Two hours outside El Paso, they rode past a boundary marker which told them they were on Ryan land. They swung eastwards into the valley and it took them a further three hours of hard riding to reach Greenville. It was a town that was well named, for it overlooked a vast acreage of fine grazing and woodland. On the way, they had past no more markers to show they had moved off Ryan property. They had seen a lot of beef on the hoof, but no people.
In Greenville there were people, most of whom went about their daily business without casting a second glance at the weary looking, dust-covered couple who rode through town. And neither Edge nor Aunt Matty paid any attention to anything about Greenville except a wagon that was parked outside the Lone Star Saloon. The wagon had high sides and a conventional tail-gate, but with a framework of wooden bars fixed on the top of it. The doleful eyes of the white bull peered disinterestedly out through the bars.
Two broadly built men were lounging in rocking chairs at either side of the hotel entrance. And these were the only people in the spick and span town who kept the approaching riders under close scrutiny. They continued to watch with unblinking eyes as Edge and Aunt Matty slid from their saddles and hitched their horses to the rail.
‘Ryan bought that there bull yet?’ Aunt Matty demanded, jerking a thumb towards the wagon then starting to unfasten the bulky saddle-bag holding the last tombstone.
Both men got grim looks on their faces and used the forward rock of their chairs to help them upright.
‘Mr. Ryan’s business is his own, lady,’ the one on the left snapped.
‘Work for him?’ Edge asked evenly, sliding the Winchester from the saddle-boot and canting it up to his shoulder.
Two of his top hands,’ the one on the right drawled. ‘What’s it to you?’
Edge pursed his lips. ‘Nothing, unless you happen to know whether he’s still paying fifty grand for the beef.’
Aunt Matty, working with sweaty faced determination, had managed to ease the heavy grave marker out of the saddlebag. She had to hold it low down, in both hands. The two men on the hotel stoop stared at the tombstone with dumbstruck awe. The woman grinned at them. She had done a lot of grinning, smirking and quiet smiling over the final, untroubled leg of the long journey.
The taller man was the first to recover from the surprise. ‘I told the lady - Mr. Ryan’s business is—’
‘Ours when he’s doing it with us,’ Edge cut in, and started up the step to the sidewalk.
Both men went for their guns, hands moving as if at the dictate of some linking machine. Edge whirled and slapped down the Winchester, pumping the action. Before the revolvers were clear of the holsters, the rifle was aimed at the head of the bull.
‘Drop the irons, fellers,’ the half-breed said evenly. ‘Or Ryan’s in on the dead meat business.’
‘What is this?’ the shorter man demanded.
Aunt Matty sniffed. ‘Drop the guns like the man says and you can come and find out,’ she invited flatly.
‘Mr. Ryan!’
It was the shorter one again, his voice raised to a bellow. Edge’s narrowed eyes swept over the men, who were frozen in the act of drawing their guns, barrels not yet clear of the holsters. Then to Aunt Matty who continued to express confidence, her slender frame not bending under the weight of the last tombstone. Finally, along the street. The citizenry of Greenville displayed total indifference to what was happening in front of the Lone Star Hotel.
A window banged open on the second floor of the hotel. Both Edge and Aunt Matty glanced up. The bull remained firmly under threat of death and the tombstone stayed solidly held. Framed in the upstairs window was a man of middle-years. Big-built and well-dressed. Wearing a neatly trimmed grey beard.
‘Guess you’re Mathilda Tree and the hired gun,’ he called down evenly.
‘Oh, my God!’ a recognizable voice croaked from within the room. There was a sudden splashing of water.
Woodrow Ryan snapped his head round to look at Vic Evans. ‘Stay where you are!’ he ordered. Then he looked down into the street again. ‘Apaches didn’t get you over Arizona way, uh?’ he asked reflectively. Then he gave a curt nod. ‘Since you made it I reckon you deserve a hearing. Come on up.’
‘No!’ Evans shrieked, with another splash of water. ‘They’ll kill me!’
Ryan sighed. ‘Quit whining, Evans!’ he growled without turning this time. Then he got frost into his dark-eyed gaze as he stared down at Aunt Matty and Edge. ‘No one kills nobody on Ryan land unless Woodrow Ryan says so.’ He moderated his tone. ‘Let ’em up, fellers.’
He stepped back out of sight and the window banged closed.
‘Okay,’ the taller man allowed. ‘But we keep our damn guns.’
‘Edge?’ Aunt Matty asked. ‘You don’t want to kill that bull.’
The half-breed pursed his lips. ‘Back in the holsters - all the way.’
‘You mean any harm to Mr. Ryan?’ the shorter one wanted to know.
‘Treat folks the way they treat me.’
There were the sounds of the guns being returned to the holsters. Edge slanted the rifle to his shoulder again. It was still cocked.
‘The lady first,’ one of Ryan’s men said, in the tone of an order.
Aunt Matty nodded and went through the open double doorway into the shady interior of the hotel lobby. It was a lot cooler in there, the air fresh with the scent of scrubbed timber. The two men held back only a moment, realized they could make no more demands, and followed the woman. The bespectacled desk clerk pretended the same disinterest as the people out on the street and was suddenly very busy with paperwork as the group crossed to the foot of the stairway and started up.
‘Vic Evans’s room?’ Aunt Matty called.
The clerk swallowed hard. ‘Five.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But you didn’t ought to go in, lady. He’s taking a bath.’
Aunt Matty sniffed. ‘He came into the world naked,’ she said with soft-voiced menace.
The clerk gulped again.
At the head of the stairs, the woman strode purposefully towards the appropriately numbered door. It was closed. Ryan’s men kept shooting anxious glances over their shoulders at the impassive Edge. The half-breed showed no expression, his lips pursed as if he was on the point of whistling a melancholy tune.
‘Come on in,’ Ryan yelled as he heard the footfalls out on the landing.
‘Open the door for a burdened lady, young feller,’ Aunt Matty said to the taller of Ryan’s men.
‘I ain’t gonna take—’
Edge snapped the rifle down to level it. ‘Cheaper to blast you than the bull,’ he warned softly.
Both men became like statues again. Then the tall one inched forward. ‘It’ll be me comin’ in first, Mr. Ryan,’ he called, much louder than necessary.
The rancher ventured a short laugh. ‘After what I’ve heard, understand why you’re nervous, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Come on in, Harding.’
The handle rattled and Harding pushed the door open. Aunt Matty had stepped to the side. Now she leaned forward to peer between the frame and the solidly built body of Harding. She showed the broadest grin of all. There was the sound of a man catching his breath. It had to be Evans. Harding moved into the room, and Aunt Matty shuffled in behind him, only now beginning to show the strain of hauling the heavy tombstone.
‘You sure look like you’re seein’ a ghost, Vic,’ the woman taunted. ‘But I sure enough ain’t one.’
The second Ryan man did not need a jab in the back from the Winchester to urge him into the room. He wasn’t about to miss the action. Edge moved through the doorway only a moment behind him.
‘Mr. Ryan!’ Evans pleaded. ‘She’s even got a tombstone for me!’
The terrified man sat quivering and naked in a tin bathtub. His clean, white skin contrasted starkly with the black scum coating the water to hide him from the waist down.
Ryan ignored Evans. He was seated on a rattan chair at the side of the bed. ‘Some
thing you people should know,’ he said evenly, ‘before there’s more killin’ on account of the animal.’ He started to rise. ‘There was a mistake and—’
‘He’s the mistake!’ Aunt Matty cut in, continuing to stare fixedly at the handsome face of the man in the tub. ‘He was born a mistake and he’s been makin’ ’em ever since.’
‘Mathilda, listen to Mr. Ryan!’ Evans pleaded. ‘The bull ain’t—’
‘Important!’ the woman snarled.
Footfalls sounded on the stairway, clearly heard through the open doorway.
‘You’ve been a snivelin’ cowardly skunk all your life, Vic!’ Aunt Matty snarled. ‘Can’t expect you to die any other way, I’m thinkin’.’
The newcomer was on the landing now, quickening his pace towards room five. There was a frenetic disturbance under the scummed water. Aunt Matty gave a shriek of horror as she saw a look of cunning replace the fear on Evans’s face. Then his hands came clear of the bath water. He used the same double grip Aunt Matty favored. It was a Colt .44 he aimed at her. As the woman released the tombstone and a small man wearing a green eyeshade pulled up short in the doorway, Harding and his sidekick went for their guns again.
‘One mistake’s enough!’ Edge warned.
‘Leave it!’ Ryan bellowed above the crash of the chunk of marble against the floor.
The man in the doorway ducked from sight. Aunt Matty fumbled in the pocket of her long coat. Evans squeezed the trigger of the Colt. He hadn’t cocked it. He gave a hoarse cry of horror as the trigger remained inert. Then his wet thumb slipped off the dripping hammer as Aunt Matty leveled her gun. The double-action needed no cocking. The Tranter exploded in the two-handed grip. The woman rocked back only slightly with the recoil. The Colt fired an instant later, as Evans opened his mouth to scream. But he was dead before he could utter a sound. It was Aunt Matty who added noise to the moment of silence following the gunfire. She gave a grunt of sadness as she looked down at her own blood.
The range was just a few feet and both were freak shots. The woman’s bullet plunged into Evans’s chest, burrowed a hole through his heart and drove out of his back without touching a bone. It punched a hole in the bath and the dirty water began to drain out and spread across the bare floorboards. The dead man’s bullet angled downwards, hit the marble tombstone and ricocheted on to a new course. It penetrated Aunt Matty’s lower stomach and didn’t stop until it had smashed through her entrails to puncture a lung. She sat down hard and fell backwards, to lean against the doorjamb. Blood bubbled in her throat, but she continued to live.
‘Reckon that settles it,’ Woodrow Ryan said with a nod, voice and expression totally lacking emotion. ‘No way of knowin’ which party really owned the beef. So I give Mr. Evans the same chance I figured the lady had. Can’t pay a dead man.’
He reached into the inside pocket of his well cut jacket and drew out an envelope.
‘Safe to come in now, Mr. Ryan?’ the little man with the eye-shade called.
‘Sure, Herbie,’ the rancher answered.
The man stepped nervously into the doorway and looked with shocked eyes from the man in the emptying tub to the raggedly breathing woman.
‘Read what my telegraph said, Herbie,’ Ryan instructed, as he drew the flap out of the envelope.
Edge saw the money. All hundred dollar bills. Not nearly enough to add up to fifty thousand. Then his hooded-eyed gaze raked across the room to fix upon the little man.
‘Lady oughta have a doctor, Mr. Ryan,’ the man whined.
A doctor wouldn’t be able to help Aunt Matty. Her ugly face was bloodless. The dark stain on the front of her coat, enlarging by the moment, showed where most of her blood was going.
‘Read, Herbie,’ Ryan insisted impatiently.
Herbie unfolded an old-looking telegraph form. He glanced around at everybody, then cleared his throat. ‘Addressed to Barnaby Tree. At a town way up north. Signed by Mr. Ryan. Reads like this: “Bull all is claimed to be, will pay five thousand dollars for the animal.” That’s all.’ He blinked as he made another survey of the room.
‘Beat it, Herbie,’ Ryan ordered.
The little man disappeared from the doorway, happy to leave. He began to run after taking his first few steps.
‘That was the mistake,’ the rancher said. ‘Somewhere along the line, that five thousand got another zero added to it. I ain’t fool enough to offer no fifty grand for an animal that ain’t proved itself at stud.’ His dark eyes moved from the dying Aunt Matty, to Edge, and back again. ‘Hope you folks will take my word for that.’
Edge nodded. ‘Fifty grand was always too much.’
‘Young feller,’ Aunt Matty said weakly, forcing the words around the rising blood. ‘You divide it up the way we agreed.’
Her eyes, becoming glazed as death encroached, remained fixed upon the body in the bath as the water, its black scum now streaked with red, widened its staining of the scrubbed floor.
Ryan handed the money to the half-breed, who counted off twenty-five of the bills and folded them into his pocket.
‘I’m gonna die, Edge,’ the woman said, and a trickle of blood spilled from the corner of her mouth and laid a trail down to the hair-sprouting mole. That two and a half thousand that’s mine . . . you fix for me to be taken back and buried along with Mu?’
The half-breed gave the woman’s half of the money back to Ryan. ‘You know the local mortician better than me, feller,’ he said. ‘Fix it. She’ll need a marker. I’ll tell him where.’
Woodrow Ryan seemed on the point of expressing his resentment at the half-breed’s demanding attitude. But he met the cold stare of the ice blue eyes. ‘I’ll have my men take care of it,’ he promised as Edge turned towards the door.
‘Do that.’
‘He was the worst of the lot,’ Aunt Matty rasped, the words powering more blood from both corners of her mouth now.
Edge halted and looked back as he was about to step over the frail dying form. All the water had drained from the bathtub now, to expose Evans in complete, lilywhite nakedness.
‘The skunk with the biggest stink,’ the woman went on. ‘His whole life was nothing but a filthy, rotten, stinking…’ Her beautiful body folded forward to hide her ugly face and Mathilda Tree died.
Edge clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he moved out into the hallway. ‘Yeah,’ he muttered. ‘But nobody can say he didn’t die clean.’
Don’t Miss #19 In George G. Gilman’s
Bestselling Series…
EDGE
Other titles in the EDGE series from Lobo Publications
#1 The Loner
#2 Ten Grand
#3 Apache Death
#4 Killer’s Breed
#5 Blood On Silver
#6 The Blue, The Grey And The Red
#7 California Kill
#8 Seven Out Of Hell
#9 Bloody Summer
#10 Vengeance Is Black
#11 Sioux Uprising
#12 The Biggest Bounty
#13 A Town Called Hate
#14 Blood Run
#15 The Big Gold
#16 The Final Shot
#17 The Final Shot
#18 Ten Tombstones To Texas
And More to Come…
EDGE: Ten Tombstones to Texas (Edge series Book 18) Page 13
