Edge reached the side of the bed in two and a half long strides and did not use time in contemplation of the attractive features of the woman in the framework of spread hair; nor the well-proportioned length of her body and limbs appealingly contoured by a single sheet that made it obvious she was again wearing only the flimsiest of night attire. The moment he came to a halt, he drew the Frontier Colt but did not cock it. He transferred it from his right to his left hand, then back to his right, but this time fisting it around the barrel. Then, without the slightest sign of a grimace or even the blinking of an eyelid, he thudded the base of the butt against her left temple at the hairline, hard enough to sound a muted crack of metal hitting bone with just a thin cushion of tissue between. The skin split and a little blood seeped from the fissure as the woman’s head was wrenched to the side by the force of the blow. She made no sound to indicate a conscious awareness of pain: but curtailed her breathing for several moments. Then she began to breathe more deeply than before.
The half-breed slid the gun back in the holster, peeled the sheet to the foot of the bed and could not fail to see that the nightgown she wore was sheer enough to reveal the dark areas at the base of her belly, crests of her breasts and at her armpits. Elsewhere her skin seemed to be as pale as the color of the diaphanous gown. There was a natural gentleness about the manner in which he stooped, raised the unconscious woman into a limp, seated posture and then folded her over his left shoulder— like he was taking precautions about causing her any further discomfort. Then, as he straightened up and turned and carried her out of the room, he ensured that her body and limbs were as decently covered as the daring nightgown allowed and took care to keep her firmly in position without touching her intimately.
And he continued to treat the insensible woman with the utmost decorum until he had carried her out of the Best in the West and into the second-story pressroom of The Prospect Tribune, carefully closing each door behind him. There he set her down on the nearest available chair with no consideration for her posture or modesty while he spent something over a minute familiarizing himself with the workings of the flatbed handpress in a comer of the room. He discovered how to raise the heavy platen high up off the bed so that he could slide out the form of type from beneath it. Then he unfolded the hinged tympan to free the form, which he was careful to set down gingerly on the floor even though he recognized it as the setting for the reward rider to the wanted flyers on him. He took as much care to be as quiet as possible in shifting the lightest table in the room to position it end-on to the press. Then he slid the bed without a form on it back under the platen, and again observed the proprieties in picking up the senseless woman and lowering her, face up, onto the table, with her head resting on the bed of the press. Next he checked that the see-through fabric of her nightgown was pulled high at the neck and low at the ankle-length hem and at the wrists, before he worked the bar handle to lower the spring-pressured platen until it just touched the tip of her nose.
Then he vented a sigh of satisfaction and took the time to make and light a cigarette. He held the flaring match at the same level as the gap between the platen and the bed to keep the darkness at bay while he double-checked what he had achieved, grunted his dissatisfaction and, in the moonlight entering through grimed and dusty windowpanes, made some adjustments. He raised the platen, turned Marsha’s head on the side and worked the bar to narrow the gap once more, not so much that she would feel any pain from the pressure when she regained consciousness; but sufficient so that she would not easily be able to pull her head clear.
He sat down then, after dragging a chair to the side of the press and leaned forward from it to put his face on a level with that of the woman. He started to smoke the cigarette at a faster than usual rate, not inhaling, and blowing out the smoke from pursed lips into the face of the unconscious woman, who, before the cigarette was smoked down to half its length, came coughing and gagging back to awareness. At the start of this, Edge dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed out its fire beneath the toe of a boot.
The hand that had dropped the cigarette now moved into the hair at the nape of his neck and emerged as a fist around the handle of the razor, which he carefully pushed toward the throat of the woman, whose terror at coming awake to the sensation of choking had almost instantly been subdued by agony from the blow with the gun butt, then a moment later was displaced by greater fear. And her mouth gaped wide to vent a scream when she found she could not move her agony-filled head. But just a whimpering moan sounded when the cold metal of the flat of the razor’s blade was pressed to the sweat-tacky flesh under her jaw. And then she caught her breath as a match was struck, its flare blinding her for a moment before she saw the lean, glittering-eyed, darkly-bristled face of Edge.
“Three choices, lady,” the impassive half-breed told her evenly.
She started to breathe again and he had to ease the razor away from her to keep from slicing into her flesh when she swallowed hard before she rasped: “You're the man who killed Frank.”
“All three and a half thousand bucks worth of me, lady.”
“I can’t move. Where is this? What are you doing to me?”
Edge shook out the flame before it burned his finger and thumb and dropped the match as he replied: “Make the right choice and nothing more that’s bad will happen to you. Far as I’m concerned. You’re in the press room of the local newspaper next door to the Best in the West. Make one of the wrong choices and I’ll cut you dead. Make the other—’ ’
“Please, mister, I—”
“. . . the other wrong choice,” the half-breed concluded levelly, “and I’ll leave you flat.”
Chapter Eight
MARSHA was looking her age again, as the throbbing pain inside her skull mixed with the chilling terror that had an icy grip on every fiber in her body: this combination acting to contort her face and deepen the lines in her cold-sweat run skin.
She was probably still on the right side of forty, but only just, with a firm and statuesque body that was standing the test of time better than her face. It was an oval-shaped face with regular features that in the best of circumstances after a skilled application of the right shades, paints and powders would more than merely hint at the classical beauty the woman had possessed as an innocent young girl; before the passing years and loss of innocence took a toll.
Her teeth were still good, white and evenly matched as she clenched them in determination not to give in to panic. And, even at this moment of nerve-twisting tension, there was beauty in the round, wide, thickly-lashed eyes of the woman.
“First wrong choice is to start to scream, lady,” Edge told her evenly. “You’ll drown in your own blood from a cut throat before you finish it. Second one is act the dumb blonde so 1 have to put the pressure on you. Best to tell me what I need to know and that way your headache won't get any worse.”
“Please, mister,” she hissed through her gritted teeth, and now closed her eyes tightly, “You murdered the man I was going to marry. Frank’s dead so there’s nothing you can do to cause him more harm. And 1 can’t understand. Why do you want to cause me more suffering than you have by shooting him down like some mad dog you’d cornered in a—”
“Okay, lady. The way you dress for bed I couldn’t help but see you ain’t a true blonde. And I’ve heard enough to know you’re not dumb. All you have to—”
“This is crazy. Like a nightmare. My whole world is getting turned upside down.” There was a tremulous shrillness in her voice and her eyes began to emanate a hard glitter as she moved toward hysteria.
“I have nothing against you, lady,” Edge said. ‘‘It looks like it,” she countered, taking a grip on sullen anger to combat the urge to panic.
“Had nothing against Frank Crowell until—” She snorted now.
“. . .he took a shot at me when I told him not to. It was one for one, Marsha. Self-defense.” “You should get together with that crazy old
preacherman, mister. Get th
e stories you tell into line. He says you gunned down Frank to keep him from killing—”
“Austin Henry Loring told me about that, Marsha. It’s what he honestly believes happened and—”
“I don’t want the murderer of the man I was going to marry calling me by my given name, mister!” she cut in, and now it was a brand of righteous indignation that sounded in her tone and showed on her pale face in the ink-smelling darkness of the flatbed press. “My name if you have to call me anything is Miss Onslow.”
“He told me about what he thought happened in the alley down the street, and a great deal more, Miss Onslow,” Edge said, not entirely certain that her abrupt switch to this new mood was a step away from hysteria. “Mostly about something that happened seven years ago. Did you know Crowell that long?”
“Having this knife against my throat is scaring the shit out of me, mister,” she said. Paradoxically, she sounded calmer.
“You don’t have any plan to yell for help, Miss Onslow?”
Now she proved she was self-composed enough to have thought rationally about her predicament. And his. She replied: “I’m no brilliant mind, mister. But I’m not dumb the way you were talking about it a while back. No, I don’t have any plans to scream. Start squeezing my head under here though and I won’t be held to any promise you figure I’ve made. And I reckon the whole damn town will be here to ask you some questions before you’ve squeezed me—”
He withdrew the razor and returned it to the pouch at the nape of his neck. He said into the pause that followed her unfinished sentence: “I was asking if you and Crowell had a long engagement, Miss Onslow?”
“You’re not going to release me from under this thing?”
“No.”
“So we can talk like two civilized human beings?”
“I’m not much of a talker, Miss Onslow. But I’m going to tell you what Austin Henry Loring told me. You ready to listen?”
“I have any choice?” she countered sourly.
He told her the bald facts about the massacre at the Rock of Jesus. He referred to the place by the preacher’s name for it just once and did not name the four men who committed the atrocity until he concluded: “Frank Crowell and three other men did the Indian-killing and then left after Loring was lashed to the corpse of his wife, Miss Onslow. One of the others was named Barr. And there was a feller called Red and another one who was Ben. I need to find at least one of those three, Miss Onslow.”
The story of the seven-year-old tragedy had been told in not much over a minute, during which time the woman had gasped and caught her breath on several occasions, the grimace of horror taking a firmer hold on her features at each sound she vented in response to the coldly spoken words of the impassive-faced half-breed. After which, he patiently waited out a pause of perhaps half a minute; not attempting to anticipate how Marsha Onslow would seek to counter die allegations against her newly dead fiance, but mildly surprised when she ended the silence by saying:
“Yes, I can see how Frank could have been capable of such a thing back then. And it explains his phobia about anything to do with religion and the church. Especially how he just couldn’t abide to have a minister near to him.”
“Not asking you to allow that Crowell took a hand in what happened out where the church was being built seven years ago, Miss Onslow. Need to know if those three names I mentioned mean anything to you.”
“They were his friends,” she replied in the same dull-toned voice: her manner vague as if only one small part of her awareness remained in the newspaper pressroom while most of her consciousness was concerned with times and places far removed from her. The new assault of shock and the horror it triggered had been reduced to a numbing effect on her capability to experience any kind of emotion to the present circumstances. And she was maybe fitting into a fresh pattern, events during her relationship with Frank Crowell that she had never before been able to siot into context. “They were in the war together. Not proper soldiers for the CSA. Frank was part of some group ...”
“Raiders?” Edge suggested, satisfied with the line Marsha Onslow was taking.
“Yes, that’s right. Somebody or other’s raiders were what they called themselves. Don’t ask me for the name. Red and Ben and Barry I only remembered because you reminded me.”
“Barry?”
“Barry, Barr . . . whatever. I’ve known—I knew—Frank since a couple of years ago when I first came to this town and he gave me a job as croupier on the Best in the West roulette wheel. We got to be pretty close pretty quick and in two years people who work and live under the same roof all the time say a lot to each other. Talking is about all there is to do in towns like Prospect, mister. The kind where the most exciting thing to do most times is to go down to the livery and watch the horses shit.”
“No Indians to shoot up, preachers’ wives to rape—’ ’
“I’ve heard about a bunch of savages getting killed out at a place where the fallen down church is, mister!” she snapped, fully back in the present again now. “Like most strangers to town who arrive by train, I saw the church and the grave markers. And I asked about it. Not Frank, because I was here in Prospect a few days before he gave me the job and I’d already had my curiosity satisfied by then. The way it was told me—and the way it’s told to any other stranger around here who troubles to ask—nobody knows how the savages and the woman came to be shot up the way they were. Because the old man who was found tied to the corpse of the woman was crazy out of his mind. Sent those who found him on their way. And had buried the dead and gone his own way the next time people went by the place.
“You say it was seven years ago. I don’t know. Just that it all happened back when this town was no more than stockyards and a railroad depot for loading cattle into cars. Whatever, Frank was a drifter back then. Him and the three guys he came west with after the war was over. He told me about that time in his life every now and then. Mostly when he drank too much. And that didn’t happen very often. But he never spoke of taking part in anything like what happened at the chapel beside the railroad, mister. That is the honest truth. Mostly he only spoke about the past since he came to Prospect in the early days of the town and how he built the Best in the West from nothing. Then, after we were engaged to be married six months ago on the twentieth coming, we spoke mostly about the future we would have together. Turned out to be a lot of talk about nothing, didn’t it?”
She sniffed and Edge altered his opinion about the reason for the light that entered her eyes while she was talking in the dull monotone. It was not triggered by tightly controlled anger. Marsha Onslow was on the brink of spilling tears of despair.
“Just Red, Ben and Barr or Barry?” he posed. “Crowell never used their—”
She sniffed again and swallowed hard. And her determination not to break down sounded in the severity of her tone when she answered: “I’ve told you, mister. I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you those names. You reminded me of them. It could be that if you told me their other names, I’d be reminded again. But I just don't know if Frank ever called them Smith or Johnson or whatever. All I do know for sure about anything is that I’m reaching the end of my tether, mister.’’
“I believe you, lady,” Edge told her.
“You better believe me, mister,” the woman rasped back at him. “Because although I don’t want to get my throat slit or have my head crushed, I can feel a scream coming on. And I don’t know if I can stop it.”
“Much obliged for the warning,” he said, and rose from the chair. He heard her gasp as the bar squeaked faintly when he shifted it; then she caught her breath and held the scream in check when he moved the handle so that, it eased the platen up off the side of her head instead of pushing it lower. “And for being so honest with me,” he added as he turned away from the press when he saw she would be able to withdraw her head and get clear of the machinery and table on which she was sprawled as soon as she felt capable of doing so unaided.
�
��You wouldn’t have taken the risks of coming back to town if you didn’t believe in what you are trying to do, mister,” she said, after she had moved just to the extent of rolling her head so that she was staring up at the underside of the platen. “Knowing Frank the way I did I can believe as wholeheartedly as you that he did what you claim. He’s dead and I could have been. What point in lying?”
“None, Miss Onslow,” he answered from close to the door, half turned toward her as he reached for the handle.
“Nor in you saying you’re sorry for mistreating me the way you did? After you misjudged the kind of person I am?”
“Right, no point,” Edge told her as she continued to lay along the table with her head in the press, only her scantily covered torso moving with her measured breathing as her tone of voice suggested her mind had wandered into the maze of the past again.
He pushed open the door and stepped sideways across the threshold and onto the landing at the head of the outside stairway, then pulled the door closed. He froze with his right hand still draped to the handle of the door when something small and hard and circular was pressed against his spine, midway down his back. And a man’s voice he failed to recognize growled:
“I can tell you more about one of Frank Crowell’s old wartime buddies, Edge. Why don’t we go—” The half-breed powered into a counterclockwise turn. He kicked off with his right toe and gave impetus with a shove of his right hand against the door handle. This as he spun on his left heel and whiplashed his left arm backwards. Thus was he only a quarter way through a full tum when his rigid left forearm impacted with the hand gripping the revolver and dislodged the muzzle from against his spine.
“Sonofa—” the man holding the gun started to rasp into the void that followed what he had been saying before.
The Godforsaken Page 8
