She was unable to formulate an ending to the claim that she considered carried sufficient menace. And Edge filled the pause with:
“Ben Tremayne, Mrs. Donovan? In the event Maguire doesn’t plan on showing up: because he’s heard more about me than I have about him?” “Please do not tempt providence, sir,” Loring urged—like Marsha Onslow, less concerned for the safety of the widow since she had challenged the half-breed with' defiance and not been made to suffer for it.
“How’s that, feller?”
“To quote what is so often misquoted, my friend, -pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
“If a man can’t take pride in the truth and in himself, what else is there?” Edge answered. And reminded: “Ben Tremayne, ma’am?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard Barry speak of him. When he spoke of Frank Crowell and John Maguire. Mostly about them all fighting in the war together.
I swear to God, and you’ll have to hurt me if you won’t believe me, I know nothing about...” She ceased to press the back of her head against him and peer up into his face, to look imploringly at the other woman and the preacher then raked her gaze over the area of the outcrop, the chapel and the burial ground. Then she spoke in a tremulous whisper. “It is apparent to me that something terrible happened here some seven years ago. That involved Barry and his three comrades from the war. He never made mention of it to me.”
“Obliged, ma’am,” Edge said, and came up from the crouch, taking the razor carefully away from her cheek and sliding it back into the pouch at the nape of his neck.
“So you believe me?” She sounded drained and uncaring about his response.
“Maguire must have been someplace not far off if he planned to board the same train as you?’ ’
“Albuquerque. It was purely by chance Barry knew he was in the territories. He never kept in contact with anybody he knew before he set up in the freight business in Santa Fe. He didn’t even know Crowell was still operating the saloon in Prospect. He never knew where Tremayne went after the four of them went their separate ways. And knew of Maguire just from reading the newspaper accounts of his exploits. As fortune would have it, the man was last reported to be in Albuquerque. And when Barry received the wire from the Prospect peace officer telling him of Crowell’s death, he sent one of his own. To Maguire care of the express office in Albuquerque relaying the same message. Maguire was still in the town and wired back that he hoped to join us on the train to Prospect.”
Edge stooped to pick up his discarded mug and at the same time dropped his cigarette butt in the fire.
“What your husband and his three comrades in arms did here seven years ago, Mrs. Donovan—” Austin Henry Loring began.
But the widow raised her hands and pressed her palms tightly to her ears. She implored: “I have no desire to know about it. Whatever it was, he has been paying for it ever since. By never experiencing a moment’s peace of mind during his waking hours. And never once has he knowingly harmed any living creature or committed a single act of ill will against a fellow human being. And now he has suffered the ultimate penalty. Patently, he had a heart seizure. In a manner of speaking, that is what everyone dies from—the curtailment of the heart’s beating. But I will believe until my own dying day that Barry died of fright. And I have no wish to know what magnitude of terror can haunt a man to that extent.”
Edge had left the trio by the fire to go to where his horse was hitched to the buggy beside the chapel. He stowed his mug back in the center of his bedroll and then gave the gelding a drink of canteen water from his hat.
“Will you say as much in a court of law?” Marsha Onslow asked, sympathetic in her attitude toward the widow now that the earlier envy of her had been displaced by a degree of empathy—the bleached blonde perhaps wishing she was able to experience the same brand of loyalty to the memory of her dead man as did the redhead to her own.
“Opinions count for nothing,” Eileen Donovan answered. “And if they were admitted in a courtroom, I would speak only good of my late husband. That is all I ever knew him to be.”
“You’re leaving, sir?” Austin Henry Loring asked anxiously as Edge put his damp hat back on his head and unhitched the reins from the buggy wheel.
“My business here is all done.” He waved a hand at a fly that droned out from under the preacher’s blanket that was draped over the bulky corpse of Barry Donovan on the rear seat of the buggy.
Marsha Onslow asked: “But you think there’s a good chance Maguire will show up in Prospect?”
“That’s my view.”
Chapter Thirteen
THE man called Edge had not before noticed that the town of Prospect had a public clock that chimed the hours: until he rode down the north trail beside the railroad track among the homesteads and heard the three strikes that marked the time in the morning when, old wives tales had it, the human spirit was at its lowest ebb and the soul was most ready to leave the body.
The clock was on the facade of the railroad depot building, its white dial illuminated only by the light of the moon and the big and bright stars of Texas. This same light glinted on the dusty windows of the passenger cars and the polished metalwork of the locomotive of the train that stood silently alongside the depot boardwalk.
After the last echo of the chimes had faded there was just the clop of the gelding’s hooves to keep the all-pervading silence at bay. And, as during his visit to Prospect last night, there was only a crack of lamplight to be glimpsed here and there among the buildings of the peacefully sleeping town. He reined the horse to a halt and listened fleetingly to the muted hum of a community at rest: struck a match on the butt of his holstered Colt and lit the cigarette that had been angled, unsmoked, from a side of his mouth for more than thirty minutes. Then he heeled his mount forward again as he blew out the flame. He toyed with the dead match between a thumb and two fingers as he moved his ice-blue eyes slowly back and forth between the narrowed lids. He listened as intently as he watched, while he relied on his sixth sense for lurking danger to warn him if a threat should suddenly manifest itself at his back.
It was obvious to anyone who witnessed his ride down the center of the main street that the halfbreed was looking where he was going. Even more apparent was the fact that, although he made no more sound than was necessary, his approach to and ride into town was far from secretive. What the most diligent observer could never know was the extent of Edge’s readiness to respond to any aggressive move against him by anyone tempted to attack him because they considered him ripe for ambush: for the stoical expression on his hat-brim-shadowed face and the easy way he sat his saddle was no more than a wafer-thin veneer designed to lure a potential enemy into reckless overconfidence.
It was a long ride from the railroad depot to Joel Slocum’s livery stable, from one end of the street almost to the other: made to seem even longer by the strain of remaining tensed for lightning reaction to the initial sight or sound of actual danger, not imagined or innocent, like a seeming movement in the dark moonshadow of a sidewalk awning, the creak of a bedspring or the scurrying across a patch of moonlit ground of a mouse. Past the telegraph office and between stores and houses, the office of The Prospect Tribune, the Best in the West and then the stage line depot to his right. Over on his left was Avery’s and Ruth’s Aurora Restaurant. A few doors down on that side, a street cut off the main thoroughfare. Beyond this a dry-goods store opposite the law office. Then came the grade school and across the street from this the candy store and the barbering parlor with the alley between them where Frank Crowell had died.
Nobody threatened and nobody pleaded in the darkness of the alley tonight. The dog that had barked at him when he made his escape from town after he killed Crowell just whined now, as he rode past the feed and seed merchants, the two private houses and the boardinghouse of Mrs. Cloris Doyle. He swung to the right then, and tossed away the dead match, to ride onto the side street between the church and the livery. Only
when he halted his mount out front of the stable and swung down from the saddle did he become aware of a sweet fragrance that competed with the acrid aroma of tobacco smoke for dominance of the cool night air. He had his attention briefly captured by a patch of color across the street—the floral tributes to the memory of Frank Crowell that were stacked on and around the mound of earth that marked the fresh grave in the cemetery at the rear of the church.
Then Edge dropped his part-smoked cigarette to the street and ground out its fire under a boot heel, opened the stable door and led his gelding inside to where the smells of horses and saddle soap and feed and horse apples and wet allowed no entry to other aromas. The stall in which his mount had previously been put was now occupied by another -animal, so Edge put the gelding elsewhere—gave him a brisk rubdown and saw to it he had feed and water before he struck a match to check if there were any other strange horses in the livery.
Just the one—a big, powerful black stallion that was well cared for and had been resting here in Joel Slocum’s stable for some time. The saddle and other gear had been taken by the rider to wherever he had elected to bed down. As he was careful to ensure that the match was totally cold before he dropped it to the straw-littered floor of the stable, Edge briefly pondered the possibility of the man sleeping peacefully in a room at the Best in the West or Mrs. Doyle’s boardinghouse or someplace else in town. And was ninety-nine per cent sure that if the man who rode the black stallion to Prospect was easily asleep, the newcomer was not the one he had come here in the early hours of a new day to see—and had taken nerve-stretching and muscle-knotting precautions to be seen by.
He had been genuinely at ease while he was in the livery, but the moment he stepped out through the cracked-open door the familiar tension took an ice-cold grip on him in back of the impassiveness on his face and the nonchalance of his ambling gait. But the look on his angular features and the way he moved his lean frame was involuntarily habitual now—no part of any ploy to trick a wary watcher into a false sense of security. His right hand swung through a short arc that kept the slightly curved fingers always within a part of a second of fisting around the jutting butt of the holstered Frontier Colt, while his left was already fastened around the frame of the Winchester that was canted to his shoulder, thumb resting on the top of the hammer and forefinger curled to the trigger. Thus, he no longer simply invited an attack: he had set out to provoke one.
“You got nerve, mister, I’ll say that for you!” a man called as Edge moved out onto the center of the main street again, where the side street between the livery and the church formed the intersection.
The speaker was some three hundred yards away as he broke the silence, and stepped off a shadowed sidewalk to move to the center of the same street out front of the telegraph office. But because of the stillness all around he did not have to raise his voice very much to carry what he said to where the half-breed came to an easy halt. Then noise, mostly of other voices, and an ever-increasing level of light began to spill from the buildings on either side, as drapes were jerked apart and some doors were pulled open. And the more impulsive citizens of Prospect stepped outside the safety of the buildings.
Then much of the sudden swell of sound was suddenly curtailed when the two men on the center of the street were seen. And the voice of just one of these men was again the sole disturbance in an otherwise almost palpable silence that pressed down on, in from the sides and along the street.
“Didn’t expect nothin’ less, though. After I heard tell how you stopped the train out in the boondocks. That was quite somethin’, by all acounts.”
“Don’t they say small things please small minds, feller?” Edge answered.
The man tilted back his head and vented a raucous laugh as he started to advance slowly along the street toward the half-breed. “Lousy try, mister. Shows nerve of a different kind. But you can’t rile a pro like me into drawin’ against you over this kinda distance: you with a rifle and me with just a little old six-shooter. By the way, if you ain’t already guessed it, I’m John Maguire. Oldtime partner of Frank Crowell that I know you killed, and Barr Donovan that I reckon ain’t in the land of the livin’ no more?”
Maguire was pushing fifty and was no lightweight. He stood about five feet nine or ten inches tall and was broad-shouldered, barrel-chested and thick-waisted. He had a heavy-featured, ugly face with a thick-lipped mouth fronting crooked teeth, and small eyes. He was no longer called Red because the sparse hair on his shiny, domed head was gray. His eyebrows and busy moustache were gray also. Maguire’s near baldness could be seen because he was hatless: he carried his Stetson hooked over his left hand. The hat was white with a black band. His shirt, vest, pants and boots were all black. So was his gunbelt. A silver watch chain was strung across the front of his vest and his dress spurs looked to be made of the same precious metal. His English Tranter .45 in a quickdraw holster was silver-plated and the bullets slotted into the loops of his gunbelt were polished so that they glinted in the light. Thus did the man look neat and clean, prosperous and dangerous: obviously was able to command top dollar for the jobs he undertook—and the fact that he was alive and well was proof that he always gave value for the money he was paid.
The half-breed who was unwashed and unshaven and attired in old and worn and unstylish clothes, appeared disreputable by contrast as he moved at the same unhurried pace as Maguire to close the gap.
But such a comparison did not occur to Edge, because he could feel no affinity with this man who was a professional killer. He knew that if this had been possible, he might have been able to experience a degree of respect for him: for the fact that he was here, doing a job out of a fraternal feeling from the past instead of for money; that he had not attempted to bushwhack his intended victim when the opportunity was presented to him; that he had shown himself to a man with a rifle when he was way outside handgun range; and that he was as tensely alert and ready to react as was Edge himself behind a front of casualness—this glimpsed in the way that his tiny eyes remained in a fixed gaze upon the half-breed when he had thrown back his head to vent the histrionic laugh.
“He died, feller.”
“Dammit, mister, you didn’t oughta have done that!” the tall and skinny and sickly-looking Milton Rose snarled as he stepped out of his unlit office, but remained at the side of the street. “You can’t expect no protection from the law if you just go around killin’ men like they was—”
A rising tide of vocal agreement with this sentiment drowned out the lawman’s harshly spoken words. This as many more townspeople emerged from the cover of buildings along both sides of the main street; to flank the slowly narrowing gap between Edge and Maguire or to watch from behind them, everyone careful to stay out of the line of fire.
Maguire, still wary of the rifle canted to Edge’s shoulder, did not look away from the taller, leaner man. While the half-breed, aware the Winchester meant he still had many yards to spare on his adversary in the open, glanced to left and to right; both ahead of him and then over each shoulder. He saw in passing as he searched without success for a sign that Maguire had an accomplice, that the sheriff was the only bystander fully dressed— everyone else was in nightclothes, some with topcoats draped over their shoulders.
The gunslinger with one hand hidden by his hat and the other hanging close to his fancy revolver vented another gust of harsh laughter across the falling level of angry words and then taunted: “You ain’t gotta concern yourself with these folks, mister! Been talk of a necktie party, but that’ll only come to pass if a saddletramp with nothin’ goin’ for him except nerve outdraws and outshoots the fastest gun from coast to coast, border to border.’’
Less than a hundred yards separated them now and they were not the only ones on the move. Many of the again-silent watchers were keeping pace with them; gathering into two close-knit groups, one on either side of the street. But the lengthening stretches of street in back of each man directly involved in the showdown remained clea
r: the tensefaced watchers wary of carelessly loosed bullets missing the intended targets to bore into equally vulnerable innocent victims.
“I knew I could talk them out of that lynchin’ nonsense, Edge,’’ Milton Rose assured, his tone less harsh and almost apologetic. He was moving along the street from the law office with that section of the crowd that kept level with the half-breed on the west side. “And I’d have gotten them to listen to me. Especially when they knew Marsha Onslow had left town to help you. But when the train pulled in without her or you or the Donovans on it, well . . . folks would only listen to—”
“Me, mister!” Maguire cut in eagerly on the lawman, who was again in danger of being shouted down by his fellow citizens—the mere sound of the gunslinger’s voice enough to silence the crowd. “It was my turn to talk the folks hereabouts out of lynchin’ you on sight, Edge! Told them how I’d come here especially to pay back the man that murdered my old buddy Frank Crowell. And how I wanted to do it more than ever after I found out he’d likely done away with another old partner of mine. How it would be a pleasure for me and I wouldn’t want no reward for doin’ it. Pleasure to do and a happy memory to live with. Whereas decent law-abidin’ people, while they might get one hell of a charge out of a lynch party . . . after a time, they’d start to get a bad taste in their mouths over what they’d done?’’
He came to a halt and by both a change of tone and an arching of his gray eyebrows he queried the still-walking Edge for an opinion on what he had said.
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