Mule Maddox

MULE MADDOX by Ronald L. Bern. On a stormy November night in 1932, young Rafe Maddox is exploring the flooding Saluda River in rural South Carolina when he hears a womans scream. Beaching his boat behind a counry church, he finds three men attempting to rape a beautiful local girl. In a fierce struggle, Maddox fights and kills two of the men and stabs a third. He is desperately wounded but manages to get back to his boat, which is swept more than 60 miles downstream on the crest of the swollen river. He is rescued by Buck Daniels, a landowner and World War I combat veteran who tends to his wounds in a rough woods shack at the edge of his land. Assumed a rapist and murderer, Maddox becomes the object of an intense manhunt headed by longtime Sheriff Bud Clarke. Meanwhile rumors begin to circulate among fearful sharecropper families on the Daniels place about a dead man living in the shack down on the river. Dark legends grow and more people die as Sheriff Clarke edges closer to finding Rafe Maddox. Powerful currents of justice and religion, guilt and superstition, fear and moral resolution all swirl together in a surprising and satisfying conclusion.