With both arms held by his captors, he was unable to touch the brim of his new hat. But he inclined his head. ‘Good afternoon,’ he greeted pleasantly.
Charity refused to look at him or respond. Edge worked some saliva into his mouth and spat it forcefully out over the rail into the river.
‘After a morning best forgotten, feller,’ the half-breed answered evenly. He locked his narrow-eyed gaze on the face of the prisoner for a moment, trying to recall where he had seen the man before the hold-up. But the memory stayed securely locked in the back of his mind.
Henry nodded his head again, but this time in acknowledgement, as he was urged up the stairway. ‘Some you win and some you lose,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘I’m not one to bear grudges.’
‘But you are one, sure enough,’ Edge muttered.
Henry had been hurried to the top of the stairway, out of earshot.
‘Meaning he is a pervert, Mr. Edge,’ Charity said, waiting for the half-breed to open the dining-salon door for her.
‘Your word, not mine.’ He did what was expected of him, but she hesitated on the threshold.
‘I want your word, Mr. Edge,’ she said earnestly.
‘I got a lot, ma’am. Fruit, queer, homosexual—’
She cut him off with a shake of her head. ‘Your word that if I allow you to buy my lunch for me, you will not look upon it as a debt I owe.’
‘No sweat. Buy your own grub.’
She blushed yet again. ‘You mean you would expect repayment by ... with me… payment in kind?’
‘When I feed a horse, ma’am, it’s to keep him fit for riding.’
Charity made a spluttering sound, spun on her heels and retreated along the companionway towards her cabin. ‘I am not a horse, Mr. Edge!’ she flung back at him. .
Edge shrugged and eyed her rigid back and swaying hips ruefully. ‘That’s no reason not to like your oats, ma’am,’ he responded.
CHAPTER THREE
Edge ate a boiled beef lunch alone and when he was drinking his coffee afterwards, Henry appeared in the dining salon.
The thin, pale-faced man was no longer a prisoner and his gaunt features were wreathed in a relaxed smile. As he came in and sat down at a vacant table on the far side of the salon from Edge, there was a break in many conversations and an atmosphere of disapproval was evident in the near silence.
Those people on the dock owed me money,’ he said to the colored steward who approached his table - speaking loud enough for everyone in the salon to hear. The master of this tub believed me. What others think doesn’t overly concern me.’
‘I just serve the passengers, sir!’ the steward answered, his eyes big and round. Then he laughed. ‘If I got paid to think, sir, I’d be in the poorhouse for sure.’
Many conversations restarted, to contribute to a steady buzz of noise. Henry concentrated on ordering his meal and then eating it. Having made his point, he showed no further interest in his fellow passengers: until Horace Ferris entered to have his lunch. It was obvious that Henry recognized Ferris, but the short, fat man was still preoccupied with secret anxieties and paid no attention to his surroundings or its inhabitants.
As the half-breed rose to leave, he sensed eyes directing more than mild interest towards his back. At the door, he cast a fast glance across the salon: and both Ferris and Henry were part of a second late in snapping their heads around to pretend total absorption in what was on their plates. In that sliver of time, Edge saw hatred in the dark eyes of Henry and something akin to regret on the flabby face of the older man.
He went below then, to the midships cargo hold. A dozen passengers had already claimed sleeping space, in areas not already staked by the roustabouts for their rest periods. There was a mixture of the sexes across an age span from childhood to old age. The sole common denominator which grouped hold passengers and roustabouts together was poverty. It showed in the meager food they ate from wax paper packages, in their clothing and even in their faces. There were two Chinese among the passengers and a Negro roustabout. All the rest were white.
Edge’s entrance was viewed by all with idle curiosity. But, after he had taken a stinking straw mattress and two heavily stained blankets from a communal pile and spread the bedding on a clear area of decking, the sparse interest waned.
There was no stove and a large sign warned against the dangers of smoking close to inflammable cargo. Whatever was packed in the crates tightly stacked across two thirds of the hold space smelled musty. But, as he sprawled out under the blankets, his hat over his face, Edge soon became aware of a more powerful stink: despite the bitter cold, the odor of unwashed bodies was strong.
The Delta Dawn made good time throughout the afternoon and evening, steaming at a steady speed on a broad river under a clear sky. The current was constantly against her but the engines continued to thud rhythmically, drawing power from the forward boilers and turning the paddle-wheel at a regular two hundred dips a minute. The river level was high after the blizzard of the morning and it was only infrequently that the pilot had to order a change of course to avoid sand-bars and timber snags.
The putrid air of the confined hold did not bother Edge and neither did the juddering of the decking and thump of the engine. When the best of anything was available and he could afford it, he enjoyed it; when the worst was unavoidable, he endured it - his mood of the moment unaffected by outside influences.
As he slept beneath his hat and the blankets, his mind triggered dreams which he would not recall when he awoke. His contentment of the morning was gone now: a short-lived sense of well-being that was created when he awoke in his hotel room and did not feel pain in his wrenched ankle and bullet-creased arm: both injuries unwanted bonuses for the job which brought him from San Francisco to Omaha.
Hanging on the wall opposite the foot of his bed had been a print of the waterfront at Bismarck: and, feeling the drifter’s urge to move on, he had decided to head for the bleak-looking town in the wilderness of the northern Dakotas.
It was a territory which held as many memories as Iowa for him: of good times and bad. All of them centered upon a woman named Beth who had changed her name from Day to Hedges. A woman and a marriage: holding out a promise that the future for Edge could be better than the best there had been in the distant past.
But a raiding party of Sioux Indians caused the promise to be violently broken. For Beth died, more horribly than Jamie had met his end and, by a cruel twist of brutal fate, in a manner that placed the onus of her death upon a husband who loved her more dearly than he had ever loved anything or anybody.
He dreamed of Beth as he slept through the afternoon and early evening, the level of his sleep just below waking: not consciously aware of his surroundings but certain of his capability to be roused with total recall should danger threaten. Another skill developed, or talent honed, by the lessons of war.
Although she looked not at all like Beth, perhaps it was his meeting with Charity Meagher which had sown the seeds in his mind which germinated into the dreams. Or maybe it was the fact that he was aboard a stern-wheeler thrashing northwards towards the Dakotas. Bismarck was a long way east and north of the Black Hills where he had sought to put down roots with his wife. But it was in the same harsh territory.
His sleeping mind flitted to another time and another place. The Big Bend of the Rio Grande where, amid violence and death, he had met another woman. Also unlike Beth, but long enough after the passing of his wife for him to feel the need of another woman. But he lost her, too, as irrevocably as if death had claimed her. And the ten thousand dollars she paid him seemed to hold out a fresh hope and a new promise to fill the bleak future with something good.
But the money was taken from him. Destroyed, just as an earlier ten thousand dollars had been destroyed - that time south of the border in Mexico before he even laid hands upon it.
His dreaming had gone out of chronological sequence now. Mexico had been long ago. After Jamie, but before Beth. There ha
d been blood and shattered bodies. But then these elements were almost always present. Except for brief periods - such as his time in Omaha until this morning. And a man like Edge could feel good in such a spell of peace amid an existence that attracted violence. Even though he knew, without being aware of how he knew, that the good would end and evil would close in on him again.
‘You’re a troubled man, I’d say.’
Edge was already awake and had tipped his hat back on to his head as he folded up from the stinking mattress. The Negro roustabout was sitting on an upended pail four feet away. He was smoking a rough-carved pipe and held the stem clenched tight between his teeth as he spoke. And he did not make the comment until the half-breed was sitting upright.
‘I talk in my sleep?’ Edge asked, glancing at the black. He was about twenty-five, tall, broad and solidly built. He had proud, handsome features, given a quality of toughness by a two-day growth of bristles. He was warmly dressed in an old, thick coat and all his hair was trapped under a skull-tight wool hat.
‘Don’t hardly breathe, mister. And don’t move a muscle. Sure don’t move your hand offen that holstered gun. Only a man with a troubled mind sleeps with a grip on his gun.’
‘You an expert, feller?’ Edge asked, and looked around the hold. There were no lamps but moonlight streamed in with the bitterly cold air from the glassless portholes. There were perhaps thirty passengers cramping the quarters now. Most of them bedded down in family groups. Four men played poker for dead matchsticks. All the off-duty crewmen except the Negro were asleep.
‘I’m black in a white man’s world, mister. Makes me a real expert on trouble and handlin’ it so I don’t get hurt - much.’
Edge eased to his feet, stooped to cover the mattress with the blanket and stretched the final remnants of rest from his limbs as he straightened. ‘You just talking, feller? Or you saying something?’
The Negro shrugged and grinned around his pipe. ‘If I’m sayin’ somethin’, mister, I reckon I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ new.’ Then he moved the pipe and looked morosely into its empty bowl. ‘But that holdin’ of the gun while you sleep, that’s easy to see. There’s an air of death hangin’ around you, mister. I’m the seventh son of a seventh son and that means I got a feelin’ for such things.’
‘Means something else, too,’ the half-breed muttered as he turned to head for the stairway to the hatch.
‘What’s that, mister?’
‘Both your pa and his pa had a feeling for something.’
The Negro laughed with genuine humor. ‘Ain’t never been much else poor folk ever could do after the day’s work was done, mister!’ he called.
‘Shut your loud mouth, Linn!’ a roused roustabout snarled sourly. ‘Some folks need to sleep nights!’
Linn’s coat reached to his ankles as he squatted on the upturned pail. He pulled one flap aside to show a knife sheath strapped to the outside of his left pants leg. With smooth skill, he slid out the blade and sent it spinning across the hold. It was an underarm throw, with just a short swing of the arm. But easy strength powered the weapon with a speed that almost deceived the eye. The point of the knife was buried an inch into a bulkhead - no greater distance above the bulbous belly of the man who had complained.
‘And some don’t, you Irish lard-barrel!’ the Negro hissed with soft venom. He flipped open the other side of his coat and prepared to draw another knife from a similar sheath. But the fat Irishman made no counter move.
‘It’s called insomnia,’ Edge said from the head of the stairs.
‘What’s that?’ Linn asked, grinning again.
‘What runs in your family, feller.’
The Negro laughed loud again, but this time there were no complaints.
Edge stepped out on to the Main Deck and immediately felt much colder. Below in the hold the presence of so many people had served to raise the otherwise unheated atmosphere a few degrees. Outside, the air through which the Delta Dawn was pushing had an icy bite that put a stiffness into exposed skin and found its way through clothing to raise goose bumps.
Overhead, the sky was bright with the moon and myriad glinting stars. Smoke from the forward-mounted stacks curled down and skimmed off the roof of the wheel-house before disintegrating behind the boat. Sparks hissed as they touched dew on the point of freezing. Thin ice floes were shattered by the bow and the surviving shards of ice were sucked into the path of the paddle-wheel and turned to white water again before being hurled out into the wash.
The engines were having to draw more power from the glowing boilers to maintain the same speed through the strengthening downriver currents of the Missouri.
Nebraska, on one side of the river and Iowa on the other looked dark and foreboding despite the brightness of the three-quarter moon.
But Edge spent no time in contemplation of the night. He merely looked at it and even smelt it as he moved forward towards the stairway which gave access to the upper decks. Trusting his senses to warn him of potential clanger. But he was alone in the open, coat collar turned high and hat brim pulled low.
The biting air was static, only the forward thrust of the Delta Dawn giving it an illusion of tugging him. It felt less harsh when he had reached the Hurricane Deck and started towards the stern along the companionway in front of the port cabins. For his back was towards the chilling assault.
There were running lights at the top of the bow spars and a dim glow of lamplight from the wheelhouse. A strip of yellow at the glass transom above the door to Charity Meagher’s cabin went out as Edge drew near. Then the door folded inwards and the woman stepped across the threshold.
‘Oh!’ she said, too dramatically, as the half-breed halted before he bumped into her. And the moonlight made it unnecessary for her to look at him quite so hard before admitting to recognition. ‘It’s you, Mr. Edge.’
‘You want to pinch me to make sure?’ he asked lightly.
She was wearing the same coat as earlier, but now it was merely draped, cloak fashion, over her shoulders. She held it in place at her throat with one hand, but it gaped lower down to show a blue dress trimmed with white lace: tight to the waist then flaring over many petticoats to her ankles. She seemed on the point of a stern retort, but then changed her mind.
‘May we start again? On the understanding that there are no strings attached?’ She smiled tentatively, blushed, and looked down at the deck. ‘I’m the kind of girl that does not like to be rushed. Is it a deal?’
She looked up now, to show him her face instead of the crown of her head. Incredibly, despite the icy slipstream of the churning boat, her flushed face was sheened with nervous perspiration.
‘You just made the deal, ma’am,’ Edge told her with a quiet grin as he took her arm. ‘And we both know I’m going to get the pot. Just the matter of when you show me what I have to top.’
She said, ‘Oh!’ again, but with genuine shock this time. However, she allowed him to steer her sedately along the companionway and into the dining salon.
Most passengers who could afford the price of a served meal had already eaten and the majority of the tables had been stripped of their starched white coverings. Many were left bare and it was at these that individuals or groups of men and a few women sat drinking: supplied with beer and hard liquor by stewards who moved back and forth between a well-stocked bar in an alcove.
Three tables were draped with green baize and at these a trio of poker games were underway. Four more were still set for eating and it was at one of these that Edge and Charity sat down. The brunette, her color returned to its normal light tan, was genuinely surprised again - when Edge held her chair and took her coat.
‘You haven’t always been a ...’
She either could not think of a suitable word, or felt the word might insult him. So she let the sentence hang and showed him the top of her head again as he gave the coats and his hat to a steward and accepted a menu in exchange.
‘I’ve been a lot of things in a lot of places, ma
’am,’ he answered. ‘Don’t ever excuse what I am the time I am it.’
He showed her the menu and they both ordered T-bone steaks with deep-fried potatoes and side salads. The prices were high.
Charity seemed grateful the half-breed had not been insulted by the implication of her remark. ‘Because you never make mistakes in anything you do, or are?’
Edge shifted his gaze back and forth across the room, recalling her earlier mild triumph when she had been able to correct his preconceived notion of how she had obtained a cabin on the Delta Dawn. ‘I ain’t God, ma’am,’ he answered.
There was a smell of cooking in the salon, strengthening and fading as the swing door to the galley opened and closed. It was mixed in with the other odors of fresh and stale liquor, old and new tobacco smoke and the wood burning in the heating stove. The noise was low-key: voices in many conversations, cutlery on crockery, bottle necks against glasses and silver dollars chinking on beds of paper money. Behind the sounds created in the salon was the throb of the engines, the thrash of the paddle-wheel and the trickle of water along the boat’s hull.
‘But you never apologize?’ Charity insisted. ‘Just as God does not - for all the suffering He allows to take place on His earth.’
Horace Ferris and Henry were in on one of the poker games. Sharing a table with a short, young, weasel-faced man in Western garb and a thin, middle-aged man attired in similar city clothes to Ferris. In the stove-heated atmosphere of the salon, Henry had taken off his topcoat and suit jacket to display a fancy red and green vest with a gold watch chain slung between two pockets. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and his discarded clothes were hung on a coat stand behind him.
‘He may allow it, ma’am. But He don’t cause it. Why should He apologize?’
Edge had completed his survey - taking in more detail than when he had glanced around the salon on first entering. Now he looked at the woman seated opposite him, certain that of the other passengers, only Ferris and Henry had more than a passing interest in him. And that, at the moment, took second place to the cards they were being dealt by the middle-aged, distinguished looking player.
Edge: Echoes of War (Edge series Book 23) Page 4
