‘We’re slowing down!’ Martin croaked anxiously.
‘You worry too much, feller,’ the half-breed growled.
While the old man remained in a tense, sitting up attitude atop the crated casket, Edge got to his feet, slid open the nearest door and looked along the length of the train. After looking briefly at the tiny depot, he checked the view from the other door and saw the farmstead.
‘What’s the trouble?’ the old man demanded as Edge returned to the door on the depot side of the car.
‘Maybe none, if the feller who runs this water stop is hard of hearing.’
The engineer brought his locomotive to a halt alongside the depot building and vented another shrill whistle into the early hours. The sound caused a spasm of trembling to grip Martin, but the old man controlled it as he slid off the crate, shrugging out of the blankets.
‘Stay aboard,’ Edge instructed as he dropped down on to the lightly snow-covered boardwalk. ‘And keep your eyes on the farm over there. You see anything you don’t like, come running. Okay?’
The old man nodded. ‘Sure.’ But he didn’t look sure of anything.
The half-breed started along toward the depot building, where the engineer and fireman were thudding fists against a one piece wooden door. As he went by the gaps between the cars, he glanced across the fields at the farmhouse. It remained in darkness. The even surface of the snow covering the fields has been disturbed by booted feet crisscrossing between the farm and the depot.
‘Nobody home?’ Edge asked.
‘Where the frig would Dave go?’ the lanky young fireman snapped, then winced as the engineer rapped him on the shin with a boot cap.
The fireman’s ill temper vanished when he turned to look into the flint-eyed gaze of the half-breed, who he had seen shoot down two men at the Denver depot.
Edge kept his tone even, guessing that there had been a great deal of talk about him in the cabin of the locomotive. ‘Farmhouse across the way?’ he suggested.
‘I guess he visits,’ the engineer allowed. ‘But not close to train times.’
‘You need him to take on water? Can’t you handle it yourselves?’
The fireman shook his head. ‘Ain’t water we need Dave for. Phil here says the telegraph line across the bridge still looked to be in some kind of shape after the explosion, mister. We gotta try to wire Denver about the bridge gettin’ knocked out.’
‘Guess you have,’ Edge acknowledged, leaned forward, turned the handle and swung the door open.
‘Damnit, why didn’t we think of that!’ the fireman growled.
‘On account of us havin’ other things on our minds,’ the engineer answered.
He followed his crewman into the building and seemed nervous at having the rifle-carrying half-breed behind him.
The windows were shuttered, but enough moonlight came in through the open door to show the shadowy forms of the furnishings. The lanky fireman struck a match to light a kerosene lamp. The yellow glow illuminated an immaculately neat and tidy office with timetables and paintings of railroad scenes hung on the walls. There was a desk in the centre of the room with a padded chair behind it. Against a wall was a table with a wooden chair pushed under it. On the table was telegraph equipment, a pile of wire blanks and a spike heavy with used message sheets. A pot-bellied stove in a corner was cold and smelled of dead ashes.
The dead body in the combination kitchen and bedroom at the rear of the building had not started to smell. Edge saw it first, as merely a dark hump in crumpled human form on the floor between the end of the narrow bed and the cooking range.
‘That Dave?’ he asked, stepping to the side of the doorway so that the fireman could reach over the threshold with the lamp.
‘God, yes!’ the lanky young man gasped.
Phil peered between the two taller men and made a choking sound deep in his throat But he backed away and was able to contain the vomit in his stomach.
The Union Pacific’s man in Butcherville had died of a stab wound in the throat. He was still alive when he hit the floor and had lived for a few moments longer. Pain or the terror of drowning on his own arterial blood had caused him to thrash around on the floor. Blood, black now from exposure to the cold air, was spread on the boarding to either side of him and was crusted on his shirt front and his hands.
‘What’s happening?’ the pale-faced Silas Martin called from the boardwalk.
‘The dispatcher’s been dispatched,’ Edge growled, whirling and striding across the neat office. ‘You ain’t supposed to be here.’
‘The house looks deserted. You were so long and it was so quiet. I got nervous.’
‘Hey!’ Phil called as the half-breed stepped outside.
‘Do something for you, feller?’
‘Either of you know how to work a telegraph key?’
‘You work it up and down,’ Edge answered.
The engineer scowled.
‘Maybe there’s a book around. But I’d check the connection first.’
The short, tubby man seemed to be rooted to the spot by the shock of finding the body. And it was the fireman who went to the table and stooped over the equipment.
‘Phil?’
‘Yeah, Ollie?’
‘He’s right. It ain’t just Dave that’s dead.’
As the heat from the unstoked flames in the locomotive’s firebox grew less, so the sound of steam hissing from the safety valve dropped in volume. Silence crowded in off the plain.
‘Ollie?’
‘Yeah, Phil?’
‘I think we should get the hell outta here.’
‘We gotta take on water or end up stranded in the friggin’ middle of nowhere.’
‘So fill her up.’
Both men stepped out on to the boardwalk and came to an abrupt halt. Silas Martin was standing with his back to the tender, swinging the My Friend revolver from side to side to cover the engineer and fireman.
‘You’re to do What you have to do, gentlemen,’ he said, confident of his ability to stand guard over two unarmed railroad men. ‘In order to make the train ready to leave. But we won’t depart until Mr Edge returns.’
The engineer was still suffering from shock and he was afraid of the swinging gun. But the absence of Edge enabled the fireman to give free rein to his temper again.
‘Frig off, you little runt,’ he snarled. ‘The way I see it the big guy is the reason for all the trouble we been havin’. So if he ain’t back when we filled the tanks, it won’t be no hardship headin’ out without him! And remember, old timer. You blast Phil and me and won’t no one leave Butcherville tonight! Unless you and the big guy can run a locomotive?’
Silas Martin’s new found confidence drained out of him in face of the lanky young man’s tirade. But Ollie made no move against him, simply spun into a half turn and strode toward the bracket which held the water hose fast to the front of the building.
‘He ain’t really like that, mister,’ the nervous engineer explained. ‘I guess he’s as scared as I am. Sounds off like that to pretend he ain’t.’
Martin nodded, his features expressing sympathy. ‘I can understand that. I wouldn’t normally hold a gun on innocent men. But I’m scared, too. And I’ll tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘If you and he don’t do exactly what my partner wants, I’m scared enough to kill the both of you.’
The engineer swallowed hard, certain that he was hearing the truth.
The fireman could hear only the low hiss of escaping steam and his own whispered curses as he climbed up on to the locomotive, dragging the hose toward the tank filler cap.
Edge was far enough away from the stalled train to be only vaguely aware of the sounds made by the locomotive. To his ears, his breathing was a louder noise.
After leaving the depot building he had stepped off the boardwalk on the other side from the train and remained erect as he moved - until he was level with the final boxcar which still had both doors gaping open. Then
he went out full length and bellied over the frost crusted snow. At first the timber supports of the boardwalk and the deep shadows among them provided cover. Then, when this ran out, there were just the rails on the ties between him and the dark, silent farmstead.
He knew that, even flat to the white-covered, bitterly cold ground, he was not entirely hidden. That each time he slid himself forward another couple of feet, there was a possibility he would be seen - as a patch of moving darkness on immobile whiteness behind gleaming, inert rails. But nobody saw him, for nobody had a reason to look in the direction he was taking. As far as the watchers were concerned, all activity was centered upon the head of the halted train.
That there were watchers, Edge had no doubt: and he did not base this conviction on the war-taught ability to sense eyes directing their attention toward him. Instead, he reasoned that the killing of the Butcherville dispatcher was not an isolated incidence of wanton violence: and chose to believe, until events proved otherwise, that the murder had a connection with the shootings at the Denver Union Pacific depot. A choice that arose out of his cynical philosophy that if a man constantly expected the worst of any situation, he could never be disappointed. Sometimes might be pleasantly surprised.
Some eighty feet behind the last boxcar he reached a position of relative safety, could rise on to all fours and crawl over the track to squat behind a four feet high bank. He used the barrel of the Winchester to check that the bank was composed of something more substantial than drifted snow and grunted his satisfaction when he discovered frozen earth beneath the sprinkling of crunchy whiteness.
Then he glanced back along the track at the depot for the first time since leaving it. and saw the fireman hosing water into the locomotive’s tanks while Silas Martin continued to aim his small revolver at the engineer. The lanky fireman was a starkly moonlit figure atop the big engine. His partner and the old man were less distinct, in the shadow of the tender and silhouetted against the faint glow which escaped from the closed door of the firebox.
Then the half-breed shifted his narrow-eyed gaze back to the dark shapes of the farmhouse and barn, as he cocked the hammer of the Winchester and pressed the barrel down to make an indentation in the snow at the side of the bank. And now he did give free rein to his sixth sense for detecting the hostile presence of unseen watchers.
The hair at the nape of his neck felt prickly and there were beads of sweat on his palms where they curled tightly around the cold metal and wood of the rifle’s frame and stock. But he set little store by these reactions, which was characteristic of him. Back on those eastern battlegrounds he had been young and inexperienced, filled with the hopes of youth and susceptible to the imaginings of a mind not yet brutalized by the harshness that was to come. Perhaps in those days, when death had quite literally lurked behind every bush or wall, his life had been saved by an uncanny perception for hidden danger.
Down the years, during the war and in its bloody aftermath, the realities of survival had allowed little scope for him to indulge himself in the vagaries of such variables as luck and allied abstract powers. But always in a situation such as this, when he was certain of his physical abilities and there was time to spare, he attempted to re-kindle that old sixth sense. Aware that he was getting into the realm of imagination and in the full knowledge that his hunches had been wrong more times than they had been right.
So he looked upon it simply as a mental exercise which kept his mind occupied - with thought processes of his own choosing. Which was better than having to struggle against the assault of a stream of thinking he had no wish to indulge.
‘Hold it right there, trainman!’ a voice boomed. ‘Move and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground!’
The warning was shouted from the farmhouse, the words reaching the depot distinctly across the quarter mile of snow-covered fields. The lanky fireman had filled both tanks of the locomotive and was about to swing down on to the boardwalk when the first word boomed out.
Edge glanced along the track and saw the man freeze. While below him the engineer and Silas Martin dropped to their haunches and shuffled forward and across to peer between the rear of the tender and front of the first boxcar.
‘And if somebody else tries anythin’, you’ll be just as dead!’
The man was using something to amplify his voice. Maybe hands cupped around his mouth.
A cry sounded at the front of the train. Edge looked along the track and saw a muzzle flash, little more than a spark over such a distance. The crack of Martin’s tiny revolver hardly sounded above the gentle hiss of escaping steam.
‘Oliver!’ the tubby engineer shrieked.
‘Edge!’ Silas Martin yelled, the voices of both men reaching to falsetto under the pressure of fear.
‘I friggin’ warned you!’ the man at the house boomed and punctuated his enraged words with rifle shot.
But the fireman had started to move on Martin’s shout - leaping down from the locomotive to thud his booted feet on the boardwalk close to where his partner and the old man were rolling frantically from side to side, locked in a clawing embrace.
The half-breed had shifted his glinting eyes back to the farmstead by then. And curled his thin lips away from his teeth to show a cruel grin as he heard angry voices and the stomping of fast moving feet on floor boarding. Then the snort of an ill-treated horse and the creak of unoiled door hinges.
The shot from the house sent a bullet thwacking into a timber strut supporting the water tower.
Silas Martin screamed and lay still.
Phil moaned, ‘Oh my God!’ and hurled away the damaging revolver.
His lanky partner hauled him up off the spread-eagled form of the bleeding old man and snarled, ‘Let’s get outta here!’
Two men rode out of the barn, ducking their heads to avoid the lintel. When they came erect the reins were gripped in their teeth, leaving their hands free to fire repeating rifles. The bullets they exploded clanged against the metal of the locomotive. Another man lunged from the doorway of the house, shouting incoherently as he loosed a volley of shots on the run.
The half-breed’s evil grin had a fixed quality for part of a second, as the gunfire was all but lost amid a clamorous roar of power from the locomotive. He snapped another glance along the track and compressed his lips. Of the trio of men who had been on the boardwalk, only Silas Martin was still in sight, his unmoving form clear to see in the bright glow from the open firebox - before a great billow of steam broiled over him.
The drive wheels of the engine spun on the rails. Sand showered down. Rims bit the track and the thrusting power of the open throttle reached through the frantically working pistons to inch the locomotive into painfully slow movement. The line of boxcars shuddered and clanked out of inertia.
Edge struggled to quell the hot anger that threatened to engulf him, succeeded, and was surprised at having experienced the emotion. His tone was as ice cold as the snow beneath his prone body when he muttered: ‘Cool it, feller.’ And shot the running man.
In the chest, left of centre: the bullet stopping the man in his tracks and then causing him to corkscrew to the snow.
The two riders were far ahead of the man on foot, their attention concentrated on the locomotive as it picked up speed. The sounds of the moving train and the fusillade of shots from their own rifles masked the crack of Edge’s Winchester.
The half-breed killed the rider nearest him with a bullet that drilled through the man’s side, entering above the right hip bone on an upward trajectory, passing between two ribs and coming to rest buried deep in the heart. As the lead tunneled through flesh the man had time to scream his agony and fling away his rifle. The sound was loud and shrill enough to reach the ears of his partner, who snapped his head around as the dying man pitched sideways off his mount.
‘Bad things,’ Edge rasped between teeth bared again in an evil grin, ‘come in threes.’
It had to be a back shot because the half-breed did not trust himself to hit
the smaller target of the screwed around head of the man. In the moonlight he saw the hole appear in the light colored material of the rider’s coat. Watched for a moment as the bloodstain blossomed larger. Then powered to his feet and lunged into a flat out run as his third victim fell forward, bounced against the neck of the horse and was hurled into just another pile of dead flesh on the snow.
Conscious that there might be more than three ambushers, Edge cast several glances toward the darkened farmstead as he sprinted alongside the track. But no muzzle flash showed to signal a shot.
He reached the western end of the depot boardwalk just as the final boxcar was hauled clear of the eastern end. The locomotive, not yet with a full head of steam but hauling only half its normal payload, was gaining speed with every yard of track it covered.
But the running half-breed was closing on his objective, and did not break his loping gait as he saw Silas Martin raise his head and heard him call, ‘Edge!’
‘Got a train to catch,’ he gasped between quick breaths.
‘Don’t leave me!’ the old man cried weakly as the half-breed raced by him.
Edge saw the blood on the front of Martin’s coat, glimpsed the pleading look on the deathly pale features between the bushy side-whiskers and experienced regret that he had no time to explain. Another uncharacteristic emotion. Compounded by a gesture.
He flung the Winchester across the track. It hit the side of the boardwalk and fell to the ties.
Then he was beyond the injured old man, starting to feel sharp pains across his chest at the unaccustomed exertion. His breathing became labored. His eyes began to smart and blur. But he kept up the punishing pace, fighting the need to cough as locomotive smoke billowed around him. A drumming in his ears blotted out the sounds of the train. He started to feel light headed.
But by then he had drawn level with the rear of the final boxcar. He was gripped by a sensation of elation and felt he could leap forward and up to grasp the iron ladder.
He quelled the feeling and drove himself to a final burst of speed that placed himself alongside the open door. He reached up with one long arm, curled his fingers around the doorframe, almost stumbled, then powered upward and to the side, both legs continuing to pump as though his feet were still slamming at solid ground instead of thin air.
EDGE: THE LIVING, THE DYING AND THE DEAD (Edge series Book 29) Page 6