"Who's a man nobody would call gentle, like you see," the woman in the store added dully in the wake of the scream, after Magee's back, arched by pain, collapsed and the man was inert and silent.
Perhaps dead, but Gray made certain of this with two more shots: the bullets exploded with guns held at arms length, muzzles just three feet from the unfeeling head, the bullets entered and left. Went in via both eyes and came out through the top rear of his skull.
Edge looked away from the grossly overweight man who remained standing over his victims—as unmoving as they were for stretched seconds—to gaze directly at the woman for the first time. And saw that she was a thirty-year-old black-haired beauty with flawless skin and a slender build. And he growled as he dug in the shirt pocket for the makings:
"Can see why he has a crush on you..."
She made a face like she was about to throw up, then reached to the side, grabbed the door and slammed it closed. And Edge completed:
"Since he ain't no gentleman and they're the ones take their weight on their elbows."
Chapter Five
THE crowd began to disperse without the law-women and the hard men needing to tell them. A handful back into the church, some returning to the saloon but most heading for the brightly lit stores and other commercial premises or toward the houses on the curving side street and its spurs.
The black clad Gabe Millard and the gunmen who carried guns all went back into the corner office of the Elgin County Herald. And the four younger women with stars on their shirts headed for a place beyond the church—from which one of them and their mother had brought the condemned prisoners.
Edge swung down from the saddle then, having rolled a cigarette while most of the Elgin City people went back to whatever had occupied them before the execution was signalled. Now struck a match on his Winchester stock to light the smoke and began to lead the gelding by the bridle toward the intersection. Where
Earl Gray holstered his matching Tranters, his daughter came to stoop and retrieve her unfired Colt and a short, stockily built man of about forty with freckles covering his face and bald head asked:
"Okay to haul away the cadavers, Mayor?"
"When there's trash on our streets, Sam, you know I like to have it cleaned up real fast," the fat man replied to the only member of the enforced watchers who remained close to the scene of the double killing.
"I'll get right to it, sir," the town undertaker assured and hurried along the western length of the main street toward his parlor that was almost at the end of it.
This as Edge reached the intersection and was able to see that the building set back between the church and a bakery was the law office and jail—standing behind a cement apron on which stood a gallows.
"So you're the guy that killed Elliot Thombs?" Pearl said, peering hard at the half-breed from close quarters for the first time. And then she nodded as he halted to submit to her study, meeting her appraising gaze with an impassive coldness in his slitted eyes. "Yeah, I can see you ain't changed all that much from when the picture was done of you. Not really."
The woman's red hair had a few strands of grey in it and the skin that was stretched taut over the fine bone structure of her face was extensively wrinkled in the areas of the eyes and the mouth. She looked to be about fifty-five and unless her shape owed something to her undergarments she had taken as good care of her body as of her face. She was probably no taller than five feet three inches without the high-heeled boots and the Stetson.
"My girl, Pearl Irish, Joe," Earl Gray introduced, swinging clumsily away from the corpses as he dry-washed his hands so that the precious metals of his rings clinked and the jewels of the settings sparkled in the bright light. While the smile that lit his heavily fleshed features made it obvious he did not need this symbolic gesture to aid him in forgetting the evil he had just committed. "Reason she has a different name to me, she was married one time. Had that string of girls that are her deputies—Joy, Laura, Anne and Gloria. Was widowed in the war. Guess there's no chance you ever ran across Captain Zach Irish? Was an infantry officer with Ambrose Burnside's Ninth Corps?"
"It was a big war," Edge answered, aware that Pearl Irish was becoming impatient with her father.
"Mayor Gray or just Mayor, Joe. Or Sir if you like."
The woman made a sound of mild disgust.
"It was a big war, Mayor."
"I make exceptions, some folks get to being ornery jealous, Joe. So I don't make exceptions." He directed a withering look at his daughter.
"That apply to the five bucks it cost me to cross your property, Mayor?"
"Chickenfeed, Joe!" Pearl answered before her father could respond. "You're gonna be rich for what you done all that time ago to the skunk that—"
"Go attend to your duty, girl!" Gray cut in. "Out here in the middle of the street isn't the right place to discuss business for a man of my standing!"
His tone of voice was not harsh, but there was a commanding glint in his dark eyes that his daughter knew better than to disobey.
And she complained without force: "But I oughta be around when you and Joe—"
"Going to have supper first, girl." He took from a pocket of his silk shirt a gold watch and flipped open the lid. "Shall we say in two hours—that'll be at nine-thirty—at the house?"
He looked enquiringly at Pearl and at Edge. The woman nodded and explained:
"Dad means at the Triple X. You rode by it on the way to town."
"I saw it, ma'am," Edge answered around the cigarette as Pearl Irish turned to go toward the building in back of the gallows and Earl Gray waddled back the way he had come, heading for the millinery store. "Planned on stopping over in town tonight, so I'll be able to make it."
"You bet your ass you'll make it, Joe," Gabe Millard called flatly from where he stood on the threshold of the newspaper office, a shoulder leaning on the frame.
And only the half-breed looked at the black clad man. Neither the woman sheriff of Elgin County nor its owner and mayor reacted at all to the gunslinger's comment.
Gray said to Sam Gower as the freckle-faced mortician led a horse along the street: "Don't forget to pick up the paperwork from Mrs. Irish and have Doc Hargrove issue death certificates, Sam."
"Yes sir, Mayor," the man answered as Edge started forward with his horse again, bypassing the corpses Gower had come to collect and heading now along the eastern stretch of the brightly lit main street. Aware again of being covertly watched by many pairs of eyes and this time sensing resentment toward him.
Nobody looked at the half-breed, though, when he raked his glinting eyed gaze from side to side—glancing through the screen of drifting smoke from the cigarette into the windows of the lamplit buildings. In the law office Pearl Irish was hunched in a chair behind a desk: writing while her daughters were grouped behind her, as intent as their mother on the paperwork. And across the street, Gabe Millard had closed the door of the newspaper office and gone to join another of the hired men beside a table where the young Bob Lowell and three others were playing a card game. There was a man and a woman in the bakery next to the law office and just a woman in the candy store next to the office of the Elgin County Herald. A lone man in the tailor's shop and another in the building with a sign that proclaimed it housed Doctor Horace J. Hargrove's Surgery and Dentistry.
But these and the occupants of other flanking buildings he passed on his way to the livery stable were all pointedly too busy to bother with what was happening out on the street while the newcomer to town surveyed them.
The liveryman, though, could not ignore the half-breed who led the bay gelding into the stove heated, animal smelling stable: through a part open door which spilled its share of lamplight out into the chill night. Then the leather-aproned, sixty-year-old, short but powerfully built man with an arc of grey hair around the sides and back of his head and wearing thick lensed eyeglasses had to interrupt his chore and acknowledge the existence of Edge.
"Gray kill people who talk to strangers without his permission, feller?" he asked as he halted the gelding and turned to close the door through which a stream of cold air was flowing.
"Don't do that, mister!" the liveryman called from the rear, rising suddenly from a bench beside the stove where he was soaping a saddle. His frown as anxious as his tone of voice. And he added plaintively: "Please?"
"Your place," Edge answered with a shrug, leaving the door open and scanning the stalls to either side of the building that was twice as deep as it was wide and contained two dozen stalls, only six of which were vacant.
"The Mayor, he likes Elgin City to be bright when he comes to town, mister. And we all have to do our bit. This place not havin' no windows, I have to—"
"Your place, like I said," Edge cut in on the man with bad eyesight who now spoke in an apologetic tone. "I see you have the space to take care of my horse?"
"For just the one night, mister?"
"Reckon so."
"Just board and feed?"
"And brushing," Edge said, running a hand over the neck of the gelding, the coat matted to the touch by the dried mud of trail dust mixed with sweat lather.
"Be five dollars, mister," the liveryman said with a gulp. And blinked several times in quick succession behind the magnifying lenses of his spectacles when Edge froze in the act of unbuckling the saddle cinch.
"I said for just the one night." He straightened, took the cigarette but from his mouth, dropped it to the scrupulously clean hard packed dirt floor and crushed it beneath a boot heel.
The man at the bench nodded several times now, an expression of misery on his face and answered in a matching tone: "I know, mister. But I gotta make a livin', too."
Edge pointedly surveyed the eighteen occupied stalls as he growled: "You aiming to get as rich as Gray, feller?"
"The Mayor's got a four-fifths share in all Elgin City businesses, mister. He fixes the prices people have to charge."
Edge sighed and nodded. Took hold of the bridle again and told the liveryman: "Too steep for me, feller."
"Where you goin' with that horse?"
"Me and him bedded down in the open on a lot colder nights that this up in the mountains," Edge told the again anxious man.
"That ain't allowed inside city limits, mister. Mrs. Irish or one of her deputies'll haul you in for vagrancy."
"There's a lot of open country outside of town."
The liveryman shook his head. "You seen what happened to them two cowhand drifters that allowed their horses to crop Elgin County grass, mister."
"I paid the five dollars to—"
"Keep you from havin' to swing wide to get to where you're headed, Joe," Millard put in from the part open doorway. "You have to pay for anythin' else you have in Elgin County."
Pearl Irish, wearing a sheepskin coat similar to the one Edge wore, stepped into view alongside the sardonically smiling black garbed gunman without a gun and said: "There's been a change of schedule, Joe. Dad's on his way back to the Triple X now and we have to get right after him."
"Fine," the half-breed said and made to turn the gelding all the way around so he could lead him outside.
"Leave your horse with Devine, Joe," Millard said. "I'll drive the two of you and bring you back."
"And pick up the tab here, feller?"
"I told you, Joe!" the woman said impatiently. "Dad's gonna make you a rich man. In a little while, five dollars to you is gonna be no more than a drop in the ocean."
"See?" Gabe Millard growled.
"Sure," the half-breed answered. And surrendered his horse to Devine who had come from the rear to the front of his livery.
The woman turned and moved away from the stable entrance as Millard rasped through teeth that were now exposed in a scowl instead of the sardonic smile:
"So best you don't make waves, mister?"
He backed off the threshold to allow Edge to step across it.
"Or I could be all washed up?"
It was not so bright outside now and the level of light continued to fall as the business and professional people of Elgin City doused their lamps, locked up their premises, and headed for home along the street that curved south between the two hills. This as a canopy-top country wagon with a single horse in the traces rolled out of town on the west trail, its black and gold paintwork gleaming in the moonlight that was now predominant in the night.
"Gray afraid of the dark, feller?" Edge asked as Devine closed the livery door and Millard started to follow Pearl Irish—across the front of Reece's Wagon Hire which was next to the stable and into the alley on the far side of it.
"My Dad ain't afraid of a damn thing, Joe!" the woman snapped. "And you better talk respectful about him even when he can't hear you. I'll go along with Mr. Gray."
The two story building housing the wagon hire business was already in darkness and just a little moonlight found entrance to the alley, to show that a rockaway with a two horse team was parked there. With a fat man—but nowhere near as fat as Earl Gray—holding the bridle of one of the animals.
"Things sure happen fast and sometimes without fuss around here," Edge said as the woman swung open a door and climbed into the carriage. And Gabe Millard heaved himself up into the three-way protected driver's seat-neither he nor the man holding the horse having offered Pearl Irish any help.
"Have time to go home for my supper before you folks get back, Mr. Millard?" the fat man asked humbly.
"Depends how fast you eat and how long we are, Wiley," Millard told him as Edge got aboard and closed the door. Then was driven hard on to the seat beside the woman by the suddenness of the rockaway's start.
"Fast service without no fuss is somethin' of what you get for the high prices you gotta pay in Elgin, Joe," Pearl Irish said dully as the carriage made a turn to the west out of the alley. "Dad wants the best of everythin' and expects the folks that live here to give it. And get it, same as he does. Reasons nothin' cheap hereabouts."
In the confines of the passenger section of the rockaway the Elgin County sheriff even smelled like a man—wore no powders or paints or perfumes.
"Except life, ma'am."
"We gotta have rules. And if you got rules you gotta punish people that breaks them."
The rockaway rolled by the premises of Doctor Hargrove that was one of the few buildings on the main street that was still lit. The tall and thin, pale-complexioned medical man was on the threshold of his surgery, along with Sam Gower whose horse with the corpses slung over its back was hitched to a sidewalk roof support nearby. The two men watched with obvious distaste as the carriage was driven by.
Edge said, "I didn't see any sign that warned people to keep off the grass."
"Not knowin' the law ain't no excuse for breakin' it, Joe!" Pearl Irish intoned, as if it was a line she had learned by rote and used often. "And it wasn't for lettin' their horses steal Dad's grass them two cowpunchers had to go up against him. It was for what they was tryin' on with my two girls. If their Dad had been alive, he'd have defended the girls' honor. Way things are, their Granddaddy had to do it. If them two cowpunchers had just done like they was told by Laura and Joy, all it would've cost them was a five dollar fixed penalty, Joe. Ten in all, that right?"
"Fine."
Chapter Six
THE newspaper office on one corner of the side street was still ablaze with light and across from this in two directions, the law office behind the gallows and the Delaware Saloon were also lit, but in a more subdued way.
Just two of Pearl Irish's daughters could be seen in the law office and there was no longer anybody watching the four-handed card game in the building housing the Elgin County Herald. Business was slow in the saloon and the handful of patrons visible from the rockaway looked not to be enjoying themselves when they glanced up from their drinks at the sound of the carriage on the street.
"Fred Garner that has the saloon is a real expert on Indians, Joe," the woman
said suddenly, as the rig rolled along the western stretch of the main street that was deserted and lit only by the moon.
"He is?"
"Seems Wyomin' is a little bit of a Delaware Indian word. Means somethin' about on the big plain. There's a place in the state of Pennsylvania called Wyomin' Valley where the Delaware Indians used to be. Did you know that, Joe?"
"No, ma'am, I didn't know that."
"And I guess you don't care too much?"
"No, ma'am, not too much."
"Me neither, not really. Just that Fred Garner and me, we used to walk out and if we'd got married, it'd been better if we had somethin' in common."
Edge said nothing in response to the woman who he guessed was simply talking for the sake of it—perhaps because she was uncomfortable with silence between them or maybe as an outlet for the frustration of loneliness.
"You ever get married, Joe?"
"Yes, ma'am. She died."
"Like my Zach."
The rockaway was off the street now, beyond the city marker and on the trail at the base of the hill with the Triple X ranch house on its crest. Many light sources glittered through the foliage of the pinyons that partly obscured the house on this side.
* * *
EDGE met and married Beth Day a long time after the killing of Elliot Thombs that made him a wanted man with an assumed name. And they settled down on a farmstead in the Dakotas at the end of a trail that had run for countless miles in every direction across a landscape over which violence constantly hovered—and often swooped to strike. During a time when the man who had become Edge was forced to acknowledge that the sole reason for him living was life itself. Which he could preserve only by using the harshly learned lessons of the war and by remaining the dehumanized being behind the gun that war had made him.
This was his fate, he had convinced himself: until Beth Day entered his life. And he knew that this woman could not be placed in the same category of the pleasures, luxuries, and sometimes the essentials that he had to take, make use of and pay for as and when they came within his reach. So he attempted to cheat his fate. To return to working the soil on a place that was much more on a scale with the Hedges family farmstead in Iowa than this rich spread in Wyoming.
Edge: Bloody Sunrise Page 4
