Even before the steers had pushed to their feet and the men at the camp had sprang erect, a burst of three more rifle shots exploded out in the cold darkness of night to the west of the spooked herd.
This trio of sharp cracks spurred livestock and men to greater speed.
The longhorns lunged into a thundering gallop as soon as they were four-footed, beginning a headlong race into the night, snorting their bovine terror.
The vaqueros responded automatically to the start of the stampede. The causes of their angry discontent were forgotten and they moved into action with smooth speed. They snatched up their saddles and ran for the remuda. Luis Lacalle had no need to issue orders for each man knew what to do. Cattle were their business and, as experienced trail hands, they acted without conscious thought to contain the dangers of a stampede.
‘Go with them!’ Oscar Taggart bellowed after he and his son had used up almost a full minute in staring out at the moving mass of terrified cattle.
The Mexicans were galloping from the camp by then, spurs digging into flanks to demand flat-out speed from their mounts.
The old man looked first at his son, then swept his head to left and right in search of Edge. But the half-breed was not immediately to be seen. The only other man left in camp was the cook.
‘We are lucky, señor?’ Pancho said, having to raise his voice hardly at all as the beat of steer and horse hooves diminished.: The stampede is away from us. It is bad when the ganado come towards the camp in their fear.’
Taggart ignored the slow moving, quiet-spoken Mexican. And nodded his approval when he saw Zeke saddling a horse, clumsy in his haste. Then he spat out an obscenity as he at last spotted Edge. The half-breed was astride his saddled gelding and riding at a gallop—in the wrong direction. The herd and the men giving chase were racing northwards along the valley. Edge rode a lonely route up a gully towards the high ground to the east.
‘He’s running out on us!’
‘I do not think so, Señor Taggart,’ Pancho countered as he began to douse the fire. There is a man who is totally evil except for one thing. He would risk his very life to keep his word.
The elderly owner of the Big-T looked set to snarl a rebuttal. But then bit back on the intended words and his gaunt face became wreathed in a frown as he saw the lone rider swing north just before he was skylined on the hill crest.
‘I am sure he is ready to kill Luis Lacalle if the word that was given is broken,’ Pancho said flatly.
Edge was no more than a vague moving shadow against the hillside now. Then, after Taggart and the Mexican had shifted their gazes, they found it impossible to pin-point man and horse again.
‘Do you have any idea what he has in mind?’
Pancho shrugged his skinny shoulders. ‘A man like that continues to live only because he is able to hide his thoughts, señor. Just one thing is certain—that he does nothing without good reason.’
‘I’m ready, Dad,’ Zeke announced anxiously after he had swung astride his saddled stallion.
The herd and the drovers were now out of sight—beyond the rise at the northern end of the valley. The dust of their momentum had settled and the sound of pumping hooves was lost in the distance.
‘You will be no help, señor? Pancho advised. ‘You would be a hindrance even if you could catch up with the stampede,’
‘Stick to cooking, old man,’ Zeke growled.
‘He’s right, Ezekiel,’ the elder Taggart snapped. ‘Just a few minutes ago I admitted we’re only passengers on this trip.’ He eyed the Mexican ruefully. ‘Unless somebody who knows trail herding has something for us to do.’
‘We must hitch the team to the wagon and then move on to where the herd has been halted, señor.’ He pointed up the valley to where the longhorns had been resting before the shot panicked them. ‘I heard a scream. Perhaps a man is wounded, Or dead. Somebody should go to see.’
‘Ezekiel!’
The younger Taggart did not like his appointed task. He was angry with Pancho for suggesting it, but complied sullenly with his father’s order.
A hundred feet above the campsite and a quarter mile away from it, Edge saw Zeke Taggart heel the stallion forward and the two elderly men turn to go to where the wagon team cropped at tough grass.
The half-breed was back in the gully which he had followed almost to the top of the eastern high ground. But he was on foot now, having left his gelding in a deep hollow under the brow of the hill. He moved in a half crouch, cocked Winchester in a two-handed grip. And did not halt and fold down on to his haunches until he reached a low outcrop of rock at the side of the gully two hundred feet away from, and fifty feet above, the almost deserted camp.
Zeke Taggart was riding unhurriedly up the valley, ramrod straight with his head swinging this way and that. His attitude was that of a man afraid rather than one undertaking a simple chore.
And Edge knew that there was good reason for his fear—even if the city-bred man himself was aware only of an eerie sensation as he rode alone through strange, night-shrouded country in search of another man who might be a corpse.
For all three men below where the half-breed was positioned were in danger of imminent death from another trio who were bellying down the final few feet of the western slope.
Edge had marked the general direction from which the first shot came as he hurled aside his blanket and unfolded from against the wagon wheel. Then, as the cattle were spooked into noise and movement, his unblinking eyes had seen the muzzle flashes stabbed into the night by three more shots, short-lived spurts of brightness just below the crest of the western high ground.
As the dust of the stampede rose, to swirl in the cold air between the slopes, he had joined the vaqueros in racing for the huddle of unsettled horses. And been the first to saddle a mount, with the same smooth speed as the Mexicans but for a different purpose. For, just as their responses to the familiar dangers of a stampede were predetermined by experience, so his actions, after a malevolent burst of gunfire, were conditioned by events in his past.
And even had he known anything about overhauling the front-runners of a terrified herd of longhorns and turning them sharply to spiral in on the following animals, he would have ignored the steers. For in such a situation as this the man called Edge instinctively ignored the results of evil to strike at the cause.
From his vantage point on the rim of the hollow where his hard breathing horse stood, he had ignored the group of vaqueros galloping into the dust cloud of the stampede, likewise the stalled chuck wagon, depleted remuda and the three men who remained at the night camp. He crouched, as unmoving as the many outcrops of rock on the valley sides, peering across at the opposite slope. Waiting with infinite patience for the merest hint of what the men who triggered the stampede intended to do. Not trying to out-guess them and with only one conviction in his cool, otherwise open mind—that if they showed themselves willing to pose a further threat to the Big-T trail drive, they were living on borrowed time.
They began their move down towards the night camp at a crouching run, just as Zeke Taggart rode away from the chuck wagon. The half-breed matched their cautious attitudes but made faster time, back-tracking across the slope and then down the gully. He knew from the actions of the men that they were unaware of his presence in the valley. Swirling dust had obscured him when he galloped out of camp. And by the time the gritty motes had floated back to earth he was hidden against the hillside. As they themselves were, until they started down: relishing easy pickings as the main body of men galloped in pursuit of the runaway herd.
Close to the foot of the slope, the three men dropped from their crouches to go out full length. And stayed on their bellies as they started across level ground, rifles gripped in one hand, pushing through the dust and grass ahead of them. They ignored the rider sent in search of a casualty, devoting their concentrated attention to the pair of old-timers—Pancho hitching the team to the chuck wagon and Oscar Taggart loading up the gear and equipment left
in the wake of the vaqueros’ hurried departure. The American worked with awkward haste, the Mexican with measured slowness, neither revealing any sign that they suspected the stampede might have fatal consequences for themselves.
Edge rested the barrel of his Winchester across the top of a smooth rock and pressed his lips so tightly together they seemed to disappear. His bristled cheek made a tiny rasping sound against the stock of the rifle as he drew a bead on the back of one of the advancing trio. The sound, triggered by a slight movement of his curled forefinger, was much louder.
His victim arched off the ground and collapsed into total inertia.
The other two powered up on to their hands and knees with cries of alarm.
Pancho and the elder Taggart were shocked into statue-like representations of men in the act of hitching a team and loading a wagon. The American stared up towards Edge; the Mexican was held fascinated by the fresh corpse and the two living intruders.
‘Dad!’ Zeke Taggart howled. He had halted his horse to look down at the victim of the first shot to be fired by the intruders. Now he wrenched on the reins to wheel his horse.
His anguished cry echoed along with a second report from the half-breed’s rifle, the bullet angling down, like the first, across the laden roof of the chuck wagon. It found its target in the gaping mouth of a man, the lips still drawn wide in the venting of shrill-voiced shock. The second corpse dropped into a prone position beside the first and the head seemed to swell. But this was only a trick of the moonlight—the torrent of blood from the wound spreading across the ground like an extension of the shadowed flesh from which it poured.
Another shot exploded while the half-breed was pumping the lever action of the Winchester. It had less power—fired by a revolver. But over a shorter range.
The surviving member of the trio was fully erect when the bullet drilled into his belly. He staggered backwards on legs he seemed unable to control. Then he let go of his Winchester and was suddenly rock steady, his feet wide apart and both hands pressed to his wound. Blood oozed out from between his interlocked fingers. Fear contorted his face into an obscenely ugly mask.
‘He’s dead, Pancho!’ Edge yelled, standing up from behind the outcrop as the Mexican made to explode another shot between the legs of the nervous horses.
‘Dad! You all right, Dad?’
Zeke had galloped his horse back to camp and he pulled hard on the reins to bring the animal to a rearing, snorting halt beside the chuck wagon.
‘They never got off a shot, son,’ his father replied shakily.
‘He still looks alive to me, señor,’ Pancho croaked. He did not move as the team horses calmed and the half-breed came down the slope at a loping run. His arm remained outstretched, the gun in his fist covering the wounded man.
‘Just a matter of time,’ Edge replied as he reached the rear of the chuck wagon and halted beside the Taggarts. Before he leveled the rifle at the terrified man, he clicked his thumb and forefinger together. ‘It can be like that. Or it could take hours. Maybe days.’
The injured man licked his dry lips as the Mexican joined the three Americans. Like his dead partners he was in his mid-thirties. A tall, broad, hard man. Not the kind to beg for mercy. A man who had agreed to do a dangerous job and was prepared to accept the consequences if it went wrong. But not without fear.’
‘You can ... finish me off with a bullet. Or ... leave it with ... just the one inside me.’
‘You’re thinking straight, feller. Can you talk that way?’
‘Go to hell!’
Edge angled the Winchester barrel downwards and squeezed the trigger. The man’s right ankle was shattered and he screamed as he crashed down, falling across the legs of one of the corpses. His frame jack-knifed and he writhed in a paroxysm of dual agonies as he clawed at both sources of his pain.
Oscar Taggart and Pancho wrenched their shocked eyes away from the victim to stare at the unflinching profile of his impassive torturer. Zeke watched the agonized man with grim fascination.
‘Madre de Dios,’ the Mexican gasped.
‘You’re not human!’ the elder Taggart croaked.
‘I’m what I am, feller. Which is what you wanted when you hired me.’ Edge nodded towards the twice-wounded man. ‘The same kind as him and his buddies. You found me and Saxby found them.’
‘He’s right, Dad,’ Zeke said, his tone almost as dispassionate as that of the half-breed. He jerked a thumb up the valley. ‘I found one of the Mexicans out there. Maybe he was shot, or maybe he was thrown off his horse. There’s no way to tell. He’s been trampled by so many steers we won’t know who he is until we see the rest. And these three men weren’t coming down to help you break camp.’
The injured man was groaning and whimpering now, after his agony had reached a high point and was subsiding. He lay on his side, curled up: his contorted face turned towards Zeke as the younger Taggart approached him, Colt drawn.
‘What do you want to know, Mr. Edge?’
He crouched and pulled the revolver from the holster of the helpless man. Then rested the muzzles of both weapons against the caps of the bent knees.
‘Zeke!’ Oscar Taggart moaned and took a step forward as the injured man was made rigid by terror.
‘Stay back, Dad!’
The owner of the Big-T swung his anguished face towards the half-breed. ‘You going to let a boy do your dirty work for you?’ he challenged.
‘I’m not a boy, frig it!’ Zeke yelled. ‘I’m twenty bloody nine, Dad! And it’s about time you realized that!’
‘Old enough to know his own mind, I figure,’ Edge pointed out evenly, and ambled over to where the grim-faced younger Taggart was crouched beside the pain-wracked, fear-tensed man.
‘They’re Taggart cattle raised on Taggart money!’ Zeke rasped. ‘And it’s about time Dad and me did more than watch for stragglers.’
‘Not me who’s giving you an argument, feller,’ the half-breed said, and dropped down on to his haunches on the other side of the helpless man. ‘Just concerned I gave him a choice.’
He reached out and gripped one of Zeke’s wrists to move it so that one of the Colts was pressed against the man’s shirt front—left of centre.
‘A wrong word and you empty that gun into his leg. And we leave him here. If he says what we want to hear, one bullet in the heart will be enough.’ He showed a humorless grin to the doomed man. ‘Matter of whether he stays or remains.’
‘Zeke, don’t do it!’
‘Shut up, Dad!’
‘Where did Saxby hire you, feller?’
The man’s lips moved, but he uttered no sound. His complexion was sallow and he seemed to have become gaunter by the moment as he suffered the twin torments of agony and fear. His pants cuff and shirt front were saturated with blood which continued to seep from both wounds.
‘Water,’ he managed to whisper after stretched seconds.
‘Worst thing to give a man with a bullet in his guts,’ Edge told him.
Zeke was watching the half-breed eagerly, still determined to squeeze one of the triggers. His father was held rigid in the grip of horror. Pancho eyed the brutal tableau with melancholic resignation.
‘I’m ... I’m gonna die ... anyway.’
‘That’s the long and the short of it, feller. San Antonio?’
‘Yeah, you ... you bastard!’ He got power into the profanity, But it caused a heavy drain from his diminishing strength.
‘Just the three of you?’
‘For now,’ the man answered, screwing his eyes tight shut as the words emerged, barely audible. ‘Just to hold you up for a while. Until Boyd Ash and his boys get to town.’
‘Real tough bunch, uh feller?’
He snapped open his eyes to direct depthless scorn up at the impassive half-breed. ‘If you was one of that bunch and I was your best friend, you wouldn’t waste a bullet on me.’
‘Obliged,’ Edge said, and pointed to Zeke’s left hand holding the Colt against the man’s chest
.
‘No, son!’
The revolver cracked and bucked. The smell of burnt fabric was almost as strong as exploded powder. The corpse spasmed once and was still. Oscar Taggart sagged against the side of the chuck wagon. Pancho crossed himself. Edge straightened and Zeke stayed down on his haunches, sighing as he holstered his own gun. Then he looked up at the half-breed.
‘Do you know anything about this man Ash and his gang?’ he asked, and there was just a tic along his jaw line to show he felt something after the killing.
‘You heard what he said, feller. They wouldn’t spare a bullet to put a best friend out of his agony. Figure that makes them real mean.’
Chapter Eight
IT WAS impossible to tell exactly how many steers were lost during the frenetic stampede of the spooked herd. But no more than a hundred, Barney Tait guessed, after he made an experienced estimate when the cattle finally stumbled to an exhausted halt in a draw five miles north of their starting point.
He was mad at the vaqueros but he did not bawl them out, aware there had been no drovers to spare for side runs in pursuit of breakaways. But his anger found an outlet in a snarling row with Zeke Taggart—the foreman wanting to hold up the drive while the strays were rounded-up and the boss’s son demanding they be written off.
Oscar Taggart was a sullenly dejected and apparently disinterested observer of the quarrel. Pancho moved among his weary fellow countrymen, huddled in the makeshift camp close to sleep or riding line guard, reporting on the killings and checking on which of the group was now a stiffening pulp of trampled flesh back down the trail. Edge smoked a cigarette and silently awaited the inevitable outcome of the bad tempered disagreement.
And, at sun-up the following day, he resumed his role of scout when the slightly depleted herd was stirred from bed ground to continue the long trek northwards.
It was another arid Texas day of blistering heat and stinging dust, seemingly designed to make even more volatile the dangerous mixture of moods affecting the men in close contact with the massive herd of longhorns.
EDGE: Death Drive (Edge series Book 27) Page 9
