jerked up to his feet so that he could return fire.
The shooter was good but not that good. He pumped several more shots at Fargo, each one nicking at the pine behind which the Trailsman hid. But none scored a bulls-eye.
The shooter was hiding behind his own copse of pines on the other side of the road. Fargo did a little shooting of his own. He wanted to force some return fire so he knew exactly where the shooter was. They could sit here all day firing at each other and not accomplish a damned thing. Fargo wanted to know who the shooter was and what he wanted. Did he have anything to do with the kidnapping? If he didn’t, what could he have against Fargo? The Trailsman hadn’t really met anybody else except the livery man. Since the shooter didn’t seemed inclined to decisive action, Fargo took it upon himself to bring this little adventure to a close.