‘Guess that’s what I oughta say to you,’ Tait offered, looking and sounding awkward. ‘Thanks.’
‘Just doing the job I’m paid for, feller,’ the half-breed replied, as he dipped a tortilla into the chili bowl and began to eat.
‘Even though I ain’t got four legs and horns?’ He retrieved the valise from beside the overturned table.
‘That’s just a matter of how you look,’ came the even voiced reply. ‘Inside you’re just as full of bullshit.’
Tait was again quick to check an angry impulse. And he signaled his success with a shrug. ‘I already told you I’m known for my bad mouth. There’s some things a man just can’t help bein’.’
‘Like cold as a Sierra Madre night, señor,’ the old-timer said mournfully, as shouts sounded out on the dusty street. He looked directly across the cantina at the contentedly chewing half-breed who met his doleful gaze with a look of mild curiosity. ‘In one minute you shoot the life out of two men. I watch your face as you do this and you show no more feeling than if you are wringing the necks of two chickens. And the next minute, with the dead still warm at your feet, you can eat food. How can a man be so indifferent to such a…’
‘Takes practice, old man,’ Edge answered around a mouthful of chili-dipped tortilla.
‘And a willingness to learn, I think, señor.’
A dispassionate nod. ‘That, too.’
A fat Federale with triple chevrons on his sleeves appeared at the street doorway, sweat beads dropping off the curve of his jaw to splash new stains on to his uniform tunic. ‘What is going on here?’ he demanded, a hand on his holstered revolver.
The boy was at his side and the Taggart father and son were behind him.
‘A heart to heart talk,’ Edge replied, halting on the point of biting into the second tortilla. He stabbed it at his chest, then turned it towards the dead men who had now ceased to spill their blood. ‘Seems the old man figures mine shouldn’t be empty when theirs are overflowing.’
Chapter Three
THE tall, lean half-breed ate his meal and drank three mugs of coffee from a fresh pot delivered by the boy while everyone else in the cantina competed to tell the Federate non-com how the Quintero brothers came to die. For a few moments, he listened to the babble of voices, until old man Taggart yelled across the noise to command silence: and the harassed sergeant was able to question witnesses and hear their individual responses clearly.
But Edge had already discerned enough from the initial gabble of shouts to know that the Federale would cause him no trouble. Everyone would tell of the killing shots being fired in self-defense.
Edge himself was not certain whether this was the truth or not but the implications of what might have been were of no concern to him. He had received payment in advance to see that a herd of Texas longhorns reached its destination in Laramie. And without an experienced trail boss to head up the newly-formed outfit, such a drive would have been doomed from the start. So, to rescue Barney Tait from a deadly situation of his own making, Edge had gunned down two men.
As far as he was concerned, the incident was closed, unless others chose to make an issue of it.
The man who was now called Edge had not always regarded life and death in such a cold-bloodedly brutal manner. Once, long ago, when he had been Josiah C. Hedges living with his close-knit family on their farmstead in Iowa, he had been no worse than many young men of his own age, and better than many others.
Life had been hard but good and when the evil of violence and tragedy touched him, his responses were involuntarily drawn from the full gamut of human emotions.
Thus had he suffered intense anguish when a gun he was holding accidentally fired to explode a bullet into the leg of Jamie, his younger brother—to make the boy a cripple for the remainder of his short life.
But even then, so far back in time, the man who now sat in the stinking cantina of a Mexican town—poker-faced and totally dispassionate after killing two fellow human beings—had begun to learn the lessons of survival amid the dangers of the trade he was to adopt. For it was the shooting of Jamie which had sown the seed of his aversion to aimed guns. And, in retrospect, he had later realized he was defenseless while he endured the torment of seeing Jamie’s agony. Thus had he been conscious of his advantage over one of the Quintero brothers while the other was still a warm corpse.
His Mexican father and Scandinavian mother were dead before, the start of the War Between the States and his reaction to their dying had been less dramatic than he expected. But he understood this. It was more important to face the future than to dwell on the past: to tend the farm his parents had worked so hard to establish, and to provide for the lame Jamie. His responsibilities allowed little time for the luxury of grief. And such an attitude, which ruled almost every decision he took, served to temper his strength of character, just as the long and heavy farm work developed his physical powers.
When civil war came, he regarded it a responsible decision to fight for the cause of the Union against a Confederacy which both he and Jamie considered a potent threat to the Hedges’ way of life. But whatever had motivated his choice, the consequences of him making it were destined to work traumatic changes in almost every facet of the man now called Edge.
‘Señor Edge, you can confirm everything that has been said by these men?’ the Federate sergeant demanded officiously.
He had not questioned all of them—content to hear the matching accounts of the old-timer and the bartender, augmented by the many nods of agreement from Barney Tait and the vaqueros.
The half-breed completed lighting a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. ‘It was the Quinteros or Tait and me, feller,’ he replied evenly.
‘You are a professional gunfighter?’ He showed a scowl of contempt on his round, sweating face as he said this.’
‘I’m whatever I have to be to eat.’
Then I ask you to be this thing outside of this town, señor. It is a poor town, of people unfamiliar with the richness of much money.’ Now he directed his scorn towards the vaqueros and swung his head to include the trio of Tait and the Taggarts grouped close to the stiffening corpses. ‘You have achieved what you came here for. Take it and leave.’
The vaqueros appeared suitably chastened, while the bartender responded to the Federale’s scorn with a sneer of his own.
‘The Americanos have a saying, sargento,’ he muttered. ‘That it is wrong to look the gift horse in the mouth.’
‘I can see why you approve such a sentiment,’ the Federale growled. ‘Which is why I will remain here until your son brings the undertaker. So that you will have no opportunity to rob the gift of corpses you have had given to your filthy establishment.’ He pointed to the boy. ‘Go, nino!’
‘And we’re leavin’, too!’ Tait snapped at the vaqueros after the elder Taggart and whispered in his ear. ‘Get your horses and gear and meet us at the ford.’
The bartender’s sullen mood was abruptly matched by the men’s, most of whom had empty glasses and no prospect of having them refilled.
‘And bear this in mind!’ Tait added, his voice louder and harsher to cut across the mumbling of discontent. ‘Any of you figured to take his advance and not show up, the Big-T outfit has a way of takin’ care of that.’
He looked meaningfully at the corpses, then switched his gaze towards Edge as the half-breed stifled the fire of his cigarette ash in the greasy chili bowl. The Federate saw that Edge, who got slowly to his feet, engendered a kind of awe among the vaqueros and he smiled cynically.
‘It is to be hoped, señor,’ he said grimly, ‘that your enemies fear you more than your friends.’
The half-breed shook his head. ‘I don’t have any enemies, feller. That ain’t dead.’
‘Nor friends, either,’ the old-timer put in sadly, and now had no hesitation in finishing his half-full glass of beer at a single swallow, ‘Just people who need him, I think.’
Edge peeled a dollar off his new roll and dropped it on the table as a w
agon jolted to a dust-raising halt on the street outside.
‘Is too much, señor,’ the boy called as he entered the cantina, drawing an angry scowl from his leather-aproned father.
‘Keep the change, kid,’ the half-breed replied as he headed for the door. ‘A tip. And here’s another one. In my book, friends ain’t worth the paper they’re written on.’
The puzzled youngster who reminded him so strongly of another boy, stepped away from the threshold and Edge went out into the harsh sunlight. A tall and thin Mexican, strangely attired in white shirt and pants with a black necktie and stovepipe hat, was struggling to slide two pine coffins over the tail gate of the flatbed wagon.
‘Is it true, señor,’ he asked breathlessly. ‘What the boy has said? That Don Jorge and Don Camilo Quintero have been killed?’
‘The story’s true,’ Edge confirmed as he unhitched the reins of the gelding from the rail. ‘It’s a couple of characters who are starting to smell.’
The undertaker looked affronted. ‘I got here as fast as I could, señor.’
‘No sweat, feller. The Quinteros got here early. Now they’re late.’
It wasn’t much of a town. Just the single broad street running parallel with the bank of the Rio Grande for three hundred yards. Halfway down the narrow strip of Tamaulipas state between Nuevo Leon and Texas. Twin rows of single storey adobe buildings with the stockyards blocking off one end. A town with an insecure toehold in the cattle business: trying unsuccessfully to compete with the Texas towns of Laredo and Brownsville as a holding depot for the cross-border beef trade.
The signs of its lack of success were plain to see in the neglect of many of the buildings and the complete abandonment of others. With the exception of the tiny Federale post, all the buildings were business premises, established to fill the needs of transient Mexican vaqueros and American cowpunchers.
As he led his heat-weary horse diagonally across the street and hitched the reins to a post outside an open dry goods store, Edge was aware of the aura of depression which pervaded the town in the early afternoon. He had sensed this when he first rode in from the west in the cool early morning. And perhaps this was why he had elected to spend some time here—and the last of his money on feed and stabling for his horse and a meager breakfast for himself—rather than to cross the Rio Grande shallows into Texas.
For, as the young son of the cantina owner had noted, the half-breed was himself despondent behind his outer shell of impassiveness. It gave him an affinity with a town suffering the bitter effects of unfulfilled hopes.
Now he sensed a deeper and blacker mood of failure permeating through the oppressive heat which draped the town. And mixed in with this a menacing enmity. A dangerous combination of emotions that came together in the expressions on the faces of the Mexican man and his wife behind the counter in the under-stocked dry goods store. The couple were old and stoop-shouldered, unafraid of whatever else a long and hard life might choose to torment them with.
‘How does it feel, señor,’ the man asked in a croaking voice. To kill a whole town with two bullets? The brothers Quintero and their cattle were our last hope.’
While the Federale sergeant was learning the facts of the shooting, many faces had appeared briefly at the cantina windows. And seen and heard enough to broadcast the basic details of the incident.
‘Be obliged if you’d get me six cartons of forty-five caliber shells,’ Edge answered, and turned his attention to a meager display of headgear.
‘Gringo bastardo!’ the old woman hissed through compressed lips as the half-breed took off his ill-used sombrero and tried on a low-crowned, wide-brimmed black Stetson.
He placed the sombrero on the stand where the Stetson had been and returned to the counter. ‘How much for the hat and the shells, señora?’ he asked evenly as the old man came painfully erect from crouching at a low shelf.
His bristled face was set in an easy expression, but the glinting, ice-like blueness of his slitted eyes overruled every other feature.
The old woman remained unafraid, holding his gaze and responding to it with growing hatred in her own eyes. ‘We do not do business with murderers!’ she hissed. And made to sweep the cartons of bullets off the counter top.
But Edge caught hold of her wrist as her arm started its swing. She vented a grunt of surprised anger and her husband uttered a low cry of alarm. Edge leaned forward and lowered himself so that he could scoop up the cartons in the crook of his free arm and press them to his side.
‘I always pay my way, señora. How much?’
‘Five dollars to be rid of you!’ the anxious old man replied quickly.
The half-breed nodded, released the thin wrist and delved into his hip pocket. He produced his roll, peeled off a five-dollar bill and dropped it on the counter. As he turned to go towards the door, the incensed woman snatched up the five spot and tore in to shreds in hands that looked suddenly like claws. Then she spat on the pieces before scattering them to the floor.
‘That is what I think of your blood money, murderer!’ she shrieked, her dark eyes blazing.
‘Easy come, easy go,’ Edge replied from the doorway, and raked his own cold-eyed gaze over the dusty stock of the store. ‘But I figure you worked hard to build up this place.’
‘Si,’ the man muttered sorrowfully, ‘And it was for nothing now that the Quinteros are dead.’
‘Hard got, hard to lose,’ the half-breed said, struck a match on the doorframe and dropped it on a tinder-dry pile of shirts. Horror became instantly inscribed upon the wrinkled faces of the elderly couple. But Edge spoke again before they could give voice to their feelings. ‘Gringo I’ll let go, senor. But my Ma and Pa were married a full two years before I was born. So I get real fired up when somebody calls me a bastard.’
‘Agua!’ the woman shrieked, and shoved her husband towards a doorway in back of the counter.
Flames leapt up from the pile of shirts: then tongued to the side, and began to rage on bolts of cloth and a display of pants when Edge swung a boot into the seat of the blaze.
‘May you suffer the agonies of eternal damnation!’ the woman berated, and was gripped by a bout of choked coughing as black smoke filled the store.
‘I’m in training for it,’ Edge answered and pulled open the door. ‘Hasta la vista, señora?’
As he closed the door, the old man hurled a pail of water towards the fire. It fell short, only a few droplets splashing to hissing extinction in the flames.
As Edge mounted the gelding, leaned forward to unhitch the reins and eased his mount into a walk, his sense of being watched by hostile eyes was very strong. Not from the dry goods store with smoke wisping out of the cracks between door and frame, for the old couple were too heavily engaged in fighting the effects of arousing his cold rage. But from every other occupied building on either side of the sun-bright street, hate emanated with almost a palpable pressure.
Not directed exclusively at the slow-riding half-breed, though. For the town had loathing to spare, and shared some of it with the group of vaqueros and three Americans who waited at the Rio Grande ford across from the stockyard.
Edge was unperturbed by the depth of feeling generated towards him. Was simply concerned to remain alert should malice spur violent reaction. Thus, although he appeared nonchalantly at ease as he rode, he was actually tense and poised to respond to the first hint of danger.
The War Between the States had taught him how to keep constant watch without strain, along with a thousand other lessons in the art of survival as he rode with the US Cavalry, first as a lieutenant and then a captain. Facing as much danger from certain of the troopers under his command as from the gray-clad enemy.
Josiah C. Hedges was not unique in being dehumanized by the brutalities of war. And, like the vast majority who survived without serious physical harm, he rode home after Appomattox with a firm resolve to preserve within himself only the good of what he had as a youth grown into as a man.
But it was no
t meant to be.
For the six Union troopers, who had come close to killing him often during the war, reached the Iowa farm ahead of him. And left one of their number dead alongside the horribly tortured corpse of Jamie in the scorched garden of the burnt-out house.
In tracking down and extracting terrible vengeance on the killers of his brother, the newly discharged soldier called upon every hard-learned lesson in evil and viciousness which the war had taught him: to destroy everything that stood in his path. Including human life. And when another ex-soldier name Elliot Thombs spilled his life blood on the earth of Kansas, Josiah C. Hedges was wanted for murder. And took the new name of Edge,
‘You should know, señor,’ the sweating Federale sergeant said as Edge rode past the wagon on to which he was helping the undertaker load the now occupied coffins. ‘The Quintero brothers each leave a widow and three orphan children.’
The half-breed reined his horse to a halt and nodded towards the quiet cattle in the stockyards. ‘That the Quinteros’ herd?’
‘Si. Worth much money. But money cannot buy back life for the dead,’
‘But it pays for burying them, feller,’ Edge countered flatly as he heeled his horse forward to continue his slow progress along the street.
The Federale stared after the departing figure with depthless scorn in his gaze.
‘Sargento!’ the owner of the dry goods store yelled, emerging from his doorway in a cloud of billowing smoke. ‘The gringo has set fire to my place! Help! Get help for us!’
Edge halted his horse again and swung his head around to look back at the Federale. He was in time to see him give one of the coffins a final shove to set it firmly on the undertaker’s wagon. Then whirl and reach for his holstered revolver.
‘The old woman played with fire when she insulted my parents, feller,’ the half-breed said coldly. ‘You touch that gun and it won’t be just your fingers get burned.’
The man allowed his rage to cool, and dropped his gun hand to his side. ‘One day you will suffer greatly for what you are, señor,’ he rasped, then turned and started to run towards the burning store.
EDGE: Death Drive (Edge series Book 27) Page 3