On the Main Deck, two raiders were shot in the back by passengers and crewmen before they reached the gangplanks.
The dynamite exploded.
In wide, totally unconfined mid-air, the report was crashingly loud: but the noise quickly roiled out on all sides like fading thunder. The blast, too, had ample space in every direction to spread its force: except downwards. As the flare of the detonated explosive outshone the new sun for an instant, the attacking roustabouts were pushed harder on to their companions and the struggling riflemen beneath them. The bodies of the dead were driven through the snow to the frozen ground. The snow melted to water and froze to clear ice. The log pile crashed over to bury the man who had thrown the dynamite. Horses tumbled, struggled upright, and bolted.
The Delta Dawn canted towards mid-river, then was righted by the tautness of the mooring lines. All aboard who had not thrown themselves to the deck when the shooting started were hurled down by the forceful rush of air. Anything standing free and not heavy enough to withstand the blast was picked up and tossed.
The sound of the explosion and the chain reaction of noise it started was abruptly curtailed. Water rippled along the hull of the stern-wheeler. Steam hissed from her safety valves. Ears, recovered from the deafening effect of the explosion, heard only these familiar sounds: for thick snow muted the beat of galloping hooves.
The South will rise again!’ a man yelled.
The gangplanks had been dislodged by the blast. The man who had shrieked the promise leapt six feet of clear water at the bow and sprinted across the dock.
Edge, his hat whipped off by the blast, raked the Winchester around, pumping the action. With the same calmness that he had taken aim at the dynamite, he tracked the running man in his sights and squeezed the trigger again.
‘You sure won’t, feller,’ he muttered as his bullet drilled a neat hole in the side of the man’s head. The exit hole on the far side was not neat, made large and ragged by splinters of skull bone. Fragments of his blood-soaked brain stained the ground before his body crumpled and became still.
Women screamed and men shouted: the noise a mixture of jubilation, anger and hatred.
‘Hold off!’ a man’s voice bellowed from the aft Main Deck. ‘Some of you people are Southerners!’
‘Quiet!’ McBride roared from topside of the superstructure. ‘I want a report from every section of my ship!’
Edge scrambled to his feet, unbuttoning his tattered coat and wrenching the shotgun out from his belt. He saw that his pants legs at about knee level were also holed and black. The skin had been broken beneath and he felt the sting of the wounds as he straightened.
‘You changed your mind about the silence, uh Captain?’ Rhett asked as Ferris and Charity came gingerly to the thresholds of their cabins. The woman had dressed to the extent of wearing a petticoat which left the upper spheres of her breasts and her shoulders bare but covered her decently elsewhere. She held her dress in one hand and a threaded needle in the other.
‘Ain’t just women allowed to alter their ideas, feller,’ the half-breed growled, dragging his gaze away from the naked flesh of Charity’s upper torso.
He snatched up his hat, jammed it on his head and swung a leg over the deck rail.
‘Nobody died because I did!’ the woman flung at him, then crashed the door closed.
‘You took no for an answer?’ Rhett asked, genuinely surprised, as the half-breed pulled his other leg over the rail.
‘Shipboard romances never last,’ Edge growled with a cold grin, holding on to the rail with one hand as he crouched, then dropping his legs and kicking them forward.
The momentum of the kick took him out of the vertical fall and he landed on the companionway of the Main Deck.
As above, several passengers stood or wandered about in a state of dazed shock. Crew members who had heard McBride’s command scurried among the passengers or crouched beside the dead. But this activity was confined to the fore part of the deck. On the stern companionway, the sole survivor of the raiders was in a half crouch, rifle aimed from the shoulder towards a tight-knit group of fearful and confused passengers and crew. He had backed off as far as he could go before stepping out on to the wheel support.
‘I’ll surrender,’ he was saying, his tongue continually darting out to moisten his trembling lips. ‘To Southerners ready to follow the Cause again. This was no real robbery. Won’t any of you people give me your word I’ll be safe if I surrender? I’ll tell the whole story. It wasn’t supposed to—’
Edge had advanced on the rear of the group. Close to it, he saw that several men had handguns clasped in their fists: many with clear shots available. He could not see their faces, but their stances and the way they craned their heads forward revealed the fascinated interest they had for what the rifleman was saying.
‘Put up the gun, son,’ a man urged. ‘Maybe your boss would try to blow up innocent folks, but ain’t everyone that’s a savage.’
Edge could not get a clear shot at the rifleman without tipping his hand by showing the Winchester above the heads of the group. He grimaced at the memory of his Remington splashing into the river last night.
‘I want an assurance!’ the rifleman demanded. ‘I want the Captain down here to give it to me.’ Tears hung in the corners of his eyes. He looked suddenly very young.
‘Go get McBride!’ a woman snapped.
‘I ain’t shot no one,’ the rifleman pleaded. ‘Some of you people must have seen I didn’t shoot no one.’
‘Sure, son. Put up the gun before you do, uh?’
A shake of the head that flung the tears clear of his eyes. ‘I’m not gonna trust no one ’cept the Captain.’
Nobody had complied with the woman’s order. She was at the front of the group. She whirled, her wrinkled and careworn face set in hard lines. The group parted to allow her passage. Edge moved only slightly and she had to swerve around him.
‘Body wants somethin’ done, best she does it herself!’ she muttered with an angry glare at the half-breed.
‘Or himself, ma’am,’ Edge added, and fired from the hip, the Winchester barrel angled slightly upwards.
The group had not quite re-formed into a whole again after dividing to allow the woman to get through. The bullet spun along the narrowing gap and struck the rifleman in the chest. He groaned once, staggered backwards, dropped his Winchester and hit the paddle-wheel. The gap was wide again by the time he had bounced off the wheel and plunged into the ice-cold water between the boat and the wharf pilings.
‘You killed him!’ the man who had shared most of the exchanges with the raider accused.
His and many other guns were swung towards the impassive Edge as the whole group whirled to stare at him. The half-breed pumped the lever action of the rifle and continued to aim it between the divided group, pointing at no human target.
‘What ails him don’t have to be catching,’ he muttered, shifting his glinting eyed gaze over the pale, cold-pinched faces which directed mass revulsion towards him.
‘It appears to have reached epidemic proportions already,’ another male member of the group said in a whining tone.
‘They started to give us the treatment,’ the half-breed answered wryly, and showed a cold grin as he heard McBride’s angry voice behind him. He canted the rifle up to his shoulder. ‘But the old kill or cure remedy worked in the end.’
‘Who fired that shot?’ the Delta Dawn’s master demanded, his bulky frame quaking with rage as he half ran along the companion way.
‘He did!’ This from the woman who had found it unnecessary to go for McBride. Her hand was rock steady as she pointed an accusing finger at Edge.
The uniformed man glowered hard into the unmoving face of the half-breed. ‘You better have had good reason, mister!’ he snarled. That’s all I can say.’
There was a large group of passengers behind McBride. Most of them expressed shock or disgust. Rhett was among them, but he wore an expression of satisfaction. So was H
orace Ferris, a top coat cloaking his nightshirt, and a pleading look on his face. Charity Meagher was at the forefront, her pretty features constantly changing their lines: never forming into an expression far removed from the brink of hysteria.
‘I figure I got one, feller,’ Edge replied. ‘But it’s a secret’
‘You’ll tell me, mister!’ McBride snarled in response. The authorities will need to know every last detail of this incident!’
‘Except one, I figure,’ Edge replied evenly, and dug for the makings in his shirt-pocket, his eyes ignoring the boat’s master to concentrate on Charity Meagher. Her body was fully protected from the cold and male eyes now, by the blue dress with the white lace trimmings. The needle and thread had been left in the cabin and no fresh stitching showed on the silken fabric. ‘That’s already sewn up.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘Was it a guess, Captain?’ Henry Rhett asked.
‘What, feller?’
‘That the raid was a blind. You knew from the start it was really Ferris and the letter they were after.’
The two men sat at a table in the main salon, a bottle of whisky between them and a glass each in front of them. They were alone except for a bartender, and four stewards who waited idly beside tables laid for breakfast which nobody wanted.
Gut in the timber behind the wharf, roustabouts were working up a sweat in the early morning cold: digging graves for the dead. All twelve raiders had died, along with three roustabouts and one woman passenger. Two additional graves were dug into the frozen ground - for the would-be assassin Rhett had killed at the poker table, and for Fryer, the wood-cutter.
The Delta Dawn’s complement of crew did not include a doctor, but there was an army surgeon bound for Fort Sully travelling as a passenger. And he was treating the wounded in a commandeered cabin: three men with minor injuries from blast and four women suffering from shock.
From time to time, passengers made to enter the salon for breakfast: but saw Edge and quickly turned away. It was obvious that a report of the final shot to be fired in the battle - and perhaps even the story that the half-breed had instigated the gun-battle - had been circulated around the stern-wheeler. Whichever, no one who had hurriedly reclaimed his or her stolen money from the bodies of the raiders appeared to regard Edge’s actions favorably.
‘They were too full of the God-on-our-side bullshit to be just hold-up men, feller. You ought to have spotted that.’
Rhett grimaced and took a gulp of whisky. ‘I told you, Captain. I’m strictly an amateur in that line. Same as that bitch Jason. And that butch bastard Scott. What you mean, Captain? God-on-our—’
‘Amateurs, like you,’ Edge cut in, and sipped the rye with relish, the alcohol taking the taste of gun smoke out of his mouth. ‘But with their tails in the air for a different reason. Men need a better reason than money to put their lives on the line the way they did.’
‘Just that? You figured they figured themselves as big heroes for the Cause just because they took risks?’
Edge grinned coldly, took another drink and rasped the back of a hand over his jaw bristles. ‘Only one of them died before I was sure, feller. The one that stole my money.’
The half-breed had his money back in his hip pocket now. Down on the Main Deck, Ferris had pushed free of the Crowd and made McBride the promise that he could explain Edge’s actions. The Delta Dawn’s master had accepted this, still angry, and confined his parting snarl at Edge to a warning that he was not to leave the stern-wheeler.
Ferris was with McBride now.
Charity had rushed back to her cabin, still maintaining the pretense to all except a few that she had no connection with Ferris.
Edge had come directly to the salon, stopping only once, to retrieve his stolen money from the corpse behind the door of Ferris’s cabin. Rhett had come hard on his heels.
‘I can see why you weren’t absolutely sure, Captain,’ the man across the table from the half-breed muttered. ‘Seeing how you risked your own and a lot of other people’s lives for money. They could have been like you.’
‘Don’t claim to be unique.’
Rhett nodded, then shook his head. ‘Bob wrote me a lot about you and I’ve seen you operate, Captain. But I guess I’ll never understand you.’
Edge emptied his glass and showed a wry grin as the liquor burned down his throat. ‘Your brother never did, that’s for sure.’
‘Not for want of trying.’
‘Yeah. He never stopped trying to get to the bottom of every man.’
‘Go to hell!’ Rhett snarled, and lunged upright, his knees banging the underside of the table.
Edge was holding his glass and he fisted a hand around the bottle before it could tip.
‘Can’t you ever be serious with me?’
Rhett had spun around and started for the door, his mincing, hip-swaying gait accentuated by the rage. His lips pouted girlishly as he flung the question back over his shoulder.
‘Told you once, feller,’ Edge growled. ‘Not even just good friends.’
Earlier, Charity Meagher had slammed a door in Edge’s face. Now Henry Rhett did it, at longer range but with more violent temper.
‘Is he what I think he is?’ a dour-faced steward asked, trying to mask the depth of his interest.
‘It sure ain’t just the way he walks,’ Edge answered, poured himself another drink, rose, and carried the brimful glass and the Winchester to a table set for breakfast. ‘Anything that’s filling,’ he told the steward closest to him. ‘And hot coffee.’
The man scooted away, pleased to have something to occupy his time. The bartender came out from behind his counter to retrieve the bottle. One steward polished cutlery on a cloth and the other two attended to the fire in the pot-bellied stove.
Echoes of war sounded in the half-breed’s mind. There had been a lot of men suffering a great deal of boredom then, between the battles and skirmishes that presented the opportunities to kill or be killed. And there had been men, of higher status, who discussed situations and took decisions in remote places: removed from the arenas of war. And still other men who acted on the very borderline between life and death -these actions risking the lives of others as much as their own.
As in the war, Edge experienced no agony of remorse about the three roustabouts and the woman passenger who were being lowered into the frozen ground because he had taken the action he did. The twelve raiders were going into the same ground, every cent of stolen money had been recovered, the Delta Dawn was still in one piece - and Ferris and the letter were safe.
The Union was not in a state of war with the Confederacy: but to prevent a war was as important as to win one. The enemy had dictated that the methods of achieving the former should be the same as the latter objective.
Edge ate his breakfast with an untroubled mind. He compared Charity Meagher with Jeannie Fisher, Henry Rhett with his brother, Ferris and McBride with senior army officers he had experienced, the passengers and crew of the stern-wheeler with nameless and faceless troopers and himself with Captain Josiah C. Hedges.
In almost all cases, the echoes were distorted. In one respect, they were not. Hedges had been his own man forced by circumstances to rely on the help of others. So was Edge.
Breakfast was good, except for the second cup of coffee he drank after he had finished eating. It came from the same pot as the first, but it tasted bitter. But it was not the sourness in his mouth that carved the lines of a grimace on to his lean, dark-skinned face. Just his thought process, until his mind carried him out of the stove-heated salon to the memory of being alone on the blizzard-ravaged deck in the darkness: surrounded by potential danger and keyed up to meet it.
The door of the salon swung open.
Instinctively, Edge dropped a hand to grasp the frame of the Winchester leaning against his chair.
Horace Ferris entered first, freshly washed up and shaved and warmly dressed against the cold weather outside. Rhett and Charity Meagher were immediately behind
him: as freshly turned out to experience the new day as was the New Orleans businessman.
‘Captain McBride has ordered the entire crew ashore for the interment service,’ Ferris announced solemnly. ‘Passengers are at liberty to choose.’
The bartender and stewards grinned their welcome of the news, and hurried out, shrugging on their topcoats and eager to enjoy a break in the dull routine that had existed since the raid.
Rhett shut the door in their wake and then followed Ferris and Charity to the table where Edge sat. The two men smelled of pomade and the woman of a more subtle perfume. All three expressed a kind of grim solemnity which obviously had nothing to do with the mass funeral about to take place on the snow-covered bank of the river.
‘I have told McBride of our mission in general,’ Ferris said.
He sat opposite Edge. Charity was at the end of the table. Rhett remained standing.
‘How general?’ the half-breed asked.
‘That we are on important Government business and that forces seeking to overthrow the Government are attempting to stop us. I did not mention the document or the fact that I intend to hand it directly to the President.’ He was starting to sweat in the warmth of the salon. Beads of moisture oozed out of his thinning hairline and trickled down his forehead. He mopped at them with a pure white handkerchief before they dripped off his brow.
‘The man is no fool, Edge. And there is probably nobody dense enough aboard this ship not to realize that the attempted robbery had a political motive.’
Edge nodded, stood up and ambled to a window. Morning was well advanced now, the sun high and bright. The snow on the ground was dazzlingly white. The crowd of crewmen and passengers gathered around the area of open graves was swelling by the moment. The bodies were already in their final resting places. McBride stood alone in the centre of the embryo cemetery, a bible protruding from a pocket as he blew visible breath into his cupped hands.
‘Left them cold, uh?’
Edge: Echoes of War (Edge series Book 23) Page 11