But nobody did and, as the night grew, older and colder, a grey and damp mist rolling in from the Pacific to hover eerily amid the forest, he began to think that he might have guessed wrong. But he felt no sense of frustration. He was being paid well and was allowed to do the job the way he wanted. He asked for nothing else and neither did he expect it. Fate called the pattern of every man’s life. All the man could do was watch for the new piece to be slotted into place and be ready to use it for his own ends.
They started to steal the big gold at two o’clock by Edge’s reckoning. Grainger didn’t have to rouse Wylie and Salter. All that was necessary to get them from under their blankets was a low whistle. And after they had got to their feet and stepped lightly over to the wagon, there was no exchange of words. Not even hand signals. The plan to steal the wagon had obviously been well rehearsed.
Only in cutting four horses out of the remuda did Wylie and Salter make any sound, whispering softly and placatingly to keep the animals calm. The horses knew the scent of the men and there was no disturbance as they were led into position to be harnessed to the wagon. Grainger had moved to the side, taking his role of guard more seriously now. But the Winchester he held across the front of his broad chest was this time ready to swing into covering the people sleeping in the camp.
No matter how quiet men remain, and are able to persuade their animals to be, a four horse team cannot be hitched up in absolute silence. Shod hooves thudded against turf, bones cracked, harness slapped and horses snorted. Normal, everyday sounds. But in the dead of a misty night they had a strangely loud quality. There had to be at least one light sleeper among the score or more people sprawled under blankets beside the fires or slumbering in the wagons. But nobody woke. And though Wylie and Salter did their chores with a sense of urgency, there was also a certain brash confidence in their actions. Grainger, too, despite the steady rifle, showed almost careless nonchalance as he swung his head from side to side, surveying the camp.
Then, as the two younger guards returned to the remuda and saddled three horses, Edge remembered Case drinking the coffee. And he also recalled that Grainger had been at a campfire which wasn’t his own when the dude and the half-breed returned from town. Edge had not drunk any coffee after eating the stew.
Not that it mattered. Edge was the only man in the camp being paid to protect the big gold from its guards. And his plan to do it did not involve getting help from anybody else.
One of the saddle horses was hitched to the rear of the wagon. Grainger and Salter mounted the other two. Wylie hoisted himself up on to the wagon seat. Now there was a signal: a curt nod of the head by Grainger. He and Salter turned their horses and Winchesters towards the camp. Wylie unwound the reins from around the brake lever.
“Giiiiittttt uppppp there!” he yelled, and snatched a whip from the seat to lash across the backs of the team.
The animals whinnied in alarm, then reared and lunged forward. The tendons stood out on their hindquarters, and then the initial effort of setting the great weight rolling was over. The wheels rose up out of the dents they had sunk into the turf, and the wagon was moving.
Somebody shouted something from the far side of the camp. A man. Walter Peat who had had other things on his mind besides coffee when he brought Arabella back from Seascape? Or one of the spielers who had also been late into camp?
“Shut your mouth and go to sleep!” Grainger yelled.
Wylie continued to whip the horses and started to scream a string of obscenities at them in a demand for greater speed. He was yanking on the reins, steering the team towards the start of the trail beside which Edge waited. It hadn’t been difficult to call the direction the thieves would take. Town lay to the north. And Clarence French had driven his buggy south.
Salter sent a shot towards the wagons, the bullet cracking across the campsite and thudding into something metal. The impact sounded more stridently loud than the report.
“Lunkhead!” Grainger snarled, jerking on his reins to order the horse into a wheel before thudding his heels for a gallop in pursuit of the wagon.
Salter was only a yard behind him as more shots rang out and figures sprang up at the firesides. Forms that swayed, reeled and even collapsed again. The wagon kept up its headlong pace, displacing tendrils of white mist that swirled around it like smoke from wet wood smoldering without flames. Edge had been crouched behind the tree. Now he stood up to his full height, the metallic scraping of the rifle’s lever action lost amid so much other raucous sound. He stayed in cover, except for one side of his face as he peered out around the rough bark.
Wylie had to haul the team into another turn to get on to the logging trail. A sharper one this time, in the opposite direction to the first. A left hand turn that put most of the dragging strain on to the offside wheels. Edge was positioned on the left of the trail. He saw the wagon canting to the right while Wylie leaned to the other side. He watched the front offside wheel wobble, then spin at a faster rate as it came clear of the ground. It slammed down into the turf again, bounced, and spun free. It quivered through the air with the power of a catapulted missile, then its iron rim dug a massive piece of bark from a tree trunk. The front axle bit into the ground, half stopping the hurtling wagon. Then it snapped. The front of the wagon’s chassis scraped an enormous black scar across the lush turf. The rear of the wagon skewed into a side-slid, started to tip, and then smashed into a tree. The two lead horses broke from the traces to bolt while the back pair were stopped dead in their tracks. They reared, snorting in pain and terror. Wylie was pitched from his seat and his scream cut clearly across every other sound of the wreck. The splintering of wood, the grating of gold against iron, the fear and pain of the horses and the impact of wagon into tree.
The power of his involuntary motion snapped the reins from his hands and he turned head-over-heels in a graceful arc. The short trajectory sailed him between the necks of the rearing horses and thudded him into the ground at the base of a tree. His screams ended in a deep-throated groan as Edge stepped out from behind the tree.
A handgun began to crack. A small caliber weapon, the sounds of its reports diminished by the cacophony which had preceded them.
“Let’s get outta here, Ray!” The voice was recognizable as that of Salter.
“But for you, we’d have made it!” Wylie gasped.
Edge glanced down at the man on the ground. His feet had hit first. At an awkward angle. Both legs had broken at the ankles. His feet had been wrenched off by the impact and thrown across the trail. Shards of broken bone showed up incredibly white against the rivers of blood flowing from the meaty stumps. He had lost both his rifle and his handgun during the rapid ejection from the wagon seat. Not that he could have used them. His hands were turned at acute angles from his fractured wrists.
“Lot of gold to lose, feller,” the half-breed muttered. “Natural you’re broken up about it.”
“How?” Wylie croaked.
“For two pins, I’ll tell you.” He dropped the metal retaining pins he had taken from the front wheel hubs of the wagon. They splashed into Wylie’s blood.
Then he whirled, slamming the Winchester against his shoulder. He squeezed the trigger and missed the target. The wrecked wagon was almost completely blocking the trail. Grainger had chosen the escape route, angling across the campsite and into the timber at the south-east corner of the clearing. But Salter was a little late in chasing after the older man, and there was an instant for a clear shot as he galloped across the narrow gap between the canting wagon and the trees flanking the trail. The man with the light handgun got him first. Winging him in the thigh. Salter instinctively leaned forward to claw at the place where he had been hit. The bullet from the Winchester cracked across the back of the man’s neck. Then he was lost to sight, the hoof beats of his mount diminishing. There were no more shots.
“Goddamn gun’s empty!” Roger Case shrieked in high-pitched anger. “Blast at them, somebody.”
“ Ain’ our g
old they was after!” a man snorted in response.
“Edge! Where the hell are you, Edge?” The dude’s voice seemed to have risen an octave, quivering close to hysteria.
“Maybe they killed the bastard, I hope!”
The hoof beats had almost faded into nothing now as Grainger and Salter put distance between themselves and the scene of their abortive attempt to steal the big gold. The words rang out clearly in the misty night. Weak as it was, the half-breed recognized the voice of Turk.
“Ain’t your day, feller!” he called evenly.
“Oh, Christ!” Jo Jo Lamont groaned.
“Oh, dear, dear me!” The Nepalese put in.
“Edge!” Case yelled, relief dragging his voice down to a normal level. He started to run drunkenly towards the wrecked wagon. “What happened to Wylie? You see him?”
“Yeah,” the half-breed replied sardonically. “But nobody’ll be seeing so much of him again.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Case had reached the gap between the wreck and the trees. He saw Wylie and stopped abruptly. His pale face shaded whiter and the skin took on a sheen. A wet gurgle vented from his lips. A pepperbox dropped from his hand.
Edge shouldered the Winchester. “Means he’s lost a couple of feet.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“WHAT’S your name, feller?” Edge asked.
The Nepalese came awake with a start, sat up sharply and banged his forehead painfully against the axle of the wagon under which he had been sleeping. He yelled, and the two tigers growled irritably.
“Oh, goodness gracious me!” he exclaimed, his dark eyes growing wide in his brown face. “You frightened me most badly.”
The half-breed was squatting down at the side of the wagon, a menacing silhouette against the white sea mist which had thickened as the early hours of the new day past. Visibility was down to just a few feet and the fires which could be seen were mere ghostly orange glows suspended in the murk.
“No sweat,” Edge said softly. “What’s your name?”
The small, wiry-built Nepalese massaged his forehead. “Vishwabandhu Nageshwar Singh, sahib,” he replied nervously.
Edge pursed his lips. “Guess that’s why you get called Nep.”
The man looked sad. “I like to be called Singh best, sahib. But if you prefer, I am not a man of violence. You will call me what you will, most certainly.”
“Need your help, Singh.”
His teeth were whiter than the mist against his dark complexion. “Most pleased I will be, sahib.”
“Case’ll pay you the eight dollars a day.”
Singh’s grin broadened. “Mr. Case is indeed a most generous man.”
“He don’t know it yet,” Edge said flatly. “Thinks he’s saving that much now he’s light four guards.”
Perhaps he was, in his sleep. Grainger had made a circuit of the camp fires the previous night, dropping some kind of soporific drug into the coffee pots. It was apparent in the way all but a handful of the showmen and spielers went quickly back to sleep after the violent disturbance of the attempt to steal the big gold.
Walter Peat and another man who had not drunk any of the doped coffee carried the critically injured Wylie to Doc Elkins’ office in Seascape. But the man had lost too much blood and a lot more drained from the stumps of his ankles on the jolting trip to town. He died on the way, cursing Edge, and was taken to the funeral parlor instead.
Once he was assured that the block of precious metal was safe, Case surrendered again to the effects of the Micky Finn and crawled gratefully back under his blankets. And even those who had not been drugged returned quickly to their makeshift beds after surveying the wreckage. It became even more apparent that the dude’s crowd-pulling exhibit was resented by the other carny people, who relished the fact that it looked like the end of the trail for the customer-cornering big gold.
Edge waited for an hour beside one of the larger fires, drinking coffee freshly made in his own pot and smoking two cigarettes. Then he went to rouse the Nepalese. The camp was even quieter than before, the uncomfortably damp sea mist having a muffling effect on the slight sounds which did disturb the tranquil early morning hours. Then, after getting the willing co-operation of Singh, more sound invaded the clearing. The snorts of horses, the growls of wilder animals, the creaking of ropes under heavy strain, the grunts of laboring men and the mournful music of the harmonica.
The job took three hours to complete and for a lot of this time the half-breed and the Nepalese were unaware of the chill of approaching dawn as they heaved, pulled and sweated at their work. Sometimes a weary voice called for quiet, but Edge and Singh ignored the demands and nobody came to see what was happening. The mist was whiter when it was over, for the first grayness of the new day was creeping in from the east, pushing night’s darkness out over the ocean.
“We get some sleep now, I think will be most good idea,” Singh suggested with a yawn rubbing his aching muscles.
Edge grinned. “Just don’t snore, feller.”
He disappeared into the mist and Singh, bewildered, bedded down beneath the wagon again. He had hardly had time to close his eyes before the half-breed reappeared, hauling his bedroll.
“To have the company I am most pleased, sahib.”
“Saying it’s good enough,” the half-breed growled as he ducked under the wagon and unfurled the bedroll beside Singh’s gear.
The Nepalese showed his sparkling white teeth. “Back home in Katmandu I have one wife and eight children, sahib. In San Francisco there is most high-born Indian girl who is with child by fruit of my loins. I am most certainly not to pansy boy. Oh dear, dear me, no. My taste is indeed for passion-flowers.”
“Keep it that way,” Edge said, tipping his hat over his eyes. “And you’ll still have a stalk to get fruity with.”
The camp came awake slowly and irritably. The traumatic interruption to drugged sleep had the effect of lengthening the period it took to shake off the heavy-eyed drowsiness of most of the carny people. The sun was high and hot enough to have burned off the final traces of mist by the time the majority of the people camped in the clearing became fully aware of their surroundings. Case was one of the last to wake up.
Shaking his head to clear the fuzziness that clouded his mind and blurred his vision, he dressed hurriedly and went to survey the wreckage of his wagon. The first doubts hit him when he failed to see Edge standing guard on the wreckage. Then he saw that the wagon had suffered further disintegration after the crash. The rear wheels had been removed, the side canvas was torn and the side board was missing.
“Edge!” he yelled. Then, when he drew aside the ripped canvas with a trembling hand, his voice rose to the pitch of hysteria it had reached the previous night. “Edge, it’s gone! The gold’s gone!”
People halted their preparations for breakfast and stared towards the slight form of the near-demented dude. Case whirled, drawing wide the canvas.
“Look, for Christsake!” he screamed. “It’s gone.” Blood vessels stood out like lengths of blue cord against his pale features. “The whole goddamn inside of the goddamn wagon.” He tried to say more, but his throat constricted, trapping the words inside him.
Nobody moved in for a closer look.
“We all got our problems, Case,” the man billed as the rubber man called gleefully. “I just cooked me an egg and it’s bad.”
“Bastards!” Case roared as laughter rippled around the campsite.
“Quit yelling, feller!” the half-breed called evenly, and the noise quietened as he rose from the wagon, stretching.
“Where’s my goddamn gold?” Case roared, and delved a hand under his jacket.
The half-breed’s arms had been reaching far out to the sides as he flexed his muscles after the short sleep. They swept down to his body in a blur of speed, the right hand draping the butt of the Colt. “Don’t do it, feller!” he snapped. “Last time I saw that peashooter, it was empty. But you point it at me, I’ll
kill you anyway.”
Case stayed his hand.
“Most wise indeed, Mr. Case, sahib,” Singh announced, stepping lithely out to stand beside Edge. “I show him, Edge sahib?”
Edge sighed. “You don’t, he’s liable to bust something fatal.”
Nodding enthusiastically, the Nepalese clambered up on to the seat of his wagon, then went higher, on to the flat roof. Dramatically, Singh hauled at the canvas cover. The tigers roared, baring their massive teeth as they blinked into the sunlight. The teeth were yellow. But not so yellow as the block of gold that was set solidly in the centre of the wagon bed. The striped animals had been squatting on their haunches, one on each side of the big gold - like trained sentries. Now they continued to play their unwitting roles. With growls quivering from their jaws, and tails swishing with menace, the animals rose and began to move. Prowling in a circle in the restricted area between the gold block and the iron bars of the cage built on to the wagon.
The carny people stared in silent awe at the spectacle. Edge relaxed into nonchalance and stooped to gather up his gear. Singh squatted proudly atop the cage, arms folded and a broad grin pasted on his dark features. But the dude’s expression was even brighter as he launched into a run and skidded to a halt beside the cage wagon. One of the wild beasts prodded a paw through the bars, claws extended in an attempted maul. But Case seemed totally unaware that he was only an inch or so out of range. His wide eyes drank in the sight of his gold, securely held upon the iron framework taken from the wrecked wagon.
“How on earth did you manage it?” he gasped at length.
“Wasn’t easy,” Edge replied wryly.
“I was great help, indeed yes,” Singh announced, and dropped the canvas back to veil the cage at a nod from the half-breed.
“Right,” Edge agreed. “And he’s on the payroll.”
His panic over, Case became the hard-headed businessman again. “I do my own hiring, Edge!” he snapped.
“After last night, that’s something you shouldn’t boast about,” the half-breed told him evenly. “Singh’s getting eight bucks a day, same as you were paying Grainger and his partners.”
EDGE: The Big Gold (Edge series Book 15) Page 6