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He had built a rudimentary cabin miles away from any other dwelling, and survived by hunting and trapping animals, exchanging furs for the few basic necessities that he could not produce himself.
Local hunters occasionally glimpsed him moving through the forest; he was a thin, bearded figure who disappeared into the undergrowth at the first sign of another human being’s presence.
Over the years, stories accumulated around Silas, as often happens with such solitary figures.
Some said he was simple-minded.
Others claimed that he had become savage, that he lived more like an animal than a man.
The children frightened each other with stories of the wild man of the valleys, although most of them had never seen him and would never see him.
The truth was that Silas Barrow simply wanted to be left alone, and in the vast expanse of the Ozark wilderness, it was perfectly possible to achieve that wish.
Thomas arrived in this isolated world in the spring of 1888.
He was 17 years old and became an orphan when his parents died from the flu a few days apart.
Thomas was a distant cousin on his mother’s side, and the Barrows were his only living relatives willing to take him in.
During some months of that year, Thomas was occasionally seen accompanying the sisters on their sporadic trips to the city.
They described him as a thin, quiet boy with dark hair and a nervous temperament, someone who seemed grateful to have found a home after his loss.
He helped load the groceries into the cart and kept a little apart from the twins, as if he wasn’t sure of his place in this strange new family.
Then, with the arrival of autumn and when the leaves began to change color, Thomas stopped appearing.
When the shopkeeper’s wife asked about him during the sisters’ next visit, Mave, or maybe it was Elizabeth, no one could tell them apart, replied that Thomas had become restless and gone off to look for work in Springfield, or maybe Kansas City.
It was a fairly common story in those times.
Young people often left rural areas attracted by the promise of better wages in growing cities.
Nobody thought to question it further.
But inside the Barrow house, a different reality had taken hold.
Josiah Barrow, bedridden from a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed, but with his mind still active in its twisted way, had called his daughters to his side shortly after Thomas’s arrival.
With a trembling voice, which he believed came from divine inspiration, he told them that Providence had sent them the boy.
His family lineage was pure, uncontaminated by the moral degradation that infected the outside world, and it was his sacred duty to keep it that way.
Thomas, she declared, was destined to be her husband.
Not in the legal sense, which would require the intervention of the worldly authorities they despised, but in the spiritual sense that mattered to God.
The twins, who had known no other authority in their entire lives than that of their father, who had been raised under his particular doctrine of sanctity and family separation, accepted this statement without question.
What they did next would remain hidden for years, a secret buried as deep as the cellar where they kept their cousin chained up.
Four years passed in silence.
It was 1896, and Sheriff Reuben Galloway was sitting in his office in Forsyth reading a letter that had arrived in the mail from Illinois.
The handwriting was neat and cultured, belonging to a woman named Martha Hendricks, who identified herself as the aunt of Thomas, the boy who had gone to live with his Barrow cousins eight years earlier.
He explained that over the years he had written several letters to Thomas, sending them by regular mail to Forsyth, but had never received a reply.
She understood that young men often neglected correspondence, but something about that absolute silence bothered her.
Would the sheriff be so kind as to inquire about the well-being of his nephew?
Galloway folded the letter and looked out the window at the town square, where farmers were loading their carts and women were buying dry goods.
He was 58 years old, a former Union Army tracker who had witnessed more violence than his fair share during the war and who had subsequently come to the Ozarks in search of peace.
He had served as sheriff for almost 15 years, a position that consisted mainly of settling property disputes, chasing the occasional horse thief, and deliberately turning a blind eye to the bootlegging operations that everyone knew existed in the remote valleys.
The cases of missing persons in the Ozarks were complicated matters.
Young people were constantly leaving in search of better opportunities elsewhere.
The women got married and left.
Sometimes, people would simply wander into the forest and never be seen again, victims of accidents or deliberate decisions.
The distances were enormous.
The population was dispersed and data recording was, at best, irregular.
Galloway had no agents deployed in remote areas.
He could barely afford to pay the two men who worked in the village.
Communication was limited to news brought by travelers and mail delivered by traveling postmen.
A man could commit a murder in one valley and no one in the neighboring valley would find out for months, if ever.
This was the reality of law enforcement in rural areas in 1896.
And Galloway understood that his authority only extended as far as the communities were willing to recognize it.
In places like the deep canyons where the Barrows lived, that recognition was minimal at best.
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