Silver in the Blood (8 page)

"They miss us," the Zulu said anxiously.

"They'll be back," Edge answered. "Any more?"

"Two."

"Get them."

As the Zulu trotted back to the shack, Edge broke open the other kegs and loaded them into the back of Martha Wilder's wagon. Then he hauled himself aboard and began to sprinkle the powder from one keg around him. Anatali appeared at the rear of the wagon and Edge told him to break open the final kegs and hand them up. He emptied the contents of five kegs into a pile in Martha Wilder's bathtub which he stood in the center of the wagon, wedged between the bunk bed and the mirrored dresser. Then he took a sheet from the bed, tore off a strip and soaked it in kerosene from the lamp. He buried one end in the pile of powder and tied the other end to the rail behind the driver's seat. He emptied what remained of the lamp oil over the broken kegs and jumped down from the wagon, holding a carton of supplies which he tossed into the rear of the bullion wagon. The Zulu continued to watch him in silence as Edge climbed into the bullion wagon and used the butt of the Colt to unfasten one of the crates.

Edge looked at the neat top layer of silver ingots dispassionately, sensed watching eyes and turned to see the Zulu peering at him, testing the point of the
assegai
with the tip of a finger.

"You've got to give a little to get a little," Edge said softly as the sound of returning horses vibrated in the air. He lifted out one bar and knocked the slat of the crate back into place.

"Some men do a lot for so much silver," Anatali said.

Edge sighed and jumped to the ground. "Some men would have let near seven feet of brawn with no brains walk back into the pass."

The Zulu considered this comment for several seconds, then smiled. "I sorry."

"Free lesson," Edge answered as he moved towards one of the outcrops guarding the area of the mine. "Don't ever be that. Just be right."

"I don't, understand," Anatali said as he followed the white man.

Edge spat into' the dirt. "Being right means never having to say you're sorry."

Both men peered down the slope and saw the group of horsemen clustered on the trail. The red hair and beard of Jake Tabor marked him out like a signal beacon.

"The lady's in real trouble," Edge murmured as he spotted Martha Wilder astride a horse ridden by the outlaw named Keene. "That guy's no gentleman."  

"Hey, you up there!" one of the gang shouted. "We know you're there."

"Figured you did," Edge shouted back.

"We want the silver. Wilder will want his daughter back."

"Thee will exchange with us?" Tabor sounded like a hellfire and brimstone preacher opening a sermon.

"She in one piece?",Edge demanded."

"Bruised is all," Keene answered and whispered in Martha's ear.

"I am all right," the woman shouted. Her tone indicated that her mental health was in a much worse condition than her physical.

"One man brings her half-way up here," Edge instructed. "We'll come down with the wagons. First one will have the shipment aboard. Your man gets aboard and the woman gets on the second wagon. I hold a gun on your man while the second wagon passes and heads west along the trail. Then I drive the silver down to you."

There was some three hundred feet between the rocks and the trail. The two sides had to shout to each other.

"I will dictate the terms of the exchange!" Tabor thundered in fury.

Edge spat. "So kill the girl and let's
shoot it out."

Anatali grunted and pressed the point of his spear into the small of Edge's back. Edge looked over his shoulder, flashing his teeth in a sneer. ''So stick me and run the goddamn show yourself," he hissed,

The Zulu eased the pressure.

"All right, have it thy way," Tabor shouted up the slope and said something to Keene, who heeled his horse, forward.

"No, Tabor! Edge called. "Thee is the man."

A murmur of anger rose from the group.

"Thee know who I am?" Tabor shouted.

"Bother thee?"

"Do not mock me!" the outlaw leader roared.

"You coming or do I start shooting?" Edge called with impatience.

There was a stir of movement among the outlaws, then Tabor urged his horse forward to bring it alongside Keene's mount. The big man with the beard plucked Martha Wilder out of the saddle and swung her across his own horse as if she were as light as a bag of feathers. Then he muttered something to his men and started up the slope.

"Let's move," Edge hissed to the Zulu and they both ran to the wagons.

"What I supposed to do?" Anatali pleaded as they climbed into their respective seats.

"You heard the plan. Do like I said, then play it by ear."

"Ear?"

"Listen for the explosion, lunkhead. When it comes start whipping the team like you hated all horses."

He clucked his own team forward, pulling them into a tight turn to head towards the gap between the rocks.

"What about you?" Anatali called out with concern.

Edge rested the silver bar on a shelf behind his seat, clamped the Winchester between his knees and started to roll a cigarette one-handed. "Obliged for your concern," he muttered, not loud enough for the Zulu to hear him as he steered the wagon between the rocks.

"Hold it right there!" Tabor called. He had halted his horse at a half-way point up the slope and was pressing a revolver against Martha Wilder's right ear. They were close enough for Edge to see the stark terror visible in the woman's unbeautiful face. He hauled on the reins.

"Something?" he called, hanging the cigarette from the side of his mouth and taking a match from his pocket.

"How do I know the silver is in that wagon?" Tabor demanded, forcing the woman to bend her head into her shoulder as he applied heavy pressure to the revolver.

Edge reached through the opening in the canvas and brought out the silver bar. He tossed it in a shallow arc and it hit the ground, bounced, and came to rest between the front hooves of Tabor's horse. Tabor glanced down at it but did not remove the gun muzzle from Martha Wilder's head.

"Thee may come down. But slowly. I still do not know whether to trust thee."

Edge urged the team forward, his lips splitting to show a cold grin that was backed up by the glittered slits of his eyes, "You sure as hell are going to get a bang finding out," he thought to himself.

"HOPE you didn't hurt that high-priced body of yours when, you fell out, Miss Martha?" Edge said softly, touching his hat brim as he halted the wagon. The cigarette bobbed from the corner of his mouth like some loose-fitting extension of his face.

The woman gave a low, anguished cry as Anatali swung his wagon to pass the first one.

"Just, bruised as we said," Tabor answered for her, his flat eyes boring into Edge's face.

"It's a hard world," Edge said, striking the match and touching it to the end of his cigarette. "You find that out when your butt hits it a hefty crack."

The second wagon stopped alongside the first. Edge blew out the match. His other hand rested on the butt of the holstered Colt. Tabor released his grip on the woman and took the pistol from her head.

"Go with the nigger," he instructed.

His gun was a Navy Model Remington. The hole in its muzzle was like a third, flat eye, much more threatening than the other two glaring out from under, the slope of his brow. The woman slid from the horse, seemed on the point of collapsing when her feet touched the ground, but fought against it. Anatali leaned down and hoisted her bodily on to the seat beside him. Edge blew out smoke and gave a slight nod. The Zulu muttered gentle commands to his team and the wagon moved forward.

"Hey, Jake!" Keene called from below.

Edge knew from his tone what the ugly little fat man was going to say. Tabor was too close and too tense to notice the difference in height of the wagons. From a greater distance it was obvious that one rode lower on its springs under the weight of a million dollars worth of silver bullion—the wrong one. As Tabor's attention was distracted by the shout, Edge snatched the cigarette from his mouth and pushed its glowing tip into the knot of the kerosene-soaked sheet behind him. Then, in a streak of fluid motion, he lashed with the reins at the backs of the team, kicked off the brake and lunged off the seat, Winchester grasped in one hand. With his other hand he grabbed a handful of Jake Tabor's flowing beard and jerked viciously at it. The big man roared with mixed pain and surprise and was wrenched sideways from his mount as Edge released him and fell hard into the saddle of his own horse, trotting behind the bullion wagon.

"Forget the fireworks!" Edge yelled. "Move it! Like quicksilver!"

As the gang held their fire, afraid of hitting Tabor, Anatali let out a blood-curdling Zulu war cry that did more to frighten the horses into speed than the lash of the whip across their backs. Then, as the speeding wagon rushed headlong down the slope towards them, the outlaws wheeled their horses to run out of its path, too panicked to get off any shots. Edge snatched a glance behind him and groaned his displeasure as he saw the second wagon, its canvas aglow with suffused light from the flaming fuse, only a few yards away. The trained team, even driverless and wide-eyed with terror, was keeping on station. Edge took aim, held it and waited for the Zulu to wrench the bullion wagon into a shuddering turn onto the trail. Then, clinging to his mount with his knees, he snapped off two shots. Each of the horses died instantly, fountaining blood from wounds between their eyes. As they dropped dead in their tracks, the ends of the shafts slammed into the hard ground, snapped with a tremendous crack and the wagon tumbled end over end down the slope.

One outlaw and his horse were crushed into a single bloodied pulp as the end of the wagon bounced onto them. Then the flame found the shower of powder thrown up by the crashing roll of the wagon and the explosion brought searing death and mind-shattering agony to more than half the remaining members of Jake Tabor's gang.

A piece of blazing canvas wrapped itself around the head of a fleeing man and dripped flame on to his clothes, sending him screaming into the pass to die as a human torch. Four more were blasted with their horses into the ground, shattered bones piercing through torn flesh and scorched clothing. The iron rim of a wheel swished through the air to decapitate a man whose headless body remained upright in the saddle for long seconds as his horse bolted. A skimming piece of jagged metal from the bathtub cut a bloody path across a face, gouging out the eyes, the impact altering its course so that it ricocheted into the back of another  and with sufficient force to dig deep enough for the lung. Two riders were unseated by the blast to fall beneath the trampling hooves of their companions' horses which reared in panic.

In the few seconds the explosion took to spread, its havoc, the bullion wagon rocketed away, the noise forcing even greater speed from the team than Anatali's voice and whip had produced. Edge, his ears ringing with the mighty crash of exploding powder, his body pressed forward by the blast, drew his razor and slashed through the reins holding his horse at a gallop behind the wagon. Then, using the two cut ends of the reins, he swung away and then past the speeding wagon, getting ahead of it to lead the way, catching a glimpse of Martha Wilder's sob-wracked body as she clung with both hands to the enormous Zulu.

After they had put two miles between themselves and the scene of the explosion, Edge held up his hand and brought it down slowly. Anatali understood the message and hauled back on the team, bringing them to a gradual halt. When they had finally stopped, the horses snorted, eyes still big and round and red with fear as steam rose from their sweating backs and they began to feel the pain of lather stinging in the wounds opened by the whip. Anatali put a gentle, protective arm around the shoulders of the sobbing woman. Edge looked up at her with distaste.

"You like Jake Tabor or something, Miss Wilder?" he snapped.

The harshness of his tone cut through her emotions and she turned her tear-swollen face toward him, showing pain and bewilderment.

"So stop making noises like you're missin’ him," Edge told her. "We got enough problems without a wailing woman to add to them."

She sniffed back her sobs and sneered at him. "What kind of an animal on two legs are you?" she demanded.

What she lacked in physical attractions, she made up for in spirit. Her thick body was quivering with rage towards Edge.

"The kind your Pa figured could get you and this wagon-load of trouble to San Francisco," Edge answered evenly. "I don't count on no help from you. But the black bouncer there has his uses. I'd be obliged if you'd leave off spooning with him so he can concentrate on his job."

Shock leapt into the woman's small eyes and she sprang away from the Zulu as if he had bitten her. Anatali's face broke out in an expression of ugly rage.

"You treat Miss Martha with respect, Mr. Edge!" he commanded.

Edge eyed him with contempt as he rested a loose hand on the butt of the Colt. "Respect has to be earned, feller," he said. "Another free lesson. Now, let's move again.  Off the trail. Tabor won't let it lay like it fell. We've got to throw him."

As Edge heeled his horse forward, shoulder blades itchy in anticipation of the Zulu's spear, Martha Wilder bit her lip against the urge to expel the residue of her emotion and slid to the far end of the wagon seat. And Anatali fought the anger back into his belly and jerked the reins for the team to follow the white man's tracks off the trail on to a diagonal course across the floor of the valley.

Back at the pass, Jake Tabor surveyed the scene of destruction and gave vent to his feelings with a stream of profanity that called upon every force for good and evil in heaven and hell to bring down vengeance upon the man who had tricked him. He alone had escaped injury, save for
a grazed elbow resulting from his fall. All the seven men still alive on the trail were either cut or bruised on the face and body, some with minor burns as well. They waited in nervous silence, huddled in a group as the cursing man with the red beard led his horse down the slope towards them, a single bar of silver in one hand.

"We were tricked," he said unnecessarily as he halted before them, glowering.

One of the gang members cleared his throat, then shuffled his feet. The graze across his high forehead and his singed eyebrows were not the sole signs of injury. An earlier wound was marked by a bandage on his, right hand: a grubby dressing covering the bloodied stumps of two fingers.

"I am in no mood for conversation, Murray," Tabor thundered in warning, his face a mask of furious hate. "Least of all with thee who survived when my son was killed in an ambush."

Murray's nervousness intensified but he steeled himself to have his say as Tabor turned the silver ingot slowly in his hands, then suddenly peered closely at its stamped marking "I recognized the guy!" Murray stammered. "The one who blew us up, Jake."

Tabor's eyes were gleaming as he looked up from the silver. "And I recognize the silver," he whispered hoarsely, speaking to himself. "I had wondered why Mason Wilder kept it hidden in Virginia City so long after he mined it." He looked up into the bewildered faces of his men, raising his voice to a shout. "Adele did not know where the silver went because it was stolen from the man Warner. This is that metal!"

He held the ingot aloft.

"The guy who…"

"Hold thy peace, Murray!" Tabor roared, swinging up into his saddle. "His name is of no consequence. To catch and kill him is all that concerns me."

He wheeled his horse.

"I don't know his name." Murray insisted, ignoring the pitying glances of Keene and the other men who knew he was courting disaster by ignoring Tabor's warning. "But I know he's the man that shot Miller."

Jake Tabor swung in the saddle, his face a dark tableau of smoldering hatred and rage that seemed to drive Murray back from him with a kind of invisible energy. With the stench of death drifting around him in the twilight of the day, Murray sensed his own doom and his lips moved in a silent prayer recalled from childhood. But he did not die. For Tabor looked along the trail into the darkness that had swallowed up the silver and the killer of his son. And the hate he had shown to Murray spread from his face to taint every fiber of his powerful body, every fragment of it directed towards Edge.

"If any of thee kill that man, so will thee die, suffering the full weight of the revenge I have in my heart for my son's murderer."

He punctuated this thunderous promise with a mighty smack on the flank of his mount which sent the horse galloping away like a cannonball. His men streamed after him. Their forgotten comrades watched them with dead eyes.