‘Sure,’ Burton said quickly, gaining courage from the tally, as Edge moved painfully towards the batswings. ‘And we got us the cover of the village. All that’s outside is open country.’
‘Can we count on you, Edge?’ Parker asked.
‘Have the Apache fix me a hot bath, Melendez,’ the half-breed called from the doorway.
‘Si, señor.’
‘Alfaro put up six thousand dollars if we got Gonzalez within shooting range,’ Parker augmented, ‘With Wayne dead, it’s no loss to us to cut you in.’
Edge leaned against the door frame, taking deep breaths of the citrus-scented night air. ‘Obliged,’ he replied softly. ‘But I got a better reason than money to want Gonzalez dead.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘Usually do.’
He pushed open the doors and stepped outside. The cantina was still the only source of light at this end of the street. But a faint glow in the sky showed there were several lamps lit at the post. As he neared the open doors of the livery, Al Gibbon emerged, leading a saddled horse. The fat man came to an abrupt halt with a gasp of fear and shock. He reached a hand to his empty holster before he remembered his Remington was still on the floor of the cantina. The nearness of Edge made the booted Winchester useless.
‘Easy, feller,’ the half-breed soothed. ‘Our business is over, unless you want to start it again.’
The cross of crusted blood on his cheek showed up plainly in the moonlight. He shook his head. ‘No, mister. I reckon all my business in this stinkin’ town is finished. Bounty huntin’ ain’t what I was cut out for. You made that bastard of a bandit sound like one hell of a mean sonofabitch.’
‘Yeah,’ Edge replied as the fat man hauled himself up into the saddle, ‘He’ll steal the clothes right off a man’s back.’
Gibbon grimaced. ‘It’s what he done to that old-timer scares me.’
‘He’s still out there, Al!’ Parker called from the cantina doorway. ‘Be safer to stay here with us than make a run for it on your own.’
The fat man shook his head. ‘I won’t be on my own, Tim. The major’s sendin’ a couple of men for help. I’ll take my chances with them.’
‘How far to help, Edge?’ Parker wanted to know.
‘Too far. If the fellers from here get past Gonzalez they’ll only need bring back a burial detail.’
Parker kicked a door away from him, and stopped it dead with his hand as it flapped back. ‘So why the hell didn’t Alfaro send for reinforcements when we brought the woman in?’
‘Maybe he wasn’t scared enough.’
‘Luck to you, Tim,’ Gibbon called, jerking on the reins to wheel his horse away from the half-breed. ‘I figure this is my best chance to see Dorrie again,’
The clop of the gelding’s hooves sounded very loud moving along the empty street.
‘Dome’s a woman just finished three years in a Texas prison for shooting a man in the back to save Al’s life.’
Parker supplied grimly. ‘She found something to love in that yellow tub of lard!’
‘Maybe it ain’t just his belly that’s big,’ Edge muttered.
He stepped into the livery. There was enough moonlight shafting in through the open doorway to show him what he was looking for. From the discarded gear of the dead Bruce Wayne, he drew a Winchester rifle out of the boot and two cartons of .44 cartridges from a saddlebag. As he emerged, he heard the galloping hooves of horses. From the corner of the livery, he watched the unmistakable figure of Gibbon and two uniformed men riding due east across the valley floor. His face showed nothing of what he thought about the chances of the trio. When they were hidden behind the intervening lemon groves, he returned to the cantina. Melendez grinned and the bounty-hunters nodded their approval when they saw he was carrying the rifle.
In his room, the Apache woman was pouring a final pail of water into the steaming tub to fill it. ‘Señor, are we all to be killed?’ she asked dully, her haggard face pleading for reassurance in the flickering light of a candle she had set on the dresser.
‘Being dead be any worse than being alive for you?’ Edge asked indifferently.
‘It is not much, but it is something, señor.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, jerking a thumb towards the door.
‘We will all be killed?’
‘It’s something. What’s going to happen tomorrow is something else.’
She left the room and closed the door. Edge stripped himself naked except for the razor hung around his neck and lowered himself gratefully into the water. He ignored the soap and simply relaxed his punished body: feeling the liquid warmth begin to ease his pain.
For an hour he sat in the bathtub, until the water was cold. Then he toweled himself dry, leaving an ugly stain of grime on the rough fabric. He dressed then, checked the rifle, and stretched out on the bed. His belly rumbled a complaint that he had eaten no food since a greasy breakfast. But his muscles and mind made a priority claim to rest. And he slept, his hat over his face and his left hand fisted around the frame of a dead man’s Winchesters
‘They’re here!’
It seemed he had been asleep for only a matter of moments, But when he lifted his hat off his face strong morning sunlight through the window dazzled his eyes. There was pent-up excitement in the voice of Parker and a grin pasted to his handsome face. He had bathed and shaved and brushed off his clothes.
‘The whole band, it seems. Apparently preparing for a full attack. Centre and both flanks,’
Edge sat up and swung his booted feet to the floor. Every muscle responded badly to the movements, but the soak and the rest had eased the sharpness from the pain. He rose and went to the tub of scummy water. There he stooped and pushed his head fully under the surface. He held it there for long seconds. When he straightened, the church bell began to ring out. Not in warning. Seven measured notes to mark the hour.
‘Bandits at seven o’clock, uh?’ Edge growled. Time I was up,
‘And just us and the Federales.’ As he said this, his grin became a sneer of contempt. The damn locals are trying to pretend nothing is happening.’
He whirled and led the way along the corridor and across the empty cantina. Outside the sun was already beginning to make its heat felt. Tyree, Hawkins and Burton were on the plaza displaying their own brands of grimacing scorn. The villagers were also out in the bright sunlight, moving along the street, across the plaza and around to the rear of the packing station. Each carried a pick, a shovel or a hoe to continue work on the irrigation ditches beyond the south lemon groves.
‘You’re crazy, you know that!’ Hawkins called.
‘Stupid crazy!’ Burton added shrilly, ‘You don’t deserve to have men like us fightin’ for you!’
‘We do not deserve to have men like you here, señor,’ the widow of Pedro Martinez answered dully, her red-rimmed eyes raking across the faces of all the Americans. ‘This we know.’
The emptiness of her stare was somehow more potent than the most powerful expression of hatred would have been.
‘Frig them!’ Parker snarled and the curse had a strange ring coming from him.
He led his men at a run along the street. Edge followed at a more leisurely pace, aware that many of the villagers came close to the point of speaking to him. But it was not until he reached the curve of the street that his name was called.
‘Señor Edge!’ The tall, gaunt-faced priest stepped from the porch of his church. He had never looked more solemn,
‘Something you want, padre?’ Edge could see the bandits now. Perhaps a mile and a half out along the valley, mounted and advancing in a strung-out line at walking pace. A heat shimmer had not yet developed and every feature of the terrain stood out in stark clarity. Soon, it would be possible to recognize individual members of Gonzalez’s band.
‘To explain. Señorita Montez called a meeting in this church last night. Not just of the caballdo. Of everyone whose home is San Parral.’
‘I ain’t feeling left out,’ E
dge said evenly.
‘We are not cowards like the gringo named Gibbon, Señor Edge. But neither are we pistoleros. Any one of us would have done what Señorita Montez did to bring the wagon to San Parral. If we had been in her place. The places of her parents and brother.’
The bounty-hunters had reached the post. The gates were opened and they went in. Only Parker glanced back to see if Edge was following.
‘But that was different, was it not? There was danger, but always hope. Here there is only hopelessness unless the miracle for which we prayed comes to pass.’
‘Did Isabella join in that prayer, padre?’
He shook his head sadly, but not as a reply. ‘She told me what she said to you. But her confession was well received, The most Godly of us can forget our faith on occasions.’
‘And you’ve got a son to prove it,’ Edge said, without rancor.
Father Vega nodded now. ‘So it is a foolish man who casts the first stone, Señor Edge. You are still regarded very highly by all in San Parral. So it is not because of lack of faith in you that we appear to be failing you. It is just that you cannot perform miracles. And we have pleaded help from elsewhere.’
He crossed himself and turned his face to the sky.
‘No sweat, padre,’ the half-breed murmured. ‘I never did figure to compete with The Man who walks on the water. Just aim to kill the man who crucified my pride.’
Chapter Seven
THE adobe walls of the San Parral Federale post were each twenty feet high and a hundred feet long. And thick enough, which meant they would withstand rifle fire. The double timber gates were adequate. Wooden walkways, reached by a ladder either side of the gateway, ran along the west and north walls, four feet from the top. A single adobe building was angled against the south and east walls, subdivided into quarters, the mess, the stables, the armory and the post office. A twelve pounder cannon was mounted on a plinth in front of the porched entrance to the office. Its metalwork gleamed brightly in the morning sunlight. Alfaro had even had his men polish the steel plug jamming the muzzle.
The rest of the compound enclosed by the walls was open ground, swept clean of every speck of dust and compacted to rock hardness by the marching feet of hard-drilled Federales.
The man who had come down to open the gates for Edge shinned back up the ladder to join the rest aligned along the walkway of the north wall, The half-breed climbed up in his wake, the exertion reawakening the almost forgotten aches.
‘Anythin’ interestin’ in the priest’s sermon?’ Hawkins drawled.
‘Seems I come a bad fourth to the Holy Trinity,’ Edge answered halting behind Alfaro and Parker and narrowing his eyes against the sun’s glare to peer at the advancing riders.
‘At a time like this, it is unwise to be irreligious,’ Sargento Riaz said huskily, and crossed himself.
‘I didn’t argue,’ Edge countered evenly.
‘Bastard!’ Alfaro snarled. He was the only man with field glasses. He crouched to rest his elbows on the rough surfaced top of the wall. When the glasses were held steady to his eye he repeated the oath.
‘Comandante?’ Romero asked anxiously.
Alfaro straightened and let the glasses hang from the strap around his neck. ‘They have our men!’
‘Fatso, too?’ Tyree asked.
‘Al Gibbon,’ Parker amplified.
‘Him I did not see.’
The bandits were less than a mile away now, stretched out in a line of advance a hundred yards wide. Although the horses continued to be held to an easy walk, plodding hooves raised dust which made riders and mounts indistinct.
The bolts of fourteen Fruwirth carbines were worked on the order of Teniente Romero. Romero and his fellow lieutenant drew their revolvers. Federales and bounty-hunters bellied closer to the sun-heated wall.
‘A flag of truce, sir!’ Romero reported tersely.
‘I have eyes!’ Alfaro snapped. There was tension in his voice. The back of his uniform tunic seemed more darkly stained with sweat than any other, ‘Have the woman brought up here!’
‘She’s just a bedroll warmer, major,’ Edge reminded.
‘But she is one of the best of that kind,’ the major answered pointedly. The leer he showed to the half-breed failed to mask the underlying fear.
‘That she sure is,’ Hawkins agreed with a genuine smile of remembered pleasure.
Romero and the other lieutenant were briefly ashamed, until the more pressing need for concern regained control of their feelings.
The two men were detailed and hurried down the ladders and across the compound.
Out on the valley, the line of advancing bandits came to a halt. Then, before the dust settled, a group at the centre started forward again. Five riders, the one in the middle holding aloft a rifle with a white bandana tied to the muzzle. The pace was a steady canter, raising more dust. The thirty or more men left behind remained mounted. At a distance of half a mile they were faceless. But their gun belts and crossed bandoliers showed up starkly against their white shirts. Each rested a rifle stock on his right thigh, the barrel angled diagonally towards the sky.
‘For bandits, they appear well trained,’ Alfaro muttered.
‘This is no parade we’re reviewing, major,’ Parker growled tensely.
‘Al ain’t with ’em, that’s for sure,’ the young Tyree mused, and used a shirt sleeve to mop sweat from his forehead.
‘Must’ve killed him,’ Burton put in with a sigh,
‘That’s two wished they’d stayed trail hands,’ Tyree countered.
‘Different kind of picnic,’ Edge muttered. ‘Lot more red meat on this one.’
‘You got a rare sense of humor mister,’ Hawkins answered with a broad grin,
Edge judged the southerner with the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks the only man on the walkway not afraid. The half-breed moved further away from him, to the other side of Alfaro, between Riaz and the pasty-faced Burton.
‘Now the talk starts,’ the Federale commander rasped, his field glasses trained on the forward group of bandits.
The full-bodied Eva had not struggled against her escorts as they helped her across the compound and up a ladder to the walkway. With her left foot heavily bandaged and her wrists tied behind her, there had been little opportunity. And pain, exhaustion and humiliation had drained her of strength, perhaps even the will to resist imminent and inevitable death. Her dark eyes were empty of hope and she kept her full lips compressed as if her single resolution was to remain silent. During some interlude between rapes by the Federale officers, she had been allowed a needle and thread to sew her torn gown.
‘Hey, I see Saint Edge of San Parral delivered my message!’ Ortiz Gonzalez yelled.
He and the others had halted their horses about two hundred yards away. He had passed the flagged rifle to Toni and cupped his hands to his mouth as a makeshift bullhorn.
‘Saint Edge?’ Tyree growled.
‘It’s just talk, feller,’ the half-breed muttered, ‘Like I said, I’m a bad fourth.’
One of the captured Federales sat his horse next to Toni. The other was beside Teniente Romero’s namesake. The captives were in control of their own horses, but sat their saddles in a too-rigid posture. It was apparent that the ropes across the front of their tunics were lashed to some kind of support at their backs.
‘They treat you good, Eva?’ the bandit chief shouted.
The woman had been pushed into the line between Alfaro and Parker. The men who had brought her from below had returned to their positions and she was not covered by any guns. The pain of having to share her weight between both feet showed as large beads of sweat on her forehead and around her mouth. Salt hungry flies were as lacking in compassion as the men on opposing sides in the stand-off. With her hands bound, Eva was unable to brush them off her face.
‘Your woman is still able to perform her duties, bandito,’ Alfaro responded. ‘My men also?’
‘I figure we’re in the money, Tim,’ Jack Burt
on suggested, resting his cheek against the stock of his Winchester. ‘The bastard’s set up for a shot.’
The enlisted men and non-coms were also aiming rifles at the forward group, standing like statues in the mounting heat and intensifying glare of the sun, as motionless as the white adobe they leaned against.
‘He’s under a flag of truce!’ Parker snapped.
Alfaro merely stared contemptuously at the over-anxious bounty-hunter.
Edge touched the muzzle of his Winchester to the small of Burton’s taut back.
‘Okay, okay!’ Burton rasped, porting his rifle. ‘I never figured any of you guys to be so set on the honorable crap.’
‘Ain’t that,’ Edge answered evenly. ‘Just set on killing that feller myself.’
‘One thing for sure, Federale,’ Gonzalez called, ‘They’ll always do their duty without complainin’.’
He vented his harsh laugh, Romero and Toni leaned across and pushed the muzzles of revolvers into the necks of their captives. Both prisoners gaped open their mouths on cue.
Fresh sweat broke out on the forehead of Major Alfaro above the tightly-held field glasses. A gasp escaped his compressed lips. Then: ‘Their tongues are cut out.’
‘What happened to Al Gibbon?’ Hawkins yelled.
‘Who señor?’
‘The American who was with those two!’
The major with a close-up view of the lean, lined face of Gonzalez, uttered a low sigh of pleasure. ‘He looks most anxious,’ Alfaro reported.
‘There was no American!’ the bandit leader snarled. ‘What you tryin’ to do? Scare us?’
‘Al split and got through!’ Tyree gasped.
His voice sounded strained. His laugh was hollow.
‘And will not be concerned with anything except saving his own worthless hide,’ Tim Parker pointed out evenly.
The atmosphere of hope which had pervaded the line of men at the top of the wall abruptly disappeared, like a globule of spittle evaporated by the sun.
‘You can’t scare us!’ Gonzalez went on, his confidence mountings ‘If there had been a gringo with them, these Federale pigs would have told us! For they told us much before Toni and Romero grew tired of listening!’
EDGE: Savage Dawn (Edge series Book 26) Page 8
