The Living, the Dying, and the Dead

by George G. Gilman

  “They came last evenin’. Just as dusk was failin’. Rode in on the north trail. Didn’t stop by this place, for which me and Stella was mighty grateful. They didn’t look like the kinda company folks want to entertain. Even though we hadn’t seen anyone ’ceptin’ Dave Hardin’ since the big snow came.”

  There was a dullness back in his tone, of a man needing desperately to talk but resenting the impassive audience which was all he could command.

  “Couple of passenger trains had come through from Denver by then, but nobody’s gotten off while the tanks were bein’ filled. Just too damn cold for folks, I guess. But a couple of real weird-lookin’ guys got outta the caboose of the iron carrier that pulled into the depot.”

  Edge continued to sip the hot, strong coffee without giving any indication that his interest had abruptly deepened in the story Lockwood was telling. Not that the homesteader looked up from his splayed hands to see if his words were producing any reaction from the half-breed.

  “Fancy-dressed foreigners. Chinese, I’d guess. Like a lot of the guys they used to build the railroad. But these two looked a lot richer than ’em workers. Anyway, that’s when the trouble started over to the depot. Couldn’t see nor hear much from this place, but got told about it by one of ’em guys while the other two was using Stella.”

  Silas Martin groaned and rolled his head from side to side. Edge and Lockwood both looked at the old man, but he quietened again. His breathing began to sound stronger.

  “All on account of his box, ain’t it, mister?”

  “They did your wife wrong, but they told you right, feller.”

  Lockwood sighed, lifted his mug in both hands and almost had his lips to the rim when he saw the globule of saliva floating on the surface of the coffee.

  “Just not your night,” Edge said.

  “There’s more in the pot.”

  “Later.”

  “Hard and mean as they come.”

  The half-breed rocked forward and topped up his own mug. “I told you, there’s no time to talk about me. The trouble at the depot.”

  Lockwood licked his dry lips and began to study his hands again. “Seems these three that rode in from the north figured to ride on the train. But the fancy-dressed foreigners got ’em to change their minds. Come down off the caboose with guns on the brakeman, which kept the-engineer and fireman and Dave Hardin’ in line. The three guys you shot, they didn’t do nothin’ to stop it. Guys with an eye for the main chance, they was. Like you.”

  “But not so hard and mean.”

  “You can say that again.”

  ‘Try not to repeat myself. It wastes time. Sooner you get through, sooner you get fresh coffee.”

  “Don’t do me no favors.”

  “Used up all my goodwill on your woman, feller.” Lockwood drew in a deep breath and seemed set to snarl an angry retort. But then sighed back into depression. "All right. The foreigners let the train take on water and leave. Stayed on board ’emselves after they made a deal with ’em three you shot. Give ’em money—a hundred bucks—and promised four hundred more iffen they’d get the box off you and the old-timer. And bring it to the next water stop east. That’s at Olsen Creek. Train hadn’t been pulled outta the depot more than five minutes when Stella and me got Dave killed.”

  Silas Martin groaned again, but only Edge glanced at him this time. The man at the table was too deeply enmeshed in bitter memories to be distracted by the present

  “Far as we knowed, not havin’ seen nor heard nothin’, there was only Dave over to the depot. Usually, he came over here to supper every night. But what with trains’ cornin’ outta Denver thick and fast, we figured he was too busy. So we took him a plate over. Just got to open the door when Dave shouted somethin’. Never will know 'what it was. Warnin’ to keep out, I guess. Anyway, one of them three you shot was a real nervous guy. Me and Stella could see right across the office into the room at the back. Saw this guy swing his arm at Dave. Looked like a punch. But next thing Dave was rollin’ around on the floor spreadin’ his blood all over.

  “Ain’t much more to tell, mister. The three of ’em brought ’emselves and their horses over here. Ate die supper Stella’d cooked and then started in on rapin’, sleepin’ and talkin’. Until your train came in. Have that fresh coffee now?”

  Edge nodded toward the pot “How far away is Olsen Creek?”

  “Seventy-five miles,” Lockwood answered as he rose from the table and went to the sink to empty the cold coffee before approaching the range. “Unmanned halt Just a place by the track where the Union Pacific keep cordwood and water.”

  He lifted the pot off the range and started to pour coffee into his mug.

  The half-breed appeared to be deep in thought— was in fact briefly contemplating why Hitoshi and Zenko had decided to hire the trio of drifting gunmen. But he was conscious of the thin farmer standing four feet away from him, distrustful of the way Lockwood had become thirsty. So that when the man made to hurl the scalding liquid, Edge was ready to combat the move.

  The homesteader had time only to set down the near empty pot and swing back his right hand which was fisted around the mug. By then, the half-breed had forced his thighs hard against the seat of the chair—using the rocker action to power his rise and leap forward over the unconscious form of Silas Martin. Both his hands flew away from the arms of the chair.

  Lockwood stumbled backward with a cry of alarm that took on the shrillness of terror as Edge fixed a double-handed grip on him. His right fisted around the man’s wrist, forcing him to drop the mug. His left fastened on the scrawny throat, to choke off the scream.

  Then he backed the man fast to the table and bent him over it. The homesteader trembled from head to toe, his weak eyes bulging and his mouth gaping wide. His free hand lay uselessly at his side and he made no attempt to struggle. When Edge released him, he remained sprawled across the table top. But it was despair rather than fear which dictated his total lack of reaction.

  “I wanted you to kill me, you sonofabitch,” he said hoarsely.

  “I know. But we covered that.” The half-breed’s total lack of expression had not been marred by even a flicker of emotion since Lockwood had telegraphed his intention to goad him into the attack.

  “I ain’t got the guts to kill myself, mister.” Tears welled up from his eyes and because he was lying flat-out on his back the salty beads trickled from under the lids to the tops of his ears.

  “That’s a problem a lot of us have, feller.”

  Lockwood raised his head off the table to look quizzically at the tall, lean man who backed away from him to sit down again in the rocker. “You mean there’s been times when you . . . ?”

  “I’m a widower, too,” Edge supplied as his hooded, glinting eyes trapped the gaze of the man and provoked him into curious silence. He extended a forefinger toward Martin again. “So is he. Figure his hurting will soon be over.”

  Frowning, Lockwood rose slowly to his feet and then sat down on the chair at the table. For a long time the breathing of the unconscious Martin was the only sound in the room. As the homesteader pondered a way to capitalize on the glimpse of deep sadness which had been revealed to him dining the moments the half-breed had allowed his guard of impassiveness to drop.

  And as Edge recalled the unaccustomed hot anger which had gripped him when he saw the possibility that the old man might lose the corpse of his wife. Then how he had felt the need to leave his rifle with Silas Martin as a sign of good faith that he meant to return the casket to die wounded old man.

  Perhaps at the beginning the five-dollar-a-day fee had had some bearing on why he had accepted the job with Martin. Or maybe that had merely been a cynical excuse he had made—to himself as well as others. For was it not true that the relationship between a man and his wife was the only association for which he had any respect? No, even beyond that The grief a man felt for his dead wife.

  Certainly the loss of Beth had affected him worse than the death of Jamie. Ja
mie was his brother, deserving of love and respect because of blood ties. The feelings between a man and a woman in love had to be stronger and deeper, based as they were on the abstract foundations of trust.

  After Jamie’s brutal death, thoughts of suicide had never entered his head. But when he discovered Beth’s rancid, stinking corpse . . .

  He buried her decently and it had required little effort to do this. Silas Martin wanted the same thing for the remains of his wife, but was not finding it easy to achieve such a simple aim. Which had aroused a feeling of affinity within Edge—strong enough for the half-breed to discount his initial suspicion that the old man had a less honorable motive for getting the casket to New York State.

  So it was memories of an old and personal grief which Morgan Lockwood had seen fleetingly displayed upon the sooted and bristled features of Edge—recollections of the death of Beth and his responses to it, resurrected by the disparate actions of Martin and the homesteader in similar circumstances. One man deserving of what little sympathy the halfbreed was capable of feeling and the other—who was content to leave the near-naked body of his wife to freeze in the open night—not worth the price of a bullet or effort to break his neck.

  As Lockwood’s mind took hold of an idea somewhere close to the truth, he looked across at Edge with a sneer on his lips. “She was no loss, I bet”

  “Who?”

  “Your wife. Kinda woman that’d marry a man like you, she’d be no good. Outta a dancehall. Or maybe a cathouse. Yeah, I bet she was a whore!”

  “Keep talking, feller,” Edge said evenly, thin lips and narrow eyes offering no more of a clue to his thoughts than his voice did.

  “Couldn’t been no decent woman. Outta the same kind of gutter you come from. She ever tell you how many men screwed her before you? What she die of, mister? The clap, I wouldn’t mind bettin’.”

  He laughed his excitement through the sneer as he watched Edge rise slowly from the rocker, step across the unconscious Martin and move to the table.

  “A whore she was! Ain’t that the truth? A fifty-cent piece of ass outta a cathouse! Stmkin’ of every drunken bum that ever shot his load into her.”

  Lockwood’s voice rose to a shriller pitch and spittle sprayed from his quivering lips as the half-breed halted on the other side of the table from him. And drew the Remington from its holster.

  “I got it right, ain’t I? Or else you’d be bumin’ up with temper!”

  Edge’s thumb clicked back the hammer.

  The skinny man across from him tried to hurl more insults, but the laughter of triumph filled his scrawny throat and exploded out into the small, warm kitchen. He threw his arms wide to the sides and screwed his eyes tight shut.

  The handgun roared, the report amplified in the confines of the room.

  Lockwood curtailed his laughter.

  “I won, you sonofabitch!” he yelled. “I forced you to kill me! I beat you and—”

  He screamed then, as the pain burst through the numbing effect of the bullet’s impact and seared to every nerve-ending in his system. He snapped open his eyes and tore his gaze away from the smoking muzzle of the Remington to look down at the blossoming red stain at the crotch of his pants.

  Edge waited for the scream to give way to sobs. Which happened as Lockwood dropped back on to his chair with a force that almost tipped it over.

  “Nobody had Beth before me, feller,” he said then. “And you’ll never have another woman. Don’t ever believe again that rhyme about names not hurting anybody.”

  Lockwood was whimpering now, probably not hearing the half-breed’s. words as he stared down at his cupped hands, which filled with blood as he nursed his injury.

  “Edge,” Silas Martin groaned, weakly and painfully. “Was that a shot I just heard?”

  “Yeah.”

  ‘You all right?”

  “Fine.” Edge holstered the Remington and went down on his haunches besides the old man.

  ‘Then what?”

  “Lockwood was shooting off his mouth, Silas,” the half-breed replied. “I aimed lower.”

  Chapter Eight

  THEY rolled away from the Butcherville farmstead at first light with Edge up on the wagon seat and Silas Martin wrapped in several blankets on the back, wedged as comfortably as possible between the crate and the side of the flatbed.

  The half-breed had shaved and eaten a breakfast of bacon and beans. The old man had got down a half cup of coffee before he coughed it up again, along with pieces of the last meal he had in Denver. He was living on borrowed time but possessed the kind of will-power that would ensure he got the most days, hours, minutes and seconds out of the loan before he finally succumbed to the inevitable.

  Behind the wagon moving slowly alongside the railroad toward the leading arc of the rising sun, Morgan Lockwood lay on the double bed he had shared with his wife and willed himself to die. But deep down knew that help would come before he starved to death in the small, cold farmhouse. Out on the field in front of the house, the three dead gunmen and the half-naked woman still lay crumpled on the snow.

  While across the track, in the back room of the depot building, Dave Harding’s corpse began to stink of decay.

  “That was a real terrible thing you did to that man back there,” Martin said mournfully after the sun had hauled itself completely clear of the horizon and the buildings of Butcherville were merely small dark dots in the far distance.

  Edge, driving the wagon with the brim of his hat pulled low over his forehead against the glare of the sun, made no reply.

  “It was an accident, what happened to me,” the wounded old man went on after he had replenished the strength expended on his first effort to speak. “That engineer was scared I’d do something stupid and get his partner killed. He was just trying to get the gun off me. He didn’t mean to shoot me.”

  Again the half-breed held his peace.

  “And we shouldn’t have stolen his wagon and team. I could have paid him.”

  Edge looked briefly back over his shoulder, to where only the old man’s pale and already-thinning face showed above the blankets. “You still have to talk, don’t you?”

  The wagon jolted and Martin bit hard on his lower lip as the movement triggered a fresh wave of pain from the area where the bullet was lodged in his flesh. “Not just for the hell of it. I hired you, son. So I felt responsible for what happened back there. The Lockwoods were innocent bystanders. You killed her and gelded him. There was no need for that.”

  Edge was facing front again, detecting a faint warmth in the rays of the sun which struck his lower face. The ruts cut in the snow by the wagon-wheels began to crumble into twin lines of dirty-colored slush.

  “I figured I was doing you a favor when I shot her, feller.”

  “She’d never have hit me over that distance!” Martin interrupted grimly.

  “But that doesn’t matter anyway,” the half-breed went on in the same even tone. “Her husband reckons she’s better off dead, after what those drifters did to her.”

  The old man vented a weak snort of disgust. “An excuse after the event. I hope it helps you to sleep better at nights.”

  “Maybe it will,” Edge allowed.

  “Even though you shot the balls off the man who gave it to you.”

  "I didn’t ask him for anything, feller.”

  Exhaustion, pain or the realization that he was beating his head against a brick wall caused Silas Martin to sink into suffering silence. More than five minutes passed before Edge spoke.

  “Not much in this world I give a damn about. My own life. The job I’m being paid to do. The memory of my wife. That’s why what happened back there happened. And we didn’t steal the wagon and team. Lockwood’s got three new horses, all of them better than these two. And the hundred bucks the Japanese put up for the ambush will more than pay for a new wagon.”

  There was no response to this and when he glanced over his shoulder again he saw that the old man was sleeping. A dying m
an wedged against the side of the crate containing the casket in which lay the dead body of his wife. The Irving man up on the seat faced forward again and began to rake the surrounding plains country with slitted eyes gazing out from the shadow of his hat brim. The terrain was too flat, the morning visibility too good for danger to be lurking within effective range of the slow wagon. But Edge had to occupy his mind with something—to keep out of his thoughts an insistent demand to consider who aboard the flatbed was the most fortunate. The living, the dying or the dead?

  Mai Lin’s troubles were over.

  Silas Martin had one final task to complete and then would be able to rest easy.

  “Edge?”

  “No contest, feller,” he muttered to himself between exposed teeth clenched in a sardonic grin. “It may be a dog’s life but you’re one sonofabitch who ain’t ready to leave it yet.”

  “What’s that you say?” the old man asked as he was jolted awake in time to hear the half-breed’s voice without being able to discern what he said.

  "Nothing, Silas. Thinking aloud is all. And barking up the wrong tree.”

  During the three days and nights it took them to reach the Union Pacific fuel stop at Olsen Creek, Martin was asleep more than he was awake. And his ability to rest, even aboard the jolting and pitching wagon, helped him to cling on to the final thin threads of his life. But he was unable to eat and each evening and morning when Edge took a look at his wound the festering flesh was uglier and smelled worse. He got weaker and paler with each hour that passed. And sometimes during the warm, sunlit days it seemed to the half-breed that he could actually see the old man becoming thinner.

  Edge followed the railroad all the way to Olsen Creek and did not see a train until the early morning of the third day out of Butcherville, when a smudge of dark woodsmoke against the rising sun caught his eye.

  There was a stand of scrub pine four hundred feet north of the track and he used the crack of the whip to urge the horses into a gallop toward the timber. The noise and speed roused Martin to a frantic world' of pain and dust and he yelled questions at Edge, who remained silent until the wagon and team came to a halt in the cover of the trees. By that time the old man was unable to make any sounds except groans in response to the fires of agony searing his body.