Redeker growled a command and the buggy creaked and rattled into motion, the arched design of the vehicle’s body allowing the big front wheels to turn sharply and bring it completely around in its own length.
Just before Edge rode between two houses on the south side of the street and as the buggy began to backtrack over the rutted sign of its approach, he heard part of a sourly spoken comment:
‘. . . him, Joseph, on account of he’s the kind that goes lookin’ for trouble wherever...’
The intervening buildings blocked off the rest of the girl’s jibe and then lengthening distance drew a complete veil over the sounds of the buggy’s progress. After a while, it would have been possible for Joe and Maria to see Edge and for him to see them. But nobody turned around as the lone rider headed up the south-west trail and the buggy crawled in a southeast direction. For the town, now inhabited by two more ghosts, was behind them; soon, was below them as they headed in opposite directions for the ridges flanking the valley.
The couple were riding towards a pre-determined destination—the town of Fallon with its promise of a doctor who would help deliver their baby. Edge was aiming for...?
Maria Lassiter had almost been right, except her harsh tone had accused the half-breed of “lookin’ for trouble” with a selfish motive.
Just twice had this been so. Once, when he rode out on a vengeance trail in search of the men who tortured and murdered his kid brother. Then again, many years later, when a conviction that Sioux Indians had taken his wife triggered another bloody journey on which to kill was of more importance than to survive.
For the rest of the time?
Before Jamie’s terrifying and agonizing death on the Iowa farmstead, the man who was now called Edge had never needed to question his motives. He was Josiah C. Hedges then, the elder son of a tough Mexican father and a beautiful Swedish mother. Life had been hard but uncomplicated by any events which had no direct bearing on eking the necessities of living from the farm on the prairie. Then, after the death of his parents, it had become simpler in many respects.
Until the first shots of the War Between the States portended the end to what once had been.
Whenever he considered the coming of war and his response to it, the man who now rode up a valley side in the Wind River range never sought to use this interlude in his history to justify what he was. For he acknowledged that countless other boys had been forged into men by the same brutal process—yet had returned in peace to take up the same style of life as before.
So to his mind the decision that he should go to war while Jamie remained at home to tend the farm was not a momentous one. At the time he took it, in consultation with his younger brother, it had seemed the obvious thing to do.
War taught him how to kill and to survive to kill again.
And he was an attentive and quick to learn pupil during the harshly cruel lessons on the battlefields of the Eastern states. For no other reason than he believed in the cause for which he was fighting and was anxious that he should be on the winning side.
He rode for the Union cavalry, first as a lieutenant and then a captain. And had to fight a double war—against the Confederate enemy and against six men under his command. A half dozen of the most amoral and vicious killers who ever donned army uniforms. Thus did he have to hone his wits as well as his military skills in order to survive the enmity of both foe and so-called friends.
And, by the first of many cruel twists of his ruling fate, it was decreed that these six should reach the Iowa farmstead ahead of the discharged Captain Hedges in that euphoric period following the Appomattox peace signing.
Jamie died badly, suffering at the hands of men who regarded mercy as a weakness. But his killers made a fatal error by leaving one of their own dead beside the mutilated corpse of Jamie in front of the burnt out farmhouse. So was Josiah C. Hedges’ first step along the revenge trail given direction.
Was that the most momentous step—most momentous decision—he took? In retrospect he could consider it so. But at the time there had been no pause for such abstract contemplation. Impulsively, instinctively, recklessly, he had ridden out after the killers. And had found them and made them pay the price for their crime—using his war taught skills to track them down and to punish them.
During this vengeance hunt a man who was not perhaps innocent had died by the violent hand of Josiah C. Hedges. But certainly he was innocent of any major crime against his killer and thus had Josiah C. Hedges become wanted for the murder of Elliot Thombs. And, as a result of this and the mispronunciation of his name, had the killer acquired the name of Edge.
His short lived, tragically-ended marriage to Beth had come much later, but there had not been time enough—or Edge had been unwilling—to learn that he was destined never to put down roots nor to form any deep relationship with a fellow human being. There had been examples enough of this between the killing of Jamie and his meeting with Beth, but he had ignored them.
And even after his wife’s death—the grief harder to endure than the anguish following Jamie’s murder—Edge had striven when the opportunity occurred to carve himself a niche in the peaceful world of ordinary people going about their routine business.
But always the obstacles placed in his path were too difficult to overcome. Always he won only to lose—be it a woman, money or even a roof over his head. And always there was violence. Blasting gunfire, flashing blades, the screams of the dying and the crimson gouting of their blood.
Jamie and Beth. A farm in Iowa and another in the Dakotas. As his mind re-spoke the accusing words of Maria Lassiter, these two people and these two places in the distant past were vivid in his memory. He had been to countless other places and known countless other people: some still alive and perhaps just as many as violently dead as his brother and wife.
But, as he achieved the top of the valley side and halted his horse to look back, he purposely elected that they should remain an unknown statistic buried deep in his memory. For he knew that if he gave them close consideration he might discover that the pregnant girl aboard the buggy had spoken the whole truth.
The buggy was only half way up the opposite slope of the valley, its progress through the snow necessarily slower than that of a horse and rider. The horses of the two dead men, burdened only by saddles and bedrolls, could have travelled much faster. But the pair of stallions were content to trail Edge at the same pace as the gelding.
From the high ground the half-breed had a bird’s eye view of the ghost town with the snow on its single street trampled and littered with two corpses. And it was hard for him, in his present frame of mind, to visualize the same setting with slightly different components had his ruling fate decreed he should have spent the night elsewhere.
He had been down there and he had fired the first shot. They were the actual facts of the incident. Just as he had been in the cantina in the town on the south bank of the Rio Grande where the Taggart father and son had come to hire hands for a cattle drive. The drive which had taken Edge to Laramie at the cost of many lives. And so could be said to be directly responsible for him being in the ghost town at the head of the valley below.
The death of Isabella had triggered events which took him to the Mexican town on the bank of the Rio Grande...
‘Shit!’ Edge rasped between tightly clenched teeth, then pursed his lips to direct a stream of saliva at the snow. ‘You’re what you frigging are is all.’
The gelding had pricked his ears to the soft-spoken curse: was expecting the touch of heels to his flanks which moved him forward on to Lassiter range.
Astride him, the rider’s face continued to show the silent snarl which was a sign of a mind troubled by undeniable doubts. But not for long, because he was not the kind of man to indulge his weaknesses: had learned from bitter experience that survival depended upon the very opposite of this—the careful nurturing of his strengths.
So, very soon, his lean, lined, dark hued features resumed their familiar impassiv
e set. The words of Maria Lassiter were forgotten, as were the many memories they had triggered. The self-doubt was still there but it, too, was pushed far into the back of his mind. Irksome only because of the knowledge that it might be re-activated at any time by somebody who cared enough about the man to question his motives.
To the west of the valley the country took the form of a high plain featured with expansive stands of timber and slabs of rock, some towering over a hundred feet high. Snow blanketed everything, softening lines and angles. The crystal clearness of the bitterly cold air emphasized the vast distances to the horizons on every side.
For a long time nothing could be seen to move on the white wilderness except the gelding and its rider and the two stallions. And, after a while, all signs of Buel’s and Young’s morning presence on the plain were gone. For their tracks had churned up the snow from the north west. Edge’s route took him southwest. The stallions ignored the sign that indicated the way home and remained on the backtracks of the gelding.
After his period of introspection as he rode up the valley side, the half-breed had taken to constantly surveying his surroundings: his narrowed eyes raking from left to right, his head swinging to direct searching glances back over each shoulder. He would have done this even had Maria Lassiter and Joe Redeker not warned him about the potential dangers of riding across Bar-M range. For it was in his nature born of experience to use caution as a weapon: and not only against a specified threat. For his only possession of value was his life and events had proved over and over again that he was in danger of losing this, too—at any moment of the day or night.
And so he rode the snow covered high plain with fear for company—his dread of dying an ice-cold ball in the pit of his stomach. Dormant for the moment, but primed to explode into life at the first sign of danger. And be controlled by the man and utilized as another weapon: cooling the impulse to recklessness and steadying his physical responses.
So, when he saw the trio of men ahead of him, he was able to form his thin lips into a brief smile of satisfaction. The words of the pregnant girl and the self-doubt they had inspired had no lasting effect. His easy, almost involuntary, caution had enabled him to pick out the forms of the men and their horses against the deep shade at the northern fringe of a stand of timber. And the cooling effect of expanding but controlled fear kept his mind open while toning his reflexes. Outwardly, his attitude astride the gelding and the expression on his bristled, cold-pinched face remained casually indifferent to his surroundings.
The timber grew on a gentle slope and the undisturbed layer of snow at the foot of the rise indicated the men had reached their present position by coming down through the trees. They and their mounts were unmoving until the half-breed approached to within fifty feet of passing them. Then, at a single low-voiced word of command, all three spurred their horses out into the virgin snow. To align themselves directly in Edge’s path, facing him.
They were dressed in the same manner as the corpses back at the ghost town, but their goggles were pushed up on to their foreheads. The eyes thus revealed were hard and weary: bagged from lack of sleep and dulled by frustrated enmity. They were all of about the same age as Edge, with unshaven faces marked by the scars of lives which had seldom been easy.
‘Where you think you’re goin’, stranger?’ the man who had ordered the blocking move asked hoarsely.
He had the heaviest build inside his bulky clothing.
Edge reined the gelding to a halt some fifteen feet away from them. The stallions stopped twice that distance behind him. The half-breed nodded, indicating the due west direction beyond the men and horses in his path. ‘That way.’
‘No you ain’t.’ This from the shortest of the three. Livid, flesh twisting scar tissue on the right side of his jaw also made him the ugliest.
All three men sat easy in their saddles, hands holding reins to horns. All had their coats fastened so that holstered revolvers were inaccessible. But rifle stocks jutting from boots were in plain, menacing sight.
‘You’re trespassin’, you know that?’ This man had a high-pitched voice, its feminine quality dramatically at odds with his rugged, aggressively hewn features.
‘I didn’t see no signs,’ Edge replied evenly.
The top hand of the group nodded. ‘We ain’t fenced the east boundary yet, stranger. That’s why we ain’t comin’ down hard on you. Shortest way off the Bar-M range is south. With this snow you won’t reach the barbed wire until sundown,’ I reckon. Soon as you do, find a gate and go through it. You see any more Bar-M hands, you tell ’em Van Dorn already give you the marchin’ orders.’
‘Hey, Van Dorn!’ the man with the scarred jaw growled. ‘Them horses.’
Van Dorn shifted his weary gaze from Edge’s unresponsive face toward the riderless stallions. He studied them for a moment, then: ‘What about them, Raven?’
‘The one with the white patch on the shoulder. That looks like Ben Buel’s mount.’
Van Dorn looked longer and harder at the stallions, screwing up his tired eyes to combat the glare of sun on snow. Then regarded Edge with the same brand of rising suspicion. ‘What about that, stranger?’
‘I wouldn’t know, feller.’
‘Starr,’ Van Dorn croaked.
‘Yes sir!’
‘Go check the brands on them horses.’
The man with the high-pitched voice spurred his mount forward through the deep snow. Then decided he distrusted the half-breed’s easy attitude and jerked on the reins to command a curving approach to the stallions, taking him wide of the man astride the gelding.
‘How come they’re trailin’ you, stranger?’ Van Dorn wanted to know.
Edge had ignored Starr to concentrate on the two men still facing him. They were perturbed by his apparently nonchalant and yet at the same time careful study of them. And were no longer confident enough to be relaxed themselves. They sat rigidly straight in their saddles and their gloved hands made small movements over the horns.
‘Maybe they like me.’
‘I friggin’ don’t!’ Raven snarled, anger emphasizing the whiteness of the scar tissue on his jaw. ‘I don’t like none of this!’
He shot a glance toward Van Dorn.
‘Three to one,’ the top hand replied and his own voicing of the odds seemed to ease his mind.
The hooves of Starr’s mount crunched loudly in the snow. The expelled breath of men and horses made white wisps in the air, like the first signs of gunfire before the sharp reports and stench of exploded powder. Death hovered in the cold, sun bright morning. Waiting for a mistake to be made or a deliberate decision to be taken.
‘But ain’t no reason for anybody to get . . .’ Van Dorn continued.
To be interrupted by a shrill shout from Starr: ‘Hey, they both of ’em got the Bar-M brand, damnit!’
Edge had been certain of the outcome of the man’s investigation. But could not foretell the reactions of the trio of Lassiter hands. He had split them up and rattled at least one of them. And was sure that, despite their look of hardness, none was—or would be—a killer by anything except instinct.
All this shaved down the odds a little, by giving him the advantage of speed allied with lethal skill.
He kicked his left foot free of the stirrup and used his right to power a leap from the gelding’s back. Both hands released their hold on the reins and horn and gripped the Winchester. He pumped the action even before the barrel was clear of the boot.
Just for a moment, as he fell toward the snow, he considered the jarring possibility that the cushioning whiteness might be a lie: might conceal the crippling hardness of a jagged rock. In such an event, numbing shock or even unconsciousness could prevent him from following through on his first shot. And two men would be left alive.
Then it was as if the world was suddenly blasted into small red pieces by a deafening barrage of awesome gunfire.
His Winchester spat the first, almost insignificant shot: the stock kicking against his sh
oulder in recoil as the bullet’s charge exploded. Then he was down full length in the snow, hardening from its initial softness as it compacted beneath his weight. His target had been Van Dorn, simply because the man’s bulk made him easier to hit than Raven.
There was nothing to choose between the speed of the shocked and frightened men as they dragged their own rifles from the boots. Until the bigger man was hit in the chest by the Winchester bullet and released his grip on the gun to clutch at the blood-splashing hole in his coat.
That was when the holocaust and its bedlam of noise broke out.
The first volley of shots tore into the head of Raven. Rifle fire from close range that drilled small holes through one side of his skull and exploded massive, gory craters on the other.
Edge had time to pump out an expended shell and jack a fresh round into the breech of his rifle and then saw the dying Van Dorn meet his end.
Like the scar-faced man, it was his head that was the target. But his attackers, by accident or design, directed their bullets into his face rather than his skull. There were entry and exit wounds again. But this time whole chunks of crimson flesh were torn free of the bone structure, to fall faster to the snow than the liquid blood.
The half-breed’s nightmarish image of the world ending in a bright red explosion was the aberration of just part of a second. Then cold reality was re-established in his mind. And he took the calculated decision to seek out Starr rather than to check on the next move of the deadly newcomers.
He rolled over on to his back, shifting his narrow-eyed gaze and the muzzle of the cocked Winchester away from the limp forms of Van Dorn and Raven tumbling from their snorting mounts. The roll continued, to bring him over on to his left side.
‘He’s ours, if you don’t mind, son!’
Edge already had the shrill-voiced Lassiter hand in the sights of the Winchester. But had stayed his finger against the trigger at first pressure. For Starr was not a threat. The man had drawn his rifle from the boot, but then hurled it down into the snow. His arms were thrust high into the air, as if he were trying to grasp the morning sun suspended above his head. His face wore a deep-set expression of painful terror which took on an eerie quality from the big, sightless eyes of the goggle lenses held to his forehead.
EDGE: Eve of Evil (Edge series Book 28) Page 3