‘Your mistake, feller,’ Edge answered evenly, moving forward, ignoring the obvious survivors for long moments while he surveyed the sprawled forms, ensuring none was faking death. ‘Pretty sorry state it got you into.’
Pedro and Isabella Montez moved into view, their Colts leveled. Fontaine and the other troopers swung their attention to the twin brother and sister.
‘Some wanted to take the girl,’ the scar-faced man went on. ‘I didn’t allow that.’
Isabella looked close to collapse. There was a glazed look in her dark eyes and her pulse raced at the side of her neck. Pedro was as calm and impassive as Edge.
‘Why, hombre?’ the boy asked evenly. ‘Why did you not kill us? Why did you not have your way with my sister?’
He sounded genuinely interested in having an answer. But Hardy read in Pedro’s face the signs that this was not the end of the killing. Just a brief interlude.
‘Because he’s a fool, that’s why!’ the young trooper growled. ‘Same way we were fools to listen to him.’
Pedro shifted the aim of the gun a fraction of an inch. The range was twenty feet and he proved he was a natural marksman. Hardy made no defensive move and took the bullet in the heart. He staggered back half a step, then corkscrewed to the ground. His dying silenced the moans of the injured man.
‘Perhaps I will learn to be less of a fool if I listen to you, hombre,’ Pedro offered.
Shock held the surviving troopers in open-mouthed silence. Isabella’s reaction to the new death was a mere stilling and tightening of her trembling lips. Ree giggled.
‘I just want outta the army,’ Fontaine said croakily. ‘All I wanted. And enough of a stake to set me up good and safe. You just happened along. I figured just a - yeah, I’ll be honest with you people. Just a bunch of Mexican peasants.’
His hands were still above his head. He jerked out a thumb towards Edge. ‘Him, I knew was different. But he did me a favor blasting Sheldon. Kinda made things right for me. Showed me the gold and gave me the guts to kill those bastards Shotter and O’Keefe.
‘But I had no reason to harm none of you people. You gave me the chance I been lookin’ for. Lookin’ for for years. And I blew it. It’s a stinkin’, cruddin’ life.’
‘You have no need to be troubled by it further, señor’, Isabella said flatly.
And shot Ned Fontaine.
The heavy Colt bucked in her double-handed grip. The bullet creased the trooper’s shoulder. He yelled and started to turn. She cocked the hammer and fired again. This time she hit him in the hip and he went down on to one knee. His hands were thrust forward, his mouth wide.
Pedro fired four times, fanning the gun. A single bullet entered the eye of a trooper and the man was dead before he hit the ground. The other one had time to turn and run. Three wounds, widely spaced, blossomed patches of blood on his back.
Fontaine was dead by then, too. For the girl had learned to make allowances for the Colt’s recoil. And she placed a shot between his oustretched hands and into his screaming mouth.
Ree’s giggling had expanded into harsh laughter. A sound similar to that which he had vented back in the saloon of the Dragonara Hotel in Amity Falls.
‘You can’t kill a helpless man!’ the trooper with a bullet in his kneecap implored as Pedro advanced to stand over him.
The boy had realized the Colt was empty and stooped to pick up the one Fontaine had discarded. He stayed in the attitude as he aimed the gun at the last survivor of the deserters.
‘Wounded, but still capable of thought, hombre,’ he said evenly as he pulled back the hammer. ‘You may still learn from the mistakes of other men. And there is still a long way to travel until we reach Mexico.’
He squeezed the trigger. The wan face of the trooper was abruptly sprayed with the crimson which exploded from his left cheek. He became as still as the other corpses.
High overhead, the breeze which had been springing up and dying all night rustled the topmost branches of the trees.
‘What was your plan, hombre,’ Pedro asked as he dropped the Colt and straightened from his final kill.
‘Stampede the horses and pick off the fellers that didn’t get trampled. Figured I was single-handed.’
The boy showed a grim smile. ‘The pupil has surprised his teacher?’
‘Didn’t realize there were three in my class,’ Edge answered.
Only now did Isabella unclasp her hands and allow the gun to fall. Then dropped her arms to her sides. Her breasts, the nipples still enlarged by the cold, were clearly defined in the moonlight.
‘My mother and I insisted upon being part of this, Señor Edge,’ the girl said in a tone of infinite sadness, her glazed eyes fixed on the wagon parked beyond the sprawled and stiffening corpses of the troopers. ‘My mother paid for her insistence with her life.’
She spoke slowly, with a pause between each distinctly articulated word. So that her brother had time to go back into the timber, pick up the body of his mother and carry her towards the wagon before Isabella finished.
The first shot they fired,’ Pedro added, showing no sign of his former exhaustion as he toted the corpse in both arms. She had taken a bullet in the centre of her forehead. There was little blood around the hole. Her eyes were open and expressed determination.
‘It is why I took human life,’ Isabella continued. ‘Not because of the gold. My father killed to protect this. My brother also. Perhaps my mother. Gold is like all material things. It can be replaced. Human life cannot. It can only be avenged.’
The tears flowed. Her body jerked with sobs. She fell hard to her knees and then prostrated herself. Her weeping became silent.
Pedro rested the body of his mother on the grass while he lowered the tailgate of the wagon.
Edge shifted his cold, glinting gaze from the boy to the girl and knew that none needed help.
‘I must apologies for my apparent cowardice, sir,’ Ree said, emerging from behind the saddles as Edge started to pull his own gear from the heap. ‘And for the manner in which I am unable to control my most misplaced mirth in circumstances which are so tragic.’
‘You ain’t yellow, feller?’
‘Just the pigmentation of my skin, sir.’
‘And you don’t really figure that death is funny?’
The Siamese looked from the impassive Edge, to the weeping Isabella, to the grim-faced Pedro.
‘Perhaps because I have never killed a fellow human being, sir,’ he suggested gently. ‘If I had, perhaps I would not find it impossible to—’
‘No sweat, feller,’ the half-breed cut in. ‘Seems like ignorance really is bliss in your case.’
‘And it would seem that it is most folly to be wise in the ways of inflicting death,’ the Siamese replied, after making a second survey of the only other people left alive in the clearing. Then he changed his tone, as a sign that he was extemporizing his latest poem: ‘Death in numbers/Is no more distressing than/The passing of one/For when the hand of God/Reaches down to—’
‘You want to hitch the team to the wagon?’ Edge cut in wearily. ‘Be dawn pretty soon. You’re a lousy oder, feller. But soon after sun up, there’ll be a worse one from all these corpses.’
CHAPTER NINE
THEY slept for the remainder of the night and until noon of the following day in a cave two miles south of the corpse-littered clearing on the shore of the lake. But, before bedding down, a fire was lit and they cooked and ate a meal. And felt warm and dry.
They awoke to the blistering heat of the day, not fully rested from the grueling, energy-sapping events of the previous one. They drank coffee and only Edge ate a meal - cold from his own supplies - before setting off again on the long journey towards Mexico.
The wagon was as it had been before the deserting troopers stole it, except that the bullet scar on the paintwork covering the gold strut had been camouflaged with a mixture of the black wood ash and axle grease.
Inside, the space once occupied by the dying Antonio M
ontez was taken up by the blanket-wrapped corpse of his wife.
The half-breed and the boy rode their respective horses and both had reclaimed their own gear and weapons. Pedro had wanted to take a couple of the troopers’ mounts as reserves for the mare and the gelding, but agreed sullenly with Edge that the army brand on the animals would invite trouble.
Isabella had criticized Mr. Ree with far more severity - in fact, had given him a snarling tongue-lashing when she spotted him robbing the dead of money and valuables. The Siamese’s response had been a voluble and obsequious apology. But the girl was still aggrieved as the wagon rolled slowly through the rugged mountain country beneath the harsh afternoon sun. Sitting as far away from the timid Oriental as she could on the wagon seat.
Not until they were back on the trail, far to the south of the valley entrance where the body of Antonio had been abandoned for scavengers, did anyone refer to the massacre in the clearing.
‘We did wrong.’
It was Isabella who made the comment, in a tone of grim determination. Edge was riding on the near side of the wagon, closest to her. Pedro was on the other side. Both looked at the girl, while Ree continued to concentrate on the trail ahead, the reins of the ox team held loosely in his hands. But it was he who responded to her.
‘We have all sinned against our own God, madam. Perhaps I may talk of degree, as you have done. The soldiers had life and you took it. Even when it was not necessary. Life, the most cherished possession. After the breath was gone from their bodies, I merely took that which was of no use to the lifeless.’
There was no anger in his voice.
And Isabella ignored him. ‘Some were bad and perhaps deserved to die. But others were seeking only the same kind of relief we are attempting to bring in San Parral. Who are we to be judges of their mistaken methods? And their executioners?’
‘They brought it upon themselves, mi hermana,’ Pedro snapped. ‘And we did not do what we had to do only for San Parral. We did it for our dead parents.’ He sat straighter in the saddle. ‘And we did it well.’ Now he leaned forward and turned his head, to look across the front of the wagon at Edge. ‘Did we not prove ourselves most capable, hombre?’
The half-breed was rolling a cigarette. In completing this, and striking a match on the wagon, he maintained his constant vigilance over the surrounding terrain. ‘You did okay, kid,’ he allowed. ‘Just like those troopers made a fine job of stealing your gold. But best you remember where over-confidence got them.’
‘Si, Pedro,’ his sister added. ‘And it ill-becomes the son of Antonio Montez to boast of such things.’
‘I cannot help feeling the way I do,’ the boy countered, irritated. ‘Nor that I cannot be exactly as our father was.’ Abruptly, he smiled. ‘And I relish the taste of revenge. That makes me like you, eh hombre?’
‘If you live long enough, kid,’ Edge answered. ‘As the years pass, a man tends to lose his sweet tooth.’
Isabella nodded. Perhaps in agreement or maybe an outward sign of some secret and far removed thought.
There was just heat and dust and creaking timbers and clopping hooves for a long time. Then a stage coach approached from the south, the four-horse team hauling its burden at a steady canter. As the two vehicles passed, Isabella shouted a question. But the driver of the stage merely touched the brim of his hat, the guard raised a hand and the passengers peered curiously out of the glassless windows.
‘Either a town or a way station not far off,’ Edge supplied in answer to the girl’s inquiry. The team hitched to that stage is pretty fresh.’
‘Let us hope it is a town,’ she said with a sigh. ‘With people less bigoted than those of Amity Falls. With a Catholic priest who will bury my mother in consecrated ground.’
Then she withdrew into her private realm of grief and remorse.
‘Hombre?’ Pedro called after another lengthy silence.
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘I have lost my interest in looking at the dead.’
‘So maybe you should take up knitting? Every youngster should have a hobby.’
The boy showed an angry scowl, but then controlled the impulse. ‘Yes, I am young. But I seek the knowledge of experience. Jose Lajous was the first dead man I had ever seen. I have seen many since him.’
‘Sure, kid. After a while, everybody gets to look the same. Dead ones, that is.’
He glanced at the girl, but she was unaware of the narrowed, glinting blueness of his eyes as they surveyed her.
‘Now it is the thoughts in a man’s mind when he knows he is to die which intrigue me,’ Pedro insisted.
‘Most fellers are happy to wait a long lifetime to find out about that, kid.’
‘But you thought my father was about to kill you, hombre. When you were tied to the wheel and he was aiming a gun at you. What was in your mind at that moment? Were you afraid? Did you have regrets of all you had left undone? Did you recall events in your life which—’
‘Was thinking that stuff about a man dying with his boots on was crap, kid,’ the half-breed cut in, dividing his attention between Isabella Montez and the huddled buildings of a town in the far distance. That dying in bed has to be the best way to go - in the right company.’
‘Hombre!’ Pedro snarled, realizing Edge was not giving him a serious answer as he intercepted another appraising glance towards his sister. ‘There is something you should know! Isabella is promised to another man!’
‘Ain’t nothing easier to break than a promise, kid.’
The reason to do so would have to be very good indeed,’ the girl said, revealing that she had been aware of the exchange. There was no emotion in her tone as she continued to stare towards the town they were approaching.
‘Nothing in the universe/Is all good/Or all bad/Even God/Has a mighty wrath.’ Having intoned his latest poem, Ree leaned forward to look around Isabella and smile at Edge. ‘I feel the madam—’
‘No way, feller,’ Edge interrupted.
There was no town marker. The trail became a narrow street, lined by crudely built frame structures under the towering cliffs of a deep gorge. A sign over the stage depot proclaimed: Mountain City. There had been signs above other doorways, but the painted words had been obliterated by weather. As the wagon rolled along the street, it became obvious that Mountain City would have been a ghost town had it not been for the well-tended stage depot. Roofs had holes in them, windows were broken or boarded up and dust blown by old winds was heaped against firmly closed doorways. Cobwebs hung across stoops. The smell of the place was of ancient decay mixed with fresh horse-droppings. The heat trapped between the high cliffs of the gorge was like that from an open oven door.
‘Welcome, strangers! Ain’t much of a town anymore, but everythin’ the other side of this doorway is yours!’
The speaker was a gray-haired old-timer. He was six feet, tall and broad at the shoulders and hips. He spoke around a clay pipe clenched between false teeth. His tone was friendly, but his grip was tight on the frame and barrel of a Winchester slanted across his chest. He had stepped out of the shadows and on to the threshold of the stage depot.
‘We are looking for a church and a priest, señor,’ Isabella responded, dejected as she peered around at the blank facades of the abandoned buildings.
‘Never was neither here, ma’am. Just a bunch of miners and them that sponged off miners. All of them went when the vein give out. Just me left here. Takin’ care of stage line horses and feedin’ passengers.’
There was a corral and barn beside the depot’s main building. Four weary horses were in the corral.
‘Miners die like other people, feller,’ Edge said.
The bearded old-timer nodded, puffing out blue, aromatic smoke from the pipe bowl. ‘Sure enough do, son. But the ones we had here weren’t much for religion. About the only way you knew a funeral was happenin’ was when folks took their hats off!’
He gave a cackling laugh.
‘So the dead got buried?’ Edge asked
impassively.
‘Sure did, son. Ain’t healthy for the dead to—’
‘In boxes?’
‘Sure, Mort the mortician took care of that.’ He pointed with the Winchester. ‘Across the street there. Course, his name wasn’t really Mort, but—’
Edge heeled the mare forward and the man in charge of the stage depot allowed his voice to trail away as the wagon moved in the wake of the half-breed. Then the old-timer watched with only mild interest as Edge and Pedro dismounted and, using their rifles, prised the boarding off a window of the undertaking parlor and climbed inside. They came out a minute later with a plain pine casket, hoisted it into the rear of the wagon and climbed aboard. Then could be heard the lid nails being hammered down with the butts of revolvers.
‘Hey!’ the old-timer yelled as the half-breed and the boy climbed out of the wagon and swung back into their saddles. ‘I oughta tell you folks! Take you more than three days to reach Cedarville, haulin’ that rig! You could all catch the disease and die from totin’ a corpse that long!’
‘Obliged,’ Edge replied.
‘I was only funnin’ about you not bein’ allowed in the depot, son! Why don’t you get your buryin’ done here! Then sit a spell! Have some coffee! Somethin’ to eat, if you’ve a mind!’
‘Mine’s open, feller. But the lady’s is set on a priest.’
The bearded old man underwent another mercurial change of mood. ‘So frig off and leave a lonely old man to his empty day!’ he snarled. ‘And I hope the Cedarville folks run you outta town when they smell what’s in that box!’
‘We go now, señor,’ Isabella instructed Ree.
’Si, move out!’ Pedro added.
Edge glanced back at the old-timer, who was puffing furiously at his pipe. ‘Figure to keep the lid on it, feller,’ he called. ‘So mum’s the word, uh?’
Shortly after sun up the following morning, the stench of decomposing flesh from inside the coffin got too strong to endure in the mounting heat of the new day. In a reversal of roles, Pedro had become much more of a realist than Isabella since they were orphaned. It was the boy who suggested that Senalda should be buried and he alone who convinced her to agree, by reminding her of her attitude to leaving the body of their father for the mountain scavengers - that, like Antonio, their mother would not much care where her body rested if it was not possible to take it to San Parral.
EDGE: Violence Trail (Edge series Book 25) Page 11
