“He ain’t,” the half-breed told her quietly. “Especially not at me. That was the idea.”
“What am I gonna do?” Jo Jo wailed, losing more of the watchers’ sympathy with every word she uttered, stressing her own misfortune above Turk’s suffering.
“Learn to chew over the crud before you spit it out. Maybe you’ll find another guy to ride herd on you.”
He heeled the horse into an easy walk, riding alongside the line of Seascape citizens waiting to see the big gold. The carny people from the other sideshows hurried forward to gather around the unconscious Turk and the sobbing Jo Jo.
“All he done was put a hole in your hat, mister!” a man in the line accused with heavy scorn. “Didn’t have to do that to him.”
The man’s wife laid a restraining hand on his arm and trembled when the ice-blue, slitted eyes of the half-breed sought out the speaker.
“He hurt me, feller,” the tall rider answered softly, taking off his hat and brushing off the dust with a shirt sleeve. “Had to make him regret it.”
The man in the crowd was short and fat—and brave. “Knife didn’t even part your hair.” He shook off his wife’s hand angrily.
“Got me in a sensitive spot,” the tall man said as he set the hat back on his head and rode past. “Hurt my dignity.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE half-breed, whose ethnic mix was the result of having a Scandinavian mother and a Mexican father, was named Edge. He had not been born with this name, but it served his purpose as well as the original. He had come by it at a time when the horrors and violence of war were behind him and a peaceful life as an Iowa wheat farmer should have been his. But fate had decreed this was not to be. It was almost as if God—or, more likely, Satan—had decided that Captain Josiah C. Hedges had learned the lessons of war too well for his knowledge and skills to be wasted.
For it was a chain of events outside his control, not a voluntary choice, that had driven him away from the end of the conflict between the North and the South and on to the start of a peacetime trail more bloody and vicious than anything he had experienced as a Union cavalry officer. Revenge had been the initial spur, driving him to seek retribution against the men who had destroyed everything he had fought the war to preserve. Honor had been satisfied, but afterwards there had been no trail back into the kind of life that might have been.
Just a trail that went aimlessly forward, sometimes inviting and at other times compelling, the rootless man called Edge to follow it. Gaining and losing fortunes and in the process having to kill in order to survive. Killing fast and brutally, before he suffered the same fate. And to what end? Once he had succeeded in taking a tenuous grip on a future that was not aimless. But it had proved to be cruel fate playing a dirty trick. The hope of sharing a peaceful, happy life with a wife on a farm in the Dakotas had been more viciously shattered than the dream of returning home to Iowa and a kid brother.
Hatred and revenge had driven him out on to the trail again, but there was to be no honor satisfied this time. A lone man could not wipe out the entire Sioux nation, and what was the point: when the man discovered the bitter truth about the death of his wife? That he had contributed as much to her terrible end as the Indians.
And so the wanderings of Edge had become aimless again and he rode the trail more bitter and brutal than ever: seeking only to stay alive. Without reason. Unless it be to make all men pay for the suffering caused to him. Or for the sheer, cold-blooded pleasure he derived from responding to violence with a greater degree of violence? Perhaps because he did not want to know the answer, he never questioned himself or his actions. He simply rode the trail. Through the open country of the mid and Far West most of the way. But sometimes arriving in towns like Seascape.
Allowing the stallion to make his own easy walking pace down the main street, Edge saw that he could go no further west on this course. For the town was set spectacularly atop high cliffs overlooking the vast, blue-green emptiness of the Pacific. But it did not make its living from the ocean. The sound of the breakers crashing against the base of the cliffs, distant but loud in their fury, provided audible evidence that the Pacific was too far below and too angry to accept boats. The great, broad belt of towering redwoods arcing around Seascape to the north, east and south and the strong scent of fresh sawdust permeated through the arid air witnessed this was a timber town.
It wasn’t long since Edge had been in another town that drew its living from the massive forests of the north west. A town that had lived up to its ominous name of Hate. But he seldom reflected upon the past and as he angled his horse towards the front of the Redwood Saloon he drove into the back of his mind the memories which the scent of sawdust threatened to stir. There was a drinking trough adjacent to the hitching rail and the stallion sucked thirstily at the sun-dappled water. It had been a long, hot ride for the sun had made its heat felt almost from the first moment it showed itself full-face above the horizon.
The shade of the covered sidewalk in front of the saloon was pleasant. Through the fastened opened batswings the air was even cooler. There was only one other person in the big room, and he wasn’t large enough to give off much body heat. He was a short, skinny, middle-aged man with buck teeth and wire-framed eye-glasses. Standing behind the long, polished wood bar with a brass rail at its base, he wore a freshly-laundered white shirt and a much-stained leather apron. He showed more teeth in a wide grin of genuine pleasure as his only customer approached. He didn’t seem to mind at all that Edge banged his hat against his black shirt and black levis, leaving a trail of dust on the previously clean floor.
“Welcome to you stranger!” he greeted effusively. “Seein’ as how my regulars ain’t in a drinkin’ mood today, I’m buying the first one. For the pleasure of your company, like. Name your poison.”
“Beer,” Edge answered, leaning against the bar and hooking a heel over the rail. “On account of it’s better than rye on a hot day and it’s cheaper.”
The grin stayed in place while the bartender drew the beer. “When Herb Alton stands treat in his own bar, you don’t want to worry about the expense,” he said happily.
Edge drew a handful of coins from his pants pocket and set them on the counter. “When I’m paying, I worry about the expense,” he said. “And I’m paying.”
“Suit yourself,” Alton answered, deflated. He placed the foaming glass in front of the half-breed and slid five cents from the small pile of loose change.
“Usually do,” Edge said.
The sound of Jo Jo’s sobs, shuffling feet and low-voiced conversation drifted in from the street. Alton moved to the side to look around his customer as a group of the carny people moved along the street in front of the opened batswings. They were carrying Turk’s inert form. The distraught Jo Jo trailed the group, ignored by them.
“What the hell happened?” Alton asked, more rhetorically than in expectation of an answer.
Edge was looking at a faded and curled notice pinned above the bottle-lined shelves behind the counter. It read: ROOMS TO RENT—50 CENTS A NIGHT. He glanced down at the coins and calculated there was forty cents in nickels and dimes. He raised the glass to his dusty lips. “Guy used his right arm for the wrong thing,” he muttered, and sank half the beer at a single swallow. It was cold and tasted better than anything he had ever swallowed before.
“Uh?” Alton asked, bewildered. “Looks to me like somebody got hurt.” He craned his neck and went up on his toes to look through an end window in the saloon. “Yeah, they’re goin’ up to Doc Elkin’s place.” He shook his head ruefully and made tutting sounds. “I said all along them carny folk’d cause trouble. You see it, stranger?”
Edge was sipping the beer to extend his enjoyment of it “Wasn’t much to see. A woman opened her mouth and a guy got cut up over it.”
“Mrs. Blackhouse was right!” Alton said with feeling. “Them there brazen females was sure to cause trouble. Flaunting their bodies on the open street like they was whores in a city ca
thouse.”
Edge probed at the pile of change with a dirt-grimed finger. “How many hours will that buy me in one of your rooms?” he asked. “If I take a bath as well as rest up?”
Alton’s generosity in offering to buy a drink was uncharacteristic. He eyed the pathetic heap of money with scorn and did a fast, long-range tally without having to touch the coins. “That forty cents’ll buy you a room for as long as it takes you to have the bath.”
Edge continued to sip his beer, but the direction of his hooded-eyed gaze drew the attention of the bartender to the notice above the shelves. Alton merely glanced at the curled sign. He shook his head.
“That rate applies when circumstances are normal, stranger. All the business premises in Seascape have upped their charges. On account of the carny people. It keeps them camped in the timber and outta town most of the time. It was Mrs. Blackhouse’s idea.”
Edge finished his beer and looked ruefully into the foam clinging to the sides of the glass. “I’ll take the room and bath,” he said, and pushed the forty cents towards Alton. “Wouldn’t want to offend Mrs. Blackhouse with the dirt under my nails.”
“I’m unimportant, young man!”
The voice came from the doorway. Alton nodded a greeting as the half-breed turned. The woman was fat, fifty and may once have been pretty, even beautiful. But time had carved the lines of bitterness into the set of her flabby features. She wore a shapeless black dress and her grey hair was held in a severe bun on the crown of her head. Even in the shade of the covered sidewalk, she continued to hold a white parasol aloft. She stood firmly just beyond the threshold of the saloon doorway, in an attitude which suggested nothing on earth would lure her through the batswings.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” Alton said deferentially.
Mrs. Blackhouse ignored him, fixing Edge with an unblinking, malevolent stare. “It is the moral tone of Seascape which concerns me. We are proud of our town and despise violence even more than the loose ways of the so-called entertainers who have invaded us.”
“Seems to me the advance was in the opposite direction, lady,” Edge said.
“Many were tempted,” she allowed. “By frustrated avarice and an even more basic urge. But I fear your act of viciousness will leave a more lasting impression on them than the sight of great wealth and half-clothed females.”
“You hurt the guy they took up to Doc Elkin’s?” the bartender exclaimed.
The doorway with a sign over it was to one side of the saloon, adjacent to the end of the bar counter. The sign read: ROOMS THIS WAY. Edge started towards it. “It was him or me, and he had his chance,” he called. Then he altered course, turning towards the batswings.
The fat woman barred the exit. “I intend to report the incident to the sheriff when he returns from Portland, young man,” she said with menace.
Edge halted on the inner threshold and ran his icy gaze insolently over the bulky figure of the woman. “You’ll do what you have to, lady,” he said softly. “And I can see you’ve got plenty of body to be busy with.”
Mrs. Blackhouse had a pasty complexion. Abruptly, the flabby flesh of her cheeks flushed. “Well I never!” she gasped, insulted.
“Guess that doesn’t worry Mr. Blackhouse no more,” Edge said, and went forward.
The woman held her position for a moment, then sidestepped hurriedly out of the half-breed’s path. “My husband has been dead these past fifteen years!” she hurled at him as he stepped down from the sidewalk.
“My condolences,” Edge said, sliding the Winchester from the saddle boot. “To your husband for being married to somebody like you.”
The woman’s color deepened. She tried to hurl a retort, but managed to vent only an inarticulate croak. Then she whirled with a swish of dress fabric and waddled along the sidewalk. Edge looked beyond her, to the carny midway at the end of the street. The showmen who had helped carry Turk to the town doctor were now back at their tents and doing some business. The big gold exhibit still had the largest crowd and some of the customers who emerged from the rear of the tent returned to join the end of the line for a second look. Others moved along the midway, prepared to be encouraged into spending a little money elsewhere. Mrs. Blackhouse stood in front of the Seascape Bank for a few moments, ramrod stiff, watching her fellow citizens disregarding her advice. Then she pivoted and waddled through the bank doorway.
Edge looked across the deserted street, towards a two storey building with a sign proclaiming it was the office of the Seascape Lumber Company. “What day is it, feller?” he called into the saloon.
Alton was wiping and polishing the beer glass the half-breed had used. “Sunday.”
It meant the blinds at the windows and doors of the company office were not simply drawn against the sun. As he swung to re-enter the saloon, carrying the Winchester, his attention was once more captured by the carny midway. A buggy drawn by a high-stepping white horse was heading sedately towards town from the east. Holding the reins was an incredibly fat man who smiled brightly at the men and touched his hat to the women who greeted him. As the buggy came clear of the midway and on to the street, the half-breed saw its driver was even fatter than he had seemed on first impression.
He must have weighed at least three hundred and fifty pounds, all of it stacked on to a five and a half feet frame. His girth was enormous, his belly seeming to begin beneath the lowest of his many chins and sagging over his belt to rest on his thick thighs. His face was round, with bright, sunken eyes, bulging cheeks and a protruding mouth. He was sweating a great deal, the moisture oozing across the scarlet flesh of his face faster than he could mop it away with a handkerchief. His tight-fitting shirt, which clung to every flabby bulge of his torso, had been changed from white to grey by sweat. Even his dark colored pants, encasing him like a second skin, looked like they might drip water if they were wrung out. But he was happy in his discomfort, still showing twin rows of even, white teeth as he reined the black gelding to a halt outside the saloon. It was difficult to guess accurately at his age, which could have been anything from thirty to fifty. For in having to stretch over the obese flesh, the skin remained unwrinkled.
“Good day to you!” he greeted brightly as he eased off the buggy seat and swung himself carefully to the ground. The wheel springs gave a groan of relief and the buggy’s body was raised at least three inches higher when free of the man’s weight. “Am I going to have some company in this hostelry?”
He wore spurs, which jingled in cheerful accompaniment to his mood as the fat man patted the gelding’s neck and hitched the reins to the rail. He also wore a matched pair of gold-plated, ivory-butted Beaumont-Adams revolvers in tooled-leather holsters tied down at his thighs. His index fingers looked too thick to fit between triggers and guards.
“Doubt they’ve got a bathtub big enough for the both of us,” Edge said, and re-entered the saloon.
Every swell of fat trembled when the man laughed. “Haven’t got one big enough for me on my own,” he answered, hauling himself up on to the sidewalk to trail the half-breed. “Reason I have to ride out down the coast to find a quiet stretch of ocean. Trouble is, I’m sweating like a pig again time I’ve made the haul back to town. Two cold beers, Herb. For me and my fellow guest.”
Edge had almost reached the doorway which led to the rooms for rent.
“The stranger don’t allow folks to buy him drinks, Mr. French,” the bartender answered, beginning to draw a beer.
The fat man hauled a chair away from a table and dropped into it gratefully. He used the handkerchief to wipe more sweat from his face, then took off his hat to fan himself. He was bald except for a crescent of sandy hair above each ear. “So I’ll drink alone,” he said with a shrug that caused the chair to creak. “Make my tab a little lighter.” He shook with laughter again. “Won’t do the same for me, though.”
Edge went through the doorway into a hall that made a right angle turn to run through the rear of the saloon.
“Any room with an op
en door!” Alton called after him. “Tub and pitcher down at the end. You have to fill ’em yourself. Pump marked salt water.”
There was only one of the six doors closed. Edge chose the room at the far end because it was closest to doorway which gave on to the yard behind the saloon. The two pumps were immediately outside and he only had to tote the pitchers of water a short way. The room was spartanly-furnished, but clean. The bed-linen was sparklingly white: very appealing to Edge, who had been sleeping under the stars for more nights than he could remember. But he stuck to the rules of the room rental.
He drew the drape curtains across the recently cleaned window and set the tub down alongside the bed. Then he made a dozen round trips to the salt water pump to fill it almost to the brim. There was kindling beneath a fire-blackened pot in the yard, but the icy cold ocean water felt too good to spoil with heat. There was no key in the door lock and no bolts, so when he had stripped almost naked, he lowered himself into the chill water so that he faced the closed door. This put his back to the window but sometimes a man could not cover all the angles as well as he would like. He had to be content with the best he was able to do. So, with at least one man in town who had good reason to hate him, the half-breed had placed the Winchester on the bed and the Colt on the floor immediately beside the tub: both within a two-feet, easy reach.
The item of apparel which he continued to wear as he sat in the tub, enjoying the shock of coldness against his tacky skin, looked at first glance like mere ornamentation. It was a string of dully-colored beads, threaded on to a leather thong which was looped around his neck. In fact, it served a useful purpose for, attached to it at the rear, beneath the fringe of long black hair, was a buck-skin pouch. In this pouch nestled a sharply honed open cut-throat razor. This razor, like the scar tissue which marred the even coffee color of his hard skin at the left shoulder, right hip and left thigh, was a relic of the war Between the States. The reason for carrying it so, and the speed and expertise with which he used it for purposes other than shaving, could also be traced back to this traumatic opening sequence that had pitched him into a life of violence.
EDGE: The Big Gold (Edge series Book 15) Page 2
