‘Willard and me aren’t here to fight your battles for you!’ Abbie protested vehemently.
‘Just to start the war,’ Edge answered.
‘That’s right, sis,’ her brother said before she could rebut the half-breed’s comment. ‘If Billin’s is the man who killed Pa and I blast him, all hell is gonna break loose.’
There was a break in the talk and everyone except Edge looked expectantly at Abbie. The half-breed continued to watch the Four Aces as customers began to leave, as eager as most other citizens of Freedom to get back to normal now that their positions had been established. Merchants and professional men, glowing with the effects of liquor and doubtless feeling they had a prosperous future ahead of them, providing their merchandise and services for a far greater volume of passing trade.
Out beyond the bead curtain, Ramon could be heard dragging the unconscious Briggs along the hallway and into the kitchen.
‘We don’t even know if he is the right man yet,’ Abbie said at length. ‘And if it turns out he is, then we can bide our time. We’ve waited years, so we can wait a little longer.’
‘No, Abigail,’ Willard corrected. ‘The stage is due to leave Freedom at eleven. If me and Mr Edge ain’t out of town by then, Billin’s is gonna send his men for us.’
‘And that won’t be no surprise, miss,’ Ely added.
Another pause, but this time it did not last so long.
‘Very well,’ Abbie murmured tautly. ‘What do you have in mind, Edge?’
‘A drink, lady. Over at the Four Aces.’
‘You’re crazy,’ Ely snapped.
‘For me to take a close look at this man Billings?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And see you get gunned down?’
‘Don’t figure that’ll happen. So far Billings has played it straight. He says Grogan and Leech started the killing without his knowledge and I believe him.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ Martha Emmons asked.
‘Because he doesn’t want a town run by gunlaw, ma’am. The kind of people I’ve just seen coming out of his place look much like you and Ely and Hayes and Tuttle.’
‘Hamilton Janson from the bank,’ the blacksmith muttered bitterly. ‘Joe Wilde who runs the newspaper. Dekes our land agent and Frank Rollin’s who takes care of all the legal work around town. Them and a few more who was always behind Billin’s in tryin’ to make Freedom into somethin’ it never oughta be.’
‘Back-stabbin’ bastards, all of them!’ the Widow Emmons spat.
‘But not many of them I’d guess,’ Edge said, ‘who’d take much more killing and still stick with Billings. Because men like that will know that if Freedom gets known as a town where the gun settles all differences, the high-spending trade will stay clear.’
‘After you took that shot at him, that one-eyed nose-picker sure didn’t sound like a man who wanted peace,’ Ely growled.
‘He made a promise is all,’ the half-breed allowed. ‘To send his guns after the kid and me, if we were in town after the stage time and to kill any townspeople who cause trouble. Seems to me he was on safe ground in threatening the local citizens, most of who don’t have any intention of getting in his way. And I’m ready to take the chance that he’ll hold off trying to get rid of the kid and me until the deadline’s reached. If for no other reason than to prove to his business buddies that his word’s to be trusted.’
‘All right,’ Abbie said suddenly, moving towards the front of the restaurant. ‘I’ll go over to the hotel with you.’
‘Why you ready to take that risk?’ Ely asked as Edge rose from his chair.
‘It’s no risk,’ Abbie answered. ‘This Billings guy doesn’t know me.’
‘I’m talkin’ to Edge, lady,’ the blacksmith said, and there was suspicion in his eyes as he gazed up at the tall, lean half-breed. ‘Not so long ago, you didn’t give that for what was happening in this town.’
He snapped his fingers.
‘Awhile ago I hadn’t been threatened,’ Edge answered flatly. ‘Guess there’s a lot of towns all over where I ain’t welcome. Don’t want there ever to be another one where I’m this much unwelcome.’
‘What about me, Mr Edge?’ Willard asked anxiously.
‘Stay out of sight, kid. Billings knows you’ve got an axe to grind. My head doesn’t go on the block until eleven.’
‘It’s almost ten now,’ Ely warned.
On the threshold of the restaurant, Edge made to take Abbie Clayton’s arm. But she flinched clear of him.
‘Be safer for everyone if you pretend to like me, lady,’ he told her and moved out on to the sidewalk.
‘Come on, sis,’ Willard rasped. ‘For Pa.’
The woman stepped quickly outside to catch up with Edge and pasted a smile across her lovely face as she linked her arm through his.
‘Play acting is all,’ she said in a tone that was no match for the smile she wore. ‘Like me not being Willard’s sister.’
Then an angry frown took command of his face. Which perhaps meant the shakiness of his hand was not caused by anger.
‘Then get out of my place and out of my town, sir!’
‘And take your woman with you, mister!’ Rose Pride snarled.
‘The hell you say!’ Billings snapped, wrenching his head around to look at her.
She came down the bar towards him, having to lean against the counter to keep from staggering. She held an empty glass in her right hand and the half-empty bottle of rye in the left. Her eyes were glazed with the effect of drinking.
‘Sure I do! I’m madam at the Four Aces. And I pick the whores.’ She stared with contempt at Abbie. ‘We’re all filled up.’
‘You are!’ Billings told her, his voice a hiss. ‘With whisky!’
His anger with her became mixed with that he felt for Edge and he lashed out with an arm. The blow was a back-handed slap which cracked viciously against her cheek, the rings on his fingers dragging the skin and opening up three bloodied ruts.
Rose screamed her pain and staggered backwards for three short, awkward paces. Then fell heavily to the floor, the glass and bottle breaking. Sam curtailed his piano playing and many of the watchers gasped.
‘You shit!’ the madam shrieked from the floor after she had drawn a hand over her cheek and looked at the blood on her fingers.
‘Not as one of the girls,’ Billings said to Abbie. The position of madam has just become available.’
‘You shit and bastard!’
‘What do you say, my dear?’ the one-eyed man posed, calm and collected again, as he totally ignored the enraged woman sprawled on the floor amid broken glass and spilled liquor.
Abbie smiled. ‘I’d be a fool to turn down a bed of Rose’s, wouldn’t I?’
‘A wise choice, my dear. I’m sure you will be very happy here in Freedom.’
Abbie’s smile was more radiant than ever. ‘I have a feeling this is going to be the happiest day of my life,’ she said, turning away from the bar.
Edge also swung towards the doorway.
‘Where are you going?’ Billings asked.
‘To get my valise from the stage depot.’
‘I’ll have somebody get that for you.’
‘Let the bag get her own baggage!’ Rose Pride snarled as she finally managed to get to her feet.
‘I’ll do it myself,’ Abbie insisted, and fell in beside Edge on the way to the batwings.
‘You want more!’ Billings roared and Edge and Abigail Clayton heard more gasps, another sound of flesh on flesh, then the scream and thump as the drunken madam was again knocked to the floor. ‘How much more you want?’
‘No, darling! Please! I love you! I don’t want any other woman–’
‘Shut up, bitch!’
‘What’s goin’ on in there?’ Leech demanded as he reached the top of the steps and found his view into the bar room blocked by the forms of Edge and Abbie who emerged from the batwings.
‘The madam just took a prat-fall, sheriff,’ the
woman replied.
Edge added, ‘Matter of injured Pride.’
Chapter Eleven
Nobody in the Four Aces had watched the couple advance across the intersection, so there was genuine shock when Edge pushed open the batwing doors and escorted Abbie Clayton into the barroom.
Sam, the Negro piano player, was the first to see the half-breed. And he snatched his hands off the keyboard as if music was a sin and Edge an avenging angel! The abrupt cessation of the familiar ‘Down Yonder’ caused everyone already in the barroom to look at Sam. Then they immediately swept their gazes toward the doorway on which the Negro’s large eyes were fixed.
Billings, Leech, Lee and Travis were in a close-knit group at a centre point of the bar. Rose Pride and four of her whores were playing poker with no stakes at a corner table. Three whores sat at tables with potential clients. Another whore was midway down the stairs, just ahead of a satisfied customer. The two Negro bartenders.
‘What the frig, mister?’ Randy Leech snarled, and swung his body in the same direction his head was facing, at the same time reaching down for the Winchester which rested against the bar.
‘Hold it!’ Billings ordered, through teeth clenched to a cheroot. And in part of a second he look of shock was changed to a smile of admiration as his one eye took in the sight of the beautiful face and provocative figure of the woman beside the half-breed. ‘Miss, you’d likely have been the best thing I laid eyes upon on the best of days. But today...’
He allowed the sentence to hang unfinished. Then hardened his tone and expression to snap, ‘You said you didn’t drink before noon, Edge.’
‘But today ... is exceptional,’ the half-breed said wryly. ‘So I’ll make an exception.’
‘You’re wise, Edge,’ Billings said, his tone easing. ‘It’s a long hot, stage ride to Dry springs. And there they only have water to shake a man’s thirst.
Abbie Clayton continued to display her acting skills. Neither by flicker of an eyelash nor the merest tensing of her body did she revel disappointment that Billings was the wrong man, or evil delight that he was the right one.
‘They got beer and liquor over to the Sheepman, mister,’ Leech rasped and his expression showed that he was almost tasting the frustration of not being allowed to touch his rifle.
While Lee and Travis, who seemed as drunk as they were last night when Chris Wilkes stirred up the trouble, directed an even deeper brand of hatred toward the half-breed.
‘Hey, now,’ Billings said lightly. ‘The good times aren’t rolling quite yet, Randy. We mustn’t turn away business to the competition.’
‘Funny business, I bet,’ the sheriff muttered.
‘Don’t you think you’d better return to your duties,’ Billings told him, injecting a note of authority into his voice. ‘It would seem to me that this is the least likely place in town to require the presence of a peace officer.’
He glanced casually but pointedly around the barroom. And like trained animals, Lee and Travis straightened their backbones and flexed their muscles. While the man with the whore on the stairs and the three who sat with girls at tables moved fractionally to display the revolvers in their gunbelt holsters. And the two Negro bartenders bellied close to the counter and hooked their hands over the top, signalling that there were guns of some kind within easy reach.
All the men worked to some degree of hardness into their eyes as they looked briefly toward the half-breed. The whores cast appraising surveys over Abbie Clayton, and Rose Pride tried to generate a sneer of contempt that lacked conviction – seemed concerned only with the brightness of the smiles which had been exchanged by the tall blond on Edge’s arm and the one eyed man.
‘What’ll I do Abi?’ Leech wanted to know.
Billings ground out his cheroot under the boot heel and drew his lips into a taught line for a moment then rasped: ‘I don’t know, Randy! Get the window of the law office fixed. And – oh, yes – tell Bart Briggs to get the lead out. He brought the stage in early, so there’s no reason why he has to wait until eleven to get rolling again.’
Leech was less tense when he felt the weight when he felt the Winchester in his hands.
‘Play us some music,’ Billings said to the man at the piano. ‘And what is your pleasure, sir?’ he directed at Edge. ‘In the way of a drink, of course. It would seem you are already catered for in another service we provide at the Four Aces.’
Edge steered the woman directly from the doorway to the bar, forcing Leech to move to the side on his way out. Sam began to play ‘Greensleeves.’ Lee and Travis backed off to the end of the bar at the foot of the stairs and the man who had been to the room with the whore went out of the hotel. Low-voiced conversations got underway again. As did the poker game with no stakes, the madam surrendering her hand to the whore who had just turned a trick. Rose Pride went to the end of the bar near the piano player and called loudly for a bottle of rye and a glass.
‘Beer,’ Edge told the closest bartender and looked at Abbie as the woman disengaged her arm from his.
‘I never touch alcohol of any kind,’ she responded.
The Negro shrugged and went to draw the half-breeds beer. Billings’s uncovered eye brightened and made a close-up survey of the woman’s features and upper body.
‘There are only two other reasons a lady would come to the Four Aces, Miss...?’
‘Smith,’ Abbie supplied and Edge looked hard into the images of the woman and the one eyed man reflected by the mirror behind the bottle and glass lined shelves. Smith was the name of the killer of her father had used all those years ago in St. Louis. Neither reflected face showed any telling reaction to the name. ‘Abigail Smith.’
‘To gamble or to...’
I know a heart from a diamond is about all. And I can see those stones in your rings are real, Mr. Billings.’
The one-eyed man laughed as Edge exchanged some coins for the glass of beer the Negro set down in front of him.
‘Randy said he mentioned work to you, Abigail. And he certainly did not exaggerate when he told me what you looked like. Just as I’m not exaggerating when I tell you there’ll be no shortage of work – and trinkets like these,’ he waved both his many-ringed hands in front of her. ‘–now that I am running this town.’
‘What I heard Mr. Billings.’
‘Call me Abi, Abigail.’
Edge had achieved what he set out to do in coming into the Four Aces. Which was to discover how much firepower Billing commanded, and estimate the quality of it.
Leech, Lee and Travis he knew about of course. These three all around thirty . Young enough and capable of handling themselves in a dangerous situation. With good reason to hate he half-breed – and anyone he allied himself with – after the ways in which Wilkes and Grogan had died. Leech from a city background, like Billings. Lee and Travis a couple of Western drifters. The trio of useful men to have on your side in a fight – provided they had somebody to give them orders and the promised reward at the end of it was high enough.
The three men drinking with whores were of a kind with Lee and Travis. With the look of saddle-tramps who rode from one town to another, one spread to the next, hiring whatever skills they possessed to pay for eating, drinking and screwing. Cowpunching, fence mending, sheep shearing and general handyman skills, the half-breed guessed. Not one of them had the stamp of a professional gunfighter.
The man who left the barroom after descending the stairway from the upper floor of the Four Aces had looked like a clerk or storekeeper.
How many of his kind would back Billings if it came to a showdown with guns deciding the issue? Few of them he decided. Certainly all of them had got clear of the hotel long before the stage was scheduled to leave Freedom.
The Negro bartenders and the piano player? They were working for a Southerner with aristocratic pretensions. They would do as they were told.
And that was the opposition. A bunch of men like Billy Seward, Bob Rhett, John Scott, Hal Douglas, and Roger Bell. Not
a Frank Forrest among them. Which could turn out to be a bad omen for the respectable people of the town of Freedom. For if Billings was the man the Clayton brother and sister were after, and the kid got lucky and killed him, there would be nobody with authority to take command. And with nothing to gain from surrender, men like Leech and Travis and Lee might well elect to vent their spite against the town.
Whereas in the war, on the occasions when Captain Josiah C. Hedges was unable to give the orders – Like the time he caught a bullet and was unconscious for a long period – Sergeant Forrest had adequately filled the breech.
Edge vented a low grunt of self-anger.
‘You say something, sir?’ Billings asked .
‘Not a thing,’ the half-breed replied and finished his beer. He was angry at himself for allowing his mind to bring back memories of the distant past in an attempt to draw parallels with the present. To justify why he should have allowed himself to be mixed up with the troubles of Freedom and the murderous ambition of Willard and Abbie Clayton . . . Which meant he was reaching for the material to build a false premise.
None of the men Billings had gathered about him were anything like the vicious bunch of troopers the half-breed had commanded during the war. Willard only very remotely resembled Jamie. And his blue-eyed blond sister was a part-time whore which had to rule out any parallel between her and the clean-living woman who had died so long ago in Iowa.
So, Edge was involved because his fate had decreed he should be. And, as always in such a situation, he had known from the start that he was fighting a losing battle in trying to remain neutral. A battle against destiny and his own intrinsic nature.
For he was the only born killer in town: Unles Billings…?
‘This beautiful young lady has agreed to give Freedom a try,’ the one-eyed man said. ‘While you have been deep in thought. And I am willing to pay more than a penny if you have been reconsidering–’
‘Be leaving soon, feller.’
EDGE: The Frightened Gun (Edge series Book 32) Page 10