EDGE: Ashes And Dust (Edge series Book 19)

by George G. Gilman

Edge nodded. ‘We’re in the same business, Sheriff.’

  The man in the doorway shook his head. ‘You’re no lawman, Edge.’

  ‘But I’m looking for troublemakers. Six of them.’

  Now the sheriff nodded. ‘Bounty-hunter, uh?’

  ‘He is working for me, Sheriff,’ Emma said. ‘We are seeking some men who—’

  ‘Looking for Conrad Andrews and his bunch,’ the half-breed supplied. ‘They got something belongs to the talkative lady.’

  ‘Insufferable!’ Emma snorted softly.

  The lawman clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Something like money, uh?’

  ‘A lot like it, feller. And a lot of it’

  The big man in the doorway sighed. ‘They’re sure spending it like there’s no tomorrow.’

  ‘Then they are in El Paso?’ Emma exclaimed excitedly.

  ‘Staying at a better place than this, ma’am.’ He glanced around the room, seemed set to spit, then looked at Emma and decided against it.

  ‘Which is why we’re in a place like this,’ Edge supplied.

  ‘They know you?’

  ‘The lady,’ Edge replied. ‘They saw a lot of her.’

  Emma picked up the double-meaning and glared at Edge. But he was concentrating on the sheriff. So she turned her anger on the lawman. ‘You must know they’re criminals! Why haven’t you arrested them?’

  ‘El Paso’s my patch, ma’am. I got a stack of wanted bills on Andrews, Harry and George Hare, Kenyon Lamb, Ira Walker and the Jap. But that’s other folks business. They ain’t even spit on the sidewalk in my patch, far as I know.’

  ‘That is a terrible attitude to take!’ Emma accused, and glared fleetingly at Edge again. ‘I have come to expect it from some kinds of men. But you are a peace officer, Sheriff!’

  ‘That sure is my job, ma’am,’ he agreed. ‘Keepin’ the peace. But them six outlaws stick closer together than bees around a honey pot. And if me and my deputies try to take them ... well, be like full-scale war instead of peace. Course, if they started in with their bad ways, then that’d be a different matter. Be them startin’ the war on my patch.’ He swung his gaze towards the still seated Edge as the half-breed ground out the cigarette under his heel. ‘And I ain’t just talkin’ for benefit of the lady, Edge?’

  ‘I been listening, too, feller,’ the half-breed responded.

  A nod and an easy smile. Then my visit ain’t been wasted. You got my message. If you figure to tangle with Andrews and his bunch - and I figure you fully intend to - then you do it off my patch, mister.’ He touched his hat brim. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, and moved away as quietly as he had approached.

  ‘I think it is disgusting!’ Emma said, her voice little short of a snarl. ‘A peace officer who allows wanted criminals to roam freely, spending their stolen money.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Edge rasped. ‘Insufferable. Let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out of here.’ He stood up from the bed and canted the rifle to his shoulder.

  ‘Oh, you are so close mouthed!’ she snapped.

  ‘But you open yours enough for the two of us, ma’am,’ he called back as he went out through the gap in the canvas wall.

  Emma held back for a moment, but then the cockroaches made more scuttling sounds in the straw of the bed and she half ran to catch up with Edge.

  The cantina was doing brisker business than before. A crush of men - all Mexicans - were drinking and talking about the recent shooting. A lone woman was at the table to the right of the door, scrubbing it clean of blood. All talk was curtailed as Edge and Emma emerged from the back. As the half-breed placed a dollar bill on the bar top, he spoke in the native language of the apprehensive audience.

  ‘Before anyone says anything about a short time, you should know I speak better Mexican than my father - and he was Mexican.’

  ‘You are leaving, senor?’ the squint-eyed owner of the cantina asked. ‘For good?’

  ‘For the lady’s good, feller.’

  He headed for the door and Emma moved quickly to stay with him in the corridor opened up by the drinkers.

  ‘I almost forget, senor. The sheriff, he had a message for you. He say best in Mexico, senor. But you have to start at Holden House on Division Street’

  Their horses were still hitched to the rail outside the Bella Cantina, as hungry and weary as the two riders. There were men on the street, perhaps the same ones as before or perhaps different. Whichever, news of the shooting had been circulated and the interest shown in Emma Diamond was curious rather than sensuous.

  ‘I suppose that makes the sheriff here somewhat better than Mr. Schabar in Dream Creek,’ the woman said as she imitated Edge by swinging up into the saddle. ‘At least he is not being obstructive.’

  ‘Both equally as good, I’d say,’ Edge answered as he backed the gelding away from the rail and headed him south along the street.

  Emma hastened to get alongside him. ‘Good?’

  ‘At minding their own business, which is protecting their towns.’

  ‘By detaching themselves from everything that happens outside!’ she countered haughtily.

  ‘Schabar didn’t want the Andrews bunch back in Dream Creek. The feller here wants them out of El Paso. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, ma’am.’

  ‘Because it justifies the existence of a man like you, I suppose? So that you can earn ten thousand dollars doing the work which peace officers choose to neglect.’

  The Bella Cantina had been on the south side of town and already Edge and Emma had ridden clear of EI Paso into the sand and sandstone country spread along the northern bank of the Rio Grande.

  ‘You accepted the terms, ma’am,’ he reminded her coldly.

  ‘Because I had no alternative, Mr. Edge. And that is driven home almost every hour that passes.’

  ‘So what’s the hassle?’

  ‘I’m just talking to keep from screaming! With frustration!’

  ‘You only have to ask, ma’am.’

  She caught the new tone in his voice and snapped her head around to stare at him. When she saw his easy grin, her eyes generated a glare. ‘Even if I could and you were the last man on earth…’ Her violence-shocked mind in her weary body ran out of words.

  ‘I’m whittling them down, ma’am,’ the half-breed said pensively. ‘But if you can’t - well, I guess ten thousand is enough compensation.’

  ‘It’ll buy a lot of whores,’ Emma rasped bitterly.

  Edge released the reins and swung both arms. His right hand, reaching across the front of his body, fastened on her shoulder. She had time to shriek a cry of alarm. Then his left back-handed her across the cheek. His grip on her ensured she felt the full weight of the blow - and prevented it knocking her from the horse.

  ‘You brutal beast!’ she screamed at him as he calmly resumed a hold on the reins and she streaked a hand to massage the source of her pain. ‘You ... you animal!’

  ‘I’ll kill for it, lady,’ the half-breed rasped. ‘I’ll fight for it. I’ll work for it. I’ll be polite for it. Once I even married for it. But I’ll never pay for it.’

  ‘All right!’ she snapped. ‘All right! You’ve made it perfectly clear. I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s a way you won’t have to keep saying that, ma’am,’ Edge told her, his tone soft and even again.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt to say it’

  ‘So why d’you keep rubbing your face?’

  She snatched her hand away from her cheek. Moonlight showed the red puffiness against the suntan.

  ‘Just keep your mouth shut as tight as your legs.’

  She continued to stare straight ahead, and merely tightened her mouth line in response to the crudeness of the half-breed. And the ride became as silent as it had been a few days earlier after she had buried her wayward brother. Just her mood was different. Then she had been wrapped in the silence of grief. Now she was sulkily sullen.

  Edge was as impassively alert as ever as they rode south to
the river. Emma submitted in docile silence to having a lead rope hitched to her gelding, so that the half-breed could move ahead and guide her across the Rio Grande. The water was many feet below flood and the two horses were required to swim only a few yards across mid-stream. At either side of this, the geldings could wade, struggling against the currents and dragging their hooves through the sucking mud

  ‘We’re in Mexico now?’ Emma said dully as the horses carried them out of the river on the south bank . ‘If that doesn’t get me another beating?’

  ‘We’re in Mexico,’ Edge answered.

  She glanced to the left and right and ahead. At a barren desert plain and the rearing ruggedness of the Sierra Madre far to the west.

  ‘Why should they come here?’ she asked, wearily heeling her horse into a slow walk in the wake of the tall half-breed.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her and showed his teeth in a tight grin. ‘ You’ll feel better after a good night’s rest, ma’am.’

  ‘But no smarter. Not in your way.’

  ‘Which is why I’m worth ten grand to you.’

  ‘It’s worth it to me - just not to be in any way like you, Mr. Edge.’

  ‘It’s the difference that could have made it interesting,’ he told her pointedly, which brought another long silence from Emma Diamond.

  Which did not end until they looked down from the crest of a hill at the first sign of human life they had seen since leaving El Paso. It was a Mexican dirt farm - a crude house and ramshackle stable set in a pocket of arable earth surrounded on all sides by almost barren rock. A well at the side of the house showed how the farmer was able to eke a living from lemon grove and cornfield that were the extent of his farm.

  ‘Do you think there is a chance we may rest down there, Mr. Edge?’ Emma asked flatly.

  The half-breed did not reply, and when she dragged her tired gaze away from the farm to look at him, she saw he was examining the scene below with cold suspicion.

  ‘It’s just a homestead, surely?’ she said. ‘Owned by poor peons doing the best they can to stay alive.’

  ‘Poor peons don’t ever get to ride good-looking saddle horses,’ the half-breed told her, not breaking his concentrated appraisal of the farm and the intervening ground. ‘Stay here.’

  She swallowed hard and peered down the slope to survey the scene in its new, frightening aspect. ‘What if...?’

  ‘Ride for El Paso like you had the Jap breathing down your neck, ma’am. And go home or get yourself another man.’

  She looked at him pleadingly. ‘I’d rather come with you, Mr. Edge.’

  He showed her the faintest of sardonic grins. ‘Wrong time and place to see if we could make it. Stay here!’

  He heeled the gelding off the hilltop and down the gentle incline, listening for the sounds that would indicate Emma Diamond was following him. All he heard was a single, soft-spoken word.

  ‘Insufferable!’

  He ignored her.

  Cactus plants grew at widely spaced intervals in hollows of sandy earth over the slope. But they offered no cover to anything larger than a lizard. So Edge maintained a direct course towards the farm buildings, riding slow and easy. The gelding’s hooves clopped monotonously against the hard rock.

  The moon showed the house and stable in stark contrasts of white adobe and black shadow. A window at each side of the house door spilled lamplight, its yellow glow giving a gloss to the coats of the trio of saddled horses hitched to the shaft of a two-wheeled cart canted over on to a broken wheel.

  Inside the stable, a burro whinnied. The horses raised their heads and pricked their ears. For a moment they held a frozen posture as they watched the lone rider approaching. Then they dipped their heads again, to munch at the patch of grass growing under the wreck of the cart. In the stable, the burro kicked at the wall.

  There were no sounds from inside the house and no one moved across the lighted windows. The chimney of the squat, one-storey building did not smoke. The ripening lemons gave a tangy smell to the hot, dry air immediately around the farm buildings. It was stronger than the atmosphere of disillusion and decay that was a less tangible emanation from the place.

  ‘You will come no closer, gringo!’

  ‘Unless you wish to meet your maker, Americano.’

  The first man spoke in heavily accented English. The second in Spanish. As they moved to frame themselves in the windows, the door swung open and a third man stepped on to the threshold. All held leveled revolvers and Edge had been allowed to close on the house to within thirty feet. It was long range for handguns, unless the men were either very good or very lucky.

  ‘Only the good die young, so they say,’ Edge said, speaking in his father’s language, as he reined the gelding to a halt.

  The man in the doorway laughed. ‘They talk out of a hole not meant to speak through, senor. I did not kill a man until I was thirty years. Nor steal a single pesos.’

  ‘And Pedro lives,’ the man on the right said enthusiastically.

  ‘Not good, but well,’ the English speaker added, and laughed as loudly as Pedro until the obvious leader of the trio snarled a curse at him.

  Pedro looked to be about twice the age he had been when he turned bad. His partners were not yet half his age. All were as filthy and unshaven as Edge, but a lot shorter and a great deal thicker around the waist and chest. They were dressed in expensive boots, pants, shirts and hats. American style. All wore crossed bandoliers.

  ‘What you want here, hombre!’ Pedro demanded, trying out his own English. All humor was gone now. ‘You bounty hunting for the damn Federales, uh?’

  ‘Didn’t know the heat was on for them,’ the half-breed answered in the same language.

  Pedro asked a question of the man on the left. He called him Espada. Espada told the top man that the American was trying to be funny.

  ‘Pulque!’ the man in the doorway snarled, and reached his free hand out of sight beyond the frame. There was a shuffling sound. When his hand swung back into sight, it was fisted around the neck of a bottle. He lashed a foot to the side and the kick exploded a cry of pain. It sounded like an old man. ‘I will tell you something, Americano,’ Pedro called to Edge. ‘I do not think you are funny.’ He grinned as he raised the bottle. ‘But perhaps my sense of humor will improve when I have some more pulque in my belly. Then, perhaps, I will not shoot you. But, perhaps...’

  He let the sentence hang and tilted the bottle to his lips. He had to crane his neck backwards and his gaze swept up towards the cloudless sky. But Espada and the other man continued to cover the half-breed with their eyes and long-barreled Colts.

  Edge remained in a nonchalant attitude astride the unmoving gelding, feet still slotted into the stirrups and hands, holding the reins in a loose grip, folded around the saddle horn. The liquor made gurgling sounds as it flooded down the throat of Pedro.

  ‘Mr. Edge!’

  The half-breed cursed, kicked his feet free of the stirrups and tipped himself backwards off the horse. Two shots exploded as he took a double-handed grip on the Winchester stock and jerked the rifle from its boot.

  Both bullets went high over his upswinging legs, the Mexicans at the windows distracted by Emma Diamond’s shout and the beat of hooves as she urged her gelding into a gallop.

  ‘A woman!’ Pedro yelled, and dragged the bottle from his lips to smash it against the doorframe.

  ‘Americano!’

  ‘Young!’

  The other two gunmen chorused their excited cries. Then all three blasted at the cart as Edge lunged towards it and dived full-length to the ground in its cover. He had turned a full somersault in powering off the back of the gelding - as the horse reared and then bolted in response to the sudden action. He hit the ground with his feet, adjusted his balance, and snarled another curse as he went into a crouch and scrambled for cover.

  Splinters of wood spat at his head and one of the hitched horses snorted and rolled over, blood pumping from its holed throat The bulgin
g eyes stared hatefully at Edge, as if the animal had horse sense enough to blame the stranger for its imminent death.

  ‘I feel the same way about her,’ Edge rasped, ducking his head as a further fusillade of three shots cracked into the cart and exploded more splinters.

  He glanced up the slope in time to see the woman try to swing the galloping gelding into a tight turn. But the speed was too fast and the slope too steep. The horse lost his footing and tumbled into a roll. Emma was luckier than she deserved to be. Both her feet slid from the stirrups and she had the sense to release her hold on the reins. Horse and rider slammed to the ground, but Emma was several feet away from where the weight of the animal hit. The gelding screamed the agony of a broken back as it quivered and tried to rise. The woman tumbled countless times, giving no sound. She came to rest and was still.

  ‘What is happening?’

  Another woman - much older - shouting the terrified demand from inside the house. In Spanish.

  ‘Be quiet, hag!’

  From Pedro, and punctuated with three shots. Two bullets smacked into the carcass of the dead horse. The other chipped wood from the rear of the cart and bit into the slope beyond. The two surviving horses of the Mexicans tried to drag the cart in their panic. But the weight of the dead one was too much to move. Edge’s gelding had ended his bolt in the lemon grove.

  ‘You think he is dead, Pedro?’ Espada asked.

  ‘The crazy woman looks it!’ Pedro snarled. ‘What a waste!’

  Emma’s gelding gave a final cry of agony, and died. Silence descended upon the farm and its surrounding country as if it had a physical presence. Edge put his eye to a knot-hole in the side of the cart. Light continued to fall from the two glassless windows and the open doorway. There were no forms to interrupt it now. Voices began to hiss in urgent whispers. Edge eased back the hammer of the Winchester, which already had a shell in the breech.

  ‘Hey, gringo!’ Espada called. ‘If you still alive, you listen. Gonna toss the owner of this place out through the door. You toss away your rifle and your pistol, you hear. You don’t, by the time I count three, this hombre gets shot real bad. If you dead, he gets shot anyway, I guess. Is tough on him but—’