EDGE: A Ride In The Sun (Edge series Book 34)

by George G. Gilman

  Hedges came slowly upright. "No, ma'am," he an­swered.

  "You gonna fill us in, Captain?" Forrest asked.

  "They were a remnant of Lee's army who decided to make a stand is all," Hedges answered. "Lieutenant Henderson walked into their trap. We didn't." He turned and headed for the door. "Set the woman free."

  "No!" she cried, and there was emotion in her voice for the first time since she yelled across the street into the night. Then it was gone again. "My men died here. My son. And all our people. I want my defiled body to die here, too. Please."

  Captain Hedges had an impulse to try to talk the woman out of her misery. But from the doorway, breathing night air that now smelled only of old and new death, he abruptly felt too weary to nurture the spark of compassion into full life.

  He raked his slitted eyes around the faces of the kill­ers in uniform arced in front of the shack. Then, "Guess there's no problem in getting a volunteer. Make it quick for her."

  Seward stepped forward, drawing his Colt.

  "Nah, don't waste lead," Forrest growled and went into the shack behind the youngest trooper.

  As Scott, Bell and Douglas crowded onto the thresh­old, Hedges swung up astride his gelding and booted the Henry rifle.

  The woman had time to scream. Then there was a heavy thud, a tinkle of breaking glass, a splintering of wood and a clash of displaced metal.

  The three men in the doorway moved away and For­rest and Seward emerged from the shack, looking satis­fied and brushing dust from their hands.

  "Mission accomplished, Captain," the sergeant re­ported. "Pushed that friggin' heavy clock on her."

  "Yeah, I heard," Hedges answered as he dug the makings from a pocket of his tunic and began to roll a cigarette. "Guess for the kind of hurt she had, time really was a great healer."

  Chapter Three

  WHEN Edge woke at sun up the day after his run-in with the Mexican bandits it was the same as almost ev­ery other time since the opening weeks of the War Be­tween the States. The few exceptions were when he had bedded down sick or with too much rye whiskey under his belt.

  So when he snapped open his eyes and looked up into the no-longer pitch-blackness of the underside of his hat, he knew instantly where he was and had total recall of how he got there. Thus, as he folded up into a sitting posture and tipped the Stetson onto the top of his head, turning first one way and then the other to rake his hooded eyes over his surroundings, he was not a man trying to establish bearings. Instead, he was check­ing to see that he had come awake naturally and that his mind was not triggered to awareness by its highly developed sixth sense for menace.

  But the brush-covered hillside on which he had made camp was silent and still in the post-dawn warmth and light of the rising sun. Except for small sounds and weary movements made by the scrawny gelding forag­ing on a tether twenty feet or so higher up the incline.

  Above where the horse stood, the rise reached to a rocky ridge which was starkly outlined against the solid blueness of the northern sky. A mile to the west and half that distance in the east, the ridge made almost right-angle turns to run southwards down the slope. The outlaw trail from Paraiso emerged from behind the rocky arm in the east and was visible for several miles on the desert-like terrain which spread southwards to­ward a line of craggy rises and steep-sided mesas.

  This meant the half-breed had needed to double-back some in order to bed down on the slope. But there was time enough to take such precautions and even though the night had past peacefully, the man did not consider the spare time had been used wastefully.

  While he lit a small fire, boiled water for coffee and cooked a breakfast of salt pork and beans, he continued to make use of his carefully chosen vantage point to keep watch over his surroundings. Just once, a memory of the long-ago war flitted through his mind. Sparked by the appearance of the Federale patrol, the column of men riding into view from behind the ridge in the southeast.

  The captain at the head of the column saw the smoke of Edge's fire, swung in his saddle and raised field-glasses to his eyes. The half-breed, a cup of coffee to his lips, lifted a hand and touched the brim of his hat with a forefinger. The captain lowered the binoculars and responded to the greeting with a weary wave of his arm, then, like his men, lost the scant interest in Edge which all had shown for a short time. Weary from the night-time chore of shifting rocks to recover the bodies of the crushed bandits, the column moved out across the desert. Most of the men rode with a blanket-wrapped corpse lashed to their bedrolls.

  Edge drank another cup of coffee and smoked a cig­arette, giving the patrol time to ride more than a mile out into open country, under a rising sun that beat down with a harsher light and a more fierce heat by the moment. Then, after he had broken camp, saddled and mounted the gelding, the Federales had gone from sight, lost behind a veil of their own dust and a shim­mering heat haze.

  Back on the trail himself, riding slowly over the sign left by the Federales, Edge again thought briefly of the war. He touched the shirt pocket in which the letter rested. The letter that referred to an incident in the past which had made it difficult for him to get to sleep last night while his subconscious tried to force him to re­member and relive in vivid detail the pain and anger and anguish of that blackest of times. Until a random thought of the Federale captain and his men success­fully concluding a patrol had triggered an easier-to-sleep-with memory of other soldiers in different uni­forms in another country achieving what they set out to do. One soldier in particular.

  A little before midday the half-breed reached a fork in the trail, in front of a low but expansive wedge-shaped mesa with a trickling spring four feet above the base of its point. The sign showed that the Federales had halted here to water their horses before moving off again along the south-west spur.

  Edge dismounted, half-filled his hat from the spring, allowed the gelding to drink and then repeated the process. He drank himself, topped up his canteen with the warm but reasonably sweet water and then tipped half a hatful over his head, relishing the feel of the run­nels coming out of his hair and coursing down his darkly bristled face.

  There was not much shade from the thirty-feet-high northwest face of the mesa, but the presence of running water made it a good enough place to rest up for a while after the long morning's ride in the sun. So he uncinched the saddle, placed it at the base of the mesa and lowered himself gratefully onto it, resting his back against the rough rock. The dispirited horse stood in the patch of shade into which he had been led, statuelike except for the slow rise and fall of the belly as he breathed. He did not even lift his head and prick his ears when, against the sound of trickling water, the clop of slow-moving hooves could be heard.

  Two or maybe three shod horses were being ridden toward the point of the mesa up the trail spur from the south east no more than fifteen minutes after the half-breed had lowered himself onto the saddle.

  Now, a freshly lit cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, he rose to his feet and slid the Winchester from its boot. He canted the rifle to his left shoulder as he stepped around the angle of rock, halted beside the patch of shingle through which the spring water soaked away.

  "Hey, Jack, there's a guy up ahead!"

  The woman's voice was shrill with fear, her words clearly heard in the Sierra Madre stillness even though she and the two men riding either side of her were more than four hundred yards away.

  "So what, Flo?" the man to her left countered. "Ain't nothin' to get excited about."

  "The hell you say, Clyde!" Jack snarled. "You frig­gin' gotta know anythin' with balls between its legs gets my wife excited!"

  "Up yours, husband dear!" the woman retorted.

  Jack wrenched on the reins to steer his horse close to that of his wife, then swung his right hand up and to the side. As the back of his hand crashed into the underside of the woman's jaw, Clyde streaked his right hand from the saddle horn to fist it around the butt of a holstered revolver.

  Flo gas
ped in pain and had to grasp her saddle horn to keep from being knocked backwards off her horse.

  Jack leaned forward to look across the front of his wife at Clyde and rasped, "You figure it's time to make that try, old buddy?"

  There had been no faltering in the progress of the three riders since the woman had spotted Edge and spo­ken the words which led to the blow and a threat of greater violence.

  "You didn't oughta beat up on Flo like you do, Jack," Clyde complained sourly, and returned his hand to the saddle horn. "It's like you never stop insultin' her and beatin' up on her."

  Jack shared a sneering stare between the man and the woman, and growled, "She's mine to do what I like with, ain't she?" and then turned his attention toward Edge. "Mornin' mister," he called. "Water still comin' outta Flecha Mesa?"

  They were close enough now to see the slight nod with which the half-breed responded. Close enough for Edge to see that Jack was the oldest of the trio. Pushing fifty, he was no taller than five-and-a-half feet but the flesh was packed solidly on his frame. Likewise, his round face, which at first glance seemed fat, was in fact firmly constructed, covered by leathery skin deeply in­scribed with lines which all had a downward curve. He had iron-gray hair in his long sideburns and a neatly trimmed moustache. But his bristles were black.

  Clyde was ten years younger, a lean six-foot tall with a long and almost gaunt face. His bristles and sideburns were red.

  Both men were dressed in black Stetsons, kerchiefs, shirts, pants and spurred riding boots. Both were armed with Frontier Colts and Winchester rifles. Both astride strong-looking black stallions, sitting Western-style sad­dles hung with all the accoutrements necessary for a long ride over rugged country. And both, as they reined their horses to a halt ten feet from where Edge stood, looked at the half-breed with dark eyes as lacking in warmth as those of the man on the ground.

  "Been a real lifesaver for a lot of men, this water," Jack said as he swung down from his saddle. "Cash is the name. Jack Cash. This here's Clyde Bodelle. Lady's my wife. Florence is her name."

  "Edge," the half-breed supplied as he stepped to the side so that Cash had a clear passage to where the wa­ter came out of the rock face.

  As Cash came by him, Edge smelled the sweat and dirt of his body, and the whiskey on his breath.

  "You threw a real scare into me, Mr. Edge," the woman admitted as she dismounted. "Steppin' around the corner like that, that rifle held the way it is."

  She was no taller than five feet, with a full figure garbed in a tight-fitting white shirt and an ankle-length black skirt with enough flare for her to ride astride a horse without revealing more than half the length of her high-buttoned boots. There was a shallow prettiness in the composition of her features, drawn largely from the big roundness of her green eyes. But at twenty-five or so she was already tending to fat and there was a dan­ger that overweight might soon destroy the tenuous grip she had on voluptuous attractiveness.

  Clyde, who had made to help the woman dismount, and had held back when Jack glanced harshly at him, swung down to the ground and showed a grim smile. "A man in the Sierra Madres don't take chances with" strangers, Flo. Specially not along this trail."

  The younger man had had his share of the whiskey, I or maybe more. Certainly he was unsteady on his feet as he moved toward the spring.

  "Well, you got nothin' to fear from us, Mr. Edge," Flo Cash assured the half-breed, with a smile which; showed fine, white teeth. As she patted ill-cared-for hair, too yellow to be natural.

  "Quit your preenin', woman!" Her husband snapped, as he turned from drinking at the spring and caught her smiling at Edge while gently exploring the bruised area under her jaw. "All the time you gotta act like a two-dollar whore when there's a man around!"

  He went to his horse, using his kerchief to wipe drop­lets of water off his bristles. His wife scowled at his back as Bodelle half-turned away from the spring, to stare hatefully at his partner across his cupped hands filled with water.

  Cash sensed the animosity and shot a grim-eyed glance back over his shoulder. Clyde Bodelle drank the water and the woman sighed and ran the back of a hand over her sweat-tacky brow.

  "Come on, hurry it up, Clyde!" she urged. "I want some, too."

  Edge sucked in smoke and let it out through his nos­trils as Cash began to chew on a strip of jerked beef he took from his saddle bag.

  "Don't say much, do you?"

  "Say one thing, feller."

  "What's that?"

  "You people are taking care of your own needs. Horses look like they could use some water."

  Cash nodded and swallowed a wad of half-chewed beef before he added, "Man don't take him a wife just so he can get laid regular, mister. Flo takes care of the horses. Say somethin' to you?"

  "Sure."

  Cash's neutral expression changed into a scowl. And the easy tone he had spoken in before was suddenly gone. "Mind your own friggin' business!"

  Edge simply nodded.

  Bodelle vented a short laugh as he extracted an unlabelled bottle from a saddlebag. "Don't mind Jack, mis­ter," he said. "He ain't never happy unless he's grouchy."

  "Damn right!" the woman agreed, a sneer in her voice. Then said joyfully, "Gee, that feels beautiful."

  Cash had swung his head around to glare at Bodelle, his mouth opening to hurl a curse at the younger man. But his wife captured his enraged attention and he froze, dark eyes fixed upon her and half-open mouth displaying a wad of partially chewed beef.

  Bodelle was also transfixed for part of a second, in the act of raising the uncapped bottle to his lips, his eyes fear-filled as they stared at Cash and obviously recognized the signs that his partner was about to com­mit a new act of violence.

  Then, as both Edge and Bodelle looked toward the cause of the third man's wrath, Cash powered away from his horse.

  "Like a two-dollar friggin' whore!" he bellowed.

  Flo had sat down in the shingle after drinking from the spring, and leaned her back against the rock, tilting her head so that the water ran into her yellow hair, down over her face and then fell to soak her shirt and skirt.

  It was the cooling effect of the water on her head and face that triggered her joy. Her husband's rage was sparked by the way the water-soaked shirt clung to her upper body, closely contouring her full breasts and the erected nipples that crested them.

  For a stretched second—as she heard Cash's shout, leaned forward to come out from under the spring wa­ter, and saw the depth of anger inscribed on the face of the man—naked terror took command over every mus­cle and line of her features. And for that time there was a kind of beauty visible in her pathetic helplessness. "No!" she gasped.

  As Cash's large frame concealed her from the other two men and he came to an abrupt halt, stooped and reached down with both hands to grab her.

  A movement on the periphery of the half-breed's vi­sion caused his eyes to flick along the thin lines of their sockets and he was in time to see Clyde Bodelle draw, cock and level the Colt revolver.

  The woman screamed as she was jerked to her feet, her husband's double-handed grip fastened in her hair. Then his right hand released her and he pulled the arm to the side and swung it back again.

  "Time, you bastard!" Bodelle snarled, and hurled the whiskey bottle to the ground.

  It was bluster. He looked and sounded deeply afraid. And hesitated for a fraction of a second—a man on the point of doing something he desperately wanted to do, but concerned that this new opportunity, seeming per­fect, contained a hidden danger.

  Cash altered the arc of his right arm, abandoned the intended blow at his wife and went for his holstered Colt. At the same time, he pivoted on his left heel and jerked harder at Flo's hair.

  Bodelle's momentary hesitation was lengthened as Cash, too well built to hide behind his wife, was ab­ruptly partially shielded by her pain-wracked writhing form.

  The bigger, older man did not waste the opportunity. The instant his gun was leveled alongside Flo
's hip and aimed at Bodelle's frozen form, he squeezed the trigger.

  The crack of the gunshot resounded off the face of the mesa point and faded into silence across the desert.

  The woman's scream was curtailed by the sight of Clyde Bodelle-falling backwards against the side of his horse, a blood-stain blossoming across the front of his shirt, left of center.

  The horse snorted and side-stepped, raising a cloud of dust from beneath his hooves. Bodelle, his death mask an expression of abject disappointment, fell into the rising dust. The impact of his corpse against the ground puffed up more motes, which drifted down again and clung to the sticky blood oozing from the bullet wound. Flo sobbed.

  Edge thumbed back the hammer of the Winchester still sloped to his left shoulder. And the small sound drew Cash's eyes to him like iron filings to a powerful magnet. The eyes were as hard and unfeeling as chips of rusty metal. The man cocked his gun and turned the woman so that she was now a shield against the half-breed.

  "You figure to take a hand in this, mister?" he rasped.

  "Only if you try to aim that gun at me, feller," Edge answered evenly as the taint of gunsmoke was neutral­ized in the hot air and just the smell of spilled whiskey from the broken bottle was left. "You do that and somebody else will die here."

  Cash gave a curt nod, holstered his Colt as fast as he had drawn it, and flung his wife away from him.

  She screamed at the pain as the roots of her hair took the brunt of her husband's new viciousness, howled as she staggered for several feet, struggling to remain up­right, then screamed again as she sprawled into a crash­ing fall on her belly.

  "Guess you're a whole lot smarter than that crazy Clyde Bodelle, mister," Cash said. "If any woman's worth dyin' for, she ain't the one. But if a man don't protect what's his, he ain't much of a man, wouldn't you say?"

  "Say something, feller," Edge responded as Flo be­gan to whimper and writhe on the ground, seeking to assuage her pain.

  "What's that?" Suspiciously, the dark eyes fixed upon the half-breed's impassive face.