"Something else I can't do for you, Miss Webster?" he asked.
She had sensed his nearness and snapped her head a part of a second before he spoke. And while he voiced the sardonic comment she gasped and reined in her mount. Then, her soured face altered its set from a grimace of fear to a look of entreaty.
"They said you were going out to that crazy old man's claim, Mr. Edge."
"They didn't lie."
"I'm worried about Max."
"He's close to seven feet tall, I figure. Big enough to look after himself."
She looked about to snap an angry retort, but then checked the impulse and continued in the same tone as before. "You must know Max isn't the brightest man in the world, Mr. Edge. And didn't you see the others that went with him from town? Old Kitteridge and Sam Nelson, who're close to being senile. And them two Hall boys, who'd flap their arms and try to fly off a mountain-top if you offered them ten cents to do it."
"Claim's down this trail," the half-breed said with a gesture of the rifle.
"I know it, mister. And so does everyone else from Lakeview. Know, too, that there ain't nothin' at the end of it but a lousy shack and a lot of holes in the ground. And what that crazy old Barney Galton wrote in the letters to his boys was so much eyewash, to get them to come out and see him before he died."
"I'm hopeful there's a dog at the end of the trail," Edge told her and tugged on the reins of the mare as he touched his heels to her flanks. He started the horse down the sidetrack that crossed the timber slope toward the east shore of Mirror Lake.
"Wait for me!" the woman cried, and within a few moments had brought her mount up alongside that of the half-breed. Said after a lengthy pause, "There isn't, you know."
"What, Miss Webster?"
"Any gold at the claim."
"If you say so. I say that I'm just going back there to look for the dog."
He sensed her eyes peering at his profile as they reached the foot of the slope, and the sound of the wind-whipped waters of the lake hitting the shore made conversation in the storm even harder.
"Not a man like you!" she yelled. "I just can't believe you'd go to this much trouble over a dog!"
"Lady, I don't give a shit what you believe!" Edge shouted back.
And then groaned with a mixture of anger and disappointment when a man ride his horse out from behind a rock on the lakeshore and bellowed:
"You better friggin' believe me and my partners got you covered, you bushwhackin' bastard!"
It was Elmer, the man Rico had called dummy. Grinning in triumph through the rain as he leveled his handgun at Edge as the half-breed and the woman reined their horses to a halt some ten feet away from where Elmer sat his mount.
Polly Webster said in a choked tone, "Oh, my God!"
Elmer, his grin getting even broader, taunted, "He ain't gonna help no one rides with this bastard!"
Edge turned his head fractionally to the left and raked his glinting eyes along their sockets to see Lester and Rico emerge from the trees. Also with guns drawn and leveled to the sides of their mounts' necks.
"Right, you old hag!" Lester blurted gleefully. "You ain't worth keep in' alive for a little fun! Lookin' like you do, I reckon it's been so long since that last time, it's grown over."
"If there was ever a first time with her, Lester!" Elmer yelled, and laughed harshly.
Rico, the degree of his grim-faced seriousness stressed by the glee of the others, said harshly, "Tip that rifle off your saddle, Edge."
He and the top man of the three had halted their horses at the side of the trail, some six feet to the left of where Edge sat his mare—left hand on the reins while the right was fisted around the frame of the uncocked Winchester, the muzzle of which was aimed at the tree trunk between Rico and Lester.
"Lady's like the feller you killed back at Lakeview," Edge said, head half turned now to allow his eyes to see all three men as clearly as possible through the wind-slanted rain. "An innocent party. Let her go and—"
"Innocent party is right, Edge," Elmer blurted and laughed loudly. "With the kinda sourpuss she's got, innocent is what she has to be! Ain't that so, Lester?"
The man's laughter together with the crash of lake water against the shore, the moan of the wind through the trees, and the splatter of rain on everything, covered the metallic clicks of the rifle's hammer being thumbed back.
"Sure, Elmer," Lester answered in an abruptly harsh tone. "So why don't you put the old hag outta her misery. Then we can make this bushwhackin' bastard pay for what he done to Al back in Kansas."
"Please, no!" the woman shrieked.
The half-breed experienced—not for the first dangerous moment in a life largely lived on the borderline between survival and violent death— a sense of the unreal that had the quality of a dream. In which he could not be certain of anything except his own actions and reactions to what might or might not have been actually heard or seen.
Thus, he could not be sure that in the instant before Polly Webster pleaded for her life, he actually did hear a familiar growling sound. To his left and behind him.
He was certain that unless he retaliated or discarded his rifle, he would die from a bullet exploded by Rico's gun. Certain that Rico was the one who was most distrustful of his earnest attitude, which Lester was beginning to find infectious.
To allow the rifle to fall to the muddy track was to signal the death of the woman by the revolver in Elmer's hand. And to invite for himself a much harder way to die than by a gunshot.
He heard the woman catch her breath as she saw Elmer's arm reach toward her, the hand at its end fisted around the butt of his Colt.
Saw Elmer's action and flicked his eyes along their sockets between the narrowest of lids and vented a sigh, as if resigned to inevitable death.
Lester began to curl back his lips in a grin again, convinced of the truth of this.
While Rico remained tensely suspicious of the half-breed, who said evenly:
"Good a night as any to die. When it's raining frogs and dogs."
Elmer laughed at the error.
Rico started, "Quit the talk and tip that Win—"
Lester corrected, "Friggin' cats and dogs, you bushwha—"
It was Rico's aggressive tone of voice that had stirred the German shepherd. And the younger man was closer to the dog when Lester spoke the word guaranteed to unleash the canine fury.
Abruptly the dreamlike quality of a partially unreal world was gone.
The dog lunged up from the brush and Rico threw himself away from the animal, sideways off his horse. Too intent upon getting out of range of the extended claws and the exposed fangs to think about the Colt in his hand.
Lester snapped his head to the side to stare at Rico and the dog and then made to bring his suddenly rage-filled gaze back to locate the half-breed.
Edge elevated the barrel of the rifle and moved it fractionally forward. Squeezed the trigger and did not watch as the bullet drilled into Lester's chest, from a range that was close enough with a high-velocity rifle for the shell to jerk the victim violently backwards with the force of impact.
This at the same time that Rico came voluntarily clear of his saddle, but watching the dog instead of where he was going. So crashed his head into the side of the tree that grew tall and straight between his own mount and that of the dying Lester. Hit the trunk hard and awkwardly enough for the collision to break his neck with a sickening sound of snapping bone.
The snarls and barks of the maddened dog disturbed all five horses on the lakeside trail the mount of Elmer affected no more nor less than the others. But the surviving member of the trio of Al Falcon's friends was in the grip of fear of his own. Terrified by the abrupt turnabout of a situation in which—a moment earlier—he and his partners had appeared unassailable. And mixed in with the fear of what was happening was a fury that it had been allowed to happen.
During this flurry of violent action, Polly Webster sat rigidly erec
t in the saddle of her head-tossing, ground-scratching mount, her eyes squeezed tightly closed and hands pressed over her ears. Her lips were pulled wide in a piercing scream and, with her hands covering her ears instead of gripping the reins, the inevitable happened. When the horse reared in panic, and she was tossed backwards from the saddle to crash to the rain-softened trail.
Elmer had fired once at Edge but it was an instinctive shot, his aim further spoiled by the movement of his mount. The bullet going high and wide out across the lake.
Now he triggered a second bullet from the Colt. His horse four footed and his stretched arm held rock steady. But the grin of triumph that had began to spread across his cold-pinched, rainwater-run face started to alter into a look of despair. Which took on a frozen quality at the moment he fired his gun.
For an instant of muzzle flash just preceded the report from his revolver. Down at the right hip of the half-breed and at side of the mare's neck as it, too, became four footed.
Elmer knew he had failed. Failed worse than Lester and Rico, who had been surprised by the way the dog sprang out of nowhere. While Edge had the rifle aimed in their direction. So, as the dog was going for Rico and the man was blasting at Lester, he should have plugged Edge. Instead of which, he wasted a fatal length of time staring at his dying partners and then was distracted by the old sourpuss making that awful row. Dummy was right. He forgave Rico for calling him that all the time. And started to hate that cocksure Lester for going against what Rico said. Rico was for all three of them blasting at Edge from out of the darkness. Killing him before he knew what had hit him. But no, Lester had said they should capture him and give him hell for a long time. Some Apache torture Lester and Al Falcon had come across way back.
The thoughts came and went in the mind of Elmer quicker than the lightning flashes of the earlier part of the storm. A thousand of them, it seemed, in the time it took for the bullet to explode from the muzzle of the rifle and blast an entrance into the center of his forehead. And he was dead. Tumbling backwards off his horse as Edge hurled himself sideways off his.
The half-breed's mind was as devoid of thought as his face was lacking in expression during the moments of time separating the death of Lester and the killing of Elmer.
This as he angled the Winchester skywards, pressing the stock against his thigh while his right hand flicked forward and was snapped back to pump the lever action. The horse reared and he fought to regain control of her with a left hand on the reins. Rico and Lester were already off their mounts by then and the tone of Polly Webster's scream had changed as she began to slide from her saddle. But the slitted blue eyes under the hooded lids concentrated to the exclusion of all else on Elmer's head—as the man stared in horror at his partners with the same expression at the shrieking woman, and then started to grin.
The younger man's mount was marginally quicker in thudding down on to all four hooves. But the half-breed elected to fire the rifle the moment his target was steady rather than to wait until the mare was. And started to power out of the saddle an instant after he triggered the shot from the Winchester in the one-handed grip. An instant later saw the grin of Elmer's face start to change and saw, also, on the periphery of his vision, the muzzle flash of the Colt. And knew with a briefly experienced sense of cold-hearted triumph that this shot from the revolver would be as ineffective as the one exploded while the man's horse was at the top of its rear.
Then the half-breed fell on something softer than the muddy surface of the trail and heard Polly Webster scream again after a moment's pause. He rolled off of her, on to his knees, and used the Winchester as a lever to get to his feet. Peered down at the woman venting the shrill sound and saw that she was sprawled out on her back with her eyes still screwed shut, her hands over her ears, and her mouth wide open.
"Lady!" he snarled. But no spoken word could ever be loud enough to penetrate into the world of terror that enclosed her. So he straddled her, leaned down, and swung a vicious backhanded slap into her left cheek. And her hands flew away from her ears as her head rocked to the side. The scream was curtailed by a gasp. She rolled her head straight again and now her eyes were wide open—showing the same brand of terror that contorted the rest of her features—as she stared up at Edge.
"They're dead and we're alive, Miss Webster!" he shouted at her and was abruptly aware that his voice was too loud. Listened to the verbal silence while the woman flapped her lips without speaking, and heard the rain falling but not the wind blowing. Also heard a sound alien to the storm that he could not quite identify. Said without shouting: "You took a fall is all, lady. And I had a crush on you for a while. Nothing to get excited about."
He swung away from her, trying to think what the sound could be that came from the side of the trail away from the lake. Where the still teeming rain and the cluster of now calm horses obstructed his view.
"Oh, my God, I was sure the end was near for me!" Polly Webster rasped as she struggled painfully to get to her feet—needing to roll over on to her belly and raise herself on to all fours to achieve this.
"It was near, lady," Edge confirmed as he used his free hand to ease a horse out of his path. "But I didn't rise to the occasion and so you didn't have it in you."
"What on earth are you talking—oh, crazy is right about you! Making stupid dirty-minded jokes at a time like—my God, the dog is . . ."
She had come across the trail to stand beside Edge among the horses. Her tone of voice altering each time she allowed a sentence to hang unfinished. Until she was in a position to see what he could and gagged on a tide of rising bile.
Lester was spread-eagled on his back to one side of a Douglas fir tree—no more nauseating a sight than the corpse of Elmer sprawled out beside the rock on the other side of the trail.
It was Rico who had died in the most sickening way, having flung himself unwittingly headfirst into the tree to escape the attacking lunge of the German shepherd. A man with a thin skull who hit the tree too hard. So that his head was split open and its liquid contents spilled out. To stain the tree trunk and the exposed root upon which Rico's head and arms lay in death.
A gruesome enough sight in itself. But the horror of the scene was expanded beyond the bounds of what the woman could stomach by the actions of the dog. Who lay on his belly with his paws extended to hold the dead head of the man still. While he rhythmically lapped at the fluids which continued to ooze from the open skull.
Polly Webster retched, but managed to fight the rising sickness back down her throat as she swung away from the scene. And blurted, "The dog's a monster!"
Then she sank to her hands and knees again in the middle of the trail, and emptied her stomach of everything she had eaten that day.
The dog interrupted his feeding on the contents of a human head and started to growl.
"Easy, feller," Edge murmured.
And now the dog rose, turned from the corpse, and padded toward the half-breed, licking his lips. Sat down close to the man's left leg.
The woman finished being noisily sick and demanded between sobs: "You must put down the creature! It's only one step removed from a wolf and it has developed a taste for human remains!"
"I don't know, lady," Edge said evenly as he stroked the ears of the German shepherd and the dog whimpered softly.
"You saw it with your own eyes, man!" Polly Webster said harshly as she rose to her feet.
Edge shifted his gaze from the man at the base of the tree to the gore-smeared trunk that had caused his death. And whispered against the less obtrusive sound of the slackening rain, "Far as that feller was concerned, lady, it seems to me the bark was worse than the bite."
Chapter Fourteen
The dog remained within a few feet of Edge as the half-breed led the chestnut mare from out of the cluster of horses, and quickly checked that the animal had not sustained any leg injuries during the melee. Then the German shepherd took up his usual position close to the mare's left hind leg after the
half-breed had swung up astride the saddle.
The woman watched with eyes that were still wide with remembered terror and horror; coughing and sobbing as she rubbed vigorously at her mouth and chin with a coat sleeve to remove the fined remnants of her sickness.
And all the time the rain was easing and the visibility was lengthening as low cloud moved off in the wake of the electric storm and the high cloud thinned and straggled. But the Rocky Mountain air got colder as the night advanced and the lights of the town's waterfront street could be seen across Mirror Lake before the moon showed pale through the clouds.
"You're not going to do it, are you?"
"Do what, lady?" Edge countered in an even tone.
"Put down that dog?"
"My business, lady."
"My God, you're always ready to kill a man just like that!" She tried to click her finger and thumb but the skin was too wet for a sound to be made. "Yet you cringe at the thought of putting down a mere dog."
"Lady."
"Yes?"
"I been known to kill women, too."
"Go to hell!" she flung back at him.
"It's a hot idea for a cold night," he muttered and heeled the mare forward. The dog sprang up off his haunches and began to trot along in the wake of rider and mount.
There was just a drizzle drifting out of the sky now, and for the fifteen or so seconds it took for the air to become totally void of rain, Polly Webster watched in a state of rage, the man and his horse and dog moving along the lakeshore. Unable to consider anything other than the revulsion she felt for the dog and its owner.
Until she abruptly realized that Edge was riding south—toward the claim instead of backtracking to town. And her experience with evil on the lakeshore was consigned to a dark recess of her memory as she recalled the desperate errand that had drawn her out into the timber this night.
EDGE: The Killing Claim Page 12
