EDGE: A Ride In The Sun (Edge series Book 34) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Back Page

  Copyright

  Dedications

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  The Drummer

  Chapter Two

  The Battle

  Chapter Three

  The Woman

  Chapter Four

  The Drunk

  Chapter Five

  HOT EDGE

  While playing poker in a border town saloon, Edge is slipped a mysterious message: the Indian who led the violent attack that resulted in the gruesome death of Edge's woman, Beth, has been caught.

  Folding his hand, Edge heads for an abandoned Federale post to meet the hombres who are holding the hated Sioux hostage. Seems as if the captors want more than money in exchange.

  Just when it looks as if the deck is stacked, Edge decides to play another game. The redskin's scalp is at stake—this time Edge holds all the cards.

  A RIDE IN THE SUN

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition DEC 2014

  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 and illustrations by West World Designs © 2014.

  http://westworlddesigns.webs.com

  This is a High Plains Western for Lobo Publications.

  Cover Illustration by Cody Wells.

  Visit the author at: www.gggandpcs.proboards.com

  For N.W.,

  who rides even taller in the saddle as I do

  Author’s Note

  SINCE shortly after the first Edge book was published readers of the series have been writing to me. For the most part, I am happy to say, the mail has been highly complimentary about the books and, not unnaturally, I read such letters with great pleasure.

  Several of them, however, did more than merely give a boost to my ego: the first one sowed the seed of an idea and those which followed caused this seed to ger­minate.

  This process was begun when the Edge series was firmly established and the character of the man himself had made a strong impression on the readers. And not only Edge. The six troopers who rode with him throughout the greater part of the War Between the States seem also to have stayed in the minds of many readers after the books in which they appeared were set aside. In addition, certain other secondary characters in various stories have had a similar appeal.

  What, readers have asked, was Edge like as a young man on the Iowa farm before the start of the Civil War? Why, others enquire, are there not more wartime stories featuring Sergeant Forrest, Bob Rhett, etc.? Edge's reaction to the untimely death of his wife was only touched upon in retrospect—cannot there be a story which covers this period of his life in detail?

  In this book you are about to read, I have attempted to comply with these and other requests. In doing so, I have used almost the same technique I employed when writing the Civil War books—i.e. a running contemporary story broken by flashbacks to incidents in the past of Edge. I have departed from the technique insofar as each flashback takes the form of a complete short story: this has been made necessary because of the time that passes between the various incidents covered by the stories.

  Of course, not every reader of the Edge series has written to me on general or specific points about the books, so I have no way of knowing the extent to which there is a desire to hark back over his past. I can but hope that every one of the many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world who have read the pre­vious books in the series will enjoy this one, and ap­prove the technique I have used in writing it.

  My thanks go to the readers who sowed the seed of the idea behind the book and to those who helped in the process of germination. I trust it will flourish.

  Chapter One

  OUTSIDE the Oro Blanco Cantina the mid-morning New Mexico sun beat down cruelly from a cloudless sky, glaringly bright and intensely hot, upon the cluster of adobe and frame buildings which comprised the inap­propriately named border town of Paraiso.

  Inside the cantina the temperature was maybe even higher. But at least the patron and his four customers did not have to squint against the harsh brightness of the day, unless they happened to glance out of the shaded interior toward the street beyond the single glassless window and the open door. They had no cause to do this, for there was nothing taking place beyond the confines of the cantina walls that was of greater in­terest than the poker game being played within them.

  The game was five-card draw with nothing wild and the players were the quartet of Americans who sat around one of the four tables in the cantina. But the Mexican owner of the place was as eager to see the outcome of the game as the four players. His name was Gomez and he stood at the end of the bar counter closest to the occupied table, in a position to watch the play and pass across uncapped bottles of beer whenever an order was signaled to him. He was a short, fat, almost bald man of about fifty with avari­cious eyes and thick lips which he constantly wetted with the tip of his darting tongue. During the game, which was over two hours old, he was the only man in the cantina to alter the set of his fleshly features, expressing vicarious pleasure, disappointment or resigna­tion at the swinging fortunes of successive hands.

  The four players were a mixture of ages and builds but in general appearance they were representative of almost all the passing-through Americans who came to and quickly went from Paraiso.

  Travis was a broad-shouldered, barrelchested, thick-waisted forty-year-old with a recently healed knife scar on his left cheek and the dead white skin of an ancient bullet wound across his right temple. The short clipped hair on his head was iron gray but his thick and droop­ing moustache was jet black. He spoke with a lazy southern drawl.

  Wogan was a skinny Irish-American in his early thir­ties with a prominent facial bone structure, deep-set green eyes and the kind of animated Adam's apple that no poker player should have.

  The youngest member of the quartet was Blackburn. He was about twenty, less than five and a half feet tall but powerfully built in proportion to his height; a good-looking young man, with soft brown eyes and a mouth that pouted. At the outset of the game he had told un­funny jokes between hands, but stopped when the laughter began to sound strained and the pots got big­ger.

  The fourth player had never laughed or even forced a smile at Blackburn's attempts to be funny. At six feet three inches, he was the tallest of the group at the table. His some two hundred pounds were stacked on lean lines, with not a single ounce of excess flesh to be seen. Although he spoke like a native-born American, and at first impression looked like one, he was able to talk to Gomez in accentless Spanish. A closer study of his face revealed unmistakable signs that there was some Latin blood in his veins.

  It was the face of a man in his late thirties, yet the weathered flesh seemed to have too many lines that were too deep for a man of those years. In the dark coloration of the skin was the first clue to a heritage drawn from a mixed marriage, for it was apparent that the hue had not been entirely as the result of exposure to the sun and the wind. The hair which framed the face was jet black, growi
ng thick and long enough to brush the man's shoulders and conceal the nape of his neck.

  There was also a trace of Mexican in the high cheek­bones and the firm jawline, between which the dark, deeply lined skin was stretched taut. Maybe, also, in the cut of the hawklike nose and the wide, thin-lipped mouth—especially when the lips were curled back to reveal the white and even teeth in an infrequent smile, a smile that never injected a trace of warmth into his eyes: permanently narrowed under hooded lids, light blue and piercingly sage in the way they surveyed the other players, his cards, or perhaps a hungry fly that happened to alight on the table.

  His eyes owed nothing to the part which a Mexican father played in his birth. They were the predominant feature he had inherited from his Scandinavian mother.

  This player was the man who in recent years had been called Edge.

  "Open for a hundred."

  "Stay."

  "Stay."

  "Your big one and another."

  "Fold."

  "Shit, I'm out."

  "Stay."

  "Call."

  Apart from Blackburn's weak attempts at humor be­tween the earlier hands, talk at the table had been con­fined to asking for cards and playing them with, every now and then, the laconic exchange of poker terms in­terrupted by an equally curt request to Gomez for more beer.

  The cantina's patron supplied what was needed and put the payments in a pocket of his leather apron with a smooth and mechanical series of actions, not needing to shift his greedy gaze away from the pile of bills in the pot or the largest heap in front of the player who hap­pened to be winning most at any particular time.

  He hardly ever looked at the players themselves, and this not only because he found money far more interest­ing than men. For what was there to look at? Ten years he had owned and run the Oro Blanco Cantina in this godforsaken town in the south-west corner of New Mexico Territory, just a mile or so north of the border and about the same distance from the territorial line with Arizona. A town which existed for no other reason than as a stopover for men like these. All kinds of men, and yet really only two kinds: those who were running and those who were chasing them. They were outlaws and bounty hunters, coming north or going south, never lawmen. For if the fugitives reached this far north they were beyond the jurisdiction of the Federales and if they rode as far south as Paraiso, the United States peace officers had already given up the pursuit.

  Gomez had seen a thousand or maybe even two thousand men like these four, dressed in dark-hued, hard-wearing pants and shirts with wide-brimmed hats atop their heads, carrying revolvers in tied-down hol­sters hung from well-stocked gunbelts. These were weary and wary-eyed men, with thick stubble on their faces and sweat-stained, dirt-streaked flesh and cloth­ing, riding horses which were as tired and travel-marked as themselves, for it was a long way from any­where to Paraiso.

  One of the taciturn men at the table was different from the others and from the vast majority of cantina customers. The tall, lean man named Edge had come into town from the north two weeks earlier and had chosen to stay in Paraiso, renting one of the Oro Blan­co's back rooms by the day. Sometimes that happened. But mostly Gomez's trade was drawn from men like Travis, Blackburn and Wogan who used the cantina for liquor and maybe food for an hour or so while they rested themselves and their mounts.

  A card game among strangers met up in this way was not unusual. But seldom was there so much money in a game. Gomez, who loved money with only slightly less fervor than life itself, knew that there was precisely $5,072 passing back and forth and moving around the table on this harshly hot morning in his cantina which smelled of stale sweat, old food and spilled liquor.

  The largest share of this had been contributed by Travis, who rode into town early from the south. It was he who suggested a game of two-handed stud after the man called Edge finished eating breakfast. That had been pennyante stuff. The heavy money started to come out when Blackburn joined the game a few minutes after riding in from the north. A half hour later Wogan showed up in Paraiso, coming in off the same trail Blackburn had ridden. Travis invited the newcomer to take a hand and suggested the game be changed from stud to draw. So far he was close to $3,000 down, what he had lost divided about equally between the other three players. But he was as impassive in losing as Edge, Blackburn and Wogan were at winning, until a man rode up to the front of the cantina, dismounted, hitched his horse to the post outside and stepped onto the threshold. He stood there to allow his eyes to adjust to the shade inside the fetid, smoke-layered room.

  "What the frig do you want, punk?" Travis snarled through yellow-stained teeth clenched to the small stub of an evil-smelling cigar. This after he had turned his head a fraction and his tiny eyes to the full extent of their sockets to glance away from the five cards in his hands to look briefly at the newcomer. "Either come in or move your friggin' ass outta here!"

  It was the most he had said at any one time in the whole two hours since the game started. And he had never cursed before.

  "Gee, what'd I do wrong?" the man in the doorway asked anxiously.

  Blackburn and Wogan glanced at the newcomer without speaking and resumed study of their cards. Edge looked at him for a second longer and saw that he was a short, thin, sharp-featured kid of eighteen or nineteen with a face sheened by sweat and clothes lay­ered with trail dust.

  "Mistimed your entrance on a high drama play, looks like," the half-breed answered evenly and returned his attention to the game, lifting two fifty-dollar bills from the pile in front of him and transferring them to the pot of opening bets.

  "How the hell was I supposed to know?" the young­ster growled resentfully as he crossed the threshold and moved to the center of the bar. "Like a beer."

  Gomez scowled his displeasure at having to move away from the card game. Travis seated to Edge's left, Blackburn across from him and Wogan to the half-breed's right all stayed. Travis's temper was back under control. And Wogan's Adam's apple began to bob.

  "Is there a guy named Josiah Hedges in town?" the youngster at the bar asked after the beer had been poured and Gomez extended a palm for payment.

  "I have never heard the name, señor," the fat Mexi­can growled. "Twenty-five cents. Or I take pesos if you have come from Mexico."

  "Who wants to know, kid?" Edge asked, the young­ster's question having frozen him in the act of picking up more bills.

  "Play the game or fold and jaw someplace else, mis­ter," Travis snapped.

  "My name's McCord," the newcomer said after tak­ing a swig at his beer and smacking his lips in apprecia­tion as the dust was washed from his throat. "But that don't matter. If this guy Hedges is around, I was told he'd pay for this beer and a lot more over the top."

  "None of it friggin' matters, punk!" Travis snarled, and spat the stub of his cigar to the floor, where it came to rest among many others. "Because if Hedges is around Paraiso, he ain't in this stinkin' waterin' hole! Now, are you gonna bet or are you gonna yak, Edge?"

  McCord did a double take at the halfbreed, his fore­head creased by a frown. "Edge? Hedges? Maybe I didn't hear the name right."

  Edge, his fan of cards laid face down on the table, added two hundred dollars to the pot and fixed his narrow-eyed gaze on the puzzled face of McCord. "Somebody not saying it right is how it got changed, kid. Why should I buy you a beer and let you keep the change?"

  The youngster smiled. "A lot more than the change, mister. Unless you give the bartender a hundred-dollar bill to break."

  "Twenty-five cents somebody owes me," Gomez muttered and moved along the bar counter to resume his watch over the game.

  "For what?" Edge asked as it was his turn to bet again, and he raised the ante to five hundred.

  Each of the other three players eyed him with anx­ious suspicion after he had so casually added the money to the pot.

  "A couple of guys give me a letter to deliver. Paid me twenty-five bucks for my trouble and reckoned as how you'd be sure to pay me a hundred after you got
the letter."

  Travis matched the half-breed's bet, Blackburn vented a low-voiced curse and folded and Wogan added to the pot after some stretched seconds of hesitation.

  "Six hundred is how much it'll cost you fellers to stay in the game," Edge drawled, looking away from McCord for just long enough to count out the bills and drop them on the heap in the center of the table. "Let me have the letter, kid."

  Now Travis took his time, switching his small-eyed gaze from his fan of cards to that of Edge and back again, as McCord came to the table, half-finished beer in one hand while the other delved in the front of his shirt.

  'Shit, stay," Travis rasped, and used the back of a hand to brush sweat off his bullet-scarred forehead after placing his bet.

  Wogan, his Adam's apple unmoving and a look of ejection on his thin face, merely sighed as he closed up his hand and placed the cards neatly on the deck. McCord drew a small envelope from inside his shirt as he halted at the table between Edge and Travis. The man with the scarred face grunted and ground his teeth together as McCord extended the letter toward the half-breed, but then jerked it back as a brown-skinned hand was raised to take it. "They said you'd give me a hundred bucks for it."

  "After I've read it, kid," Edge answered evenly. But his slitted eyes, like slivers of blue ice between the lids, locked on McCord's eager gaze with a brief intensity that gave the lie to the half-breed's otherwise casual at­titude.

  McCord swallowed hard, then said, "How do I know you'll—?"

  "I always pay what I owe, kid. Figure that in a town like Paraiso, won't cost more than ten dollars to bury you. Makes it the cheapest way to get what's mine."

  McCord's nervousness increased when Gomez said, "I am mortician as well as patron of the cantina, señor. He is not very big, so I will do the job for seven fifty."

  "This is gettin' to be a grave matter," Blackburn growled, then giggled.

  Wogan grinned.

  "I ain't gonna tell you again, Edge!" Travis rasped, and ran a shaking hand along his sweat-tacky brow. "Bet or I'll figure you've folded!"