The half-breed swung around and strode to the water-trough. The horses had drunk their fill, and he had to pump out some more from the tank on top of the tower. He held his hand and the razor under the hose as the two women watched him. Neither of them seemed to trust herself to speak.
‘She can get dressed and you can hitch the wagon now,’ the half-breed told Aunt Matty evenly. ‘He won’t be bothering you ladies anymore.’
‘Nor nobody else for sure after that,’ the older woman replied hoarsely.
‘Charged too much for the water, ma’am. Couldn’t give back what he took. Have to be content with splitting the difference.’
The disablement of her assaulter and the easy tones in which Edge spoke had the effect of calming Muriel Tree, and she emerged from her torment aware that the cool blue eyes were surveying her body. She emitted a squeal - of violated modesty - and sprinted for the open doorway of the shack, curving wide of the sprawled form on the ground.
‘Muriel and me are real grateful to you, mister,’ Aunt Matty said as she gathered up the trailing traces and urged the team over to the front of the wagon.
‘Third of fifty grand grateful, way I hear it,’ the half-breed answered. He also went over to the wagon, but towards the rear.
‘You hear right,’ Aunt Matty admitted openly. ‘You’ll be ridin’ with us? I guess?’
He hauled himself up over the tailgate and moved some bales of hay. He found a wooden crate with a hinged lid and looked inside. It contained grave markers that were identical to the one which was on the mound above the body of Bradford Bean back at Railton. He counted them. Nine. Then he dropped the lid back on the crate, replaced the hay bales and dropped down to the ground. He checked that his horse had not wandered far, and then rolled a cigarette as he watched the woman hitch the team.
‘I’ll be with you, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘But just to protect my investment. You do the other nine killings yourself.’
She continued with her chores, doing it like an expert. ‘My third husband was a stonemason. I learned the trade from him.’
Edge blew out smoke. ‘Which number was the killer?’
Aunt Matty tested the tension of the traces, nodded her satisfaction and sighed. She climbed up on to the seat. Weariness gave her face a haggard look that accentuated nature’s unkindness to her features.
‘Never did finish telling you the story of that bull, did I, young feller?’ She sniffed. ‘After Vic Evans and his hands got off scot-free for murdering Barnaby, Muriel had this strong urge to kill them all at the first chance she got. But I wasn’t for that - couldn’t see how a slip of a girl like that could do it. But I made up those tombstones to humor her, kind of. Took a long time over it, hoping her crazy anger would cool. It did, some. Changed her mind. Said she wanted to get the bull and bring him down to Texas. Intention was to get the money and use it to hire the best lawyers and force a trial for the killers.’
‘Markers just for ballast in the high winds?’ the half-breed suggested wryly.
‘Who’s tellin’ the damn story?’ Aunt Matty demanded angrily.
‘You don’t get golden spurs for length, ma’am.’
She ignored him. ‘I told Muriel I’d go for that. I helped her get the bull out of the Evans spread and I’ve been with her on the long haul down here. I almost quit when I found she’d put the tombstones aboard, but we was down south of Oregon territory by then and a long way from home. To boot, there was no sign that the Evans bunch were tracking us. Until the other night, which you know about.’
‘Changed you some, uh?’
The familiar expression of hatred re-entered the woman’s face. ‘Changed me a lot, young feller,’ she said venomously. ‘Now I’m all for using every one of them tombstones.’ A sniff. ‘But I ain’t so sure about Muriel. I don’t know if she’s got the gall to kill a man.’
The object of the woman’s doubt emerged from the shack, dressed in a long gown that didn’t cover everything it was supposed to. In the heat of his lust, the giant had ripped off one sleeve at the shoulder, popped several buttons below the high neckline and torn a long rent at the thigh. On her face, Muriel wore a vague expression of one in deep thought. But there was nothing vague about her stride as she walked towards the unconscious man with the blood-drenched groin. She had a gun belt strapped around her waist, with a full load of shells and the butt of a Remington .44 jutting from the holster. She held a wooden box in one hand and in the other carried a single-barreled hammerless shotgun with a lot of fancy decoration on the hinged frame.
‘That gets us out of a bind,’ Aunt Matty said softly, calling Edge’s attention to her face, which was now expressing tight-lipped pleasure. ‘Evans’s men kept our guns,’ she amplified. ‘And that bastard of a sheriff back in Railton wouldn’t allow us to buy any new ones in town. Figured I’d have to ask you for a loan of yours, which you wouldn’t have agreed to, right?’
Edge dropped the cigarette and trod it into the ground. ‘Not in a million years, ma’am,’ he answered, and moved to retrieve his horse.
‘And we ain’t got nowhere near that much time,’ Aunt Matty said, picking up the reins. ‘Come on, Mu, we got to be mov...’
Her voice trailed away as the half-breed swung up into the saddle. Both of them looked towards Muriel, who had halted at the side of the wounded man.
‘Leave him to die, my dear!’ the older woman muttered brutally. ‘He deserves it.’
Muriel stared down at her assaulter, her blonde hair sweeping in front of her face to hide her expression. ‘A train might come, Mathilda.’
‘Then he’ll suffer worse - a man like him - if he lives.’
The golden hair trembled as Muriel shook her head. ‘But I won’t have made him pay for what he did to me. Terrible things, Mathilda. I’ll get sick just thinking about them. And then, after he did all that, do you know what he wanted me to do?’
‘I’ve been married five times, Muriel,’ Aunt Matty replied dully. ‘Ain’t nothing I don’t know about what men like to do to women.’
Muriel placed the box on the ground as her sister-in-law was speaking. She opened the lid, took out a cartridge, slid it into the breech and snapped the gun closed.
‘She’s kind of young,’ Edge called softly, watching Muriel as she stood up and took aim with the shotgun. ‘But looks like she’s going through the change, ma’am.’
‘He wanted me to take him in my mouth!’ Muriel said shrilly, lowered the gun and squeezed the trigger.
The recoil thrust the woman backwards, and took her out of range of the gushing gore. The shot pellets smashed into the bearded face between his upper lip and his flared nostrils. They spread inside his mouth and tore through flesh, gristle and bone until they buried themselves in the ground beneath. The entire top three-quarters of the man’s head disintegrated in a crimson and white explosion of blood and bone fragments. His body did not move. Both his eyes survived whole, and floated away from him on a river of blood. They stared accusingly up at the sky as it darkened in the wake of the setting sun. Another moving river was formed: from a different direction and colored black. A column of ants was marching in for an unexpected feast.
‘Live ones won’t be so easy,’ Edge warned, watching the woman closely for a hysterical response to the ghastly result of her action.
But she was calm and deliberate as she returned to the side of the mutilated man and picked up the box of shotgun cartridges. She stepped demurely over the inert form and moved to the wagon. She no longer limped.
‘He got what he deserved!’ she said emphatically as she climbed aboard and sat down hard on the seat.
‘Even what he wanted,’ Edge growled, eyeing the corpse, messily decapitated above the mouth line. He spat as he wheeled his horse. ‘A little head.’
Chapter Five
A MOON - fuller, higher and brighter than last night - made tracking easy. Even more helpful was the trackers’ knowledge of their quarry’s ultimate destination. But, for the first few mile
s east of Dry Lake Bend, Edge rode ahead of the wagon to assure himself that Evans and his men really were making in the general direction of distant El Paso.
Then he dropped back, hitched the gelding to the tailgate and ran forward to haul himself up on to the seat of the moving wagon. Muriel Tree had the reins now, while Aunt Matty vented regular snorting sounds from inside the covered wagon.
‘We take it in turns,’ the woman explained. ‘One sleeps while the other one drives. We think that, even with the bull, Evans can move faster than a wagon.’
The half-breed was experiencing a weariness of his own after the long ride under the hot sun. ‘Sounds like a great idea,’ he said, his tone suggesting it was not. ‘If you can be sure of picking up a new team of horses every once in a while.’
Muriel continued to stare straight ahead, but her profile became set in hard lines. ‘We aren’t stupid, Mr. Edge! We did bring this rig all the way down from the Canadian border, you know, and with the same team!’
The reason she had to keep her attention to the front was that the leading pair tended to veer from side to side. The pair behind were equally as tired, ready to go meekly where the ethers led.
‘We stop for one hour at the end of every four,’ she added.
‘Ain’t enough,’ the half-breed warned. ‘Figure the team had longer than an hour at the last stop and they ain’t been hauling more than thirty minutes since. Yet they’re close to dropping in their tracks, ma’am.’
‘Attend to your own business, mister, and I’ll attend to mine,’ Muriel snapped. ‘You saw what I did back there to get the animals water. Doesn’t that show I’ve got the team’s interest at heart?’
‘Shows you’re anxious to catch up with the bull,’ Edge answered. He leaned across and snatched the reins out of her hands.
Muriel gave a cry of angry surprise and whirled in the seat to glare at the half-breed. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.
‘Over anxious, I’d say,’ he replied steering the team down a slight slope to the left and easing them to a halt on a patch of tough grass to one side of a grove of mixed mesquite and cactus plants.
‘What’s all the ruckus?’ Aunt Matty demanded sleepily from the rear.
‘This . . . this . . . man is making us stop, Mathilda!’ Muriel stuttered in anger.
Edge hitched the reins around the brake lever and jumped down to the ground. He started to release the team from their traces. ‘We’re in the same business, Mrs. Tree,’ he told the woman who sat in rigid anger on the seat. ‘Which means we’ll both fail if the horses don’t hold out.’
‘Not both, young feller,’ Aunt Matty put in as she came along the side of the wagon. ‘This is a three-handed operation. And I’m glad you got the point across to Mu.’ She glowered up at the younger woman. ‘I been tellin’ her all along we been pushing the animals too hard.’
Muriel shared her glare of frustrated anger between Aunt Matty and Edge. Then she pouted. ‘We’ve got to get to a town soon where we can change the team!’ she maintained. ‘The longer we stop, the farther Evans will get in front of us.’
‘Evans and his men have got horses, too,’ Edge pointed out, continuing with the chore of unhitching the team. ‘And the bull. Men and animals alike have got to rest and to eat.’
Aunt Matty sniffed. ‘Told her all that.’
‘Actions speak louder than words,’ the half-breed answered, freeing the team and then ground hobbling them.
‘Tried it, young feller,’ Aunt Matty said, with a stern glance at Muriel. ‘But she’s younger and stronger than me. Real strong when she’s in a temper.’
Edge was on his way to attend to his own horse at the rear of the wagon. ‘Figure she’s a little younger than me. But I can take care of her in the other department.’
He was out of sight of Muriel, but she flinched at the sound of his fist smacking into an open palm. Then she got a defiant look into her green eyes as she draped a hand over the Remington in her holster. She stared down at Aunt Matty, and her mouth took on the line of a sneer. ‘You try to lay a finger on me, mister, and you’ll regret it, I’m telling you.’
Aunt Matty grinned along the side of the wagon at Edge, who was unsaddling the gelding. ‘And that skunk Evans called me a tough egg,’ she rasped.
Edge responded to the grin with one of his own. ‘I know which one I’d like to go to work on,’ he said wryly.
After that, he lit a fire and his chores were over for the night. Whistling, Aunt Matty prepared a meal while the sullen-faced Muriel spread fodder for the horses and watered them. While they ate, the younger woman maintained a stony silence, and her older sister-in-law chattered about inconsequentials for a short time. Edge was tired and the food hastened his weariness towards a point where he was ready for sleep.
‘It wasn’t a third of what the bull fetches we intended to offer you,’ Aunt Matty said. She had been talking about her husbands, explaining that her fifth and last had been called D’Eath, which was why she had reverted to her maiden name. Edge had been listening to the sound of her voice, rather than the words. Even though it was obvious Aunt Matty was talking to him rather than the sulking Muriel. But this sudden change of subject snapped him out of his dozing state.
‘Got your message from the railroad man,’ he said from under his hat, tipped forward over his face as his head rested on his bedroll.
‘Sorry we told him what we did,’ Muriel put in coldly. ‘We can handle this business ourselves.’
Aunt Matty sniffed. ‘Maybe we can and maybe we can’t. But back at Railton weren’t neither of us so full of spunk.’ She looked at the lounging Edge and moderated her tone. ‘Figured to offer you fifty dollars a day to ride escort for us. On account of there being Indian country up ahead.’
‘Deal’s made, ma’am,’ the half-breed said.
‘I know it,’ was the quick reply. ‘Just wanted you to be aware—’
‘I think we made the best deal,’ Muriel interrupted acidly. ‘Man like he is, he’d have taken us to Texas by way of Philadelphia and got enough days’ work to get every cent we’re going to make.’
Edge raised his head and tilted back his hat so he could send a cold stare at the younger woman. She saw the harshness in those eyes, and the cruel line of the thin mouth made her catch her breath. His voice seemed to extract every trace of warmth from around the glowing fire.
‘Mrs. Tree, something you ought to know. Night ain’t long enough to tell you all the things I’m not. One of the few things I am is honest. You make any more accusations like that and I’ll kill you. That’s a promise.’
He tilted his hat forward again and rested his head back on the bedroll. Muriel grew scarlet as she let out her pent-up breath. Then she sucked in another and seemed on the point of hurling an angry retort at the half-breed.
‘Talk of money’s premature anyways!’ Aunt Matty put in hurriedly. ‘First, catch the bull.’
‘Thank you, Mrs. Beaton,’ Edge muttered sleepily from under his hat.
‘You were listening!’ Aunt Matty said gleefully. ‘Mr. Beaton was my third.’
‘Cook, was he?’
‘No, that was Grayson Kerr, my second. Beaton wrote books. I told you that.’
‘Long ones?’ Edge’s voice was little more than a whisper now.
‘Very long,’ Aunt Mattty answered. ‘There was one time he was working on this…’
Edge thought he said: ‘You sure did learn something from all your husbands, ma’am.’ But, although the comment was formed in his mind, he did not speak it. He was asleep too soon.
As it always had been from those first few days after the initial action of the War Between the States, the kind of sleep Edge took was refreshing, but light. Even when there was no imminent threat of danger, his mind sank to only a shallow plane of unconsciousness and a highly developed sixth sense remained alert. Thus, he slumbered undisturbed through the sounds the women made in clearing away the remains of the meal and bedding down in their
tent. But, had a twig cracked in the wrong place, or a horse other than the five at the campsite given a low snort, the half-breed would have woken instantly prepared to respond like lightning to whatever menace lurked in the shadows beyond the glow of the fire.
In fact, it was the first ray of a new day’s sun that nudged him into an easy waking. There was not a cloud in sight in the clear blue sky and the seemingly limitless landscape of scrub desert showed no sign of being host to any other intruders than those who were camped beside the grove. He boiled water for shaving and coffee, then roused the women. This took some effort, revealing just how exhausted they had been. He finally had to resort to prodding the muzzle of his Winchester into a bulge at one side of the tent.
‘Hey, careful where you’re poking that thing!’ Muriel snarled.
‘Only my gun, ma’am,’ Edge said lightly.
‘Go to hell!’
‘Guess that’s gotta be where I’m headed in the end,’ he replied ruefully.
They made steady progress all through that day, across the desert and up into high country again. They often saw signs left by the group of men they were following. Aunt Matty did a lot of talking during the morning, but her mood became less buoyant during the afternoon. On occasions when she thought that the other two were not looking at her, she allowed a grimace of pain to carve deeper lines into her face. Sleeping on the ground with only canvas to keep out the night air was not good for her rheumatism. But she was determined that Muriel and Edge should not be aware of her suffering. Muriel spoke only when it was strictly necessary. Edge was his taciturn self, dividing his time between riding on the wagon and taking his gelding ahead to scout for a sign or find the easiest way around natural obstacles.
He did spot the older woman’s discomfort, but it was not in his nature to interfere in affairs that did not concern him. Only if Aunt Matty’s disability hampered efforts to win back the bull would she become a problem. Although he ignored Muriel Tree’s vexation to the same extent, he did detect a certain change in her attitude. He guessed that now he was merely a current excuse to provide a handy reason for her mood. Maybe the real motive for her pouting sourness was in the past. Was it what the man at Dry Lake Bend had done to her, or what she had done to him?
EDGE: Ten Tombstones to Texas (Edge series Book 18) Page 6