EDGE: Ten Tombstones to Texas (Edge series Book 18)

by George G. Gilman

  But the will for revenge kept him on his feet - and even started him into a crazed run down the hillside. Unable to see, he charged towards the women instinctively, his scream becoming a deeper, more powerful sound of hatred. Edge, his head raised to watch, looked at the scene with cold silence. Muriel Tree had broken open the shotgun and was fumbling a new cartridge into the breech. Six feet away from her, Mathilda Tree held the revolver out in front of her, at the full stretch of both arms as she clutched the gun in her usual double-handed grip. As he ran, the horribly-wounded man started to fan his Colt, raking it from side to side.

  The older woman fired again - and for a second time failed to find her target. The bullet cracked close over the half-breed’s head.

  ‘See why you prefer to be called Miss Tree,’ he growled.

  It was the final shot exploding from Bately’s gun that half finished the job he and his two partners had come to do. It hit Muriel Tree in the right hip and she collapsed to her knees, dropping the freshly-loaded shotgun to the ground in front of her.

  ‘Mathilda!’ she shrieked above the snorting of the rearing horses.

  Aunt Matty started to use the double action of her revolver. Bately was knocked out of his crazed charge by a bullet in the stomach. He folded forward, lost his footing and went into a head-over-heels roll. The woman moved the gun to follow his course, continuing to squeeze the trigger. Three more times. In the space of as many seconds, Bately took a bullet in his bloodied face, one in his left foot, and another in his back. He finished his roll at the feet of his killer and became as still as only a dead thing can be.

  ‘It’s done, Mu,’ Aunt Matty rasped, lowering her arms, hands still wrapped around the butt of the gun.

  ‘Two more, Barnaby,’ Muriel gasped craning her neck to stare up at the sky.

  But then her eyes closed and she fell forward.

  ‘Muriel!’ the older woman screamed, fearing the worst.

  The worst happened as the half-breed eased upright, his tall, lean frame outlined on the brow of the hill. Muriel’s torso slammed down along the length of the shotgun. The trigger was jolted and the firing pin hit the rear of the cartridge. The report was muffled by the woman’s body. But it was loud enough to drive the tethered horses into a renewed bout of snorting panic. Muriel’s chin hit the ground, immediately in line with the muzzle, as the charge belched from the confines of the barrel.

  The entire front of Muriel Tree’s head was ripped off and splashed in a gory swathe towards the base of the hill. All that was recognizable in the lumpy, slickly-wet stain on the dirt, was a tuft of golden hair.

  ‘Muriel!’ her sister-in-law screamed again, but in grief instead of warning now. She made to go to the side of the dead women, but halted and turned to stare at the approaching half-breed. Her expression was of abject defeat and misery. ‘Why couldn’t it have been me?’ she implored helplessly, allowing the gun to drop from her hands.

  Edge stepped across the broad line of slick blood stretching away from the shattered head of the dead woman. ‘Because it was her, is all, ma’am,’ he answered.

  Anger quivered across her ugly face. ‘And you don’t give a damn, one way or the other?’ she snarled as the tears spilled from her eyes.

  Edge spat into the dirt. ‘Makes no difference to me,’ he admitted evenly.

  ‘You disgust me!’ the woman flung at him, using her sleeve to brush the tears from her deeply-lined cheeks.

  ‘Long as one of you stays alive to claim the bull,’ the half-breed amplified.

  ‘Is money all you care about?’

  ‘And staying alive. You want to start making the holes, ma’am?’

  She spun around and strode angrily towards the wagon. ‘Just three for Evans’s skunks!’ she growled. ‘Mu’ll get buried some place decent, where her grave can get took care of.’

  Edge nodded.

  The woman took both shovels from the wagon. ‘Seein’ as how you’re so damn eager for the money, best you help me, mister. Longer the job takes, farther Evans’ll take that bull away from us. You understand that?’

  Edge let his Winchester fall to the ground and held out his hands. Aunt Matty tossed one of the shovels towards him. ‘I dig,’ he said.

  Chapter Eight

  THE hours of darkness still had a long run ahead of them when Edge drove the wagon up out of the hollow. In front, his piebald gelding had replaced the dead stallion in the team. In the rear, the woman squatted beside Muriel Tree’s dead body which lay wrapped in a blanket. She was giving her emotions free rein now and her sobs were loud in the night. Behind the rig as it rolled over the brow of the blood-stained hill, three identical mounds with three identical tombstones bore silent witness to the latest slaughter of the long trek from one border to another.

  The half-breed’s narrowed eyes scoured the country to the south-east whenever the wagon reached a vantage point. He was not looking for a sign of the two men with the bull for he guessed they were now far ahead. If they had not pulled out at the same time as Hollis Millard, Ray Irwin and Dale Bately, they would certainly have started running at the sound of the gun battle.

  What he sought was a town, or a man-made trail that would indicate a town was within striking distance. For, irrespective of how he felt otherwise, he respected Mathilda Tree’s wish to bury her sister-in-law in consecrated ground. But they had to reach a town fast, before the dead flesh of the woman began to putrefy. By morning would be best. Certainly as early as possible after the sun rose to quicken the decomposing process with its heat.

  But the sun had been up an hour when he spotted the trail, cutting north to south towards a pass in the Gila Bend Mountains. To the north there was a broad panorama across low country with the horizon drawing closer as the heat shimmer thickened. In that direction, only the clearly defined trail showed that man had ever set foot on the land. He swung the wagon south, up into the mountains, and followed a trail that zigzagged to lessen the steepness of the climb. It took an hour to climb a couple of hundred feet and, when the team hauled the wagon up on to a broad shelf, Edge saw the tiny community. Half a mile away.

  Hardly a town. A dozen or so crudely built shacks grouped together at the base of a rise which was pocked with tunnel entries. Closer to the shacks, and on level ground, was a much larger hole with a heap of recently dug earth at the side. Just as Edge got his first glimpse of the community, two men moved out from between the shacks. They carried a sack between them. The men were several yards short of the rim of the large hole when they saw the wagon rolling towards them.

  They dropped the sack, drew their guns and fired. But the shots went straight up into the blueness of the morning sky, the revolvers held high above their heads.

  That shootin’?’ Aunt Matty called from inside the wagon. Her voice had the tone of one who has just awakened. There was a scrabbling sound as she fought her way over the hay bales to get to the front of the wagon.

  ‘Not at us,’ Edge replied as a third man appeared. This time on the roof of one of the shacks. He waved frantically with a strip of yellow material.

  Aunt Matty poked her head and shoulders through the front flaps of canvas and peered at the activity. All three men were shouting, but were too far off for their words to be more than unintelligible sounds. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  Edge slowed the team, but did not halt them. ‘Mining camp,’ he replied curtly.

  ‘I guessed that!’ the woman snapped. ‘What’s the shootin’, shoutin’ and flag-wavin’ for?’

  Edge halted the team now. The men with the guns holstered them and hefted the sack again. The flag-waver moved to the side of the shack roof and jumped down. ‘Looks like they got bad sickness there. That’s a quarantine flag, I figured.’

  At the lip of the large hole, one of the men drew a knife and slit open the sack. White powder spilled from the split. Then both men hefted the sack again and hurled it into the centre of the hole. The powder billowed in a stark white cloud. It rose and then began to float d
own.

  ‘You settle for a mass grave for your sister-in-law, ma’am?’ Edge asked.

  ‘That what it is?’ she asked, shocked.

  ‘They ain’t just burying lime.’

  The man with the yellow flag had advanced to a midway point between the shacks and the stationary wagon. He dropped the flag and cupped his hands around his mouth.

  ‘You folks better stay clear of this place!’ he bellowed. ‘We hit stagnant water and fever’s spread. Ten dead and as many dyin’.’

  He and the two men at the side of the mass grave looked healthy enough. All were stripped to the waist and bulging with miner’s muscles.

  Edge hitched the reins around the brake lever and cupped his own hands to his lips. ‘Two fellers with a stud bull pass by here?’ he yelled.

  ‘Middle of the night!’ came the response. ‘But steer clear of ’em, mister! We give ’em supplies and feed for the animals! Warned ’em it could have the sickness in it!’

  ‘Which way they go?’

  ‘Up through the pass to get on the Tucson Trail! You swing wide you want to go the same way!’

  Edge glanced at Aunt Matty. ‘Could be no one’ll live through it, ma’am,’ he pointed out. ‘But if they do, I reckon the grave’ll be well tended.’

  The woman gave a curt nod. ‘We don’t bury her soon, could be we’ll catch somethin’ bad off her.’

  The half-breed turned towards the mining camp again and cupped his hands as Aunt Matty struggled to the other side of the hay bales. ‘We got us a dead woman!’ he yelled. ‘Obliged if you’d bury her.’

  Even over such a distance, he saw the expressions of shocked suspicion that formed on the faces of the three miners. Then:

  ‘Why the hell should we?’ the spokesman demanded.

  Edge was about to reply, when attention was switched from him to the rear of the wagon. He heard the tailgate drop, then the thud as Aunt Matty sprang to the ground. He leaned out of the seat to look along the side and saw the woman move off the trail, carrying the blanket-wrapped body as though it weighed no more than a couple of pounds.

  ‘No farther, ma’am!’ the man with the flag warned when she had closed to within a hundred yards of him.

  Aunt Matty stopped abruptly, and knelt to rest the body reverently on the parched ground. From a pocket of her long coat she took some paper and a pencil. Still kneeling, she wrote a message. Then she took a pin from her hair to fix the paper to the blanket. She dropped the rest of the paper and the pencil and clasped her hands together in the attitude of prayer. The silence in the mountains took on the quality of that in a cathedral for the minute or so Mathilda Tree prayed.

  ‘You will have my eternal thanks,’ she called to the men as she got painfully to her feet.

  She waited for a nod from each of them, then turned and started back towards the wagon. The men waited until she had climbed aboard, to sit beside Edge, before walking across to the body.

  ‘You want to know what I wrote in the note?’ she asked as Edge flicked the reins to start the team and tugged gently on them to steer the horses off the trail for a wide sweep around the shacks.

  ‘Weren’t addressed to me,’ he replied.

  ‘I said to put a marker on the grave for Muriel. I told them her full name. And I said to put: “Murdered by one of her husband’s murderers”. Not very holy like, but it tells the truth.’

  The half-breed made no response.

  ‘And, after I’ve got my share of the money, I’m comin’ back here and I’m gonna see to it a proper monument is raised to that girl. What do you think of that, young feller?’

  Aunt Matty sat very erect on the seat and folded her arms across her small breasts. A look of grim determination was carved on her face. Her eyes, drained of tears now, were as hard as dark pebbles as they stared up at the pass through which the trail snaked.

  ‘I think you’re a woman who most times does what she sets out to do, ma’am,’ Edge replied softly.

  She nodded her agreement and turned to fix him with the hard stare. ‘Which proves I don’t have to marry a man to learn somethin’ from him.’

  Wry humor curled back Edge’s lips to show his teeth, gleaming among their surrounding of bristles. ‘Hope that don’t mean you’ve made five mistakes you’ll regret the rest of your life,’ he said.

  But Mathilda Tree was not yet ready to try humor as a palliative for grief. And, as she stared ahead at the pass, there was no indication that she ever would. Muriel’s death had hardened her: to a point, possibly, from which there could be no melting back to the gentler feminine characteristics.

  ‘I’d thank you,’ she said tautly, ‘to treat my marriages the way you asked me to treat yours.’

  The half-breed’s expression became impassive. ‘You’re learning a lot, ma’am,’ he told her softly as he veered the wagon back on to the trail. ‘What’s over is done. Don’t do anybody any good messing with the past.’

  ‘Unless a body’s got to make others pay for messin’ up the past.’

  ‘I ain’t about to argue with that,’ he replied, and an easy silence settled between them.

  Up at the pass, they were able to get a broad view across the country to the south and saw rock mountains dropping down to dirt foothills which, in turn, gave way to desert. They could pick out the trail, straight as an arrow’s flight, angling south-east for Tucson, lost through the heat shimmer and over the horizon.

  ‘Hungry for anything else except revenge?’ Edge asked.

  ‘How far to Texas?’

  He halted the wagon. ‘Two tombstones, I figure.’

  Her mouth line grew firmer, and she rose from the seat. ‘I guess your greed for the money matches mine for the lives those skunks. So if you reckon we got time to eat and rest, I’ll go along with it.’

  There was no more talk as, by tacit agreement, Edge attended to the needs of the horses while Aunt Matty set a fire and prepared a meal. Afterwards, the man shaved and then the woman used the still-hot water to wash the blood from the shotgun. She reloaded it and placed the gun behind the seat when the wagon started to roll again. The sun got hotter as it rose higher. The heat did not appear to diminish as the afternoon wore on. Dust kicked up by the hooves of the team billowed around Edge and Aunt Matty. They sucked it in through their mouths and nostrils and sweat pasted it to their faces.

  A day, a night and half another day slid into a past which both had agreed was best forgotten. During that time they maintained a steady pace and discovered it was fast enough. For, from the anxious-to-talk, lonely men who tended the stage-line way stations, they learned that they were gradually over-hauling the two men with the high-priced bull. At first, the information they received indicated it was the bull which was holding up Evans and Jeb Stuart. Then, ten miles west of Tucson, they heard that Stuart had taken sick. The men had rested at the way station until, before dawn, Evans pulled out with the bull in tow. Stuart had awakened two hours later. He had been terrified rather than angry at being left behind. Despite his sickness, he had taken off at a gallop in pursuit of his boss.

  ‘The fever?’ Aunt Matty suggested as the wagon began to head along the final stretch of trail towards Tucson.

  ‘Maybe.’

  The woman looked as if she was about to spit, but transferred her disgust into words. ‘And maybe he’ll die before I get a chance to plug him, the lousy skunk.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  There ain’t none for him. For me, all the difference in the world.’

  Edge nodded. ‘Guess so. But ain’t no use getting into a sweat about it, ma’am.’

  ‘Horses sweat, young feller,’ she snapped. Men perspire. Ladies merely glow.’

  Edge glanced at her. ‘You’re dazzling me,’ he said wryly.

  ‘I’ll ask you to pay attention to your drivin’, mister. And work the horses into a sweat. We can buy a new team in Tucson.’

  ‘You paying?’

  ‘Hock eveythin’ I own if I have to. Why, Vic Evans co
uld catch the fever same as Jeb Stuart.’ The mere thought of being cheated in this way fed fresh fuel to the old woman’s anger. She glowered at Edge. ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  The half-breed cracked the reins over the backs of the horses. ‘Hope for your sake Evans is,’ he answered as the team broke into a gallop.

  They were eight hours behind Evans at the last way station before Tucson: and six behind Stuart. When they reached town in the evening twilight they had pulled back two hours on the fat man. And Stuart was only thirty minutes behind his boss.

  This information came from the man who ran the town livery where Mathilda Tree purchased a fresh team. It had been a good day for the man. Both Evans and Stuart had also done horse business with him. He was able to pass on the information that Jeb Stuart was real sick. Evans had looked fine.

  After buying supplies to top up their diminished stock, Edge and the woman pulled out of Tucson under a night sky that was clouding over: the low-hung cover for the moon and stars being driven down from the north by a strengthening wind.

  ‘That’s Apache country you folks are headin’ into!’ the liveryman called after them.

  Aunt Matty reached into the back of the wagon, took out the shotgun and rested it across her bony knees. Clear of the lights of the town, the grim lines of her expression altered slightly to depict a quiet apprehension as she surveyed the dark landscape.

  ‘Seem to have heard somewhere that Injuns ain’t supposed to attack at night,’ she said suddenly, her voice no louder than a whisper.

  Edge nodded. ‘Lot of white folks have heard that,’ he answered, and spat down at the side of the trail. ‘But a lot of Indians haven’t.’

  ‘Ain’t anxious for myself,’ she said after a long silence, during which she continued to peer around in every direction - even leaning to the side to stare behind the rolling wagon. Injuns are the same as the sickness, young feller. They could get Evans and Stuart before me.’

  ‘Sure, ma’am,’ Edge allowed. ‘You already told me what the difference would be.’