The Edge of Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  “Maybe you could talk to him,” Belinda suggested. “Maybe if you explained the truth about everything, he’d see that he’s wrong to hate you.”

  Don Eduardo looked at Viola and said, “You talked with him, señora. Did he seem to you like the sort of man who would listen to reason?”

  “Not at all,” Viola answered without hesitation. “He’s been nursing his hate for too long. I don’t think he could put it aside now. It’s all he has left.”

  Don Eduardo spread his hands and said to his wife, “You see? There is nothing to be done. We must wait.”

  “Wait and hope that John gets back here in time,” Viola said. “That . . . and be ready to fight for our lives if we don’t get any help.”

  * * *

  The sun was nearly down when Stonewall and Hermosa came in sight of the ranch. John thought there might be some sort of trouble here, so Stonewall was more nervous than he would have liked to admit. He had been watching for smoke in the sky that would indicate burning buildings and listening for the sound of gunfire, although it was beyond him why any of the rustlers would have doubled back to attack the ranch.

  Instead, the place looked quiet and peaceful in the fading light. From a distance, Stonewall could make out the trees, the roof of the house, the water tank standing to one side a little higher than anything else.

  He and Hermosa reined in, and Stonewall heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Looks like John was wrong for once,” he said. “That sure doesn’t happen very often. I reckon we can ride on in—”

  Hermosa reached over and gripped his arm.

  “Wait,” the vaquero said.

  “What is it?” Stonewall asked with a frown. “Everything looks fine to me.”

  “Look there.” Hermosa pointed. “Above the water tank.”

  Stonewall squinted, and as he did, he made out several dark shapes wheeling through the air. They were little more than dots at this distance, but he had seen such things often enough in the past to recognize them.

  “Those are buzzards,” he said.

  As he watched, one of the carrion birds dipped down toward the water tank and disappeared. It must have landed on top of the tank, Stonewall realized. The other buzzards continued to circle.

  “Something is dead up there,” Hermosa said, his voice flat.

  “Maybe a . . . a rat?” Stonewall suggested as a ball of sick fear began to form in his belly.

  Hermosa shook his head and said, “Not a rat. One of the zopilotes would have picked it up and carried it off by now. What’s up there is too big for them to lift.”

  “Well, an animal of some other sort, then,” Stonewall said, but even he could hear how hollow his voice had become.

  “An animal, yes,” Hermosa repeated with a grave nod. “A man.”

  “We can’t be sure about that. Anyway, what in blazes would a man be doing on top of the water tank?”

  “A man might be up there to work on it. But a dead man?”

  Hermosa’s shoulders rose and fell in an expressive shrug.

  Stonewall took off his hat and scrubbed a hand over his face. It seemed like a week since he’d had any sleep, and he’d been in the saddle for so long that every muscle in his body ached. But for a second there he had felt a lot better when he thought everything was fine on the ranch after all.

  Hermosa had kicked that right out from under him. Everything the vaquero said was correct. There had to be a dead man on top of the water tank.

  That might well mean the trouble here was already over.

  Viola might already be—

  Stonewall swallowed hard and clapped his hat back on his head. He wasn’t going to believe that anything had happened to his big sister until he had undeniable proof of it. Viola had always been extremely capable of taking care of herself, so Stonewall was going to assume she was fine.

  Thanks to Hermosa’s keen eyes, though, he knew they couldn’t afford to go riding in openly, as if nothing were wrong.

  Hermosa seemed to be thinking the same thing. He asked, “Which approach has the most cover?”

  Stonewall scratched his jaw in thought for a moment, then said, “It’ll take longer, but we need to circle all the way around to the south, across the border. There are more trees and buildings if we come in that way. If we can make it to the barn and the corrals, we’ll have a good view of the front of the house from there, and maybe we can tell what’s going on.”

  Hermosa nodded in agreement with the plan, then glanced at the sky and said, “It will be dark in an hour or so. Trouble often comes with the twilight.”

  “If it does,” Stonewall said, “we’ll be ready for it.”

  Chapter 19

  Night fell quickly in Arizona Territory once the sun dipped below the horizon. Normally that wasn’t a problem, but Viola hated to see it happen tonight.

  The darkness meant they couldn’t see the enemy coming.

  And come they would, she thought as she knelt at one of the front windows and watched the dusky shadows gathering.

  It was getting even darker inside the house. When the maids started to light the lamps, as they normally did at this time of day, Viola had told them to stop and added that they should blow out the ones they’d already lit. She didn’t want any of the defenders silhouetted against the glow so they would be even better targets.

  A footstep beside her made Viola look around. Dr. Fredericks stood there, crouching a little so he could look out the window.

  “Better move back, doctor,” she said. “There’s no telling when they might start throwing lead through these windows.”

  Fredericks retreated quickly. He said, “I’m afraid you have more experience at this sort of thing than I do, Mrs. Slaughter. I deal with the aftermath of trouble. I rarely find myself squarely in the middle of it like this.”

  “I know, and I wish you weren’t here now. Not that I don’t appreciate any help you can give us—”

  “I know what you mean,” Fredericks said. “I could have driven away and not been trapped here.” His voice took on a determined tone as he continued, “But I have patients here, so I’m glad I stayed. I have every confidence that we’re all going to be all right.”

  “So do I,” Viola said.

  That was stretching the truth, she thought, but she knew better than to give up hope. She had come through some dangerous situations before, and John hadn’t always been at her side during those times, either.

  “I don’t know much about this sort of thing,” Fredericks went on. “What do you think they’ll do?”

  Viola had been pondering that quite a bit herself. She said, “Unless their numbers are overwhelming, I don’t believe they’ll launch a full-scale attack on the house. If they had that many men, they would have already done it. So it’s more likely they’ll try to drive us out into the open. The best way to do that is with fire.”

  “Fire,” Fredericks repeated. Viola heard the worry in his voice. “You mean they’ll try to set the house on fire.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Flaming arrows on the roof, perhaps, to borrow a trick from the savages?”

  Viola shook her head and said, “The roof is slate. It won’t burn easily. They might try to shoot flaming arrows through the windows or get close enough to throw torches through them. It’ll be up to us to keep them from succeeding.”

  “The other people who are wounded could probably get out of the house if they had to, but Don Eduardo shouldn’t be moved too much,” the doctor said. “It could be very dangerous for him.” Fredericks paused. “But not more dangerous than staying in here while the place burns down around him, of course.”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that. We’ll do our best to see that it doesn’t.”

  “You know,” Fredericks mused, “if this man Becker wants Don Eduardo and Mrs. Rubriz alive, he can’t just massacre everyone wholesale. He’ll have to take prisoners.”

  “Only until he has the ones he wants,” Viola pointed out.
<
br />   “And then everyone else . . .”

  “Will be a problem to be disposed of,” she said.

  * * *

  A large rock cairn jutted up from the flat ground covered with scrub grass. Stonewall and Hermosa crouched behind it, each man peering past the cairn toward the barn and corrals about two hundred yards away.

  The cairn marked the border between the United States and Mexico, and right now it provided some cover for Stonewall and Hermosa, too. Stonewall hoped that in the fading light their shapes would blend in with that of the marker in case anyone happened to look in this direction.

  “I see no one moving around,” Hermosa said quietly. “Perhaps the ranch is deserted.”

  “Maybe. That might not be a good thing, though.”

  Stonewall hadn’t seen any signs of life as they approached, either. They had left their horses a quarter of a mile behind them and proceeded on foot for about half that distance before dropping to hands and knees and crawling the rest of the way to the border marker.

  Stonewall listened intently. He didn’t hear anything. A cloak of silence seemed to have been dropped over the ranch. That was unusual in itself. There were evening chores to do, and a lot of times there was horseplay going on around the bunkhouse. The quiet was ominous.

  “We need to get closer,” Stonewall said. They had brought their rifles with them, so he picked up his and went on, “You stay here and cover me. When I get to those trees”—he pointed to the cottonwoods that grew near the barn—“I’ll stop there and you can come on across.”

  “The ground between here and there is wide open,” Hermosa pointed out. “Anyone who looks in this direction will see you.”

  “Yeah, I know, but we’re not doin’ any good out here. I reckon we’ll just hope that anybody around the place who ain’t friendly will have their eyes on the house instead of back here.”

  The vaquero didn’t argue with that. He simply picked up his Winchester and gave Stonewall a grim nod.

  Stonewall tugged his hat down tighter on his head, then burst out from behind the border marker and ran toward the trees. He zigzagged a little, just in case anybody was trying to draw a bead on him.

  Running in boots wasn’t easy. Like most hombres who had practically grown up in the saddle, Stonewall figured that any job a man couldn’t do from horseback usually wasn’t worth doing.

  This evening, though, he had no choice. He summoned up all the speed he could as he ran with the rifle held at a slant across his chest.

  His heart hammered wildly in his chest, and not just from the exertion. His muscles were braced for the shock of a bullet at any second.

  That shock never came. He reached the cottonwoods and slid to a stop among them, pressing his back to one of the tree trunks.

  After standing there a moment with his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath, he took off his hat and waved at Hermosa. From here, Stonewall couldn’t see the vaquero behind the border marker even though he knew Hermosa was there.

  Hermosa emerged from the cairn’s shelter and loped toward the trees. Now that Stonewall had crossed the stretch of open ground without drawing any fire, Hermosa obviously didn’t feel quite as much urgency. Despite that, his long legs covered the ground quickly, and he joined Stonewall in the trees.

  Stonewall gestured toward the barn and said in a half-whisper, “We can get in there now and take a look at the house. I’ll go first.”

  “Be careful,” Hermosa advised. “If there are bad men around, some are likely to be in there.”

  “Yeah, I know. But there’s only one way to find out.”

  Bending low, Stonewall ran through the gloom, past the corral, and up to the back of the barn. There was a door here. He had it open and slipped through in a matter of heartbeats.

  The hinges squealed a little more than he liked, though.

  He stopped just inside the barn. The shadows were thicker in here. The double doors at the front were almost completely closed, but not quite. When he looked along the center aisle he saw a thin line of grayish light, indicating the gap between the doors.

  Stonewall listened again but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. Several milk cows were kept in stalls in here, and he heard them moving around a little. They seemed restless, and one of them mooed plaintively. A couple of others joined in.

  Those simple sounds told him something. The cows hadn’t been milked this evening, and they weren’t happy about it.

  That was the last bit of evidence he needed to tell him something was very wrong here. A chore like milking the cows never would have been neglected otherwise.

  He sniffed the air. Manure, straw, animal flesh . . . those were the only things he smelled. Tobacco smoke would have told him that someone was in here.

  Of course, just because nobody was smoking a quirly in the barn didn’t mean he was the only human occupant, he reminded himself. Maybe somebody was just being careful not to give away their presence.

  Stonewall started toward the double doors.

  His booted feet made no sound on the hard-packed dirt of the center aisle. The walk through the barn wasn’t long, but his nerves were stretched so tight it seemed to take him an hour.

  Finally he was at the doors. He leaned forward and peered through the gap. From here he could look across the two roads and the large open area where the party had been held the previous night and see the house behind the picket fence.

  In this poor light, he couldn’t tell if any smoke rose from either of the two chimneys. The house sat there dark and quiet, flanked by a couple of outbuildings and the water tank, some tall cottonwoods looming behind it, several shorter trees and shrubs in front of it.

  Stonewall regarded this place as his home, but it sure didn’t feel very welcoming at the moment.

  He was about to return to the back door and hiss at Hermosa, indicating that the vaquero should join him, but before he could turn away from the door he heard a faint noise close behind him. It was only a tiny scrape of boot leather against dirt, but that was enough.

  Stonewall dived down and to the side as something swished over his head. He heard a grunt and then somebody stumbled into him.

  Whoever this man was, he might be a friend, attacking Stonewall because he didn’t know who he was. Stonewall didn’t want to hurt him until he found out what was going on here.

  Then the man let out a harsh, vile curse and Stonewall didn’t recognize his gravelly voice. Stonewall lowered his head and lunged forward. His shoulder rammed into the man’s legs. Stonewall hooked an arm around his knees and heaved. The man let out a yell as he went over backward and crashed to the ground.

  Stonewall scrambled onto his knees and swung the Winchester one-handed, hoping the barrel would strike his attacker in the head and knock him out. The blow missed, however, and Stonewall had to put his other hand down to catch himself as he lost his balance.

  That left his chin hanging out in the open for the kick that the man swept around at him. The blow knocked Stonewall across the aisle. He lost his hat and the rifle as he rolled over a couple of times and came up hard against the gate across the front of one of the stalls.

  He started to pull himself up but froze as he heard the unmistakable sound of a revolver being cocked.

  “Who the hell are you, mister?” the gravelly voice demanded. “Speak up or I’ll start shootin’.”

  Stonewall didn’t say anything. He figured the stranger didn’t really care who he was. He just wanted Stonewall to say something so he could shoot at the sound of his voice.

  Now that the man had committed himself and given away his own position, though, he couldn’t afford to wait very long. Sure enough, only a couple of seconds went by before the man’s nerve broke and he squeezed the trigger. Stonewall saw Colt flame bloom in the darkness as the sound of the shot assaulted his ears. The bullet thudded into a board somewhere as Stonewall threw himself onto his belly and palmed out his own Colt.

  The gun roared and bucked in his han
d as he triggered twice, bracketing the spot where he had seen the muzzle flash. He figured the man had ducked one way or the other after firing.

  His ears were ringing from the shots, but he heard a choked scream. The man fired again, but the shots were wild, spasmodic, as if his finger was jerking the trigger with no conscious thought. He emptied the gun, and then Stonewall heard something hit the ground with a soggy thud.

  He pushed himself up but had to grab the stall gate with his free hand to keep from falling again. That kick to the jaw had shaken him up more than he realized at first. As he stood there he heard rapid footsteps slap against the dirt and lifted his gun to shoot again if he needed to.

  “Stonewall!”

  That was Hermosa’s voice. Stonewall sagged a little as he recognized it.

  “Here,” he called. “But be careful, I don’t know how many of them are in here.”

  No more shots sounded. A moment later the vaquero gripped Stonewall’s arm and asked, “You are all right, amigo?”

  “Feel like a mule kicked me, but other than that I’m fine,” Stonewall told him. “I think there must’ve only been one fella in here, and I’m pretty sure I got him.”

  “One more thing you can be sure of,” Hermosa said grimly. “If there are more of them, they know now that we’re here.”

  * * *

  The shots made Becker stiffen and turn his head. He had been looking toward the house, but now he gazed toward the southwest.

  “Did those shots come from the barn?” he snapped.

  “Sounded like it,” Herb Woodbury replied.

  “Who’s over there?”

  “Walt Bryce, I think. Maybe he thought he saw somethin’ and got spooked.”

  “No,” Becker said, “I counted seven shots.” He turned to the Apache. “Bodaway—”

  “I will find out what happened,” Bodaway said before Becker could finish. The Apache faded away into the shadows.