"Your horse is all right," Morton said in a hushed whisper that was almost reverent.
"Obliged, but I'd like to check for myself," Edge told him and entered the shadowed interior of the stable. It was almost as clean as the kitchen, with the walls and stalls painted white and the fodder neatly stored in marked bins and racks. His saddle was a disreputable intrusion among the highly polished gear hung on hooks along one wall: and his horse was like an ill-used Mexican burro compared with the sleek, well-groomed mounts on either side. He ran a hand gently down the animal's flank,
"See how the other half lives, feller?" he asked. The horse looked at him with a jaundiced eye, jaws chopping on fresh, sweet-smelling feed. Outside John Firman's voice droned on. Edge suddenly felt very hungry but decided to wait.
"I'm getting acid in the stomach hearing him from this distance," he told the horse.
The crack of the rifle shot was close and loud enough to sting the eardrums. The second of barren silence that followed it seemed to stretch into eternity, and then the screams and shouts of panic invaded the stillness with an almost obscene stridency, like laughter in an empty church. An army of guns exploded in stern rebuke and Edge moved. As the stench of burned powder drifted in through the sunlit doorway of the stable he dived for his saddle, snatched the Winchester from the boot and leaped up the stairs to the loft three at a time. He went full length to the floor among a scattering of loose hay and used the muzzle of the rifle to crack open the unlatched loft door. The high-pitched cries of alarm and terror had diminished now, under the barrage of gunfire and snorting of spooked horses in the stable and corral. Edge's eyes swept the yard behind the house, the lines of his face formed into a neutral expression that revealed nothing of what he was feeling as he studied the carnage below.
John Firman had been pitched forward across the table, blood from a massive wound in the back of his head, pumping out to stain the white frosting on the wedding cake. His elder son was crumpled at his side, spreading blood from a chest wound on to the dirt. The organist had died clutching her young assistant to her breast. She had taken a bullet in the side of the throat and one in the back. The boy lay beside her, a large red hole where his left eye had been. The four maids had been gunned down as a group, clustered together as if for protection, their once white aprons spattered with thick blobs of each other's blood.
Even as Edge looked on, fifteen men were spreading out in a line across one side of the yard, firing from the hip and the shoulder with repeater rifles, shooting indiscriminately at the wedding guests. A fat woman took a bullet below her enormous right breast, half stood and opened her mouth to scream. But all that came out was a great gush of blood and half digested food which fountained into the face of the man opposite her. The man turned away to vomit and caught a bullet in his ear. Another man went sideways off his chair and fell on his back under the table, eyes and mouth pulled wide by the agony of his death. One of the young bridesmaids, no more than seven years old, was jerked out of her chair by three bullets ripping into her frail body. She fell across the table, head hanging at a grotesque angle and a steady drip of blood from a gaping shoulder wound began to fill the mouth of the dead man below.
Two men leaped up from the table to try to run but were gunned down into pools of their own blood before they could take more than two steps. A woman threw her hands up to her face in horror and a bullet drilled a neat hole through one of them and smashed through her nose. Edge saw Cindy sprawled full length on the ground, her accentuated cleavage sullied by the sticky, slick shine of crimson blood. It came from the pulped mess of what had once been the lower half of her face.
Suddenly, as if he had been struck deaf, Edge couldn't hear the shooting any more. But the interval of silence was ended by a series of nervous whinnies from the horses below. He inched forward to bring his eye closer to the crack in the door and looked down at the line of men. They stood, rifles still poised, regarding the scene of slaughter with the same cold lack of emotion as that with which Edge watched them. Then he heard a small, whimpering sound and steeled himself for another burst of gunfire. But when a man at the center of the line merely smiled and lowered his rifle, Edge brought his attention back to the blood-soaked table with its awful decoration of bodies in attitudes of death. The shooting had not been entirely at random. There was one survivor and it was obvious that this life had been spared for a purpose. The new Mrs. Chilton Firman stood in trembling terror at the center of the massacre, her white wedding gown spotted with flecks of red blood from her dead husband and father-in-law. Her mouth was working pathetically, but emitting only a series of low, agonized moans.
"How about a kiss from the bride," the man at the center of the line suggested evenly.
Edge was just about to look at him when the banging of the screen door captured his attention. He was in time to see Morton Firman rush out holding a shotgun in front of him. His young face was as white as the paint on the house. Tears coursed down both his cheeks, sparkling in the sunlight. The first barrage took away his life: the second his face. His body slammed into the door and he crumpled to become a blood-soaked pile of rag and bone on the step.
"Guess he wasn't the best man after all," Edge muttered.
Chapter Two
THE Winchester was comforting in Edge's hands as he watched the line of men advance across the yard, then break formation to become a circle around the helpless, trembling woman. She looked too terrified to be aware of anything save her own predicament, but she just might recall his presence and summon a memory of his disappearance into the stable. He wanted no part of this fight, but he had learned from bitter experience that sometimes circumstances took no account of personal feelings. So he carefully worked the action of the rifle to pump a shell into the breech. The fifteen men below him were all as different from each other as most men, and yet there was something about them that set a pattern. Tall, short, fat, thin, young, middle-aged, handsome, homely: despite all these overt dissimilarities there was, in the faces of the men and in the way they carried themselves, the mark of meanness allied with evil that made them as uniform as a set of army blues would have done. Edge knew that he could have stepped into the circle and to an outsider would appear as one with the rest—an animal joining with its own kind.
"You're an animal, Jake Tabor! An animal that feeds on the blood of innocent people."
Adele Firman had found her voice and her tone was strong and resolute. The shock of the wholesale killing had passed, or perhaps had merely withdrawn to a dark corner of her mind, awaiting a future moment to spring out and drive her into hysteria. Edge heard her venomous words with a start, for it was as if his own thoughts had been transmitted to her.
The man she addressed shrugged his shoulders. They were massive, like the rest of him. He stood several inches over six feet tall and his body was broad and muscular, balanced evenly on his long, splayed legs. He was about fifty and wore no hat, so that every line and wrinkle in the sun-burnished skin of his arrogant face was visible. He had a lot of thick red hair which sprouted in all directions from his head and blazed an unruly trail down each cheek, to join as a beard which reached from his jaw to the center of his chest. His mouth was wide and slightly twisted at one corner, turning his smile into a sneer. His eyes were dark, set far apart, and did not even show bogus warmth as he regarded his victim.
"Thee are no better than I, Adele Wyatt," he said.
"My name's Firman now," she spat at him.
"Widow Firman," Tabor said, raising his rifle and twirling it around his head. "So now all this is thine."
"But she ain't no lucky lady, Jake," one of the men said with a harsh laugh.
The others waited for Tabor to show his amusement before breaking into cackles. Adele looked around at their grizzled, sneering faces with disgust.
"Mister, why did you shoot my Mommy?"
The laughter was dying and ended abruptly, awesomely as the young, voice posed the question. All, turned to look at the second
of the tiny bridesmaids, who was edging away from her hiding place behind the pump organ, some twenty feet from where the men were encircled around Adele. This girl was older than the other bridesmaid—perhaps nine or ten. She was very pretty, with blonde hair done in ringlets. Cindy had given her the bouquet of roses.
"Which one was thy, mother, child?" Tabor asked, fully recovered from the surprise of seeing her.
"The lady in the blue dress." She spoke in a conversational tone, as if detached from what had happened, perhaps not understanding it but seriously needing to satisfy her curiosity. She pointed a steady finger to where a once attractive woman was slumped across the table, the back of her dress already stiffening with sun-dried blood.
"No, Tabor!" Adele implored, taking a step away from the table.
Two men moved in, close and each angled his rifle towards one of the woman's ears. She halted.
"Thy mother was unfortunate, child," Tabor said easily. "Would thee like to see her again?"
The little girl nodded and her ringlets danced with sunlight. "Yes, please."
"Very well." Tabor shot her in the center of the forehead and the frail body was flung backwards and exploded a mournful wail from the organ as it hit the keyboard before coming to rest across the stool.
"Oh, you filthy bastard!"Adele exclaimed.
Tabor sighed. "If thee believed as I, thee would know the child was now with her mother, Adele," he said. "Thee will now tell me where the silver is hidden."
"You've killed all these people for a few dollars worth of silver?" Her tone was incredulous.
"Put them all on a scale and they would not weigh a fraction of the silver, Adele," Tabor said. "Thee know that. They died because they were here with you. Like that child's mother, they were unfortunate that we could not spare the time to wait for thy wedding to finish."
"I don't know where it is."
Edge didn't know whether she was lying or not. He had watched the murder of the child with the same steely-eyed impassiveness as he had witnessed the preceding events. He hated the murderer for what he was but in Edge's word all emotion was neutralized if it was shorn of personal involvement. So he merely studied the face of Jake Tabor and knew that the man did not believe the woman.
"Thee may tell me now or later, woman," he said. "I have told thee we are pressed for time."
"And I've told you I don't know where Warner stashed the silver," Adele threw back at him.
She was a handsome woman in her mid-twenties. Under the head-dress her hair was jet black, like her eyes. She had the pale complexion of one unused to the outdoor life and there was about her face a hardness of experience that marred what might have been prettiness. She was tall and the voluminous, wedding gown merely hinted at the voluptuousness of a figure at full maturity. Despite the gun muzzle at each side of her head and the evil intent visible upon the face of each man around her, she held herself with pride and dignity. Edge wondered if she had been expecting an interruption to the wedding: if she had mistaken him for a silver-hungry killer when he rode up.
Tabor ignored her denial and cast a glance around the yard. He looked directly at the stable and Edge tightened his grip on the Winchester, certain he could put a bullet info the bearded man's heart before the other could even lift his rifle. But Tabor's gaze was lower than the loft door.
"The well," he snapped.
The men at each side of the woman took one of her arms. She stepped out firmly between them, skirting the body-draped tables, her only sign of nervousness a slight trembling of her lower lip. Tabor fell in behind the trio and the other men ambled along as a group behind him. Edge had to inch forward and push the door open a little wider to see what was happening immediately beneath him.
The bucket was at the top of the well, resting on the low wall. Tabor leaned his gun against one of his thick legs and unsheathed a knife to slash through the rope. Then he jerked some slack free of the winding axle and stood in front of the woman to knot the rope around her ankles. For a moment she seemed on the point of lashing out with a foot towards him, but a tightening of the grip on her arms dissuaded her. Tabor straightened up and sighed.
"Thee knows thee must die, Adele," he pointed out. "Thy guests went the easy way."
"Pig!" she cried and spat full into his face.
Several of the men shuffled their feet and leaned forward, expectant of violence. But Tabor merely reached out a hand, grasped the bridal head-dress and wrenched it free. He used it to wipe the spittle from his beard.
"Warner never tamed thee," he said softly. "And I doubt if the Firman boy would have done it. Thee are the spawn of alley cats and thee shall die like a cat."
He applied the brake to the handle, stepped up to the woman, and lifted her with the ease of a man hoisting a baby. His two henchmen released her and she began to scream, flailing with her hands, battering him about the head. He ignored her as if her fists were the attacks of flies, and raised her clear of the wall. Then be let go of her and her body dropped like a stone. Her wail of fear became a scream of agony as the rope jerked taut. The hollowness of the deep well magnified the sound, emphasizing its ring of terror. Tabor leaned over the wall and his men fought with each other to peer inside. Edge had to move forward a few more inches to see through the circle of bent heads to where Adele Firman was suspended, upside down, the skirts of her wedding gown hanging over her head, revealing her legs clad in blue pantaloons trimmed with pink lace. The catcalls and peals of laughter from the men were silenced by a roar from Tabor.
"Can thee hear me, woman?" he demanded.
Adele was whimpering, not struggling against the hold of the rope. She didn't reply.
"Where is the silver, Adele? Where did Warner hide it?" His voice echoed back at him. It was the only answer he got. His movements were impatient as he held the handle steady, removed the brake and began to allow the axle to turn, his strength easily able to contain the weight of the woman on the rope.
She gasped once as her descent began. The intense excitement of the men grouped around the well was like an evil force suspended above them in the hot afternoon air. Edge glanced away from them, over to the food table and felt the knife of hunger twist inside his stomach. The food still looked fresh as the flies fed on the greater delicacy of fresh blood. A strangled gurgling sound came from the depths of the well and the rope began to sway as the woman struggled to get her head clear of the water. Tabor allowed the handle one more turn and then held it.
"Don't kill her, Jake," one of the men said urgently after a few moments.
"Thee hold thy peace," the bearded man rebuked and allowed the woman to suffer several more, moments before using two hands to haul her clear. "Are thee ready to tell me what I wish to know, woman?" he roared down the well.
A series of sobs travelled back up with the echo of his voice. He sighed and lowered her once more. The movement of the rope was less pronounced now, as Adele's failing strength took its toll on her ability to resist. With the skill of an experienced torturer, Tabor took the state of the woman's will into account and did not leave her submerged for more than five seconds. Then he turned the handle and continued to rotate it until she came to the top of the well, her feet only an inch from the coiled rope. Her shoes had come off. She was still conscious, able to groan her wretchedness, but could offer no struggle. The entire lower half of her body was clear of the, wall at the top of the well. 0
"Can thee hear me, woman?" Tabor barked.
A choked sob came weakly from beneath the sodden folds of the wedding gown. Tabor reached out a hand, hooked his fingers over the inside of the waistband and wrenched at it. The entire gown came off, both skirts and bodice. Clothed only in a laced corset and pantaloons, Adele Firman swayed at the end of the rope, hair and arms hanging limply around her inverted head. Her shoulders were very white against the dark background of the well.
"Thee were Warner's woman," Tabor said. "Thee kept him warm on cold nights at his hideout. A man tells his woman much when he is
in her arms." There was no response from the woman.
"I think she's taking a nap, Jake," one of the men suggested and reached out to stroke the naked calf of one of her legs.
"Try," Tabor instructed and the man's hand bunched into a fist, fastening hard to the flesh. Adele Firman shouted her pain and the cry brought a smile to the face of the renegade Quaker.
"It is time for thy afternoon smoke, Keene."
A short man with no teeth and a scar on his forehead greeted the suggestion with a grin and dug into his shirt pocket. The others watched him with mounting excitement as he produced a half-smoked cigar and lit it. He spoke around its wet end clamped between his gums. "Ain't a lot to work on, Jake," he said.
Tabor nodded and swung the woman around so that her back was to him. Then he took out a knife and leaned over the wall. The lacing of the corset parted with a series of dull popping sounds and the garment fell to splash in the water at the foot of the well. The men crowded closer now, as Tabor grasped the final item of the woman's clothing and ripped it off, tossing it over his shoulder. The lust of the group rose like a noxious smell to where Edge watched as the men craned forward to look at the naked whiteness of the gently turning body. Then one of the men, moving stealthily, backed away, stooped quickly and snatched up the tom pantaloons. He pushed them quickly inside his shirt and rejoined the others in time to see Keene press the glowing end of the cigar into Adele Firman's flesh. Her scream was like the wail of a banshee, echoing and re-echoing down the tunnel of darkness as her body writhed on the end of the rope.
"Tell me, woman. And stop this!" Tabor's voice was resonant with anger.
"Pig!" she screamed back. "Pig, pig, pig. You'll rot It hell!"
"But you'll be there before me, woman," he thundered, and nodded to Keene, who sucked hard against the cigar and pressed it against flesh once more, lower down the stomach. He held it there longer and the woman's scream was more prolonged.
EDGE: Blood on Silver (Edge series Book 5) Page 2
