Brun snorted. “Shucks. Your brother ain’t all that great. I beat him once out to the fair in the turkey shoot.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” Tom warned.
“Don’t you underestimate me,” Brun said.
“Whoever shot Emmett and almost shot Charles is bound to try again,” Fargo mentioned.
“Have you ever been to our lodge?” Tom asked, and answered his own question. “No, of course you haven’t. It’s a fortress. We’ll be safe there.”
“For how long?”
Tom didn’t hide his annoyance. “Why are you bringing this up? To upset me? Isn’t it bad enough I’ve lost one of my brothers? Must you rub my nose in the fact I might lose more of my family?”
“So you really care about them?”
“Go away,” Tom said. “I didn’t like you when we first met and I like you less now. So what if I haven’t gotten along with them in the past? They’re still my brothers and sisters.”
Cletus Brun said, “You heard Mr. Tom. Go pester someone else, little man, and leave us be.”
Fargo couldn’t remember the last time anyone called him “little.” But the woodsman was a lot wider across the chest and shoulders and must outweigh him by sixty to seventy pounds. “Suit yourselves.” He tapped his spurs and rode to the head of the line.
Roland was a study in glum. “I just don’t get it,” he said as Fargo came up. “I just don’t get it at all.”
“Get what?”
“Why the killer chose Emmett. He could have shot any of us. Why Emmett? Emmett was just a kid.”
“He also shot at Charles.”
Roland gave a start. “The next oldest. It’s almost as if the killer started with the youngest and was working his way up.”
Fargo hadn’t thought of that. “How long until we reach the hunting lodge?”
“Another hour and a half yet, maybe more. Why?”
They were about to go around a bend in the trail.
“Keep going,” Fargo said. “I’ll catch up.” He rode past the bend and promptly reined into the woods. A dozen yards in he drew rein. No one else had seen him break away. He sat and watched them file by, one by one until the last of the pack animals went past.
Fargo was alone. Silence fell but it didn’t last long. A jay shrieked and a robin broke into song and presently a doe and a fawn emerged from the greenery and crossed the trail farther down.
Fargo was acting on another hunch. Odds were, whoever shot Emmett wanted to add to the tally, in which case the killer might be stalking them. He stayed where he was as the minutes crawled on turtle’s feet. He was about convinced he had been wrong and was raising the reins when the Ovaro pricked its ears and turned its head toward the trail.
Around the bend came a rider. A middle-aged man of middling height who looked as if he never bathed and wore clothes that looked as if they had never been washed. He was chewing lustily and his cheek bulged, and a moment later he spat tobacco juice. He held a rifle by the barrel, the stock propped on his thigh.
This, then, was the killer. Fargo let him go by. He mentally counted to thirty, reined to the trail, and shadowed the shadower.
Fargo could have shot him. He could ambush him as the killer had ambushed them but he needed answers and the only way to get them was to take him alive.
Spitting tobacco every now and again, the man rode along as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Fargo stayed well back. At each turn he slowed and checked before riding on. A quarter of an hour went by. Half an hour. More. By Fargo’s reckoning they were near the hunting lodge. At the next bend he slowed again and warily risked a peek.
The man had stopped. Thirty yards away he sat his horse in the middle of the trail. For a few moments Fargo thought the man had heard him. Then it hit him—the killer was waiting for someone.
Reaching down, Fargo shucked the Henry. He quietly ratcheted a round into the chamber and swung down. Holding on to the reins, he led the Ovaro in among some oaks and tied the reins to a limb. Then, paralleling the trail, he crept forward. The killer had his back to him. It would be so easy to fix a bead between his shoulder blades and bring him crashing down.
The man’s sorrel stamped and the man twisted in the saddle.
Fargo froze. He was in a crouch in high weeds and hoped he blended in.
The man was staring back down the trail and had his head cocked to one side.
A second later Fargo heard the thud of hooves.
Around the bend came two more on horseback, a man and a woman. Both were young, no older than twenty-five, and wore matching riding outfits and polished boots. Both had brown hair and brown eyes. Both had oval faces, thin eyebrows and thin lips. Judging by how much alike they looked, Fargo took them for brother and sister. Neither wore a revolver that he could see, but from the saddle scabbard on each horse jutted the hardwood stock of a rifle.
Tobacco Man didn’t seem surprised or alarmed. He turned his mount sideways and leveled his Spencer and when they were ten feet out he said, “That’s close enough.”
The pair came to a stop. They glanced at one another and smiled.
“What’s so funny?” Tobacco Man demanded.
“We thought we made our wishes clear back in Hannibal, monsieur,” the young man said with an accent that made Fargo think of New Orleans, and the French Quarter.
“We told you that you were not to take a hand in this yet here you are,” the young woman chimed in.
Tobacco Man showed his yellow teeth in a sneer of contempt. “And I told you two that I don’t scare easy. You’re the ones who should stay out of it if you know what’s good for you.”
“We can’t do that,” the young man said.
“We’ve been paid,” the young woman said.
“So have me and my pard,” Tobacco Man said. “The difference being that one of us is on the inside, which gives us an edge.” He wagged the Spencer. “Were I you I’d light a shuck and forget this whole business.”
“We can’t do that,” the young man said again.
“A contract is a contract,” said the young woman.
“You two are damned peculiar. You dress alike and you talk alike and I suspect you even think alike. It’s spooky.”
“Do you hear him, sister?”
“I hear him, brother.”
They laughed.
“That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about,” Tobacco Man said. “Now get it through your heads that this is our job, not yours. My partner and me are locals. You two are from out of town. That gives him and me a better right.”
The young man put his left hand on his saddle horn and lowered his other hand to his side. “What a marvelous convolution of logic.”
“Isn’t it though?” his sister agreed.
“A what?” Tobacco Man said.
“When we saw you following Charles Clyborn around Hannibal we knew you were a competitor,” the brother said.
“We’re not being paid for you or your friend so we tried to persuade you and your friend to bow out,” added his sister.
Tobacco Man spat dark juice.
“It didn’t work,” the brother declared.
“No, it didn’t,” the sister echoed.
“So now you leave us no choice.”
“None at all.”
Tobacco Man raised his Spencer. “You prattle worse than biddy hens, the pair of you. Since you won’t listen, you’re the ones who leave me no choice. I’ll shoot you both dead if you don’t light a shuck. Be smart and make yourselves scarce in these parts.”
Once again the brother and sister glanced at one another and then at Tobacco Man.
“Did you know when you woke up this morning?” the brother asked.
“Did you feel it in any way?” from the sister.
“Know what?” Tobacco Man responded.
It was the sister who said, “Did you know that this was the day you were going to die?”