Bivins rocked back and forth, growing continually harder. He liked the slippery feeling that the two other men had left for him, and he realized he was getting close. He held the knife up in front of his face, giving Cammie Lynn a good look at it, and taking great pleasure in the terror he saw in her eyes.

Henry Bowman finally caught a glimpse of blue denim forty yards ahead of him. He quickly moved to put a large walnut tree between himself and the strangers he knew were up ahead, and then he did something that might have surprised a casual observer: he hooked his left index finger inside the steel band and positioned the left earplug in his left ear.

L.C. Bivins slowly waved the knife in front of the girl's face as he continued to thrust in and out of her. The two other men had involuntarily relaxed their pressure on her legs. They were waiting to see what L.C. was going to do.

"Let's see if this'll make her twitch a little bit," Bivins said, and drew the entire length of the knife blade vertically across Cammie Lynn's left nipple, slicing it in half.

The girl's throat was raw, she was choking on the rag, and she was about to drown in her own mucous, but the pain of this latest act was indescribable, and she twisted with all her strength, causing the wire to bite more deeply into both her abdomen and her throat. An inhuman noise ushered from her nasal passages.

What the hell...? Henry immediately stepped slightly to the right and ducked his head to get a better look through a gap in the foliage. At first, Henry did not understand what he was seeing. There was a cluster of three men and one boy, and it appeared that the men were engaged in trying to move a fallen log, while the young boy stood with his back to Henry. Henry noticed a twelve-gauge pump gun of uncertain make lying against the end of the log. What on earth is making that noise? Henry wondered.

L.C. Bivins felt the beginnings of his orgasm and let out a guttural sound of satisfaction. He drew back his hand, and prepared to thrust the knife's entire 5" blade into Cammie Lynn's abdomen.

"Wait, L.C.!" Nat Bivins yelled as he ran around Gary Cort and grabbed his cousin's arm, wanting him to delay the damage until after he had a chance to use the girl. "I ain't had my turn yet!" Bivins dropped the knife, twisted his arm out of Nat's clumsy grasp, and backhanded his cousin on the side of head, sending the boy's glasses flying. Nat stumbled and fell to his knees behind the older man.

When Nat Bivins had run to his older cousin's side and had then been knocked away, Henry Bowman had seen exactly what was going on. He instinctively slid to the left to put more of his body behind the walnut tree, and swung his big Smith & Wesson up into the braced position, cocking it in the process. The first emotion that came into Henry Bowman's mind was gin-clear: Kill all four of them. Then he saw the big one shake his head as if to clear it. Reason took over once more, and Henry silently pleaded Stop what you 're doing! Go! Leave the girl! Just go!

Henry had his front sight trained on L.C. Bivins' sternum, but his eyes darted around the area, looking for other men in addition to the four he saw. He spotted no other people, but he did see an H&R single-barrel shotgun leaning against a tree in between himself and the rapist, in addition to the twelve-gauge pump he had noticed before.

L.C. Bivins glanced with disgust at his cousin, who was feeling around on the ground, trying to find his glasses, then turned his attention back to the girl, and smiled. Oh, shit thought Henry. L.C. bent over, picked up the knife, and raised it in an overhand grip, as if it were an icepick.

"Freeze!" Henry Bowman yelled at the top of his lungs.

L.C. Bivins, Trent Bivins, and Gary Cort had not noticed the soft click of Henry Bowman's revolver being cocked moments before, but they would have had to been deaf not to have heard his shouted command. L.C. jerked his head up from where he was selecting the spot to sink the knife, and Trent and Gary whirled around. All three of them immediately spotted Henry.

"Get him!" the oldest Bivins commanded as he clenched his teeth and raised the knife again, preparing to drive it home. Trent and Gary were used to following L.C. Bivins' orders, and they did not elect to defy him this time. Both men ran for their guns.

Trent Bivins ran towards the sweetgum tree where he had leaned his shotgun before raping Cammie Lynn. The old Harrington & Richardson single barrel was ten feet away from him, roughly in the direction of the tree behind which Henry Bowman stood. Gary Cort took two quick steps towards the J.C. Higgins he had left lying against the log.

Henry saw L.C.'s arm muscles tense and knew the man was about to kill the girl. He relentlessly increased the pressure of his right index finger and ignored the fact that Trent Bivins was about to cross his line of fire. Front sight he grimly reminded himself. There was a natural tendency for shooters to focus on the target instead of the sights at the moment of letoff, especially when under pressure. L.C. Bivins was blurred slightly in Henry Bowman's vision. The 24 karat gold insert in the front sight blade which covered Bivins' heart, however, was sharp enough for Henry to see the tiny hammer marks on it, made when it had been installed by Fran Longtin in S&W's Springfield, Massachusetts service facility a year earlier.

The big revolver thundered, and the 173-grain hollow point bullet made by Allen Kane in Lakeville Arms swaging dies exited the 8 3/8" barrel at 1870 feet per second. The bullet passed less than ten inches from Trent Bivins' left ear and struck L.C. Bivins in almost the exact center of his sternum. The combined effect of the muzzle blast fifty feet in front of him and the painful crack of a supersonic projectile passing less than a foot from his ear was very disorienting to Trent Bivins, and he winced and stumbled, but kept running for his shotgun.

The effect the bullet had on Trent's cousin L.C. was more impressive.

Allen Kane had used a long hollowpoint punch in the swaging die when he had made the slugs, which made a large cavity in the nose of the bullet that extended down almost to its base. This concentrated the projectile's mass towards its outer circumference, nearer to the actual bearing surface, and was one of the reasons that the slugs had shot so accurately for the Indiana experimenter. The design had the secondary effect of destroying much of the structural integrity of the bullet.

Over the years, ammunition manufacturers would regularly use these same construction techniques in vain attempts to increase the incapacitating power of low-powered, low velocity sidearm ammunition. The results were almost always disappointing. Cartridges such as the .25 and .32 ACP usually had too little velocity to make even the most fragile bullet break up, and if the slow-moving slugs did fragment, penetration was so slight that an attacker's leather coat would sometimes stop the bullet entirely.

Frangible bullets were a different story in a high-intensity cartridge like the .44 Magnum, and in Henry's long-barreled gun with its tight cylinder gap and full-pressure handloads, doubly so. When the Lakeville Arms 173 grain 'Jugular' hollow point hit L.C. Bivins, it truly lived up to the moniker its late designer had given it. As the front half of the projectile turned itself into microscopic fragments of lead and copper, it released over one thousand two hundred foot-pounds of kinetic energy inside the chest cavity of the rapist and murderer.

Bivins' chest cavity literally exploded, and the homogenized contents of his upper torso followed the path of least resistance, just as the laws of physics dictated. In L.C.'s case, the weak point was a gash in his back made by a piece of his spine which the impact had turned into a secondary missile.

Nat Bivins, the feckless younger cousin who had been backhanded by L.C. only moments before, had just crawled to a spot directly behind L.C. when Henry fired his first shot. Nat's back was sprayed with a mixture of blood, heart tissue, and fragments of both bone and metal just before the 230-pound corpse of his late cousin landed on top of him.

In a move he had practiced some forty thousand times, Henry Bowman glanced at his second target and hauled the gun down out of recoil. While he did this, he pulled the Smith's trigger double action until the tip of his trigger finger touched the revolver's frame behind and to the left of the trigger. This was far enough to make the cylinder advance to the next chamber and lock in place, but not far enough to make the gun fire. Thirty years earlier, Ed McGivern had called this technique the 'two stage, braked trigger pull'. Twenty years in the future, shooters would call it 'trigger cocking'. As Henry finished trigger-cocking the revolver, he focused his master eye on the gold insert of the front sight.

Trent Bivins, with a searing pain in his right ear, tried to get his shotgun into action from its position leaning against the tree. At the instant the front sight of Henry's gun crossed the line of Trent's scalp, Henry Bowman gave the trigger the additional pressure needed, and his second shot hit the younger Bivins brother just to the right of the tip of his nose. The back of Trent's skull split open under the tremendous hydraulic pressure, and over one-half of his brain matter was blown out the jagged opening.

Henry Bowman did not see the effect of this shot, for he was already backpedaling and rotating his whole body-maintaining the braced position of his arms, torso, and neck-and trigger-cocking the Model 29 again as he brought it to bear on the figure of Gary Cort.

Cort had enjoyed his session with the young girl, and had been doing his best to dislocate her hip from its socket while L.C. was taking his turn. He was out of breath from these exertions, and this new development had appeared out of nowhere. Every part of Gary Cort's brain was being bombarded with stimuli, and he acted instinctively. In Cort's case, this meant grabbing the shotgun with his right hand, and sliding his right forefinger inside the trigger guard at the same time.

Sticking his finger into the trigger guard before he had complete control of the weapon was not the only bad habit Gary Cort had when it came to gun handling. He also was rather cavalier about using his gun's safety, and it was disengaged at the moment. As Cort's hand instinctively tightened around the weapon, his finger pulled the trigger, and an ounce and a quarter of number six bird shot shredded leaves ten yards above and to the right of where Henry Bowman stood.

As a flustered Gary Cort pumped the slide of his shotgun, Henry Bowman put the gold bead on Cort's center of mass and exerted a little more pressure on the trigger. He was aiming for the heart, and he got it. Cort fell as if every bone in his body had suddenly turned to liquid. He was dead before his knee struck the spot where his shotgun had been resting.

From the moment Henry had yelled until the time that Gary Cort's body collapsed in the grass was less than four seconds.

Henry Bowman saw Nat Bivins frantically trying to extricate himself from underneath his dead cousin, and he made a snap decision. He sprinted to the boy, put a knee onto his back, and shoved the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson into the base of his skull. Henry swept the area with his eyes, looking for signs of any other people, especially hostile ones. Seeing none, he clenched his teeth and looked at the girl.

He was relieved to see that she was still alive. Her eyes stared at the sky, for she was in shock. Then a strong feeling of revulsion washed through Henry when he saw what the man had done to her chest. He looked at the trembling form of Nat Bivins, saw the boy's glasses six feet away in the grass, and started to formulate a plan.

"Who were they?" Henry demanded, making sure the boy could not see him out of the corner of his eye. "Him, that's my cousin L.C.," Nat snuffled, pointing towards the corpse a few feet away. "Did Trent 'n' Gary git away?"

"They're dead. Who's the girl?"

Nat Bivins' voice carried surprising hatred. "That's Cammie Lynn. Little bitch," he added. It was clear that he was starting to blame her for his current predicament. "Di'n't even git my turn," he muttered. Henry inhaled slowly, thinking about this last comment, and trying to appear calm.

"Damn' ol' L.C.," Nat said with feeling. "Always keepin' me out of ever'thing, and I was th' one what got her here for 'em."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I follered her last two, three days. Told 'em right where to git her," he said proudly. "Little bitch was going to tell on us."

"Tell on you?" At this question, Nat Bivins closed his mouth defiantly, and Henry stabbed the muzzle into his neck as a reminder.

'"Bout the business. Car parts."

"What kind of car parts?" Henry demanded.

"Any kind you need," Nat said with what might have been a touch of pride, "L.C. can git. Week, sometimes two, an' th' price ain't but half what the dealers get." He rushed on, explaining himself. "She was talkin' 'bout it to one a the people she babysits for. Little boy's big brother tole me."

A babysitter raped and murdered by some hicks running an Ozark chop shop Henry thought with disgust. And if she knew what they were up to, there had to be a hundred others.

"What was L.C. going to do with the girl after he finished with her?" Henry asked. "Leave her out here?"

Nat shook his head. "Naw, 'specially not this close to the house." Henry felt his heart lurch at this bit of news. "L.C. was going to pitch her in the hog pen, after we was through." Nat Bivins' face turned sullen again. "I was s'posed to git a turn first."

Henry felt his guts turn over, but he kept his voice level.

"How far is the house, and who's there now?" / hope it's close by and empty.

"Quarter mile, maybe a li'l more. No one's home right now. Aunt Char, she's gone to Cape 'til Monday. Uncle Dane, no tellin' when he'll get back." Henry didn't like the sound of this last comment, but said nothing about it.

"Where's the hog pen?"

"Oh, it's 'fore you get to the house."

"Anybody know you're here?" With what these four had planned, I doubt it, but who knows what these cretins were thinking. The Bivins boy shook his head.

"You going to kill me?"

"I ought to," Henry said lamely. He knew he would not. "Don't move."

Henry Bowman stood up and bolstered his Smith. He fished in his pocket and pulled out the big two-bladed Case knife and opened the larger of the two blades. Without taking his eyes off the prone figure of Nat Bivins, he reached over and slid the blade of the knife in between the log and the wire which bound Cammie Lynn's abdomen to it, then dug the tip of the blade in the wood and pulled on the handle. The soft iron wire made two popping noises as the keen blade parted it. Henry dropped to his knees and carefully sliced through the wire wrapped around the girl's wrists, also. He looked at the twists binding the girl's neck to the log, then stabbed the knife into the side of the log, parting the wire as a cold chisel would.

Time to cut out he thought. Two more things first, though.

Henry Bowman stowed his knife, then drew his gun and held it at the ready. "Keep your face in the grass, just like you been doing," he commanded. Nat Bivins did not move.

Henry walked to where the boy's glasses had fallen, picked them up, and put them in the pocket with his knife. Then he stepped over to the crumpled corpse of L.C. Bivins, and extracted the billfold from the hip pocket of Bivins' torn, bloodstained ove ralls. There was a large sheaf of bills in it, and Henry removed all but $80, glanced at the driver's license, wiped off his fingerprints, and replaced the wallet in the dead man's pocket.

"Stay where you are 'til you're sure I'm gone," Henry told the boy. "Then get her some help. I'll be calling in, and if I find out she didn't make it, I'll come for you. You won't see it coming any more than you did this time. Get it?" Nat Bivins snuffled, and Henry watched the back of the boy's head as he nodded his understanding. "Don't bother looking for your glasses any more-I've got 'em." He gave a quick look around, made himself stare at Cammie Lynn's ravaged body, then jogged off into the woods.

"Came to a barbwire fence half mile back," Henry explained, throwing a thumb over his shoulder to emphasize the point. He had met up with David Webb about a mile from the site of the killings. "Got 'No Trespassing' signs all over. Thought I'd find a decent place to shoot long range here, but no soap. Let's head back, and try farther down the river."

"Suits me. You okay? You look kind of funny."

"I think I may be coming down with something-stomach flu, maybe."

"That sucks."

"That's not all. My Smith just broke the center pin inside the ejector rod," Henry lied. "And like an idiot I only brought one gun this trip."

"You can't shoot it at all?"

"Not 'til I get back to my kit and take it apart to check it out."

The two of them began hiking back towards the Gasconade. On the way, Henry had to stop and relieve his bladder. When he did, he slid Nat Bivins' glasses out of his pocket, wiped them off, and put them under a fallen tree limb lying on the ground.