Few words were spoken. Just two voices were raised in a sharp exchange.
‘Get out here on the street, Billin’s!’
‘Why, boy? Why do you want to kill me?’
‘Get out here, I said!’
Edge heard the shouts of the kid and the one-eyed man while he was in Ramon’s bakehouse, using his razor to cut the ropes which tied the bearded Bart Briggs to the big table.
‘What’s happenin’?’ the frightened stage driver asked.
‘None of our business, feller,’ the half-breed told him. ‘Go get your rig ready to roll, uh?’
Briggs scurried out ahead of Edge, went to the door of the stage-line depot and banged a fist on it. ‘You got some mail and freight to go, Jake?’ he asked, looking back over his shoulder towards the hotel and the two figures standing in front of it.
Edge hoisted his saddle and bedroll from the sidewalk and tossed it on to the railed roof of the stage. Then leaned against a rear wheel of the rig and took out the makings from a pocket of his shirt.
‘Grey mare down in Ely’s livery,’ he said to Sherman Hayes, who sat in the rocker on the sidewalk out front of the restaurant, allowing Martha Emmons to bathe the bullet wound in his right temple.
‘Yours?’ the veterinarian asked, unable to shift his gaze from Billings and Clayton.
‘Yeah. Thrush in two hooves. Obliged if you’d take care of it. Or shoot the animal if it’s gone too far.’
‘Be happy to.’
Now Edge looked towards the main point of interest in Freedom. As did the Widow Emmons. Their attention captured by Willard’s demand that Billings should arm himself, and the response of the one-eyed man.
The gunbelt to which the boy referred belonged to one of the surviving drifters who, with his partner and the negro bartender stood on the hotel stoop, apprehensive under the threat of the double-barrel shotgun Jonas Cochran aimed at them. Ramon Alvarez had unbuckled the belt from the man’s waist, pushed his gun into the holster and tossed it so that it fell in front of Billings’s booted feet.
The whores and Rose Pride – her face bruised and crusted with dried blood from the beating the one-eyed man had given her – looked down on the scene from the upper rooms of the hotel.
‘You called yourself Smith many years ago,’ Abbie Clayton replied to Billings’s pleading question. ‘In St Louis. Where you shot a man who caught you cheating at cards. Man you murdered was named Clayton.’
The beautiful blue-eyed blonde with the statuesque body stood in the doorway of the law office.
Billings wrenched his gaze away from the boy to look hard into the equally resolute face of his sister. He looked too long and too hard – obviously trying to recognise Abbie as she might have looked fifteen years earlier. So that when he started to say, ‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken,’ there was no one who saw and heard him who believed he was telling the truth.
‘It was our Pa you shot down, mister!’ Willard rasped.
‘You are brother and sister?’ Billings was genuinely surprised.
‘Our Pa didn’t have a gun when you killed him,’ the boy went on, as if he had not even heard the words of the one-eyed man. ‘But I’m ready to give you a better chance than he had. Because I’m not the kinda killer you are, Billin’s. Now, pick up that damn gunbelt!’
A brief silence clamped over the town again. Broken when Edge struck a match on a wheelrim of the stage. Then the one-eyed man unclenched his fists, and broke out in a new sweat as his fingers trembled.
‘Very well,’ he said, and dropped slowly into a crouch.
Willard turned slightly, splayed his feet wider and bent his left hand so that it was level with the butt of the Tranter jutting from his belly holster.
‘Be careful, Willard!’ Abbie warned. ‘He cheats at cards.’
Billings’s hands became rock-steady as he picked up the gunbelt, slung it around his waist, fastened the buckle and straightened. There was still sweat on his face and wet stains on his shirt from his armpits. But he was no longer in the grip of fear. He stood in a casual attitude, muscles relaxed and expression revealing nothing of what he felt. Not in the gun-fighter’s pose which the boy had so awkwardly adopted, but looking as if he could take it up in part of a second.
‘Yes, son, be very careful,’ he said, in his Southern lazy drawl. ‘I’ve got some kind of vague recollection that I shot and killed a card cheat in St Louis a lot of years ago.’
The Claytons’ tension mounted and the boy moved his hand fractionally nearer the butt of the Tranter as his sister made to speak, but held back as Billings continued.
‘And I might well have called myself Smith. Called myself all kinds of different names all the time. But one thing I’ve never done is gunned down an unarmed man.’
‘You–’ Willard started.
‘Shut up and listen, son,’ Billings interrupted flatly. ‘You gave me a chance, so I’m giving you one. I never had to shoot down an unarmed man because it was never necessary. Because at the time you’re talking about, I was one of the fastest guns around. Which is why I used all kinds of different names. Because, like now, I didn’t like killing men way back when.’
Edge drew deeply against his cigarette and recalled something the one-eyed man had said in the Four Aces earlier, ‘The gun’s not my way anymore.’
‘You ain’t scarin’ me!’ Willard flung at Billings, and both his voice and expression gave the lie to his words.
‘You’re scarin’ the hell out of me, son,’ Billings went on in the same easy tone of voice. ‘Because I don’t want to have to kill you. This gunbelt you made me put on is the first I’ve worn in ten years. But I haven’t forgotten how to use a six-shooter, son. Which is why I give you fair warning. That if you draw against me, I’ll kill you. Though I don’t want to. Because it’ll be a waste of your life. I never cheated at cards. Because I was as good with them as with a gun. Your sister was younger then than you are now. She was told lies and believed them.’
‘No,’ Abbie cried.
It was as if Billings had never heard her. And. he began to talk not just to Willard Clayton now. He started to address everyone in Freedom but, knowing the futility of any more attempts to win them over, he did not raise his voice.
‘When I won enough in a game to build the Four Aces, I decided to turn my back on cards and the gun. Become a businessman. And operate as straight as I did in the old days. And I could have done well for myself here. Well for the town as well. But it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.’
He became pensive as he spoke the final words and he raised one ringed hand towards his face, the index finger aimed at his nose.
Willard went for his gun.
‘No!’ Abbie shrieked.
‘Abi!’ Rose Pride yelled from a second storey window of the hotel.
A gunshot cracked. To put a full stop to a series of actions that merged into a single fluid movement of Billings’s right hand. Which resulted in Willard Clayton taking a bullet in his heart even before the muzzle of his uncocked Tranter was clear of the holster.
‘Who–’ Martha Emmons gasped through the hands she had flung to her face.
Willard .took a backward step, gazed down in surprise at the bloodstain on his shirt front, and then fell into a heap in front of the sidewalk.
‘The kid,’ Edge said through a cloud of blue cigarette smoke. ‘The bogyman got him.’
‘No more!’ Sherman Hayes roared, powering to his feet from the rocker as Cochran swung the shotgun towards Billings. ‘Freedom’s had its fill of killing.’
Abbie flung herself down into a crouch beside her dead brother.
The one-eyed man thrust his still smoking revolver into the holster, unfastened the buckle and let the belt drop around his ankles.
The clock in the dry-goods store began to chime the hour of noon.
Some people thought they could see the shadows begin to lengthen again.
Abbie Clayton clawed a hand towards the Tranter which had fallen from Willar
d’s grasp and holster.
Edge drew his Remington and triggered a shot across the intersection. The bullet hit the revolver on the street and kicked it a foot beyond the woman’s reaching fingers.
‘Billings has no reason to lie, lady!’ the half-breed said as all eyes swung away from the gun in the dust to stare at Edge.
The woman sobbed.
The half-breed slid his revolver into the holster.
‘Sherman Hayes is right,’ the saloon keeper agreed and allowed the shotgun barrels to tilt towards the ground. ‘Same as the stranger is. But we don’t want Billin’s nor any of his people here in town.’
‘It is my intention to leave, sir,’ the unlikely looking former gunslinger said, shifting his one-eyed gaze from Edge to the bald-headed owner of the Sheepman. ‘And in time Freedom could discover it’s the town’s loss.’
‘Can we come, Abi?’ the redheaded whore called down eagerly.
‘Anyone who wants to is welcome,’ Billings invited, raking his eyes over the windows with the whores at them and then the negro bartender and the two drifters.
‘Me, too?’ Rose Pride wanted to know nervously.
Billings smiled. ‘Sure, darling. We’ll go someplace where our kind of business will be welcomed.’
The madam’s bruised and cut face was abruptly wreathed with a smile. ‘That place we was goin’ to first? The town south of here those Mormon people abandoned?’
Billings flicked his fingers. ‘Why not? There’s no one there anymore. No one to stand in our way of making it the most wide-open Goddamn town in the US of A.’ His smile was a match for that of Rose Pride. ‘Sure, sweetheart! We’ll go to Las Vegas!’
As he went up the steps of the hotel, Jonas Cochran moved out of his way.
Ramon started across the intersection towards his restaurant while Martha Emmons hurried over to where Abbie Clayton kneeled beside her dead brother, sobbing.
‘Where are you going, Mr Edge?’ Sherman Hayes asked, dropping back into the rocker and exploring his injury with careful fingers. As the half-breed pulled open the nearside door of the stage.
‘No place, feller.’
‘But you’re leaving.’
‘All I ever do. Never do get any place.’
He dropped into a seat, his back to the way the stage was headed. And allowed a column of smoke to rise in front of his face from the cigarette angled out of the corner of his mouth.
‘It wasn’t all for nothing, you know,’ the veterinarian said morosely. ‘It might seem that way now, but this town’s going to be a better place to live in after Billings and his bunch are gone.’
Hayes peered along Main Street beyond the stage and then swung his gaze in other directions to look along the two streets which flanked the Four Aces. To where the townspeople of Freedom who had taken no part in the gun-battle were beginning to emerge nervously from behind the safety of walls, unmarked by bullet holes and not stained by blood.
‘Si señor,’ Ramon Alvarez agreed eagerly. ‘The town is saved. You, Señor Edge. The Señors Hayes and Jonas Cochran. The poor dead boy and Señor Ely. And me. One day, all will be agreed that we six were magnificent!’
The half-breed took the cigarette from his mouth and ground it out under his boot heel as the stage tilted and creaked with the weight of Bart Briggs. Then, as he touched the brim of his hat before tipping it forward over his bristled face, he answered, ‘I guess we did all right. But you can bet your ass some wise guy’ll come along and go one better.’
EDGE: The Frightened Gun (Edge series Book 32) Page 13