‘Other side of the trees, kid. You weren’t supposed to hear me. Makes it part my fault you almost killed me. But you ever point a gun at me again, make the shot count. Or you’re dead.’
Clayton swallowed hard as he got quickly to his feet, leaving the discarded handgun on the ground. ‘I’ll get him for you. You got stuff with you? I’ve only got eatin’ utensils, a mug and things like that for myself.’
‘Obliged.’
The boy moved hurriedly and nervously away from the fire, still shocked by the near miss and not looking at the half-breed after a single anxious glance at the lean face lit by the light of the flickering flames.
After he had dropped down into the dry wash and gone through the timber, Edge squatted on his haunches at the side of the fire, checked that the boy’s mug was clean and poured coffee into it. He sipped at the hot, strong drink without revealing any facial response to what he thought of it. His narrowed eyes looked at the gun and then the wagon and horses.
The final light of day had now followed the set sun down below the western curve of the mesa but the flames illuminated the campsite well enough. And he saw that the revolver was a British-made Tranter .45 six-shot with customised wooden grips. While the enclosed wagon was like many the half-breed had seen during his disenchanting stay in New York City: except for the carefully lettered wording painted in vivid gloss-red on the matt-black side – THE GREAT MARVO, MAGICIAN AND DENTIST. Like the gun and the wagon, the two-horse team looked well cared for.
‘I guess the sign means you’re better at magic than shooting?’ Edge posed as he heard hooves set rocks rolling and turned to watch the youngster lead the mare up out of the dry wash.
Clayton’s mind was obviously still anxiously preoccupied with recent events and he had to think for a few moments before he understood what Edge was talking about. ‘Oh, the great thing,’ he said as he moved the mare wide of the fire and hitched the reins to a rear wheel of the wagon. ‘If you’re in the entertainment business, you have to have a name like that. Folks expect it. All right if I use your mug, Mr Edge? Seein’ as how you’re usin’ —’
‘Looks like you keep your things clean, kid. Yourself included. So I don’t figure I’ll catch anything off you.’
‘And pick up my gun?’
‘Long as you remember what I said about not pointing it at me again, no sweat.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No debt, either.’
Edge watched the boy until Clayton had come to sit down across the fire from him and poured himself a cup of his own coffee. And now could see nothing of Jamie in him. Willard Clayton was a lot skinnier than the half-breed’s brother had been. And his build lacked the muscular development, his skin did not have the deep tanning which had marked out Jamie as a prairie farmer who worked long hours in the open air under the unpredictable Iowa skies. This boy’s hair was definitely blond, whereas Jamie’s colouration was sandy. The eyes of the youngster across the fire were brown and... Edge vented a low grunt of vexation as he realised he could not recall the colour of his dead brother’s eyes.
‘You say somethin’, Mr Edge?’ Clayton asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh.’
Under the frock coat, the boy was dressed in a brown and white check shirt and well-cut pants that looked as if they were part of a tailored suit. There was a black string tie neatly knotted at the collar. Both his gunbelt and the holster held at the belly were old and there was a bullet in every loop. His boots were high of heel and he did not wear spurs. On his way to get the half-breed’s mare he had dusted off his clothing.
‘See, I want to be a gunfighter. What I do now, that don’t appeal to me at all. It was just that when my Pa died, it seems right I should take over what he did. He spent years gettin’ me ready to do that.’
‘Following in his footsteps to the Promised Land is what appeals to you, Willard?’ the half-breed asked.
The boy grimaced and, just for part of a second as the expression was forming on his features, it could have been a ghostly replica of Jamie’s face which Edge saw through the distorting effect of shimmering heat rising from the fire. ‘Way I’ve been told, the best live the longest. And they live highest off the hog. Stands to reason, it seems to me.’
‘Stands to reason old men lie about their lives, Willard. Specially to over-eager kids.’
‘Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, Mr Edge,’ Clayton said, piqued. ‘And to live their own lives.’
The half-breed nodded. ‘For as long as they want to, God willing.’
Clayton seemed satisfied to have reached this degree of agreement and he finished his coffee at a swallow. ‘You want some more?’ he offered. ‘Because I have to get movin’ now. I plan to do a show in Freedom at eight o’clock tonight.’
Edge topped up his mug, emptied the rest of the coffee on to the ground and held out the pot towards the boy as Qayton got to his feet. ‘Freedom?’
The youngster showed surprise. ‘Town about five miles south east of here. Only town within two days ride of here. Ain’t that where you’re headed?’
‘No.’
‘Well, if you do happen through there in the next couple of days, we can exchange mugs then. If you don’t, it ain’t important. Been nice meetin’ you, Mr Edge.’
‘I’ll remember you for awhile,’ the half-breed answered, using his free hand to massage a bruised thigh.
Confident of fresh supplies close at hand, Qayton used water from a container in the rear of his wagon to wash out the coffee pot and mug. Then he unhitched the mare, led the animal across the hollow and retethered her to a clump of mesquite. He collected the can from where it was lodged in the timber and took it with him up on to the wagon seat. A single bullet had at one time penetrated two opposite curves of the target.
‘If you change your mind about comin’ to Freedom,’ he called across the hollow, ‘come see my show, Mr Edge. Like I said, I don’t enjoy my work, but I’m damn good at it.’
‘Obliged for the coffee.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘The simple kind’s always the best.’
Clayton made a clucking noise and flicked the reins to set the two-horse team into motion, up out of the hollow the way they were facing and then into a right turn, the boy driving by the light of the now risen three-quarter moon.
As he listened to the sounds of the wagon’s progress go out of earshot, Edge rolled a cigarette and lit it; all the time listening for other noises in the night. Soon, there was only silence beyond the hollow with, down in the depression under the mesa, just the crackle of burning wood.
When he had first dropped on to his haunches at the fire, the half-breed had intended to use the flames to cook himself a meal. But the prospect of a change of diet in a restaurant of a nearby town persuaded him to suppress his hunger and he lit and smoked the cigarette. Alone and unmoving in the almost total silence he relied entirely on his sense of hearing to warn him of approaching danger while his slitted eyes, glinting in the firelight, stared at a fixed point in the middle distance: not into the fire in the event that a threat might appear in the darkness, when a man could lose valuable time while his pupils adjusted to the night.
Jamie had been younger than Willard Clayton when he died, he had not yet celebrated his nineteenth birthday. He died badly, on a bright day in June 1865, a few hours before his elder brother – then named Josiah C. Hedges – rode home to the Iowa farmstead from the war. Six troopers who served under Captain Hedges in the Union cavalry had reached the farm ahead of their former commanding officer. There to put the crippled youngster to agonising death and burn the farm buildings, without learning the whereabouts of the money they knew the older brother had sent to the boy.
The troopers had left one of their own dead beside the corpse of Jamie Hedges in the yard of the burnt-out farm, providing a pointer, if one had been needed, to the killers the half-breed set out to track down. And track them down he did. And took his revenge against them. U
sing every skill which he – a one-time Iowa farm boy himself – had learned during the long, bitter and bloody years of the war between the States.
But when he brought his brutal vengeance hunt to a vicious end, he found himself as empty of triumph as when he learned that the Union defeated the Confederacy. And on this occasion, down on the Arizona-Mexico border strip, he lacked even the solace of a future pleasant in prospect. For in the act of trailing and finding the five former troopers who murdered Jamie, Josiah C. Hedges killed a man in Kansas who the authorities of that state felt did not deserve to die. Thus did the recently mustered out Captain Hedges of the US Cavalry become an outlaw named Edge – this name adopted after a mispronunciation by an enraged Mexican.
Wanted for murder and without a home to go back to or kin to offer him shelter, Edge accepted his lot as a drifting loner, asking favours of nobody and eking a living by selling his war-taught skills to whoever needed and could afford them.
On occasions he had attempted to put down roots and every now and then somebody had discovered that, deep inside his hard and implacable facade, there were remnants of a few of the finer human feelings. But always his attachments to a place or a person had been violently severed. Most brutally when his beautiful young wife had died, in circumstances that cruelly apportioned to him a large amount of the blame.
Which had embittered and hardened him still further, draining him of virtually the last vestiges of humanity and sinking these even deeper beneath his bleak and impassive surface. And he had taken up again his aimless drifting across the American west and the Mexican north, handling uninvited trouble as efficiently and coldly as he dealt with the violent men and events he was paid to combat. Gradually over the years – most of them, bloodier and in many ways harder to endure than those of the war – the tenets of his code of life had been pared away. Until now, this man who sat beside a fire in the moon shadow of the curved mesa adhered inevitably to only two rules. If unwanted favours came his way, he always returned them. And he never hired his gun for the specific purpose of killing a man.
The fire died low and the chill of night dropped down into the hollow. With no new brushwood to devour, the flames did not crackle. So that the silence was total until Edge stood up and crossed to where the mare was hitched. As he rolled his shirt sleeves down over his hirsute arms, fastened them at the cuff and put on a knee-length black coat he had taken from his bedroll, the half-breed smiled, enjoying the utter stillness and total lack of human company, recalling how during his visit to New York City he had come close to relishing such a simple pleasure only amid the stands of timber and expanses of grass in Central Park.
Then he shook his head as he unhitched the mare and swung astride the saddle. New York was some two thousand miles away and a single event which happened in the city was all that should stick in his mind, for it was there that he had been granted an amnesty on the old murder charge. Which meant that he was no longer a wanted man who needed to be constantly moving, hiding his true identity under an assumed name.
He heeled the mare forward, up from the hollow between the tracks left in the dust by the wheels of Clayton’s wagon. And he saw that the youngster was following an old and little-used trail which stretched straight as an arrow from east to west before it veered to the left at the curved mesa and then ran in a direct line again towards a huddle of hills three miles to the south west. Edge rode in the same direction as the wagon had taken, trying to blot from his mind thoughts of what had happened two thousand miles away and several weeks ago. For it had never been his way to reflect deliberately upon the impossible. And it was certainly not possible for him to revert back from what he had become to anything approaching what he once had been.
His long ride from the east into the west had proved that. For when violence invaded the train by which he left the city, his responses had been those of Edge, not Josiah C. Hedges. Equally instinctive was the way he took a hand in the troubles of the Rosses in the Middle-West. Afterwards he could have reached his old home in just a few days of riding. Or, in a matter of a few more days, returned to the farm where he and Beth had set up house. But he had not even briefly considered either alternative, instead he had pushed west and then south, waiting and watching for new opportunities to draw and use his Remington, Winchester or straight razor. Preferring the risk – as he doubtless always had done from those opening days of the war – that he could finish up a blood-spilt corpse rather than face up to the prospect of growing peacefully old with only the changing of the seasons to add variety to life.
Which brought into question what might have happened had Jamie not died so young. Or Beth had survived. Which in turn brought him, as the lights of a town showed ahead between the folds of two hills, full circle back to the futile exercise of considering the impossible.
A few yards beyond where the lights first came into view among the hill crests, a wooden marker stood at the side of the trail, one end tapered to a point. Weather had not yet completely obliterated the words on the marker, which had been painstakingly burned into the surface with a hot branding iron. In the moonlight, Edge read: THIS WAY TO FREEDOM, STRANGER.
The mare whinnied and scraped at the ground with a fore-hoof, impatient to be on the move again after the rider had halted her so that he could rake his eyes along the faded lettering on the marker.
‘Easy,’ the half-breed soothed, running a hand gently down the neck of the horse. ‘Nothing worthwhile comes just by following a sign.’
As if sensing a break in the routine of long days in every weather trekking across a seemingly endless wasteland and cold nights in bleak camps under the stars, the mare wanted to be given her head. But the man in the saddle held her on a tight rein, to maintain the same even pace over the final half mile as he had demanded throughout the day.
This final stretch of trail – as underused as that behind the half-breed, for there were no outlying homesteads on this side of Freedom – made a gentle curve on a constant upgrade. Between flanking low hills, the sides of which changed gradually from dusty soil to scrubland and then to grassy meadows. At the points where the grass began, fences had been erected of five strands of barbed wire strung between posts. Flocks of sheep grazed on the turf, the animals close to the trail scampering away with nervous bleats as the horseman rode slowly by.
Then the ground levelled out and Edge rode between the two farmhouses and their barns and shacks which flanked the start of Freedom’s main street. It was a broad street, without sidewalks at this end, lined beyond the farms by small houses with gardens enclosed by picket fences. Lamp and candlelight gleamed from windows and smoke laden with the smells of cooking curled up from chimneys. There were shade trees in all the gardens and some of the householders grew flowers or vegetables while others neglected the rich-looking soil of then-plots.
This section of the street ran for about a hundred and fifty yards into the commercial centre of town, where the sidewalks began and the buildings – a mixture of old and new – were of stone as well as frame construction, a number of them rising to two storeys.
On the left a bank, a gunsmith, a dry goods store, a. saloon called The Sheepman and the sheriff’s office. Across from these a livery stable, the fire station, a drugstore, a stageline and telegraph office with just one wire strung between poles going south and a combination bakery and restaurant. Beyond this, the street forked, one spur running due south and the other curving away south east. For short distances before these less broad streets became open trails running between barbed-wire-fenced grazing meadows for sheep, they were lined by more houses similar to those on the north side of town. While in the angle of the Y formed by the dividing of the main thoroughfare was the newest and largest building of Freedom. Two storeys high and constructed of stone, it had a lamplit, garishly painted sign on the roof which named itself as THE FOUR ACES HOTEL, Prop. Abraham Billings.
Light spilled brightly from every window at the front and along the splayed sides of the hotel. Also fro
m over and under the batwing entrance doors, together with tobacco smoke and raucous sounds of piano music and talk and laughter. Parked in front of the hotel, to one side of the shallow steps which led up to the canopied entrance was the wagon of Willard Clayton, the two horses no longer in the traces.
During his slow ride into town, Edge was alone on the main street. He could hear the rowdier element of Freedom raising a little hell in the bar room of the hotel and glimpsed an occasional couple or a family group through the uncurtained windows of houses. As he angled the mare from the centre of the street towards the livery on the right, he saw that The Sheepman saloon and the Freedom Restaurant and Bakery were also open for business, their windows misted by condensation. And that a lamp glowed dimly in the law office.
As he swung down from the saddle, a latch scraped and one of the two big doors of the livery stable opened to spill a wedge of light and the shadow of a man out across the street.
‘Evenin’ to you, mister. Thought I heard the sound of business comin’.’
He was about sixty, with silver hair, a dark and drooping moustache. There were no bottom teeth in his friendly smile. A couple of inches under six feet in height, he was well built, with bulging muscles contoured by the tight-fitting top part of his grey Long Johns with the buttons unfastened to show his hirsute chest, the hair as silver as that on his head.
‘Heard right, feller,’ Edge replied as the man pushed the door open wider to allow the newcomer to lead his horse inside. ‘Feed and water and stabling for a night.’
‘And a set of new shoes, looks like to me. I’m town blacksmith. Only one for thirty miles in any direction.’
‘You set your charge because of that?’ the half-breed asked, not aware of how cold the night had become until he was inside the livery and blacksmith shop and felt the heat from the cheerfully glowing forge.
There were a dozen stalls around two walls, half of them occupied. The smells in the place were of burning, coffee and horse droppings.
EDGE: The Frightened Gun (Edge series Book 32) Page 2