“Oh, God, his pills!” Eileen Donovan shrilled as Loring and Marsha Onslow reached the far side of the burial ground—close enough for Edge to be able to catch the mischievous wink that the woman directed at him.
His attention was yet again drawn to the fat man. And he was in time to see Barry Donovan weave on collapsing legs, trip on a tie and start to fall hard to the ground, his hands thrust out in front of him once more, but not in a pushing attitude nor in an attempt to break his fall. Instead, it was like he was making some crazed effort to catch hold of the caboose at the rear of the, speeding train that was now more than a half mile away.
“I’m coming, my darling!” Eileen Donovan yelled. “I’ll help you, Barry! Don’t die, please don’t die!”
Loring snapped his Bible closed and pulled free of Marsha’s grip to stride fast among the grave markers in the wake of the distraught woman who was running toward where her husband lay ominously still after rolling onto his back. And then Edge moved toward the same objective, but with less haste, aware that Marsha Onslow was hurrying to join him. The bottle blonde fell in breathlessly alongside him as the redhead dropped hard to her knees beside her unmoving husband and shrieked:
“All right, you can forget it! Barry is dead! His heart finally gave out like they said it would if he didn’t take it easier! So you’ve got what you want, you murdering bastard! Just as surely as if you had shot him dead!”
Marsha glanced at the half-breed’s hard-set profile and was unable to see any outward sign of how he was reacting to Donovan’s death by heart attack. She accused sardonically:
“You don’t exactly have winning ways with women, Edge.”
“Been known to beat them from time to time, lady.”
“I bet you have,” she countered, and there was a catch in her voice.
“It is another sign from the Almighty on high!” Loring declaimed, clutching the Bible to his narrow chest as he tilted back his head to turn his face to the naturally sculptured face high up on the outcrop of rock. “The second evildoer has perished by His hand on the very scene of his vicious iniquity! By this has God condoned what we are—” “Shut up!” Eileen Donovan shrieked as she threw herself across the unfeeling corpse of her husband. “How dare you claim that the good Lord—”
“Vengeance is mine!” Austin Henry Loring interrupted the tearful woman in a tone of voice tha suggested he was on the verge of venting trium phant laughter. “An eye for an eye! I am vindi cated in my long-suppressed desire for revenge! 1 is already haJf complete!-’
Now he fell to his knees, clasped his hands t< either side of the Bible and bowed his head ii reverent genuflection and silent prayer, while th new widow remained prostrate across the corpse shaking with sobs. This as Marsha Onslow abruptl halted, only now aware that the half-breed had lei her side—to step across the railroad track and hea for where his chestnut gelding continued to graz on the crest of the low rise to the northeast. "Edge!” she yelled, irritable.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe she knows something about the other two!”
“Not going anyplace I won't be coming bac from, lady.”
“You mind if I talk with her?” Marsha wante to know , straining to control her ill-temper wit the half-breed w ho did not look back at her as h moved toward his distant horse.
“Could be the kind that never gets done. lady. “What?” she snapped.
"Woman's work.”
“You are infuriating!”
“Talking.”
Chapter Twelve
IT took the unhurrying half-breed something over forty-five minutes to walk out to where the chestnut gelding was calmly foraging on the hill crest, check him over for injury and ride him back to the late afternoon shadow of the rock outcrop beside the railroad track.
In this time, the train had gone from sight and there was just a faint smudge of dark smoke above the disintegrating heat haze in the south to show that it had disappeared in this direction; the sun had slid noticeably lower down the southwestern dome of the sky; and the group of three living people and one corpse that had been out in its full glare were now in the cooling shade of the Rock of Jesus.
Edge had watched the transportation of the body of Barry Donovan as he started to ride back—the remains loaded onto the rear seat of Loring’s buggy that had been concealed beyond the southern end of the outcrop. The preacher had gone to bring the buggy to the side of the track and Marsha had driven it then, Loring and widow walking behind as if they were following a funeral cortege. The body was left in the buggy parked beside the chapel and the preacher appeared to be consoling the widow while the second woman started a fire in the circle of stones and set a pot of coffee to boil. There was a certain brusqueness about everything the Prospect woman did, like she was doing it reluctantly and in an ill-humor.
“According to your way of thinking, Edge,” Marsha Onslow announced sourly as the half-breed swung out of his saddle on the other side of the track, “the preacherman is a real old woman! He’s hardly stopped talking since you left!”
“The innocent should not be made to suffer, sir,” Loring defended, “for the sins of those with who they have associated. This is certainly to be applied m the case of an innocent who until today had no knowledge of what took place here seven years ago?”
His tone and the expression on his skeletal face altered the statement to a query.
“Coffee’s starting to smell good,” Edge said as he led his horse carefully across the railbed, track and ties. And he appeared to be totally indifferent to the eager Loring, the irritable Marsha Onslow and the grief-stricken new widow, until he had hitched his reins to a wheel of the buggy and took his tin mug from his bedroll to bring to the fireside, where he dropped onto his haunches on the other side of Eileen Donovan from the preacher—the two of them seated on a block of adobe. And he said:
“You’ll recall I made mention of why 1 stopped the train, ma’am?”
“I have no wish to discuss—” the widow with the pale, tear-stained face started to say, her voice unaffectedly refined again as she reached the numbed stage of coming to terms with grief.
“I said it was to hear the truth. Now your husband can’t tell it me, I’m counting on you. There’s no great rush, so I can spare you more than three. Even more than ten. Let’s say a hundred, uh? Give or take a count or two either way? How about as long as it takes me to drink a cup of coffee?”
His tone was as neutral as his expression. But both Eileen Donovan and Austin Henry Loring listened to him and looked at him with mounting fear. The widow gasped and the preacher made a wet sound in his throat when Edge casually thrust his mug toward Marsha Onslow, who sat On another adobe block partway around the fire.
A smile replaced the frown on the face of the faded beauty with the bleach-blonde hair. And she said as she poured coffee from the pot into the mug and returned it to the half-breed: “Maybe you and he should switch collars, Edge. The way you have of putting the fear of God into people.”
The coffee was too hot to drink at once. He rested the mug on the ground and took out the makings. He was aware that both the widow and the preacher wanted to speak, but could not trust their voices to be pitched at the desired tone yet.
“I ain’t God, lady,” he said to the Prospect woman.
“You know what I mean.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
“You want to know about me tying up with the preacherman and heading out here with him?” she asked, and poured herself some coffee in the mug Edge recognized as belonging to Austin Henry Loring.
“There’s some coffee-drinking time to kill, lady. And women—”
“Yeah, women and talk go together like love and marriage,” she cut in, ill-humor momentarily flaring in her eyes again. But when she glanced at Eileen Donovan it was with something akin to malicious envy rather than malevolence. But then she sighed, and peered into the fire with an attitude of resignation apparent in her expression and the posture she adopted on
the block of adobe. “I never really did love Frank Crowell. I suspected it lots of times, but it wasn’t until he was dead that I knew it for certain. Oh, I cried for him. But it was as much over my own feelings of guilt for going through the motions of grief as a bride to be; as it was for knowing Frank was down at the mortician’s parlor and I’d never see him agin. You know what I mean, Edge?”
“Do I have to?” the half-breed asked as he lit the cigarette with a glowing stick from out the fire. She was fleetingly sullen, then gave a slight shrug and shifted her gaze from his face to study the heart of the fire again. “No, I guess somebody like you could never understand how a person can get trapped. Get into a nice easy rut. Know there’s something better she can do with her life. But a lot worse, too. So she stays where she is, scared she might step out of the frying pan into the fire instead of the land of real living. And takes a drink or two over the usual on those times when she really gets to hating herself bad for not doing what she knows she ought to.”
“Sister, you are speaking of the lives of almost every one of God’s creatures who has the gift of free will,” Loring assured. “We must make sacrifices to play our part in the order of things. Strong liquor is but a foolish palliative, my friend. Far better to turn to the comfort offered by the Almighty as we travel this vale of tears on our journey to His house of many mansions or to the sulphurous domain of the devil where—”
“Yeah, preacherman,” Marsha Onslow cut in dully. “But when a person lives in a saloon at the other end of town from the church, liquor is quicker.” She had looked from the fire to Loring and now glanced at Edge again before she returned to studying the flames and continued: “Anyway, I guess you’ve got the picture, mister. When you killed Frank, you made the decision for me. And maybe you did me a favor.”
Eileen Donovan vented a strangled sound of shock and was ignored.
“Without knowing it, so I didn’t figure I owed you much. If anything. Except when you made it so I had to talk to you. But you didn’t have to do that. You know it now. Frank Crowell’s dead and gone and I can remember the good times we had together. While I take my chances at finding something better. And—sorry preacherman—without being much concerned if anybody up there is watching, I figure my chances will be better if I do what strikes me as the right thing. And, since I’ve good reason to believe everything the preacherman and you have told me, Edge, I felt I had to help the both of you.
“I started when I didn’t snitch on you after you had the fight with Milton Rose last night, didn’t I? Then, when I saw the sheriff and Mr. Loring putting their heads together in the law office I got to wondering if there was anything else I could do.”.
Austin Henry Loring had gradually sunk into a contemplative attitude that spread an expression of melancholy over his gaunt face: that was at the other end of the emotional range from the evangelical fervor that had previously lit his eyes and animated his sparse features.
“I apologize for not remaining where you told me, sir,” he offered, in much the same flat tone of voice Marsha Onslow had used.
“No sweat, feller,” Edge answered, conscious of the pale-skinned widow tensely studying his every move as he smoked the cigarette and sipped the coffee.
“But I got to thinking, you see. I know you object to ... to me preaching to you, as you infer it. But the fact remains, sir; in the darkness of the night I was visited by black thoughts about how you might interpret my agreement to you performing the will of God.”
“You came to Prospect, feller.”
“Yes. Yes. I don’t know with what precise intention. Perhaps just a vague hope of meeting with you again before ... in any event, I got to town very early this morning. Day was just breaking. Just Sheriff Milton Rose seemed to be up and about. He had me come into his office and began to tell me about the events of the night. Then Miss Onslow joined us. Since my mission now had the official backing of the law—man-made justice as well as . . .’’He cleared his throat. “Well, I was most anxious to confer with you again. In truth, to plead that you allow the law to take its course rather than to take it into your own hands ... I’m sorry. It showed I had very little faith in your ability to exercise restraint, Mr. Edge.” “Restraint?” Eileen Donovan gasped in a strangled tone of incredulity. And she was ignored yet again.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen, Edge,” Marsha Onslow said quickly, fervid sincerity gleaming in her eyes. “But what I do know is the whole town’s against you. Except for Milton Rose. And me. I figured that if I was seen to be on your side when something else bad happened, it would make Prospect people stop and think before they did anything they’d be sorry for.”
“Like lynch you,” Loring put in, and produced a flicker of ice-cold anger in the narrowed eyes of the half-breed.
“And he’s not talking because he likes to hear his own voice now,” Marsha warned. “The sheriffs old and sick and he’s not much more than a town retainer. ’ ’
“He told me.”
“Frank Crowell had a lot more respect. I didn’t have any trouble at all starting the ball rolling and getting pledges for the three and a half thousand dollars to put up the reward. Part of salving my conscience ...” She was momentarily shamefaced, but shrugged out of the mood. “Anyway, there’s been lynch talk. And I let my conscience lead the way again. Rode with the preacherman out of town. Looking to find you. Went first to the place where Mr. Loring was supposed to wait. Saw somebody on horseback had been there and gone north along the railroad track. Figured it had to be you and so trailed you.”
“We reached the Rock of Jesus while you were asleep,” Loring put in when the woman paused for breath. “Needed some rest ourselves and so we bedded down without disturbing you.”
“I wanted to let you know we were here,” Marsha assured.
“I felt that here within the vicinity of the Rock of Jesus, the Lord’s will would be done. As it was.” He tilted his head to look up at the eroded top of the outcrop and smiled his contentment.
“It was the train stopping that woke us up, Edge. You sure don’t pussyfoot around when you make your mind up to something, do you? Holding up the train that way?”
‘‘Orin stopped it with plenty of distance to spare.”
‘‘I mean singlehanded. There might have been a whole bunch of hard men aboard. Any one of who might have shot you on sight.”
“Prospect ain’t the kind of town hard men come to very often, lady. In a bunch or one at a time. And ordinary people don’t take to killing lightly. Way Orin pulled out all the stops to keep from running me down with his locomotive, most men will hold back from using a gun against another man.”
Eileen Donovan seemed eager to say something, but Austin Henry Loring spoke first. Shook his head in admiration as he murmured:
“Foolishness and bravery are often one and the same thing.”
“With three and a half grand on my head, I figured risking my ass was worthwhile, lady,” Edge said to Marsha Onslow. Then, as he tipped the dregs from his mug into the fire, he turned to the widow and waited for the hissing sound to finish before he asked of her: “You were going to say, lady?”
She shook her head much more vigorously than had the preacher. “No, nothing.”
Edge came erect and the suddenly breathless woman tilted back her head to gaze up at him. “Figure the count has to be two or three thousand past what I said, Mrs. Donovan. And in all that time you’ve said just the one word. That called into question my self-control as I recall?”
“You do not frighten me,” she said hoarsely. The negative action of the half-breed’s head was almost imperceptible. But the woman seated below him saw it and she began to breathe as if an invisible claw had fastened around her throat.
“Bad start, lady. It’s truth time, remember? And you’re so afraid of me you’re almost wetting your drawers.”
He let go of his empty mug and it rattled on one of the stones encircling the fire and bounced to the ground. Both women and the prea
cher found their attention captured by the falling mug and each of them was startled by the sound of metal against rock. Then a far deeper degree of shock gripped each of them as Edge dropped into a crouch behind Eileen Donovan, forced her head back into his shoulder with the bar of his left forearm and with his right hand fisted around the handle of the straight razor, and pressed the side of its blade into the soft bulge of her cheek.
“Edge!” Loring and Marsha Onslow said in unison.
“It’s the truth that I have no desire to cut you, Mrs. Donovan,” the half-breed said softly into her ear that was partially obscured by her auburn hair. “It’s also the truth that I will if you lie to me. Question: you knew what your husband and three other men did at this place seven years ago?’-’
She gulped and managed to force out: “No, I don’t know what—’’
“You knew he was once a friend of a man named Frank Crowell?’’
“Yes.” The gulp came after the reply this time. “You knew Crowell owned a saloon in the town of Prospect?”
“Yes.”
“You know of two other men who were close friends of your husband and Crowell in the War Between the States and for a time after it?” “Yes.”
“You know their names?”
“Yes.”
“So tell me, lady.”
“Please, you’re hurting me.”
“The truth often hurts.”
“Maguire and Tremayne.”
“You know where they are, Mrs. Donovan?” Now she forced her head harder into his shoulder —so that she could stare defiantly up into his impassive face rather than in any attempt to draw back from the threat of the razor pressed against her flesh. “That was what I was going to tell you when you were bragging about you think you’re the only man around here who can shoot to kill! You were lucky, that’s all! Barry had them hold the train for as long as he could, but Maguire still missed itl He’ll get you, though! Some other time! Especially when he finds out you’ve killed Barry as well as Frank Crowell! Maguire has a reputation as the most deadly gunfighter that ever ...”
The Godforsaken Page 12
