The Godforsaken Page 5

  “Way of the world, feller,” the half-breed said evenly, and a scowl showed on his face in the flare of the match struck on the butt of the reholstered Colt. “Just when we think we’ve got a good thing going, it has to come to an end. Sometimes a dead one.”

  Chapter Four

  A woman yelled, shrill with horror, from the doorway of a small house beside the schoolyard: “It’s Mr. Crowell! Mr. Crowell from the saloon has been shot by the stranger!”

  Her screeching announcement signaled a raising of many voices in the immediate vicinity that moments before had been held down to fearful whispers. This body of strident sound became intermingled with that vented by groups of local citizens approaching from the northern end and midtown stretch of the street. There were many more patches of light spilling out from windows and doorways up there now. But close by where Edge stood over the crumpled corpse of Crowell, the lamps that had been lit were now doused. And nobody who was shouting or watching in silence from the adjacent buildings dared to venture outside their shelter.

  From several miles to the north came the mournful wail of a locomotive whistle as the engineer of the delayed train announced he would shortly be hauling the string of freight cars into the Prospect depot. The geldings in the traces of the preacher’s buggy, already disturbed by the gunfire and the clamor of voices, were once more spooked into a struggling bolt hampered by the dead weight they had to drag. And then they were driven to a greater degree of panic by two more gunshots, these fired by the town sheriff, who was at the forefront of the crowd running down the street, his revolver aimed skywards as he exploded the shots in an attempt to silence the pandemonium around him so that Edge might hear his demand to surrender.

  But the two shots served only to draw all attention momentarily to himself. And in the next instant the cacophony was even louder: as other men drew revolvers to explode them into the night sky, then thunderously loud, the final traces of shock gone so that just anger powered voices and actions, when diverted attention was switched away from the sheriff to the mouth of the alley, where the black-clad stranger to town no longer stood over the corpse amid the discarded empty shellcases.

  To reach the boardinghouse of Mrs. Cloris Doyle, Edge had to turn right at the far end of the alley and head across the back lots of the barbering parlor, a feed and seed merchant and then around the backyard fences of two single-story houses. There was a mean-sounding dog chained up in one of the yards but nobody came outside to check on why he was barking and snarling as the half-breed slowed his loping run around the comer of the fence and closed with the rear of the narrow, three-story high boardinghouse. A just-starting-to-leaf shade chestnut tree, with some rustic outdoor furniture, on the back lot of the place, enabled Edge to reach a partially open window on the second floor. The important branch got to be dangerously slender where it reached toward the target window. And it sagged and creaked enough to erupt sweat beads of tension in the wake of those of exertion as he almost failed to get a handhold on the sili in the crack below the lower frame. Then his weight was transferred to the more solid support and he was able to push up the window so it was fully open, and snake himself headfirst into the room.

  Then he closed the window and took a second or so to scan the night vista to either side of the tree’s spring foliage. He saw the dog, just whining his frustration now, was as big as he had sounded. He did not see the emaciated old preacher or anybody else. Now he became aware of feminine perfume permeating the atmosphere of the unlit room. But it was a former presence this revealed, for he was alone, in the room and, he sensed as he stepped out onto the landing, in the house: for the whole place had an empty feel to it. But Edge did not trust such an intuitive response and allied stealth with haste as he went up the narrow stairway and into his room on the third floor at the front, where he took his gear from the closet and left without pause to glance ruefully at the clean and comfortable bed. Nor did he bother with the window for the muted body of sound now being vented by the angered citizens of Prospect indicated they were still concentrated in the area of the alley between the candy store and the barbering parlor. And he knew the angle was such that he would not be able to see that far along the street without opening the window.

  By way of two flights of stairs, two landings, a hallway and a kitchen,, he reached the back door of the boardinghouse. It was locked and bolted while the front one stood wide open in the wake of Mrs. Doyle and her other boarders crowding outside to discover the cause of the gunfire and the shouting.

  The locomotive whistle sounded from much closer as Edge, his saddle and accoutrements over his left shoulder and his packed bedroll under his right arm, halted at the street end of the broad alley between the boardinghouse and the town bakery, from where he had a restricted view of an empty stretch of Prospect’s main street and could see the full length of the just as deserted side street that formed a right angle on the west side—starting between the stone church with its pointed spire and the clapboard livery stable and hayloft of Joel Slocum. He was in deep moonshadow, but needed to cross something like a hundred feet of dangerously bright street to get to the temporary haven of the building where his gelding was enstalled. If everybody from this area of town had gravitated to the scene of the killing, no one was closer to him than a hundred yards or so, Edge judged. And if he was spotted, even if just before he made it into the livery stable, that distance did not give him enough leeway to get back out of the place in good shape to have a better than even chance of escaping this town unscathed.

  He rejected with just a few moments of consideration the only alternative method of getting to the livery—circling some distance to the south and crossing the trail out among the homesteads. This would take too long and in the meantime the townspeople would have abandoned impulse for reason. The fact that he had taken his stuff from his room would have been discovered and his horse—and everybody else’s, too—would surely be put under guard.

  Maybe he could steal a mount from one of the homesteader’s bams out in the country and . . .

  “Brothers and sisters—friends—nobody but I alone is to blame for the violent end of that unfortunate soul!” the old preacher shouted.

  And his voice was instantly recognizable, even though the words reached Edge from a considerable distance off. Just how far, he saw when he risked leaning out into the open to look around the corner of the boardinghouse as the skinny, dishevelled, gaunt-faced oldtimer continued:

  “The keeper of the den of iniquity was driven by sinful impulse to further take issue with me for speaking of the word of Almighty God in his establishment!”

  He was beyond where the main body of people were clustered on the street between the school-house and the alley where Crowell’s corpse lay, standing on the footboard of his buggy, holding his Bible in both hands thrust out in front of him—toward the angry and frustrated men and women who, albeit unthinkingly, were drawn to gaze at him by the mere power of his rhetoric.

  “With God on my side, how can I fail?” Edge growled as he stepped clear of the moonshadow, to move without undue haste along a direct line from the comer of Mrs. Doyle’s boardinghouse to the side street fagade of Joel Slocum’s livery stable, for the most part not looking where he was going, his face bathed with the sweat of high tension turned to the side; glittering eyes peering at the rear of the preacher’s main audience, at the old man himself who was clearly visible up on the buggy, and the scattering of smaller groups and individuals on the street and the sidewalks and stoops beyond the speaker. These townspeople, not a part of the crowd, presented the main danger to the half-breed: that while they were held briefly spellbound by the commanding voice of the man on the buggy, they might glimpse on the periphery of their vision the figure moving far down at the southern end of the street.

  “—and so I beg you, good people of this fair town, in the name of—”

  Like many of the other listeners at closer quarters, probably, Edge for the most part heard the sound of the prea
cher’s voice without paying sufficient attention to take in the sense of what he was saying. Then, as the half-breed reached a point a little past midway to his objective, the engineer of the behind-schedule train sounded another blast on his whistle that was loud enough to mask the old man’s words. Instinctively, all eyes now switched the direction of their gaze. And Edge quickened his pace, to reach the livery and make the cover of the church before the preacher lost his audience in the wake of the whistle breaking the spell.

  The melancholy sound faded from the night and was replaced by the muted but steadily rising roar of steam power. The old man tried to reestablish himself as a focal point, but no more than half a dozen words left his lips before he was cursed and howled and snarled into silence. At least, Edge assumed the preacher was the target of the anger because as he let himself into the livery and struck a match to get his bearings, there was no swelling of the tumult to indicate the vengeful crowd was surging down the street at the instigation of somebody who had seen him before he ducked out of sight.

  He shook out the flame after seeing the stall in which his horse was quartered. Then he worked quickly but without undue haste to ready the gelding for riding; not so involved with the chore that he failed to keep listening to sounds from beyond the confines of the livery. First the again fading hubbub of angry voices, and then the rising volume of noise from the train became increasingly dominant as it slowed toward a halt in the depot at the far side of the town. Finally, the squeal of applied brakes, the clatter of cars one against the other and the gushing of excess steam from safety valves acted to mask everything else to the ears of Edge, even the clop of the chestnut gelding’s hooves as he rode the animal at an easy walk down the center of the west-running street, which was a street of stockyards and commercial premises, dark and empty and closed up for the night, or, he corrected himself as he saw the rundown and decayed state of the buildings and the pens on either side, closed up and shut down forever. It was a derelict and ugly monument to the kind of town Prospect once had been before the sodbusters moved in on the surrounding country and proved the land was better for growing crops than grazing Longhorns. Better in terms of short-term profits, anyway.

  Then he rode beyond the leaning post with the broken crosspiece that once proclaimed the western limit of the town. And started out along the open trail that gradually swung to the north of due west as it rose up a gentle grade then cut through a timbered ravine in which there were many signs that it was the area where Prospect people came to cut fuel for their fires. Maybe in the old days building lumber had been taken from here, too. It was many years since cattle in any large numbers had been driven along the trail, for brush had a tight and strong hold on the soil close in to either side.

  Beyond the timbered section of the ravine, he struck another match and relit the part-smoked cigarette that had remained angled from a side of his mouth since it went out as he climbed the chestnut tree behind the boarding house. Then he dropped the dead match to the ground before demanding an easy canter from his mount: unworried that, after daybreak, a posse headed up by the most incompetent lawman west of the Red River would be able to pick up his tracks. Not that he was about to underestimate a man of whom he knew nothing, but it seemed a safe bet that a peaceful country town like Prospect certainly did not require, and probably did not have, the best sheriff in the state of Texas. And it was a good bet, if not a sure thing, that the kind of peace officer who wore the tin star in a town like that would not feel confident enough of his tracking ability to attempt the task at night.

  So, believing he had the time element on his side, the half-breed now set about making an ally of distance. And he was certain he had doubly frustrated pursuit—with distance and then care to cover his trail as he zigzagged and backtracked, circled and where possible rode along water courses—when he saw the smoke of a small fire two nights and a day and a half after he secretly left Prospect. He was eating a noon meal of jerked beef and sourdough biscuits washed down with water without getting out of the saddle when he first glimpsed the dark smudge on the sun-bright blue above the distant heat-hazed skyline. Since he had never lost his bearings while he took pains to confuse possible pursuers, he knew he was still to the northwest of Prospect, heading today in a northeast direction. That meant the railroad spur that connected the town with the main Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe track bisected the terrain somewhere in front of him. So his first notion on seeing the smoke was that it came from the stack of a locomotive. But later he saw the source of the smoke was not moving and he rejected the idea of a stalled train for the more likely explanation that somebody had lit a cooking fire to prepare a more elaborate lunch than he had eaten.

  The smoke was gone from the sky and there were just gray, cold ashes in the circle of stones where the fire had once burned when the impassive-faced, tense-behind-a-veneer-of-cool-compo-sure half-breed reined his mount to a halt, in the mid-afternoon shade of a strangely eroded rock outcrop. He remained in the saddle as he raked his narrow-eyed gaze over an unfinished adobe building with a collapsed timber roof, an untidy scattering of unused building supplies, a diamond-shaped arrangement of eleven adobe grave markers and, parked beside the gleaming rails of the train track, a dilapidated buggy with two doleful-eyed, sway-backed grey geldings in the traces.

  From within the building that had fallen into disrepair before it ever came close to being completed, a familiar voice called:

  “Bless you, my son!”

  Edge sent a globule of saliva into the burnt-out ashes and growled: “I didn’t sneeze and my Pa’s dead, preacherman.”

  Chapter Five

  EDGE swung down from his saddle and led the gelding toward the open end of the building as the emaciated, ragged old man came carefully out, picking his way between the debris of the fallen area of roof. The lower part of his frock coat was dustier than the rest of his clothing from where he had been kneeling. He clutched his hat in one hand and his Bible in the other.

  “Mock if you must, friend. I would ask that you do not, but I am unable to censure a man to whom I owe so much. Welcome to the Chapel of the Rock of Jesus. My name is the Reverend Austin Henry Loring.”

  “Edge,” the half-breed replied, even-toned in contrast to the old man’s fervor, and impassively unresponsive to Loring’s toothless grin. “If anybody owes anybody anything, it’s me to you, feller. But I don’t plan on paying you back by lending an ear to your preaching.”

  The old man put his hat back on and took a firmer, two-handed grip on the Bible; like he expected Edge to make a surprise snatch at it. “Whatever you wish, friend, sir, Mr. Edge. I fail to understand how you can be in my debt, but . . .” He shrugged his shoulders, then became eager again after the moments of perplexity. “I was about to move on after my period of meditation. But I think now I will remain. You will rest and share a pot of coffee with me?”

  “Sounds good,” Edge answered as he unfastened one of his saddlebags, and removed a burlap sack which he set down on one of the stones encircling the dead fire. “I’ll supply the grounds, you do the rest.”

  “As I said, friend, sir—”

  “Edge is fine.”

  “Edge, then. Whatever you wish.”

  The half-breed led his horse from the outcrop into a patch of shade where there was a little scrub grass on which the animal could chomp. Then he hobbled him with a rope, took off the saddle and gave him a drink of water out of his hat. By this time, Austin Henry Loring had built and lit a fire with debris from the derelict building for fuel. And he had taken what he needed for coffeemaking from under the rear seat of his buggy. Edge climbed onto the buggy and drove it into the shade of the rock, on the other side of the building from where his horse was hobbled, and between the wall and the well-ordered arrangement of grave markers.

  “Oh my, I’ve neglected them again,” the preacher said with a contrite tone and a woeful expression. “I’m afraid I’m so often engaged in contempiation of how I may minister to the spiritual need
s of my fellowman that I sometimes overlook the welfare of God’s other creatures.” “Yeah,” Edge acknowledged as he scanned the weed-choked burial area with the uninscribed markers at the head of the eleven mounds. Then he recrossed to where the buggy had been halted, wheelruts and hoofprints showing it had been driven here from the south, along a route that paralleled the railroad track just a few yards to the west of the twin curves of sun-glinting metal. Also stretching into the heat haze of the south—and into the north, also—along the same arc as the railroad was a line of poles with the telegraph wire strung between them. On the pole beside which the preacher had reined his buggy team to a halt, a wanted flyer had been tacked, freshly printed and not long enough posted to have been bleached by the sun or torn by the wind.

  “Yes, I already knew your name,” the old man said, still penitent.

  “Yeah,” Edge murmured again as he finished reading the bold, black lettering on the parchment-thick rectangle of cream-colored paper.

  WANTED FOR THE MURDER OF

  FRANK CROWELL

  IN PROSPECT, SUN COUNTY, TEXAS.

  EDGE

  Beneath this was a badly drawn portrait that did not resemble him in the least and a reasonably accurate physical description. Then came the request that information connected with the crime and its perpetrator should be communicated with the law office in Prospect. And finally, like it was an afterthought, mention was made of a “very generous reward.”