EDGE: Montana Melodrama

by George G. Gilman

  Sheldon yelled: "So you company men can be certain you'll get paid within the week! And I feel sure the businessmen of this town will extend credit for that period wherever it is necessary!"

  Another chorus of voices expressed a restrained satisfaction and the crowd began to disperse.

  The Linn Players had advanced to the front of the Lone Pine but seemed reluctant to go closer to the scene of the triple shooting. They all looked as terrified as most of the Ridgeville citizens sounded.

  "Did we hear correctly, sir?” Linn asked huskily. "The bank has been robbed of every cent?"

  Edge drained his glass and thrust it toward the youngest male member of the company, an effemi­nate boy of about eighteen who took the glass au­tomatically and was surprised to find himself holding it. "Be obliged if you'd return this when you go back inside. Yeah, feller. Opinion seems to be that a bunch called the Campbells got away with everything in the bank. Killed three people in the process."

  "Oh, my God!" Linn gasped. "What are we go­ing to do? The entire receipts after expenses from a four month sell-out tour."

  "Aw, shit!" the beautiful Elizabeth Miles rasped, speaking her thought aloud. Then, more forcefully: "Isn't anybody going to go after the thieves?" Her flashing green eyes shifted from the dispersing crowd on the street to her frowning fel­low players and then settled on Edge.

  The half-breed shook his head as he patted his hip pocket. "I take personal care of what's mine, lady."

  "And so long as you're all right, it doesn't mat­ter about anybody else?" She sneered.

  "Why should it?"

  "No reason, mister. Except that you look like the kind of man who makes a living out of other people's troubles."

  Edge nodded. "Sometimes I do, lady."

  "But who around this town can afford to pay you now?"

  "Nobody, I guess. But I ain't looking for work anyway." As he swung away from the anxious frown of Linn and the scowl of Elizabeth Miles, he patted his hip pocket again. "I already told you, lady. The Campbells didn't leave me in the soup."

  Chapter Two

  BECAUSE Ridgeville was not on a major trail to anywhere and boasted of nothing to attract tour­ists, the town had no hotel. There was a boarding-house just across from the Lone Pine Saloon; it was run by a frail old spinster who had been so appreciative of Hamilton Linn's performance. Normally it catered to the needs of itinerant log­gers; and from its run-down appearance these were few and far between.

  Edge had been told to try his luck at Miss Emma's place by the redheaded bartender when he first reached Ridgeville at midday. But the little old lady had claimed that all her rooms were taken by the Linn Players. He did not believe this because the two-story house was too big and ram­bling to be fully occupied by the theatrical com­pany. And his impression that she was lying was strengthened by her frosty attitude toward him: making it plain that she did not approve of the way he looked.

  Nevertheless Miss Emma did tell him that John James down at the livery sometimes allowed strangers to sleep in his stalls. And she added with a sniff that the qualifications for this privi­lege seemed to be a capacity to match drink for drink with John James and a ready ear for his endless stories that interested nobody but himself.

  So it was to the JJ Livery Stables that Edge went now, moving at a slow and easy gait along the southeastern stretch of Pine Street. All the way down to where it ended at the bank of the creek, the sheer, curved face of the sixty-foot-high Indian Bluff looming across the other side.

  He walked between the darkened and shut­tered facades of business premises, for Pine was the commercial street of Ridgeville. The second street, which was called Douglas, was lined on both sides with houses, a few of which were owned by the town's businessmen but most by the lumber company, which rented them to its em­ployees.

  A gleam of light showed through a crack in the big double doors of the livery. Edge assumed this meant that the owner of the place was not yet bedded down. Before he opened one of the doors, the half-breed struck a match on the butt of his Colt and lit the cigarette he had rolled while walking down the street.

  "If I'd known them theatricals was gonna play­act somethin' excitin' with shootin' and stuff like they done, I mighta come see it," John James growled as Edge stood on the threshold, peering out at the street where a man was hurrying toward him. He recognized him as the company man Sheldon, now wearing a topcoat and hat.

  The livery was a large establishment with a dozen stalls along each wall and a living area at the rear. It was as clean as a working stable ever could be. There were just two empty stalls, which was a measure of JJ's success at his business. Half­way down the central aisle a ladder led up to the trapdoor that opened into the hayloft. Edge waited until he had walked past this before he said: "The shooting was for real, JJ. Bunch of men just robbed the bank. Killed the banker and his wife and your local lawman."

  James was about fifty. Short and overweight, he sported a potbelly and a pair of breasts that resembled those of a girl on the verge of puberty. If he had bought any new clothes since his body and limbs had begun to run to fat, Edge had not seen him in them. The stained pants and under­shirt he wore were contoured to his every fleshy bulge. He was bald except for a ring of gray hair that reached from ear to ear around the back of his head. There was more gray hair sprouting along his top lip in a bushy mustache. His face was round and he had bulbous cheeks that crowded his small, dark eyes.

  The unhealthy ruddiness of his complexion, the glaze in his eyes, and the sloppiness of his garb marked him as a drunk. But the livery business paid him enough so that he could afford the liquor. And he always kept his wits sufficiently about him to do a good job of tending to horse­flesh—on the premise that if he was ever too drunk to do his chores, he would lose out on the business he needed to buy more liquor.

  "Bart Bolt and Joe and Amy Trask are dead?" He was instantly as sober as he probably ever got. "Sonofabitch! Good old Bart was in here havin' a snort . . . couldn't have been more than ten minutes before the shootin'. Sonofabitch!"

  “It sure is that right enough, JJ," Sheldon growled as he entered the livery. "Money isn't important, though I suppose the company won't view it that way when they have to come up with more to meet the payroll."

  He entered one of the stalls close to the front of the stable without pausing in his bitter-toned talk. "It's terrible about the sheriff and Mr. and Mrs. Trask being gunned down that way. But rest as­sured, JJ. The Campbell gang will not get away with this. The company has the funds and connections to locate and hire the best men available to hunt down and bring the culprits to justice."

  The living quarters were not partitioned off from the rest of the stable. They occupied a twenty-foot by twenty-foot area which was crowded with a narrow bed, a table and two chairs, a closet, and a cooking range. A fire was burning in the range.

  Edge did not become aware of just how chilly the night air, had been until he felt the warmth from the glowing grate of the range. He sat down in the chair across the table from the grim-faced liveryman and listened to Sheldon. Edge smoked and JJ started to drink again. With a single shot of rye whiskey he seemed to get drunk in as short a time as he had appeared to sober up a few mo­ments before.

  A pot of coffee was bubbling on the range; its aroma went some way to negate the smell of horses and human body odor that otherwise per­vaded the atmosphere. As JJ poured himself another drink and Sheldon urged his horse from its stall, Edge rose from the table and went to the range. He took a tin mug down from a nearby shelf and filled it with coffee.

  "Good night to you, gentlemen," the lumber company man called as he led his mount out of the stable. "They'll pay for what they did. By God, how they'll pay!"

  If JJ heard what Sheldon promised as the door closed behind him, he was not impressed by it. He simply threw his new drink down his throat and poured another.

  Edge sipped the strong coffee and remained standing at the range. Sensing that his host was getting ready
to talk, and prepared, for a while, to be the passive listener that Miss Emma had said was one of the requirements for being allowed to bed down at the livery. He had spent much of the afternoon in the same way, while the liveryman attended to his chores and related the story of his life.

  JJ offered Edge a drink, but took no offense when it was declined. Neither had the older man been miffed when the half-breed drifted off to sleep on his bedroll in a stall, lulled by JJ's voice and the gurgling sounds of the fast-flowing Little Creek. For when the liveryman nudged Edge awake three hours later, it was to invite him to share a meal of well-cooked pork and beans.

  "Was gonna be payday for the company men tomorrow. And for folks like me that do business with company men. Time for us to collect on all the credit we been givin'. The trail from Casper got washed out for a while and ain't no company man been paid for more than a month." When JJ started to talk, he peered down the central aisle of the stable. Now he allowed his head to drop for­ward so he was gazing into the shot glass he gripped in his big hands. "When good old Bart left here he said he was gonna go by the bank and see if the Trasks needed a hand. To divide the money from the big boxes into the little pack­ets that each man was supposed to get this mornin'. It is after midnight now, ain't it, mister?"

  One of the big doors at the front of the livery opened again and Hamilton Linn entered. He was no longer in his Shakespearian costume and he looked shorter and thinner in a cream-colored duster coat and a black derby. Older, too. He was probably on the brink of sixty. Five and a half feet tall and several pounds underweight.

  Edge had not been aware that the man was wearing theatrical makeup in the saloon. Without it, he was seen to have a pale and waxy complex­ion with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, a thin and crooked nose, a sour-looking mouth, and a weak jaw.

  "Good old Bart was about the only friend I had, I reckon," JJ muttered.

  "What the sheriff was, sir, was too old for his job," Hamilton Linn boomed out, in a bass voice that was as strong offstage as on.

  The liveryman wrenched his head up to glare with drunken resentment at the newcomer and demanded: "Who the frig asked you to butt in?"

  Linn was momentarily taken aback by the degree of venom in JJ's voice. But then he nodded sagely when he saw the man at the table pour an­other drink from the now just quarter-full bottle. "I came here to speak with you, Mr. Edge," he said after dismissing JJ with a grimace of disgust. "To request your assistance."

  "Helping other people is what other people do, feller," the half-breed answered.

  "I’ll friggin' help you, mister!" JJ snarled, springing up from the table, glass in one hand and bottle in the other. "Comin' in here runnin' off at the mouth about good old Bart. I'll help you outta my place! With the friggin' toe of my friggin' boot! If you don't turn right around and leave under your own friggin' steam!"

  Linn spared another grimacing glance for JJ. He saw that the man was swaying on his splayed legs and could barely keep his slack mouth closed after throwing whiskey into it, so that most of the liquor ran down his jaw. Then the actor returned his level gaze to the impassive face of Edge and promised: "It will be to your financial advantage if you hear me out and agree to the proposition I put to you, sir."

  JJ hurled the empty glass against a wall but continued to grip the uncapped bottle by the neck. "You hear me, mister!" he snarled. "You and your bunch is stayin' at the old crone's place! And takin' care of your nags in her stable! So you got no business to do in my livery! And where you're standing right now is in my livin' quarters! Where no one comes unless I friggin' invite them! And I ain't even invitin' you to leave, mister! I'm friggin' tellin' you!"

  He came out from behind the table to get close to the actor. Linn stood his ground and spread a sneer of contempt across his thin face, unafraid of the much heavier man who was consumed by drunken rage and apparently lacking in any kind of coordination between his mind and muscles.

  "You have liquor where your mind should be, sir!" Linn boomed. "Why do you not return to your chair and sit down before you fall down?"

  JJ reacted to this the same way he had reacted when Edge told him three people had died from the shooting down the street. It was as if he had not taken a drink in weeks—but on this occasion his anger was far greater and had a ready target to give it outlet.

  He made as if to swing around and go back to the table—to do as the actor had tauntingly suggested. But in reality the move was made for the sake of lengthening the arc of the bottle, now sud­denly become a club. His hand was fisted around its neck and rose high as he drew back his arm.

  Hamilton Linn spotted the movement as an at­tack and was suddenly afraid. Not of being hurt, but of what he was certain he had to do to keep from having the bottle smashed against the side of his head. He felt this as his left hand delved into the pocket of his duster. Edge heard the tell­tale click of a gun hammer being cocked an in­stant before Linn yelled: "Don't be a fool!"

  The half-breed rasped a curse through clenched teeth as he dropped his mug of coffee and lunged forward in a partial crouch. His right shoulder canted to thud against the upper left arm of Hamilton Linn; his left hand clawed to catch hold of JJ's swinging bottle.

  The actor went into a sideways sprawl with a cry of alarm that sounded in unison with the crack of a gunshot. And Edge moved instinctively to get clear of the small-caliber bullet that tore out of Linn's coat pocket. He smelled the scorch of the bullet-holed coat fabric.

  The liveryman turned to track the falling Linn with glowering eyes and in his rage was not even aware that Edge had sent the actor crashing to the floor. Then JJ gave vocal vent to an even greater degree of fury, as the bottle made shatter­ing impact with an unseen target just short of Hamilton Linn.

  Edge felt a bolt of agony as the bottle thudded against his left temple. He glimpsed through a spray of liquor and broken glass the shocked face of the man he had knocked to the floor. Heard JJ curtail his shriek of high anger. Smelt the spilled whiskey. Wondered if he was seeing the actor with both eyes or if one was blinded by shards of bottle glass imbedded in it. Sensed he was an in­stant away from slumping into unconsciousness—that his powerful lunge toward Linn was about to end as a limp-limbed collapse.

  "You've killed him!" the actor boomed.

  Pitching facedown into a bottomless black hole, the half-breed heard the voice of JJ responding to Linn but was unable to discern what the livery­man was saying.

  Then a woman spoke, very clearly. She said: "Shit, it makes me feel sick just to look at it."

  And Edge was surprised to hear his own voice say—when he was certain he had only thought— "You shouldn't speak ill of the dead, lady."

  Chapter Three

  ELIZABETH Miles vented her own surprise in a gasp and Edge had a fleeting impression of her flinching away from him as he cracked open his eyes. Fleeting because the dazzlingly bright light that lanced against his eyes sparked an explosion of intense pain under his skull—which was only marginally eased when he dropped his hooded lids.

  "Go ahead and cry out, Mr. Edge," the actress urged in a hard and biting tone. "It isn't possible for me to think any the less of you. And there's no one else to hear you."

  For what seemed a very long time, the half-breed hated her. Not for what she had said. His teeth were gritted and his lips curled back in an ugly snarl to prevent a scream of pain from burst­ing out of his throat. And the look on his face was just one result of how his body was reacting to the searing agony in his head—his muscles drawing the skin taut between every bone of his frame. He hated her simply because of the sound of her voice—each syllable seeming to compound the thudding pain.

  But it was simply his punished brain playing tricks with time. The agony remained at a high peak of intensity for just a few seconds. And when he cautiously cracked open his eyelids he quickly saw he had been tricked once before—that the period between hearing the mumbling words of JJ and the crystal-clear voice of Elizabeth Miles had been far longer than he ha
d at first thought. For the dazzling brilliance which had so unexpect­edly assaulted his eyes was not from a kerosene lamp. It was simply sunlight shafting down on to him through a window.

  "To me, you're a pain in the ass anyway. But don't take that personally. I regard all men the same way."

  "You've got a bad mouth, Miss Miles," he rasped through the gritted teeth. "But you should know that each time you open it, it ain't my feelings you're hurting."

  "If you'll just hold still, I can do what's neces­sary without talking, Edge. Or you can give my day a really fine start by telling me to get the hell out of here. That you'd prefer somebody else to act as your nurse."

  Edge saw they were in the JJ Livery Stables without needing to raise his head. In the stall by the south window that John James had allocated to him. Stretched out on his bedroll in the straw-layered floor of the stall. Fully dressed except for his hat and his boots. The woman was kneeling beside him, dressed in tight-fitting blue denim pants and an open-necked check shirt: an outfit that in its own way displayed the feminine curves of her slender body and limbs as alluringly as the gown she had worn the last time he'd seen her.

  There was no makeup on her face this morning? and she did not look so classically beautiful. Looked better for it, he thought. Younger and fresher. Maybe twenty-two or three, with a flawless complexion in the bright sunlight. Green eyes and full, pouting lips. Her blond hair hung down below her shoulders at the front and back, in natural waves that were a little unruly. So she was, offstage, a lot closer to Shakespeare's concep­tion of the teenage Juliet: but then the playwright had never had to consider that his lines would not be sufficient in themselves to hold the undivided attention of a saloon filled with tough Montana lumbermen.