EDGE: The Day Democracy Died Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  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

  Other Titles in This Series

  THE DAY DEMOCRACY DIED

  By George G. Gilman

  First Published by Kindle 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by George G. Gilman

  First Kindle Edition October 2013

  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 © 2013. 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.G. C.

  The American connection

  Chapter One

  The man cracked his eyes to the narrowest of slits against the driving rain and peered ahead. The black gelding beneath him continued to splash wearily through the hoof-deep mud of the trail. The wind veered away from the west and the rain fell with greater force, totally cutting off rider and mount from their surroundings. But the man was not given to seeing things which did not exist and he was certain he had seen a building crouched at the side of the trail: glimpsed it when, for no more than a second, the rain had slackened. The horse was newly purchased and not yet sufficiently familiar with the moods of his owner to sense the subtle change which had come over the man.

  Horse and rider had covered another hundred and fifty feet of muddy trail when their rain-lashed private world was penetrated. The bullet made a hissing sound through the storm, punctuated by the crack of the rifle which had exploded it towards the man.

  ‘Get outta here, Stanton man!’

  ‘Dan, you don’t know!’

  The order had been snarled by a man. He had been cautioned by a woman, her voice shrill with fear.

  ‘Name’s Edge, feller!’ the rider called - loud to be heard above the rainstorm but evenly pitched. ‘I’m my own man.’

  The gelding was army trained, so the rifle shot had not spooked him. He responded instantly to the tug on the reins, coming to an abrupt halt. Edge was self-taught and had been poised to meet trouble from the moment he had glimpsed the building through the curtain of slanting rain.

  ‘Dan, it’s a public road!’

  There was no overt reason why a lone rider on a muddy Nebraska trail travelling through a cold and rain-soaked afternoon should have regarded the building with suspicion. Unless the rider happened to be the man called Edge, who had learned that survival depended upon expecting the threat of danger to become a reality at any moment from any quarter.

  ‘Damnit, Laura. We ain’t in no position to take chances!’

  Edge had been holding the reins in just one hand since he saw the building. His right had been resting on his thigh, close to where the stock of a Winchester rifle jutted from the boot forward of his knee. The impassive set of his face had not altered and his posture in the saddle continued to be relaxed under the assault of the teeming rain.

  What the horse had failed to sense was that, beneath the nonchalant exterior, the mind and muscles of the man had tensed for action and reaction.

  The narrowing of the eyes gave no clue to this - had anyone been close enough to see. For, during the long ride from Fort Sully in the mid-Dakotas, Edge had been watchful every foot of the way. As he continued to be watchful now, moving only his eyes across his restricted field of vision while he listened to the man and the woman argue about how they should further respond to his unexpected appearance on the trail.

  ‘But he’s probably just an innocent traveler!’ Laura pleaded.

  Their voices remained loud, his still a snarl and the woman’s losing some of its earlier shrillness. Edge’s words were as evenly pitched as before, after he had turned to the side and spat in the same direction as the wind.

  ‘Don’t claim anything for me I’m not, ma’am!’

  He doubted if they could see him. Once, they had. Maybe even more than once. When he had glimpsed the building? Or when another brief veering of the wind had revealed him to them while he had continued to be blinded to everything except the teeming rain. Perhaps in that instant Dan had got off the rifle shot. Edge chose to believe this and, in so doing, had to accept the man had purposely missed, aiming two feet above and to the left of his hat.

  ‘Your name don’t mean nothin’ to us, stranger!’ Dan snarled as Edge heeled the gelding forward again, at the same sluggish pace as before. ‘But you sure look like the type Stanton’s been hirin’!’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Dan,’ Laura challenged, her tone almost a snarl now. ‘You can’t shoot a man because of what he looks like!’

  Edge looked precisely what he was. Six feet three inches tall, he weighed close to two hundred pounds. He carried little excess fat and his flesh was evenly distributed to give him a lean, hard frame. The couple in the building would have received only a fleeting impression of his build, their view impaired by the weather and the knee-length coat which he wore. It was unlikely that they saw any detail of his face in such conditions over such a distance. If they had, perhaps Dan would have aimed the rifle shot to kill. For he was afraid, and the face of the man called Edge would not have served to ease his mind.

  It was a face that drew features from a double heritage, passed on by a Mexican father and a Scandinavian mother. A face as lean as his physical build, with high cheekbones and a firm jaw line. The eyes, which were deep-set under jutting brows, were of the lightest and clearest blue: never wide beneath their hooded lids and never looking warmer than winter ice, even in repose. The nose had a hawkish quality. The mouth was long, the lips narrow - suggesting, to those who cared to take note, the latent cruelty that had been instilled in the half-breed.

  The skin - stretched taut over the bone structure - was dark brown, due in part to the Mexican blood coursing his veins. But a life spent almost entirely in the outdoors, exposed to every extreme of weather, had deepened the coloration even more. The network of lines which cut deep into the skin also had two sources. One was the passage of the more than thirty-five years which stretched out behind him. The second was the harshness of his existence during so many of those years.

  Framing his face as he rode closer to the man with the rifle was the upturned collar of his coat and the pulled down brim of his hat. Inside these was the jet black, shoulder-length hair, coarse-textured and sheened: as much a physical characteristic inherited from his Mexican father as his ice blue eyes had so obviously been drawn from his northern European mother.

  Heritage, the passing years and countless experiences with evil had fashioned the face, the component features contributing to a whole that was sometimes regarded as handsome, sometimes ugly. The impression depended upon the preferences of the man or woman who drew it. In their present mood, Dan and Laura would surely see only the surface menace - heightened by a two-day growth of bristles - and might react instinctively.

  So Edge moved his right hand from his t
high to the frame of the Winchester, not wanting to kill or maim but preparing himself to do so if events proved such an action to be necessary for his survival. And, by the same token, he was just as capable of drawing back from the brink of violence if the actions of others allowed.

  It had been that way since Dan shouted the threat . . . since Edge first saw the building through the rain . . . since even before he had come to be called Edge. For, although behind the viciousness that showed in his face and demeanor there was most definitely a killer, it was one who killed only from necessity, not by instinct.

  ‘He’s comin’ closer, Laura!’ the man in the building yelled, his voice rising to a shriek.

  The wind continued to slant the rain forcefully out of the invisible sky. But the building acted as a weather break and the half-breed could see it now, its outline blurred by the rain which curled around its corners and over its roof. As Dan shouted, Edge reined in the gelding and eased his right boot out of the stirrup. His free hand gripped the saddle horn and released the reins.

  The place was a stage line way station, single storey and L-shaped. Out back of the section facing the trail was a corral, the two sides not built on blocked off by fencing. The fence was broken down in several places. The building was in a bad state of repair.

  Before the rainstorm the decrepit condition of the place would not have been so apparent. But now, many of the garishly printed posters which had been tacked up to cover almost every square inch of wall had been made sodden by water and then torn by the wind. They flapped under new assaults, and sometimes were ripped free and flung down to become pulp in the mud. The timbers that were revealed were cracked, warped and rotted. There was not a pane of glass left in any window. The stoop had long ago collapsed to rubble. Out back, the stable doors facing on to the corral either lay in the mud or swung and creaked on hinges, ready to be wrenched from the frames at any moment.

  Edge saw the figures at a window at one end of the way station and tensed himself to the peak of readiness.

  ‘The warning shot I won’t hold against you, feller!’ he called, concentrating on the window, watching for the slightest movement that might signal the need to make his move. ‘But I figure you’ve got a rifle aimed right at me now.’

  ‘You can bet your damn life on it, stranger!’ Dan roared.

  Edge nodded and his head was all that moved. ‘Best you know the score before you match me.’

  ‘Listen to the man, Dan!’ Laura pleaded urgently.

  Her voice sounded against the metallic scrapings of a repeater rifle being pumped, muted by the hissing rain.

  The half-breed went on as if there had been no interruption. ‘Don’t like having a gun aimed at me, feller. If there’s the time, I always give folks that one warning. Coming in out of the wet now. If you want to point that rifle at me, you’d better want to squeeze the trigger.’

  ‘I can plug him, Laura!’ Dan shouted, supremely confident. ‘I got a clear shot.’

  ‘Please!’ the woman gasped.

  ‘My life against yours,’ Edge said, and touched his heels to the flanks of the gelding.

  The slow plod through the sucking mud began again, but this time the horse was unsettled: perhaps made nervous by the voices calling through the rain, or the fact that his rider was using only one stirrup and not holding the reins.

  ‘You’re not a Stanton man, are you?’ Laura demanded. ‘We don’t want any trouble with somebody who means us no harm!’

  ‘Mean to kill the feller with you, ma’am,’ Edge replied. ‘If he’s still pointing the rifle at me.’

  He had reached the most dangerous point of his approach now. The enveloping curtain of rain was too far behind him. The solid cover of the way station was less than a rifle shot in front of him. He was afraid, but the emotion was controlled: to an extent where he could harness it and use it to power extra speed of reflex action.

  From their voices, it was obvious that the man and woman in the way station were hampered by a different brand of fear. They were as scared of the results of their own actions as of the tall, calm half-breed moving slowly towards them.

  ‘No!’ the woman shrieked.

  There was a flurry of movement at the window and Dan roared an obscenity.

  Edge lunged sideways out of the saddle, pushing with his left foot and left hand and wrenching the Winchester from the boot.

  Dan’s rifle exploded a second shot while the half-breed was in mid-air and pumping the Winchester action. He glimpsed the muzzle flash and knew he would not hear the hiss of the bullet through the rain. For the spurt of flame revealed the gun was angled up towards the drenching sky.

  Dan cursed again and Laura screamed.

  Edge hit the soft ground, the impact sending up a spray of mud in every direction. The gelding was not perturbed by the further discomfort of wetness against his coat.

  ‘It’s all right!’ Laura roared. ‘It’s all right, mister! I’ve got the gun!’

  Edge had rolled, covering himself from hat to boots in clinging mud. He rose to his knees and one hand, holding the rifle high, then unfolded fast to his full height. As the woman ended her panicked assurance, the half-breed exploded a shot. The bullet hit the timber above the window and penetrated its rottenness. Laura screamed as she was showered with sodden splinters.

  Edge, the mud being washed from his face and clothing by the teeming rain, pumped the action of the Winchester and sent a second shot towards the building. This time to the left of the window.

  ‘He’s murderin’ us!’ Dan yelled.

  Edge levered a third shell into the breech and exploded it through the timber to the right of the window.

  ‘I’ve got the gun!’ Laura shrieked again.

  ‘Give it to me!’

  ‘No!’

  The door beside the collapsed stoop was wrenched open and the woman raced out into the rain. The rifle was held high above her head, clasped in two hands.

  ‘Look!’ she yelled.

  ‘Laura, come back! He’ll...’

  Dan had started out of the way station, but advanced only two paces before he pulled up short. The woman was already stock still, ten yards away. He looked from Edge to Laura and back again. Then, showing the depth of his conviction that he expected the half-breed to kill them, his mouth dropped open to gape wide in amazement. For Edge had sidestepped to his horse, leaned across the saddle and booted the Winchester.

  Must this thing I have about guns being aimed at me,’ the half-breed supplied as he picked up the reins and led the gelding forward.

  ‘But you could’ve killed us!’ Dan snarled, stoking a new fury. ‘Blastin’ at us the way you did!’

  ‘Leave it, Dan,’ Laura said wearily, dropping her arms and allowing the rifle to fall into the mud. ‘He didn’t kill us, so leave it.’

  ‘Right, ma’am,’ Edge augmented. ‘All I did was show I don’t just shoot off my mouth.’

  Chapter Two

  For a moment, it seemed that every muscle in the woman’s body had been drained of strength by her relief. But she managed to stay on her feet until the man reached her. Then she leaned gratefully against him. Dan swallowed hard as Edge drew near. He hugged the woman protectively.

  ‘Ain’t much I can say, Mr. Edge.’ He spoke the name tentatively, as if unsure he recalled it correctly. ‘Except that decent folks learn not to trust nobody around Democracy.’

  Edge sighed wearily. ‘When a man’s not got much to say, best he keeps quiet after he’s said it.’

  The man accepted the advice with a shrug of his shoulders. The woman, her shock diminished, became abruptly sullen and looked ready to snarl a retort.

  ‘Let’s get inside out of the rain,’ Dan urged, and turned to shepherd her back towards the doorway of the building.

  ‘Worth saying and doing,’ Edge allowed, but did not follow them. Instead, he led the gelding around the side of the way station, through a break in the corral fence and across to the stable block.

  It was ju
st a shell, malodorous with the stinks of decay. All the one-time fittings had been taken away, and rain poured in through several holes in the roof. But the walls kept out the full force of the wind and he was able to tether the horse in a corner that was relatively dry. He didn’t unsaddle the animal and carried just a wax paper-wrapped package of food and his Winchester across the corral.

  Up close to the way station and no longer suspicious of what it contained, he glanced disinterestedly at those posters which were still readable. The name DEMOCRACY was prominent on each of them and all were designed to attract votes for various candidates in a forthcoming election, SNYDER for Mayor, BAILEY, MEEK, GRANT, MCQUIGG and SWAN for town councilors. All the men were claiming to seek office on the liberal ticket. No opposition parties were represented on any of the posters.

  Edge entered the way station through the rear door.

  ‘If you won’t listen to an explanation, at least accept an apology from my husband, Mr. Edge,’ the woman snapped at him. ‘And share a meal with us?’

  They were sitting on piles of dislodged timber in front of a pot-bellied stove. The woman was fumbling through the contents of a carpetbag while her husband attempted to light a fire in the stove. Away from the driving rain, there was still enough light left in the late afternoon for Edge to see clearly the couple and his surroundings. The daylight came in through the window on the leeward side of the building. All the other windows were boarded up.

  ‘Our name’s Warren, Edge,’ the man mumbled, glancing up only briefly from his chore. ‘Laura and Dan. Sorry I acted so nervous awhile back.’

  ‘If it was an act, it was a fine performance, feller,’ the half-breed answered wryly. ‘But I don’t want any other part of your play.’

  Warren snapped up his head to glare at Edge now. ‘We ain’t about to ask any favors, mister! If you want...’

  His wife put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Leave it, Dan. You’ve apologized and I’ve offered to make amends the best we can. Enough has been said.’

  The man was about forty. Once well built he was now running to fat. He had short-cropped blond hair above a fleshy face that was very pale. His wife was at least five years his junior. She was a fine looking redhead with a slender but generously curved body. They matched heights at around five feet six inches. And there were other similarities they shared: a recent veneer of hardness overlaying a long experience of easy living, expensively tailored clothes well past the time when they should have been replaced, a clumsiness in the way they went about their menial chores - all of it adding up to a general impression of a once rich couple reduced to hard times.