“Tell him he’s making a mistake, ma’am,” Edge said softly to Arabella.
“He will, Walt!” she pleaded. “He’ll cut me, for sure.”
Edge’s hand was fisted around the handle of the razor. The rifle wavered in Peat’s trembling grasp. Edge turned his wrist. A half inch of the finely honed blade sank into the girl’s cheek. It scraped the underside of the bone and pricked her gum. Warm blood spurted over his hand. She screamed.
“Oh, my dear God!” Peat gasped.
The half-breed widened his eyes so that the youngster was certain to see the cold intent visible in them. “Drop the rifle and back off, feller,” he ordered softly. “Or start blasting, The suspense is killing her.”
Arabella was shaking with sobs and shock. “Do it, Walter!” she screamed at the top of her shrill voice. “Jesus, I’ll be scarred for life.”
It was as if the Winchester had suddenly become red hot. Peat tore his gaze away from the trap of Edge’s stare, looked in horror for an instant at the blade dug into the girl’s cheek, then glanced at the rifle. He slammed it down into the dust. He backed away fast, toppling over a tree stump. He picked himself up and widened the gap even further between himself and the guns.
“Let’s take a walk, ma’am,” Edge muttered, nudging Arabella forward with his body.
She moved, gingerly, the razor blade still inserted through her cheek and pricking at her gums. Peat watched in silent, horrified fascination. Drops of blood ran off Edge’s fisted hand and splashed to the dust, spotting the shuffling progress of the couple. When the half-breed was standing between the rifle and the scattergun, he released his grip around the girl’s waist. She remained absolutely still. Edge dug his right heel into the ground and raised his toe as he swung it The Winchester was trapped beneath his foot. Then he powered down into a crouch. His right hand held the razor rigid. The blade remained sunken to a depth of half an inch in her flesh. Its honed edge sliced her face from just beneath the eye until it bounced off her jawbone and came free. Agony and shock froze the scream in her throat, then plunged her into unconsciousness. As the strength went out of her legs, they folded under her and she crumpled into a heap where she had stood.
Edge allowed the crimson-stained razor to slip from his grasp and snatched up the blunderbuss. Peat made to lunge towards the inert Arabella. But the gaping muzzle of the scattergun froze him in an awkward, forward leaning stance.
“Why?” he croaked.
The half-breed sighed. “She heard about my aversion to guns being pointed at me. Did it twice. Once, she even fired at me.”
“But she’s only a kid,” Peat wailed.
“Eighteen or nineteen, I’d guess. Ain’t exceptionally young by my rules.”
“She needs help.”
“Not your worry, feller.”
“But she is!” he wailed, his voice quivering with anguish. “We’re going to be married.”
The half-breed shook his head. “You’ve got a prior engagement.”
He squeezed the trigger. The blunderbuss was loaded with a charge of buckshot. Released from their paper wrapper, the pellets roared from the wide bore muzzle through a dense billow of acrid black smoke. They peppered Peat’s body from mid-thigh to throat, ripping through his clothes and tearing into his flesh. The impact of the blast lifted him off his feet and hurled him backwards. His dark clothing became sheened with brilliant crimson. He hit the ground like a limp, inanimate life-size doll. Life-size, but dead. The thud of smacking against the ground splashed up blood from a thousand wounds merged into one large area of torn-open skin.
“Mister, I ain’t with them!” a cracked voice cried.
Edge caught a glimpse of a man standing in the firelit doorway of the assay office. He had lunged into a crouch, dropping the scattergun and scooped up the Winchester before he saw that the man had his hands clasped over his bald head.
“I live here, mister. That’s all. Just live here. They come by. Asked if they could rest up for the night. That’s all, mister. I ain’t with them. Honest to God, I lived peaceful in Silver City all my life. I ain’t—”
“Hey,” Edge called easily.
“Yeah, mister?”
“I’m about convinced.”
The man was in his sixties. Dressed in patched Levis and a tattered shirt without a collar. He was small and skinny with an emaciated face clothed in flaccid, deeply scored skin. He screwed up his eyes as if trying to prevent the tears oozing out. Some moisture dribbled from the corner of his slack mouth. As the half-breed stepped over the blasted body of Peat to advance on him, the old man seemed about to turn and run. But he held his place and, when he was close enough to look through the doorway, Edge saw why. For the same reason he had shown himself. The front entrance was the only way in and out of the assay office.
It wasn’t an office anymore. Perhaps because it was the only sound building left in Silver City, the old man had turned it into a single-roomed house. There was a bed against one wall, and a table and single chair pushed against another. The fire was in a grate at the rear. There were some cooking pots, crockery and canned goods on a shelf. Nothing else.
“Name’s Griffin, mister. Brad Griffin. No use me saying I’m glad to see you, on account of you’d know I was lying.” He had no teeth and now his gums had started to rot. They were black and smelled bad.
Edge nodded. “Being honest pays, feller.”
Griffin continued to clasp his hands over his head. “Guy took my gun. Couldn’t stop him. What them young folks do to you?”
Edge spat. “Riled me.”
Griffin swallowed hard. “Anything you want, you tell me, mister. I wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of you.”
“Stay there,” the half-breed ordered, and swung around.
He ambled across the square and retrieved his own Winchester and the gun belt. When he had buckled and tied the belt in place, he smashed Arabella’s rifle against the corner of the saloon. The stock snapped away from the frame. He retraced his footsteps, and saw that the girl was still crumpled into an unconscious heap, breathing raggedly. Griffin continued to stand with his hands on his hairless head.
“They say anyone was meeting them here?”
“No, mister. Just said they was on their way to get married and asked if they could rest up here for the night. I don’t own Silver City. Just live here.”
“Anyone else?”
“What?”
“Live here?”
“No, mister. Just me. Been ten years since the last prospector finally gave up on digging a fortune outta the hill.”
“But you’re still here, uh?”
“Ain’t got nowhere else to go. Lonely, but after ten years a man gets used to that. Was the blacksmith in the old days when Silver City looked like booming.”
Griffin wasn’t so frightened anymore. He was no longer talking to ease his nerves, rather to relieve his loneliness while he had the opportunity. The half-breed had been about to turn away; to go to hitch the team to the wagon. But suddenly he halted the movement. The abruptness of it roused Griffin’s fear again.
“I say something to rile you, mister?” he stuttered.
Edge grinned. “Nothing, feller. You can take the hands down, if you want.”
“Real grateful to you, mister.” He lowered his hands. “Something you want?”
“To know if the forge still operates?”
Griffin expressed bewilderment. Then he shrugged. “Been better than ten years. But I could try her, I guess. You gotta horse needs shoeing?”
“Maybe that, too. I ain’t checked the team.”
Griffin rubbed his hands together and grinned. “Be a pleasure to do some work again.” Then a crafty look entered his eyes. “Talkin’ of pleasure, you got anything in mind for that there girl?”
Edge looked over to where Arabella had returned to consciousness. Congealed blood was holding the two sides of the razor wound together. She was staring vacantly at the stiffening form of Walter Peat. “Maybe.�
��
“What?” The old man looked despondent.
“Got no money to pay you for your work.”
“You mean—?” Excitement widened his eyes and erupted more moisture from the corner of his mouth.
“If you do a good job and don’t care she’s a little marked up, maybe you’ll strike lucky in Silver City.”
Griffin licked the saliva off his lips. “Ain’t her face I’m interested in, mister. I ain’t one to look at the mantelshelf when I’m pokin’ the fire.”
He gave a harsh laugh and started towards the blacksmith’s forge, dragging a gimpy leg and eyeing the girl lustfully.
“No!” Arabella shrieked, the horror of the future more overwhelming than the shock of the immediate past. She struggled to rise, but was too weak from the massive loss of blood.
Edge approached her and stooped down. She cowered away from him, but he merely picked up the fallen razor. With her eyes following his every move, he crouched beside the unmoving form of Peat and cleaned the blade on the dead man’s pants leg. “He only pointed a gun at me once, ma’am,” the half-breed told the dumb-struck girl. “And I killed him. You did it twice, and even took a shot at me. Only right you should have a fate worse than death.”
“Not with him, please!” she wailed. “Not that ugly old man!”
Edge straightened up, shrugged and showed a mirthless grin. “Way it’s got to be, ma’am. I always pay my debts, but I don’t have no money. And Mr. Griffin is just itching to be of service.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
EDGE drove the wagon down from the hills in the late afternoon of the following day, while the sun was still high enough to be hot. He had slept the night in Griffin’s bed at the ghost town while the old blacksmith filled his order. The trail from Silver City cut a torturous course through the high country, then ran easily through the gentler terrain lower down to connect with the main north-south route on the coast.
Since he had a rested team and a somewhat lightened wagon, the half-breed could have made better time. But he chose to match his pace with his mood. And he felt relaxed: as contented as a man like him could ever be. For he had achieved his two short-term objectives—in recovering the stolen gold and heaping brutal vengeance upon those who had taken it. The future? A man like Edge had no long-term objectives.
Yellowtown, as he approached it, did not look like the kind of place which would match his mood. The trail had taken a wide swing inland, to go around the back of a coastal hump of rock. Then it headed for the ocean again and he saw the town. Like Seascape, it was on the Oregon coast. But it was a lot closer to the Pacific breakers, which crashed angrily on one side of a strip of sand beach, as if enraged at not being able to reach the town on the other side. It had a main street which ran down to the fringe of the beach with three, narrower, streets intersecting it at intervals. It was well named, for the ocean winds had lifted sand from the beach and hurled it across the town: often and forcefully enough to stain the frame buildings with its dull coloration.
There was no wind today, as the team and the wagon wheels left their prints in the mantel of sand layered on the street. The impressions were superimposed on many others, for Yellowtown had had some heavy traffic. And all of it had been one way. Down at the intersection closest to the beach, the main street was blocked with double-parked wagons; covered rigs, flatbeds, buckboards and buggies. Saddle horses were hitched to every available rail and post. People—men, women and children, thronged the sidewalks and streets.
Beyond the intersection, Edge could see on to the beach, where the carny tents had been set up. But there was not a customer nor a spieler to be seen among the tents with their garishly painted signs. And the half-breed could recognize no familiar figure in the crowd at the intersection, whose interest was centered upon one of the buildings on the south side of the street. It seemed like an angry interest.
But not every citizen of Yellowtown was down at the ocean end of the street. The lone figure of a middle-aged woman stood, arms akimbo, in the doorway of The Ocean Spray Restaurant in the middle of the block between the first and centre intersection. She had a thin body and a haggard face. Her soured expression seemed like a permanent fixture. It became even more deeply inscribed into her sallow complexion when Edge angled the wagon to the side of the street and reined the team to a halt immediately outside the restaurant. Her bleak eyes raked from the driver, to the tiger show sign on the ripped canvas, then back to the driver.
“I don’t want no trouble in my place,” she announced, and her voice matched her looks.
“What about custom?” Edge asked, picking up the Winchester and climbing down to the sidewalk.
“From you people, that means trouble,” she answered, and unfolded her arms to jerk a thumb down the street. “Look what’s happening at the Pacific Winds Hotel.”
He could look west without screwing up his eyes now, for the sun had changed color from blazing yellow to dull red as its leading arc reached for the top of the ocean’s curve. He spat under the belly of one of the horses in the wagon traces.
“You can tell me all about it while I’m eating, ma’am,” he said, and brushed past the woman to enter the restaurant.
The room was neat and clean, with a dozen tables set in four place settings on red and white gingham cloths. Automatically, Edge selected a table where he could sit with his back to a wall and have a clear view of doors and windows. He leaned the rifle against the chair and hooked his hat over the muzzle.
“Steak and the trimmings,” he said. “No soup to start. And no dessert if the steak’s as big as I hope it’s going to be.”
The sour-faced woman had watched him irately. She seemed about to yell at him, but then she came inside and shrugged her shoulders. “Since you’re the only customer I reckon I’ll get today, I might as well make the most of you.”
She slouched between the tables and went out through a door at the rear. Edge rolled a cigarette and smoked it. The appetizing smell of cooking meat wafted into the restaurant through the doorway into which the woman had gone. Vishwabanduhu Nageshwar Singh came in through the door from the street. He was dressed to do his show, in a sweat-stained loincloth and with a tiger skin draped over his shoulders. His ribs ridged the dark skin of his naked chest and his legs looked like thin lengths of brown timber. His eyes and teeth glinted with excitement.
“Did I not tell them, sahib!” he exclaimed. “I told them you would most certainly recover the big gold.”
The half-breed grinned at the little Nepalese as he weaved between the tables. “Where’s the cats, feller?”
Singh halted before the table and his expression became crestfallen. “Oh dear, dear me! The sheriff of this town. A most severe man named de Cruz. He make me lock my beautiful beasts in livery stable. Not allow me to show them until they in cage. Not believe they most amenable tigers, sahib.” He brightened. “But now it is okay, goodness gracious. You bring back my cage. Just like I tell Mr. Case you would, sahib. I watch for you all day. That how I see you come to Yellowtown. While all the others cower in hotel, fearful of people’s anger.”
The woman emerged from the kitchen, carrying a plate of food. She saw Singh and pulled up sharply. “Oh, Christ, another one of ’em,” she wailed.
Edge nodded. “Like I told him before, ma’am, his crowd’s getting everywhere these days.”
“How’d you get out of the hotel?” she asked Singh as she started forward to deliver the plate to the table.
“I am most clever Nepalese, lady,” Singh answered. “Small, too. I climb out of window everyone think too little to guard.”
“You want grub?”
“Thank you, no. I am too excited to eat now that everything going to be all right. The sahib has brought back big gold.”
The woman had been about to return to her vantage point at the doorway. But she pulled up short, and stared hard at Edge as he began to eat the meal.
“Good,” he told her.
“But can’t it wait u
ntil after you’ve delivered what you brought?” she demanded. “I didn’t know you were the guy they’ve been waiting, for. Christ, there could be a lynching while you’re sitting here filling your belly!”
Edge continued to chew on the succulent beef.
“Lady right, sahib!” Singh urged. “Lots of bills put up all over countryside. Promising big gold worth one million dollars to be seen in Yellowtown. People come many miles to see it. When get here and no gold to see, they very very angry. Goodness gracious, how angry they are. Blame Mr. Case most, but not like any show people. Not want to see my beautiful beasts or anything. Want only to tear down our tents and maybe beat us. But most severe sheriff de Cruz, he order us into hotel. For protection, you understand.”
“But he’s only one man,” the woman pointed out. “And there’s some real tough guys live in Yellowtown and out on the farms. Hard drinkers, and they been drinking, mister. Getting meaner with every drink they took.”
“And I’ve been getting hungrier every mile I’ve covered,” the half-breed responded.
There was a shout out on the street, strident above the distant buzz of angry conversation. The woman groaned and hurried to the doorway. Her body became rigid as she looked out. All the sourness in every fiber of her emaciated body showed in her face as she glowered back over her shoulder. “Didn’t I tell you,” she accused. “Didn’t I say you’d bring trouble to my place?” She sighed. “They’ve seen your wagon.”
Edge hooked the hat from over the Winchester muzzle and set it on his head. Then he sighed, stood up and sloped the Winchester across his shoulder.
“Oh dear, dear me,” Singh muttered.
“I don’t want no shooting in my place, mister!” the woman warned.
Edge looked down reflectively at his half eaten meal, then started towards the door. “I’ll go along with you there, ma’am,” he said. “There’s more than enough noise for a man to eat by with your voice.”
“You can always eat someplace else,” she flung at him as he pushed past her.
He grinned. “Doubt if there’s a better steak to be had in town.”
EDGE: The Big Gold (Edge series Book 15) Page 11