EDGE: The Blind Side Page 8

  He suddenly spat viciously down at the trail, just as another squall lashed out of the ominous dusk sky. And against the roar of the wind in his ears and the hiss of rain on the ground he snarled:

  "You crazy Mex bastard! You got no busi­ness giving a shit about what she thinks of you!"

  He spat again and then shook his head as if he needed to make an effort to force the scowl off his face and replace it with the usual im­passive set. After this, it seemed that he rode for a very long time through a shallow sea of mud that was constantly pocked by teeming raindrops. But then, as he emerged from this period of intense concentration upon the de­manding process of shutting his mind to thoughts of the blue-eyed, blonde-haired, slim-bodied Englishwoman he knew he had not been detached from his surroundings for as long as it had appeared while he struggled to reestab­lish his self-control. For he could still see the rain-marked trail as the squall moved away, so there was the murky light of dusk left in the Arizona evening. For a few more seconds, any­way: until full night was clamped down be­tween the unbroken sky and the sodden land.

  The norther tugged a final time at man and mount, then suddenly dropped. And in the sur­rounding silence the splashing hoofbeats of the gelding over the liquid ground sounded as eerily loud as had the voices of the men in the basin. While it was not possible to tell if the pitch darkness of the moonless and unstarred night merely created an impression that the unmoving air was colder than the norther had been or whether the temperature actually had dropped several degrees. Certainly, the half-breed in the cold, rain-drenched clothing knew that it was only in his imagination that the smell of smoke through the dampness and the glimmering of a number of lights against the darkness in the distance stirred a sensation of warmth somewhere deep inside him. As he relished in anticipation whatever mild degree of comfort was available in the promised shelter of the town of Fallon.

  Closer to the actuality of warmth and dry­ness, Edge reined the gelding to a halt and peered down the slope over the final mile be­tween himself and the community as he took out the makings and rolled and lit a cigarette. And in the time this required, decided he was totally in control of his own reflexes. Both phy­sical—he was able to peer into the night in every direction and know he was seeking a threat and had the capability to deal better than most men of his age with any kind of sudden attack. And mental—he had admitted to himself that he lusted for the body of the sensual Englishwoman, did not regret scorning her in the circumstances that existed then but would not refuse her advances if the oppor­tunity came again.

  "A bastard attracted to a bitch and vice versa, I figure," he murmured to the horse as he heeled the gelding forward toward the glim­mering lights.

  The animal offered no response—did not even raise his ears.

  "The world is full enough of our kind," he added, peering across the darkness shrouded range to the left and the right and over his shoulder. "Hello, a no-strings screw and good­bye. It should be easy, shouldn't it?"

  The chestnut gelding splashed steadily on down the sloping trail, surefooted and reliable. Not needing to be steered, maybe because in his equine imagination he was savoring the warmth and the food and the rest that he sensed was waiting for him among the lights of Fallon. And Edge grinned with his teeth clenched to the cigarette as he continued to watch for trouble in the darkness and said:

  "You're supposed to tell me it would only be easy if I was as much of a bastard as I think I am, feller." Then he sighed and ran a hand gently down the side of his mount's neck as he added: "You ain't much of a conversationalist, are you? But that's okay since I ain't usually much of a talker myself."

  He was almost up to the point where the open trail became the building-flanked street of a town that was larger than it had looked—both from back on the distant valley side and from the impression he received when he began to head for the cluster of glimmering, then gleaming lights. From far off the notion of the place being small had been based upon the false premise that since he had never heard of the town of Fallon it could not be of any significant size. While from closer range he had been led astray by the assumption that the entire com­munity was huddled within the confines of the lamplight—whereas, when he rode in off the trail he was at the northwestern end of a street that was in darkness for more than a half mile.

  A dangerous darkness, he suddenly realized —but revealed no visible sign of his discovery as he continued to ride, apparently easy in the saddle, between the high facades of two barns. And it required an expert to spot that there was anything to be mistrusted in the way he let go of the reins with his right hand and seem­ingly absently scratched his thigh—so that he was only a half second away from sliding the Winchester out of the forward hung boot.

  "Freeze, son!" an expert snapped and Edge instantly recognized him from his voice as Clark Selmar.

  The half-breed used his left hand to rein in the gelding, as he pushed the part-smoked cig­arette with his tongue from between his teeth so that it angled from the side of his lips. This as he closed his lids to the narrowest of slits and peered at the mouth of an alley between the barn and an equally dark, less high building beside it.

  "Fine and dandy," the rancher said, less stridently. "Want you now to put your hands up behind your neck and join the fingers, son. Way you would if you was sittin' in your very favorite armchair after a hard day's chores."

  Edge released the reins from his left hand and brought this up with his right to do as he was instructed. Only then felt the tension gen­erated by others drain out of the incident, as he continued to peer at the alley from which the short and overweight Selmar stepped, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of a dark-colored oilskin coat.

  "Something, feller.'

  "You say it, son."

  "Sitting like this because I've already seen your top gun do his stuff."

  "Floyd's the C-bar-S foreman, son. Hired on as such and just happens to know how to han­dle a rifle."

  "Has me covered now, I figure?"

  "You bet your ass he has," Selmar confirmed evenly as he halted twenty feet in front of and slightly to the right of where Edge sat unmoving astride the statue-like gelding.

  "He shows himself, it better not be with his rifle still aimed at me. Unless he's ready to kill me. On account of I'll sure as hell be fixing to kill him."

  "Talks big, as well as to himself, Clark!" a man called in a derisive tone from the roof of the building on the other side of the alley from the barn.

  "Don't they say that a guy talkin' to himself is showin' the first sign of goin' nuts?" another man asked, rhetorically sardonic. He was posi­tioned in the cracked open doorway of the barn to the left, directly to the side of where the half-breed sat his mount on the center of the street.

  "You run off at the mouth too much, Whit­ney!" Selmar snapped, with a cursory glance over his shoulder toward the flat roof of the single-story building. Then he peered for longer at the front of the barn across the street to warn: "And you're already crazy, Floyd, if you don't take this man seriously."

  "Aw, Clark, come on—" Floyd started to complain sourly.

  At the same time as Whitney growled: "Hell, I'm just lettin' the stranger know he ain't got just the one Selmar hand—"

  "Shut up the both of you!" the man in the open cut in.

  "One thing about talking with a horse like this one, feller," the half-breed said into the silence that was permeated with disgruntlement. "Never does answer back."

  "Like a couple of answers from you, son?"

  Edge had finished his narrow-eyed scanning of the darkened area of town where he was forced to halt: decided there were only the two men close by to back up the rancher. And now he peered toward the illuminated section of Fallon as he supplied:

  "The four fellers you caught branding your steers raped a woman, Sehnar. Back in the timber beyond the valley where this trail and the one to Tucson meet. She wanted me to see they got what's coming to them for what they did to her. Knowing they've
been hanged will maybe be good enough for her. Won't matter what they're hanged for officially. They can only die the once. That about cover it?"

  There was some activity at the well-lit center of town, but this street and the corners of the ones that intersected it were not thronging with citizenry. Perhaps because the night air was too damply chill for strolling and the places of entertainment and commerce extended a warm welcome that was too tempt­ing to refuse. Or maybe it was that the portents of dangerous trouble kept all but the most foolhardy curious off the streets.

  "How do I know that ain't all hogwash, son?" Clark Selmar asked, his tone lacking conviction. "Way you been followin' me and my boys with the prisoners, seems to be you could be lookin' for a way to spring the rustlers loose?"

  Edge spat the dead cigarette butt off his lower lip and answered: "Was making sure they didn't get loose themselves, feller. And if they did, they didn't stay that way."

  "Well, son, you can quit worryin' on that score now. Because that double-dealin' Arch Hayden and his cronies are locked up real tight in Jack O'Rouke's jailhouse."

  "That's fine, feller," the half-breed drawled. "Just the one thing I have to worry about now."

  "There is?"

  "You told me to freeze while ago. If I stay out here like this much longer, it's what I could do."

  "Okay, on your way," Clark Selmar allowed. "But if it is hogwash you been givin' me and you try grabbin' them thievin' bastards out of Jack O'Rouke's place, you'll wind up real cold, son. Real quick. Buried in the ground as deep as you're tall."

  Edge lowered both his hands and took up the reins from where they rested across the saddlehorn. Heeled the gelding forward.

  "That's tellin' him, Clark!" Whitney yelled in admiration from the building roof as the half-breed rode by. "Buried deep as he's tall. Reckon there ain't nothin' so freezin' cold as a grave in the ground."

  "Hey, cool it, Whitney!" Floyd called as he stepped out of the barn, the door swinging open a little wider with an eerie creaking sound. He held his repeater in a one-handed grip at his side, barrel canted down toward the rain-softened street surface. A tall, thin, slicker-coated man with a gaunt and darkly stained face whose tone of voice revealed he shared in his boss's opinion of the half-breed now—even before he went on: "Like Clark says, I reckon we oughta take this guy real serious. Close to, he looks like a real mean character."

  Whitney rose to reveal himself in dark sil­houette against the only slightly less dark backdrop of the sky above the roofline of the building. Shorter and stockier than Floyd. Not wearing any kind of topcoat or hat now the rain was finished. Both his hands held low down in front of him, gripping the butt of a revolver that was aimed between his feet and glinted dully in the faint level of light that reached him from the mid-town area. His hair showed as blond or even white in the same fringe glow.

  "Don't be a fool!" Selmar snapped over his shoulder. "Do like Floyd told you!"

  The attitude of the man on the roof had been tautly aggressive when he first showed him­self. Now he shrugged.

  "The boss and the foreman, stranger," he called down in a rasping tone as Edge rode by him, the impassive-faced man astride the geld­ing shifting his head to look from the C-bar-S hand at the front of the barn to the one on the roof of the building across the street. "So I gotta do like they say. I'm cool, but I ain't shiverin'—you know what I mean?"

  Edge nodded and answered in an even-toned voice: "A fair shake is what we all want."

  Chapter Ten

  The building on top of which Whitney had been standing had a sign painted on each window that flanked the porched doorway announcing it housed the headquarters of the Fallon Cattlemen's Association: and before Edge had ad­vanced very far along the town's main street, Clark Selmar and his two hands had entered the place and lit a lamp that spilled a shaft of bright light from one of the windows.

  By this time, the irritating itch between the half-breed's shoulder blades had dulled and he was aware of being watched once more—but there was no sensation of threat in the new survey, which was being made from a corner on the first intersection of this side of town. Some hundred yards from where he had been ordered to halt by Selmar, so within earshot of what had been said. That distance closer to the well-lit area of Fallon—where more people were moving in view now—but still only on the fringe of the light.

  Edge rode by a bank, the office of a news­paper called the Fallon Advocate, a small chapel and a large house. Like the two barns, the place the trio of men had entered and the feed and grain store across from this, all the buildings were of frame construction and had been put up several years earlier. Beyond the intersection, and along the streets that went off to either side, the buildings were of more recent origin and used a wider range of mater­ials. A mixture of residential and commercial premises, spaced wider apart than the group that seemed to have been all the town had con­sisted of for a long time.

  "Guess the newspaper office was something else in the old days," the half-breed said as he started across the intersection, and glanced only briefly at the side of the small chapel with its truncated belfry. And added, as the man stepped away from the wall so that he was seen a little more clearly in the fringe of the light: "Sheriff?"

  "The Advocate's always been here, Mr...?"

  "Edge," the half-breed supplied and looked more closely at the lawman who angled out across the intersection to draw level with the gelding and fall in beside it. Saw a man of fifty or so with a weather-stained and life-lined face that was as long and lean as his own. But was dark eyed as well as dark skinned, with a weaker jaw and a much thicker moustache that did not droop to either side of his small mouth. About five feet ten inches tall with a muscular build beginning to thicken with middle-age fat. The man dressed in a city-style but country made suit of dark-hued, rough-textured fabric that looked to be in need of pressing—perhaps only since the rain of the day had drenched it. He also wore a vest, a dark-colored shirt and a tie—the vest and the tie grey like his wide-brim­med Stetson. So that the brightest thing about his appearance was the five-pointed metal star in a circle that was pinned to the breast pocket of his crumpled suit jacket—on the upper slope caused by the bulge of the gun he carried in a shoulder holster.

  "Mr. Edge. Since when Fallon was just the Selmar ranch and a handful of little home­steads. Those days, the paper didn't sell more than a couple of dozen copies, but Otis Selmar—that was Clark's father—he used to make up the losses. In the same way he had the chapel built and paid for a preacher to be here. Be­lieved that people who lived out on the frontier shouldn't be shut off from the rest of the world. And should have easy access to religious guidance if they felt the need. Education, too. The building that is now the Fallon Bank was a school able to take up to twenty pupils when it was first erected. I'm extremely pleased there was no serious trouble with Clark Selmar, Mr. Edge."

  Sheriff Jack O'Rouke spoke like a man who had been educated at a fine school a great many miles to the east and north of the one he and Edge passed now, across from the court house—both buildings of white stone set back from the street behind neatly trimmed lawns bisected by cement walks. Was from one of the New England states, the half-breed guessed, the burr almost gone from his voice but the breeding still clearly discernible.

  "No sweat."

  "And I trust there will be no more trouble concerning the prisoners I am holding in the jailhouse, Mr. Edge?"

  "I caused some already?"

  "Indirectly. The multiple rape of which you spoke to Clark took place outside the valley, as I understand you."

  "Right."

  "Which places the crime outside my area of jurisdiction. If the lady concerned wishes to press charges, representations should be made to the law office in Tucson. We strive to see that justice is done by due process of law in this area, Mr. Edge."

  The mounted half-breed and the lawman walking alongside the gelding had reached the center of Fallon's nighttime activity now, and Edge saw he had be
en wrong to think of it as the mid-town section. For, in fact, it was at the southeastern end of the main street which, be­yond the oasis of light and movement in the darkness, curved away due south through the night across the rolling hill country of the valley bottom similar to that he had ridden over during the rainy afternoon.

  "Does Selmar money pay for that due process as well as the church and the school—"

  O'Rouke's urbanity abruptly vanished as he shot out a hand to catch hold of the gelding's bridle. And he glared with scowling eyes up into the heavily bristled face of the half-breed, teeth bared as he rasped:

  "I was elected by the citizens of Fallon and I'm paid out of civic funds, mister! And you better believe me! I was down the street doing my sworn duty! Which means that if there had been criminal gunplay, I would have done my level best to see the guilty party or parties were brought to justice."

  Edge consciously needed to make the effort to suppress his anger at this man who for a few seconds had control of his horse. And knew, from the way in which O'Rouke snatched his hand away from the bridle, that the Fallon law­man had glimpsed the depth of feeling which had been directed down at him from the slivers of glinting blue that were the half-breed's eyes—and the lawman had, in turn, to concentrate hard on not showing his fear.

  "My mistake if one was made, feller. When I see the lady, I'll tell her about Tu—"

  "A mistake was made, Mr. Edge," the lawman cut in and now it was obvious he had to work hard at checking anger—at himself and Edge—in the wake of diminished fear. "But I can understand how it happened. I should, per­haps, have made my presence known at the same time Clark Selmar did. But being on the side of the right does not always make a man do the right thing. Good evening to you, and I hope you enjoy your stay in our town."

  "Obliged, sheriff," Edge answered, and res­ponded to O'Rouke's tip of the hat with a similar gesture of his own, before the crumple-suited man turned and moved back along the darkened length of the street—heading for the brick built jailhouse which had no painted sign to announce what it was, but had barred win­dows and the upper part of a gallows showing above the fence around the yard out back to make its function obvious.