Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (17 page)

Edge dug out the makings and began to roll a cigarette as they entered a darker area of the timber where the canopy of trees formed a high roof arching over the narrow spur trail and hid the moon. ‘Except for our independence.’

‘Hell, we’re not going to get married.’

Edge showed a narrow eyed grin. ‘Even if we are real engaging fellers, uh?’

Steele dropped his hand away from his beard and drawled evenly: ‘It seems to me that we’re already totally divorced from reality.’

CHAPTER • 10

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THE TWO men reached the abandoned and derelict shack of a lone prospector a few
minutes after the start of a sudden summer thunderstorm and a powerful wind had begun to hurl sheets of stinging rain into their faces. So they were sodden to the skin by the time they had attended to their horses, stabling the unsaddled animals in the mouth of the old mine workings, the roof of which had caved in some thirty feet back from the entrance. The log cabin had long been deserted by the miner but it was sturdily built and had withstood the passage of time well enough to still have a sound roof and walls. These adequately kept out the violent weather once they blocked the door-less doorway and glassless windows with old timber props.

It took a while to get the fire started in the rusted, pot bellied stove with damp kindling: and longer for the flames to blaze to a degree of heat sufficient to boil a pot of water. They had no ingredients for hot food so ate jerked beef, sourdough bread and stale cheese from Edge’s trail rations moistened with fresh made coffee. Then they bedded down and despite the whine of the gusting wind, the lashing of the rain, the sounds of the violently moving trees on all sides and the occasional crash of thunder and flash of lightning, they slept relatively undisturbed.

Awoke after dawn to a day that was brightly sunlit: warm and fresh smelling from the rainstorm. The fire was easy to re-kindle with wood that had dried all night inside the shack and Steele started coffee to heat while Edge went outside to check on their horses. Then Edge shaved and sat back, smoking a cigarette as he watched Steele go to work at removing the beard. Saw the Virginian, who was a head shorter than himself and weighed just about proportionately less for his height, now looked more than a year or so younger than he suspected him to be.

When they were saddling the horses, Edge asked: ‘Did you have a good reason outside of vanity for taking off your whiskers, feller?

Steele shrugged. ‘I had that beard for a long time. And I reckon some people who only knew me with it might not recognise me now it’s gone.’

Edge swung up astride his gelding, watched Steele check his cinch and get into the saddle then chided: ‘With or without it, you look just as ugly to me.’

Steele laughed and heeled his horse forward. ‘I wish I’d known that last night. Then I wouldn’t have felt the need to stay awake, fearful for my honour.’

The day remained bright and warm as they made steady progress along the spur trail that cut a constantly twisting and turning loop around the northern head of what Steele said was the Stony River Valley. Passed some widely scattered lumber camps and mine workings where it was plain nobody had been in many years. The town to the south that Steele knew to be still inhabited was never in sight at any time.

‘Did you have a special reason to come this way that time you want to Brogan Falls, feller?’ Edge asked as they crossed a shallow, fast running stream not far from its source.

‘I went there on the turnpike. But since I wasn’t in any hurry to get back I rode this trail because I needed the time and some peace and quiet to do some thinking. Can’t recall what about now.’

‘You tried everything you could to make a go of things on the spread, uh?’

‘As hard as I ever tried to do anything else,’ Steele answered reflectively. ‘Put in some long hours and did my damndest not to look for trouble. But . . . ‘ He made to scratch in his non-existent beard and shrugged as he altered the motion of his glove hand to gently massage the area of skin on his jaw that was lighter coloured than the rest of his element burnished, time lined face. ‘Seems it wasn’t meant to be.’

Edge nodded. ‘What it is for some of us, I guess. Ain’t no answer to it. You just have to roll with the punches and keep your head down and your ass covered when the lead starts to fly.’

‘Right,’ Steele said with a melancholy look that matched his tone. ‘There are just so many times a man can try again when he hasn’t succeeded at first. Bound to come a day when he’s battered his head against the wall so often he’s near beaten his brains out.’

Edge massaged his right temple. ‘I know the feeling. So maybe we can both quit trying to teach each other lessons we already learned from experience? Maybe we forgot them on occasion, but they’re still lodged in there someplace.’

‘I reckon so.’

‘One other thing?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Did you make any money out of the Trail’s End spread?’

Steele patted the front of his sheepskin coat. ‘I’ve got a few dollars in my jacket under here, Edge. Everything else is tied up in the place and the stock on it. No chance of getting at that now. So wherever I head I won’t be travelling first class. And if you reckoned to collect a reward for – ‘

‘Forget it, feller,’ Edge cut in grimly. ‘I always figured the only worthwhile reward I was ever going to get will be in heaven.’

‘Likewise,’ Steele growled. ‘So we’ll always be out of luck. Since the way I see it, we’ve both done more than enough to reserved our places in hell.’

It was early afternoon before they returned to the Sacramento Turnpike with its row of telegraph poles. The wire they supported maybe no longer dead. But there was no sight or sound of pursuit. Nor any other travellers heading in the opposite direction on any sort of business. Until after sundown. Then, in the early evening, they needed to delay lightning a fire at their night camp a few feet back from the turnpike when a fast moving rig was heard making rattling progress from out of the east into the west. And both of them moved back close enough to the trail to watch a stage with a four horse team clatter past: heard voices raised in irritable argument between the passengers inside the Concord and the driver and the man riding shotgun up on the box seat.

‘Sounds as if they’re running late and some people don’t like the discomfort of making up the time,’ Steele suggested.

‘It’s going to be a long ride and a lot of discomfort to Brogan Falls,’ Edge said. Steele shook his head and corrected as he peered after the stage: ‘There’s a way station midway between Brogan Falls and Pine River. We rode around it on the spur. But it wouldn’t have been much comfort to a wanted man like me.’

He pointed up at the telegraph line. ‘In the event the wire’s been fixed.’

‘Look on the bright side, feller.

‘You reckon that there’s some kind of bright side to all this?’

‘This Pine River place where you ain’t known can’t be so far off if the halfway stage stop is in back of us. And even if they’ve already fixed the telegraph wire, maybe you not having the beard any more will mean nobody there will – ‘

Steele swung around and started back into the timber, toward where they had been interrupted in making camp. ‘Could be, if we don’t get blasted into that hell you were talking about before we get there.’

They had a cold supper, eaten mostly in silence and then Steele lost no time in bedding down. But some ten minutes later, just as Edge had slid under his covers with the Winchester on one side of him and the second Colt Hartford on the other, the Virginian said:

‘Don’t mind me.’

Edge ignored the apologetic tone and answered wearily: ‘I figure you can mind yourself.’

‘You know what I mean, damnit!’ Steele was obviously pleased to have the chance to qualify his apology with a harsh tone. ‘I’m sorry if I’m not in any kind of mood to see the bright side of much. I guess I’ve still got the prison blues from my time in the Broadwater jail, brooding on the rope that was waiting for me back east.’

Edge was unsure if the Virginian saw his upraised hand when he allowed: ‘No sweat, feller.’

The next morning both men professed not to be hungry and elected to swallow some canteen water instead of making coffee to sluice the bad taste of a night’s sleep out of their throats.

So they were able to make an early start and the sun had been up no more than a few minutes when, an hour after they set off, Edge sniffed deeply and Steele emerged from a contemplative mood, looked hard at the other man and saw him peering fixedly ahead. Then the Virginian caught the same scent of wood smoke in the air as Edge and muttered:

‘I reckon if that’s hell we’re getting close to, it ain’t so heavy on the brimstone as some preachers pretend.’

Edge pinched out and tossed away the cigarette he had been smoking and growled: ‘I figure we both deserve some luck of the good kind for a change.’

They rode around a bend in the trail, emerged from the thick expanse of pine trees and showed matching grins of surprise and eager anticipation as they reined in their geldings. This as they surveyed a broad valley spread eastwards for as for as they could see to a ridge a mile or so distant.

There was more timber to the north and south, but a large enough un-wooded area between for a good looking, well tended farm of maybe fifty acres to be established on the level terrain between the forest on three sides and the foot of a grassy slope on the fourth. Four crop fields, a fruit orchard and two pastures were spread to the north of where the turnpike took a gentle curve across the southern boundary of the property before it straightened out toward the distant slope. There it climbed and went over the lower, northern end of the ridge.

A modest farmhouse and three outbuildings were sited in the middle of the property, approached from the trail by a wagon wide track. At this summer time of the year the crop fields were filled with growing wheat and corn. And a dozen head of beef, a milk cow, a small herd of sheep and a single goat grazed the meadows. The animals comprised the only tangible signs of life on the place at this early hour of the day. But the smoke that rose through the still air in a solid vertical line from the fieldstone chimney at one end of the single story timber house signalled somebody was up and about inside.

‘Does it remind you of home?’ Edge asked.

‘What used to be home,’ Steele corrected ruefully and shook his head. ‘You could put this place down on mine a dozen times over and still have room enough to build a small town.’

Edge signalled for the Virginian to move on ahead of him and invited: ‘You want to pay your respects to a fellow landowner? Maybe talk us into a decent breakfast?’

Steele started forward and Edge saw a faraway look in the man’s coal black eyes. Decided that whatever else he said, the Virginian was still capable of feeling pangs of disappointment at how fate had yet again cheated him out of the substitute birthright he had fashioned for himself in the Providence River Valley.

There were no fences on the place outside of those that enclosed a corral and the meadows to keep the stock off the crops. But such men as these two did not even think about taking a catty-cornered shortcut across the carefully tended fields to the farm buildings. Instead they rode along the trail to where the track cut off and followed this to the yard. Which was one part hard packed dirt with a well at the centre and a smaller area of rock garden in which many kinds of heather with foliage of subdued colours flourished from as much careful attention as the fields. A few well fed foraging chickens paid little attention to the two horses and their riders as they reached the end of the track where the men swung out of their saddles and hitched their reins to the rear of a flatbed wagon parked between the well and the barn from which emanated a rich aroma of stored fruit. The door of the farmhouse between two sparklingly clean windows hung with pure white lace curtains was opened before the newcomers had covered half the distance from the wagon. And a middle-aged woman of well scrubbed appearance in a freshly laundered floral dress and a starched waist apron as white as the window curtains showed herself. She was short of stature, broad from hips to shoulders and had mostly silver hair. Her fleshy, red cheeked face was featured with brown eyes and a rosebud mouth.

‘If you gents have come to see George I have to tell you he’s still in town,’ she said in a luck-lustre tone that did not match anything about her or the place. ‘And I don’t know when he’ll be back.’ She stepped over the threshold and directed a bleak eyed look toward the trail where it went from sight over the ridge to the east.

The gently smiling Virginian took off his hat as he answered: ‘My name’s Adam Steele, ma’am. This here is Edge.’

Edge tipped his hat, his expression impassive.

Steele went on: ‘We’re both of us strangers to these parts so we don’t know your husband. Or you son, maybe – George?’

‘My husband is what he is.’ She only now thought to go through the feminine motions of patting her highly shined hair and running a nervous hand over each rubicund cheek as she surveyed her male callers. ‘George Guthrie he’s called. My name’s Mrs Rachel Guthrie. We ain’t got no son. Nor no daughter. And there ain’t no hands on the place at this time of year. So if you’re in a robbing frame of mind, you’ll have easy pickings. But I should tell you there’s not much to steal. Except for some –‘