Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (15 page)

Edge nodded. ‘I had an early start this morning and there’s been a lot on my mind since yesterday. So I’d like to get some sack time now. Be ready to face the last leg to Pine River.’

‘Sure,’ she allowed morosely. ‘Like I used to say to Vic for the short time we were together: you’re the boss so you call the shots. I guess you want me to clear up the mess we made cooking and eating?’

‘Whatever you want.’ He moved back from the fire, unfurled his blanket roll, arranged his saddle as a pillow and slid the Winchester out of the boot to share his bed. She said: ‘It’s a small enough favour. Me doing the domestic chores in return for you allowing me to ride with you. Especially since I know you don’t want the kind of comforts I provided for Vic at nights.’ She hardened her tone. ‘And even in the afternoons sometimes: like you and the rest of them guys from Brogan Falls saw?’

‘Way it is,’ he said as he finished moving his body into a comfortable position under the blankets and tipped his hat over his face. ‘Sweet dreams. But don’t have none about me and Vic Munro being two of a kind.’

‘No chance, mister.’ Her soured tone sounded strained but she was unable to sustain it. And she went on in the manner of somebody speaking her thoughts aloud as she began to clatter pots and cutlery: ‘It seems to me, now that I’ve talked with you for more than a couple of minutes and seen the way you are, that there can’t be no one else in the whole wide world who’s quite like you. Because . . . and you know what I think?’

‘I think I’m going to hear what you think?’

‘I
think
you don’t give one sweet damn for anyone else in the whole damn world. That every frigging person in the whole frigging world can do whatever the frigging hell they want to

as long as it doesn’t interfere with what you have in mind to do. I reckon that’s what makes you one of a frigging kind.’

‘That about sums it up.’

‘And leaves a lot of minuses in you as a person other people might like to get to know!’

she countered grimly.

‘It won’t be that which makes me lose sleep, lady.’

‘I don’t give a – ‘

‘It’ll be the yakking noise you’re making.’

‘Go to hell!’

She made more clattering sounds than necessary in the process of cleaning and stowing away the dishes and utensils. And Edge made allowances for her ill temper: set some kind of time limit on the leeway he would give her. Then was unaware of the time that elapsed until the forest night became quiet. Except for tiny sounds that conjured up in his mind’s eye images of the glowering Hannah Foster as she prepared to bed down, then slid under the blankets and got as warm and comfortable as possible on the hard ground in the October cold of the night. But perhaps a half-minute after just the crackling of the fire disturbed the quiet she abruptly sat up and announced resolutely:

‘I know you’re not asleep, mister.’

‘You want me to be impressed again?’ he asked wearily.

‘Will you answer me one question?’

‘Sometimes I can be all heart.’

‘This business you need to attend to in Pine River. If I can help you with it in any way, I want you to know I’d be ready and willing to do that. If you’d let me? I know an awful lot about what went on in that town. And you ain’t been there in a long time.’

‘You know a lot of men, I guess?’

‘I sure do. And a lot about the women they talk about when they – ‘

‘It’s not possible you knew the man I need to find,’ he cut in on her.

‘I don’t know this Guthrie guy, I admit that. But Slim Haydon and a whole lot of – ‘

‘Not George Guthrie or the sheriff, lady.’

‘But how can you possibly be sure I didn’t know the guy you’re looking to find? Seeing as how you ain’t been there in such a long time?’

‘Take my word for it.’

‘But if you’re going to meet up with him and he’s been there ever since you left, surely the chances are – ‘

‘Okay, lady: if I tell you, will you shut up and let me get some sleep?’ he growled. She was petulantly disgruntled when she countered: ‘Well, if it’s real personal and you don’t want a whore like me to know about it, I wouldn’t – ‘

He folded up slowly, set the Stetson back on top of his head and eyed her bleakly across the flames of the fire that she had built up before she bedded down. She met and held his level gaze and seemed ready to be defensive. Then recognised in his fire-lit expression that he was as ready to reply to her questions as she was eager to know about this aspect of the life of a man she could not fathom in so many ways.

‘I guess there were times when business at the Junction Hotel cathouse was slow, uh?’

‘Now and again.’

‘But never slow enough that you had to go down to the cemetery and dig up some johns?

‘What?’

‘The man I’m going to Pine River Junction to find is six feet under.’

‘That’s . . . ‘ She was lost for words until she finally breathed: ‘ . . . crazy.’

‘No it’s not. It’s what you have to do with a man who’s dead. You bury him in the ground.’

‘But why – ‘

‘Because he’s dead and his body would get to stink up the place and maybe spread disease.’ He held up both hands in a gesture that expressed tacit surrender, maybe an apology for snarling the facetious retort. ‘The truth is, I’m going to Pine River to get the body because it’s not buried where it should be. And I owe it to the dead feller to put that right.’

‘But can you do that? Just dig up a body and take it some place else to bury?’

‘I’ve seen it done but it’s not something I’ve ever tried to do before.’

She considered this for stretched seconds, shrugged, looked hard at him and showed a fleeting smile. ‘Well, whether the law allows or not, if you want to do it badly enough then I reckon you’ll go right ahead and do it: come what may.’

He inclined his head. ‘No sweat.’

She shuddered. ‘It sounds to me like a crazy thing to want to do. But knowing as much about you as I do on such short acquaintance, I reckon you have a damn good reason.’

‘He was kind of a friend of mine.’

‘Kind of?’

‘I guess you’d say Adam Steele and me really were two of a kind for a long time. Then he died and I’m still living. And it’s time how that came about was brought to book.’

CHAPTER • 9

__________________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST time Edge met up with Adam Steele was after the Virginian tried to blast
him out of his saddle and steal his horse. That, Edge explained to Hannah Foster on a chillingly cold night in a timbered expanse of northern California, was on a blisteringly hot day in a parched expanse of Mexican desert a lot of years ago.

Not an auspicious prelude for forming the foundation of any degree of friendship between a high born dude from Virginia and a man who, as often as not, was called a half breed. This at a time when the mixing in his veins of his mother’s Scandinavian blood and the Mexican from his father had caused a younger Edge to be distinctly the produce of two races.

Their paths had crossed twice more after that initial violent meeting and on each occasion there had been a kind of uneasy, unspoken truce between these two men from totally different backgrounds who – it had seemed at the time – shared similar aims and ambitions. In the aftermath of the bloody Civil War in which they had fought on opposing sides at a time when they would certainly have killed each other on the battlefield without a second thought, each had saved the life of the other more than once. But, in the way that the unpredictable can sometimes re-direct what would seem to be the pre-ordained destinies of such men who apparently had so little on common, a strange rapport had been established between them. For his part as the years elapsed – and he knew it had not been the same for Adam Steele in this respect - Edge occasionally found he coveted the kind of life he heard the Virginian had forged for himself. At a place not so many miles away from where he now told the tale to Hannah.

Edge had attempted once to settle down: took himself a bride and began to farm a small place in the Dakotas. But the cruel fate that ruled his life had intervened and once again started him out on the violence trail. And he became resigned to having to live such a dangerous life until a faster gun, a bushwhacker or a fresh twist of fate caused him to die in some Godforsaken piece of country: without anyone to give a damn one way or the other. At best, mourned be some woman not unlike Hannah Foster, maybe.

Then he came across the Colt Hartford rifle with an inscribed plate on the butt. A distinctive rifle that he was certain had once belonged to Adam Steele. Which was a find that seemed to be pre-destined by a fate that was maybe not going to take any cruel turns this time. He had never seen a rifle so inscribed before Steele tried to kill him with the unusual weapon down in Mexico. And he had never seen one since his last meeting with the Virginian. So he used it as an excuse to seek out Adam Steele: gave fate a push this time, since on previous occasions it had been by accident the men who were an unlikely two of a kind had met up in troubled circumstances.

For it provided an ideal opportunity for Edge to come up to northern California and find out for himself at first hand just how well Steele had managed to put down roots a continent away from his comfortably rich beginnings in Virginia. To set up a stud farm where he raised fine horses. No longer troubled by the kind of violence that continued to mark the trails that Edge rode as he criss-crossed the United States and the territories from coast to coast and up from the Mexican to the Canadian borders in search of whatever peace of mind he could find. So, with the rifle he was convinced belonged to Adam Steele stowed in his blanket roll, Edge rode north from the ill-named community that translated from the Spanish to Money Mountain, aiming for the Providence River Valley where he had heard the Virginian had his spread: appropriately named Trail’s End.

The journey did not lack for the kind of hardships and brutality that had become a way of life for Edge. But he had learned how to take such malevolent adversities in his stride and put them dispassionately behind him. And felt confident that at the end of this trail he would uncover the secret that had eluded him for so long: find the formula which would enable him to get the better of the vicious destiny that had ruled his life for so long. But the undertaking was destined to be of no avail. In San Francisco he discovered the Colt Hartford with the inscribed plate was not the rifle that Abraham Lincoln had given Ben Steele and was later inherited by his son.

By then he was too close to his objective to abandon the search. And it was not very far from the sprawling city by the ocean to the small lakeside town of Broadwater. Where Adam Steele was locked up in the jailhouse: waiting to be taken east – there to stand trial for the murder of a lawman in the aftermath of the long ago Civil War.

*** *** ***

On a warm June night shortly after he learned of the tough spot the Virginian was in, Edge positioned himself in cover at the side the trail that led out of Broadwater toward Sacramento: the railhead town from where the trains started for the trip east. For he knew that on this night Adam Steele was soon to be moving along this trail in the custody of a United States Marshal named Al Strachen.

And when he heard the sounds of the slow moving wagon, Edge raised the Colt Hartford to his shoulder and waited for the rig to roll into clear moonlit view. Next aligned the rifle sights on the centre of the flatbed driver’s forehead: experienced a moment of surprise at the inconsequential fact that Adam Steele had grown a heavy, predominantly grey beard. But in the moonlight relieved darkness the Virginian was still immediately recognisable as the one time boyishly good looking eastern dude.

A little over six and a half feet tall, with a compact frame clothed as usual on a cold night in a sheepskin coat. On his head a low crowned hat, the wide brim of which shaded a long face with regular features that made him in later life nondescriptly good looking to women: his eyes coal black and his mouth line strangely gentle for such a hard man. The hair under the hat would surely be entirely white by now, without a trace of the red that had been its natural hue. Close to fifty or maybe already past that milestone, the one time boyish good looks were surely now all gone, replaced by a complexion like well-used leather, cracked and discoloured.

Edge waited several stretched seconds for the range to shorten to fifty yards: then he squeezed the trigger of the Colt Hartford. And for an instant after the low toned exchange between the two men aboard the wagon had ended the single report in the stillness of the dark forest seemed to fill the entire world. Then, before the series of diminishing echoes had finished, Strachen was folded belly up over the seat backrest, blood spurting from his brow and gory brain matter spewing through the exit wound in the top of his skull. The horse in the traces and the one hitched on at the rear came to skittish halts. Steele’s wrists above his leather-gloved hands were roped together in front of him but he was able to reach to the side and grasp the reins from the dead man’s knees before they slid off. And a half-formed curse became a grunt of relief when the horse in front of him made no move to bolt. He quickly considered the alternatives: rescue, or a misdirected shot fired by somebody that was gunning for him and had aimed at the wrong man – now was about to correct the fatal error?