“accident,” statistically speaking.
Threads thus pulled together in such fashion, one sensed an undeniable inkling of … intelligence. A whiff of … purpose. Something other than random chance. So many odd events just happening to come together?
Hardly plausible.
Someone was reading from a script, it seemed.
Turning to the first page of the file he wrote a single word.
“Horton.”
He returned the file to claims for further processing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The men arrived on site early the next morning in a lather of anticipation, having first bolted down a cup of joe and cut of sirloin and scrambled eggs and bacon and hot biscuits brimming with gravy, then another cup of joe. Like experimental scientists rushing to the lab to see if the experiment worked. Hopeful in the extreme, but prepared for disappointment as well. Arriving in their trucks one after another as dawn stole over the land.
Stealthily the men made their way to the brush-thick loam in which the trap cleverly had been set the previous afternoon. As the platoon steadily advanced the unmistakable hints of intelligence at work plainly emerged.
Something had been trapped.
Because the trap had been intentionally well concealed in a thicket of shrub they heard the thrashing critter before they saw it. Heard distinctly the unmistakable commotion of a caged beast, that is, as the company drew within, say, thirty yards of the covert locale.
Many an ear pricked. Many a pulse quickened.
Could it be? Yes it could. Something’s coming, something good.
Frank and Jay as self-appointed forepersons of the endeavor stole crouching through the scrub, rifles in hand, by way of a reconnoitering initial foray. Moving cautiously to the point a sundial easily could have timed their advance. Though eager in the extreme, neither man wanted to be the first to discover the trapped animal yet boasted one free paw full of claws.
As more closely they approached, the scrabbling, shaking, atavistic hubbub emanating from the trap took on an unexpected tenor. A frankly bewildering tone, to be frank. Not the conventional rise and fall of feline yowling they expected, suffice to say.
The men stopped. Intently they listened. Again slowly forward they crawled.
Again the unexpected sounds faintly could be heard.
“God damn it god damn it” --- or words to that effect -- somewhat vaguely could be made out.
Frank stopped in his tracks. He hushed his crawling companion with a finger to the lips.
“You hear that?” he whispered.
Jay nodded.
“Sure did,” he mouthed back.
“Mebbe its Buster and Bob,” Frank suggested.
“They was behind us,” Jay responded.
The men watched and waited silently for a time.
More thrashing and mad crashing and shaking of steel. The sounds of a caged animal, assuredly.
Then another cry, one heard even more clearly than the first.
“Somebody. Anybody. Get me the hell out!”
With a sigh Frank stood, as did Jay, and the others of the company who too had heard the disappointing intelligence. They pushed through the brush to the side of the trap, rifles at their sides, looking like a boy scout troop that has just discovered the raccoon it diligently has tracked is, in fact, the scout master’s poodle.
“Hold on hold on hold on,” Frank said with something like disgust.
He turned back to the equally disgusted company.
“Who knows how to open this damn thing?”
Nobody did, particularly, which is why it took the better part of a half hour to get Lester Grimes freed of its steel and chicken wire confines. Lester at length climbed spitting and sputtering from the smallish -- for a full grown man -- bunk in which he had unexpectedly spent a coolish spring night. Brimming with equal parts indignation and explanation, though the former fell on deaf ears, and the latter was not especially necessary.
That particular branch of the Grimes clan inhabited a hovel just the other side of Blue Creek where the creek empties into the Platte, as every man on hand well knew. None among the regiment needed a diagram to immediately understand exactly how the trap intended for a cougar had, instead, bagged a mere Grimes. One look at the poultry decorating the interior of the intentionally well-concealed trap and Lester did what his nature demanded of him, no questions asked. With chicken fetching a market price of eight-six cents a pound, a real steal. Literally. Little suspecting the trap into which he stumbled. Though on reflection some might have wondered why Lester did not stop to question exactly why and how freshly sectioned poultry parts happened -- just happened -- to be lying about for anyone with an appetite to grab, before they remembered he was a Grimes.
Lester once freed drove himself to town later that very day to swear out a complaint with the Sheriff against the half dozen or so men whose names he remembered from among the capturing party, for kidnapping, and false imprisonment, and trapping a man out of season. Sheriff Hampton nodded and smiled and allowed as how he would get right on it. He placed the hastily scrawled and dutifully X-ed complaint in the file drawer reserved for those things promptly to be forgotten, then promptly forgot about it.
Not because he, the Sheriff, lacked temerity to tackle the occasional thorny assignment. Whether Lester had a legal beef for having been lured into a trap intent on stealing chickens, for example, or, conversely, whether Lester faced jeopardy for compromising the trap intended for something with four feet -- and so was more properly considered the un-aggrieved party in the whole mess -- represented a jurisprudential hum-dinger, no mistake. No, the matter failed to capture the fancy of local law on strictly jurisdictional grounds.
For going on a generation the land inhabited by the brethren or coven or posse -- or whatever the followers of Henry and Parrish were calling themselves these days -- had been beyond the reach of mere government, immunized or inoculated or shielded by unspoken consensus, not lawless so much as a law unto its own. Say a roughly ten-mile by ten-mile roughly hexagonal slice of black dirt and pine- dotted hills bordered on the north by the river and on the other three sides by fanaticism. Or, more accurately, followers of an itinerate tent preacher named Hoskins, of whom Henry himself had been a follower, and thereafter Parrish. Walled off not by iron curtain so much as wholesale, unquestioning, unswerving adherence to received dogma and conviction. A Kingdom into whose confines outsiders only sporadically strayed -- for purposes of birthdays and barn raisings and threshing bees and horseshoe pitching of a summer’s afternoon -- but which remained intellectually impermeable withal, and thus beyond penetration or contamination, or even facially benign infiltration, by any and all outsiders and their crazy ideas. Any federal revenuer intent on collecting a pound of taxing flesh was sure to be met by a wall of buckshot. Or a Methodist missionary. When Sheriff Hampton’s predecessor the first Sheriff Hampton foolishly attempted to serve a subpoena or warrant of distraint or restraining order on a sullen camp follower of a hot summer afternoon some years earlier the matter did not end well. The Sheriff summarily jailed a half dozen men and walked with a limp for three weeks. Eventually the whole thing was dropped. No treaties were actually inked. Instead, by mute consensus and unspoken agreement the law and other trifling social mores to which the rest of us dutifully bend and scrape agreed to look the other way so far as the roughly hexagonal principality of rural dystopia was concerned. Provided, of course, the doom-and-gloomers did not bust out from their hostile and unforgiving plain to bodily assault us. They didn’t much bother us, and we didn’t much bother them. We could hunt there, and fish, and take short cuts to other places, but at our own risk.
As Lester found out the hard way, too.
Not to mention the fish and game boys sent packing a week or so earlier.