Behind him, the villagers moved out of their houses and through the groves to resume work on the irrigation scheme. Again, the half-breed’s highly developed sense of being watched—war-taught and peace-honed—told him that eyes were following him as he diminished in the distance on the trail north. But there was no danger from that direction and he concentrated his attention, from behind a nonchalant exterior, on the ground to left and right and ahead of him. Somewhere out there was the sadistic Gonzalez and his followers. One time rebels with a fine cause of overthrowing a tyrannical government: now having acknowledged that the revolt could not succeed and preying on the simple peasants they had, in the long past, sought to liberate.
Edge spat into the thirsty ground before lighting a fresh-rolled cigarette. Mexican politics were not his concern and he had no feeling about Gonzalez. All that concerned him now as he held the gelding to an easy walk along the sun baked valley floor was the purchase of a silver wedding band for Isabella Montez.
He knew exactly where he could get such a ring—from an American prospector who grubbed among the hills at the northern end of the valley. An old-timer known as El Loco Hombre by the people of San Parral. Silver was hard to find in this section of the Sierra Madre, but the old-timer always managed to locate enough to pay for his Spartan, hermit life. Over many years, he had built up a miniature ore processing plant in the cave which was his base camp. And, with skills learned as a young man, turned the basic raw material into fine ornaments. From time to time, he brought his silverware into San Parral, to be shipped out with the lemons on the wagons to market in a far distant town.
Edge had seen the old-timer once and recognized the fine craftsmanship of his silverware.
There was no way of knowing when El Loco Hombre would come to the village again, but his cave was just a half-day’s ride away.
The half-breed remained on the well-trodden trail for three miles, then angled off to the north-west, taking a short cut towards the jagged ridges previously used only by the old-timer and his burro. He continued to smoke, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old, which was unusual. But then it was an unusual day. Not because he had killed a man. Rather because he had asked a woman to marry him—and been accepted.
The proposal had been offered at a time of trouble which presaged far greater violence. But this was not the reason why neither Edge nor Isabella had experienced elation at their betrothal.
Francisco Sorrano had exclaimed: ‘Then San Parral is doomed!’
Edge was concerned only about his own destiny and that of Isabella Montez. For the past had taught the lean-faced, narrow-eyed half-breed that whenever a chance of happiness was offered to him, he accepted it at his peril. And, on the long journey from the dust and corpse-strewn Mission of Santa Christobel to San Parral, he had made Isabella aware of this. Telling her about Jamie, of Beth, of fortunes won and lost and of many other brutal and bloody episodes which proved the point.
Yet she had promised to marry him, unconcerned by the lack of romantic courtship, willing to leave the village her family had died for, feeling no love for him, and inviting tragedy. Doing all this simply because she considered she was in his debt?
For a man like Edge this possibility—perhaps even certainty—left a sour taste in his mouth. Cigarettes were less mind dulling than hard liquor. And the desolate valley with its silence and oven heat was more conducive to profound thought than the fetid cantina with its noisy new patrons,
He was up on the western high ground, riding through the cut between sheer cliff faces which led to the old-timer’s cave, when he reached the decision to order a silver ring. But whether he would place the band on the woman’s finger or retract his proposal was still unresolved. And this indecisiveness was, for a man like Edge, the most disconcerting factor of the whole affair.
Then a man screamed.
It was a shrill, piercing sound almost painful against Edge’s eardrums. Drawn out long, flowing over the crest of the rise ahead and wailing down the cut.
Edge reined his horse to a halt with his left hand and fisted his right around the frame of the booted Winchester.
Two rifle shots cracked and the gelding reared. The reports, rather than the puffs of dust ahead of him, caused the animal’s unease.
The scream ended with a groan.
Edge calmed the gelding with soft words and a gentle hand on the neck. Then tilted his head back to look up, out of the shade of the cut at the strip of brilliant blue sky trapped between the cliff tops. Two Mexicans, with serapes draping their shoulders and sombreros shading their heads, were aiming Winchester rifles down at him.
‘We miss because we want to, mi amigo!’ the one at the top of the left hand cliff called down cheerfully. ‘You don’t let go of that rifle, we won’t want to miss again,’
Edge released his grip on the rifle and draped both hands over his saddle horn, ‘It was thinking about making a Miss into a Mrs got me into this,’ he muttered.
‘I guess you gotta be the half-Mex half-gringo from San Parral, uh?’
Edge looked directly ahead, eyes still narrowed from surveying the highly-placed Mexicans as silhouettes against the bright sky. Three more serape and sombrero clad Mexicans had moved into view at the top of the cut. All of them tall and slender and fit looking. The man in the centre middle-aged, flanked by boys still in their late teens. Wearing white shirts and pants beneath and below the serapes. With bullet-glinting gun belts and crossed bandoliers. Each aiming a Winchester at the trapped rider. It was the oldest of the three who spoke, his American argot sounding strange with its Mexican accent.
‘Name’s Edge,’ the half-breed said.
‘Hey, that’s a real sharp name, ain’t it?’ He laughed, loud and harsh, at his own joke.
The younger men continued to eye Edge as if he was a piece of prime beefsteak and they were hungry. Their eyes were as dark and round and expressionless as the muzzles of their aimed rifles.
‘Of a real dull feller to get caught this way.’
The middle-aged man shook his head, ‘Not the way I hear. You made a mistake is all.’
‘You also hear about me and pointing guns?’
‘Sure did. Ain’t much that goes on in Sonora Ortiz Gonzalez don’t hear about.’
The man who was in agonizing pain groaned again. Gonzalez shouldered his rifle, turned, swung the Winchester down again and squeezed the trigger. There was just the thud of a falling corpse as the sound of a gunshot rolled away across the ridges. A moment later the bandit chief returned his attention to Edge. He had not worked the lever action of the repeater and the smoking barrel was up to his shoulder again.
‘A pointin’ gun ain’t no fun at all. ’Cept for the guy doin’ the pointin’. You wanna come on up and maybe live a while longer?’
‘Obliged,’ the half-breed replied, and moved the gelding forward with a cluck of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and a gentle touch of boot heels to flanks.
As the three Mexicans backed away from him, he sensed the Winchesters of those on the cliffs trained on the nape of his neck. The razor and pouch suddenly seemed to weigh very heavy.
He had never been to the old-timer’s place before. But the hermit miner had given him directions, saying he would be pleased to welcome a fellow American hinting that the hospitality would be far greater if Edge brought a few bottles of liquor with him.
Edge had not brought any liquor, but El Loco Hombre was too dead to notice. He lay in a messy heap at the mouth of his cave and had left the world as naked as when he came into it. They had used a knife on him, to cut all the fingers from one hand and all the toes off one foot. Bright crimson had flowed to entirely cover his face from the fountains of his eyeless sockets.
‘The sight does not disgust you, señor?’ Ortiz Gonzalez asked, eyeing Edge with intense interest. When he was not talking gutter American, the bandit chief sounded like a cultured Mexican.
‘We had a drink together one time,’ the half-breed answered,
raking his gaze over the scene which had the corpse as its focal point ‘Bought our own, so there was no debt either way?’
The cave was directly opposite the top end of the cut, in a flat-floored, squarish bowl of rock, between a hundred and two hundred feet across. In some places the rock wall was sheer to a height of fifty feet at the most. Elsewhere, the cliff had crumbled and pathways had been trodden to the top by the feet of the old-timer and hooves of his burro.
Some thirty or so Mexicans, dressed and armed like their leader so that the impression was of a uniformed army, stood or squatted at ground level and on the pathways, Another Mexican, who Edge recognized, lay full-length and face down to one side of the cave mouth, with blood stains on both thighs and more blood matting the hair of his head.
All the bandits except Gonzalez scrutinized Edge in the same hungry way as the youngsters. The hungriest looking of all were the two men standing at either side of the mutilated corpse. It was apparent from their positions that they had been supporting the tortured old-timer when his groan caused Gonzalez to trigger the killing shot which ended the man’s agony.
‘Hey, so you really are one tough guy, uh? You seen this kinda thing lotsa times before?’ The bandit chief punctuated his new attempt at Americanese with another harsh laugh.
‘Ain’t nothing under the sun that’s new, feller,’ Edge answered, after glancing again at the prone form of Pedro Martinez to confirm that the man who ran the San Parral fruit packing station was still breathing.
Gonzalez drew the Colt .45 from his hip holster and aimed it at arm’s length at Edge. The half-breed looked hard into the face of the bandit and saw in the cruel smile a direct challenge to his own threat about pointing guns. It was a face like Edge’s own, to the extent that experiences during a harsh life had reformed the basic features into lines which promised latent brutality. A lean, sunburned, scored, intelligent face. The dark eyes too close together, perhaps. The line of the thin mouth certainly short. Four teeth were missing at irregular intervals—three at the top and one below. The only hair visible under the curved brim of the sombrero was in long sideburns. It was all gray.
‘If you are tired of seeing the same things over, you will not unfasten your gun belt. And you will not dismount after you have done this.’
He thumbed back the hammer of the Colt. All the bandits except those positioned at the top of the bowl were totally indifferent to this prelude to a possible killing. Edge moved his hands slowly from the saddle horn to his belt buckle. He allowed the gun belt to drop to the rocky ground and then swung easily from the saddle.
‘So you do not always kill a man who covers you twice, mi amigo?’
Edge glanced up at the cliff top as Gonzalez holstered his Colt. ‘They say it’s the exception that proves the rule, feller,’ he answered.
‘And you are a very exceptional man, so it is said,’ Gonzalez posed.
‘Who’s been doing my advertising, feller?’
The bandit leader jerked a thumb towards the unconscious Martinez and reverted to Americanese. ‘That guy. Figured to outrun us on the open trail. Blasted his horse from under him. Still tried to run, so we plugged him in both legs. When we told him we were fixin’ to hit San Parral he reckoned we’d never get past the local hero. Talked about you like you was some kinda saint.’
Pedro was the son of Alberto Martinez, one of the men who had been left to feed the buzzards at the Mission north of the border. He had tried to atone for his father’s wrong by constantly over-reacting to the half-breed’s part in bringing the wagon to San Parral. Only Jesus Vega had been more open in his admiration. Pedro would have been on his way back from a distant town where he had gone to arrange fuel supplies for the new steam-powered water pump.
‘Maybe it was the halo shining in my eyes got me into this mess,’ Edge muttered.
‘We done harder things, mi amigo,’ the cheerful Mexican on the cliff top taunted.
‘Then we find this other guy,’ Gonzalez continued. ‘We was in the hills then, on account we didn’t want no one in the village to see us and blow the whistle before we was good and ready.’
‘If you killed for laughs it was a lousy act,’ Edge said, raking his narrowed eyes around the faces of the morose, hungry-looking bandits. He also looked for a possible avenue of escape, and confirmed his first impression of the small basin inhabited by a minor army—if he was going to get out alive, it would be by permission of Gonzalez.
The bandit chief shrugged his slim shoulders. ‘We needed to rest up. Looked to us like the old goat was minin’ silver. He reckoned he didn’t have none. Just kept on sayin’ that. Finally got to believe him. After Toni and Romero got through askin’ him the hard way. But it past the time, you know?’
‘You got anything else to kill, feller?’
Gonzalez crooked the finger of his free hand, made a half turn and strolled across to the facedown figure of Martinez.
The two young bandits, who wore identical moustaches and had basic features in common to suggest they were brothers, looked more hungry than ever. The way they jerked their Winchesters for Edge to follow Gonzalez made it obvious that bullets biting into human flesh would be a great relief to them.
Toni and Romero, the torturers of the old-timer, backed into the cave. Gonzalez was standing on one side of Martinez. Edge came to a halt on the other side, the pair of youngsters taking up positions a couple of yards behind him. Gonzalez dropped into a squat and tossed his rifle away. There was a great deal of strength in the one-arm throw. The elder of the two men in the cave mouth caught it deftly. Then the bandit chief drew a knife from the back of his belt and swatted at the flies feeding on the head wound of the unconscious man. He began to talk like a Mexico City diplomat again.
‘We were forced to render the young man unconscious when he complained at our treatment of the miner. We did not kill him because we thought we needed him. You have now changed that situation, Señor Edge.’
Gonzalez bunched a tuft of the unconscious man’s hair in a fist. Then jerked the head up from the dust-powdered rock. Next slashed with the knife across the taut skin of the throat, Blood gushed from the gaping wound. More arterial crimson torrented from the sagging mouth, powered by a noisy, dying breath. The handsome face of the young Martinez had been expressing pain from the blow which knocked him out. It altered not at all. Gonzalez released the hair and the head thudded to the ground. The disturbed dies settled and waded in fresher food, and were left in peace to gorge.
The bandit leader grunted softly-—a man satisfied with a task skillfully accomplished. Most of his followers remained as disinterested as before: their taste for slaughter at secondhand jaded. Edge had known the victim and regarded the killing with equal detachment. He did not try to predict what the unpredictable Ortiz Gonzalez had in mind.
The man with the blood-dripping knife in his hand looked up at Edge, and displayed his gap-toothed smile. ‘The old gringo was blind and no longer a man. This young fellow countryman of mine was a cripple. It can be said I did them a favor, can it not?’
Edge sighed. ‘I told a feller back in San Parral I hoped your heart was in the right place.’
Gonzalez suspected the remark was some brand of black humor directed at him. Briefly, anger narrowed his dark eyes and twisted his thin lips. ‘Enough of this preamble!’ he snapped. Then he moderated his tone as he began to use the knife again—with a more delicate touch.
Edge glanced around at the bandits once more, and saw that their leader had at last captured their interested attention.
‘Six gringo bounty-hunters visited our camp. They raped those of our women who appealed to them. Then killed all but one woman. The one they did not kill they took. Since there is nothing new under the sun, you already know of this?’
Boots scraped on rock behind Edge and a rifle muzzle hit him hard at the base of the spine.
‘To lie is to die.’ The threat delivered in Spanish, spoken in a tone of trembling anger.
‘Then livin
g’s easy, feller. It’s no secret.’
‘You saw Eva, the woman of Señor Gonzalez?’ From the same angry youngster, speaking English this time.
Tension was almost a crackling sound in the heated shade of the basin as the sun inched lower towards evening. Edge sensed all eyes except those of Gonzalez trained on him. The leader of the bandits continued to wield the knife, stooped in concentration over the body of Martinez.
‘Large as life,’ Edge answered evenly. ‘Give or take a foot.’
‘They left a message scratched in the dust among the dead women,’ Gonzalez said without looking up. Telling me they would keep Eva safe to be delivered to the Federales at San Parral.’ He sighed and straightened up to his full height ‘They knew I could not allow such an insult to pass.’
He had sliced the shirt from the back of the corpse without puncturing the olive brown skin. Then, in well-formed lettering, he had printed a message into the flesh, wiping away blood runs with the cut shirt: FREE EVA—GONZALES. Lengthwise.
‘What you think, uh, Edge?’ he asked with a grin. ‘You think I’ve made my demand plain?’
‘No sweat, feller. It’s real clear-cut. And I figure I’m the mailman?’
The grin stayed in place on the lean face of the bandit ‘More than that, señor?’ A harsh laugh that resounded between the cliff faces. ‘There is more to be conveyed, and I ran out of notepaper.’
The rest of the bandits on the rim of the basin joined in the humor. Gonzalez waited for the laughter to subside, then his voice and his expression became threateningly serious.
‘The woman, Eva, is unimportant except as a symbol of the insult to me, Edge. She is the latest of many who have kept me warm during the Sierra Madre nights. I can get many others with little more than a snap of my fingers.’
He snapped his fingers. The half-breed glanced around again, but not in expectation of seeing an entourage of bandits’ women appear. Simply to check on a feeling he had. It was a correct one. From the expressions on the bristled faces of most of the men, it was obvious they did not regard the loss of their female companions so lightly.
EDGE: Savage Dawn (Edge series Book 26) Page 5