‘Quickly!’ Mrs. Grover urged the nonchalant half-breed. ‘I appeal to you!’
Edge eyed the suddenly concerned woman who had seemed to derive some kind of sensual pleasure from watching the killing. His gaze was as bleak as at the moment he had put a bullet into the helpless Pearce. ‘Not one little bit you don’t, lady!’ he growled.
Chapter Three
The boatman was a Mexican. He was about sixty with a wiry build and a completely bald head above a face that seemed to proclaim that he carried the weight of all the world’s troubles on his skinny shoulders. He was sitting on the centre seat of his rowboat, staring morosely out across the sun-sparkled waters of the bay and picking his nose, when Edge halted on the pier boarding above him and dropped the Navy Colt into his lap.
He yelled in terror and leapt to his feet. The small boat rocked dangerously but was held fast to its mooring by a line. The gin clattered to the damp bottom of the boat and the man glared up angrily at the calm-faced half-breed.
‘What was that for, you son of a fat sow and an ancient hog who was castrated after your birth?’ he demanded in his native tongue.
‘I speak the language as well as you, old man,’ Edge replied evenly in Mexican Spanish.
The boatman swallowed hard and lowered himself carefully back on to the seat. Then flinched as the half-breed let his saddle and bedroll thud down into the boat. Again the small craft was threatened by sinking as it pitched and yawed.
‘Senor, I am a poor and honest—’
‘Gives us something else in common, feller,’ Edge interrupted. There was a rusted iron ladder stretching down the side of the pier and he swung out on to it as the Mexican gripped tightly on to the seat.
‘What do you want of me?’
The half-breed had reached the foot of the ladder and he stepped aboard the rowboat. His two hundred pounds settled the craft lower in the water. Then the bow was lifted as he sank on the stern seat and rested his feet on the pile of his gear. He jerked a thumb into the air. ‘You got a sign up on the pier.’
The Mexican’s face was as dark in skin tone as that of Edge. But his greater age had etched it with many more lines and the flesh was flaccid at the cheeks and throat. When he nodded, the loose skin flapped. ‘Si, that is true, senor. I row for visitors to this great city. I row them along the shore to see the sights for only twenty-five cents.’ He smiled and when his lips parted he displayed gums that were toothless and diseased. The smell of his breath was discernible, even through the thousand and one other odors - rancid and fresh - that wafted over the waterfront. ‘I will do this for you with great pleasure, senor. I regret the insult to your honored parents, but I was surprised by the manner...’
His voice trailed away when he saw that his passenger was shaking his head. And his smile went the same way as his voice, to be replaced by a frown of anxiety.
‘I’ve seen all I want to of this town, feller,’ Edge told him, shifting into a more comfortable position on the hard wooden seat. ‘Oakland Pier. Close as you can get to the CP depot.’
‘Senor!’ the boatman exclaimed, anxiety expanding towards terror as his watery eyes almost popped out of their sockets.
‘Yeah?’ Edge asked easily, taking out the makings.
‘You must take the ferry boat to the railroad depot, senor. She is big with the powerful engine and the side wheels to drive her through the many strong currents over such a long distance. And the fare it is not much.’
‘More than I’ve got, feller. Row.’
The old man’s fear increased and he moved his hands towards the shipped oars lying in the bottom of the boat. Then he shot a glance over his shoulder. The waters of the bay looked calm, except where the surface was churned into trails of white foam behind the many craft moving back and forth between every point of the compass. But the dark eyes saw the panorama with the wisdom of long experience and recognized countless dangers. There was the threat of being rammed by a larger craft, of being caught in a powerful current or rip-tide, of being shrouded by a thick sea mist which could roll in from the ocean even on such a fine day as this and of being capsized by the vicious wash of a steamer.
He had never taken his tiny rowboat more than a hundred yards off shore and as he curtailed his mental tally of what might happen if he did, he determined that he was not going to break his rule today. As he turned around to face the stern again, he folded his arms and compressed his lips into a thin line.
Edge raised his eyebrows.
‘I refuse, senor. It would be madness for me to make such an attempt. I request that you leave my boat and take the ferry.’
The half-breed did not express disapproval of the Mexican’s attitude. He appeared to be gathering up his gear and the old man smiled with relief. Then gasped as he saw that the saddle and bedroll had merely been moved, so that his unwanted passenger could pick up the Colt. Edge leveled the gun slowly and eased back the hammer as he drew a bead on the tip of the old man’s nose.
‘I told you. I can’t afford the fare.’
The Mexican’s lips moved several times before he managed to utter the words. ‘So you would take advantage of a helpless fellow countryman, senor? To do what you demand for nothing?’
A shake of the head. ‘You get paid in kind. This revolver. It ain’t new, but I figure it’ll fetch ten bucks in any bar in this city. Seems like a good price for a one way trip across the bay.’
‘It will be two ways for me, senor.’
‘I ain’t buying your problems.’
The Mexican gulped. ‘If I refuse, senor?’
‘Then I got no further need for the feller I hired. So I’ll fire him.’ Edge grinned. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Another gulp. ‘You mean...?’
‘No gun. All you get is the bullet.’
The old man unfolded his arms and sighed as he lifted the oars and placed them in the rowlocks. That one Mexican should treat another so in a foreign land is—’
‘Let’s go,’ Edge growled. ‘Save your breath for the long row ahead of you, uh?’
He allowed the hammer to move to the rest, then dropped the gun into the bottom of the boat. The Mexican stood up to reach for where the mooring line was hitched around a hook in a pier piling. ‘I hope what I think is true, senor.’
‘Thinking’s okay.’
‘That you are not a pure blood Mexican?’
He used one of the oars to shove off from the pier, then dipped them both into the water to correct his course.
‘Just half,’ Edge supplied, lifting his feet back up on to his saddle and tipping his hat brim down over his eyes.
‘But even that half is bad. I think you are evil through and through. I think that you are the most—’
‘You made your point, feller,’ Edge cut in again. His eyes were hidden by the forward sloping hat brim, but the old man sensed that they remained unexpressive while the thin lips curled back to show the half-breed’s gleaming white teeth. ‘And you made your choice.’
The Mexican glanced mournfully over his shoulder, across the stretch of bay that suddenly seemed much broader than he had ever realized before. And he could not recall a day when it had ever been so busy with such large and dangerously fast-moving ships.
‘Between certain death and what is almost certain death, senor,’ he grunted as he turned to face his relaxed passenger in the stern again, and rested one oar for a moment so that he could cross himself. ‘Or, as they say, between the devil and the deep blue sea.’
‘Just keep thinking that way, feller,’ Edge advised softly. ‘Ain’t the devil immortal?’
The old man stared hard at the exposed lower half of Edge’s face and was abruptly aware that there was something not quite human about the grinning snarl formed by the slightly parted lips. A religious man when it suited him to be so, he shuddered at the thought Edge had injected into his mind. But then the sea began to slap hard against the hull as the boat nosed out of the sheltered water between the piers and ran into the
first light swell of the bay. And he put superstitious notions out of his head, applying himself totally to the practical considerations of how he was going to survive the daunting trip he had been forced to take.
Edge was as physically relaxed as he looked to the Mexican. And the thought process that led to his nonchalance was logically clear cut. He knew nothing about rowing a small boat from one side of the bay to the other, whereas the old man was knowledgeable enough about the stretch of water to be terrified of it. But he was prepared to attempt the crossing, rather than be shot. He would try his damnedest to make it and there was nothing his inexperienced passenger could contribute after scaring him into the attempt.
And the half-breed did not even apply his mind to the problems faced by his reluctant helper. Instead, he thought bitterly about the result of his second visit to San Francisco and, for a while, logic was ignored as his mind delved back through the past and fastened involuntarily but tenaciously on to the old man’s figure of speech about the devil.
Was his ruling fate some supernatural antichrist who controlled him from a sub-depth of fire and brimstone? An evil spirit - maybe even with horns and a tail - who had been patiently inactive during the early life of Josiah C. Hedges. Perhaps while waiting for a sign that the young Iowa farm boy was ideal material to be implanted with the seeds of evil.
Many such signs had been given during the long Civil War. No more, probably, than by tens of thousands other soldiers who fought, maimed and killed their enemies on the battlefields of the East. Perhaps Hedges - first a lieutenant and then a captain - should have died in the Shenandoah Valley, at the first Battle of Bull Run, in the prison camp at Andersonville or during the grueling escape north. He might have died a thousand times in a thousand violent ways: at the hands of the Confederate enemy or by the actions of certain men he commanded.
But he had survived the hell of war; perhaps he did so by allowing the seeds of evil to flower - in his mind, his heart and in his physical being. For he survived by learning to kill the enemy before the enemy killed him. Or, if the enemy wore the same uniform he did, by earning the respect of those who sought to kill him. By proving he was possessed of more viciousness, a greater endurance for suffering and a larger capacity for the enjoyment of killing than they were.
At the ending of the war, he had been intent upon putting such things behind him. He had headed home for the Iowa farmstead where, before the incident at Fort Sumter, the devil and his evil had been to Hedges no more than words thundered by a deep-voiced preacher from the pulpit in the church at the nearest town some Sunday mornings.
Evil reached Iowa before the returning cavalry captain. And Hedges’ kid brother Jamie died in agonizing pain and a welter of senselessly spilt blood.
Was it a reflex action by a man so well-schooled in the art of killing that sent him riding south to savor the bitter taste of revenge? Or was he deliberately driven to commit murder by the not-to-be-denied hand of the demonic creature that the deep-voiced preacher had so often spoken about?
Certainly, every act he played out between discovering the buzzard-ravaged body of Jamie and killing those responsible for the boy’s brutal death had been coldly premeditated. And yet his relentless pursuit of the murderers and the ruthless manner in which he made them pay for their crime had, at the same time, been undertaken in a state of involuntariness. At the time, he was consumed by a grief and rage that allowed him no time or space to examine what he was doing. Then, from the vantage point of hindsight, he had recognized the indisputable truth. The force that powered his motive was so all-consuming that he could not have elected to ignore it, even had he been given the choice.
The tiny rowboat began to rock violently as it ran into the wake of a speeding sternwheeler. Water slopped over the gunwales. Crewmen on the packet yelled abuse at the Mexican. The old man almost let go of the oars to cross himself again. But a current tugged at the bows and he rowed furiously against it, his lips moving to mouth a silent prayer. As he pleaded with God, his dark eyes glared a deep hatred towards his passenger. But Edge did not raise the hat from over his eyes. Had it not been for the obvious fact that his brown-skinned hands were fastened in a strong grip on the seat, the Mexican might have thought the half-breed was asleep: sitting almost upright with his body moving in sympathy with the roll and pitch of the tiny boat.
On the long ride south many years ago, a man had died who would still have been alive - had he not stood in the path of the vengeance-bent Hedges. Since then, many other men had suffered the same fate for the same and countless more reasons. But it was only for the slaying of Elliot Thombs that Josiah C. Hedges was wanted by the law. All those other killings had been committed by the man who had become known as Edge. And the same fate, destiny, driving force or demon that mapped this violent course for him acted also to protect him from some of the consequences of his actions.
He was a man with a violent past, a troubled present and an aimless future, walking a dangerous line between life and death as he experienced the present and stored it in the past. Always he survived the threat of death. For the most part he evaded capture by the law. But seldom was he free of pain and anguish.
The physical suffering was bearable, for he had learned how to endure such agony during the war - in the same way that he learned how to inflict it upon others. But the doubts that attacked his mind as such times as this crossing of San Francisco Bay were much harder to take. Because he regarded them as undeserved - a punishment for crime or crimes he could not recall having committed. A life sentence, ordained by his ruling fate, was thrust upon him whenever he sought to establish and reach for a goal in the future that should have remained barren.
First there had been the return to Iowa after the war, when his well-formed plan to work the farm with Jamie had been drowned under a sea of blood.
Then, far south and across the border in Mexico, a buried cache of ten thousand dollars had held out the false promise of a new start. But rats had grown fat on the paper money before Edge found the useless remains.
For a long time after that he had submitted to whatever destiny had in store for him, drifting from state to territory, town to town, earning enough to live on and using his skill with blade and gun when the enemy of his survival proved to have more substance than hunger and thirst.
It was during this period of his life that he came to acknowledge that he was not in control of his own future. This, despite the fact that he considered no man his better.
Then, up in the harsh Dakotas, he married Beth. And, for a pitifully short time, it seemed he had beaten whatever - or whoever - it was that had tormented him for so long, until the day when it appeared the Sioux had robbed him of his wife. But they had done so only indirectly: and when he discovered how she had died, he suffered the worst anguish of all.
He came to realize then that he was doomed to live and that such a fate was more harrowing than if he had known he was doomed to die. For, as he searched for Beth he could have been killed more easily than on those Eastern battlefields in the distant past of the war. But the destiny that sentenced him to suffer so harshly also protected him from death so that he could live to take the brutal punishment.
‘Senor, this is total madness!’ the Mexican boatman shrieked as his tiny craft was gripped by a surging rip-tide and hurled into the path of a clipper under full sail.
Edge uncurled one hand from the seat and pointed a finger to tilt his hat brim off his forehead. The sky was a brilliant blue still. The sun was a ball of angry yellow fire. Sun and sky made the convoluted surface of the turbulent bay a crazy mirror reflecting everything on it in distorted images. The rowboat was racing sideways, shipping water and refusing to respond to the frantic attempts of the Mexican to drive her into forward momentum. There was a breeze blowing out here in the centre of the bay and the clipper was taking full advantage of it as she sped towards the harbor area on the San Francisco side. She was close enough for Edge to see the horror etched into the faces of the cre
wmen as they leaned over the bow, yelling and waving for the small boat to get clear.
‘You want to die, feller?’ the half-breed asked, his tone even but having to shout to be heard about the hiss and slap of water and the roar of the airstream through the clipper’s rigging.
‘Most certainly I do not, senor!’ the terrified Mexican shrieked.
‘So you’ll do all you can to stay alive, I figure,’ Edge replied, and hooked the pointed finger to ease the hat back down over his slitted eyes again.
The boatman mouthed a curse, screwed his eyes tight closed and pulled with every ounce of his strength against the oars. The tiny boat cut clear of the current, the clipper’s helmsman spun the wheel. The two craft converged, missed each other by the length of an oar, and the open water between them widened. Wash from the larger boat battered the smaller one and raised salt spray over the oarsman and his passenger.
‘You crazy bastard!’ somebody bellowed.
The Mexican stuck out his tongue then grimaced as he tasted the seawater on his lips. He sighed, then grinned his relief. ‘We are okay, senor,’ he reported breathlessly. ‘We are not yet wanted in Fiddler’s Green.’
Edge was back in his private world of deep contemplation, hands folded tight on the seat and body moving with the motion of the boat.
‘That is the heaven for seafaring men, senor’ the boatman explained. ‘If they have faith, they will all go—’
‘Just want to go to the Oakland railroad depot, feller,’ Edge responded, his voice at a normal conversational level now that the clipper and her accompanying noise had scudded out of earshot. ‘Got faith I’ll get there.’
‘You are a man I do not like at all well,’ the Mexican complained sullenly. ‘But I am pleased that you trust me.’
‘You think what you want to,’ the half-breed growled, coldly and cryptically. ‘Be obliged you don’t talk about it.’
Edge: Slaughter Road (Edge series Book 22) Page 4
