One booted foot hooked over the floor of the car while the other failed to make the height. His kneecap bumped over ties and he cursed at the pain, willing strength into his punished muscles. He heaved with one arm and one leg and a moment later was sprawled face down on the floor of the car. Sweat beads turned to pinpricks of ice on his flesh and the aches in his chest, legs and arms screamed for relief. When he squeezed his eyelids tight shut it seemed impossible to open them again.
Then the drumming against his ears took on a different note, changing in pitch and cadence. He had to listen to it for several moments before he realized that the sound came from outside his skull - was caused by the clatter of the car wheels. He snapped open his eyes and turned his head to the side. The snow-covered trackside began to blur as Phil and Ollie urged the locomotive faster.
His punished body protesting with a higher degree of pain, he rose on to all fours, crawled to the other side of the crate and pressed a shoulder to the unplaned timber. At his first attempt there was no movement. Then, urging himself to greater effort with curses rasped between clenched teeth, he tried again. It seemed to be another failure but then the crate containing the lead lined casket moved a fraction of an inch. And, with this small start made, he used the momentum to keep the slide going, altering his posture to use hands, shoulders and chest.
His eyes were closed again and the drumming inside his head blotted out the sounds of the speeding train. A rush of cold slipstream against his sweating face warned him he was close to the door. Then the crate tipped and he experienced the sweet relief of not having to push it any more. It went out of the car and he did not hear the clatter as it hit the ground, as he struggled to prevent himself following it before he was ready.
He desperately wanted to rest his aching body: even considered doing this and then working forward along the roofs of the boxcars to the locomotive.
But he jumped, suspecting the crew were aware he had boarded the train - not knowing if they carried weapons in the cabin - and concerned to get back to the injured Silas Martin as soon as he could.
The luck in which he did not believe but accepted in whatever form it came, was with him. His legs were bent and he spread his arms: ready to absorb the impact of landing and to retain his balance for as long as he could. But he came to a soft stop, his feet sinking deep into a pile of old snow drifted against some high brush - his body whip-lashing forward to slam into more cushioning whiteness.
The train rattled away from him and he coughed on the smoke it trailed. He closed his eyes again and swallowed the snow that melted in his mouth. His skull was filled with sounds he could not identify. When they had subsided, so had the noise of the speeding train. The white covered world was abruptly silent. Then he heard his own breathing. And the crunching of compacted snow as he moved - rolling over on to his back and sitting up.
There was not even the taint of wood smoke in the bitingly cold air now. The stars against the blackness of the unclouded sky looked close enough to reach out and touch. The moonlight seemed much brighter.
He eased to his feet, wincing against the pains, which were at their sharpest down the long lengths of his legs. He blinked his eyes to clear the final blur of mistiness from his vision and looked back along the glinting rails.
The crate lay close to the track a hundred and fifty feet away. More than half a mile beyond this was the dark bulk of the Butcherville depot building with the water tower atop it. Across the fields from this, the farmstead was still unlit. Three small, dark humps showed on the whiteness of the fields. All that moved back there were two horses, walking nervously over to where their riders lay.
Silas Martin was no longer sprawled on the boardwalk, was nowhere that the half-breed could see.
Far off, in the other direction, the rear of the train was a diminishing dot between the gleaming rails.
He flexed his muscles and moved tentatively out of the snowdrift, his tone sour as he muttered, ‘I thought the train was supposed to take the strain.’
By the time he reached the crate, he was walking easier but he did not make the mistake of going down on to his haunches to examine the timber. The crate had hit the ground without the benefit of more than an inch of snow to cushion the impact, but it seemed to have survived without splitting open on three sides or either end.
As he continued, he was able to quicken his pace without too much discomfort and when he reached the eastern end of the boardwalk his pains had been reduced to dull aches.
‘Act naturally, Mr Edge. It’s not finished yet.’
Martin’s voice was a weak whisper, trembling with nervousness.
‘How many?’ the half-breed asked, not moving his lips as came to a halt and eased his rump gratefully down on to the side of the boardwalk.
He had seen the old man, lying curled up on his side in the deep shadow under the boarding, both hands fisted tightly around the Winchester. Now, feigning a weariness it would have been simple to genuinely feel, he massaged his bristled cheeks and gazed across the fields at the farmstead.
‘Only heard one. Couldn’t get what he was saying. But he must have been talking to somebody else.’
‘How badly you hurt, feller?’
‘Bad enough. But I can hold out long enough to cover you. It’s the obvious place you’d go. Over there.’
‘If you have to, shoot as straight as you think, Silas,’ Edge growled and pushed himself up from the boardwalk.
He stepped over the track and started across the fields, his chosen course of a straight line taking him between the two horses nuzzling their dead riders and meaning he had to lengthen his stride to pass over the body of the first of the ambushers he had killed. Not until he had done this did he raise his right hand to drape it on the butt of the holstered Remington.
‘Now to the belt buckle, mister! Unhook it and let it fall.’
Edge halted but kept his hand where it was. His eyes, narrowed to the merest slivers of ice blueness, raked from the door to the window of the farmhouse and back again. The door was still open. With the moon behind the house, the window looked matt black. He was twenty feet from the front of the house. The barn was thirty feet to his right. A horse made soft noises inside the latter. The man who spoke out of the former sounded as nervous as Silas Martin a few minutes ago,
‘You got a good reason to kill me, feller?’ the half-breed asked evenly.
‘Only one I need is iffen you don’t do like I say.’ As nervous and perhaps as old as Martin.
‘You got a gun aimed at me?’
‘You bet I have!’
‘Means I’ve a good reason to kill you.’
‘Morgan!’ a woman moaned. ‘We have to...’
Edge thought there was a good chance the man was bluffing - that the ambushers who had taken over the farmstead would not have allowed the owner to keep his gun. But he could not be sure the nervous and elderly sounding man was still unarmed now that the ambushers were dead. There was a much better than fifty-fifty chance such a man who farmed this isolated piece of terrain was no crack shot.
So he began his move Just as the woman started to shout the name, and had taken two long strides toward the corner of the frame house when Silas Martin fired the first shot with the Winchester.
The window shattered.
The woman screamed.
The man snarled, ‘Sonofabitch!’
Martin fired again, the bullet cracking through the open doorway to clang against metal.
‘Please! Stop it! Stop it! We don’t have any gun!’
It was the man who pleaded, his words competing with further explosions as Martin continued to give Edge covering fire.
Then the half-breed reached the cover of the corner of the house, the Remington in his hand but unfired.
One more shot cracked out from beneath the depot boardwalk, hissed through the broken window, ricocheted off metal and produced a wet sounding, sharply curtailed groan from the man in the house.
Martin shouted some
thing, but his voice was too weak to carry to Edge.
‘You bastards! You bastards! You killed him! You killed my man!’
The woman was a fat blonde of forty plus whose voice was suddenly louder and shriller as she burst from the doorway of the house. She was naked from the waist up, her lower body covered by a piece of material tied with string around her hips. It gaped wide to expose her flabby thighs as she ran her arms stretched out to their fullest extent in front of her.
‘Don’t try it, lady!’ Edge snarled, stepping out from around the corner as the woman threw herself down close to the nearest dead man.
But even when he loosed a shot, which kicked snow up at the side of her face, she ignored him. Her hands fisted around the dead man’s discarded Winchester and she used his body as a rest to draw a bead on Silas Martin.
Perhaps she would not have hit the wounded old man, who had hauled himself painfully up from under the boardwalk and was now leaning against it, using the half-breed’s empty Winchester as a makeshift crutch for additional support.
But Edge could not take the chance. His first shot had been fired from the hip. Now he took careful aim along his outstretched arm, and squeezed the trigger just as the woman completed the pump action of the rifle.
The bullet blasted killing entry into her skull through the left temple. It did not have the power to exit from behind her forehead. The reaction of her nervous system caused her to complete a half roll - off her belly, up on to her side and then sprawling, arms spread-eagled, on to her back. Her large, saggy breasts with the nipples distended by contact with the cold snow lost bulk and looked young and firm. Her lower body and legs remained decently covered by the blanket wrapped around her. The death mask fixed her features into an expression of hysterical grief.
‘Stella! It ain’t true! I ain’t killed!’
The man who staggered from the doorway, blood seeping from a neck wound to soak into his shirt collar, was about fifty. Tall and very thin, with glazed eyes and spittle running through the bristles on his jaw. He stumbled to a point midway between the door and the dead woman and then halted. He shook his head violently, which seemed to clear his mind and his vision. Then dropped hard to his knees and began to beat at the snowy ground with his fists. Droplets of blood flew away from his neck wound to spot the whiteness.
‘Why?’ he wailed.
‘She was aiming to shoot my boss,’ Edge said softly, advancing on the kneeling man as Silas Martin began to stagger away from the boardwalk.
The distraught man appeared not to hear the words. ‘Why us? We never did no harm to nobody! Why we gotta be made to suffer this way?’ He heard the half-breed’s footfalls or sensed his presence, and ceased his frenetic beating at the ground. Resting on his knees and forearms, he screwed his bleeding neck around to gaze helplessly up at the tall, lean figure towering over him. For a few moments he struggled with a memory, then his eyes filled with hatred as he recalled Edge as the man he had tried to bluff into surrender. ‘One way I’ll die happy, mister,’ he snarled.
‘How’s that, feller?’
‘Iffen I live just long enough to see you swingin’ from the end of a rope, you murderin’ sonofabitch!’
‘Long life to you, feller,’ the half-breed said, and pursed his lips as he shifted his gaze toward the hobbling figure of Silas Martin. ‘On account that a man in my line of work might just end up being that kinda highered hand.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
“IT DON’T make no difference to the hate I got for you, mister,’ Morgan Lockwood growled. ‘But I guess you done my Stella a favor, puttin’ that bullet in her head.’
Edge and Silas Martin were warm for the first time since leaving Denver, the heat emanating from the fire in the cooking range of the farmhouse kitchen. But the old man was unaware of this small comfort, for he was unconscious, sprawled out on his back on the bare boarding of the kitchen floor, his head rested on a pillow. His plumpish torso was naked, except for strips of linen sheets which were bound around his chest. His face was red again, the unhealthiness of this high color emphasized by the doughty whiteness of the skin of his upper body. His breathing was regular but shallow. There was a .25 caliber bullet from his own revolver imbedded so deeply in his right side that it was probable a surgeon with the best available equipment would not be able to save his life.
Edge had not tried to probe for the bullet - had simply cleaned the wound with hot water, poured a slug of Lockwood’s whiskey into the hole, and dressed it. It was as the liquor seared and soaked into the bloody tissue that the old man screamed and passed out.
Even this treatment had been delayed, at Martin’s own insistence - that while he kept Lockwood covered with Edge’s Remington, the half-breed should go retrieve the crated casket. Aware that such a delay would make no ultimate difference, Edge had done this, using the homesteader’s flatbed wagon and two horses, having to pile up snow behind the wagon then roping both horses to the crate to drag it aboard. The corpse of Mrs. Martin was now in the barn, still on the wagon.
‘They gave her a bad time?’ the half-breed responded to the emaciated man’s opening, which was the first thing Lockwood had said since he had got up off his knees and come into the house.
He had led his pair of unwelcome guests into the small kitchen, lit a lamp and started a fire in the range. For the whole time, while Edge eased the clothing off Martin’s upper body and took a look at the bullet wound, Lockwood had acted as if he were alone - had used the first pan of boiled water to bathe the congealing blood off the furrow which a ricocheting shell had dug across the side of his neck.
He sat now where he had always sat, on a hard seated, straight backed chair at the table in the centre of the room. Edge had claimed the cushioned rocker to one side of the range.
Outside, the four dead lay where they had fallen on the snow, stiffening quickly in the bitterly cold air of the early morning hours.
‘Had her two times each,’ Lockwood answered, staring down at the splayed fingers of his work-roughened hands which he pressed against the table top. ‘One of ’em held a gun on me all the time. But least they didn’t make me watch. Kept me in the parlor. Had Stella tied to the bed in the other room. Cried a lot at first, she did. But then it was like she was struck dumb. I reckon somethin’ went in her mind. Could be she’d never have got over what they done to her. So maybe you did her a favor.’
‘What happened, feller?’ Edge asked, rising to take the boiling coffee pot off the range. He unhooked two china mugs from pegs on the dresser.
‘To her?’
‘No. Over at the depot and here at the house. When they first came to Butcherville.’
He set the mugs on the table and filled both to the brim. He carried his own mug of the strong, steaming brew back to the rocker and sat down, after placing the pot on the side of the range to keep warm.
‘Any reason I should answer your questions, mister?’ Until now the skinny farmer with the weak looking grey eyes and thinning grey hair had been speaking with a dull tone, as if out of a private world of misery. But as he said this he shifted his gaze toward Edge and the words he spoke were harsh with deep felt bitterness.
The half-breed pursed his lips. ‘You seem like a man who needs to talk. Nothing else you have to say will interest me. Not a lot of point to talking if no one listens.’
The fight went out of him and he dropped his head to stare at his hands again. ‘Stella was good at listenin’. You don’t find that in many women.’
He glanced across at the half-breed again and found his gaze trapped by a level stare of glinting blue indifference. When he escaped, he accused tonelessly: ‘I think I liked ’em three bastards out there better than you, mister. Least they talked halfway civil to me when they wasn’t rapin’ Stella.’
‘They fix you a cup of coffee, feller?’
Lockwood leaned forward, lowered his face over the mug and spat a stream of saliva into the coffee.
‘Your loss.’
‘Wor
th it, mister! A man that has feelin’s gotta relieve ’em the best way he can. If I spit in your eye, I reckon you’d kill me. Right?’
‘You got anything left to live for, feller?’
‘Not now Stella’s dead I ain’t.’
Edge nodded. ‘Then I wouldn’t kill you.’
Lockwood grimaced but did not look directly into the half-breed’s face this time. ‘How’s a man get to be so hard and mean as you, mister?’
Edge extended a forefinger to point down at Silas Martin. ‘An hour or so, he’s going to wake up or die. Whichever, I’ll be leaving then.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Means I don’t have the time to answer your question.’
Silence descended on the small, warm kitchen, marred only by the breathing of the unconscious old man. Until Morgan Lockwood spoke again.
‘They came last evenin’. Just as dusk was fallin’. Rode in on the north trail. Didn’t stop by this place, for which me and Stella was mighty grateful. They didn’t look like the kinda company folks want to entertain. Even though we hadn’t seen anyone ‘ceptin’ Dave Hardin’ since the big snow came.’
There was a dullness back in his tone, of a man needing desperately to talk but resenting the impassive audience which was all he could command.
‘Couple of passenger trains had come through from Denver by then, but nobody’d gotten off while the tanks were bein’ filled. Just too damn cold for folks, I guess. But a couple of real weird lookin’ guys got outta the caboose of the iron carrier that pulled into the depot.’
Edge continued to sip the hot, strong coffee without giving any indication that his interest had abruptly deepened in the story Lockwood was telling. Not that the homesteader looked up from his splayed hands to see if his words were producing any reaction from the half-breed.
‘Fancy dressed foreigners. Chinese, I’d guess. Like a lot of the guys they used to build the railroad. But these two looked a lot richer than ’em workers. Anyway, that’s when the trouble started over to the depot. Couldn’t see nor hear much from this place, but got told about it by one of ’em guys while the other two was using Stella.’
EDGE: THE LIVING, THE DYING AND THE DEAD (Edge series Book 29) Page 7
