The Godforsaken Read online

  “You may do it whenever you are ready.”

  “What?” Red asked, frowning his bewilderment.

  “And in whatever manner pleases you.”

  “I think he’s gone outta his head, Red,” Frank growled, and seemed afraid to be near a lunatic.

  “He sure as hell is crazy, you guys!” Ben snarled as he snatched up the blood-smeared gun thrown from Norah’s dead hand. “What the nutty preacher is sayin’ is that he’s ready to get his! And we can do it any which way that we like. Which is mighty big of him considerin’ he ain’t in no state to—”

  “Yeah, Ben, I got his drift now,” Red cut in as the younger man cleaned the blood and dust off his gun under his armpit.

  “Red, I’m through here,” the blue-eyed, prematurely gray-haired Frank said, attempting to mask his nervousness with a forced attitude of boredom. “Let’s just blast the sonofabitch and get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m for that,” Ben agreed eagerly, and checked his move to push the Remington into his holster.

  “I ain’t so sure about killin’ a man of the cloth,” Barr argued, as he lit a fresh cigar with a flaming piece of fire kindling.

  The imperturbably unresisting Austin Henry Loring looked openly into the face of each man who spoke and his gaunt features did not alter their opinion. Then, like the three younger men, he directed his unblinking gaze toward the leader by common consent; and waited with more patience than they did for Red to reach a decision on his fate, in a silence kept from being absolute by the crackle of the fire, the bubbling of the stew, the subdued sounds made by the livestock and the rising and falling hum of swarms of flies voraciously gorging on the rapidly drying blood of eleven corpses.

  “You ain’t gonna put up no fight, yellowbelly preacherman?” Red rasped scornfully, at length.

  “If I needed to be reminded of my lifelong-held belief—” . '

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,’’ Red cut in with sour intolerance. “Not only not killin’ and stealin’ and all'them other Sunday church laws, preacherman. I heard what she said before she ate the lead. Guess you go in for that turnin’ the other cheek crap, too?”

  “Red, we didn’t oughta pull his pecker about what he believes in,” Barr warned, and backed off toward where his horse was hitched at the rear of the wagon—looking anxiously about himself as if he suspected some mysterious power was lurking nearby, poised to attack him.

  “Frig it, I’m with Frank,” Red snapped. “With the tail dead and one of Barr’s soggy-with-spit cigars messin’ up the grub in the pot, there ain’t nothin’ to keep us here. Ben, go bring your lariat.” Ben went to do Red’s bidding, his coal-black eyes bright with excited anticipation of what was to come. He took a piece of fresh chewing tobacco out of his saddlebag and was noisily masticating juice from it as he extended the coil of rope toward Red.

  “We gonna string him up, drag him or what?” The bigger-framed man shook his head and moved around the fire with a gesture that the eager younger man should follow him. In his own small, green eyes there was an expression of contempt and triumph not dissimilar to that which the preacher had displayed earlier.

  “Turn around,” he instructed as he halted three feet in front of Loring, both men standing beside the corpse of Norah. ”1 wanna see if you got a streak down your back to match your yellowbelly.” “Red, I ain’t religious, you know that, but I don’t go for—”

  “I ain’t gonna kill him, Barr,” Red cut in on the complaint. Then he sighed through a grin as the preacher obeyed the instruction—drew the Remington from his holster and tossed it a few inches into the air: just enough so that he could fist his hand around the barrel of the revolver. Next he pushed it higher and out to the side, and whipped it back along a short arc, to crash the base of the butt into the side of Loring’s head between his right ear and the underside of his hat brim.

  If the preacher experienced a bolt of pain from the point of the impact, he had no time to vent a cry: he was unconscious on his feet and so certainly felt nothing as he corkscrewed downward and sprawled on his-side at right angles to Norah’s corpse. The blow had not broken the skin beneath the matting of gray hair so there was no blood on the man’s head.

  “He’s still breathin’ his God’s pure air,” Red growled as he cast a sneering glance at where Frank and Barr stood holding the unhitched reins of their horses. Then he guffawed and added: “So

  I figure I ain’t muffed my chance of gettin’ through them Pearly Gates!”

  Then, the laughter reduced to a grin of evil intent, he holstered the gun and with the eager help of the giggling Ben put into effect the scheme that had occurred to his warped mind while he nurtured his anger toward the unresponsive preacher. He drew a knife from a sheath at the back of his belt but, to the sighing relief of Barr and the impatient scowl of Frank, used the sharply honed blade only to cut the lariat into short lengths and to slice through the fabric of the Lorings’ clothing. And, less than ten minutes after the gun butt crashed into the preacher’s head, Red and Ben were finished: and the three younger men followed the example of their older mentor in swinging up astride the horses. They spent just a second or so looking down with either grins or grimaces at the result of Red’s and Ben’s handiwork.

  Both the dead woman and the senseless man had been stripped naked—the clothing cut from their bodies scattered carelessly over the campsite. Then Norah had been arranged on her back with her legs splayed and Austin was placed face down on top of her. His ankles were tied together and so were those of the woman, but interlocked at the small of Austin’s back. His forearms were bound beneath her head and her wrists were tied at a midway point between his shoulder blades. To complete the gruesome and obscene tableau, a length of timber staking had been driven into the ground at either side of Norah’s head. They projected high enough to reach above the man’s head, and hold it firmly in the position that placed his lips hard against her blood-filled mouth.

  “You get some twisted notions every now and then, Red,” Frank growled as he tugged on the reins and heeled his mount into movement.

  “Appealed to me as a real fittin’ climax,” the grinning Red countered.

  “Climax!” Ben yelled, and then laughed so forcefully his wad of tobacco was ejected. “Shit, that’s a good one, old buddy!”

  He moved his horse in the wake of Frank’s mount.

  “I ain’t so sure I wouldn’t have preferred to see you put a bullet in him,” Barr muttered morosely. “That’s gonna be a bad way to die.”

  He had taken the dead cigar from between his teeth to speak. Now he hung it back there but did not relight it as he clucked his mount into a slow walk behind the other two.

  “Nah, it’s real fittin’ just like I said,” Red argued as he cast a final, self-satisfied look over the area surrounding the unfinished chapel. “There he is—a preacherman out front of his church, with his flock of one-time heathen Injuns that he must’ve converted, set to die in the arms of his everlovin’ wife.”

  He spurred his horse into a faster start than the others, intent upon catching up with them. “And what’s more, yellowbelly!” he taunted a man who could not hear him, “you’re gonna die in what I hear is called the missionary position.”

  His raucous burst of laughter once again dis- ' turbed the team horses and Indian ponies in the remuda.

  Chapter Three

  THE man who sat in the rocker on the stoop of the Aurora Restaurant in midtown Prospect gave the impression of being at peace with himself and with the world about him. And there was no indication as he relished the cigarette he smoked and the coffee he sipped, that he missed anything of note on the main street of this small Texas town. He appeared not to look at anything in particular.

  This early spring evening, with the weather warm and the sky clear and star-spangled and half-moon lit, he was what he appeared to be as he took his ease and quietly enjoyed a sense of well-being, though he remained to a degree alert to the possibility that this state of affairs migh
t come to an end. For life had conditioned this man whose name was Edge not to take anything for granted; certainly not to be lulled into a false sense of security after a time of good and easy living during which trouble of any kind had not even brushed the outer limits of his tranquil existence.

  The life that had taught this man the hard way that he had to take his ease whenever opportunity presented but always to be prepared for a violent shattering of his peace, was more than forty years long. And even when he was in repose, his face revealed to the perceptive observer that many of the years had been crowded with harsh experiences. Even clearer to be seen in the time-lined and element-burnished face of Edge was the fact that he was of mixed parentage. The mixture was northern European and Hispanic—his mother had been an immigrant from Scandinavia and his father was a Mexican. The survivor of the dead parents’ two sons was a man who could be considered either handsome or totally devoid of good looks: the opinions divided by responses to the suggestion of latent cruelty discernible in his eyes and the set of his mouthline. Some, maybe the most perceptively discerning of people in his past, had claimed that there was much more than just a mere suggestion of the evil that lurked within the man: that his capacity to unleash brutality on those who crossed him was blatantly obvious—even when he was as placidly composed as he was on this pleasant evening in Prospect, Texas.

  His eyes were ice-blue and had a cold glitter in even the faintest of lights. Their lids were permanently narrowed, like he was always in the brightest of lights. The upper ones were hooded. His mouth was broad and thin-lipped, with above and to the sides an unobtrusive Mexican-style moustache, while his jawline was firm and suggestive of aggression. His cheekbones were high and prominent and between was a nose that was aquiline in shape. His hair was thick and worn long enough to reach below his shirt collar. The same shade of grayness that could be seen amid the jet-black hair showed up more obviously in his bristles when he needed to shave.

  It was a hard, lean face. And his frame was hard and lean, too—he was six feet three inches tall and weighed a proportionately packed two hundred pounds.

  He was dressed all in black: riding boots without spurs wom inside the cuffs of his pants, a gunbelt with a Frontier Colt in the holster which was not at the moment held by the toe ties down to his right thigh, shirt, kerchief and Stetson, all of this relatively new except for the revolver. And what he wore beneath the topclothes was recently store-bought with a single exception—the circle of dull-colored beads on a thong around his neck under the kerchief with, hung at the nape under his shirt, a leather pouch that contained an open straight razor.

  Throughout the entire winter just past, while he spent some time in Arizona, old and New Mexico and latterly Texas, he had needed to draw the razor only to shave. He had not once fired the .45 revolver, nor the Winchester rifle that was with the rest of his gear in his room at Mrs. Doyle’s boardinghouse down at the southern end of the main street, since he rode away from what was left of what must have been the strangest and most ill-fated whorehouse on the frontier.

  He had drifted through bigger and smaller, dirtier and cleaner, livelier and duller, better and worse towns than Prospect as he rode whatever trail took his fancy whenever he took it into his head to move on, purchasing whatever he or his chestnut gelding needed and just occasionally indulging in what he felt he wanted—from the stake that was just a little less than four thousand dollars at the start of winter. Just the new clothes from a store in Santa Fe, a new saddle and accoutrements from a leathersmith at El Paso, a replacement bedroll with cooking and eating utensils bought from a down-on-his-luck drifter at a rockbottom price outside of Arizpe in Sonora, infrequent nights of bed and board in hotels or rooming houses and even rarer meals in restaurants like the Aurora, had cost him money over and above that spent on the necessities. And, all in all, this had not been an excessive drain on his resources, and that he still had close to two thousand dollars between himself and poverty contributed just as much to his seemingly lethargic feeling of contentment as did the warm glow from having a full belly and the anticipation of sleeping under a roof between crisp, clean bedsheets.

  Did he want a drink before he made tracks down the broad, quiet, sparsely lit street to Mrs. Doyle’s boardinghouse? He pondered this idly as he continued to sip the strong, black coffee and watched the progess of a buggy and two-horse team as the rig came slowly toward the midtown area from the north. A drink of beer or liquor, he corrected himself as he arced the cigarette butt out of the moon shadow and over the rail of the stoop to the dusty, wheel-rutted and hoof-printed street. He did not have to wonder whether he had differentiated between want and need. He was never confused between these two quite separate demands that were made upon a man from within.

  Diagonally up and across the main street from the single-story, frame-built Aurora Restaurant which was on the east side, was the two-story, brick and timber Best in the West saloon. When the restaurant closed up for the night—and the coffee-drinking half-breed was the last patron on the premises— the Best in the West would be one of just two commercial enterprises in Prospect still lit and open. The other was the railroad depot that was at the northern end of the street, but this was dimly lit and occupied by only two disgruntled railroadmen awaiting the arrival of an overdue freight train. The entire lower floor of the saloon was brightly lit, the yellow light of several kerosene lamps spilling out through the frosted-glass windows and the batwinged doorway across the roofed sidewalk. Also, two of the five upper-floor windows allowed a little light to escape through the cracks where drapes failed to meet at the center, these narrow fingers of illumination falling onto the railed balcony of the sidewalk roof. And there sounded to be many more than just two people in the place—the talk and laughter of the patrons and staff competing with the clink of glass on glass, the chink of money changing hands, the rattle of the machinery of some games of chance and the off-key clanging and thudding of a dilapidated player piano. In total, this noise that seemed to float out of the saloon on drifting tobacco smoke was not overly obtrusive, though, even in such a quiet country town as Prospect.

  The door behind and to the left of Edge opened and the round-faced and round-bodied man who did the cooking at the Aurora asked diffidently: “Pardon me, sir, but I reckon you wouldn’t have no objection if me and the wife closed up the place now? You just leave your empty cup on the stoop there when you’ve finished.”

  Edge drained the cup down to the dregs and held it out toward the nervous man. “I’m through and I’ve no objection, feller. The supper was the best I’ve eaten in a long time.”

  The fat man beamed his appreciation of the compliment as his wife who waited at table began to douse the lamps in the small and clean restaurant behind him. “Real nice of you to say so, sir. All our meat and game is fresh from the ranches and the country nearby. And the vegetables are local grown, from the farms around town and some in our own yard out back. Oh, dear, I can’t say I like the look of that.”

  The husband and wife who ran the restaurant had not liked the look of the half-breed when he rode into Prospect from the south this afternoon: unshaven, sweat-run and with his flesh and clothing powdered by trail dust, weary from the heat and the long miles of travel, so in no humor to alter the natural impassive set of his face to even hint at a smile, and thus looking grudgeful, mean and maybe ready to use the handgun in his holster or the rifle in the boot against whoever unwittingly riled him over the line in back of which his dark anger was under control. Edge had sensed the homesteaders in the fields and front yards of the places which flanked the south trail eyeing him with surreptitious apprehension as he rode toward the town. He experienced at close quarters the uneasiness he had triggered in the local citizenry when he led his mount into the livery stable of Joel Slocum and again from the women and old men on the street as he moved among them on foot, heading with his heavy load of gear toward the boardinghouse of Mrs. Doyle that the liveryman had recommended as the best place in town for
a passing-through stranger to rest up. And Mrs. Cloris Doyle was more than a little perturbed by her first impression of the man who tracked dust and brought a bad smell into her scrupulously clean and fresh-aired place.

  It was nothing new in the experience of the half-breed for his first appearance in a quiet community to provoke such nervousness and suspicion among peaceable people. For it was a long time since he had slotted neatly into the pattern of conformity that was essential if a man was to be comfortably accepted as one of the crowd against the conventional backdrop. During this same length of time, he had always elected to go his own way in his own manner and leave those around him to keep their initial impression of him or change their views according to his actions, unless somebody ventured to question him, when he would volunteer some placatory information about himself and his reasons for being where he was—sometimes.

  This afternoon and evening in the town of Prospect, nobody asked him any personal questions, not even the local lawman whose office Edge passed on his stroll from the boardinghouse to the restaurant and who looked out through the halfcurtained window with something stronger than idle curiosity in his eyes. But by this time the stranger was washed up and shaved and had dusted off this clothes, looked a little rested up and cooled down and not so apparently ready to go for his gun at the least provocation. He still looked a trifle too capable of taking care of himself without a thought for the welfare of others, maybe; he still did not offer the first word of greeting to other strollers, nor invite others to greet him; and spruced up better than most of the local citizens he still quite obviously was not and never could be as one with them. But those who had not witnessed his arrival in Prospect were pleasantly surprised that he was not the brutish ogre they had imagined him to be from the gossip that had been spread about him. Whiie those who had instigated the tall stories were now inclined to believe what Joel Slocum and Cloris Doyle had said about the stranger’s unlikely good manners in his dealings with them.