And he did. About the derelict fort at Cloud Pass, too. And about how he had come up the side of the valley in a state of extreme drunkenness. How he was doing a fine job of killing those he felt sure were responsible for the death of his only friend—until Ewan Campbell and the other men jumped him. He explained how it was he'd been able to do this so expertly.
Occasionally he moved away from fact, and from conjecture based upon fact, and began to ramble off into the realm of wishful thinking. About how it was all right he had killed the wrong people. Because Ridgeville people were just as guilty and soon they would get what was coming to them. Some of them, at least, when the Campbell bunch hit town.
He couldn't recall why they would hit town and asked Edge to prompt him. And the half-breed reminded him about Craig Campbell's suspicion that his woman had been captured by Hamilton Linn and his troupe of traveling players.
"Oh yeah. Them folks is all right, mister. I didn't take to the old feller when he said somethin' bad about good old Bart. But I can understand him now. He didn't know my good buddy. And he was all steamed up about gettin' robbed. Like you, mister. But you said . . ." JJ was adrift in a hazy limbo and had just a fingerhold on reality. But he bore down for a while and sought to tighten his grip.
"Yeah, you said you wasn't gonna help him. So he went ahead and helped himself. Him and his buddies. And me. Now you. I took a swing at him with a bottle. Hit you. You didn't come up here to the pass because I hit you with the bottle, did you?"
Edge shook his head.
JJ said, "What, I didn't hear you?"
Edge opened his mouth to reply, but then realized the man would not hear him even if shouted at the top of his voice. For he had slipped out of his waking limbo into a state of coma.
The fire was out by then, but John James still had a couple of hours of life left to live. He spent them on a bed in the barrack-like building while Edge nearby, listening to the shallow breathing and alert for any change that might signal the, fact that JJ was on the verge of coming out of it But he did not. There came a time, while it was still dark outside the lamplit building, when the man breathed out and did not breathe in again.
Edge was smoking when this happened, and he swung his feet to the floor he dropped what was left of the cigarette under one of his heels. Then took one of the blankets off the bed where he had been resting and draped it over the newest corpse at Cloud Pass. Before he allowed the fabric to fall over the waxy-looking face, he murmured, "After drinking, smoking, and women, JJ, breathing was about all you had left to give up."
Chapter Eleven
EDGE went back to where he had left the mare and brought her up to the abandoned fort. He unsaddled her and put her into the rope corral behind the barrack to feed and drink while he went inside the building and doused the lamps. He lay down in the curtained-off section, far removed from the bed on which the blanket-draped corpse of John James was beginning to stiffen.
He chose to separate himself from the dead body not because it was dead—he was too familiar with death to be morbidly concerned by its physical presence. He did so out of respect for the man who had once occupied the body under the blanket—on the premise that there is no dignity in death and the least he could do for JJ now was to allow him privacy as he began to return to the dust from whence he came.
Or he could have buried him, Edge reflected as he came to the brink of sleep—fully dressed and with his hat over his face and his left hand fisted around the frame of the Winchester—but the thought was fleeting. He needed to rest for what little was left of the night, and even when the new day broke, he knew he would not bother put JJ in the ground. They had never been that close.
Not close at all, of course, Edge thought as he washed up and shaved before a mirror-topped bureau in the section of the barrack where women guests of the Campbell brothers were able to maintain some semblance of modesty. Sunshine began to burn off the dawn mist and draw the night dullness out of the air.
They had been alike, that was all—except that JJ was more than ten years older than Edge. That short a time! He finished scraping all but the bristles of the Mexican-style mustache off his face, washed off the soap, and leaned closer to the cracked and mottled mirror.
The lines inscribed in the dark-hued skin were many and deep. But how many were of relatively recent origin and had much had they deepened in the last few years? He could not tell, because he had not looked at himself this closely before.
Now he finger-combed his hair and brushed some loose strands off his shoulders. This was nothing new, had been happening for some time now. But this was the first morning he had been moved to peer closely at the loose hairs on the dark-colored fabric of his shirt—to see if any were gray. None were.
Which was small consolation as he hefted his gear and carried it out of the segregated section of the building, down the aisle between the beds in the area where the corpse of JJ was beginning to smell, and into the sun-bright open air. Where the stink of death was much stronger but was almost totally masked by the fragrance of pine forest at morning.
Did his saddle and bedroll and accoutrements seem to weight heavier? Did it require a greater degree of effort to swing the saddle and gear across the back of the mare? Was the crick in his back when he unbent after buckling the cinch and the creak in his leg joints as he got astride the horse in his imagination, or was each a very real symptom of the physical decay which accompanies the passing years? The inescapable aging process which comes to all men, no matter how unlike most others they consider themselves to be?
Edge heeled his mount out of the corral, around the side of the barrack, across the former compound with its scattering of stinking dead, and onto the easy-to-follow trail left by the large group of horsemen and women who went down from the pass in the night. He spat twice and then lit the cigarette he had carefully rolled—all the while watching to see if his hands showed the slightest tremble.
By the time some smoke had been drawn into and expelled from his system, the sour taste of too many yesterdays had been removed from his mouth. But his mind remained uneasy until he forced himself to consider what JJ had told him last night.
What JJ had told Edge could have been said in a fraction of the time it had actually taken. And the half-breed endeavored to get it down to the basic facts in his mind, without wandering off the way the dying man had rambled away from the subject.
After Craig and Ewan Campbell had been leased by the elderly sheriff, Bart Bolt, into custody of the trio of obviously phony lawmen, the town of Ridgeville had returned to normalcy. The only difference was that the self-appointed town peace officer was treated with even more scorn. Which he accepted with tacit indifference and continued to go through the motions of being the lawman in a town where nobody broke the law.
Bolt's only friend was JJ and as the liveryman was always quick to point out, the feeling was mutual. The two men, one a good deal older than the other but alike in many other respects, spent good deal of time together. Swapping stories the past. Bolt telling yarns about his days running the law offices in many Texas towns while JJ told about fighting Indians before the war and fighting Yankees during it.
From time to time, when the circumstances h seemed right, JJ had tried to pump Bolt for information about the release of the Campbell brothers. But the elderly sheriff had always maintained that the three men who came for Craig and Ewan were genuine territorial marshals who were traveling with their wives.
Until the day that two more men rode into Ridgeville—some three months after the Campbells left town—and showed papers which proved indisputably that they were Arizona marshals. And announced that they had come to check on the whereabouts of the men who had been buried as two heaps of chopped meat in the Ridgeville. cemetery.
Bolt had started to plead ignorance of the whole affair, but the townspeople were quick to point out that he was lying. Which was when the Campbells and the first of their constantly changing 'bunch' rode onto Pine Street and gunned down
the Arizona lawmen. Then Craig told Bart Bolt he was a crazy old fool for not telling the people of Ridgeville of the deal they had struck that day three months earlier. When the elderly sheriff could have blasted both Campbells into eternity—but would have been gunned down himself by the fake lawmen, and would have died with the knowledge that this trio and their whores would then put the town to the torch and kill as many women, children, and old people as they could before the loggers came running to the rescue.
Alternatively, Bolt could have put up the gun with which he was covering the Campbells. And in return for this, many lives in addition to his own would be spared. And the town would be protected for all time—or, at least, for as long as Craig and Ewan maintained a hideout for fugitives at the derelict fort up in Cloud Pass.
Sheriff Bart Bolt had accepted the deal and thus had compromised himself as a lawman. And had been ashamed of himself, irrespective of the fact that making the compromise had secured far more than his own continued existence.
For a while, after Harry Bellinger had buried two more out-of-town peace officers in the Ridgeville cemetery, the citizens had treated Bolt as a hero—maybe overreacting to their earlier contempt. But now the boot was on the other foot and Bolt spurned their attempts to fete him, remaining scornfully aloof to everyone except his old friend John James. And, as the smoke of the cooking fires in Cloud Pass was seen for what it truly was—instead of being assumed to mark the camp of some trappers or hunters—every deep thinking citizens of Ridgeville experienced the same brand of shame which twisted in the belly and guts of Bart Bolt.
But this period passed by and time had its healing effect on the consciences of the loggers and the merchants. Sometimes the Campbells came to town; at other times strangers appeared who made it known that they were heading to or from Cloud Pass. Hard men all of them, often with painted women who wore revealing dresses and swayed their hips more than was necessary.
Bart Bolt knew many of them from the years he'd served as a peace officer in other towns. But those that he did not know were poured from the same mold—a man didn't have to be a well-traveled sheriff to see that.
But they stopped at Ridgeville only to buy supplies, to take a drink or two in the saloon, eat a meal, have a haircut or bed down for a night or more in greater comfort than the trail or the derelict fort at the pass offered. There was never any trouble and none of these visitors—with their gun-belts slung around their waists and their smiles that never put light into their eyes—ever took anything he did not pay a fair price for.
Twice, lawmen had come up from the south and twice they left convinced that the Campbell brothers had never been there—and that the four Arizona marshals who preceded them had ridden out of town after receiving the same answers to the same questions.
Occasionally, when loggers were working in areas far from Ridgeville, stories were recounted of gunfire heard far off to the south or southwest. The townspeople realized that men were probably getting killed. Lawmen and bounty hunters trailing the fugitives who sought refuge at the sanctuary run by Craig and Ewan Campbell. Men who had gotten too close to their quarry or been spotted by lookouts posted by the men already holed up at the pass.
But the matter was seldom pursued for very long. Because such talk always ended up torturing the townspeople with doubt and guilt and shame. Law-abiding people who condoned the lawless deeds of the shifting population of their neighboring community up the hill. And why did they do this? To have the protection of the killers and robbers and kidnappers and rapists. Which meant protection from the protectors—for until the Campbells brought that kind of trouble to Ridgeville, it had never come before. Ridgeville was just too far off the main trails through the Rocky Mountains to attract such people.
Only two citizens of the lumber town ever considered putting matters right. Bart Bolt and John James. The two men who talked and drank for hours at a time in the sheriff’s office or the livery stable. The sheriff always remaining sober enough to keep his friend from going off half-cocked to implement one of the endless impossible plans of campaign they dreamed up.
Such was the situation when Edge rode into the outwardly serene and untroubled town of Ridgeville just four days ago. And had been assumed by all to be on his way into or out of Cloud Pass. Disliked at sight but accepted once he showed was not here to make trouble.
Then came the bank robbery and killings and after the initial shock had passed, the ostriches town shoved their heads back into the sand. No believing that any group from Cloud Pass was responsible and hopeful that the Campbell bunch would take action against the raiders. Confident of a fresh supply of money from the company—not enough to make good what was stolen, but sufficient to keep them safely in the Ridgeville area while others took risks and maybe got lucky.
The town drunk.
A group of no-account actors.
And a lone stranger who on first impression might just have been involved in the bank raid but who was later given the benefit of the doubt.
The Linn Players and this man named Edge were not local citizens and so the town could not be blamed for whatever actions they took against the Campbell bunch. While everybody knew that John James was a great friend of Bart Bolt and a drunk.
What nobody in Ridgeville or Cloud Pass knew; about JJ except for the late sheriff was that he had once been an Indian fighter and an expert marksman with a rifle. He had developed both skills while he was in the army, long before he took to the bottle, and both were recalled and used to reasonable effect when he reached the pass. After he had taken the time to sober up from the long drunk that the death of good old Bart had provoked.
In the old days, JJ had ruefully told Edge as he neared death, he would have killed more of those sonsofbitches. Maybe every last one of them. From a distance and with the sniping rifle. And some up close with a knife. The way he had killed so many stinking Indians and frigging Yankees and lived to tell the tale. Then he had asked Edge to remind him why the Campbell bunch were riding for Ridgeville.
And now, as the half-breed reminded himself of his own reason for returning to town, he shook his mind free of memories from a more recent past. And discovered he did not need to work at barring unwelcome thoughts from his head.
For a distant fusillade of gunshots captured his attention, driving home the unspoken tenet that he had always lived by: that a man who walked the thin line between life and death was only as good as the next step he took. Now, as he got a bearing on the direction of the shooting beyond the thick-growing timber to the east, he was able to smile again. Maybe the younger fellers walked that line faster, but that kind were easier to trip up.
He kept the mare to the same easy pace on the downslope while the gunfire continued to sound, sporadically after the initial violent burst, for perhaps a full minute. Then it ceased abruptly and the forest silence enclosed this section of the valley again—disturbed only by the soft clop of the mare's hooves until other living creatures in and under the trees decided it was safe to go about their business again.
The man who could be said to be both in and under a tree was not a living creature. He was hanging with a rope around his neck from a very high branch of a Douglas fir, his booted feet pended some thirty feet above the ground.
Edge saw him the moment he rode into a glade. But as he reined the mare to a halt and gazed u at the hanged man, he guessed that the Campbells and their bunch had passed directly under the dangling feet, in the darkness of night without being aware of what was above them. Thus they had not read the message that was written in large letters on a piece of white board and tied with string to both wrists of the dead man:
HE FIGURED HE WAS A BIG MAN LIKE YOU
CAMPBELL. BUT WHEN I WAS THROUGH
WITH HIM LOOK WHAT HAPPENED.
AL FALCON
The man who hung as still as the death that had claimed him was the Montana Lumber Company's top man in Ridgeville—Bill Sheldon.
Edge se
t his mare moving again and touched the brim of his hat as he rode under the dangling corpse with the bloated face and a bad smell. He glanced briefly up at Sheldon and muttered, "For somebody in the timber business, feller, you sure finished up close to the top of the tree."
Chapter Twelve
IT was getting close to noon when Edge found the corpse of Bill Sheldon and read the message that explained so much about recent events—even to a man who was on the outside looking in.
In no great hurry to find out anything more about this business, which was really none of his concern, the half-breed stopped for regular meal breaks, bedded down from dusk until dawn, and did not get back to Ridgeville until eight o'clock the next morning. He heard no more shots fired in all this time; in fact, he heard no sounds that was not a sound indigenous to the forest for virtually the whole way to Ridgeville. Which was not as it should have been on a work day in the vicinity of a lumber company.
Thus he rode with more caution than usual as he neared town and altered his intended line of approach when he arrived at a lumber camp. It was deserted but not abandoned—with tools scattered around, sap still oozing from the stumps of recently felled trees, and some red embers among the ashes of yesterday's bonfire. He veered south of the route the Campbell bunch had taken and within thirty minutes emerged on the trail close to where he left it three days ago. He had to ride no more than a thousand yards around a sharp curve to reach the sawmill.
It looked to be in the same forsaken condition as the lumber camp. The buildings were silent, the handsaws idle, the chimneys not belching smoke and the smell of escaped steam absent. Wagons and trucks were haphazardly parked, some partially loaded or unloaded with cut timber and logs, their teams gone from the traces.
Edge looked and listened hard, his left hand holding the reins loosely while his right lay deceptively relaxed on his thigh, a few inches from where the stock of the Winchester jutted from the forward-hung boot.
EDGE: Montana Melodrama Page 10