EDGE: Rhapsody in Red (Edge series Book 21)

by George G. Gilman

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MORE EDGE TITLES

  Rhapsody in Red

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition July 2013

  Names, Characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover Design and illustrations by West World Designs © 2013.

  http://westworlddesigns.webs.com

  This is a High Plains Western for Lobo Publications.

  Cover Illustration by Cody Wells.

  Visit the author at: www.gggandpcs.proboards.com

  For P.W.

  As scared as I was on the night of the silver gun.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE mountain lion was old and ready to die. He had not eaten for more than seven days and the waterhole beside which he lay had been dry for half that time. Not that food or drink could save him now. And old age was not directly responsible for the death that would soon come to him.

  High above him, a flight of six buzzards circled—patient, slow-moving dark dots against a brilliant blue sky otherwise blemished only by the angry yellow eye of the cruel sun.

  The big cat could not see the sun, for the morning had not yet run its full course and he was in the shade of a low mesa. But on such a blisteringly hot day as this even the deepest shade offered little comfort. So the mountain lion panted and this constant rise and fall of his exposed flank sapped at the final reserves of energy. It had been several hours since he last had the strength to flick his tail at the swarm of flies that buzzed over his sparse, dehydrated form. And it had been during the night that he had managed, for a final time, to turn his head and raise his body to lick at the wound which would shortly kill him.

  It was in his right hindquarter and, perhaps, had he been just a year younger he might have evaded the bullet that caused the wound. Then again, if he were a year older, slower reflexes might possibly have caused the rifleman to make a clean shot. In either case, the big cat would have been spared the agony of a lingering death.

  There had been four men, riding north through the lower slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, below the snowline and above the great sand dunes trapped at the eastern end of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The cougar was feeding on a freshly killed mule deer, upwind of the human intruders. An excited shout had warned him and he reacted instinctively—but with the sluggishness of great age. The single shot, exploded in the failing light of early evening by a man bored from a long day of monotonous travel, missed the head and tore into the sinewy flesh of the animal’s hindquarters.

  Fear had powered the escape from following gunfire. Then pain had slowed the bounding run. At first, the big cat had climbed to higher ground, covering terrain he knew. Then the pain diminished, but the period of relative comfort was a cruel trick on the animal. The lead buried deep inside him erupted a fatal festering in the surrounding flesh. The infection squeezed evil-smelling puss to the wound opening. And when it was licked away, there was always more to replace it. Then other poison entered the animal’s bloodstream, to be carried relentlessly to every part of its body: and to the brain.

  Thus, as the big cat’s physical energy was drained by travel and lack of food, so its mental instincts were undermined. He came down out of the mountains and dragged himself across the unfamiliar desert. And if there was an animal logic which drove him to do this, it had to be that his former domain was now associated with the men responsible for his impending death. Or perhaps it was just that he had lost his bearings. For the pain had returned and it was not just confined to the area of the wound. The poison coursing through his veins engulfed his entire body with searing agony. And so he moved in a desperate effort to escape something he carried with him.

  Then he stopped at the waterhole in the morning shade of the mesa. But the alkali water was as brutally deceptive as the initial numbing of pain had been. For it served only to prolong the animal’s doomed life.

  It was possible the cougar knew this, but such an animal does not resign itself to anything—until the inevitable becomes the reality.

  The buzzards certainly knew it. For they had appeared two days ago. Always either circling against the limitless blue of the daytime sky; or perched in the night upon the mesa’s edge.

  The sun reached its noon peak and lanced down to erase the final sliver of shade from beneath the mesa’s western face. The big cat blinked, then became rigid, mouth open and arid tongue draped into the gritty sand. The scavengers ceased to circle on the high thermals and seemed to hover: poised for a graceful descent towards the long-awaited meal.

  Then the panting began again.

  Whatever was moving out there between the fringe of the sand dunes and the first rocky slopes was too far off to be an immediate danger. But the cougar continued to watch, panting harder now that the rays of the sun seared directly onto the length of his body.

  High above, the birds resumed their slow circling, taking advantage of the ever-moving air currents. Below them, the blanket of heat pressing against the scorched terrain did not stir. And the shimmer of the slick-looking haze that veiled the far horizons was just an illusion.

  So it was the pain-wracked eyes of the cougar, rather than his impaired sense of smell, that told him what was moving inexorably toward him. And he growled just once, his eyes glinting with the dark fires of the depthless hatred. Then, having expressed his feelings for man, the animal died.

  The birds swooped.

  With intense beauty and grace, they arrowed out of crystal clear space. And, at the moment of alighting on the earth, became cumbersome and ugly. Shrieking with greed, eyes afire and wings flapping, they fought each other for the greater prizes offered by the carcass.

  Amid a constant cloud of stinging dust, beaks stabbed and talons ripped at the animal’s eyes, tongue, and genitals. Hot blood spurted from warm flesh. Strips of meat were ripped from the sides, back, belly, and throat—to be gorged by the rapacious birds. Gory entrails were dragged from the massive wounds. The heart, lungs, stomach, and liver were torn out of the body, trailing slimy sinews caught in the ravenous beaks. The mutilated carcass was dragged and rolled under the vicious assault of the powerful birds. Drying blood smears were left in the wake of the erratic course, and flies settled on the stains.

  Then, less than three minutes after the scavenging had started, its pace slackened. Their feathers, beaks, and talons crusted with crimson changing to black, the birds were near satiation. But they continued to feed: almost delicately now, as they picked the blood-moist meat off the white bones. And, as they fed, their distrustful eyes cast constant glances southward: in the direction of the man they had seen long before the dying cougar had become aware of the human intruder’s approach.

  The man watched the birds from a distance of something over a mile, closing on them at the easy pace of the horse he rode. But his eyes were not d
istrustful. Neither were they contemptuous of the display of greed. Certainly not horrified at a vivid memory which the sight of the scavengers feeding erupted from the back of his mind. His eyes were merely watchful, from behind a surface veneer of total indifference.

  They were eyes of the clearest blue, which surveyed the sun-baked wilderness from under deeply hooded lids. The dominant features of a long and lean face, their piercing brightness was emphasized by the dark coloration of his leather-textured skin. Exposure to extremes of weather had contributed a great deal to the skin tone. But heritage had also played a part, from seeds sown by a Mexican father in the womb of a Scandinavian mother. His hair, jet black and growing to a length that brushed his shoulders, was also inherited from his paternal parent. The rest of his features—with the exception of those ice blue eyes, which were drawn entirely from his mother—resulted from a mixing of the blood of two races.

  The cheekbones were high, stretching the skin taut from the firm jaw line. The mouth was thin and there was a hawkish line to the nose with its slightly flared nostrils. It was a face that could be viewed as handsome or ugly, depending upon how the beholder responded to the latent cruelty that was at once subtly and clearly visible in the composite of the features. It glinted in the permanently narrowed eyes, was hinted at in the slight twist of the mouth, seemed etched into the lines of passing years and bitter suffering that scored the skin, and threatened from the set of the strong jaw.

  At this noon hour of a blisteringly hot day, it was a heavily stubbled face—with a thicker growth of bristles along the top lip and curving down at each side of the mouth telling of a mustache. A sweat-run face, with particles of red Colorado dust clinging to the salt moisture and caught in the bristles. The face of a man somewhere between thirty and forty who had lived hard and experienced much—little of it good to recall.

  He was a tall man, rising to three inches above six feet. And on such a rangy frame his two hundred pounds of solid weight was distributed to give him a deceptively lean look. His clothing was as travel stained as the wearer: a wide brimmed, low crowded black hat. Shirt and pants of blue denim. Black riding boots without spurs, worn under the pants cuffs. A gray kerchief around his neck. At his waist was a scuffed gunbelt with a holster tied down to his right thigh. The butt of a Colt .45 Navy Model jutted from the holster and each loop of the belt was slotted with a shell.

  On his workaday saddle of uncertain age were two canteens, a bedroll, a rope coil and a boot which held a 44/40 Winchester repeating rifle. The saddle was snugly fitted to a sway-backed pinto gelding with a coat only slightly flecked with the white lather of sweat.

  The man rode easy in the saddle, allowing his mount to make its own walking pace along a little-used trail between the sand ridges of the dunes and the Sangre de Cristo foothills. Easy, but not careless. His hooded eyes, slit against the sun dazzle, moved constantly in their sockets: from the feeding birds to the trail ahead, then to either side, and, from time to time, glancing over each shoulder.

  When he turned to scour the country he had already traversed, his sweat-stained shirt hugged tighter to his muscular back and contoured a narrow bulge that extended from under the line of his hair to reach a short way down his spine: A bulge caused by a leather pouch with its mouth held beneath the shirt collar by a beaded thong encircling his neck. In the pouch was carried a wooden-handled straight razor.

  When he was a half-mile distant from where the cougar had died, his presence put the buzzards to flight. But they had eaten their fill, so their squawks were of alarm rather than anger.

  With bloated bellies, the birds were even more awkward on the ground, but once in the air, flight gave them beauty. For the gruesome gore matted in their feathers and caking their beaks and talons was lost against the dazzling brightness of the sun.

  They spiraled upwards, then arrowed into level speed high above the dunes.

  The small mesa squatted a dozen yards off the trail to the east and as the lone rider drew level with the mutilated carcass of the animal, he could see it without veering to the side. He saw, also, what had killed the animal. For, during the frenetic feeding, the fatal bullet had been wrenched free of the flesh and tossed to the dust close by the trail.

  What was left on the bones was not yet old enough to stink of decomposition. But the gelding caught the scent of fresh blood and shook with a tremor of fear. The man smelled the nauseating odor of advanced gangrene and spat into the dust.

  “Easy feller,” the man called Edge soothed, stroking the neck of the horse with a brown-skinned hand. His narrowed eyes raked the skeleton and untouched paws of the carcass and identified the remains of a mountain lion. Then he drew back his lips to show a bitter smile. “Alive he would whip us both. But that’s one cat can’t be brought back.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE gelding responded immediately to the touch of heels against his flanks, chomping at the bit in his eagerness to spurt away from the scene of recent death. But Edge shortened the reins and tightened his grip, keeping firm control over the spooked horse until the mesa was several hundred yards back down the trail.

  A half mile beyond this, the trail swung up from the arid valley floor to make its first assault on the high ground. Far ahead, seeming disembodied from the earth and floating without movement on the broiling heat shimmer, saw tooth mountain peaks glinted in the sunlight: their snow-covered slopes holding out a promise of coolness to a man traveling through the furnace heat of the dune country. But the snowline was still many miles away and several thousand feet above the foothills. And the promise of coolness would certainly turn out to be the reality of bitter cold: harder to endure than the searing heat below.

  The tall half-breed was aware of this as he made camp at the side of the trail, in the sparse shade of an aspen grove. And, had he been the kind of man given to flights of fancy, he might have linked the false promise of the snow-capped mountains with the incident of the cougar and drawn a parallel with his life—past, present, and future. But on the few occasions when he did contemplate what had been, was, and what might be, his line of thought was always as bleakly realistic as his actual existence.

  Wind-snapped foliage from old storms provided kindling for a fire and there was a patch of dusty grass for the gelding to feed on. There was no water, except from the canteens, and he used this frugally—to boil a mug of coffee for himself and to moisten the gelding’s mouth. For the snow-capped peaks were too far off to guarantee streams and springs close at hand.

  He rested himself and his mount for two hours, until the sun was casting midafternoon shadows and was far enough advanced on its slide down the western sky to lose some of its fierceness. But he did not sleep. Instead, as the fire burned low and went out and he finished a meal of jerked beef, sourdough bread, and coffee, he maintained his unhurried survey of the country on all sides. And saw nothing that moved until he began to saddle the gelding.

  Then, far to the south, he glimpsed an intrusion upon the massive stillness of stoic rock and drifted sand: a tiny black dot drawing nearer and growing larger in perspective as it progressed sluggishly along the trail between mountain and desert.

  His deeply lined face retained its impassive set as he cracked his eyes to glinting slits and peered with concentrated effort into the south. The dot enlarged, moving clear of the blurring effect of the heat haze. And a line of lazily rising dust showed behind it: too much dust to the stirred up by a single horse.

  He was in a good spot to watch the approach. Some four hundred feet above the valley floor on a flat area of shelving under the humped crest of a rise, Higher than the mesa where the cougar had died and able to see across the tops of the dunes flanking one side of the trail. So he was able to spot the stage for what it was while it was still more than three miles away.

  His response was a short-lived grin that altered his mouth line to express mild pleasure, but did nothing to warm the ice like quality of his slitted eyes. Then he took out the makings from a shirt pocket an
d rolled and lit a slim cigarette. He had smoked it, dropped it into the dust, and lost the taste of the tobacco by the time the stage halted at the side of the mesa.

  Over the reduced distance, he recognized the lines of a heavy, brown-painted Concord coach hauled by a four-horse team. A driver and guard were hunched on the high seat and a male passenger had been squatting on the roof baggage before the stage rolled to a halt. Then the man leapt down and ran to take a closer look at the remains of the big cat. A youngster, from the agile way he moved: and something of a dude, judging by the glinting trimmings which decorated his clothes.

  Despite the silence clamped over the scorching terrain the half-breed could not hear what the youngster was shouting back at the people aboard the Concord. But it was obvious he was making an excited report and that, while the driver and guard were unimpressed, he held the avid interest of the other passengers. Because the coach was canted noticeably to one side as the curious occupants responded to what was being said.

  But the interest soon waned. The elegantly dressed youngster climbed back aboard as effortlessly as he had left, and the reins were slapped to start the team moving again. Edge lost sight of the coach as it took the curve and started up the grade. But it had drawn close enough by then for him to pick out more detail.

  The roof passenger was very young, maybe not yet out of his teens. His hat was a white ten gallon, his shirt and pants were cream trimmed with black, and his high boots reversed this. He wore a black gunbelt with a holster tied down to each thigh.

  He was perched on some expensive-looking luggage atop a stage with the line’s name painted on the doors: and with strips of white canvas hung along the roof rails.

  Contrasting with the youth and outlandish dress of the roof passenger, the driver and guard were both well advanced into middle age and were garbed workaday style in dark-toned denim.