‘He own you?’ the half-breed asked, coming to a halt when the Winchester muzzle was three inches from the cowhand’s chest.
‘No! But he knew I had good reason to be mad at you. After you put a hole through my hand. We got to drinkin’ last night. In town. Just a few of us that was out at the Big-T. He wanted us all to ride against your whole outfit. But the others, they didn’t want no part of any shoot out.’
Edwards was still shaking badly, unable to wrench his terrified gaze away from the fixed cold stare of the half-breed’s eyes. But the way his voice rose had nothing to do with his fear. He had to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the herd. They were below and behind him, moving steadily between the slopes of the high ground under a cloud of dust and flies.
‘But you were happy to do a little bush-whacking for him, uh?’ Edge yelled.
The man knew he was doomed. And although his limbs and shoulders continued to quake a physical response to his mental anguish, his blood-caked face became set in an expression of grim defiance. ‘Sure I was!’ he roared, and held up his shaking right hand with its filthy dressing. ‘Any man who’ll blast a hole in somebody just because of a wrong word—I’d kill him with pleasure! I thought that when I was drunk last night. And I didn’t have no second thoughts about it while I was waitin’ for you this mornin’.’
Edge allowed him to finish, as the point rider broke away from the relentlessly moving herd of longhorns to gallop his horse across the slope.
‘Just you and Saxby, feller? In a while only Saxby?’
‘Don’t count on it, you sonofabitch! Them that didn’t want any part of a shoot out ain’t ready to leave it there. They left their guns in the holsters, but they dug deep into their pockets. Matt’s halfway to San Antonio by now. With plenty of cash to hire the best guns in Texas!’
Barney Tait brought his black stallion to a skidding, snorting halt. Edwards was at last able to tear his gaze away from the trap of the half-breed’s stare, to look up into the fury coming from the face of the new arrival. ‘He’s gonna kill me, Mr. Tait!’
‘Not with that rifle, he ain’t!’ the Big-T foreman snarled, shifting his blazing eyes from Edwards, to Edge and then down to where the herd was tramping noisily past.
But a movement on the periphery of his vision caused him to snap his head around. In time to see Edge’s right hand leave the Winchester barrel and disappear momentarily into the long hair at the nape of his neck. When it re-emerged it was wrapped around the handle of the razor which Tait had good reason to remember.
The half-breed’s arm straightened as he leaned forward from the waist, over the length of the Winchester still aimed one-handed at Edward’s heart.
The scar-faced man with fresh blood drying on his face had time to start a scream as the defiance was swept from his features by sheer terror. And a final tremor quaked him from head to toe as he glimpsed the sun-glinting blade of the razor.
Then the blade dug into his flesh, an inch below his left ear—and was slashed in a ripping arc across his throat, to come clear close to his right ear lobe.
A crimson torrent erupted from the gaping wound. And his dying scream faded into a meek gurgle as his windpipe became awash with blood. His hands reached out for support and found the aimed rifle. They gripped it for perhaps a full second. Edge angled the Winchester down at the ground and Edwards dropped hard to his knees. The man was feeling no pain. Just terror of what awaited him beyond death. Then he knew the awesome secret, releasing his grip and collapsing on to his side. His wide eyes stared, fixed and vacant, at the slow moving herd and the men controlling the longhorns. His gaping mouth filled with blood and just a few drops spilled over to run down his chin.
The half-breed stooped to wipe the razor clean on its new victim’s shirt before he replaced it in the neck pouch.
‘That’s the most brutal friggin’ thing I ever did see!’ Barney Tait rasped. ‘He didn’t have a chance!’
Edge eased the rifle hammer to the rest and canted the weapon to his shoulder. ‘He was standing there trembling like a Colorado aspen for a couple of minutes, feller,’ he replied dispassionately.
The man astride the horse chewed vigorously on his wad of tobacco. ‘I don’t give a frig about...’
‘Seems to me,’ Edge cut in, turning to start over the ridge where his gelding waited, ‘that I gave him a fair shake.’
Chapter Seven
NOBODY asked Edge for an explanation of the events leading up to the killing of Edwards and he did not offer one. And by the evening of the fourth day out from the Big-T ranch, the men who witnessed the blood-letting on the sun-drenched ridge had been drained of any feeling about what they had seen.
It was only at night that they had an opportunity to make these feelings known to the half-breed. For during the daylight hours when the herd was moving inexorably northwards—following a route to pick up the Goodnight-Loving Trail west of Fort Concho—Edge rode out ahead: or occasionally swept wide around behind the herd to check for the possibility of trouble to the south, east and west. Thus, he only came into close contact with the drovers at night camp during the eating of the meal cooked by Pancho and the bedding down to rest. At the first camp, the Taggarts, Tait and the Mexicans made an emphatic point of avoiding him—speaking to him only when it was strictly necessary and most of the time acting as if he was not present. He knew they were afraid of him.
The next night the men had overcome their fear of him and he sensed their scorn as they watched him attend to his horse, eat his food and bed down.
Finally, there was curiosity with undertones of nervousness and contempt. On several occasions during that night—at the camp-fire beside the parked chuck wagon and when he made one of his periodic patrols around the bedded down steers—men came close to posing questions to him. But each time they were dissuaded by his icy gaze and grimly set mouth-line.
By the end of the fourth day the men had lost interest in Edge and his cold-blooded brutality on the ridge. For by this time the killing seemed to them like something from ancient history: bone-deep weariness of the drive was beginning to take its toll of the drovers. And they had another man to hate and fear, for more personal reasons.
Tait was a hard and dedicated trail boss whose preference for cattle above men became more evident over every mile of Texas which was put behind the massive herd. The longhorns were in prime condition and ever eager to push on from dawn to dusk in the wake of the big lead steer. The vaqueros were skilled at their trade, but subject to human weaknesses. As an outfit they were undermanned to cope with such a large herd. During the day they were constantly in the saddle, riding at point, swing, flank or drag. Eating dust and sweating under the harsh blaze of the sun. At night it seemed to a resting man that he had been asleep for only a few minutes before he was roused to take his duty as guard.
None of them had expected the job to be easy, irrespective of the high pay for the additional risks involved in driving the hated Big-T herd. For pushing any herd up any trail was an exhausting, uncomfortable, dirty chore. But this was a real bad one, because the trail boss demanded twenty miles a day despite his lack of manpower. Which was double the daily distance covered by most herds on the trail.
It was inevitable that the frenetic pace would affect the men and Edge saw the first signs of strain at that fourth night camp.
The herd was bedded down in a broad grassy valley featured with rock outcrops and crisscrossed by numerous gullies. It was a fine, clear night and the men on guard and those eating Pancho’s beef stew and sourdough bread turned their faces eagerly towards a light, cool breeze wafting down the valley from the north. But with their hunger satisfied and the sweat of the hot day dried on their filthy flesh, the vaqueros began to brood about their lot.
As always, Edge sat apart from the other members of the outfit: impassively smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee—his back against a wheel of the chuck wagon into which Pancho was packing his cooking utensils. Oscar and Zeke Taggar
t were already unfurling their bedrolls close to the roped remuda of horses, the son as exhausted as the father from the long days of dusty heat behind the herd—city men unaccustomed to watching for breakaway steers which had eluded the skilful but overstretched vaqueros.
Tait was out with the longhorns, taking the first night watch with three of the Mexicans. The other seven drovers—joined by the aged cook after he had packed away his pots—sat on their saddles in a group to one side of the fire. Smoking cheroots or pipes and talking softly in their own language.
But, the half-breed learned from the disjointed snatches of the conversation which carried to his disinterested ears, the talk was not about himself or his actions. And he was not being pointedly ostracized airy longer. The men, with unshaven, work-weary faces—constantly shifting their postures to try to ease aching muscles—were exchanging examples of Tait’s snarling deprecations of their work and rasping their discontent about every aspect of the job they had regretted taking almost from the very start.
Hearing them, and wrapping a blanket around his shoulders as the cooling breeze strengthened and got colder with the advance of evening into night, Edge briefly recalled occasions during the war when he had sat apart from the troopers under his command, aware of their discontented belly-aching which almost always resulted in him becoming the convenient subject of the resentment.
If he had felt anything for the troopers at such times—or the vaqueros now—it was mild scorn. Towards men who had chosen, or been drafted, to do a job and then indulged in futile complaints.
‘Señor Taggart!’ Luis Lacalle said sharply, rising to his feet.
‘What do you want?’ Zeke growled sleepily.
‘Your father.’
The younger Taggart folded up from his bedroll, red-eyed and haggard with fatigue. ‘He’s asleep, mister. Which is what I want to be. If you’ve got a problem, see Tait.’
He made to stretch out again, but the short, broadly-built Lacalle stepped away from the group of tense-faced Mexicans towards him. ‘It is Mr. Tait who is our problem, señor. We wish to speak with the owner of the Big-T herd about this.’
The man with gaps in his teeth had to make a considerable effort to be polite. Anger was brewing just beneath the surface of near exhaustion and he was determined not to be deterred from a course of action which had been difficult to decide upon.
Zeke recognized this and also saw that the men still seated by the breeze-fanned fire were as resolute as their spokesman. He seemed to recall the presence of the half-breed as an afterthought, ‘Edge?’
‘Yeah, feller?’
Zeke had been hardened by the first four days on the trail. This was easy to see in his general appearance—his flesh was as filthy as his new clothes and he was unshaven, his once neatly kept hair now constantly disheveled. The redness of initial exposure to the sun had been shaded into brown. But all this merely contributed to a surface impression of the man—a temporary cover-up of the weak good looks which had seemed to stamp him as little more than a spoiled and callow youth at the outset. A more permanent change in him showed more subtle signs—in the way he had come to accept with grim stoicism the hardships of the trail; learning from his mistakes and becoming protective towards his father instead of having to rely on him and be resentful of the situation.
‘You are hired to deal with trouble.’
‘From Saxby and whoever he can get to back him,’ Edge replied.
‘Señor Edge cannot deal with this matter,’ Lacalle rasped, tense with impatience. ‘Your father is the owner of the cattle we drive. It is he who must be told we will go no farther unless...’
‘You’ll go all the way, feller,’ the half-breed interjected evenly. ‘Or stay right here. As buzzard meat.’
‘You cannot frighten us,’ the aged Pancho challenged as Lacalle expressed a sneer. ‘And you are not stupid, so you know this.’ He pointed an untrembling hand towards the cattle, a massive patch of darkness on the dusty pasture which appeared as white as northern snow in the moonlight. ‘Just the smallest of noises could start the ganado into a stampede. You know this. Mr. Tait told you, so you know.’
Edge’s face beneath his hat was as unmoving as his frame draped by the blanket. ‘Without drovers, I figure it won’t make no difference whether the herd is quiet or running every which way, feller.’
Lacalle’s sneer became a scowl. ‘Twice you have said you will kill only men who help the one named Saxby. Only a moment ago...’
‘Saxby aims to stop the Big-T herd getting to Laramie. Back at the ranch there was a chance of hiring new hands. Out here if you and your bunch quit, you’ll be doing just what Saxby wants.’
Lacalle shook his head in a curt dismissal of the half-breed’s argument. And swung to face the weary but resolute Zeke Taggart.
‘One other thing, feller,’ Edge said before the Mexican could speak. ‘You gave your word to stick around so long as I stayed with the outfit. I figure a man who breaks his word ain’t worth nothing more than a bullet.’
Lacalle’s anger broke surface as he whirled to glower at the calm, soft-spoken half-breed. ‘How can a man like you set store by honor?’ he snarled. ‘A man who can cut the throat of another while he holds a gun on him? Such a man is not worthy of the word of Luis Lacalle!’
His voice was rising, louder and shriller. And as he shrieked his own name Oscar Taggart was wrenched out of sleep.
‘What in tarnation is going on?’ he demanded, shoving himself up into a sitting posture—and grimacing at the pains this triggered in aching muscles. He raked his bloodshot, heavily bagged eyes over the campsite. Then tried to fist the gritty feeling out from under the lids.
The Mexicans want to quit, Dad,’ his son supplied.
‘Like hell they will!’ the elder Taggart roared, struggling to his feet. ‘Edge!’
The half-breed sighed. ‘We already did that bit, Mr. Taggart,’ he said. ‘We’ve reached the part where you either listen to Lacalle’s whines or I blast him into a buzzard’s breakfast.’
‘Señor Taggart!’ the Mexicans’ spokesman said quickly, struggling to contain his own anger as the owner of the Big-T herd was about to give full vent to his. ‘All we ask for now is a hearing. Which will be as much in your interest as in ours.’
‘And if you listen, señor,’ Pancho augmented, ‘all you will lose is a few minutes sleep.’
‘Sleep’s just about the most important thing we’ve got to lose right now,’ Zeke growled.
There was a tense pause in the exchange, the cold silence disturbed by the crackling of the fire and the contented lowing of cattle on the verge of sleep. Oscar Taggart looked from his exhausted son to the impassive Edge and then at Lacalle and the other Mexicans. And he sighed wearily in face of the vaqueros’ determination not to be put off.
‘All right,’ he allowed, then hurried on as Lacalle drew in a breath to begin voicing his grievances. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to tell me anything I don’t already know. You’re sick and tired of the way Barney Tait’s been riding you. You’ve had enough of being yelled at to keep the herd moving faster than any herd ever travelled before. The outfit is only half as big as it should be and yet my foreman is acting as if we are at double strength. Is that about the size of it, Lacalle?’
The elder Taggart lacked the youthful flexibility of his son—and the burden of his sixty years made it physically impossible for him to combat the exhausting effects of the grueling pace of the drive. Like Zeke, he had been bronzed by the sun and dirtied by the dust, but his coloring seemed to emphasize the many deep lines of strain carved into his face. And the dirt ingrained in his pores, in combination with the gray bristles on his jowls and jaw, added to the impression of a man close to defeat. He looked thinner, shorter and much older than when the men had first seen him in the cantina of the town across the border.
But his voice and expression had a strength of character that counteracted his physical weakness that served notice on all those who might be r
eady to discount him. These were signs that, for as long as his body was able, he possessed the necessary determination to endure anything the trail demanded of him. And in his red-rimmed green eyes as he stared at the Mexicans there was bitter contempt for all who did not share his resolution.
‘Si, señor,’ Lacalle acknowledged, resentful of the scorn. ‘Even though you are paying us much money to...’
‘I don’t know one solitary thing about running a ranch, raising cattle or driving a herd,’ Oscar Taggart cut in, his tone rasping. ‘Only thing I know about this Big-T is that it’s always given me a handsome profit. And I’ve got Barney Tait to thank for that. So whatever he does to get my cattle to Laramie is just fine with me.’ He looked into the blazing fire for a few moments and the sight of the leaping flames seemed to fuel his feeling against the vaqueros. He fixed Lacalle with another hard, unblinking glare. ‘Neither me nor my son are familiar with the rigors of trail driving. But we are prepared to take them without complaint. You and your men are supposed to be experienced…’
‘Señor,’ Lacalle snapped with a curt nod at the scowling Zeke. ‘You and he will make many thousands of dollars when the ganado are driven to Laramie. It is not the same!’
‘If the herd gets to Laramie,’ Zeke corrected. ‘And if it gets there in ten weeks from the day we started out.’
‘Ten weeks!’ Pancho gasped. ‘It cannot be done. One time I cook for Texas outfit who drive herd smaller than this from Brownsville to Cheyenne. This used up more than twenty weeks.’
Oscar Taggart ignored both his son and the old-timer, but picked up the point they had made. ‘My foreman tells me it can be done!’ he rasped at Lacalle. ‘And, as I told you before, I trust Barney Tait.’
The first shot was a lonesome sound, isolated in a capsule of silence: the fire and the cattle subdued while the work-weary Mexicans assimilated this new aspect of the drive. But the silence after the crack of the fired rifle was much shorter than the one which preceded it. For a man screamed in fear or pain as the loosed bullet tunneled through his flesh. And then five thousand head of cattle panicked in response to both sounds.
EDGE: Death Drive (Edge series Book 27) Page 8
