Vengeance Is Black

  Table of Contents

  Title/Copyright

  Author's Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For D.H. a newcomer to the Edge team — welcome!

  AUTHORS NOTE

  New readers of the Edge series may like to know that this book, although it tells a complete story, is the latest in a sequence set during the Civil War. Forerunners, in chronological order, are: Killer’s Breed; The Blue, The Gray And The Red; and Seven Out Of Hell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE were eight passengers inside the rattling stage, which was two too many for comfort. They sat, four on each side of the centre aisle, squashed shoulder to shoulder: six of them expressing tacit displeasure towards the man and the girl who had boarded at the Summer depot.

  The girl, a pretty redhead in her early twenties, was disconcertingly aware that she was regarded as an unwelcome intruder and tried to conceal her embarrassment by feigning sleep, keeping her head bowed and allowing it to sway with the motion of the stage.

  The man, tall, lean and with the look of a predatory animal about his dark-skinned features, was not inclined to pretend anything. He had boarded the stage at the dawn of a new day following a night when there had been no time for rest. So, after a peremptory, cold-eyed glance over the disapproving faces of his fellow-passengers, he had simply relaxed against the seat padding and surrendered to the fatigue attacking his mind and body.

  It was, perhaps, that momentary brushing of ice-blue eyes across each face that confined the reaction of the passengers to silent chagrin. This, and the uneasy suspicion that although the man was asleep there was about him a latent threat: a quality of menace to suggest he was still on guard against offence even though sleeping.

  This was not true, of course. For in spite of what this man had become, he was still a mortal human being, as vulnerable when sleeping as any other of his species. But it was true that the circumstances which had wrought the aura of evil about the man had also honed the subconscious deep within the hard exterior to a sharpness that admitted sleep so far and no farther. Thus, the disgruntled stage passengers were wise to leave their resentment unspoken. For this man was the one known as Edge, who could awake in a split-second and explode blood-soaked violence in the following instant if the cause were strong enough. And Edge needed little enough cause. A wrong word directed against Elizabeth Day might well have been sufficient.

  “This last leg from Summer up to Deadwood always seems the worst part of the trip somehow,” a hawk-faced mine owner in a fancy vest and immaculately creased eastern business suit said with a sigh.

  He shot a nervous glance towards Edge, suddenly aware that his remark could be misinterpreted. But the denim-clothed knees continued to be clamped against the Winchester held between them and the long-fingered, weathered hands maintained their loose, interlocked attitude across the flat stomach.

  A poorly dressed but starchly clean woman of middle years sitting opposite the miner nodded in agreement and stared forlornly out of the window at the passing landscape. It was not a vista designed to improve the mood, of anybody surveying it. For the stage trail cut an arrow-straight course across mile after barren mile of the wild, untamed countryside of the Badlands. It was the ultimate of bleakness: a vast area for as far as the eye could see upon which nothing moved except the stage and the lifeless dust churned up by the spinning wheels and the galloping hooves of the team. For the sun was at the noon height of its intensity and the evolution-toughened wildlife that did exist out there among the eroded ravines and rises did not stir at such an hour. Even the tenacious brush appeared as unmoving and dead as the grotesquely shaped rocks in which it somehow found pockets of life-sustaining soil.

  “It is positively eerie,” the woman commented and gave an involuntary shudder as if to prove her point. “Not like it was part of God’s earth at all.”

  “He sure seems to have given up on it, ma’am,” an overweight liquor salesman put in, wriggling his ample rump to try to regain some of the seat space he had been forced to surrender to Elizabeth Day. “Like he put this country down here meaning to do something with it, but the Devil staked a claim while His back was turned.”

  “God never loses out to the Devil,” an aged evangelical preacher boomed from a corner seat “Except in the struggle for men’s souls — and then it’s the men themselves who choose the side.”

  “Not only men, reverend,” the drummer said good-humouredly, with a knowing wink towards the garishly dressed young woman sitting across the aisle from him.

  He was paying the woman’s fare from Omaha to Deadwood, and receiving interest in kind on the non-returnable loan. The woman lowered her false eyelashes in a mockery of coyness. She had sold her soul to the Devil long before the salesman put up his proposition: but had learned that a pretence at innocence placed a higher price tag on her body.

  “It is never too late to seek redemption,” the preacher shot back, and lowered his head over an open prayer book.

  The ten year old son of an army lieutenant travelling alone to join his father, stared pointedly out of the window, instinctively aware that he should try to detach himself from adult conversation of this nature. His view, from the opposite side of the stage to the woman, was almost indistinguishable from the one she saw. The Badlands of the Dakotas were the Badlands, from whichever direction they were surveyed.

  Bleak, monotonous and dangerous.

  Atop the stage, side by side on the box seat, the grizzled driver and fresh-faced young guard were more aware of the dangers than the passengers in their care. Not least of these was the possibility of snapping an axle or smashing a wheel on the uneven trail, for even if nobody was injured in such an accident, the chances of survival on foot were slim.

  So, while urging calculated speed from the four-horse team, the driver kept his aged, experienced eyes glued to the trail for sign of potholes and weather-tossed rocks which could signal disaster.

  The guard allowed his narrow-eyed gaze to wander farther afield, making systematic sweeps in every direction. For he knew that although the terrain gave every impression of being a dead land, the vista was a falsehood. The Southern Dakotas was Sioux territory and it was common knowledge that there had been a number of isolated incidents of late: and when separate bands of Indians started on the warpath it often meant that an uprising was in the wind.

  The driver spotted a new arroyo angling across the trail ahead: a water course cut by the melting snow of winter. The torrent of water had gone its way weeks previously, but the rock-strewn trench it had dug remained as a trap for the unwary. But the driver was alert to such dangers and hauled steadily on the reins as he applied the wheel brakes.

  “Rough going for awhile, folks!” he yelled to the passengers as the team started down into the arroyo at a walk and the stage tilted behind the horses, the wheels locked into a slide by the brakes.

  They crossed the cracked, arid bed, the stage swaying and creaking on its well-greased springs, then started up the other side. There the team was urged into a trot, through a canter and achieved a gallop along a stretch of trail as smooth as a Badlands trail could ever be. It curled over a rise and then angled between a pair of rearing buttes.

  The guard became suddenly more alert, his grip tightening on the Winchester and lifting the rifle a few inches above its resting place on his knees. His clear brown eyes swung to left and right, examining every niche and cleft in the irregular convolutions of the sandstone cliffs. Then the stage ran clear of the sparse shade of the buttes and into open country again. There had been no Sioux ambush and
the guard eased back into an attitude of alert relaxation.

  “Reckon we’ll make the hills, Abner,” the driver yelled above the clatter of the rolling stage. He spat out a globule of dust-flecked phlegm that was caught by the slipstream and hurled on to a rock. The moisture hissed and vaporized.

  Abner stared ahead through the shimmering heat haze to where the Black Hills showed as a shadowed line across the northern horizon. He nodded without enthusiasm. “You hear anything about the Clay gang getting what’s coming to them, Fred?” he rasped.

  The driver shook his gray-haired head. “Last I heard they took a Wells Fargo coach for ten thousand in silver. Gunned down the driver and four shotguns.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Month, about.”

  Abner grimaced. “Time for another hit,” he said grimly.

  “Yeah,” Fred agreed wryly. “That Clay and his boys figure to live high off the hog.”

  As was his custom, Fred hauled on the reins to bring down the speed of the stage, encouraging the team to maintain an easy canter, conserving their strength for the long haul up the pine-covered slopes of the Black Hills which lay ahead.

  Inside the stage, most of the passengers had followed the example of Edge and were sleeping: whether because they needed rest or because the monotony of the trip forced it upon them. The exceptions were the small boy, the liquor salesman and the dancehall girl he was taking to Deadwood. The boy’s open stare swung between the couple, drawing responses of a strained smile from the woman and frank dislike from the man.

  “Ain’t you tired, kid?” the drummer asked at length, jerking back his hand as the boy’s gaze dropped to interrupt a lustful grope towards the woman’s satin-covered knee.

  “I was asleep all last night,” the youngster replied.

  The innocently implied criticism of the couple’s morals caused the woman to explode into a fit of giggling. Her sharp elbow jabbed into the ribs of Edge, snapping him out of sleep. For the split-second it took him to assimilate his surroundings, his hands were galvanized into claws and moved the minutest fraction of an inch towards the Winchester. But then the tension drained out of him and his movements were casual as he reached up and tilted the low-crowned hat away from his forehead and eyes.

  His gaze swung over the forms of his fellow passengers and settled on the nervous greenness in the eyes of the woman who had roused him. Her mouth was still open, showing tobacco-stained teeth in the hangover of her laughter. “Yes, ma’am?” he asked easily, allowing his blank stare to descend from her breasts exposed by the scooped neckline of her garish dress.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, trying to draw away from him, crowding the middle-aged woman further into her corner. “It was an accident, mister.”

  Edge nodded. “They happen,” he allowed. He treated the drummer to a cold grin. “But I guess someone in your line of work learns to take precautions against the worst kind.”

  The fat salesman seemed on the point of challenging Edge’s insult, but did a fast double-take and confined his reaction to an innocuous grunt

  Edge let it pass and felt his attention drawn elsewhere in the coach, his eyes meeting the frank stare of the boy. “You want something, kid?” he asked.

  The boy shook his head. “Nothing, mister.”

  He continued to examine Edge, seeing a tall man of more than six feet, with two hundred pounds of body weight evenly distributed so that his frame suggested hard leanness. He saw a long, high cheekboned face with the flared nostrils and burnished skin coloration passed on by a Mexican father. The hair — thick and black and falling to the broad shoulders — was also from his father. But the eyes, crystally clear blue, and the thin line of the mouth above a firm jaw line were the gifts of a Swedish mother. To these basic features the turbulent passage of violent time had added a veneer of hardness that was evident even when the man behind the face was at his ease.

  Now, after many hours had passed since he had last shaved or even splashed water on his face, Edge appeared at his harshest: driving the salesman far back from the offensive, stirring nervous excitement within the woman and fascinating the boy. He was aware of these varying effects he was arousing among his fellow passengers but was neither proud nor rueful. He was what he had become, and what he had become was what others had forced upon him. So others had to either accept him or pay the price of questioning what he was.

  There were few exceptions to this self-made rule and one of these sat opposite him now: Elizabeth Day, having slipped from feigned into real sleep, bowed head rocking gently from side to side as her slender body was held upright between the salesman and the boy. Elizabeth Day, who had ridden into a town with Edge and was now with him again, hoping perhaps to forget the tragedy that had struck so viciously at her.* (*See – Edge: Bloody Summer) Whether Edge was prepared to help her forget — or whether she would allow him to share her burden — was something the hard-eyed half-breed was unable to decide upon. And that bothered him for he was a man who had survived by his ability to make quick decisions and to judge in an instant the reactions of other people.

  “Children should be seen and not heard,” the dancehall girl said suddenly.

  “I know that, ma’am,” the boy replied seriously. “My dad told me that. But I haven’t said anything unless you asked a question.”

  “Smart aleck kid!” the drummer mumbled.

  The driver snapped the reins over the straining backs of the team to set the horses into another stint of galloping and then slowed them as the stage adopted an upwards cant over the rising ground of the foothill country.

  The abrupt change of pace roused the elderly woman in the window seat and her cry of alarm jerked the miner and preacher out of their sleep.

  “Black Hills,” the miner said with the authority of one who had travelled the stage route on many occasions. He checked the time on a gold watch strung on a chain across his vest. “Ahead of schedule.”

  Edge glanced out of the window, looking across the preacher who had his eyes closed, lips moving to form the words of a silent prayer. There were groves of cottonwood featuring the terrain now and the country had taken on a softer appearance, the rocks less rugged, the vegetation turning from brown to pale green. The time of day helped with the effect for the sun was well advanced on its downward course, its glare not so intense so that the shadows it cast were of a lighter shade.

  The stage halted at an unmanned way station dose to the mouth of a ravine from which a narrow, fast flowing stream gushed. There was a pot-bellied stove in which the driver started a fire: and some coffee, jerked beef and cans of beans. The mine owner and the elderly woman knew the eating arrangements from previous trips and had come prepared with picnic hampers. The rest of the passengers ate the stage line supplies, the liquor salesman washing down his meal with swigs from a bottle out of his sample trunk.

  The driver replenished the station supplies with a case unloaded from the stage and an hour after the halt was called they were on their way again, the foothills behind them as the trail wound up towards a pass flanked by twin peaks starkly outlined against the darkening sky of falling dusk.

  Edge was preoccupied, his mind striving to understand the unfamiliar, involuntary attraction he felt towards Elizabeth Day. And he quickly resolved this by admitting that it was not totally unfamiliar: for he could well recall another time and another girl — Jeannie Fisher — who had produced precisely the same reaction within him.* (*See – Edge: Killer’s Breed) But on that occasion he had been little more than a boy and Jeannie had provided the initial impetus that had cut across the bloody horrors of war to spiral them into a private turmoil of all-consuming passion. In this instance, Elizabeth offered no encouragement, having maintained a stony silence ever since they had boarded the stage back in Summer. So Edge continued to wrestle with the dilemma in his mind — whether to take what he wanted, which was his natural way, or to curb his impatience in the hope that the girl would give him a sign.

  The s
hot was like the roar of a cannon in the quiet mountains. Up on the box seat, Abner’s dead hands released his rifle and he was flipped backwards and then sideways, his feet hooking over a handrail. He swung, upside-down, along the side of the stage, his vacant eyes staring at the passengers.

  Blood rushed from the severed artery in his throat and sprayed into the terrified face of the elderly lady. She screamed and her eyes rolled to signal a faint.

  “Christ, a hold up!” the miner yelled, clawing a Whitney from a fancy hip holster and swinging his head to peer through the window.

  The driver yelled and cracked a bull-whip along the backs of the horses, spurring the team into a full gallop. Two more rifle shots punctured the evening and the side of the miner’s head exploded into fragments of bloodied flesh and gleaming bone splinters. His dead body was flung against the petrified salesman and the Whitney roared at the touch of a jumping nerve. The bullet drilled into the heart of the unconscious woman, a scarlet blossom expanding across the stiffened bodice of her dress.

  Edge, the instinct for survival transcending every other consideration save one, jerked the Colt from his holster and began to fire for effect out of the window as his other hand bunched on the front of Elizabeth’s dress and he swung her out of the seat and down on to the floor.

  “Oh, my!” the girl exclaimed, reaching up and pulling the boy down beside her.

  “Lord save us!” the preacher screamed as more rifle fire sent lead smacking into the wood of the stage.

  “He helps them who help themselves, feller,” Edge rasped, thrusting the Colt into the preacher’s trembling hands.

  He swung out of his own seat into that vacated by the boy, bringing the Winchester up to his shoulder and narrowing his left eye behind the back sight. But there was nothing to see except a yawning chasm with a sheer drop less than a foot away from the spinning wheels of the stage. This section of the trail had been hewn out of the side of a mountain, a sharply rising gradient with a deep gully on one side and the rugged bulk of pine-covered high ground on the other.