EDGE: The Day Democracy Died Page 2

  Edge found a piece of unrotted timber and placed it on the damp dirt floor in a corner, twenty feet from the stove. He sat down on the plank, leaned his rifle against the wall and unwrapped the package on his lap. There was just jerked beef and sourdough bread, but plenty of it. He ate sparingly though - as he always did when he could not be sure where the next meal was coming from.

  Like the stables, the way station was little more than a shell. But enough of the debris of decay remained to show how the place had once been. The rear had been given over to living quarters for the man who ran the place. The front section had been a combination office and waiting room where passengers could purchase tickets and kill time until stage departure. It had been a long time since a stage called at the station.

  The half-breed’s sodden, mud-stained clothes began to dry on him and the coldness of the Nebraska day became more apparent. Until Dan Warren succeeded in building a fire in the stove and its warmth went a long way to make the weather an unpleasant memory. Then the damp clothing of all three occupants of the derelict way station started to steam.

  The Warrens ate a meal of bacon and beans. And there were just the sounds of the rainstorm until the couple poured themselves seconds of coffee.

  ‘Will you not even accept this?’ the woman asked, getting to her feet and extending her steaming tin mug towards the half-breed. ‘A simple favor between passing strangers? With no need to feel beholden.’

  Edge had finished eating and had re-wrapped what was left of his food before the Warrens began their meal. Then he had rested the back of his head against the wall and closed his eyes. He had not slept.

  At first, his thoughts had been concerned with the beginnings of his strong feeling about guns being aimed at him. Nobody enjoyed the experience, of course. But few made such an issue of it as the man called Edge.

  It had begun long ago, on an Iowa farmstead when he was very young. His brother Jamie was several years younger. They had been playing with their father’s old Starr rifle and fate had decreed the older brother should be holding the gun when it discharged its single shot.

  Jamie had not died. But he had been severely crippled for the remainder of what fate also decreed should be a tragically short life. His right leg shattered to the extent that he had to swing it forward with both hands in order to walk. From the day of the accident, when the man called Edge was still named Josiah C. Hedges, he had started to learn how to handle guns.

  At first, his father was the teacher. Then, after their parents died, the older brother passed on his knowledge to the younger and continued to learn himself.

  But he was still a simple Iowa farm boy. The war between the states made him into a man. As a cavalry lieutenant and then captain for the Union, the skills he had already mastered were honed and new ones were learned.

  And, at the end of the war, as he rode away from Appomattox Court House he was much like the man now resting in the shelter of the abandoned stage line way station. But the future he envisaged as he rode out of the East and into the mid-West required none of the evil qualities he had developed on so many bloody battlefields. And he was willing - and still capable - to forget the bad lessons he had learned.

  Then he found the tortured and bullet-riddled corpse of his young brother - the flesh of Jamie providing a meal for buzzards beside the burning ruin of the Iowa farmstead.

  In tracking down and taking his revenge against the murderers of Jamie, Josiah C. Hedges used every cruel and evil skill he commanded. In war, his uniform and a cause protected him from the consequences of such actions. In the uneasy peace, the law branded him a wanton killer. And he took the new name of Edge.

  All that was long ago. Easy to recall because the memories of his family were always fresh in his mind. Since then, his life had been featured by one violent episode after another as he moved aimlessly across the always-menacing landscape of half a continent. Sometimes he sought to determine an aim - and set out to achieve it with a resolute single-mindedness that brooked no interference from earthly forces.

  But always he failed: when he attempted to return to what once had been his, when he married, when he tried to put down roots far from the land that was his birthright; and even when it seemed he was on the point of establishing the most tenuous of relationships with a fellow human being.

  For the fate which had caused him to cripple his brother inevitably took another cruel twist. And the man called Edge was forced to accept that he was not only a loner, but also a loser.

  Each explosion of violence deepened the lines inscribed on his lean face and hardened his attitude towards his fellow man. Each improved his skills and the reflexes which set them in motion - the skills of a killer who unleashed his latent cruelty for the sole purpose of survival. Like a wild animal in an alien terrain.

  For, when a man is destined to be denied the rights of a human being, he is faced with only two alternatives. To give up and to die or to fight for all that is left to him - life.

  Edge had never once contemplated suicide.

  As he rested in the warmth of the way station, he involuntarily revealed that he was not asleep by occasionally raising a hand to rasp the knuckles along the bristles on his jaw. And, during this period, he had sensed that he was under surreptitious scrutiny by the silent couple seated close to the stove. When he cracked open his eyes, Laura Warren approached him. Her gown under her long coat rustled as she walked. There was a faint, sad smile on her attractive face. Behind her, Dan Warren was grimacing.

  The half-breed set his hat squarely on his head again and touched its brim. ‘Obliged, ma’am,’ he said, and took the mug.

  Her smile expanded to one of mild satisfaction, then she swung around and returned to her seat before the stove.

  ‘Dan and I feel the same way you do about such things, Mr. Edge,’ Laura said pensively. ‘Throughout our lives we have never asked anybody for anything. Thus, we have never felt in debt to others.’

  She pushed her splayed hands out towards the stove and stared in the same direction.

  ‘Ain’t him or us look like it got us any place good!’ her husband growled, peering sullenly at the driving rain through the glassless window.

  ‘We’ll get by,’ Laura Warren said with soft-voiced determination. Then she hardened her tone as she looked at him. ‘Provided we take things as they come and do not lose our heads.’

  Edge sipped the coffee. It warmed his belly and the aroma masked the dankness of his surroundings. It was the first since a dawn breakfast, for he had not made camp at midday, riding on through the storm in search of shelter.

  He had headed into the Dakotas simply because he had seen a picture of Bismarck hanging on the wall of a hotel room in Omaha. Iowa had spread out from the opposite bank of the Missouri and he had thought of Jamie. He had married Beth in the Dakotas and he recalled the bitter memories of the manner of her dying. But he had moved north, aboard a riverboat, simply on the whim of seeing a picture.

  He had not needed work, but fate ordained he should earn a thousand dollars on the trip north. Impassively, he realized that every cent would be earned in a bloodbath of violence. And so it had been. In more ways than one, it had been like re-fighting the war. He never reached Bismarck and at Fort Sully he lost the urge to go there.

  So he invested some of his newly earned money in a horse and supplies and started the ride back south. Drifting and waiting for trouble to strike.

  ‘All right, Laura. All right. Edge ain’t rubbin’ my nose in it. You called it right and nobody got hurt. I don’t need you to keep on...’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ his wife said quickly, and again calmed him by resting a hand on his arm.

  A new silence settled. And only Edge was comfortable with it, impassively drinking the coffee. A loner in a group, content to think his own thoughts.

  ‘You headin’ for Democracy, Edge?’ Warren asked suddenly.

  ‘Figure I hold the same views as Tom Jefferson did that first July fourth,’ the half-bree
d answered wryly.

  Warren was confused and his wife came to the rescue. ‘Mr. Edge is attempting to be humorous, Dan,’ she explained wearily. Then, to the half-breed: ‘He means the town, as you well know.’

  Edge nodded and got smoothly to his feet. He moved to the stove and placed the empty mug on an unopened suitcase where the other dirty utensils had been put down. ‘He mentioned it before, ma’am. And I saw the posters.’

  The woman’s nod was more emphatic. ‘There is going to be trouble in Democracy, Mr. Edge.’ She sighed. ‘But you’re no stranger to that I would guess.’

  Edge retrieved the Winchester and his meager supplies.

  ‘If you go to town, you’ll hear me and Laura started the trouble,’ Warren said quickly, waving a hand at his wife as she was about to stop him. ‘Stanton and his crowd’ll call us every dirty name they can lay tongue to. Want you to know none of it’ll be true.’

  ‘Bear it in mind, feller,’ Edge promised as he started for the rear door.

  ‘Listen to me, damnit!’ Warren snarled, then moderated his tone when his wife shot an anxious look at him. ‘Laura could tell it better. She had a lot of fancy learnin’. Enough so she was smart enough to school-teach Indians one time. She don’t care much what people think, though. Learned all I know from my Pa. And one of the things he taught me was to have respect in other folks’ eyes. I care about things like that.’

  The half-breed had reached the door. Laura seemed to be willing him to hurry and leave. But her husband was desperate to be heard. His anxious eyes raked the room. They hesitated for a moment on the mud-caked Winchester at his side. Then he shook his head and stared at the suitcase.

  ‘Edge, there’s 75,000 dollars in there!’

  He pointed a shaking finger at the case. His wife gasped. Edge halted at the door and glanced back, his eyes just short, glittering threads.

  ‘Please!’ the woman begged him.

  ‘No sweat, ma’am. Found out a long time ago big money only buys trouble. And I get more than my fair share of that for free.’

  ‘It can buy...’

  ‘Dan!’ Laura shrieked, fury shining in her dark eyes.

  ‘All right, all right!’ Dan allowed. ‘But the money belongs to us, Edge. The spread Stanton and his crowd of crooked politicians took from us was worth twice that. In Democracy they’ll tell you we stole the money. But we didn’t take nothin’ that wasn’t ours.’

  Edge and the woman looked at him. Laura was still afraid of the consequences of his revelation. The half-breed remained impassive. Warren appeared to be boiling over with the need to amplify what he had said. But then he shrugged.

  ‘Just wanted you not to get any wrong ideas about Laura and me, that’s all,’ he concluded miserably.

  ‘Leave it be, Dan,’ his wife advised with a sigh. ‘What’s in the past is done. Water down the river. And Mr. Edge—’ The half-breed showed a cold smile. ‘Doesn’t give a damn.’

  He had a hand on the doorknob when the rifle shot cracked. The report seemed to still the sounds of the storm for an instant.

  ‘You in there!’ a man bellowed. ‘Come on out the front with your hands high!’

  The shot had been exploded out back and to the left, in the vicinity of the stable block. The order had been directed from the trail.

  ‘Hogan!’ Laura Warren rasped, gripped by terror.

  ‘Get down!’ her husband snapped.

  Fear held her immobile. Warren spoke an obscenity and lunged forward, knocking her sideways off the pile of timber as he snatched up his Winchester.

  ‘You hear me, you Warrens?’ the same voice bellowed from out front of the way station. ‘Do it, or we come in shootin’.’

  ‘Crooked deputy!’ Dan Warren growled towards Edge.

  ‘It isn’t his fight,’ Laura said, staying down on the dirt floor.

  Edge had swung around to flatten himself against the wall. His hand was still curled around the doorknob.

  ‘Hogan!’ Another man, calling from the rear of the way station.

  ‘Ed Robarts!’ Warren hissed through clenched teeth as he went in a crouched run to the unboarded window.

  ‘Yeah, Ed?’

  ‘They had a horse! They ain’t got it no more!’

  The half-breed’s response to the news was a tightening of his lips and a narrowing of his eyes.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ Laura rasped, and covered her face with her hands.

  ‘Feller named Robarts is about to feel the same way,’ Edge muttered.

  ‘Come when I yell!’ Warren snapped, and dived headfirst through the glassless window.

  ‘Hogan, the side!’ a third man roared. He fired a shot. The bullet cracked through the window, hit the top of the stove and ricocheted up into the ceiling.

  ‘Bastard!’ Robarts snarled.

  Edge turned the doorknob, dropped the package of food and wrenched open the door. He swung on to the threshold, pumping the action of the Winchester.

  A man was halfway across the corral, his running figure blurred by the wind-driven rain. He was angling from the stable doorway towards the corner of the way station.

  A shot cracked out and a man screamed.

  The running man skidded to a halt and started to rake his rifle around to aim at Edge. ‘You’re not Warren?’ he croaked in amazement.

  ‘Hear I ain’t even along for the ride,’ Edge rasped, and squeezed the trigger of the Winchester. He aimed for the man’s right kneecap.

  Another shot exploded an instant before the half-breed absorbed the recoil of his rifle. Ed Robarts was hit twice. The bullet from Edge’s rifle shattered the target it was intended for. The second shell smashed into the side of his head. The impact knocked him hard to the right. He was rigid with agony as the fall started. And limp with death when he thudded into the mud. Blood, fragments of pulpy tissue and splinters of bone gushed out through the massive exit hole in his right temple. The pelting rain quickly diluted the coloring to merge it with the dark mud.

  Warren came racing around the corner of the way station, a final wisp of smoke leaving the muzzle of his Winchester.

  ‘Laura! Laura! Now!’

  He didn’t wait to see if his wife was responding to his call. Nor did he glance towards Edge. He altered the course of his mud-splashing run only slightly, to angle towards a rear corner of the corral where a trio of horses were tethered to a leaning fence post.

  The half-breed powered into a run of his own, away from the threshold of the way station towards the doorway of the stable.

  ‘Hogan!’ a pained voice shrieked from the side of the way station. ‘I’ve been hit!’

  ‘Where’s Robarts?’ Hogan yelled, half angry and half fearful. ‘Robarts, you okay?’

  Edge reached the stable and merely glanced with a brief grimace at the black gelding. The animal lay in an inert and untidy heap, a stain of slick redness beginning narrowly at the right eye and spreading to cover completely one side of the head.

  Then he turned, levering a fresh shell into the breech of the Winchester, and surveyed the corral. The wind was veering and gusting all the time now, as afternoon retreated before the advance of evening. By turns, parts of the corral or the entire area and the rear of the way station were either revealed or hidden by the teeming rain. Sporadically, he saw Dan Warren untie two of the horses from the fence post and lead them hurriedly across the corral. And also caught brief glimpses of Laura. She emerged tentatively from the rear door of the way station. Then broke into an awkward run, her progress impeded by the length of her skirt, the mud and the heavy suitcase she dragged with her.

  ‘Hogan, I think I’m hurt bad!’

  ‘Robarts? Where the hell are you, Robarts? Answer me!’

  The Warrens came together in the centre of the corral. The man wrenched the suitcase from his wife’s grasp, boosted her up on to one of the mounts and then swung into the saddle of the other. He slid the Winchester into the boot, then leaned far down to pick up the case.

  Edge watch
ed stoically. Since the three-man posse had announced its arrival, Warren had handled the emergency with cool skill - totally at odds with his response when Edge had first shown on the trail. But this time his wife had not interfered with his play.

  As he hauled up the suitcase and hooked the handle over his saddle horn, Warren continued to be in control of the situation. Laura glanced anxiously around. Her fear expanded to near terror again when she saw the tall, lean figure in the stable doorway. But then Edge touched the brim of his hat and she recognized him. She looked ready to offer yet another apology, but the wind veered once more and sheets of slanting rain drew a veil across the corral. The sound of the water pocking into the mud covered the beat of hooves. When the wind direction shifted, all that was left at the centre of the corral was the slumped figure of the dead Robarts.

  Then: They’re gettin’ away, frig it!’

  Hogan’s roar was followed by three rapid rifle shots. And then the man’s curse betrayed that each of the bullets had missed the retreating targets.

  ‘Frig you!’ the injured man at the side of the way station snarled. ‘I’m bleedin’ harder than it’s friggin’ rainin’!’

  Edge waited, Winchester held two-handed across his belly, hooded eyes training their gaze on the far corner of the way station.

  After a while, he heard voices. But the two men were no longer shouting and he could not discern what they were saying through the hiss of falling rain. But a scream of pain and an answering curse reached him clearly. A few moments later, the two rounded the corner. One was supporting the other, the injured man trying to avoid putting his left foot to the ground.