EDGE: Town On Trial Read online

  Table of Contents

  SHARP EDGE

  Credits

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Also by George G. Gilman

  SHARP EDGE

  When Edge rides in, Irving seems like just another sleepy cowtown. But by nightfall, that all changed. A man’s been gunned down in the bar, and Edge has formed a strange friendship with a hard-nose barmaid who’s been looking for him for years. Not to mention that by morning Edge has become sole owner and operator of The Lucky Break Saloon, and the center of a town battle.

  Joe Love and his vicious band of ranchers have a score to settle with the peace-loving citizens of Irving, and it looks like Edge showed up just in time for a showdown…

  For

  M.P. a straight shooter from Brooklyn.

  Chapter One

  A WARM north-east wind had been blowing across this piece of west Texas throughout the afternoon. Now, as the sun sank and the crimson light of its setting faded before the encroaching darkness of night, the rapidly cooling semi-desert air was still. But everything, whether living or inanimate, that had been exposed to the wind was cloaked with the grey dust that the northeaster had raised, carried and allowed to fall.

  Thus, the lone rider and his horse and the trail and the town marker were of a uniform coloration in the brief twilight.

  The man riding the horse slowly along the arrow-straight trail had known for more than an hour that there was a town up ahead of him: had first seen it as a cluster of dark shapes which took the substantial form of buildings as the evening air cooled and the shimmering heat-haze disappeared. Then, as he rode closer, splashes of yellow lamplight began to show among the buildings - kept them from merging into the gathering darkness.

  Night was fully born when the man reached the marker some two hundred yards short of the western fringe of the town: and was unrelieved by moon - or star-light, for in the wake of the setting sun, dark and menacing clouds had spread across the sky. So when the man had angled his horse to the side of the trail and reined the animal to a halt, he had to strike a match and lean down from the saddle to pick out some of the letters painted on the marker: and could not read all of them until he had used his free hand to brush dust off the sign: ‘WELCOME TO IRVING TEXAS.’

  ‘Obliged,’ the man drawled softly as he straightened in the saddle, raised the flaming match and lit the half-smoked cigarette that jutted from a corner of his mouth. ‘I’m called Edge.’

  The face fleetingly illuminated by the flare of the match was that of a man approaching forty years of age. Perhaps ugly or maybe handsome, depending upon the personal preferences of whoever viewed it. A long, lean face comprised of features drawn from the loins of a Mexican father and nurtured in the womb of a Scandinavian mother. The complexion was dark from a combination of his Latin heritage and exposure to the elements, the skin stretched taut between high check-bones and firm jawline: and etched with furrows that were inscribed by the passing years but deepened by the harsh experiences of so many of those years.

  The eyes were a light and piercing blue, and glittered icily between permanently narrowed lids. The nose was aquiline. And there was something cruel in the thin-lipped mouthline of the man. There was a day-long growth of bristles on the lower face: thicker above the lips and to either side of the mouth to indicate a Mexican-style moustache. Here and there among the stubble were areas of grey, but for the most part it was as jet-black as the hair on his head, which he wore long enough to reach just below the level of his broad shoulders.

  There was no one close enough to take note of the face in the light of the match, but after the man called Edge had heeled his gelding forward and ridden in off the open trail, a few citizens of Irving did glance at him and his mount. And received a first impression of a tall, lean but powerful-looking stranger. Six feet three inches tall and weighing in the region of two hundred pounds. Dressed in a low-crowned and wide-brimmed Stetson, a shirt, kerchief, pants and spurless riding boots. All looking as grey as the gelding because of the dust. There was a gunbelt around his waist, with a Frontier Colt jutting from the holster tied down to the right thigh. The saddle he sat was of Western style, hung with all the accoutrements that a cowpuncher would need to engage in his trade. Including a Winchester rifle in a forward-placed boot. And lashed on in back of the saddle was a bedroll and topcoat.

  Nobody who saw the man ride into town bothered to give him a second glance for he looked much like countless other strangers who drifted in and out of Irving. Either a saddlebum or a hard-working cowhand between jobs. Grateful to get to Irving before the cold of night really began to be felt and the sky started to shed the threatened rain.

  For his part, Edge appeared to give the town only a cursory survey as he rode along the centre of its deserted main street. While in truth his mind took careful note of everything upon which his slitted eyes momentarily settled. It was a no-frills cowtown which had sprawled out around an old Spanish mission. The adobe-built church was still there, fire-scorched and stained by time and neglect, situated midway along the north side of the street. And to either side of the mission and across the street from it were other adobe buildings which had probably once all been enclosed by a wall. But now they were merely houses and business premises of a different architectural design to the frame buildings which stretched out to either side of them.

  Edge rode between private houses, some with front gardens and some not, stores stocking the essentials and the luxuries of daily living, a number of offices where specialist services were provided and then reached the bank of a broad, shallow stream. Where the street made a right-angle turn to the south, with buildings on just one side, facing out across street and stream to the undulating terrain that was spread to the east of town.

  On the corner was a saloon called the Red Dog, a hotel named the Irving House, a building with a sign that proclaimed it was the headquarters of the Irving Cattlemen’s Association, a small chapel and a courthouse. With the exception of the saloon, the buildings on this one-sided street looked recently built. All save the chapel had raised stoops out front and were two floors high. Immediately across from the courthouse a railed plank-bridge spanned the thirty-feet-wide stream and beyond this the open trail began.

  There were a lot of shade trees in the town, all of them leaning to the south-west to indicate the direction of the prevailing wind in this part of the country. The stream made pleasant sounds running over the rocky bed and the water showed white in some places through the timber that flourished along the bank. The faltering music of a pump organ and women singing hymns came from the chapel. One of the four horses already at the rail out front of the Red Dog vented an ill-tempered whinny when Edge dismounted and hitched the gelding there. A middle-aged man with a bald head and a paunchy belly who was taking the evening air from the threshold of the hotel greeted:

  ‘Evenin’, stranger. Gonna have some rain, looks like.’ The half-breed took off his hat, knocked it twice against his palm and blew through the disturbed dust as he put the Stetson back on his head.

  ‘It’s my whistle needs wetting right now, feller.’ The man, who was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt with a bootlace necktie, licked his fat lips and nodded as he folded his arms. ‘You’re goin’ to the right place, stranger. Rusty Donnelly keeps his beer cool and he don’t water the whiskey. Passin’
through or stoppin’ over?’

  Edge stepped up on to the stoop and paused to ask: ‘You run your business as well as Donnelly runs his?’

  ‘Clean bed in a clean room plus three square meals a day, stranger. A buck and a half. Bath ten cents extra. A man wants anythin’ else extra he brings it into town from outside and he takes a room at the Red Dog. I don’t rent double rooms to single men. No offence.’

  ‘You got a livery, feller?’

  ‘No, sir. But there’s a stable on Lone Star Street. Jake Huberll charge you fifty cents a night for a good service. I’ll have my boy take your horse over to Jake’s if you like.’

  ‘Obliged.’

  ‘Soon as choir practice is through. My boy plays the organ.’

  With one hand hooked over the top of a batwing door, Edge cocked his head to the side and listened to the discordant organ music and off-key singing for a moment or so. Then grinned with his mouth as he dropped the dead cigarette stub on the stoop and said: ‘Long as they ain’t aiming to reach perfection tonight.’

  The hotelman sighed. ‘Joel is young. Willin’ to learn but with more appreciation of one of the choir members than for music, I’m afraid.’

  He grimaced as three discords in a row caused the women to halt the singing again.

  ‘Maybe he’ll strike the right note with the girl, feller,’ Edge offered.

  The man in the hotel doorway grinned as a beat was counted and the hymn singing began again. ‘One good thing to be said for that, stranger. Joel wouldn’t be able to play that danged instrument at his own weddin’.’

  Edge pushed through the batwings and came to a halt, the doors banging closed against his back: as a man snarled:

  ‘I told you already, Warford! Leave the lady be!’

  Which was countered with a softly rasped: ‘Mind your own damn business, Rusty!’

  The saloon was longer than it was broad, maybe thirty feet by fifty. With the bar counter stretching three-quarters of the way down the wall to the left of where Edge stood. There were a dozen chair-ringed tables in the L-shaped area on the customers’ side of the bar and a bare entertainments platform at the far end. The floor, ceiling and walls were untreated timber. Six kerosene lamps hung from the ceiling but only two were lit: these at the front of the saloon so that much of the rear area was in semi-darkness.

  It was down there that the woman was seated at a table close to the bar, with a coffee pot and a cup in front of her. A slim, youngish, good-looking blonde, Edge thought after glimpsing her before she was obscured by the man going toward her. A man who had risen from a table directly beneath one of the lighted lamps. A table where he and three others had been playing cards and drinking whiskey. Donnelly was midway along his bar, behind it: closer to the woman than the advancing man.

  ‘Play cards, Dean.’

  ‘She give you the brush, kid.’

  ‘Shit, I knew they’d be trouble.’

  The trio of men at the table were all in the thirty-to-forty age group, which made them from five to fifteen years older than Warford. Rough-hewn men with sun-burnished faces and work-toughened hands. Dressed in check shirts and denim pants, scuffed boots and sweat-stained hats. Carrying Colts in hip holsters.

  Tired-looking men whose weariness was suddenly jolted out of them by fear.

  Rusty Donnelly also appeared tired as he became rigid behind his bar, hands splayed on the counter top. But he had that kind of long, thin, sunken-eyed face which would appear haggard no matter what the situation or his feelings about it.

  ‘There’s not gonna be any trouble in my place!’ Donnelly insisted, bringing his anger under tight control. ‘Go back to your friends, Warford.’

  ‘I told you! I told you not to have her in here, boy! But you wouldn’t listen to your—’

  ‘Quit it, Ma!’ Donnelly snapped, taking his sunken eyes away from Warford for part of a second to snatch a look toward a shadowed doorway from which the woman had berated him.

  ‘All right, I’ll go!’ This from the woman at the table as she rose to her feet.

  ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to, miss,’ Donnelly assured as Dean Warford came to a halt and stared fixedly at the slim-bodied blonde who had picked up a carpetbag from the floor and a hat from another chair at her table. ‘It ain’t you that’s makin’ trouble.’

  ‘Just causin’ it!’ Mrs. Donnelly growled from the darkened doorway at the far end of the bar.

  The younger woman ignored the noise as she started away from the table but was able to take only five paces before her path was blocked by the tall and broadly-built Dean Warford. Who placed his splayed hands on his hips and rasped:

  ‘Just who the hell do you think you are? Treatin’ me like 1 was a handful of dirt!’

  ‘If you were merely a handful, sonny,” she answered icily, stressing the implied insult, ‘I’d be able to brush you aside. ‘But it seems you are one big clod and—’

  ‘Why you—’

  ‘Don’t, Rusty!’ Mrs. Donnelly shrieked and lunged out of the doorway.

  ‘Watch out, Dean!’ one of the men at the table yelled at the same time.

  Warford had jerked his right hand away from his hip: up and across the front of his body - obviously intent upon landing a back-handed blow on the woman’s face.

  She stood her ground and simply squeezed her eyes closed and compressed her lips in expectation of the hand cracking into her cheek.

  All this as Rusty Donnelly dropped into a half-crouch behind the bar, hands leaving the counter top. Then straightened, holding a double-barrel shotgun.

  ‘Warford!’ the bartender yelled, and began to thumb back the hammers.

  But the act was never completed. For Dean Warford had seen the start of Donnelly’s move before the bartender’s mother and one of the men at the table shouted. And his right hand dropped to his holster and drew, cocked and leveled the Colt in a blur of speed. Then he triggered a shot from the gun a split second after his left hand sent the blonde staggering out of the line of fire.

  The haggard-faced Donnelly got his nick-name from the rust-colored mop of curly hair. Which in a few moments took on a brighter and deeper hue: as Warford fanned the hammer of his Army Colt to explode all six bullets from the chambers. Only the first three shells dug into Donnelly’s shocked face, to tunnel through flesh and tissue and teeth and eyes and bones. To burst clear at the back of his head amid sprays of blood. This blood splashed against the wall into which Donnelly was slammed by the impact of the bullets. Then it spattered into the dead man’s hair as the corpse slid down the wall. This as the second three bullets exploded from Warford’s gun were imbedded with the first three in the crimson stained wall, after the eyeless face with the blood-filled mouth had sunk below the level of the counter top.

  Gunsmoke drifted, its acrid taint strong in the air.

  Choir practice came to an abrupt end.

  The blonde made a moist sound in her throat as she continued to lean like a statue against a chairback where the shove in the belly from Warford had sent her.

  The three men who had been playing cards with Warford were also rigid, but silent through the stretched seconds which followed the firing of the final shot. The same as the grossly fat, gray-haired elderly woman who had emerged from the doorway behind the bar when she shouted the last words her son was ever to hear from her.

  And Dean Warford, who seemed to be petrified in the half-turned, slightly crouched, arms-extended atti­tude of fanning his revolver.

  Until the man called Edge stepped away from the batwing doors and said evenly, ‘Let's start the wake. Figure with a name like Donnelly….’

  Warford whirled, leveled his Colt at the half-breed, while the others snapped their heads around to stare at him.

  ‘He had some Irish in him,’ Edge continued, eyeing the dead man's mother as he angled toward the bar counter. ‘Me, I'm a rye feller.’

  Chapter Two

  Warford's good-looking, clean-shaven, green-eyed, weak-jawed face w
as still expressing the remnants of fervent rage. And spittle spilled from the corners of his mouth when he snarled, "Beat it, bummer!"

  The other customers in the Red Dog saloon contin­ued to be in the grip of shock. Which was abruptly deepened and in some cases was vented in choked gasps when the tall, lean, impassive-faced stranger re­sponded to the young killer's command.

  Edge's Colt came clear of the holster with smooth speed. But Warford's was already drawn and leveled. So the younger man had time to fan the hammer of his gun, stare down at it, and then return his abruptly frightened gaze to the half-breed after the pin had fallen ineffectually against expended cartridge cases. And his fear expanded rather than faded when he saw that Edge was using the foresight of the Colt to scratch his bristled jawline. For the slitted blue eyes showed a glinting coldness which in combination with the cruel set of the thin lips seemed to personify a brand of evil that went beyond the bounds of human emotion.

  Everyone in the dimly lit saloon witnessed the ex­pression as Warford croaked, ‘It's empty, Mister.’

  That’s what I thought about a gun that made my kid brother a cripple, feller,’ Edge answered evenly. ‘Reason I object to having guns aimed at me. You do it again, make sure it’s loaded and that you kill me. Or I’ll sure enough kill you. Everyone here heard that, so you won’t get no second chance. Toss it away, feller. High.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Here.’

  Warford threw the Colt with a sideways flick of the wrist. And Edge brought his down from his face. Exploded two shots. Each causing a shudder to wrack the bodies of the customers in the Red Dog and the group of bystanders who had been drawn to the doorway and windows of the saloon by the earlier, more damaging gunfire.

  The first shot struck Warford’s Colt while it was in the air. The second kicked it off the table top where it landed and clattered it to the floor at the base of a wall.

  Eyes followed the jerked progress of the gun. Then returned to Edge and saw that he had tilted his own revolver: watched in tense silence as he ejected the spent cases to the floor and pushed fresh rounds into the smoking chambers before he slid the gun back in the holster.