Table of Contents
DOUBLE EDGE
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
DOUBLE EDGE
Meandering through the scorching desert of southern New Mexico, Edge is ensnared in a seething conflict between white men and Apaches. Seems that years ago one of the local men was murdered for raping a squaw, and both sides are out for blood...
The townspeople hatred for the tribe comes to a head when four soldiers arrive, escorting three braves wanted for stealing guns. The whole town, including the sheriff are for lynching the redskins, but edge manages to prevent the massacre ... for a while.
Caught in the horns of a dilemma, Edge is forced to play the part of peacemaker in the final act of violence ... a role that doesn’t come easy to the half-breed with a penchant for trouble.
RED FURY
By George G. Gilman
First Published by Kindle 2014
Copyright © 2014 by George G. Gilman
First Kindle Edition Oct 2014
Names, Characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Cover Design and illustrations by West World Designs © 2014.
http://westworlddesigns.webs.com
This is a High Plains Western for Lobo Publications.
Cover Illustration by Cody Wells.
Visit the author at: www.gggandpcs.proboards.com
For R.H.,
who once rode out to the southwest
and wore many hats.
Chapter One
The man called Edge had not seen another human being or even a sign of the presence of another human being for three and a half days. He was riding south down the Continental Divide towards the border of the Territory of New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Living frugally off the supplies he had purchased in Silver City and sleeping peacefully under the stars by night, he travelled by day at a measured pace astride a grey mare. While he was awake he constantly watched for any indication that he was not alone in this sun-bleached, hostile terrain. And even when he slept, protected from the mountain cold by his bedroll blankets, his resting mind was animalistically attuned to trigger him awake should he hear - or even sense - a stranger in the vicinity of his night camp. Waking or sleeping, prepared to meet and deal with any kind of threat: and assuming as a matter of course that every stranger was a threat.
Then, at close to noon on the fourth day out of Silver City, he saw the small huddle of buildings in the distance: at first sight distorted by the shimmering heat-haze that hung along every horizon like a slick, billowing, not quite transparent curtain. The buildings were directly on his due south path in the high, broad valley between the Hatchet Mountains to the west and the Cedars to the east. And offered a hard to resist invitation to enjoy shade and perhaps even coolness out of the direct glare of the cruelly hot sun.
He ran the back of his right hand over his forehead then dragged the palm and fingers down over his nose, cheeks and jaw. But even before he had wiped the sweat off his hand on the pants leg contouring his thigh, more beads of salty wetness had squeezed through the pores of his face.
It was either a handsome or an ugly face, depending upon how the person looking at it felt about the physical combination of features drawn from a Mexican father and a Scandinavian mother - and the more subtle coalescence of latent brutality and deep rooted melancholy that was also visible to anyone with more than a modicum of perception. His coloration was burnt brown, from the Mexican half of his parentage and a lifetime of almost forty years exposure to the elements. And the skin, stretched taut between high cheekbones and firm jawline - almost rock-like across his low forehead - was deeply furrowed by more than merely the passing of the years. These ruts in the dark brown skin providing the clue that the man’s demeanor of brooding suspicion, underlying cruelty and passive sadness - camouflaged to a large extent by an almost constant mask of inscrutability -was the result of great suffering.
The predominant features of the long, lean face were the man’s eyes, light blue and piercing in the way they surveyed the world from between permanently narrowed lids. The color of ice in an Arctic sea, and for most of the time as cold-looking. His nose was hawk-like and his mouthline was long, the lips thin. When these lips were drawn back in a smile which seldom, if ever, injected warmth into his eyes, the teeth were seen to be even and very white. On a day like this one, when he had shaved before leaving his night camp at dawn, a forest of dark bristles had sprouted over his lower face by noon, slightly thicker along his top lip and to either side of his mouth to suggest a Mexican-style moustache.
His face was framed by jet black hair which grew thick and long, the ends brushing his shoulders and concealing the nape of his neck.
He was a tall man - six feet three inches - and well built, with the close to two hundred pounds evenly distributed over his frame. Lean, but far from thin.
His clothing was serviceable and had provided good service. A grey cotton shirt with one pocket that bulged with the makings of cigarettes, black denim pants with the cuffs worn outside of spurless black riding boots, a grey Stetson with a wide brim and low crown and a grey kerchief tied at the back. This last item concealing a leather thong strung with faded colored beads to which - at the nape of his neck - was attached a soft leather sheath hanging inside his shirt. In the sheath was a sharply honed straight razor which he did not reserve exclusively for shaving.
Around his waist was a scuffed leather gunbelt with the holster tied down to his right thigh. Jutting from the holster was the butt of a standard .44-40 Army Model Remington. In every loop of the gunbelt was a shell, suitable for the sixgun and for the yellow-boy Winchester which was slotted in the boot hung from the Western-style saddle on which he rode. Lashed on behind the saddle was his bedroll with a knee-length black leather coat on top.
As he rode close enough for the group of buildings to be clearly defined as a single storey adobe house and a frame barn and stable with a corral out back, Edge dug out the makings from his shirt pocket and rolled and lit a cigarette. Which he hung at the corner of his mouth, leaving both hands free to hold the reins. Lightly. Ready to reach for the Remington or the Winchester should the homestead hold a threat.
At first impression, it appeared to be abandoned, looking cheerless and uncared for under the cloudless blue dome of sky from which a fiercely hot sun relentlessly glared. The flat-roofed adobe house, longer than it was wide, faced west with a wooden stoop at the front. Out back was a yard some thirty by thirty feet with the stable directly opposite the rear of the house and a barn along the south side.
No smoke rose from a stack at a corner of the house, one of the two barn doors hung drunkenly open, wrenched free of the upper hinge, and the fencing enclosing the corral behind the stable was broken in many places and leaning over in others. The few attempts which had been made to repair ravages wrought by the elements were undertaken long ago. Timber was bleached
and warped, one window which flanked the closed door of the house was boarded over and the pane in that on the other side was cracked from top to bottom. A fine layer of grey dust coated every flat surface.
But close to the homestead, within a few feet of riding his horse on to the once-cultivated front yard, Edge sensed that the place was not deserted. And he became tense, poised to react to sound or movement without altering his posture astride the mare or changing a single plane in the impassive set of his face. Fully aware of his exposed position on a broad area of sparsely-vegetated terrain where the house and outbuildings provided the only substantial cover for at least a mile in any direction. Thus had his course towards the homestead always been designed to bring him close to the house at the solid, windowless north wall.
A hen clucked and the half-breed reined his mount to an abrupt halt, dropped his right hand to his thigh, two inches away from the jutting butt of the holstered Remington. His slitted eyes stared fixedly at the closed door and cracked window pane. The chicken made more clucking sounds, the kind that preceded the laying of an egg. The noise was abruptly curtailed and the scrawny-looking bird bellied out from under the stoop. And ignored the man and horse to peck at the hard-packed, unpromising-looking dirt in front of the house.
Inside the house, a woman began to sing. Her voice plaintively melancholy in the all-pervading silence which followed the end of the hen’s clucking and the halting of the mare.
I’ll sing you a song, though it may be a sad one
Of trials and troubles and where first begun
I left my dear family, my friends and my home
To cross the wide mountains and deserts to roam…
The door creaked open and Edge and the woman saw each other midway through the final line of the first verse. They were equally unmoved by the sight of a total stranger and the half-breed remained tense behind impassiveness while the woman completed the line without a falter and with her doleful expression unchanged.
She was a fine-looking woman of about thirty-eight or nine - Edge felt reluctant to place her at forty or above. Tall, perhaps five feet ten inches, with a full-bodied form and long, finely shaped legs contoured by a man’s check shirt with the buttons in danger of popping and tight-fitting blue denim pants. She had sandy hair, cropped short, and an oval-shaped face with tanned skin, large green eyes and an attractively pouting mouth.
As she stepped out from the shade of the stoop roof she swayed a little and Edge was able to make a reasonable guess at the reason for her unsteadiness from the blotch of high color beneath the tan on each of her cheeks and the glazed quality of her eyes.
‘Well, hello to you, mister,’ she greeted, showing fine teeth in a bright smile of greeting. Ireland sounded in her voice, which was slurred as she spoke, totally at odds with the bitter sweetness of her tone when she had been singing.
‘And to you, ma’am,’ Edge responded, noting that a single plain band on the third finger of her left hand was the only jewelry she wore. Then, as he swung down from the saddle and led the mare across the front yard: ‘I think maybe the hen just produced the makings of your lunch.’
‘Huh?’ she asked.
‘The chicken just laid an egg,’ the half-breed augmented.
She shifted her eyes from the man to the hen and back again, and had trouble with the change of focus.
‘Eggs are lucky,’ she said, her slack mouth unpainted like the rest of her face. As the smile came dangerously close to being a sneer.
‘How’s that, ma’am?’
‘They’re about all that does get laid around here, mister!’ she growled. And gaped her lips wide to vent a shrieking laugh. Which lasted perhaps a full five seconds: before her big eyes rolled up in their sockets, she made a sound as if she was going to vomit, then collapsed into a drunken stupor, falling face down and spread-eagled on the rock-hard earth.
Edge took the remains of the cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, dropped it to the ground and crushed the glowing tobacco embers under a boot heel.
The mare whinnied and the chicken squawked and scampered back under the stoop boarding. As the slitted eyes of the half-breed raked over the tightly clad splayed thighs and the erotically mounded buttocks of the unconscious woman.
‘Question is, lady,’ he murmured as the carnal glint grew brighter in his eyes, ‘right now am I a good or a bad egg?’
Chapter Two
Careful about the position of his hands, he rolled the woman over onto her back, lifted her with ease and set her down gently in the shade of the stoop roof. Then he attended to his horse, leading the mare around to the back yard and into the stable. A half-dozen other hens watched him eagerly from the threshold of the barn with the sagging door.
The stable smelled of fairly recent horse droppings and there was fresh straw in one of the ten stalls. And several bales of hay stacked against a wall, with sweet water in a trough opposite.
He unsaddled the horse and while the animal drank he prepared a stall with bedding and feed. Then, after shutting the mare in the stall, he sidetracked from his return to the front of the house to check in the bam. The chickens had a roost in one comer of the large interior. Except for a flatbed wagon - as ill cared for as the house and outbuildings - the barn was otherwise empty.
On the stoop of the house, the woman had rolled onto her side and curled up into a ball, as if she felt cold. She was snoring softly. She grunted irritably when he picked her up again, but her eyes remained firmly closed as he carried her into the house.
The air inside felt even hotter than out in the broad valley, malodorous with the mingled smells of cheap liquor, stale sweat and old cooking. The room was a big one, taking up over half the house area, and served as a parlor and kitchen. It had the advantage of the window which, although cracked, was still glazed. In addition to the front door, three others led off the room. One from the kitchen area gave on to the yard at the rear of the house. The two others were in a side wall and Edge carried the woman through that which was open into a small bedroom which admitted daylight only by way of the door from the main room and cracks around the boarded-up window. The double bed which used up most of the floor space was unmade, the linen dirty and rancid-smelling. The rest of the furniture consisted of a freestanding wardrobe and a five-drawer bureau with an attached mirror and a basin, pitcher and kerosene lamp.
As he laid the woman on her back on the bed, Edge’s left boot kicked a bottle and set it roiling. It sounded empty. In the squalid, evil-smelling bedroom, any remnants of sexual desire for the full-bodied woman were dispelled from his mind. Out in the main room of the house, with the door closed on the woman, the air smelt comparatively sweet. It was hotter, unbreathed for a long time and pleasantly untainted by outside influences in the other bedroom. This was furnished much as the one in which the woman slept, except that the bed was single size. The bed was made.
A window which would look out over the yard behind the house was hung with thick drape curtains. The water in the pitcher had a layer of dust over the surface. Aware that he was intruding on the privacy of a stranger, Edge opened one of the bureau drawers and then checked briefly in the wardrobe closet. He discovered the clothing of a man. A tall, lean man. Poor quality clothing, old but well laundered. One suit and fancy white shirt. The rest denim work clothes.
Back in the main room, he had to clean out ashes from the cooking range before he could set and light a fire from kindling and fuel stacked outside the back door. A closet to one side of the range was meagerly stocked with coffee and canned, jarred and dried foods. Water was stored in two drums which stood on another closet next to the larder. In this closet were skillets, saucepans, cups, plates and cutlery. Just enough eating and drinking utensils for two people.
In preparing a meal, the half-breed was careful to use only what he could replace from the supplies in his saddlebags and canteens.
The coffee was ready first and he stood in the doorway, idly surveying the almost barren wilderness in wh
ich the homestead was situated as he sipped the scalding hot brew. Behind him, the main room of the house was as spartanly furnished as the two bedrooms with the barest minimum of creature comforts. A pine table with a scrubbed top and a pine chair either side of it at the kitchen end. Two armchairs, a bare-topped sideboard, a table littered with sewing and darning yarns and needles, a bookcase crammed with leather-bound volumes and old mail-order catalogues, a square of rush matting on the floor and two framed prints of biblical scenes on a wall in the parlor area. A kerosene lamp hanging from a hook above the pine table and another standing on a shelf midway between the two armchairs.
All the furniture was store-bought and well made. But old and ill cared for. An overturned empty bottle, an upright but equally empty tumbler and the gentle snoring of the woman in the rancid bedroom explained the neglect. A trail, distinguished from the arid land to either side by the ruts cut by wagon wheels, which led from the front of the house towards the heat-shimmered ridges of the Hatchet Mountains in the south west, perhaps marked the course which the tall, lean man had taken to escape the squalor. Forever or just for a few hours? A husband who no longer shared the marital bed? A son? A hired hand?
Edge drained the cup dry of coffee, got some grounds in his mouth and spat them out into the yard. What did it matter who the missing man was? Likewise, who the woman suffering from sexual frustration and over-indulgence in cheap liquor was. Or why the homestead - well constructed but badly run down - had been sited on this hostile stretch of New Mexico Territory.
He went to the range, poured more coffee in the cup and then ladled some mixed pork and beans from a skillet onto a plate. He sat down at the table to eat, on the chair that allowed him to watch the open front door and the firmly closed door of the woman’s bedroom.
She had stopped snoring.
Beth had never snored. During the tragically brief period of their marriage. Working a homestead much like this one. But up in the Dakotas.
EDGE: Red Fury (Edge series Book 33) Page 1