The Blue, the Grey and the Red Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EDGE

  THE BLUE, THE GREY AND THE RED

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition: June 2012

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance

  to actual events locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information

  or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author,

  except where permitted by law.

  Cover design by West World Designs © 2012

  This is a High Plains Western for Lobo Publications

  Visit the author at:

  www.gggandpcs.proboards.com

  For

  M.P.

  Who, like Edge, has Scandinavian connections.

  WARNING!

  This is not for the fainthearted reader!

  Quarter

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Although this novel is complete in itself, it does

  continue the Civil War adventures of Edge (then

  Captain Josiah S. Hedges) which began in Killer's

  Breed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There were four men and one woman in the small back room of the Royal Flush saloon at the bay end of Market Street. The game was five-card draw any pair to open and two of the men were cheating. Drew Shelby was the expert, dealing over the top of the shiny lid of a tin tobacco box. Abel Heffner caught his signals and acted upon them. Chadwick Eden lost steadily and didn't care, as he alternately lifted a shot glass to his lips and caressed the well-rounded right hip of Emmeline Greer standing by his side. The fourth man folded automatically on Shelby's deal and played the value of his hand when the cards came from a different source. He won more often than he lost.

  The atmosphere within the room was fetid with sweat, cigarette smoke, rye whiskey and the woman's unsubtle perfume: liberally mixed and laced with the oily smell of the kerosene lamp that dropped yellow light on to the worn green baize of the table covering. It was late, with night pressing a warm blackness against the small square window. The game was three hours old and the cards were greasy from oozing pores. Emmeline Greer was bored with it but held her peace because Eden had paid her price for the whole night. The saloon had become quiet a long time previously and from the silence that infiltrated the room from beyond, the entire city of San Francisco could have been dead.

  "One more hand," Eden said as he drained the bottle into his glass and Shelby picked up the deck to give them a gambler's shuffle.

  He had just lost a big pot to Heffner but this was not the reason for his sudden disenchantment with the game. His hand had sought arid found a higher and more resilient area of the woman's body and she had stooped slightly to allow him the privilege. As his hand cupped her large breast, his handsome face, aged beyond its years by an excess of hard liquor, lost the easy half smile with which he had viewed his apparent run of ill luck, and expressed blatant lust. The woman, who was not pretty but had the voluptuousness of body that guaranteed her security of employment, fixed a self-satisfied smirk upon her round face.

  "Hell, your luck has got to change," Shelby encouraged. He was about fifty, which made him twice Eden's age, and he spoke to the younger man in a paternal tone. He was a big man, with the height and shoulders of a lumberjack: but his hands were soft and supple. Dealing cards was the hardest work he had done in a long time.

  "Yeah," Heffner agreed. "Stay in, young man. The time to stop is when you're ahead."

  Heffner looked more like a professional gambler. He was pushing sixty and his hair was already white. He had a kindly face which hinted at a lack of intelligence and a surfeit of good nature. His frame was slight and he had the same kind of hands as his partner.

  Emmeline bent her body more firmly into the greasy palm of Eden. The young man looked up at her and his drunken eyes saw the promise and heightened their determination. His fingers stretched, reaching above the neckline of the low-cut dress and began to trace tiny patterns on the soft curve of flesh.

  "Maybe you'll get a pat royal this time," Shelby pressed on, showing tobacco-stained teeth in a grin. But his grey eyes continued to be flat and dead.

  "He seems to be happy with the pair he's already got," the fourth player said evenly.

  He was the tallest man at the table. He reached to six feet three inches and his build was composed of almost two hundred pounds arranged in muscular proportion that implied latent strength without emphasizing it. His handsomeness was of the essentially masculine type to an extent where he was often considered ugly. His features were angular and the burnished skin tone of the toughened, much-lined flesh of his face hinted strongly of Mexican blood in his veins. And it was true that his father came from Sonora. But the Scandinavian heritage of his mother could be seen in the piercing blueness of his narrow, deep-set eyes. At the start of the game he had been freshly bathed and shaved, but the ingrained dirt of the trail was beginning to come to the surface with sweat, and stubble was sprouting, as black as his shoulder-length hair and the moustache that grew along the top of his thin mouth and turned down sharply at each comer. He looked mean and incapable of smiling, even at his own humor. His name was Edge.

  Eden laughed. "Hey, I like that."

  "I can see you do," Edge said as he watched the young man's fingers dig deeper into the swell of the woman's breast.

  Shelby sighed and began to deal. Each card passed over the top of the tin's reflective surface. Eden released his grip on the woman with reluctance and finished his drink at a swallow. Each man gathered up his cards and fanned them. Edge looked at his three tens, king and queen. On the table in front of him was better than twenty-seven hundred dollars, which put him more than two hundred ahead of when he started. The other three, all with bigger bankrolls, regarded their cards with expressions carved from stone.

  Eden couldn't open and Edge started the pot with a twenty-dollar bill. The others stayed in. Edge discarded his queen and drew one. It came deftly off the bottom and gave him a full house. Heffner stayed with what he had and Shelby and Eden each drew one. Edge kept the ante at twenty but folded when everybody stayed in the game and Shelby rubbed the left side of his nose with a long index finger. Heffner raised by fifty and the other two went along with him. Edge stacked his money into a neat pile and pushed it into the hip pocket of his worn pants. Then he took out the makings and began to roll a cigarette. He formed a perfect cylinder by touch, for his eyes, glinting like slivers of blue glass, moved across the faces of the other three men as they pushed bills into the centre of the table. There was over one thousand dollars in the pot when Shelby ran his tongue along his top lip and Heffner sighed dramatically and folded his hand.

  "I'm out," he said with disappointment, and threw his cards carelessly on the baize.

  Shelby allowed himself a small smile with his mouth. "Let's make it interesting," he murmured and counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills. He tossed the money into the pot. "Give you a chance to get some of your money back, son."

  Eden was not holding his cards. They were spread out on the table before him. The fingers of one hand we
re moving on Emmeline's hip again, as he toyed with his money with the other. Although he was either too drunk or too preoccupied to realize he was being set up, he knew how to play poker. His youthful face betrayed no sign of what he was thinking.

  "Your five hundred and a thousand more," he challenged. Heffner drew in his breath sharply and the sound was magnified by the silence in the room. The match flaring from friction with Edge's boot heel was like a minor explosion. Shelby acted out a few moments of indecision, then picked up two bills.

  "Your thousand, and up by a like amount. Makes it expensive to see, don't it?"

  "Glad I ain't in it," Heffner said. Edge lit his cigarette and blew smoke across the table. It was grey, but turned blue as it billowed around the lamp. Eden released the woman and seemed about to pick up his cards. His hands, rich with two decorated rings, hovered, then settled on his money. "I'll pay," he said, and covered Shelby's bet. Then, impatiently, he flipped over his cards to show a straight to the queen.

  "It's not your night, son," Shelby said with phony sadness as he spread his hand. Disappointment showed momentarily in Eden's dark eyes, but was superseded by resignation as the fact of the four aces imprinted itself on his mind. He started to rise, gathering up the remnants of his bankroll as Shelby hauled in the pot.

  "It's about time you did some screwing of your own," Edge said softly.

  Everybody froze and for a moment it was like a waxworks tableau, with all eyes fastened upon the all man's expressionless face.

  "You implying something, mister?" Shelby demanded darkly.

  Edge reached out a brown-skinned hand and turned over Heffner's cards. The man had been betting without even a pair of two spots.

  "It's a game of bluff," Heffner said, a nervous tremor distorting the words.

  "Ain't up to me, kid," Edge said, talking to Eden but locking his stare upon Shelby. "But you've been taken to the cleaners. The price was too high and you're left with egg on your face."

  Emmeline looked frightened and tugged at Eden's coat sleeve. "Come on, Chad. Let's go."

  He shook free and his eyes moved from Edge to Shelby and back again. Comprehension seemed to be a long time coming.

  "You don't want trouble son," Heffner said quickly, and swallowed hard. "Your mother wouldn't like that."

  The mention of his mother had a sobering effect on the young man. His eyes were suddenly clear and he shed the years as if somebody had waved a magic wand. He looked like a boy, frustrated and helpless.

  "Go and have fun," Shelby said, trying to inject lightness into his tone. But there was a strong sense of purpose in the way he raked the money to him and began to stack it.

  "I don't like being taken for a sucker, Shelby," Eden snarled, straightening suddenly, so that his chair toppled over backwards. The woman sprang away from him with a small cry, as if she had been hurt. Shelby had the fast reactions of a man who lived by his wits. The gun he jerked from a shoulder holster under his jacket was a Continental Arms .22 pepperbox with an ornate grip.

  "He ain't heeled!" Heffner yelled, his voice pitched high from fear.

  Eden's suddenly pale face was tacit confirmation of the fact and he started to raise his empty hands in a gesture of pathetic surrender. But Shelby's knuckle was already whitening around the trigger and the killer instinct was hot behind his eyes.

  "He is!" he snarled and turned the six-hole barrel of the tiny gun towards Edge.

  Edge snapped the Colt from his tied-down holster and fired across the table. The bullet ploughed a furrow along the baize and kicked up shredded paper as it penetrated Shelby's winnings. Then it drilled a neat hole high in the man's stomach and blood sprayed the table, garishly red in the soft yellow light. Emmeline screamed as Shelby's eyes closed. But the cry was silenced by the explosion of the pepperbox. Shelby began to fall backwards, his gun hand rising as his arm stayed iron stiff. The bullet went high and rang against the burnished metal of the lamp, ricocheting into a spinning trajectory at an acute angle. As Shelby hit the back of his chair and then toppled sideways, Eden screamed and began to crumple. He hit the floor, the scream becoming a whimper, then nothing. Blood was a liquid curtain across one cheek, spreading from the scarlet slash of his eye socket.

  Death clamped a tight grip of stillness over the room for long seconds as the gunsmoke retreated into the darkness above the lamp. Then Heffner cursed and leaned sideways to look at his partner.

  "You killed Drew!" he said hoarsely, as if he couldn't believe the truth of his own words.

  Edge rested the barrel of the Colt on the table, altering the aim slightly so that it was pointed at Heffner. "Him or me?" he posed.

  Heffner looked up, saw the gun and nodded vigorously. "Sure, mister. It was self-defense. I saw that."

  "Chad's alive!" the woman exclaimed, crouching down beside the young man. "We’ve got to get a doctor for him."

  She straightened up and started to turn towards the door. Without allowing his attention to wander for an instant, Edge slid off his chair and sidestepped around the table to where Eden was curled up, silent and still bleeding badly from the eye. Heffner watched him nervously, starkly aware of the narrowed eyes and aimed revolver. Edge reached for the injured man's hand, fingers searching out a pulse. He found it, weak and slow. But in the next instant he had released the limp wrist and begun to turn, aware that something about the room had altered. Eden's shot glass still stood on the tabletop. There was merely a wet ring to mark the spot where the empty bottle had been.

  Emmeline Greer put every ounce of her considerable strength into the downward blow and made the connection just as Edge saw her. The bottle hit him precisely in the center of his head, shattering and scattering tiny shards of glass among his hair. He saw the sadistic satisfaction in her eyes, then felt the burning heat of pain as the darkness descended, turning as red as the blood on Eden's face. He toppled forward as his muscleless legs folded. His fingers loosened their grip on the Colt and the gun skittered across the bare boards of the floor. The death rattle was a dry trickling sound deep within Eden's throat.

  "Christ, lady!" Heffner yelled as he leapt to his feet. "Will he hate you?"

  ''It comes higher than loving me," Emmeline muttered as she tossed aside the broken neck of the bottle and stooped to tug the bankroll from Edge's hip pocket.

  Heffner took a moment to realize what was happening, then gathered the money from the tabletop, his greedy fingers staying clear of those bills stained by Shelby's blood. The woman was not so squeamish and raked up what was left, pushing all the bills down into her ample cleavage. Voices sounded from above and bootless feet slapped the floor.

  "They woke up," Heffner stammered.

  "Two here won't," Emmeline snapped in reply as she headed for the rear door, her long dress swishing.

  "What about Marshal Railston?" Heffner called querulously.

  "You want him, you get him," she retorted and flounced out of the room, leaving the door open to admit fresh air, tangy with the smell of the ocean.

  Heffner took too long in deciding to follow her and was not halfway to the door when the entrance from the saloon was suddenly wide and the fat, night-shirted owner stood there, pointing a double-barrel shotgun. He took in the scene at a glance.

  "Hold it," he commanded, and Heffner froze.

  The salty air began to revive Edge and the barked command cut through the final veils of unconsciousness. He groaned, rolled over on to his back and started to sit up. It felt as if his skull was vibrating.

  "I said hold it!" the saloon-owner yelled, swinging the shotgun to draw a bead on Edge. "What happened here?"

  Edge shook his head to try to clear it. Splinters of glass showered from his hair. Heffner gained confidence now that the shotgun was not pointed towards him.

  "Murder!" he exclaimed and waved a shaking hand towards Edge. "He was dealing crooked and Drew Shelby spotted it. He blasted Shelby, then the Eden kid."

  Edge spat on the floor and was about to argue. But then he saw the s
aloon owner's flabby face begin to shake and his small eyes widen in a mixture of apprehension and shock.

  "Chadwick Eden was playing poker in my place?" His voice was rasping.

  "We didn't know who he was till the final deal," Heffner defended.

  Edge struggled to regain full command of his thought processes and to make sense of the fear generated by Eden's presence in the Royal Flush. It was as if the boy's death were of secondary importance to the place in which he had died.

  "What was the shooting?" The speaker was a woman. She was behind the bulky figure of the saloon owner, shielded by him.

  "Go and get Red Railston," the fat man ordered.

  "At this time of night?" The woman sounded incredulous.

  "So he won't like it," the fat man said impatiently. "He'll like it even less when you tell him Chadwick Eden's just been shot. Do like I say, Sarah."

  Edge spat again and got to his feet, moving slowly to avoid panicking the fat man into any dangerous action. "Was Eden some kind of tin god in these parts?" he asked.

  "Gold," the saloon owner answered. "Twenty-two carat solid."

  "He bleeds like a mortal man," Edge pointed out sourly exploring his head for signs of cuts. There were none.

  "Just like your neck'll snap at the end of a rope."

  Edge pursed his narrow lips. ''You hold the trial while I was sleeping?"

  The fat man drew in his breath and shook his head slowly. His expression seemed to hold sympathy for Edge.

  "Mister, you killed Lydia Eden's son. If they had every man in the state of California on a jury, she could afford to buy them all."

  "What if I could prove Shelby shot him?"

  The flabby cheeks rippled in another negative gesture. "No good. Shelby looks dead to me."

  "He is."

  "Can't hang a dead man, feller. And there ain't nothing going to satisfy Lydia Eden except the sight of a man swinging at the end of a rope."