“Not when it puts human life at risk!” the engineer snarled at Edge, whom he could no longer see because of the intervening tender with its high load of cord wood.
“Speaking of which,” came the still even-voiced response from the platform of the first day car, “if you fellers try to move this train out before I tell you, it’ll be your lives that’ll be on the line.”
Orin spoke a string of harsh-toned obscenities as Larry attempted to placate him and the brakeman started to yell that the train was already late and to demand to know the reason for the emergency halt. All of which Edge ignored as he opened the door and stepped off the platform into the car. He announced:
“Living’s better than dying, I figure. Anyone wants to check if I’m wrong just has to try—”
He said this as he started along the central aisle of the car, addressing a scattered audience of seven nervous listeners comprised of a man, woman and little girl of about ten who had peered out of the window at him; two middle-aged men who had been playing cards together and an old man and a young one of about fifteen who were travelling alone.
“I ain’t armed!”
“I just have a couple of dollars!”
“Don’t hurt my daughter, please!”
“It’s just trinkets, my stock-in-trade, sir! But you’re welcome to take it!”
Some hands were thrust toward Edge as he strode down the aisle of the car, rifle still canted to his shoulder, thumb hooked over the uncocked hammer and forefinger curled to the trigger. Those of the man in the family group were splayed and empty. One of the card-playing drummers offered some screwed up bills and the other held out a carpetbag, while the small girl reluctantly allowed herself to be embraced by her anxious mother, and the old man sat rigid and tight-lipped, tacitly challenging the half-breed to try to rob him. The acned adolescent who was at the rear of the car, fixed the rifle-toting intruder with a look of scorn and spoke in a matching tone of voice as Edge came level with him and pulled open the door.
“All I got is some candy, you crook. Real easy to take that off a kid, they say.” He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, as defiant as the old man.
“Candy, uh?” Edge posed after a glance across the two platforms of the end-to-end day cars and through the glass panel of the leading door of the second one.
“Yeah!”
“So chew on it and don’t talk with your mouth full, kid. Could turn out to be a lifesaver.”
He stepped out of the car and closed the door beind him, muting the blustering voice of the boy as he harangued his fellow passengers for not standing up to the half-breed. Then, briefly while he stepped from one platform to the next, he could hear the irate voices of the engineer, the fireman and the brakeman, who were all now down off the train—but remained in a group beside the locomotive which became quieter by the moment as the boiler pressure fell.
There were just five passengers in the second day car. Another family group, but this couple’s offspring was just a baby in the arms of the young woman. They sat just inside the doorway to Edge’s right, the woman looking ready to faint with fear as she cradled her sleeping baby while her husband encircled her trembling shoulders with one arm and draped his other hand over the butt of his holstered Remington. This hand had white knuckles and shook, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead and along his top lip.
“Right now I don’t want a thing from you or your missus or your baby, feller,” the half-breed said softly, and did not even seem to look at the man again after an initial glance. “You don’t let go of the gun and keep your hand clear, I’ll take the lives of all three.”
“He means it, Clyde!” the woman forced from her terror-constricted throat.
“I believe you, mister,” the man added quickly. “Belief is the same thing as faith, feller,” Edge said, and continued to look toward the other two passengers in the car.
“If you say so, mister.”
“And that can move mountains.”
“That’s what they say.” He swallowed hard. “Just want you to move your hand away from—” Clyde jerked his hand up from the gun as iflhe butt had suddenly become unbearably hot. His wife vented a sob that disturbed her sleeping baby.
But he gave just a whimper before he settled peacefully again.
“Obliged,” Edge said.
“You didn’t leave me much choice.”
“For not making me kill your baby.”
The mother sobbed again and Clyde murmured words of comfort to her. While the half-breed moved toward the second couple who rode in this car—seated at a midway point along the aisle on the other, Rock of Jesus side, both of them dressed expensively in black mourning, the woman in the aisle seat, the man by the window.
The woman was a slender redhead in her midthirties with a doll-pretty, blue-eyed and full-lipped face. She looked to be as fearful of Edge as the mother—clasped her hands tightly in her lap as if to stop them from shaking and seemed incapable of blinking while her gaze was apparently trapped in a fixed stare at the impassive face of the halfbreed. The man beside her was haif a head taller at six feet and was much more broadly built; his bulk composed largely of fat if the padding of flesh on his round, smooth, pale-skinned face was anything to go by. His eyes were also blue, but were much smaller. And they blinked a great deal as one sign of his nervousness. He was also sweating, and the part-smoked cigar between the yellow-stained first and second fingers of his right hand had gone out from neglect. The constant movement of his tiny eyes ‘revealed that Edge was not the sole cause of his apprehension. He was also disturbed by what he was able to see through the dusty window of the car.
“You’re Donovan?” Edge asked as he came to a halt and captured the same high degree of attention from the seated man as from the woman at his side.
Donovan attempted to voice a reply but was able only to vent an inarticulate grunt. He nodded and either the sound or the gesture acted to jerk the woman out of the trancelike state she had been in.
“And I’m Mrs. Donovan!” she snarled as she dragged her gaze away from the half-breed’s face and replaced fear with distaste in her eyes as she looked him up and down. “And you’re out of luck if you’re after cash money. Because it’s unnecessary for Barry and I to carry it. Why is it the poor always think the wealthy walk around with wads of bills about their persons?”
Donovan found his voice to order in a thick-with-fear tone: “Shut up, Eileen!” Then he cleared his throat and started to mash up the dead cigar in his hand as he told Edge in an almost squeaking voice: “She don’t really mean to rile you, mister. I was broke for most of my life so I don’t ever get high-falutin’ about bein’ rich. But Eileen’s right. We don’t ever carry much cash around. Usually we got on more jewelry, but on account of us bein’ on our way to the funeral of an old buddy, it wasn’t fittin’ we should ...”
He was sweating more profusely and his voice was getting thicker by the moment as the Winchester rifle swung slowly down from the half-breed’s shoulder. Then he opened his hand to let fall the mess of the former cigar and began to try pulling off two rings that were trapped on his fingers by bulges of fat. His voice failed him again when the muzzle of the rifle was aimed at a midway point between the heads of the husband and wife. And Edge brought up his right hand to hold the barrel steady as he thumbed back the hammer.
“It’s the truth,” the woman pleaded, her former arrogance totally dispelled by a fresh assault of fear which this time bordered on terror. “We really are travelling to Prospect to attend the funeral of one of Barry’s—”
“It’s the truth I stopped the train to hear, ma’am,” Edge cut in calmly across her fast spoken and shriller-by-the-word attempted explanation. “But only your husband can tell it so it’ll carry conviction. Maybe his. And a couple of other fellers.”
“I don’t understand what you are talking about,” Eileen Donovan protested, and shot an imploring glance at her husband.
He was once again dividing his nervou
s attention between the half-breed and the scene beyond the window. The sweat continued to ooze from his fleshy face and in rubbing at it with a bare hand he left fragments of tobacco and cigar paper adhered to the tacky skin.
“Figure he’s getting to it, ma’am,” Edge answered. “Having bad memories.”
“I knew it,” Donovan muttered, and now stared fixedly out of the window. “Frank gettin’ shot down. The train gettin’ stopped here. I want you to know before you kill me, too, mister, that I ain’t gone unpunished for what we done that day to—”
“Mister, this ain’t none of our business!” Clyde called croakily from the front of the car. “And I ain’t about to allow my wife to be present when you cold-bloodedly—”
There was a shuffling of booted feet against the floor of the car and a rustle of clothing. Edge turned instinctively toward the scene of the activity, as Donovan started to cross himself. He glimpsed the woman with the baby in her arms being urged toward the leading door of the car by her husband, who was shielding her with his body. Clyde had not drawn the Remington from his holster. Then Edge heard Eileen Donovan’s sharp intake of breath and sensed rather than saw the initial move of her attack—before he started to turn back toward her.
“Run, Barr!” she shrieked. “Get away from him!”
She powered up from the aisle seat, face no longer pretty as it was contorted by a mixture of anger and fear and hate. Both her hands were clawed as she reached for the rifle in Edge’s grasp. And she achieved what she aimed for. Then, with a powerful lunge that allied physical capability with high emotion to produce amazing strength for such a slightly built woman, she shoved Edge into a backward stagger along the aisle.
For just part of a second after his wife was on her feet and driving the half-breed down the car,
Donovan seemed to be rooted to his seat. But then he lurched upright, staggered into the aisle and lumbered toward the rear end of the car, where he wrenched open the door, took two strides across the platform and leaped to the ground. He chose to leave the train on the Rock of Jesus side since there was no cover close by on the other side.
Edge had recovered from the surprise of the woman’s attack by then, and had come to a rocksteady halt with his feet planted firmly on the floor of the car; the rifle still held in a double-handed grip across the front of his body where Eileen Donovan had forced it.
For several seconds after he became immovable, she attempted to wrench the Winchester from him. But the initial burst of energy she had expended to send him into retreat had drained her physically, and her emotional strength was badly depleted, too, so that when she at length allowed her unclawed hands to fall limply to her sides and turned her head to peer out of the window, just a single sob burst from deep within, this an acknowledgment of defeat as she saw her black-garbed husband moving at a waddling run across open ground between the train and the unfinished church—a clear and easy target for the man with the Winchester.
“You can tell the engineer he can move out the train any time he likes, feller,” Edge said.
Eileen Donovan wrenched her head around and was in time to see the half-breed uncock the rifle and cant it to his shoulder as he turned from addressing Clyde, who was still on the threshold of the car’s leading doorway.
“Dead men tell no tales nor truths, ma’am,” Edge said to the perplexed woman. “You want to stay on the train and tell Prospect people they’d best put Frank Crowell in the ground without waiting for—”
“I’m going to remain with my husband!” she snapped, whirled with a rustle of petticoats beneath the skirt of her black mourning dress and strode resolutely along the aisle and out through the rear doorway of the car.
“You mean it, mister?” Clyde wanted to know anxiously from the front doorway as Edge went after the woman.
“Hardly ever say anything I don’t mean, feller.” The young husband and father whirled out onto the platform and bellowed excitedly: “Hey, you guys! He says it’s all right for us to leave! So let’s get the hell away from here, okay?”
There was a chorus of answering voices from up alongside the locomotive and within the first day car, all of the responses incomprehensible to Edge as he stepped down from the rear platform of the second day car, Clyde was in a better position to make sense out of some of what was being shouted, and yelled back as the confusion of competing voices died down:
“No, nobody’s been hurt! Couple of people scared all to hell got off the train! I got no idea what it’s all about!”
Steam abruptly hissed out of valves with more
raucous force than at any time since the train came to its emergency halt. And against this sound, Edge murmured:
“An old mystery, feller. About ten Indians. Don’t know if they were little. Just that now there are none.’’
Chapter Eleven
BARRY and Eileen Donovan were no longer running. He had ended his lumbering, fat man’s dash near the diamond-shaped pattern of uninscribed grave markers, where he leaned forward from the waist and pressed his pudgy hands to his thick thighs, his head hanging down while he sucked in deep draughts of hot and dry air as he struggled to catch his breath and calm his panic. His wife was at first glance much more composed as she held herself almost rigidly erect—only her head moving, from side to side with an automatonlike motion.
After a first glance at the couple, Edge turned and dropped into a low squat; so that he was able to see beneath the train cars to where his gelding was contentedly foraging for scrub grass on the crest of a slight rise about a mile to the northeast. As he located the horse, pistons thudded and drive shafts clanked, escaping steam hissed and wheelrims shrieked on the rails. The gelding interrupted his grazing, but then dipped his head to the grass again; horse sense telling him he was too far off to be in any danger.
Then the drive wheels found traction and the line of cars jerked forward and banged into each other with the force of momentum when the locomotive faltered from lack of steam pressure. But a stretched second later engine and cars were rolling in concert, the couplings that held them together pulled taut. And, as he rose from the crouch, the half-breed found his attention captured by the spotty-faced boy who was leaning out to the side from the rear platform of the first day car, a sneer twisting his mouthline as he yelled:
“At holdin’ up trains, shithead, you ain’t no Jesse James!”
Edge winced as he experienced twinges of pain from his hurried dismount, sparked by the crouch and coming erect from it. He murmured for his own ears: “Granted, kid. But he has some younger help.”
The grim-faced brakeman hauled the boy in off the platform and Edge turned away from the departing train. First he saw Eileen Donovan, who was now fixed in a totally rigid stance as she stared back at him, the mix of fear and anger and hatred once again masking her pretty features with ugliness.
“You lying bastard!” she suddenly hurled at him, screaming it loud enough to be clearly heard above the snorting of the locomotive and clanking of the line of cars being drawn in back of Edge.
And the half-breed now realized the reason for the earlier mechanicallike jerking to and fro of her head, and what had caused her to voice an oath she quite obviously had seldom if ever used before— she had been switching her quizzical gaze between the portrait on the wanted flyer fixed to the telegraph pole and the man she now decided it depicted.
“It’s you! You murdered Frank Crowell and now you’re going to kill Barry!”
She whirled and clawed at the skirt of her mourning dress to lift it clear of the ground so that she was better able to run, but once more was transfixed by the unexpected. And Edge, too, was momentarily surprised by the sight of Barry Donovan.
The black-clad fat man had not moved from where he had halted at the end of his panicked bolt from the train. But he was standing upright now, the breath trapped inside his body as he pushed out both arms at shoulder level, his thick-fingered hands clawed, like he was attempting to ward off some ghostly apparition of h
is past evil that hovered above the eleven adobe grave markers. Then he swung awkwardly around, for a stretched second looking like a somnambulist while his arms remained reached out in front of him. But nobody could have stayed asleep during the kind of terrifying nightmare that was capable of inscribing the expression of stark horror which contorted the face of this man. Then he brought his arms down and began to run again, faster than before, and toward the train he had earlier fled from, a piercingly shrill scream venting from his gaping mouth.
His wife now lunged toward him, whatever she shouted masked by his scream of terror. Probably he did not see her and perhaps he was not even aware of her as she cannoned off his lumbering bulk and sprawled helplessly to the ground. Certainly he did not slow from his headlong pace, nor deviate from his elected course—which, if the train did not gather speed, would have gotten him to the side of the track in time to get a handhold on and swing aboard the rear platform of the caboose. But the train’s speed was rising with every yard it traveled beneath the rolling billow of black wood-smoke that was stretched Out along its full length.
“Barry!” Eileen Donovan shrieked from where she sat, splay-legged on the ground with both hands cupped to her mouth. “It’s no use, Barry!” Edge shifted his narrowed, glinting-eyed gaze from the despairing woman to where her husband now altered the direction of his run: Donovan unwilling to abandon the chase even though he had f failed to intercept the train and the gap between the caboose and himself was widening by the part-second as he staggered along at the side of" the track. Then he raked his gaze back toward the woman and past her, along the same arc, to look beyond the grave markers at the undoubtedly corporeal tableau that had triggered the fat man’s massive terror.
Austin Henry Loring and Marsha Onslow walked side by side away from the base of the towering outcrop, the preacher looking no different from when Edge had last seen him—still unwashed and unshaven and attired in the ancient frock coat. He held his Bible open in both hands and appeared to be reading aloud from it. The woman with the blonde hair and statuesque frame was on his right, lightly holding his upper arm as if to steer him along a clear path while he was engrossed in religious study. She wore a highnecked, long-sleeved, low-hemmed dress that was gray in color and more functional than stylish, given form only by her shape. Her low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat was also undecorated by frills.
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