Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (19 page)

‘George, you must let it be!’ Rachel implored huskily.

Steele had turned his head to look at Edge who was showing a glinting eyed grin. Guthrie, his expression changing from incredulity to renewed anger had started to swing from the waist to direct his ill feeling back toward his wife.

‘Watch it, Reb!’ Edge rasped and slid his sixgun smoothly from the holster: thumbed back the hammer.

Steele snapped his head around to find that Guthrie had recovered from the effect of the blow and the mind-numbing shock it had triggered. Was now facing him again and bringing up both clawed hands to reach once more for his neck. But the Virginian was in time to duck into a crouch beneath the outstretched talon-like hands. Guthrie vented a roar of harsh laughter and yelled:

‘Not this time, you little squirt!’

Maybe his fingertips brushed Steele’s forehead as the smaller man unfolded so fast it seemed he had been spring-loaded. And the Virginian stepped back and brought up his right gloved hand fisted around the hilt of the knife he had drawn smoothly out of the boot sheath. Guthrie was again gripped by shock and uttered a guttural sound as he came to a rigid halt. And snatched his arms back out of range as Steele moved the knife quickly from side to side: so that perhaps a half dozen times the honed blade came within six inches of the bristled face set in an expression of naked fear. If Guthrie saw that Edge had the Colt levelled from his hip, he showed no reaction to the more distant threat.

‘Easy,’ Steele warned softly as he ceased making the threatening passes with the knife.

Guthrie blinked several times, flapped his mouth open and closed: pathetic in his inability to come to terms with what was happening to him in his own house. Then his confusion was brought to an abrupt and violent end. Rachel had picked up a chair and raised it high. Now brought it crashing down on the skull of her husband as a mixture of emotions gripped her and perhaps gave her a strength she could not normally command. For she delivered the blow with sufficient force to knock the big man senseless where he stood. Then as he crumpled the only sound that came from his slackly gaping mouth was an expelled breath. Next the thuds of his knees, a shoulder and finally his bloodied head as they hit the floorboards were loud enough to cause Steele and Edge to wince as one put away his knife and the other his revolver.

‘Dear God in heaven, I’ve killed him?’ Rachel hurled the chair away and crouched beside the man who breathed noisily in time with the regular rising and falling of his broad chest.

‘I reckon he’s alive, ma’am,’ Steele said evenly. ‘But it could have been otherwise if I’d needed to stop him with the knife – the kind of blind rage he was in.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Or Edge had to do it with a bullet.’

She ran a hand through the bloodied dark hair of her husband, stared at the wet crimson staining her palm and looked up at the two men who seemed to be drained of all emotion. Then tears spilled down her cheeks as she pleaded: ‘That’s why I had to hurt him as I did. When George is in such a state of mind he’s uncontrollable. I’ve always feared that he’s just bound to kill somebody some day.’

‘And that could be you, lady,’ Edge said evenly. ‘I figure he’ll be madder than ever when he wakes up.’

‘No he won’t,’ she contradicted softly, sighed deeply and shook her head ruefully.

‘He’ll be stricken with remorse and he’ll be the best husband a woman could have until the next time he gets in the same condition he was in when he came home this morning.’

Steele looked unconvinced and Edge spoke before the Virginian could press the point:

‘I guess the lady knows her husband pretty well after they’ve been married so long, feller.’

Steele shared a sceptical glance between the woman and Edge, shrugged and then scowled down at the unconscious man. ‘Maybe you’re right, but if I woke up with the kind of pain he’s going to be in, I sure wouldn’t be kindly disposed to whoever hit me.’

Edge turned and moved off the threshold as he growled: ‘Shouldn’t be anything new to him, I figure. Seems to me that even before he got hit so hard he was pretty much of a sorehead.’

CHAPTER • 11

__________________________________________________________________________

AS THEY rode out of the yard and started along the track toward the trail, Steele
asked: ‘Did you ever get married again, Edge? I recall that once you were.’

‘Once I was.’ He re-lit the cigarette that had gone out where it had been angled from the side of his mouth ever since Guthrie threatened violence.

‘She was named Elizabeth? And you and her had a farm, up in the Dakotas someplace, right?’

‘There’s not a thing wrong with your memory, feller.’ Edge was aware of a quizzical sidelong glance directed at him by the man riding on his left and added: ‘No sweat.’

‘How’s that. You don’t want to talk about it, uh?’

Edge shrugged. ‘The way she died – it was as bad as it can get to my way of thinking. And it took a lot of getting over. But the grieving’s all done with now. And I never did meet up with another woman like her.’

‘No two are alike.’ Steele held up a hand to check a reply from Edge. ‘But I know what you mean. Married to her or not when something good with a woman comes to an end you always look for something of the same again, uh?’

‘You got hitched yourself once, didn’t you?’

Steele scratched in his non-existent beard for a few moments. ‘I thought I was married one time. But it turned out that Lucy had a husband already. We ran a grocery store in a one-horse town called White Cross, Texas. That was the first time I made a real hard try to settle down after the war was over.’

‘And you never thought about getting yourself a wife to complete that set up you had on the Trail’s End spread?’

Steele gave a hollow laugh. ‘I reckon more women thought about that than I ever did, Edge.’ Then he shook his head ruefully. ‘The last one to have the notion was the sister of the marshal you shot the other night. But she was killed, too.’

They rode easy in another comfortable silence for several minutes along the trail that skirted the Guthrie place then curved up the slope toward the hillcrest in the east. Every now and then one of them cast a glance back toward the small cluster of buildings surrounded by crop fields and pastureland. But the lethargically moving stock was the only sign of life back there until fresh smoke from the house chimney signalled Rachel was working on the fire: maybe to boil some water to bathe the bloody wound she had inflicted on her husband. Then, from up on the east crest of the valley side they took a final look back at the Guthrie farm before they started to drop down through a wide belt of pines that obscured everything behind and ahead of them beyond more than a hundred yards or so.

It was Steele who ended the long silence to ask: ‘So, what do you have in mind to do now?’

Edge had been deep in reflective thoughts concerned with his doomed attempt to settle down with Elizabeth in the distant Dakotas before the Sioux Uprising wrote a violent end to the dream. And although he heard the query he needed a moment to clear his mind of the long ago past and shift it into the immediate future. ‘To tell you the truth, feller, I haven’t given that too much thought.’

‘Which could be a wise line to take,’ Steele allowed pensively. ‘We’ve both led the kind of lives that showed us if we made any plans then they more often than not only invited grief.’

‘And now those lives are getting to be pretty damn long – in spite of a few fellers who tied to make them a whole lot shorter?’ He pinched out the cigarette and arced it down at the trail.

‘That surely is the truth.’

‘And living from day to day, drifting from one part of the country to another – that kind of existence is for younger men than us wouldn’t you say?’

Steele sighed and confirmed sardonically: ‘I could sure handle it a lot easier when I was younger and no mistake. But with the killing of Al Strachen attached to me, I don’t reckon I’m going to be able to see out my declining years in easy peace and comfort.’

‘It wasn’t you who killed the lawman, feller.’

‘But I was known to be in his custody. And nobody knows it was a man called Edge who cut me loose from him, right?’

‘Can’t argue with that.’

‘So far just the Guthries know we’re riding together until we get to Pine River Junction. But if we’re seen to be some kind of partners when we reach town there could be a whole lot more than that couple inclined to put two and two together. After the telegraph line’s fixed and word gets spread about the killing of Strachen.’

‘Are you saying you figure we should go our separate ways before we get to town, feller?’

Steele shrugged. ‘It makes no difference to me. But if you want to ride on ahead, or hang back, circle around town or whatever, I sure won’t think any less of you.’

Edge said flatly: ‘I don’t give much of a damn what you think of me. But what I think about you is that right now you owe me a favour. And I don’t know of anyone else who’s in that position and just maybe I’ll need to call it in sooner or later. And I won’t be able to do that if we’ve gone our separate ways.’

‘Fine.’

‘Okay.’

‘The same question as before, though.’

‘I guess my memory ain’t so good as yours, feller?’

‘So what have you got it in mind to do now?’ the Virginian re-iterated as he reined in his mount and Edge did likewise.

Both had heard unobtrusive workaday sounds from some distance off and smelled smoke drifting toward them from the same direction: realised they were nearing Pine River Junction, the town that was still hidden beyond the timber perhaps no more than a half mile away.

‘I guess there’ll be some stores there,’ Edge said. ‘And we could use a few basic supplies. But you shouldn’t ride in bold as brass.’

Steele grinned. ‘Maybe your memory has dimmed with advancing years, but it could be you’ve grown a little wiser with age, Edge. Yeah, I reckon you should go on ahead and get what’s needed. And I’ll circle around: wait for you on the trail heading out the other side.’

‘That sounds good,’ Edge allowed.

‘But?’

‘What?’

‘It seemed to me like there was going to be a
but
afterwards. My idea sounds good, but . . ?’

Edge shrugged. ‘But can I trust you to do that? I mean to hang around until I show up with supplies enough to see us through to Sacramento?’

Steele looked mildly affronted. ‘You mentioned that I owe you a favour and I know it. And I’m irked you think I’m the kind of man to run out on his obligations.’

Edge shook his head as he said: ‘You ain’t very tall, are you, feller?’

‘I get by.’ Steele scowled, perplexed. ‘And as long as people don’t call me squirt or some such the way Guthrie did, I can live with my ass being closer to the ground than some other folks.’

‘However tall you are, feller, I never knew they could pile it even that high.’

Steele was becoming increasingly irritated with the other man and demanded through gritted teeth: ‘Just what the hell are you talking about?’

Edge took up the reins and smiled grimly for a moment before he replied: ‘Bullshit, feller: you’re full of it. You wouldn’t run out on a favour owed, I’ll grant you that. But you just might figure you’d be squaring things with me by taking off into the sunset. You on your own and me on mine. Nobody to say we ever rode together except for that farmer and the wife he’s maybe already killed.’

Steele showed a smile as bleak as that of Edge and urged: ‘Get the hell out of here and into Pine River. And you can be sure that if I don’t show up on the other side of town, it won’t be through any fault of mine.’

Edge was impassive when he nodded. ‘Be seeing you, feller.’

Steele tipped his hat with a gloved hand as he replied: ‘You can count on it, buddy.’

Edge started his horse at a walk on the gentle downward slope and looked over his shoulder when he figured he was just about to ride out of sight of Steele. But he had misjudged the distance back along the curving trail or the Virginian had already angled off into the trees to begin his longer trek to skirt around the nearby town. Whichever, he was gone from view.

Two minutes later the Sacramento Turnpike once more ran clear of the timber. Here, unlike on the hill to the other side of the Guthrie place, the pines reached almost to the base of the high ground on one flank of the flat-bottomed valley in which the community of Pine River Junction was spread. In truth, three valleys, for there was a meeting of two narrow defiles angling in from the north east to join this much wider one that stretched away southward.