Gritting his teeth against the pain, he drew his hand from out of the stirrup and swung his free leg over the saddle. By the time he was upright and gripping the reins of the galloping horse he had remembered Rainbow and the wound he received there; had recalled the agonizing trek back to Ohio and the farm; knew a girl had been tending Jamie's grave in the rain. After that there was only blackness except for a tiny fragment of a nightmare in which death had played a leading part.
But whatever had happened to him since he had seen the girl in the rain was no longer of any importance. The weakening after-effects of a serious illness were threatening to tumble him from the speeding horse as far more deadly, heavy caliber bullets whined about his head. As he glanced about him in the gloom of twilight the recognized the countryside of his youth and forced his reluctant brain to decide upon a plan of escape.
The flat plainslands of Iowa showed a slight rise to the north of him and he angled his lathered mount in that direction recalling how, in his early years, he had played and learned to shoot in a ravine among the hills. Although he was unaware of the events which had led to the present situation, it was obvious that his horse was much fresher than the mounts of his pursuers for it seemed that every yard he covered, widened the gap by half a yard between him and the men on his trail. Soon he was out of effective rifle range and Sheriff Layton and his posse ceased fire long before their quarry went from sight into the ravine.
The cleft in the hills was neither very wide nor very deep, on a far smaller scale than the many canyons Edge had travelled through in his wanderings of the south western territories. But at least its sides, sometimes sheer, sometimes sloping down at a climbable angle, offered a better chance of survival than the open prairie.
Edge slowed his horse to a walking pace, his eyes raking the slopes for a secure position where he could make his stand. And a stand it would have to be, for the ravine continued for less than a mile and if the pursuers emerged at the other end and saw no sign of him on the plain, they would certainly double back to search for him. As close as he had been able to judge there had been about a dozen men trailing him. Edge's only weapons were the razor in its neck pouch and the Winchester in the saddle boot—loaded with fourteen rounds. He halted his horse finally and dismounted gingerly, careful to test his strength before trusting to it. "I got out, of tighter spots than this," he muttered as he slapped the horse hard on the rump, snatching the Winchester from the boot as the animal bolted down the ravine, whinnying its protest. "But not much," he finished as he started up the steep angle of the ravine side, heading for a narrow shelf.
Once there he stretched out fiat and decided he could not be seen from below. He waited, listening to the fading sound of his horse's hoofbeats as the animal galloped away. Then came thunder without lightning and Edge turned his attention away from the direction in which he expected the riders to approach, to look towards the other end of the ravine. "It was not thunder he heard, but the thudding of countless unshod hooves as hundreds, perhaps thousands of animals headed up the ravine. After hearing the sound, he felt it; the ground trembling beneath his prone body. Small, and then larger pieces of rock started to roll, then cascade down the sides of the ravine.
It took longer for the posse to hear the stampede, for the beat of the hooves of their horses was loud in their ears. But as Sheriff Layton and his deputies rode out of the darkness into Edge's view, the sudden slackening of their pace told of their realization. Edge shot a glance back in the other direction and saw his horse bolting like the angels of death were on its tail. As, in a way, they were.
For, hard on the heels of the terrified horse, were the leading runners of what must have been the last of the enormous buffalo herds. Great, black beasts with shaggy manes, their eyes shining as white as their horns as their feet pounded at the ground, hurling their massive bodies forward at stampede pace.
The bolting horse went down, its dying whinny hardly audible above the thunder of beating hooves. Then the posse started to turn, their shouts of alarm as ineffective as the final sound of the horse against the clamor of the rushing beasts.
Layton went down under the charge, his head and body trampled into an unrecognizable mass of pulped flesh and shattered bone. Another man fell on to the horns of a beast and was tossed up and on to the head of another; then a third man was gored and flung about before finally dropping into the middle of the rushing animals. The remainder of the lawmen managed to wheel their horses and race away.
From his vantage point Edge watched the onrush, but was unable to see if any more men went down in its path as they were swallowed up by the darkness. He gazed down with a hard grin narrowing his eyes and splitting his mouth over the whiteness of his teeth, and did not come up from off his belly until the final maddened beast had passed and the sound of hoofbeats was swallowed up by distance.
Then he moved off the shelf and went carefully down the slope to amble over to where the battered body of Layton was crumpled. Imbedded in the blood and bone was something that shone faintly of silver and he stooped down and dug it free. He grimaced when he saw it was a five pointed star set in a circle. He dropped the badge back on to the body and grinned as he looked along the ravine, now filled with a solid silence.
"Now that the buffalo's gone, thanks fellers," he muttered. "And it weren't even your beef."
EDGE
Blood on Silver & Red River
Available Soon!
Title
# 1 THE LONER
# 2 TEN GRAND
# 3 APACHE DEATH
# 4 KILLER'S BREED.
# 5 BLOOD ON SILVER
# 6 RED RIVER
AND MORETO COME…
Killer's Breed (Edge series Book 4) Page 14
