Suddenly, his eyes ceased their movement along the narrow slits between the lids. And he gazed, without blinking, at a patch of deep moon-shadow between two rock outcrops where the trail rose up from the desert valley to enter the Hatchet Mountains’ foothills.
There was something there. He was certain he had seen the blue light of the moon glint on a metallic object. A gun?
Only his eyes, lost in the shadow of his hat brim, showed that he suspected he was not alone. The way he sat the horse appeared as nonchalant as previously. And he continued to move his head from side to side as the mare carried him up the slope - a gentle grade that was totally devoid of cover until the outcrops were reached. A hundred and fifty feet ahead. Then, a few seconds later, timing the action to coincide with a pebble skittering away from under a hoof of the mare, he clicked back the Spencer’s hammer, the rifle carried across his thighs and against his belly in the same manner as when he rode with Calvin Butler from Black Bear Bluff to the family ranch.
Since that momentary glint of light on something shiny, Edge had seen no further physical proof that the dark gap between the outcrops harbored potential danger. But, as he closed with his objective, he sensed watching eyes. And beneath his casual exterior his muscles were tensed and his mind was coldly planning a response should the threat to his survival become a reality.
The more ground he covered, the better his chance. For although the range was getting shorter, so was the distance to the cover of the rocks. And if there was a gun tracking him, the man gripping it was obviously not confident of his ability with it. Or he would have fired earlier. So a lunge from the horse and a fast roll for the rocks might just—
‘My husband? Where is Calvin?’
Little Fawn’s footfalls were silent. So it was the sound of her voice to which Edge reacted. Releasing the reins and gripping the rifle as she spoke the first word. But then she stepped away from the rock shadow and into the light. Showing herself to be empty-handed. In time for the half-breed to halt his act of hurling himself off the back of the mare.
He pursed his lips and allowed the breath to pass silently between them. ‘Lady,’ he said softly, ‘I sure didn’t expect anything as pretty as you to come out from under a rock.’
She was not so attractive as when he had first seen her, her good looks marred most by the ugly line of congealed blood across her throat. There was also a purple bruise on her right temple. In addition to this, her light-colored hair was in disarray and filthy and her flesh was stained by dirt pasted to the pores by old sweat. He could see more of her flesh than earlier, for the plain dress had a long tear down the front from the neck to below the small mounds of her adolescent breasts.
Around her neck was a leather thong with a metal pendant in the shape of a heart strung on it. And Edge realized it was this piece of jewelry which had caught the moonlight and warned him of somebody waiting between the outcrops.
Little Fawn saw him looking at this ornament, mistook the reason for his interest and clutched the torn dress bodice together across the barely discernible inner slopes of her breasts.
‘Please, I am with child,’ she implored.
He looked at her face again and saw now the redness of old weeping encircling her eyes, and the tracks which the tears had made through the dirt on her cheeks. She was only a hairsbreadth away from crying again - miserable and afraid.
He tipped his hat onto the back of his head so that she could see the smile he showed. He tried to make it an expression of warmth but he was out of practice. Certainly it did little to relieve her feelings.
‘You’ve got me wrong, Little Fawn,’ he said softly and made to dismount.
But the girl gasped and drew back, half into the shadows again. Edge remained astride the mare.
‘This is the trail to San Lucas.’
She nodded. ‘I have been there. Close to there.’
‘On foot?’
Another nod. ‘When the camp attacked, I try to hide my husband. I think no one see this. But Thundercloud, he see me. When people leave to run from attackers, Thundercloud pick me up and put me on his pony. For a long time we run, but pony not go so fast with two. And Thundercloud throw me to ground.’
She raised a hand and touched her fingers to the swelling on her head. ‘I fall hard. But able to roll into brush and see the white men ride by before I lose my senses. When I awake, much time has gone. I run back to camp. My husband is not in hole where I hid him. See sign that two men on shod horses have left camp. To west. Sign very confused. But I think Calvin must be taken to San Lucas. But then no sign. Except to south. I go to look at town anyway. No way to tell if Calvin there.’
She came out into the full moonlight again and tilted her head back as if to ensure that Edge saw the full extent of her desperate misery.
‘The baby all right?’ he asked.
She looked down at her slightly swollen belly, then explored the contour with both hands. ‘I do not know. Only that there has been no pain here. Nor other signs of...’
She turned her head away, embarrassed.
‘Calvin’s no worse than when you put him down the hole.’
Her head snapped around again and her eyes stared fixedly at him for stretched seconds. It was obvious she was unsure of whether or not to believe him.
‘Please? Mother of my husband can enter San Lucas. If people there see me, they will kill me. I go to ask Mrs. Butler if she will—’
‘He’s with her at the house, Little Fawn.’
The girl squeezed her weary, tear-ravaged eyes tight closed and moved her lips in a silent prayer. It was impossible to see if she was giving thanks to the white eyes’ God or some Apache deity. For a moment after her lips ceased to move, they remained parted to show her teeth in an exhausted smile. Then,
‘You, Edge? You took him to home of mother?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And he will...?’
‘Calvin’ll heal, ma’am. He’s hoping you’ll go to him. If you don’t, he figures to come looking for you.’
Relief seemed to be acting to drain her final reserves of energy. She swayed, but managed to shuffle sideways and lean her slim shoulder against one of the outcrops which kept her to her feet.
‘I must rest. Then I will go to him.’ Ever since she had dropped both hands to touch the flesh encasing her forming child, the torn dress bodice gaped. And the half-breed had to make a conscious effort to look at her face and quell the beginnings of sexual desire that threatened to surge up from the base of his belly. ‘He is all I have. Until Calvin, I had nothing. Neither from Apaches nor whites.’
‘You can have a horse, Little Fawn,’ Edge offered. And immediately regretted the words.
But the girl sagging against the rock shook her head. ‘No, Edge. Until now I thought I again had nothing. Just hope. You have given me what I hoped for. I can take nothing more from you.’
He glanced back over his shoulder - out along the trail at the end of which was the Butler place. ‘I guess Calvin won’t be going anywhere for awhile. So you got plenty of time. If Chief Acoti and his braves—’
‘The Apaches want revenge only against people who stole the hill of dead, Edge. They made my husband suffer much already.
‘Think I am no more. Just the white people of San Lucas.’ Now she looked back over her shoulder, into the moon-shadow. ‘And they will be much pleased if you are there.’
Edge smiled and set the hat back on top of his head, tilted slightly forward. ‘Obliged to you for your concern, Little Fawn.’
‘But you know this. You are kind who does what he thinks he must - whatever happen.’
‘What I must, sure. But not always what I like. I don’t enjoy hurting women.’
Now she touched the dried crusting of blood on her throat. ‘Like Calvin, I will heal. Take longer to go than the hate I carried for you all through the day and into this night.’
She smiled and did not have to make any effort to inject warmth into her wearily haggard face.<
br />
Edge heeled the mare forward and as he rode between the outcrops he said, ‘Have a healthy baby, Little Fawn.’
‘If it is so, I will remember your wish for it, Edge,’ the girl called after him.
The half-breed spoke so that his words reached only his own ears. ‘Make a change for me to be well remembered.’
The night was not much older when he rode the mare through the fold in the hills to the south-east of San Lucas and started up the slope of El Cerro de Muerto. But the first hour of the new day was almost over and just a single light shone in the darkness. From a window in the house of Sheriff Lee Temple at the far end of the street under the brow of the hill.
As he covered the final stretch of trail which cut between the claims, the only sound was made by the weary clop of the horse’s hooves against the hard-packed dirt. He sensed the presence of people in the shacks and tents built close to the mine tunnels, but was not conscious of any eyes watching his progress. Until he drew close to the intersection of trail with street. And saw a human form silhouetted in the light which cut a square in the dark facade of the house. The slight form of a girl. The lawman’s young daughter Francine who, with her plea of They wouldn’t want this, had probably done more than Edge’s threatening gun to give the four cavalrymen a few more hours of life.
Who had she meant by they? Not the living. Most of the citizens of San Lucas had been ready and willing to see the soldiers gunned down if that was the only way to kill the Apache prisoners. So the dead. Her mother, brother and sister? Or everyone who had perished the last time the Apaches had punished the whites for stealing El Cerro de Muertol?
It didn’t matter. It was just a line of thought to keep him awake as he completed his long round trip to San Lucas.
As he slid from the back of the mare and began to lead her across the street, Francine Temple withdrew from the window, and let the net curtain fall back into place.
Instead of going towards the door of the Lutter place, he angled for the corner where, yesterday, he had seen Sergeant Draper lead the army horses and Indian ponies on the way to the livery. But he halted when the door creaked open and a booted foot was set down on the boardwalk outside.
‘Drop that rifle, mister!’ Cass Lutter ordered. ‘Or we’ll have to shovel you up off the street and into your box!’
The short, rotund man with the ruddy face under a bald head took another forward step and thrust out the double barrel shotgun to the full extent of his reach. The same move allowed his emaciated wife to step across the threshold. She was as grim-faced as he, but her tone was not so harsh when she urged,
‘Best do like he tells you, Edge. There are times when Cass means just what he says. And this is one of them times.’
Edge unlisted his hand from around the Spencer before she was half-finished.
‘Now step away from the horse and unbuckle the gunbelt,’ her husband ordered in the same tone as before.
Along the street, a door opened and light footfalls sounded. Both the Lutters looked in that direction. And Edge knew he had time to move a hand from the belt buckle to the holstered Colt, draw the revolver and put a bullet into the man with the shotgun. But he didn’t.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Francine Temple called shrilly.
‘Go back inside, girl!’ Mrs. Lutter shouted and the sheriff’s daughter came to a halt at the gate in the picket fence.
As light spilled from the window of the bank, the door beside it opened and Ross and Susan Reed showed themselves on the threshold. Unlike the Lutters and the Temple girl who were fully dressed, the slightly built, pallid-faced banker and his red-haired, homely wife were in their night clothes. They looked as frightened and confused as the sheriff’s daughter.
The half-breed’s gunbelt fell in a half-circle around the back and sides of his tall frame. ‘The kid beat me to the question, feller,’ he drawled.
‘Ross, go get his horse and take it round back to the stable! Don’t get between him and this here shotgun!’
‘Dear, you’ve got no clothes on!’ the banker’s wife wailed.
‘The hell with that, Mrs. Ross!’ Cass Lutter snarled ‘This ain’t no time to stand on ceremony!’
Edge made it easier for the night-shirted banker. He moved around in front of the mare. Was tracked by the twin muzzles of the gun in Lutter’s rock-steady grip.
Reed shot a hard look at Edge as he took hold of the reins, but did not speak until he had led the horse several feet towards the opening between his bank and Lutter’s place. Then,
‘Hey, Cass! You know what—’
‘Yeah, Ross. I seen he was ridin’ bareback with Apache tack. He sure has got some explainin’ to do. Unless he wants to get his head blowed off his shoulders. Grace! Go inside and light a lamp. And you, mister, you come on in. Real slow and easy. Cause if you make one wrong move—’ He parted his lips in a vicious grin. ‘—boom. You know what I mean?’
‘That’s the third time you said it, feller. And I don’t aim to lose my head.’
Light spilled out from the doorway behind Lutter and the windows to either side of him.
‘If my Dad were here, he wouldn’t—’ Francine Temple started.
‘Be quiet, girl!’ Lutter snapped and this time did not look towards her. ‘Someone has to take care of things when your Pa ain’t around.’
He took a short backward step and made just a fractional movement with the shotgun to gesture for Edge to move forward. Looking relieved at the secondary nature of his chore, Ross Reed quickly led the mare into the alley. His wife returned gratefully into the bank.
‘Mister!’ the young girl at the gate called. ‘If you been with the Indians, did you see anything of Dad? He and some other men went after a bunch of Apaches.’
‘I saw him and he was fine,’ the half-breed told her. ‘He and the others had the Apaches on the run.’
Francine’s smile was even warmer and more grateful than that which Little Fawn had directed at Edge. ‘Gee, thanks a lot, mister!’ she cried joyfully.
Then turned and ran back into the house, slamming the door behind her. Perhaps to take up again her surveillance at the lighted window.
‘I sure hope that wasn’t a lie just to make her happy, Edge,’ Grace Lutter said grimly as the half-breed crossed the threshold.
‘No, ma’am,’ he replied, ignoring her husband and the gun now as he moved to the chair at the back of the room where he had sat yesterday, pulled it out from under the table and lowered himself gratefully on to it. ‘Sheriff Temple is the only one around tonight.’
‘I’ll ask the damn questions, woman!’ Cass Lutter growled, dropping onto a chair at the table next to where the half-breed sat.
‘Oh, do be quiet!’ his thin-faced, pock-marked wife countered in a matching tone, reasserting her authority over him now that Edge was disarmed and she was in the secure, familiar surroundings of the store and saloon. Then, as Cass Lutter’s face shaded from red to purple as his fury rose, she said to the yawning half-breed, ‘Sheriff Temple is the only what?’
He completed the yawn and drawled: ‘Cop-out’
Chapter Twelve
‘Without a head you won’t have no smart mouth to show off with, mister!’ Cass Lutter rasped, angling the shotgun barrels up from the rim of the table to draw a bead on the half-breed’s heavily stubbled, dirt-grimed and exhausted-looking face.
His wife, who had moved behind the bar counter, snorted and glared at Lutter. ‘If you got nothin’ better to do than keep on makin’ threats you got no intention to—’
‘Hold your friggin’ tongue, woman!’ her husband yelled, trembling with rage at her but keeping the gun and his eyes fixed upon the face of the half-breed.
‘I’m with him, lady,’ Edge said, soft and even. Aware that events and Grace Lutter’s needling of her husband had pushed the bald-headed man close to the brink of mindless violent retaliation. ‘On account of whichever one of you win this argument, I stand to lose most.’
From the w
ay in which the woman fixed the grim expression more firmly into the flesh of her thin face, she seemed about to hurl more scornful words towards her husband.
His finger curled around both triggers of the shotgun was livid - in stark contrast to the high color of his face.
But then the tension drained out of the woman. And she looked only at Edge - pointedly ignoring her husband. Asked, ‘You want a shot of somethin’? Or a beer, maybe? Looks to me like you ain’t had the best of times since you left town yesterday.’
‘Obliged for a whisky and a beer both,’ Edge answered, and shot a wry glance at the less strained-looking Cass Lutter. To add, as he recalled an exchange from the last time he was in the place, ‘In different glasses.’
Lutter was on the point of snarling a response. But footfalls sounded on the boardwalk outside and two men turned into the saloon and store. Ross Reed, with boots on bare feet and a sheepskin coat over his nightshirt. And a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested miner, fully dressed in denim work clothes but tousled from recent sleep.
‘What’s happenin’, Cass?’ the middle-aged, dull-eyed miner demanded.
Lutter snorted. ‘I ain’t had no friggin’ chance to find out yet, Howie. Cause Grace is wastin’ all the friggin’ time treatin’ this guy like some friggin’ returnin’ hero.’
The woman banged the glasses down on Edge’s table with enough force to slop beer and rye over the rims. The half-breed nodded his thanks and interrupted the rolling of a cigarette to take some coins from a pants pocket and place them away from the pools of liquid.
‘Later’ll do,’ she said and started back for the bar counter. ‘Maybe you’ll need refills.’
Howie and Reed remained on the threshold, the miner expressing deep confusion.
‘Kurt Tuchman saw the stranger ride up the hill, Cass,’ the miner muttered. ‘But he didn’t get me out the sack until he saw the play you made out on the street. What’s he done wrong, for frig’s sake?’
EDGE: Red Fury (Edge series Book 33) Page 11