EDGE: Red Fury (Edge series Book 33) Page 5

  ‘You never said your name, mister?’

  ‘I get by with Edge,’ the half-breed supplied. ‘But I don’t much care whether my grave has a marker on it. If you’re better with a gun than I’ve heard.’

  The tall, thin man shook his head, still not looking at Edge. ‘Just that everyone should be called by a name. I haven’t forgotten what I said out front of this place, but like Costello said, this isn’t the time to settle private differences. Way I understand it, you stopped off at the Butler place today?’

  ‘You got that right, feller.’

  ‘Just Lorna Butler there?’

  ‘Hey, Lee!’ Lutter exclaimed. ‘You think maybe Cal Butler had somethin’ to—’

  ‘Shut up, why don’t you,’ Temple cut in, and ran a hand over his face, as if he were very tired.

  ‘Her son showed up just before I left, feller,’ the half-breed answered. ‘She said he came from San Lucas.’

  Lutter seemed about to blurt out something else, but a scowl from Temple drove him back into silence.

  ‘Calvin Butler hasn’t been in San Lucas for months, Edge. And by all accounts he doesn’t spend very much time at home with his mother. When you saw him, he didn’t say or do anything that might have a bearing on the Indian situation?’

  ‘No, feller,’ the half-breed replied as Grace Lutter came back into the saloon and headed across to the pushed-together tables littered with dirty dishes and cups. ‘He didn’t do much of anything except fall down when I put a bullet in his arm.’

  The woman stopped clattering the dishes, and joined her husband and the lawman in staring at Edge.

  ‘What happened?’ Temple asked,

  ‘Your jurisdiction go that far?’

  Temple frowned his irritation. ‘If you’d shot his crazy head off I wouldn’t have given a damn. Unless it had something to do with Apache connections.’

  Edge dropped his cigarette on the clean floor and stepped on the glowing embers. ‘His Ma fell over drunk in the yard. I put her to bed. She didn’t like it I didn’t join her and she told her boy I tried to.’

  Grace Lutter vented a short, harsh, scornful laugh as her eyes glinted triumphantly. Then she looked pointedly across at Temple and injected a tone of blatantly false benevolence into her voice as she said: ‘Fancy poor Lorna Butler being that way, sheriff. Well, I’ll be blessed.’

  Lee Temple thrust a hand into a pants pocket, drew out a silver dollar and slapped it on the bar top. ‘I’ll drink the change later,’ he growled, then spun on his heels and stalked out of the saloon.

  The bald-headed man behind the bar counter guffawed his enjoyment of the put-down. ‘Ain’t often you say the right thing, woman, but you sure came good there,’ he congratulated.

  His wife ignored the cynical compliment and watched Edge as the half-breed rose from the chair against the wall. There was a glint of admiration in her grey eyes.

  ‘That must really have shaken Lorna Butler, Mr. Edge.’

  ‘She seemed real glad I didn’t kill her son.’

  ‘I mean you turnin’ down that full-blown body she likes to flaunt so much. Ain’t many men around here . . .’ She glared pointedly at her husband. ‘... who have been able to walk away from that woman. Until after!’

  She spat out the last two words.

  ‘Time she gives a man, he has trouble walkin’ after,’ Cass Lutter shot back, and guffawed again.

  His wife clattered the dirty dishes angrily as Edge stepped out of the saloon and onto the boardwalk. It was early evening and the entire hillside was in shadow from the reddening sun which was almost completely hidden behind the crest. Smoke drifted in an unbroken layer above the scattering of claims and the smells of cooking were strong in the cooling air. Now that he had been told of the Apache raid of six months earlier, the half-breed was able to view the dereliction and sense the strangely forbidding forlornness of San Lucas in a new light. And he could certainly understand the people’s strong desire for revenge. For revenge was what had motivated his actions on many occasions in the past.

  But he had no sympathy for the dour citizens of the town. Primarily because he had long ago lost the capacity to experience this and most of the other finer human feelings. But even were this not so, San Lucas had brought about its own trouble. Which was none of his business.

  ‘Mr. Edge,’ Grace Lutter called from the doorway as the half-breed unhitched the reins of the grey mare from the rail.

  He swung up astride the saddle. ‘Yeah, lady?’

  ‘Be safer if you wait for the soldiers to leave and ride with them. I heard them talkin’ when I was showin’ them the rooms. Seems the Apaches are comin’ in from all directions. If you run into a bunch of them on your own...’

  She let the sentence hang as she stepped out on to the boardwalk.

  Her voice had drawn others from the buildings. Temple, Rubinger and the forty-year-old, effeminate looking man who ran the stage depot with Rubinger. Ross Reed and the bespectacled Bob Sweeney. All of them emerging from the stage line office, to variously survey Edge with dislike, distrust, anxiety and puzzlement.

  The half-breed touched the brim of his hat and said: ‘Obliged for your concern, Mrs. Lutter.’

  ‘But you’re a man who goes his own way, no matter what.’

  He tugged on the reins to turn the horse along the street towards where it became a trail again to curve over the crest of the hill.

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish is what I say,’ the pot-bellied Mel Rubinger growled as Edge rode by the stage line office doorway. Then vented a short, harsh laugh. ‘At least it saves you the trouble of takin’ out the trash, Lee.’

  ‘Another time and another place, Edge,’ the sheriff of San Lucas called after the half-breed.

  Grace Lutter also raised her voice. ‘With what the Apaches have in mind, I reckon that’ll be in either heaven or hell!’

  Edge glanced back over his shoulder and his teeth gleamed in the twilight as he showed a wry grin on the lower half of his face. And he rasped: ‘Depending on whether we go for the climate or the company.’

  Chapter Five

  Beyond the crest of the hill the trail continued in a south-western direction, dropping down into a long, shallow valley. The sun was gone from the sky now and a low new moon spread a silvery light over a barren landscape of bleached earth and rocks splashed with a thousand stains of dark shadows.

  Immediately in back of the settlement of San Lucas, more than a hundred and fifty of these moon shadows were caused by the low mounds and timber markers of the cemetery. The trail bounded one side of the burial ground and the hill crest another, But there was plenty of room, across and down the slope, for new graves. If anyone was left alive to dig them after the Apaches came to reclaim their own hallowed place.

  Edge considered the history and destiny of San Lucas only briefly as he skirted the broad area of neatly aligned graves. Then concentrated entirely on searching for signs of danger in those pockets of deep shadow large enough to conceal one man or a whole group of men with killing in mind.

  In fact, he used his eyes, his ears and his mysterious sixth sense for danger with a mere minimum of conscious effort. With the same ease as riding the horse. From habit. Having learned during the war and on the many trails he rode since, to expect the worst at every turn. His continued survival depended as much on this constant vigilance as upon his killing skills, because it was his fate to be dogged by circumstances in which living or dying depended upon his readiness to practice the lessons a bloody war had taught him and a brutal peace regularly reiterated. Kill or be killed situations. Some of his own making - like drawing his gun against Lee Temple or riding out alone into country inhabited by hostile Apaches. Many not - the trouble with the Butlers and the accident of chance which caused him to ride into San Lucas at a time when an Indian uprising was threatened.

  So, he did not need to consciously clear his mind of reflections upon other things as he rode slowly down the valley, watching and listening and men
tally tasting the moon-silvered atmosphere for some dangerous change in its ambience. But he chose to ignore the recent past just as, during the long ride south from Silver City, he had affirmed his decision to disregard all that had gone before.

  At the end of the valley the terrain rose in a series of uneven steps toward a pass through the high peaks which formed the southern horizon. Here the trail began to loop and zig-zag, lengthening the climb but reducing the steepness of the grade so that teams could haul stages and heavily laden wagons up to the pass with comparative ease.

  The mountainscape was more dangerous here, in terms of the number of escarpments and hollows, hard-packed convolutions of earth and rocky outcrops where a small army could hide, as a single group or in dozens of scattered positions within rifle range of the trail.

  Edge bedded down for the night in a hollow some forty feet off the trail, exposed to as many vantage points above as other pockets of unsafe cover he could see below. But he had seen nowhere that was better as he rode the meandering trail toward the pass and it was certainly more secure than any place on the open hillside where San Lucas sprawled.

  The mare, well fed and watered at the Butler homestead and rested in San Lucas between periods of easy riding, accepted foreleg hobbles without protest. While Edge attended to the horse and then unfurled his bedroll, he ate two hunks of jerked beef. Then he settled down to sleep, lying on two blankets and covered with one, his saddle under his head and his hat over his face, right hand fisted around the frame of the Winchester which shared the warmth of the bed against the chill of the night air.

  He slept.

  Until the sound of a booted foot triggered him awake – to instant awareness of where he was and total recall of the reasons which led to him being there.

  ‘No, don’t kill him!’ Calvin Butler ordered hoarsely. ‘Hold still, Edge!’

  The half-breed had only shaken his head - to dislodge the hat from his face. Now he complied with Butler’s urgent command - save for swinging his eyes back and forth along the slivered lines of their sockets.

  ‘They’ll do like I tell them, if you do what I say!’

  The tall and rangy, sandy-haired young man with his left arm in a dark-colored fabric sling stood on the lip of the hollow fifteen feet away from Edge and directly in front of him. He had his old Colt Paterson in his right hand, waving it from side to side as if to call attention to the men with him. These were Apache braves, in white cotton pants and shifts, leather breechclouts and with eagle feathers in headbands. Five to either side of him, each aiming a Spencer repeater rifle down at the half-breed, stocks to their shoulders and hammers back.

  ‘Shots will warn the horsesoldiers,’ Butler said quickly, looking longer and harder at the arcs of threatening braves flanking him.

  Edge subdued his urge to self-anger at allowing the intruders to get so close to him before he awoke. The moccasined Apaches were by nature and training silent movers if the occasion called for stealth. And all but the final step taken by the booted Butler had been masked by a constant sound that travelled up the mountain from a considerable distance: a monotonous sound with no high or low notes which his sleeping mind must have accepted as a natural hum made by unseen creatures of the night.

  Awake now, coldly aware that his life depended upon the Apache braves obeying Butler’s command, Edge recognized the rising volume of sound as that made by a group of cantering horses.

  The Indian to the far right of Butler spoke a short burst of words in his own language. Then: ‘He come out from beneath blankets. He throw any weapons on ground.’

  Butler breathed a sigh of relief. Then had to clear a seemingly tangible lump of fear from his throat. ‘You heard Thundercloud, Edge. Do it’

  The half-breed used his right hand to fling off the blankets and sat up. He lifted the Remington from the holster by a thumb and forefinger and left the revolver beside the Winchester as he eased erect. He stood, hatless, his unshadowed face impassive in the moonlight, and with his hands hanging loosely at his sides.

  ‘Shooting too quick for me, feller?’ he asked.

  ‘Silence, white eyes!’ Thundercloud barked, reasserting his authority over the group. ‘Calvin, watch prisoner. Both die if warning given to horsesoldiers.’

  Then he issued a terse order in his native tongue and he and the other braves turned and moved away from the rim of the hollow - as silently as they had advanced.

  Butler already had his old-fashioned handgun aimed at Edge, and he started down the gentle slope.

  ‘These Apaches scare me a whole lot more than that warning you give me back at the house, mister,’ he growled. ‘Move over to the side. Away from your guns.’

  Edge did so and looked to the left as the sound of hoof beats rose in volume. But from the bottom of the hollow it was not possible to see over the rim.

  ‘They the Fort Catlow men and the prisoners, feller?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Butler answered with a nervous quiver in his voice. ‘And Thundercloud wasn’t just talkin.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  Edge looked over and beyond the head of Cal Butler, to where four of the Apache braves were climbing an easy-to-scale rock face: their white shirts and pants showing clearly against the dark background - until they reached pockets of cover.

  ‘I sure don’t want to die and I got no reason to carry a grudge against you.’

  Edge shifted his glinting-eyed gaze to the nineteen-year-old youngster. Butler read a question into the impassive expression.

  ‘My mother told me the truth about you. Told me a lot more stuff I didn’t know about. I acted like a damn fool and you could’ve killed me. I got reason to be grateful, Mr. Edge.’

  A threatening hiss sounded from somewhere between the rim of the hollow and the trail.

  ‘Get down,’ Butler rasped, gesturing with the gun and then dropping on to his haunches.

  The half-breed also lowered into a squat, his face betraying nothing of the thought processes of his mind as he heard the riders come around the curve and on to the section of trail that ran between the hollow and the rock face on which at least four Apaches were hidden. The horses held to a walk now.

  What concerned him was the possibility that Butler might be distracted long enough for him to reach for and use either the Remington or the Winchester. And he decided the odds on this were better than even. Less likely was the chance that he could escape the guns of the braves. He did not even consider an attempt to warn Costello and his men. For they were too close to survive the hail of bullets that would be blasted at them. And, on the other hand, it could be that Thundercloud planned on making them prisoners without bloodshed - at least until he had freed the captive braves and removed them from the danger of being hit in a crossfire.

  Butler swung his head, turning his rough-hewn, sweat-beaded face away from Edge to peer up at the rim of the hollow. And the half-breed felt droplets of salt moisture clinging to his bristles as he struggled to subdue an impulse to hurl himself at his guns on the blankets.

  The body of riders was now almost level with the hollow and dust motes rose from under the slow-moving hooves to float through the night air.

  ‘I sure will be glad to reach Catlow,’ the veteran Jaroff growled with feeling.

  ‘Real creepy out here in the—’

  Draper was forced to curtail his comment by a rifle shot.

  Somebody screamed and somebody else cursed. This in the part of a second between the first shot and a fusillade that seemed to shake the ground on which Edge and Butler were crouched.

  The half-breed’s chance had come and been resisted. For Butler’s green eyes were fixed upon him again, as was the muzzle of the revolver held in a rock-steady grip.

  Horses snorted and forehooves thudded to the ground after rears. Then the duller thumps of unseated riders falling to the trail.

  An Apache word of greeting was shrilly voiced. It was answered in high glee. Then a burst of laughter. The braves on the cliff face sho
wed themselves, rifles raised in triumph: began to climb down and then jumped the final few feet.

  Butler, then Edge, unfolded to their full heights. Then, complying with a gesture of the younger man’s gun, the half-breed moved slowly up the side of the hollow ahead of his captor.

  Costello, Hillenbrand, Jaroff and Draper lay among the legs of the now calm horses and ponies. Untidily inert, their faces and uniformed bodies stained by blood, at least two wounds apiece, their flesh assaulted by bullets exploded over a range that guaranteed hits.

  The ambushers were on the trail, knives drawn. Some worked at cutting free the former prisoners. Others made well-practiced incisions under the hair of the dead cavalrymen and spilled more blood as they wrenched off the scalps. Just one of the prisoners had a wound - a shallow furrow on his naked right shoulder where a bullet had split the skin. And it was he who interrupted the gleeful exchanges to do a double-take at Edge who stood on the rim of the hollow. Then he broke into a renewed burst of excited talk which drew every Apache eye towards the half-breed. In the subdued silvery light of the crescent moon it was difficult to see what kind of emotions the braves were expressing as they listened to fast spoken words.

  ‘It seems like he knows you from someplace, Edge,’ Butler hissed fearfully. ‘I hope to God you didn’t—’

  ‘We had a drink together, in a manner of speaking,’ the half-breed replied evenly.

  Thundercloud cut in on the slightly wounded man, to issue instructions. Then, while four of the Apaches took off at a run and the others led the animals away from the four scalped corpses, Thundercloud moved closer to where Edge and Butler stood.

  He was a handsome brave in his mid-thirties, with a broad forehead and cracked eyes. Wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted. With a half dozen eagle feathers in his headband.

  ‘You!’ he said, pointing a long finger at Edge. ‘I am told you had a hand in stopping killing of prisoners at San Lucas. For this I do as Calvin ask and spare your life. But you our prisoner. You understand?’