Edge struck a match on a dry area of tabletop and lit the cigarette.
‘Maybe nothin’, Mr. Royko,’ Grace Lutter said. ‘Cass is just bein’ his usual ornery self.’
Lutter turned his head to the side to spit on the floor without shifting his eyes off Edge’s face. The half-breed noted disinterestedly that Howie Royko was carrying a Winchester. While Ross Reed was holding the Spencer and gunbelt picked up from the street.
‘I tell you what’s wrong,’ Lutter growled. ‘The other evenin’ this guy rode out of town tall in the saddle. Headed south-west after makin’ it plain that our trouble was none of his business. Tonight he comes ridin’ in from the east. No saddle to ride tall in. With an Apache bridle and reins. And the guns he left with traded for a Spencer repeater and a Colt handgun. The kinda weapons that were stole from the army and got to the Apaches.’
‘But—’ Royko began, speaking the interruption just ahead of Reed.
‘In between him leavin’ and comin’ back,’ Cass Lutter ploughed on resolutely, ‘the Indians ambushed the army out on the southwest trail. And all of us heard the message Lee Temple sent back with young Kenny Lewis. It looked like Edge here was mixed up in the ambush and didn’t get killed. That Lee was gonna move east on the trail of the Apaches. Since then, nothin’. Until this guy shows up in town again. From the east!’
The dull-eyed Royko nodded several times as Lutter made points. And when the bald-headed man was finished, the miner was convinced, stared accusingly at Edge as the half-breed sipped the rye and chased it with a swallow of beer.
‘But there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, Mr. Lutter,’ Reed insisted, advancing far enough into the big room to place the gunbelt and rifle on a table.
‘Cass ain’t give Edge a chance to say more than a half-dozen words,’ Grace Lutter growled. ‘At least young Francine Temple asked—’
‘You’re the one wastin’ time now, woman!’ her husband cut in.
‘Why would he come back to San Lucas if –’ Reed started.
And this time the half-breed interrupted. ‘You said someone named Tuchman saw me come up the hill, feller,’ he drawled, looking at Royko. ‘That mean you people have just the one sentry posted? And him right here in town?’
Lutter grunted. ‘That why you come back, mister? Find out our plans for—’
Edge allowed a sigh to whistle out on a stream of blue tobacco smoke, doused the cigarette in the pool of spilled beer and drove the man with the shotgun into silence with a cold, hard stare.
‘All right, feller,’ he said into the silence. ‘I’ll give it to you fast. And just the once. So you all better listen good. Because I don’t know how much time we may have.’
He told them. Everything - with the one exception - that had occurred from the moment he was awakened at his night camp beside the trail until he rode back into San Lucas. The only incident he omitted to mention was his recent meeting with Little Fawn.
When he raised the shot glass and took what was left of the rye at a single swallow to signal he was through, Ross Reed was the first to speak. His smile of relief was a match for that on the face of Howie Royko.
‘So it really is true, Mr. Edge? Lee Temple and his posse have the Apaches running scared. A long way from here.’
Cass Lutter was looking at the half-breed as if he dearly wanted to believe what had been said, but begrudged allowing the benefit of the doubt.
His wife said coldly, ‘That Butler sonofabitch! And to think that today you went out to see his whore of a mother and give her a rifle. It’s them you oughta be pointin’ that scattergun at, you crazy bastard! And usin’ it on! Him for what he done to help the savages! And her for breedin’ him!’
She snatched a bottle of tequila from the shelf, took off the stopper and sucked a great gulp from the neck. She revealed she was not usually a drinker by her grimace. But she managed not to choke on the fiery liquor.
‘I ... I ... don’t ...’ Cass Lutter began to stutter. Totally confused.
His wife, her fury expunged by the outburst against the Butlers and the belt from the bottle, looked earnestly at the half-breed.
‘You said at the start that maybe we don’t have much time?’
Reed and Royko, who had lost their smiles while the woman was lambasting her husband, were now as serious in countenance as Grace Lutter.
Edge told them of his theory about why the Apaches had abandoned the camp at Black Bear Bluff so readily - of their aim to reclaim El Cerro de Muerto by making every citizen of San Lucas pay.
‘And you figure the Indians have got the beatin’ of Lee Temple and the others?’ Howie Royko asked morosely.
‘They got the whites outnumbered, that’s for sure, feller,’ Edge replied. ‘Whether Acoti was just on the run to get away or had his braves split up into small bands to pick off the posse, I got no way of knowing.’
‘Shit!’ Cass Lutter groaned, and got up from the table abruptly, allowing the shotgun to hang loosely at his side, aimed at the floor. ‘If they done that, we already lost our best men.’
‘Something else to tell you, feller,’ Edge said levelly.
The woman and three men looked at him, their anxiety mounting by the moment. He finished his beer before he said, ‘If you point a gun at me again, kill me. You don’t, I’ll kill you.’
For a stretched second, the bald-headed man was close to being gripped by a renewed rage. But his fear of the Apaches proved to be more powerful than his resentment towards Edge.
For the same period, Edge’s mind was visited by a vivid image. Of a time, long ago, when he had pointed what he thought was an unloaded gun at somebody. He was just a kid. His brother Jamie was younger. Jamie had a tragically short life. And had to live most of it with a crippled leg because the gun had a bullet in the breech.
‘Hell, mister!’ Lutter groaned. ‘You gotta admit I had cause to be anxious about why you come back here? After you stopped us stringin’ up them three Apaches the army caught.’
‘And you got egg all over your ugly face!’ his wife countered. ‘Because he come back to warn us about the savages.’
‘That, too,’ Edge said wearily, as he got to his feet. And became the centre of fraught attention again. ‘Need gear for my horse. Some blankets and supplies for the trail. Happy enough with the Army Colt. Like to trade the Spencer for a Winchester. Or buy one.’
Grace Lutter nodded. ‘Between us and Bob Sweeney who sells more than just minin’ tools, we can supply what you need, Edge. But you ain’t figurin’ on ridin’ out tonight, are you?’
‘Like everyone keeps pointing out, ma’am, the trouble around here ain’t none of my business. Like to be long gone before anything else happens to force me to take an interest,’
‘But you’re near done in, Edge,’ she said.
Reed added, ‘And that mount of yours needs to be rested, mister.’
‘And maybe that story you just told us won’t sound so good if you take off,’ Howie Royko growled suspiciously.
‘The hell with that, Howie!’ Cass Lutter snapped and there was obviously no subterfuge in his attitude - he was fully convinced that the half-breed had told it like it happened. ‘We got to believe him and we got to organize ourselves in case Temple and the boys don’t get back here. And like Edge says, this ain’t his fight.’
‘And we sure as hell ain’t done one little thing to make him feel he wants to help us,’ Grace Lutter muttered. She looked at the bottle of tequila as if she was considering another drink. But she resisted the impulse.
Hoofbeats sounded. Coming from a distance. Several animals. Approaching the town through the fold in the hills to the southeast. Shod horses.
A man shouted something. From the foot of El Cerro de Muerto.
That’s Kurt!’ Royko blurted.
‘What’s he say?’ Lutter demanded.
His footfalls, those of his wife and Reed and Royko as they’all converged on the doorway - plus the beat of hooves - masked anot
her shout from the bottom of the hill.
‘It’s Dad and the others!’ Francine Temple yelled and her voice - shrill in tone and closer at hand - sounded clearly.
Edge reached the table where Reed had left the guns and he buckled on the belt and started to tie the thong around his thigh.
‘How many you see, Howie?’ Lutter asked.
‘At least four, Cass. Maybe six or seven.’
‘They sure are ridin’ hard.’
‘My God, the others must be ...’
The volume of sound had been rising fast and the rest of what Grace Lutter gasped was lost under the beat of hooves, snorting of animals and yells of men. As the depleted posse broke from their headlong race up the slope and skidded to a dust-raising halt on the street.
‘Dad, you’re hurt!’ Francine screamed.
‘Just a scratch, honey!’ her father answered breathlessly.
‘But the others, they all—’ Mel Rubinger yelled.
‘What happened to them?’ From Ross Reed.
‘They’re dead, ain’t they?’ Grace Lutter said dully and her pronouncement brought silence except for the heavy breathing of men and horses and the scrape of boot leather as she led her husband, Reed and Royko across the boardwalk and on to the street.
‘Ernie Noble, Bob Sweeney, Lipner, young Dargan, Borowsky.’ Now there was just the breath being sucked into and expelled through the flared nostrils of the sweat-lathered horses to compete with Lee Temple’s mournful voice as he listed the death toll of San Lucas citizens. ‘Fred Lande, Lorrimer, the Mullen kid—’
‘We had the friggin’ savages on the friggin’ run!’ Rubinger interrupted vehemently. ‘But the bastards turned the tables on us. The tricky sonsofbitches split up and started in to snipe at us. Like we was friggin’ apples in a barrel! And now they’re comin’ here!’
Another near-silence, as the crowd which had gathered on the other side of the street from the buildings - in the same way as when the army men brought the Apache prisoners to town - became fearfully still.
Broken by the creak of timber as Edge, the Spencer sloped to his left shoulder, stepped across the threshold of the Lutters’ place.
Four of the five survivors of the almost twenty-strong posse whirled towards the sound. Gaunt-faced, hollow-eyed, sweat-stained and dust-covered men suffering the shock of bitter defeat and the exhausting effects of a frantic retreat. The two miners let out pent-up breath. Rubinger stared fixedly at the half-breed.
Temple said, ‘Damnit to hell, mister, you gave me a start.’
Edge nodded a curt greeting. ‘Been best if you’d given me one, feller.’
‘Uh?’
‘For me,’ the half-breed growled with contained anger. ‘I’d have been long gone.’
Chapter Thirteen
Chief Acoti led his braves over the brow of the hill east of San Lucas a few minutes after sun-up. With the glaring yellow orb at their backs, its rays lancing down to dazzle the eyes of those who remained on El Cerro de Muerto to defend it.
For the preceding two hours, the whites had been aware of the simple battle strategy which the Apaches planned to carry out. For Ross Reed, from his assigned sentry position had seen the Indians approaching the town along the trail through the Hatchet Mountains’ foothills. Then after he had summoned Temple and Edge to take a look, all three watched while the Indians pitched temporary camp.
No wickiups were erected on the blind side of the hill from San Lucas. The ponies were hobbled, blankets were spread on the sloping ground, ceremonial fires were lit and the colorfully attired shaman began to assert his spiritual authority over the assembled braves. Which in this pre-battle period took precedence over Acoti’s leadership.
War paint was daubed and feathered bonnets were donned. The monotonous beating of several single-head tomtom drums began to vibrate in the night air. So that the whites on El Cerro de Muerto in no position to see the Apaches, received confirmation of the firelight and billowing smoke as signs that soon the attack would begin.
Thundercloud and the other two sub-chiefs posted sentries only immediately around the encampment. And no white sentry except for Reed reported seeing Indians on any other side of San Lucas.
Thus did the Apaches make their intention clear. They had announced their presence and until such time as they chose to begin the battle - obviously at sun-up from the position of their camp - they would wage a war of nerves on their hated enemies. Then, because they were a relatively small force, insufficient in number to make an encircling move against such a large objective as El Cerro de Muerto, they would launch a full-scale attack from out of the sun.
Chief Acoti would be aware that such a plan ran the risk of inviting high casualties. But the hill was a sacred place which every Apache had hungered to reclaim for many years. And to die gloriously in the battle to take it back from the white eyes would be a high honor. Should any war-painted and bonneted brave have doubts of this, they were erased as the moment for battle drew near: by the frenetic beating of the taut hide heads of the tomtoms and the frenzied dancing and chanting of the shaman.
Only Ross Reed witnessed the Apache preliminaries of battle. Lying in a hollow on the brow of the hill, the hair prickling on the nape of his neck and his hands clutching a Winchester slippery with sweat. Terrifyingly aware of the light of the moon and stars losing its intensity as the grey of false and then actual dawn drove back the black of the night. Then dividing his attention between the Apaches and the line of ridges beyond them, willing the leading arc of the rising sun to show. For that would signal his retreat from the lonely hill-top, back to the men who were preparing their defence against the Apaches.
By the time he saw that first sliver of bright yellow, bellied out of the hollow, took the hobbles off his horse and began to gallop, the preparations were complete. After a frantic half-night of work which had begun only a few minutes following the return of the depleted posse. Preparations for a plan of defence which would cost the people of San Lucas dearly. But in terms of property and livelihoods rather than lives - if it was successful.
The half-breed had taken no active part in formulating the plan. For he had no stake in what would inevitably be lost. And his only contribution to the setting-up of the defense was in the form of advice when he was asked.
And the sole decision requiring more than a passing thought he had to make was after he came down from the hill in the east. When he knew that there would be no danger in leaving San Lucas in any other direction except east.
The same opportunity was open, also, to everyone else in town. But when Sheriff Lee Temple made this known to his fellow citizens, no one even hesitated to shout him down against the beat of the Apache drums.
When the disturbance died down, Susan Reed suggested that the women - certainly those with children - should take advantage of the escape route open to Fort Catlow. She got backers for the idea, but no takers. For the Apaches were going to pay for their attack of six months before. And for the men they had killed only yesterday. Everyone was determined to see them pay.
The work done, the preparations made, everybody except for Reed and Howie Royko who was watching to the north, south and west from the top of the hill of dead withdrew into the cover of the row of buildings on San Lucas’s only street. Listening to the drums and the chants, aware of the night giving way to day and glancing often to where the banker’s horse was hobbled.
There were few words spoken in any of the crowded buildings. One brief exchange was between the half-breed and the lawman while they stood in the open doorway of the Lutters’ place.
‘You could have left, Edge. No problem.’
‘I know, feller.’
‘Private reason for staying?’
‘No reason for leaving.’
‘You’re not saying anything.’
‘I got nothing to say.’
Both of them continued to show the signs of weariness and hard travel. But neither revealed any inner tension as the war drums mainta
ined the constant, unwavering beat and the smoke of the ceremonial fires drifted across the lightening sky.
Some of the other men were equally calm-looking. Calling upon past experiences of facing up to known dangers. In the war between the States, on frontier forts or perhaps as civilians while they were struggling to survive in isolated outposts before they settled into a community on El Cerro de Muerto.
Others, too young to have had such experiences or too old to draw comfort from memories of survival long in the past, sweated and frowned, did not look directly at anyone else or chance the shortest conversations for fear they would reveal the extent of their anxiety.
Every now and then a woman soothed a fretful child. The younger children slept.
When Ross Reed was seen to emerge from his hiding place and run down the slope to his horse there was a shuffling of feet, a creaking of bones and a series of sharp intakes of breath.
The young and tense-faced Kurt Tuchman who stood by the window on the store side of the Lutters’ place snarled, ‘Frig the stinkin’ army!’
Lee Temple, the broken skin on his right side treated and dressed but his shirt still stained with dried blood, shot a withering look towards the twenty-year-old miner.
‘The army has always made its position clear, Mr. Tuchman!’ he snapped.
‘If you want out, son,’ Grace Lutter called from behind the bar counter, ‘there’s still time.’
Tuchman grimaced, then looked ashamed and said, ‘Sorry, Lee. For Pa and the others.’
Howie Royko, who had started to move at the same time as Reed showed himself, and covered a much shorter distance on foot, came breathlessly into the Lutters’ place through the rear door.
‘All clear out there, Lee,’ he reported.
Temple’s thin face showed a tight grin as the banker slowed his horse crossing the street and leapt from the saddle to lead the animal along the alley.
The drums stopped.
In the silence, the small sounds of Reed installing the horse in the stable out back carried into every building.
Edge moved to stand between Rubinger and Cass Lutter at the saloon window as Temple closed the door. Other doors were closed in the other buildings. Last to sound was that at the rear of the Lutters’ place as Ross Reed entered, to be greeted with a thankful embrace by his wife.
EDGE: Red Fury (Edge series Book 33) Page 12
