The platform was rested in the centre of the street. Dorrie was positioned under the cross-strut of the gallows so that she was face-forward to the bridge. The gunslingers and deputies turned to gape at her nakedness: lustfully. The lumber men who were captives did not move, but an aura of hope rather than dejection hung above them now.
“She has to stay too long out in this sun,” the second female captor called. “Could be she’ll die of heatstroke before we can hang her.”
Dorrie was forced to pivot slowly, presenting every facet of her naked body to each watching eye. The white skin seemed almost translucent but the strong, firm curves of breasts, belly, hips and thighs did not suggest frailness. Despite the terror visible in the twisted face with the screwed-shut eyes above the biting gag, the body advertised blatant sexuality. The women stared at the richly female flesh with envious contempt. Male eyes showed a range of expressions from rage to indifference. But it was lust that was uppermost, seeming to tremble in the stiflingly hot air.
Not until she had completed her enforced pivot did anybody else move. Then the men who had hauled the platform from the alley unfastened the ropes, hitched them together and tied one end to the trapdoor lever. The slack was fed out along the street behind the platform and men and women moved forward to form a line. They picked up the rope. Only Edge, McNally and the preacher did not take a position in the line. Dorrie stood alone and trembling up on the platform, fighting to keep strength in her naked body in order to retain the slack in the noose.
“This is madness!” Corners shrieked.
“This is the way it’s got to be,” Laine called back coldly.
“Set those men free. Soon as the last one’s back behind the gallows, I’ll release your niece.”
The spokesman for the hired guns spat. “Makes trusting a one-way thing,” he drawled.
“Ain’t a single soul on this line has ever killed anybody,” Laine countered flatly. “Happy to keep it that way. Reckon you boys have a fair score between you. Makes us folks the most trustworthy.”
There were long moments of silence, broken only by the churning water wheel. Then Dorrie gave a strangled groan through the gag.
“Turn them loose!” Corners barked abruptly. Spittle splashed from his jaw into the dust.
The two deputies lowered their rifles as three of the gun-slingers tore their stares away from the nude woman to look at their spokesman.
“Standing here ain’t earning me no five grand,” he said reflectively, and fluidly slid his revolver into its holster. The others followed suit. “On your way, guys,” he told the lumber men. “No hard feelings, uh?”
“I got one,” another of the gunmen muttered with a grin as he rubbed the bulge at the front of his pants.
“Shut your filthy mouth!” Corners snarled at him as the freed prisoners began to file through the gateway and across the bridge.
Not one of them looked up at the naked woman as they shuffled past her exposed sexuality. Each face was drenched with sweat and each shirt was plastered to the body by staining moisture. Not until he was behind the gallows platform, relatively safe from the guns across the river, did each man show his relief. When the last one had achieved this, Laine dropped the rope. Those in line behind him did the same, some of the women rushing forward to embrace their men folk released from captivity.
Laine went forward and climbed up the steps to the platform. He drew a knife and suddenly the seven guns behind the lumber mill fence swung towards him. Coolly, the self-appointed leader of the revolt sliced through the ropes binding Dorrie’s wrists and ankles. He did not have time to lift the noose clear of her head. She did that herself, then lunged forward, leaping down from the platform. Her bare feet slapped on the planking of the bridge in a panicked run. Her fingers worked frantically at the knot in the gag and When She dragged the constricting length of material clear, an animalistic scream was vented from her mouth. It maintained the same awful volume and pitch until she had streaked across the front of the mill and plunged into the merciful cover of the doorway.
There was something eerily awe-inspiring about the woman’s flight and the wailing that accompanied it. So that for the time it took to complete, the watchers were held transfixed, moving only their heads to follow the headlong progress of the nude Dorrie Corners. But then her uncle shook free of the sensation that all the world except for Dorrie had stood still. He vented his pent-up rage by jerking both triggers of the double-barreled shotgun.
The scattering loads ripped a great, gaping hole in the fence and spouted a thousand white spumes from the surface of the river. But the twin explosions served as a signal and the gunslingers drew. A hail of bullets from their fanned revolvers sprayed into the street. But Laine had leapt clear of the gallows platform and the handguns were ineffective beyond this point. The Winchesters of the deputies were a different proposition - but both lawmen selected the same target.
The rifleman on the courthouse roof took a bullet in each shoulder. The impact of the twin bolts of lead flung him backwards from his crouch. As men and women in the street scuttled for cover, the man on the roof bounced against a chimney stack and was powered into a staggering, involuntary run. His leading foot plunged over the gutter and he tipped towards the ground. He screamed, then died, the top of his head impacting with the cement step. His skull cracked open and a pulpy mass of red, white and grey oozed from the ghastly split as his twitching body stretched out beside the inert form of the gunslinger.
Rifle and revolver fire spat viciously from doorways and the angles of buildings: sending the seven men beyond the fence scampering for the mill entrance which moments before had hidden Dorrie Corners’ shame.
Edge and Cyrus McNally had ducked back into the hotel doorway when the double-barreled shotgun exploded. Now the half-breed sucked the final heeltap of tepid foam from the bottom of the glass; as the old man stared in horror across the street at the newly dead Larry spilling out his brains on to the courthouse steps.
“That was Randy Cannons’ boy,” McNally said with infinite sadness as the firing stopped. “Randy was killed by one of Mr. Corners’ deputies after some trouble. Now Larry’s gone in the same way.”
Blood from the massive wound in the dead man’s head ran off the step and cascaded down on to the lawn. A piece of skull bone was dislodged and floated along the river of red to the bloodfall, starkly white in the sunlight.
“Regular chip off the old block,” the half-breed muttered, whirling around to aim the Winchester across the saloon.
CHAPTER NINE
LAINE was framed by the doorway giving on to the rear of the hotel, his bare shoulders and chest slick with sweat in the sunlight shafting in through the front entrance. The man was transfixed by fear for stretched seconds: captured by the hooded-eyed stare of Edge. The half-breed’s mouth was compressed into a tight line of cruelty that was somehow more menacing than the muzzle hole of the pointing Winchester. But then the tense, straining, mind-bursting moments of evil ended: curtailed by the cracking of Edge’s lips to show an ice-cold grin.
“Live frugally from now, feller,” he warned. “Because you’re doing it on borrowed time.”
Laine had to force a lump from his throat before he could speak. The grin that accompanied the words was as bleak as a mountain winter. “You got nothing to fear this side of the river, mister,” he rasped. “Corners ain’t about to give anyone in town five grand for turning you in.”
More citizens of Hate came in through the doorway behind the bar and Laine moved along to the gap.
“You might still figure to get something for walking me across that bridge out there,” Edge replied softly, but lowered the rifle to hang loosely in a one-handed grip at his side. The act was proof he did not believe it himself.
“Ain’t nothing will satisfy Corners’ ache for revenge now, mister,” Laine said earnestly, talking as much to the men and women crowding into the saloon behind him as to Edge. “Short of swinging as many of us from those gallows
as it takes to cure what ails him.”
“Guess a town called Hate just has to be full of hang-ups,” the half-breed murmured wryly.
He swung around to look out into the street again as the town’s citizens filed into the saloon from the rear. Not all of them, for three, armed with rifles, stood surveillance duty. Like Edge, they watched the lumber mill, the tall building throwing a foreshortened shadow as the sun climbed towards its noon peak. Nothing moved over there, except the giant water wheel rotating slowly on its axis: and the occasional flick of a tail as the horses in the wagon traces swatted at flies.
“That everybody?” Laine asked when the scraping of boot leather and chair legs against the floorboards had subsided.
The half-breed glanced fleetingly over his shoulder and saw that the shirtless man had an earnestly attentive audience arrayed before him. Men and women, some nursing small babies, and children, either stood or sat in expectant silence. Cyrus McNally had taken his place behind the bar, but in spite of the heat, nobody wanted a drink.
“All of us,” Burgess confirmed. “Apart from the men watching the mill.”
The storekeeper was clutching a brown paper bag that looked as if it might be stuffed with the collection money. But he refused to meet Edge’s quizzical gaze to confirm or deny the tacit query.
“That’s good,” Laine said, and cleared his throat: in the manner of man unused to public speaking about to make a speech.
But the sound of hoof beats - not too far away - interrupted his opening. There were Shouts from the watching sentries. Edge swung around and leaned forward to look towards the lumber mill. A lone rider, crouched low in the saddle, galloped his horse from the side of the mill, streaking towards the open gates in the fence. He made a dust-billowing turn on to the trail, heading west across the long strip of valley ravaged of trees. No shots were sent towards him, either from the town or the mill.
“What’s happening?” a man in the saloon demanded, alarmed.
The hoof beats faded into the heat-waved distance.
“One of the deputies just took off,” Edge supplied, looking at the mill. Only the wheel and the horses’ tails moved. “West.”
“Gone to get some help!” a woman put in fearfully.
This triggered a buzz of nervous conversation.
“Not a hope, unless we give him time to get to Trasker and back,” Laine snapped across the noise, silencing it. “He ain’t gonna cover no sixty miles in what’s left of the day.”
There was a murmuring of agreement. Then a man’s voice was raised. “What we gonna do before he gets back with some more hired guns, Laine?”
“That’s what I called this meeting for,” the bare-chested man answered as Edge swung around and leaned against the doorframe. “We gotta make a decision and the whole town’s gotta do it. Too big for the Citizens Committee to handle on its own. Now, we either gotta talk ourselves out of the spot we’re in. Or we gotta smash Luke Corners once and for all.”
He paused and there was a long period of hot silence. The mass of faces in front of him presented a blank wall of apprehension that appeared to offer no hope of a breach in the way of positive reaction to Laine’s alternatives. Earlier, with the fire of their own anger burning more fiercely than the high sun, their response to Laine’s leadership had been spontaneous. Now, with time to think, they were less inclined to willful recklessness. The scent of the putrefying dead infiltrated the saloon through the open doors and down the stairway.
“Seems to me there ain’t no choice, Laine,” a man said to puncture the brittle silence. “You said it yourself. We give him the chance, Corners is gonna string some of us up.”
Agreement was not entirely unanimous this time.
“That’s why I don’t want to influence you,” Laine replied. “Sure as hell I’d be one of the first to hang.”
“Me and Bess’d be in line right behind you,” one of Dorrie’s former captors said sourly.
“I ain’t for nothin’ hasty,” the old man with a bandage on his bald head whined. “Countin’ Miss Dorrie, there’s eight people holed up in the mill.”
“Seven,” Laine corrected. “One just left.”
“Okay,” the old man allowed with a wave of his mottled hands. “But they got everythin’ goin’ for ’em. I seen the rack of rifles up in Mr. Corners’ living quarters. What we got? Handful of Winchesters and a few handguns. And there’s a lot of open ground between the fence and the mill.”
“All true,” Laine agreed. “If it was easy to smash Corners, guess we’d have done it long ago. Needed the stranger here to kinda set things rolling.”
“So let him finish it,” the old man said heatedly. “Ain’t caused nothin’ but trouble since he come to town.”
All beads swung towards Edge, who was rolling another cigarette. In the expectant silence, he returned their attention with a cold stare as he ran the gummed strip of paper along his tongue.
“Alex Burgess’s got the money collected up,” the old man continued. “Man didn’t oughta mind stickin’ his neck out for a thousand dollars.”
Edge struck a match and fired the cigarette. “Working on it, folks,” he said softly. “And next time somebody wrecks my play, I’ll kill him.”
He spat.
“No!” Laine snapped. “He already tried and I don’t like his methods. I told the stranger we’re obliged to him. He brought us to our senses. Showed us Corners ain’t no God. But if we’re gonna have a showdown with him, we’ll do it our way. If any of us get killed, it’ll be because we called the shots.”
“Don’t have to call them,” Edge muttered. “They’ll just come at you of their own accord, like.”
“All in favor of a showdown?” Laine asked into the silence which followed the half-breed’s comment.
Some hands thrust into the air fast. Others went up more slowly, after surreptitious glances to left and right. Eventually, the upraised arms - some of them shaking - were thicker than the pine trees crowded into the timber-rich valley.
“Against?” Laine asked.
The old man with the head wound was first into the air with his arm. His embarrassed young wife, nursing two babies on her knees, gave a nod of agreement. A dozen or so other women registered their votes, despite the low-voiced disapproval of their men.
Laine didn’t smile. “Looks like we smash Corners,” he said softly.
“Billy!” the old man behind the bar exclaimed suddenly, like somebody erupting from a trance. His frightened eyes raked the faces of the people in the saloon. “Where’s my son?”
“Last time I saw him, he was helping me dig the graves,” the pink-faced preacher replied mournfully. He had not voted one way or the other. “Then the marshal spoke to him.”
“Colman give him some money,” Edge supplied. “For setting me up to get arrested.”
A moment of horror gripped the elder McNally, but then he sighed and showed a wan smile. “Out of town is the safest place to be today,” he muttered.
“I seen him go, Cyrus,” the lone male objector to the showdown with Corners said. “Took off to the north. Reckon he circled around through the trees on the valley slope and waded the water upstream. Didn’t wanna run into those gunslingers Miss Dorrie brought back from Trasker.”
“Don’t care which way he went,” McNally murmured. “long as he’s out of this.” He looked earnestly across the heads of the audience towards Edge. “Don’t hold it against him, mister. Colman must have tricked my boy. Billy don’t mean no harm to no one. He’s to be pitied.”
Edge nodded. “Colman’s heart sure bled for him,” he replied wryly.
“Forget Billy,” Laine said harshly. “Now the decision’s made, we gotta figure a way to get into the mill.”
Amid the almost solid support of his fellow-citizens, Burgess had lost his nervousness. His voice was strong with a determined tone: “Divide up the ammunition from the gun we have, wait until nightfall and then rush them,” he proclaimed.
Laine nodded
. “Thinking along those lines myself, Mr. Burgess.”
Edge dropped his cigarette and trod heavily on it with the heel of his boot.
“That an opinion, stranger?” Laine demanded.
“Plan sounds fine,” the half-breed replied evenly. “Should give me plenty of dead men for cover when I go to blast Corners personally.”
The attention of the people in the saloon was abruptly switched from the bare-chested man to the half-breed.
“You got any better ideas?” Laine challenged heatedly.
“Maybe.”
“Do no harm to listen.”
Edge curled back his lips to show a cold grin. “Cost you that thousand dollars.”
There was a ripple of shaking heads and a murmuring of more vocal objections. Laine brought silence to the room again.
“I don’t buy nothing ’til I know what it is,” he posed.
“Glad to hear you’re smarter than the way you been acting and talking,” the half-breed said.
The taunt erupted anger on the rugged, young face. But the memory of Edge’s speed caused Laine to force back the rage. ‘Spell it out, stranger!”
Edge came away from the doorframe, leaving the rifle where it rested. He strolled casually among the people sitting at the tables. All eyes followed his apparently aimless wandering. But he had an end in view, as men and women shrank back from him, sensing from close quarters the latent cruelty residing in the tall, lean killer.
“Mister, I didn’t mean nothin’,” the old man with the bandaged head whined as Edge towered over him.
The half-breed ignored him, and moved on towards the bar. The stink of sweating bodies was a stale fetidness in the hot air. “Wouldn’t want Corners to hear what I have in mind,” Edge said softly as he turned and rested his back against the bar.
The people waited in complete, straining silence. Edge made as if to scratch his right ear. The action began slowly, but abruptly his arm was a blur. His hand closed around the handle of the razor and drew it. A mass gasp of horror swept the room. The preacher gave a strangled cry. Edge had swung towards him and rested the blade of the razor along the top lip of the pink-faced man: sharpened side a hairsbreadth from slicing into the base of the snub nose. The half-breed did not touch him in any other way: the menace of the smooth steel, sufficient to freeze the victim into immobility.
Edge: A Town Called Hate (Edge series Book 13) Page 10