Fresh sweat drenched him from head to toe he briefly reflected on whether this would be a final mistake. If he would pay with his life for once more not taking heed of the lessons that experience had taught him so often—many times during the war and along several of the trails had ridden since then. That anger, in every instance, was a self-indulgent emotion that a man in danger could not afford to feel.
Then, as the other man spoke and the woman revealed the fact that there was just herself and two escorts, the killer grin returned to the lean, dark-skinned face of the half-breed. For a moment he held still on all fours.
Then he eased up onto his haunches and held the rifle in his left hand, finger curved to the trigger and stock wedged between his side and his bloody-sticky elbow. He drew the Colt from the holster, clicked back the hammer, and with the barrels of both guns parallel, drew beads on the shoulder and hindquarters of the docile mare. The final rolling rock skittered to a stop at the base of the slope.
Booted feet were set down on the track beyond the horse, the muted sounds of the three people moving on the pine-needle ground covering.
John rasped, "He could be playin' possum, Arnie.”
"Maybe."
"Christ, you guys trying to talk some courage into yourselves!" Fay snarled. She surged forward so fast that she spooked the mare into lunging out of her path.
Arnie yelled: "No, stay back!"
John snapped at the same time: "Grab her!"
“Take your hands off . . . damn you!"
Edge saw her first, just her head above the top of the slope. But it was turned to the side to direct a look of outrage at one of her escorts, so she had no chance to see him before she was jerked back. She squealed with alarm and perhaps pain as she thudded to the ground.
The half-breed powered himself upright at that moment, rasping out a curse that was part triumph and part response to the bolt of pain the sudden movement drove through him.
Two men with Frontier Colts in their hands stared at him with horror-widened eyes, each of them frozen in a half-crouch. One had been dragging the woman back from the top of the slope and the other looking to see why she had squealed.
"Shit!" the taller, thinner man in his mid-forties groaned.
"Sonofa …” the other man, who was ten years younger, started to bark.
Fay had been sent sprawling on her back. Now she folded sharply up into a sitting position and murmured, "Well, I’ll be damned."
Edge squeezed the triggers of both guns simultaneously and shot Arnie and John in their chests as they made to swing their guns toward him. Heart shots, the bullets tearing through flesh and passing between lower ribs on a rising trajectory to penetrate the vital organs. Not bringing death to the victims until they had a second in which they realize it was the end for them.
The elder man, who received the revolver bullet, simply straightened up, swayed to the side and fell, firing his gun at the ground in front of him. The higher velocity of the bullet from the Winchester lifted the other man an inch or so off the ground and hurled him violently backward. He tried to bring his hands up to the blossoming stain on his shirt front, but never made it. His gun fell from his nerveless grasp without being fired.
Edge swung up the rifle to his left shoulder. He had the revolver hammer thumbed back and the gun aimed at the baby-doll face of the woman before the men were stretched out and motionless on the ground to either side of her.
She had a brief moment of terror when she saw them blasted to death, but now she smiled. And Edge could see no sign that she had to force the expression across her pale-skinned, overpainted features. "You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you, mister?" she asked.
Edge had planted his feet squarely on the shale when he came erect to trigger shots at the men. And it seemed as if every muscle in his tall frame had been locked to keep his aim steady and absorb the shock of the recoils. But he did not trust himself to retain his balance on the slope for much longer. So he used some precious reserves of stamina to free his knotted muscles and make them carry him to the top of the slope. There he stood on the area of ground vacated by his horse and willed himself to stay upright and not to sway. He was aware that he was dangerously close to finally giving in to the pain that assaulted him. And giving in would mean stretching out on the ground and closing his eyes. To invite sleep or unconsciousness. Just like the two fellers on the ground in front of him . . .
"I knew you couldn't, mister," the woman said. And her voice seemed to come from the bottom of a deep, echoing mine shaft. "Hey, why don't you take the weight off and rest for a while, uh? You look done in."
Her voice suddenly sounded normal. And at the instant Edge heard her, he recalled that he had just killed the two men. Men who had been urged on to kill him by this woman.
He had not known that his eyes had briefly closed at the thought. Now he cracked them open again and drew back from the brink of a tantalizingly inviting state of torpor. His glittering gaze and the black muzzle of the Colt searched for and found the raven-haired, round-faced, full-lipped, and blue-eyed woman named Fay.
Who was no longer sitting between two dead men and smiling beguilingly at a live one. Rather she had fallen to her hands and knees and was reaching for the revolver that Arnie or John had dropped. Her head was screwed around so that she could watch the half-breed, who a moment before had seemed about to keel over and pass out. But he had pulled himself together and now Fay expressed deep-seated terror as the ice-blue slits of his eyes trapped her gaze.
"You can't kill me, mister, I'm Craig Campbell’s woman!" she shrieked. And slid her left hand an inch along the ground—so that the tips of her fingers were only half that distance away from contact with the discarded gun.
"He got a line to the Almighty?" Edge asked evenly.
"Uh?" The woman was slightly less afraid and she stayed her hand from moving closer to the revolver. She obviously considered the half-breed's willingness to talk a good sign. "He's the only feller I know with the power to make people immortal." She tried another smile and this one did show signs of strain at the sides of the paint mouth and eyes. "Hell, mister, I'm not that. And if heaven does hand out those kind of favors, reckon I'm right at the back of the line. Me livin’ the kind of life that I do."
"Did," Edge said.
"Uh?"
She was puzzled and just vaguely anxious for a moment. Then she realized what he meant by the monosyllabic remark. And a mixture of horror, rage and despair wiped the fake smile from her face, as she thrust her left hand forward, fingers clawing at the Colt and her mouth gaping wide to |vent a scream.
Edge squeezed the trigger of his revolver. He heard the crack of the bullet leaving the muzzle, but felt a fresh explosion of pain in the hand that fired the gun. He saw the Colt spin away from his grasp as another gunshot reached his ears. "Don't move a muscle, bitch!" a man shrieked. Edge swung the Winchester down from his shoulder, bringing up his stinging right hand to fist around the barrel. He felt a new surge of rage is his pain-dulled mind finally realized that the Colt had been blasted away by another shot at the moment he fired it.
He saw that the woman was frozen like a statue. Still on her hands and knees, with one of her hands fisted around the butt of the Colt she had so desperately wanted to reach. His bullet had missed her and her attention was held by another man now. Directly in front of her, but among the timber and out of sight of the half-breed.
Edge knew from the way his Colt had fallen that whoever had shot it out of his grasp was on the other side of the track. And he turned in this direction as he worked the lever action of the repeater. Knowing in the back of his pain and anger-ravaged brain that the bullet which had hit his gun could just as easily have been aimed into his body.
"Please don't do anything hasty, Mr. Edge," Hamilton Linn warned excitedly in his booming voice. "It is only I and my fellow actors."
The elderly and slightly-built man emerged from behind a tree some fifteen feet from where Edge stood. He was wearin
g his cream-colored duster with a charred bullet hole in the left pocket and was carrying his black derby in one hand. His other hand was empty, so it wasn't he who had shot the gun out of the half-breed’s grasp. He was smiling brightly.
"Scene one in this play is all."
The actor's smile became a gleeful laugh. "That is most amusing, Mr. Edge!" He clapped his hands just once. "Come, boys and girls. Everybody out of the wings and show yourselves."
It was the eighteen-year-old boy with the feminine good looks who had caused Fay to hold so still, with a Winchester to back up his snarled command. And he continued to aim the rifle at her, angling it down from his narrow shoulder as he emerged onto the track. A scared-looking middle-aged man toting a double-barrel shotgun and a plain girl of twenty or so also came out of the trees on that side.
Like Edge, the bewildered Fay looked away from these toward two other members of the Linn Players who appeared from the timber to flank the smiling man. Another man of about thirty, who was no taller than five feet but had a muscular build. And a taller woman of the same age. The man had a single shot Spencer carbine held at arm's length at his side. While the woman had a two-handed grip on what seemed to be an army model Colt with a custom-made barrel at least twelve inches long. She held the massive revolver at the base of her belly, the long barrel hanging downward. And she hung her head to look in the same direction just before Edge's glittering eye could meet her gaze.
The half-breed made a conscious effort to force his rage back into a tight, ice-cold ball at the pit of his stomach. He glanced back and forth across the trail and recognized each actor and actress in turn.
"Forgive us for surprising you in such a highly dramatic manner, Mr. Edge," Linn boomed, still smiling brightly while the other members of his company remained tense or afraid. "It seems, though, to give credence to the words of the Bard that. . ."
"Jesus," Fay rasped, letting go of the Colt and shifting back into a sitting position on the track between the two dead men. She gazed up at Edge. "Am I going crazy or are these people for real?"
". . . that all the world's a stage and … Linn tried to continue.
Edge sloped the Winchester back up to his shoulder and spat a globule of saliva at the ground in front of him before he sighed and said to the woman, "Sure seems to have got started as one crazy 'dais.'"
Chapter Seven
HAMILTON Linn laughed again as he emerged from the forest, followed by the short man who glowered menacingly at Edge and the worn with the long-barrel Colt who continued to hang her head.
"'Dais' as in stage, Mr. Edge. You possess keen wit, you know."
"Yeah, I'm as sharp as a razor sometimes," the half-breed answered sourly, moving to where his Colt lay on the track. He stooped to pick it up and went toward a tree with an exposed root that provided a makeshift chair. He sat on it an added, "But right now my edge feels a little dulled."
The expertly aimed bullet from the long-barrel Colt had hit the standard model near the cylinder. He hoped the outside dent had not carried through to the inner surface of the barrel, yet he had no particular attachment to the gun an didn't bother to check it out. He rested the rifle across his thighs and tilted the revolver to extract the four unfired bullets from the cylinder.
"Marybelle Melton was formerly with a traveling Wild West show before she joined my company," Hamilton Linn said, a little nervously, his smile strained. "Marksmanship was her particular forte."
"You're good, ma'am," Edge said as he dropped the shells into his shirt pocket and tossed the damaged gun down the shale slope into the ravine.
"Thank you," the sharpshooting woman murmured, without raising her head. "This is Henry Maguire," Linn went on, indicating the scowling man with the Spencer. Across the way there is Susie Chase, our ingénue. Young Oliver Strange and Mr. Clarence Gowan. I’m afraid I do not know the name of the young lady to whom young Oliver was so rude to a moment ago. And it would appear that there was no time for her to introduce herself to you, Mr. Edge?"
Hamilton Linn was again oozing confidence which seemed to increase by the moment. But the rest of his company was not infected by it. Maguire remained silently bellicose—his aggression directed entirely at Edge—while the others were afraid. Young Strange attempted to conceal this behind a brittle veneer of bravado.
"The name's Fay Lynch, old-timer," the doll-like brunette snarled. "And you better turn me loose right this minute. Or you’ll get what that gunslinger's got coming to him." She shifted her hard-eyed gaze from the grinning Linn to Edge, who was rolling a cigarette.
Pray what is that, young lady?" the actor boomed.
Her attempt at an evil smile was a failure for it did not fit her softly rounded features. "Nobody guns down a couple of the Campbell bunch and lives for long afterwards. And if you don't turn me loose, actor, you and your bunch will regret it. Because I'm Craig Campbell's woman and—"
Ah, yes," Linn interrupted and began to wash his hands, the action as gleeful as his expression and tone of voice. "I was sure I heard you correctly when you were pleading for Edge to spare you. He was not moved by your appeal, but you saw that I and my fellow thespians were impressed."
Edge lit his cigarette and rose from the tree root. He moved slowly, for the sake of his bruised body, but Maguire was suspicious and made to bring up his Spencer carbine.
"If you aim it at me, kill me," Edge rasped "Try to give folks the one warning. They don’t take heed, I do my best to kill them. Fact that I'm still around shows I ain't never managed less than my best."
The tone of his voice and the glint in his eye was sufficient to make the short and stocky Maguire hold still and listen. But when Edge was through, the Spencer began to move again. But came to a halt when Oliver Strange called shrilly, "Don't, Henry!"
He allowed the barrel to droop and the scowl became a sneer as he watched the half-breed go slowly and with obvious pain toward the center of the track where Fay Lynch still sat, her legs splayed under the full skirts of her modestly high-necked dress. "Just for you, Olly," Maguire rasped. "But these damn tough-talking cowboys get my frigging goat! It's my belief they talk more bullshit than they ever step in!"
There were only two words which were capable of arousing the killer instinct within Edge these days. In the past there had been many and in days gone by Henry Maguire's tone of voice might have been sufficient to rile the half-breed. But on this cool early morning in the greenish light of the mountain forest, the man had not called him a Mex or a greaser. So there was no change in the attitude of the tall, lean, dark-skinned man as he stooped—causing Fay Lynch to draw back from him with a gasp—and picked up the Frontier Colt which had belonged to a man now dead.
The good-looking blond-haired boy had begun to sweat and now shifted to the side so that he could keep the Winchester aimed at the seated woman after Edge stepped into his line of fire.
"Ain't a cowboy, feller," Edge said as he began to eject the spent shellcases from the chambers of the Colt, letting them fall into the pine needles between his feet. Then he glanced at the cowering woman. "Nor a gunslinger, lady. But it doesn't bother me getting called either. Does bother me when I get robbed and when people shoot at me."
He returned to the tree root and disappeared from sight into the timber. He went in the direction he had seen the mare lunge when Fay Lynch and the two gunmen advanced on her. He had reloaded the Colt with the shells in his shirt pocket and two from the loops of the gunbelt by the time he found the mare, grazing contentedly on a patch of lush turf. He was still within earshot of voices at the start of the track. But he made no effort to decipher what was being said.
With the Colt in his holster and the Winchester back in the boot, he drank some canteen water and splashed some on his sweat-tacky face, washed the dust off his hands, and then led the mare by the bridle back to the track. The talk had ceased by then and Edge saw why when emerged from the trees at the top of the shale slope.
Hamilton Linn, a morose frown in place of
the smile, stood where the half-breed had last seen him. Hat back on his head and both hands in the pockets of his duster, he was alone except for the two dead men and seemed to be lost in a private world of deep thought from which the sound of Edge's entrance from the timber jerked him with a start.
"I'm going to figure your left hand ain't aiming: that little gun at me, feller," Edge said. He continued to grip the bridle of the mare and let his right hand hang free and easy below the level of the Colt butt jutting from the holster.
The elderly actor, who looked even older that he had last night in the livery—and drained and weak now that he was not faking high spirits—shook his head, the expression in his dull eyes not altering. "I'm holding it, Mr. Edge. But not pointing it at you. But I am prepared to try to defend myself against you. If it is necessary. Though I would obviously prefer not to have to do that."
"You plan to try holding the Lynch woman to ransom?"
Linn nodded. "And she would not be any use for that if she were dead, Mr. Edge."
"No sweat, feller." He jerked a thumb at the corpses. "They were the ones tried to kill me."
"On her orders. She said she thought you were a lawman which was why she told the men to shoot you."
"No lasting harm done to me. And they paid for listening to her. You got a better reason for keeping her alive than I have for killing her."
"And you will overlook that I ordered Marybelle to shoot your gun out of your hand, Mr. Edge?" The nervousness was draining out of him and the promise of a smile of relief hovered at the corners of his mouth.
EDGE: Montana Melodrama Page 6