The tigers were roaring in fear and anger, rocking the wagon frantically as they chased around the big gold. The team stood in docile immobility in the traces. Familiar with the tantrums of the wild beasts, they were also immune to the explosive cracking of gunfire.
“More men die for ideals than anything else!” the half-breed rasped. He fired again, as the five other attackers still in their saddles turned to stream after Grainger.
The man being dragged was plunged into the stream and became lost to sight amid the spray raised by pumping hooves and the aquaplaning of his own body. Diluted blood colored the white water of his wake. Edge’s second shot took a man in the side of the head, and a dying nerve spasm sent him rigidly upright in the stirrups before he toppled to the side, trailing an arc of blood from his ear.
The men concentrated on retreat, yelling at their mounts and slamming in their heels to drive the horses back up the slope. They were no longer firing. But a new source of gunfire opened up. The pathetically insignificant crackle of the pepperbox and the much more forceful reports of a repeating rifle.
Edge snatched a look across the stream, over the hump of the inert form of the man who had been snatched free of the stirrup. Case and Jo Jo Lamont had sprinted away from the wagons and had reached the bank of the water course. The dude was standing erect, in the formal stance of a duelist, methodically firing the tiny gun across a hopeless range. The girl was prone on the ground beside him, elbows firm into the dirt, cheek against the stock and blazing away at the attackers like somebody born with a Winchester in their hands.
When the half-breed’s eyes swung back to look up the rise, their faintly amused expression changed to one of guarded admiration. The girl had already blasted one man from the saddle. Another slumped forward and thudded to the ground as Edge drew a bead on him.
The three survivors, leaning into the necks of their straining mounts, reached the brow of the hill. Edge raked the rifle barrel across the backs of two of them and zeroed in on the nape of Grainger’s neck just as the riders started down the far slope. The girl had selected the same man for a target and the two rifles exploded simultaneously. Grainger’s head seemed to disintegrate in a shower of torn flesh, spraying blood and shattered bone. But the crest of the hill hid his fall. And the two survivors were screened from further shots.
“My life is indeed owed to you, sahib!” Singh croaked, raising his head and cracking his fingers to peer between them at the crumpled forms littering the slope. “What a pity you had to use such violent means to save it.”
“They didn’t seem ready to be talked out of blasting you, feller,” the half-breed muttered, snatching up the Colt and scrambling out from under the wagon.
The tigers were still venting fierce roars as they bounded about inside the wagon. Edge didn’t even bother to check the stallion with its blood-run head covered with feeding flies. As he leapt up on to the wagon seat, he caught a glimpse of Case and Jo Jo Lamont, looking towards him with wide eyes staring out of pale, shocked faces. And beyond them he saw the rest of the carny showmen and spielers, continuing with preparations for their midday meal as if the attack had never happened.
Then he kicked off the brake lever and slapped the reins across the backs of the team, yelling at the horses to urge them into movement. They responded immediately, as if the sounds of the battle and the scent of blood and cordite in their nostrils had been building up a powerful reserve of strength in them while they stood in obedient and unmoving silence. Now they unleashed it, swinging into a tight turn at the dictates of the reins. Snorts vented from quivering nostrils.
“Edge!” Case yelled, and seemed rooted to the spot.
“Goodness gracious, my beautiful beasts!” Singh had started to rise, then pitched out full-length again as the heavily-laden wagon jerked forward. One of the wheels missed his hand-covered head by an inch. Then, once he felt the sun beating down on him, he jumped upright, sprinted in pursuit of the trundling, swaying wagon, and leapt to get a handhold on the tailgate. He vaulted himself up and through the canvas flaps as the wagon started the tight turn, splashing into the stream. His anxious eyes raked over the quivering flesh of the two tigers, who hurled themselves at the bars: claws extended and fangs bared. “It is so wonderful you are unharmed,” he whispered. Then he crouched in a corner of the wagon, just out of reach of the sharply pointed claws, and took out his harmonica. He began to play.
Jo Jo Lamont screamed and whirled around, dropping the Winchester and covering her mouth with her hands. But the nausea rose despite her efforts to hold it down: the bile erupted by the sight of entrails spilling from burst open flesh as a rear wheel of the wagon sliced through the body of the dead man in the stream.
“For Christsake, Edge!” Case shrieked. Now he was able to move, but only to the extent of raising a foot and stamping it back to the ground.
“Don’t like getting shot at, feller!” the half-breed called to him as the swaying wagon came back on a straight course, heading for the brow of the hill at the maximum speed the team was able to haul its heavy burden.
It had been a suicidal attack against a man with a repeating rifle he knew how to use. But that hadn’t been the plan, of course. Grainger, Salter and the bunch of drifters they or Clarence French had gathered must have been watching from the cover of the hill crest as the carny wagons halted at the campsite behind the beach. The presence of Case aboard the cage wagon and Edge riding escort would have told the two former guards which vehicle carried the precious freight. Confirmation would have been provided by how low the wagon rested on its springs. The two ex-guards would have known there would be no trouble from the others. So all that was necessary was to kill the half-breed. Case would not have stood a chance with his pathetically inadequate multi-barrel handgun. Singh had no stomach for fighting. But Grainger had shot the half-breed’s horse instead of the man and the attack was in full flood before this fact was realized. The intervention of Jo Jo Lamont? There were variables in every situation. The chances of them happening were higher where women were involved.
“I come to look after my most beautiful beasts, sahib!” the Nepalese shouted, pushing his head out through the front flaps of the wagon as the team achieved the top of the rise and lunged into greater speed going down the other side. “Whatever you feel necessary to do, you do alone. Not for eighty dollars a day will I partake of violence.”
Edge had seen Grainger slumped on the hillside, the blood from his shattered head already congealing as the flies fed avidly. Then his narrowed eyes had raked the terrain spread out before him: rolling, brush-covered hills featured with stands of timber. This, soft-looking, strip of country changed suddenly about a mile ahead, where a rocky cliff face reared high, cleaved at one point by the mouth of a ravine. And he saw the two horsemen on the crest of another hill, galloping hard towards the split in the cliff and already halfway there.
“It’s your tigers Case is buying,” Edge yelled, hauling on the reins to drive the straining team on a diagonal line down the slope. “And this rig. You’re just along for the incidental music. Keep the cats quiet, uh?”
Singh looked fearfully down the slope, towards the sun-sparkled stream which they were approaching at a breakneck pace. The bank on the far side had become an escarpment at the base of a hill. Rock for the most part, which looked terrifyingly capable of smashing the team and the wagon to pieces. The little dark-skinned man screwed his eyes tight shut, then ducked back inside the wagon. Trembling, he squatted in a corner and brought the mouth organ to his lips. Its mournful music was this time designed to calm himself as much as his animals.
The half-breed heard the wailing notes faintly above the thud of pumping hooves, creak of harness and rattling of speeding wheels. Sweat beads stood out against his weathered, deeply-scored face. More salty moisture oozed from every pore in his body, sticking his clothing to his body. He licked wetness from his thin lips and kept his eyes narrowed to mere slits to stop his vision blurring. The timing of the turn had to be precise. I
f he gave the team free rein, they would veer to the left too soon, with the risk of overturning the heavy wagon on the final, steepest section of the slope. And if he left it too late there would not be enough space or time. The horses would make it, but the front corner of the careering wagon would smash into the escarpment.
“Yooooowwwweeeeee!” he yelled, wrenched on the left hand reins, and stomped on the stock of the Winchester as it started to slide off the footboards.
The lead pair of horses were in the stream, kicking up spray. They responded to the pull of the reins, the sense of urgency witnessed by their own eyes emphasized by the full-throated cry of Edge. The rear pair followed the same line, curving down off the sloping bank to plunge along the water course. Drenching coolness spraying over their lathered flesh drove them back from the brink of a panicked bolt. All four reacted to the skilful handling of the reins, galloping on a course dictated by the driver.
The wagon tilted dangerously as it dipped into the water. As it turned, canvas was ripped to shreds between immoveable rock and the rigid iron bars of the cages dragged along its weather-roughened surface. Then the speeding wagon slammed down on to all four wheels again and began to pitch and roll as the rims bounced over the rock-strewn bed of the stream.
The music from the harmonica became frenetic and tuneless, as the terrified Singh forgot his skill with the instrument and simply blew into it: for no other purpose than to fill his own ears with the discordant sound. Anything was better than the barrage of other noises which he was sure meant the wagon was breaking up as a prelude to his death.
The half-breed allowed himself a short, taut smile of triumph at making the turn with no more damage than a torn side canvas. Then he became cold-eyed and machine-like again, his physical strength concentrating upon retaining control of the team and wagon while his mind worked on the evidence picked up by his eyes, peering ahead from under the hooded lids.
The stream had to come from the base of the cliff, or even along the ravine which cut into the rearing rock face. The water course would have found the easiest route to the ocean. And, provided there were no waterfalls or rapids, it might just point the easiest way inland. In the absence of such obstacles, its meandering course had to be less arduous than the steep rises and sharp falls of the brush-covered hills. Maybe not for a man on a horse, but certainly for a wagon laden with a ton and a half of gold and two angry tigers.
So the half-breed had made the choice and now he peered ahead, looking for white water that would indicate the presence of large, wheel-breaking rocks beneath the surface of the stream. But, at each turn, a further stretch of calm water was revealed, shining in tranquil innocence beneath the fierce light of the sun. And, despite the many curves around the bases of the rises, the stream was leading the way inexorably towards the mouth of the ravine.
The wagon came clear of the broken terrain immediately opposite the gigantic split in the high rock face. A grassy meadow stretched away in either direction from the banks of the stream. When the half-breed had steered the team up out of the water with no slackening of speed, the wheels ran across the springy turf with luxurious smoothness. The water course pointed a sparkling finger into the ravine and Edge held the wagon in that direction, after a glance to right and left had revealed no sign of the two riders.
“It is because of the purity of my life that I have been most fortunately saved yet again,” Singh exclaimed in delight as he interrupted his discordant music to look out through the flap.
“What about the dame in San Francisco?” Edge growled between gritted teeth, easing back on the reins to slacken the headlong pace. There were a lot of niches in the rocky walls of the ravine and scattered boulders on the ground. A hundred and one places two men and their horses could hide.
The Nepalese split his face into a. teeth gleaming grin. “A man’s most natural urges are not diminished when he leaves his wife half a world away, sahib. God is not a torturer. He would not make man suffer most nasty urge in lower regions. Therefore not impure to scatter fruit of loins when so many passion flowers provided for him.”
“Your wife agree with that?” the half-breed asked as the wagon hurtled into the ravine, deeply shadowed on one side now that the sun had started its afternoon descent.
“Wife never close by when matter arises, sahib.”
“Guess she wouldn’t be,” Edge muttered, leaning to one side and glancing to the rear of the wagon for the first time since the careering pursuit had begun. But there was nothing to see except the brush-covered hills and isolated clumps of trees, with the ocean a thin blue line on the far horizon. For, as the ravine swung to the right, the second wagon to leave the trail was screened by the high angle of towering rock.
“Oh, goodness gracious me!” Singh cried, the old terror re-emerging to swamp the good humor in his tone.
Edge swung his attention to the front again. Two loose horses, still saddled, lifted their heads from chomping a patch of tough grass, and bolted out of the path of the wagon. He saw wood splinter from the seat six inches from his leg before he heard the sharp crack of the rifle’s report.
“It is indeed a day of much shooting I am thinking!” Singh yelled, and ducked back through the flap, pitching full length to the bed of the wagon and covering his head with his hands. The tigers roared. “Shut up, you bloody Ugly brutes!” he screamed at them.
The brake blocks screeched against the wheel rims as Edge hauled on the lever. His free hand wrenched back on the reins, jerking up the heads of the team. The wagon side-slid around the curve of the ravine, spilling a great billow of dust behind it. Fighting to bring the snorting, sweating horses to a halt, the half-breed caught just a glimpse of the two men. The ravine was a dead end and they were crouched on a ledge a hundred feet up the rear rock wall. Nature, or the men themselves, had heaped loose rocks into a barricade on the lip of the ledge and it was over this dry-stone wall that they were firing.
A whole fusillade of bullets was sent crashing down towards the wagon before the team finally came to a panting, snorting halt. Edge was already crouched low on the seat as the lead whined about him, smashing more splinters of wood and boring holes in the canvas. The moment the wagon jerked to a halt, he powered into a leap to the ground, scooping up the rifle as he came clear. He hit the dirt sure-footed, turned and dived between the front and rear wheels. Dirt spurted from under his heels as bullets dug into the ground. Beneath the wagon, the settling dust clinging to his sweat-tacky face, Edge was in secure cover and the rifle fire stopped. His long, brown fingers extracted shells from the left side of his gun-belt and he pushed them through the Winchester’s loading gate, replacing those fired back at the camp by the beach.
“Hey, you down there!” one of the men on the ledge yelled, and laughter ripped from his mouth in a short burst. “Reckon you driven yourself into a trap.”
The tigers had been roaring, but with the end of the gunfire, they had become quiet again, except for an occasional low growl.
“Oh, dear dear me,” the Nepalese moaned. “Do you think he is right, sahib?”
Singh had his eye close to a crack between two boards in the wagon bed and was peering down at Edge. The half-breed looked up at the single dark eye between the boards and sighed.
“Sometimes I don’t think you’ve got a hell of a lot of faith in me, feller,” he muttered, pushing the final shell into the gate. He worked the lever to eject a spent casing and thrust a live bullet into the breach.
“I am ever ready to be convinced, sahib,” the Nepalese answered hurriedly.
“You hear me down there?”
Edge spat, arching the globule out of the shade beneath the wagon into the sun-bleached dust.
“He hears you, Harv,” the second man on the ledge yelled, and giggled. “Seems to make him spittin’ mad.”
“Look at it this way,” Edge said softly, a pensive expression on his hard-skinned, lean features. “Didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching up with them unless they w
anted to be caught up with. And, bearing in mind what this rig is carrying, beside big cats, I figured they’d want to get caught up with.”
“You are indeed one smart sahib,” Singh allowed after a tense pause. “But I think bullets can hurt you just the same as stupid Nepalese like Vishwabandhu Nageshwar Singh. And not only hurt, you understand.”
“Hey, we got us enough ammo to stand off an army!” Harv warned. “You just back off and leave the wagon, we won’t shoot.”
Edge inched forward, between the front wheels, and peered up at the rock face between the hindquarters of the two rear horses. He could see rifle barrels poking out over the barricade of stones. But both men stayed in solid cover. He moved to one side and then the other, surveying the floor of the ravine and the surface of the cliff below, to right and left and above the ledge. There were a dozen ways to get up to and above where the men were positioned. But not without a worse than fifty-fifty chance of taking at least one bullet before the closest group of covering boulders was reached. But, if the two men up there chose the right route, they could make it to ground level without showing a hat brim or boot heel.
“I decide to put faith in you, sahib,” Singh said. “Because there is nothing else for it. Oh, dear, dear me, no.”
“Obliged,” Edge said wryly, then raised his voice as he inched backwards, towards the rear of the wagon. “You up there!”
“He’s ready to talk turkey, Harv.”
“And I figured he was a chicken.”
“What cut of the gold French giving you?” the half-breed yelled.
“Who the hell’s French? Ray Grainger and his buddy hired me and my brother and the other guys outta Yellowtown. Even divvy all round.” He laughed. “Seems me and Jesse get to have a half share each. Cause we ain’t makin’ no deals, mister.”
Edge lowered the Winchester over the tailgate, then hooked his hands over the wood and hauled himself up and through the flap. Singh was crouching in a corner at the front, looking very frightened. The stench of animal excrement was almost overpowering under the canvas. From the ledge, there was no way to see inside through the large rent in the side canvas.
EDGE: The Big Gold (Edge series Book 15) Page 8
