The man was sweating from more than just his exertions in the morning sun. "No, sir. I always maintain a goodly stock. There's always a ready supply of timber available, of course. More than needs be, really. Ridgeville being such a health place to live and there not being so many elderly folks who—"
"If there happens to be an epidemic of fatal disease while I'm away, be obliged if you'd hold one casket back," Edge cut in on the babbling man.
The mortician shook his head and fixed an insecure smile on his fleshy face. "I don't think you have to worry on that score, sir. The Grim Reaper takes very long vacations hereabouts."
"He put in some overtime on the night shift."
The nervous smile was wiped away. "It was terrible, terrible," he said, then went back to work with the wad of rags and bucket of soapy water, professional frown on his ruddy face.
Edge heeled the mare forward, off the end the sheet and out onto the trail that ran into the timberland.
"Oh, sir!"
The rider paused to glance back over his shoulder.
"My cheapest casket comes out at fifteen dollars!"
"Cheapest will do."
The mortician was nervous again under the level gaze of the glinting blue eyes between the narrowed lids. He swallowed hard before he added, "Of course, burial is extra."
"I'll need for the corpse to be buried, feller."
Another gulp. "Say twenty dollars all in, sir?"
"Explains why you're in a dying business," Edge growled.
"I'm afraid I fail to understand you, sir.
"At your prices, I figure the cost of living has to be cheaper."
Chapter Five
IT was pleasant to ride through the cool, pine-scented shade of the trail that curved gently away from the northwest and headed south. Apart from the spurs that angled off toward lumber camps—some abandoned and others still being worked—it was the only trail in this area of the Beartooth Mountains. Edge was backtracking over familiar ground. He had ridden along the valley bottom for two days before reaching its dead end at Ridgeville.
Before this he had been in the saddle for many weeks. On trails and across country, moving! northward without haste through the eastern ridges of the Continental Divide. Just drifting with no destination in mind. Sleeping under the! stars most nights, with the occasional luxury of a bed in an isolated community where he stopped over to replenish his supplies. Buying what he needed from a bankroll which was comprised largely of reward money, earned as a result of an earlier run-in with violent trouble that had not been of his making.
And it was the balance of this reward money that had been stolen from him during the night. The larger part of it by far, because the needs of this man called Edge were few—just a good horse, serviceable gear, and sufficient food for himself and for his mount. Everything else was surplus-acceptable but never essential.
It had not always been so, but even during his formative years the seeds of the kind of man he was destined to become had begun to germinate. When he lived on an Iowa farmstead with his Mexican father, Scandinavian mother, and younger brother Jamie. When he was the quiet one in the family, doing his schoolwork and his share of the chores to the best of his ability and never desiring anything that was not available and affordable. Then, after the death of his parents, he had accepted the responsibility of running the place and taking care of Jamie. He dealt as efficiently with the infrequent intrusions of man-made trouble as he'd dealt with the seasonal work in the fields.
When the War Between the States came, he felt compelled to fight for the Union and left Jamie-crippled by a shooting accident—to take care of the farmstead. First as a lieutenant and then as a captain, he rode the eastern battlegrounds and quickly discovered a latent capacity to kill without compunction and to survive without remorse.
His name was then Josiah C. Hedges, and when the war was won he rode immediately back to Iowa. He was eager to shed his uniform and military rank, to become a farmer again, and to forget the deadly skills that war had taught him. Hopeful, perhaps, that the darker side of himself would be buried and remain so.
But it was not to be.
Six men he had led and fought alongside during most of the war reached the farmstead ahead of him. And left it a burnt-out shell, with the mutilated body of Jamie as buzzard meat in the yard.
In tracking down and making the killers of his kid brother pay for their crime, Josiah C. Hedges became a wanted man named Edge. And started out on the trail that had brought him to the Montana timber town of Ridgeville. A trail that he zigzagged through many of the states of the Union, across most of its territories, and into Mexico.
On only one occasion had he wanted, to the exclusion of all other considerations, something that was not essential to his survival. A woman for his wife. But that time was far in his past now. So was his need to keep on the move as an outlaw for he had been granted an amnesty for that old killing.
But he was too set in the ways of a lone drifter and as inevitably as he was driven to ride the aimless and endless trail, so he was dogged by violence and the need to make use of his ruthless killing skills. He no longer paused to reflect o why this should be so. Nor did he seek to justify his actions to himself anymore. He killed to stay alive and any man or woman who stood between him and this most fundamental of ambitions was on borrowed time.
In this instance, as the half-breed rode down the tree-fringed trail toward the sawmill of the Montana Lumber Company, the situation was clear-cut. In his saddlebags were supplies that could be stretched to last him no more than a week. And somebody had stolen the money which would have kept him fed for a lot longer. Without food, he would die. Ergo, the thief was going to die.
The sawmill was situated in a large clearing and was comprised of a long, barnlike building on the bank of the creek with a line of smaller buildings to either side. The latter formed a kind of courtyard which was open to the trail. A stack on either end of the mill belched smoke, and steam hissed from two engines and drifted across the creek. Pistons thudded and the blades of the handsaws screeched as they cut through recently felled trees. Heavy log trucks and flatbed wagons were parked in the courtyard, the teams in the traces. Men were unloading trunks brought in from the scattered camps from some and loading sawed planks for nearby storage or shipment to the south on others.
The men who were busy at this backbreaking work showed no sign that they saw the rider coming in off the trail. Until a steam whistle sounded and the activity was suddenly halted. Then those outside were joined by several men from within the sawmill, and all of them headed for a long shack that was obviously the mess hall.
He was spotted then by a few of the men, who spread the word to others. He recognized some from the show in the Long Pine Saloon last night. But nobody called a greeting or even nodded in his direction as he reined the mare to a halt and swung down from the saddle. He led his mount to the front of a shack that had the company name painted on a board on the roof and the word OFFICE on its door. The steady hiss of steam escaping through the safety valves of the idling engines sounded pleasant after the cacophony, noise when the mill was in operation.
As he hitched his horse to a log truck, Edge could see a man working at a desk through a single window of the office. The man seemed oblivious to the break in routine outside. Edge pushed open the door without knocking.
"Something I can do for you?" the man asked tersely without looking up from a column of figures he was totaling. He sounded like he was overworked and behind schedule, ready to be angry if the interruption was not justified.
"I figure your company has got some good maps of this part of the country," Edge said as he came into the small, cluttered office and kicked door closed behind him.
The man abandoned his clerical chore a jerked up his head, surprised that his visitor was not an employee. Edge recalled seeing him sitting, without female company, in the audience the saloon last night. He was no more than twenty-five, tall and slightly b
uilt, with sand colored hair and a pale, freckled face. He was afraid of the half-breed and caught his breath when his visitor came close to the desk to reach section of wall to which a contour map was pinned.
"Really, you can't come in here and just..."
Edge had taken the makings from a shirt pocket and was rolling a cigarette as he scanned the small-scale map of the entire valley. Now he glanced down at where the clerk was half-turned in the chair behind the desk, looking nervously up at him.
"I just did, feller. You have any large-scale maps which break down this whole area into sections?" He reached down to his holstered gun and the clerk flinched back into his chair. But the move by Edge was simply made to strike a match on the butt of the Colt.
"Certainly we have such maps, sir. But they are company-made and company property. With Mr. Sheldon gone to Casper I'm not sure I can—"
"Where are they? In the desk? In one of these closets?"
He kicked a leg of the desk and waved a hand to encompass the line of file cabinets along a side wall of the office. And as he did this, he glimpsed through the window a line of six big-built men advancing across the yard. Grim-faced men, each swinging an ax at his side. A falling ax, with a double head and a four-foot-long shaft.
"Please, I wouldn't like for there to be trouble while Mr. Sheldon was away," the clerk blurted, blinking rapidly.
"So just show me the maps and tell those fellers with the axes to go finish their coffee break, feller. And I’ll leave just as soon as I've found out what I need to know."
Two men halted outside the window and peered into the office. The clerk blinked more furiously than before as he looked back at them. Then he vented a squeal of alarm when the door was kicked open and two more men with axes stepped over the threshold.
"Is this guy givin' you trouble, Fred?" one of them growled as both took a double-handed grip on their axes, bringing them up to hold them across the base of their bellies.
"I don't think so," the clerk blurted, and started to chew on the side of an ink-stained forefinger "He wants to look at company maps. And Mr. Sheldon away, I don't know if I should—.”
"Why, mister?"
The men outside the window, the two on threshold, and the other two who remained outside the doorway had all been in the Lone Pine Saloon last night. Three of them in the group at the bar counter where Edge had stood. But none gave any sign that he recognized the ha breed. Their spokesman was a giant of about feet seven inches who weighed close to three hundred pounds and had dark-stained flesh that looked to be as pitted as the bark of the trees worked with.
"Because I'm out a lot of money I need to get back, feller."
"I heard you didn't have your cash in the bank?"
"You heard right. Which was none of your business. Just like this."
"Mighty uppity for a guy with a little bit revolver against all of us, ain't he, George?" one the men outside the doorway growled.
"Please, no trouble!" Fred urged.
"Ain't against anybody unless he stole my bank roll," Edge said. "But I'm ready to kill anyone who gets in the way of me getting to the thief."
A series of sneers and grunts greeted this, and gnarled hands took a tighter hold on the axes. Fred came up from his chair and took the chewed finger out of his mouth. He could not control the rapid blinking of his eyes.
"Look, this is ridiculous! Mr. Edge, if you are prepared to give me a reason I can accept for wanting to look at our maps, then I am prepared to—”
"Hold it, Caxton," George cut in. "Me and the boys ain't ready to believe anythin' just because this stranger says it's so."
A man at the window snarled, "And where do you get off, stranger, sayin' it ain't none of our business you comin' in here and scarin' the shit outta Fred Caxton?"
The clerk started to shake his head in a tacit denial of the fact that he was afraid, while his freckled face showed that he was . . . but of the situation rather than of Edge.
The half-breed took the part-smoked cigarette from the corner of his mouth and lowered it to his side before he parted his thumb and forefinger to drop it to the floor. Nobody in the office or peering in from outside saw the component parts of the move that followed. For the hand which had released the cigarette was in full view. Yet, less than a second later, it could be seen fisted around the butt of a leveled revolver. What happened between took place in a blur of Speed.
"Oh, sweet Jesus," Fred Caxton squeezed out from his constricted throat. And thrust his arms high above his head, his eyes snapping closed.
The two men at the window threw themselves to either side of it. Likewise those beyond the threshold of the doorway. While George and the other lumberman inside the office stood rooted to the floor, knowing there could be no escape if Edge elected to swing the Colt to aim at the and squeeze the trigger.
"Wasn't my intention to scare anybody," the half-breed drawled. And angled the gun slightly as he thrust it out from his right hip and brought his left hand across the front of his body. "Or kill anybody except the feller that stole my money." The Colt was aimed at a spot on the lintel of the door. He curled his right forefinger more snugly to the trigger and used the heel of his left hand to fan the hammer. The bullets left the muzzle on a rising trajectory and cracked between the heads of George and the slightly shorter man on the other side of the doorway. "But like I said, I will kill the feller gets between me and the thief."
The men flanking the doorway instinctive leaned to the side as the stream of rapid-fire bullets streaked between them. Expressing the dread of violent death for the brief period dining which the Colt was fanned. Then, in the first moment silence after the final gunshot, as nostrils flared the stench of black powder smoke drifting across the office, George and his partner twisted the heads around to stare at the area of the blast door lintel. They saw that the bullets we imbedded in a patch of scarred wood no more than three inches in diameter.
"He's emptied his friggin' gun! Let's get the sonofabitch!" a man yelled from outside the shack. But horror was inscribed upon his weather beaten features when he appeared on the threshold and pulled up short.
What he, like George and the other man saw, was that Edge had raised the Colt and pushed it out to the side. To press the muzzle gently against the side of Fred Caxton's head, just above the quivering clerk's left ear.
"You were right, Fred," the half-breed said evenly. "This is ridiculous, isn't it? Me needing to waste shells firing at a wall. And now you being in the firing line. You want to tell these fellers that's the only part that adds up?"
The clerk flapped his mouth, but only low and strangled sounds emerged.
"What you talkin' about, stranger?" the towering George asked.
"Quinn's wrong, George," the other lumberman in the shack explained after taking another look at the bullets imbedded in the lintel. "He only pumped five shells into the friggin' wall. That's a six-shooter he's got, so Fred's just a finger pull away from gettin' his head holed."
"But he won't get away with it, Fry," Quinn said, excitement back in his tone. "Here, give it me, Colley!"
The burst of gunfire had brought the rest of the sawmill workers out of the mess hall. But it was not the sight of these men gathered into a close-knit group as they advanced on the office that gave Quinn renewed confidence. It was the Winchester rifle that was tossed at him. And which he caught clumsily after releasing his hold on the falling ax.
"You aim that at me, you kill me with it!" Edge rasped, his tone as icy cold as the glittering stare of his eyes. "If you don't, you're dead!"
The stance of the half-breed was suddenly a perfect match for his voice and the look on his lean face. Until this moment there had been no mistaking the menace of what he was doing. Even though there was a certain nonchalance about his attitude, as though he were not taking the situation too seriously. Like he did not think it probable he would be pushed to carry out his threat. But now he was suddenly rigid on the surface—like stone. There was something about
him which subtly suggested to one of the lumbermen that was the very opposite of rigid underneath—was poised to react with fluid speed should Quinn ignore the warning.
"Horseshit!" Quinn snarled. And folded the lever of the Winchester away from the base of the frame.
It was the half-breed's own rifle. Taken by Colley—one of the men at the window—from the boot hung on the saddle of the mare. Edge saw this at the moment Quinn caught the gun. And it was undoubtedly this fact that aroused a colder than usual rage within him at the prospect of being target for the rifle. For it had been the family rifle and he and Jamie had played with it as children. The rifle which had exploded a bullet that should not have been in the breech. And made the younger brother a cripple for the rest of his tragically short life.
Edge whirled, arcing the Colt away from the side of the head of the trembling clerk. He focused it on Quinn as the lumberman just outside the doorway snapped the lever back into place, the hammer cocked behind a live shell.
The towering George remained rooted to the spot, as before, staring in amazement at the speed of the half-breed.
Unlike George, Fry did not.
He had started his move before Quinn gave his answer to Edge and had partly turned away from the half-breed as the Colt muzzle was taken away from the clerk's head. Barely a second after Edge aimed the revolver at Quinn, Fry had his back to Edge and was lunging over the threshold. The ax fell from his hands, freeing them to reach for, grip the Winchester, and wrench it from the grasp of the enraged Quinn.
"Everybody friggin' hold it!" Fry screamed above the obscenities that Quinn was snarling amid a spray of spittle. "This whole friggin' thing is crazy and nobody has to get killed here!"
"Oh, sweet Jesus," the clerk murmured, keeping his arms thrust high above his head.
Edge was just a sliver of time away from squeezing the trigger of the Colt. Which now would have blasted the final bullet into the broad back of the man named Fry. And for another fraction of a second that seemed to go on for much longer, it was as if the effort required to keep from firing the revolver drained him of every iota of energy.
EDGE: Montana Melodrama Page 4