Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (6 page)

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had opened the door at the rear of the Ramsay Meat Market. And had unwittingly illuminated a killer intent upon claiming his third victim this night. Edge cursed again as he raised a hand and dragged the back of it across his mouth where his lunge to the ground had splashed mud into his face. The woman yelled: ‘Murder! There’s murder being done out here! Wyatt, get your scatter-gun, man!’

The rifleman exploded a second shot that whined over the fence top and found no target close to Edge, jerked on his reins to wheel the horse and thudded his heels into the animal’s flanks. The woman’s scream held the tenor of terror rather than pain before the horse snorted and lunged into a gallop. Edge scrambled to his feet before a man showed in the lighted doorway, pointed a wavering shotgun over the threshold and squeezed the trigger. Buckshot peppered the fence and side of the stable across a ten feet wide alley and the woman, her back pressed against the wall beside the doorway, accused bitterly:

‘It’s too damn late now, you old fool! He’s got clean away.’

‘Damnit, Ruth!’ the man Edge knew to be Wyatt Ramsay complained. ‘You know I ain’t no hot shot with a weapon.’

His scowling wife gestured with a dismissive hand at him and stared fixedly at where Edge peered after the long gone rider. ‘Are you all right, mister? He never – ‘

‘No sweat, ma’am.’ He told the short, broad hipped, generously bosomed woman. Her skinny, buck toothed husband turned to go back inside as he muttered sourly:

‘All this damn trouble! Never does rain but it don’t pour!’

Edge scowled down at his mud-splattered clothing and rasped: ‘It sure has turned out to be a dirty night.’

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CHAPTER • 4

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A SCOWLING Ward Flynt was among the small group of worried citizens that
formed behind the line of stores midway along the south side of Main Street in the persistently falling rain. He carried out his duties as the local lawman to the best he could but just as before, darkness and the sodden ground prevented any kind of useful search for the gunman who had twice shattered the peace and quiet of Eternity tonight. Then early next morning as a watery sun failed to create more than a vague impression of warmth in the damp, wood smoke tainted air, the Eternity marshal returned. And while Edge watched from the yard out back of the Quinn and Son store in the pallid light of the new day the only pieces of evidence Flynt was able to find in the mud of the alley were the two spent shell cases ejected from the repeater rifle. If Wyatt Ramsay’s shotgun blast had drawn blood, there had not been enough of it to visibly stain the sodden ground. Nor was it possible to see if the rider had unwittingly dropped anything incriminating in his hurry to escape. Because the undeveloped area of land between the fence in back of the Main Street stores and another behind a half dozen houses on the start of the California Trail a quarter mile away was littered with trash.

‘Long gone and not a sign to be seen of him,’ Flynt complained bitterly from the other side of the yard fence as he peered forlornly in the direction the gunman had fled. This was eastwards, to where Main Street ended at the meeting of the California and Dodge City Trails, across from the railroad depot. And beyond to the stockyards and out over the flat far distances of the Kansas prairie where, in the clear morning light, the horizon seemed to be further away than usual. ‘Damn shame!’ the tall, heavily built lawman added, sighed and shook his head.

‘I know how you feel, feller,’ Edge said as he advanced across the yard, lit a newmade cigarette and added: ‘I’m as eager as you to know more about that sonofabitch who tried to kill me.’

‘More?’ the ruddy-faced, heavily moustached man countered irritably. ‘It seems to me we don’t know a damn thing about the bastard yet.’

‘He rides a dark coloured horse with a white blaze,’ Edge reminded as he shifted his gaze from the east, swept it over the southward vista and then peered into the west. He knew that the terrain to the north, that view obstructed from here by the buildings of the town, was just as flat and as almost featureless as elsewhere.

‘There’s that,’ Flynt allowed dully. ‘But I can’t go around questioning God knows how many men who ride a dark horse marked that way.’

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A train whistle sounded from far off in the east and they both peered in that direction: watched as a smudge of smoke out along the single track railroad became more clearly defined and the solid bulk of the front end of a locomotive took shape beneath it. Flynt automatically checked his watch which, Edge had noticed, was something a lot of people habitually did in this railroad town whenever a train was heard to approach.

‘The Wednesday freight,’ the lawman announced and turned to move away. ‘You better be sure to look out for yourself, Edge. The way he tried to kill you, that guy must figure you saw something more important than the markings on his horse. He maybe reckons you’ll be able to recognise him if you ever run into him again.’

‘You could be right, marshal.’ Edge’s tone implied no sarcasm in response to the concerned man’s stating of the obvious.

Flynt raised a hand in farewell and started toward the depot then paused to look back when Edge said:

‘If he’s a hired gun who came to Eternity to kill Shelby, it’s likely he’d be a stranger. And there ain’t too many of that kind in town at this time of year, I’d guess?’

Flynt’s expression revealed that he had not considered this obvious possibility. Then he gave a non-committal grunt, turned and continued on his way with lengthened strides. Edge crossed the yard, stepped into the rear of the Quinn and Son premises and drank a second cup of coffee while he finished smoking the cigarette. Then heard a key rattle in the lock of the front door and went into the store as Roy Sims entered to offer his customary less than fulsome morning greeting. He was by nature a mournful man. Past sixty, with a slight build and a pale, indoor complexion, he had a long and narrow face with small, jet black eyes and a large hooked nose, badly fitted false teeth and a full head of unkempt hair as dark as his eyes. He was possibly the most ugly man in Eternity and maybe the best dressed in the elegant city style of clothing he invariably chose to wear on every occasion.

He spoke a few terse words of token concern about what he had heard of Edge’s brushes with violence last night and then voiced his usual daily query. ‘Is there any news of a buyer for the property yet, sir?’ It was a title he automatically gave to any man in the store, from ingrained habit rather than out of respect for any individual.

‘I’m afraid not, feller.’

Sims looked even more morose as he removed his expensive astrakhan-trimmed topcoat and immaculately shaped derby and hung them carefully on a stand near the doorway. Then the approach of the train was signalled again with another shrill blast of the whistle and he announced: ‘It’s Wednesday, so that’ll be the westbound freight. Stops at the depot here, but there won’t be any passengers getting off.’ His doleful toned 31

implication was that no passengers on the train obviously meant there would be no potential purchaser for the store.

Edge headed for the door and invited: ‘There’s a pot of fresh-made coffee on the stove, feller.’

‘I’m most grateful to you, sir.’ Sims shuffled back into the parlour toting a large, square, flat rigid framed bag that Edge knew contained artist’s materials. For the man’s favourite pastime was creating with oil paint his vivid impressions of heavenly scenes, which was what he wanted to spend all his time doing as soon as he was able to give up minding the store. ‘You’ll be back when, sir? In the event somebody needs to talk business with you, perhaps?’

‘I won’t be hard to find in a small town like this one.’ Edge managed to avoid making the response through gritted teeth as he stepped out into the bright and cold morning, reflecting that for him regular time keeping was one of the more irritating aspects of running a store.

A small town was precisely what Eternity was. Its two thoroughfares comprised the trail from the east to the west and that was named for Dodge City in one direction and California in the other and a spur that was Main Street which curved north west after cutting off at the meeting of the trails. This became the Wyoming Turnpike after it crossed the Eternity River by way of a plank bridge. There was also a short, unnamed, dead end street that angled off to the right halfway up Main Street. On the California Trail was the row of small houses, in one of which Roy Sims lived, and on Dodge was the depot and the stockyard. The railroad track and the accompanying line of telegraph poles ran parallel with the trails a hundred feet to the south of them. Except for what was known locally as the top end of Main, before it crossed the river bridge, the curving street was lined for most of its length by business premises, as many empty as were occupied after the bubble of Eternity’s predicted boom burst. Behind Edge, at the top end of the street as he headed around the sharpest curve, were the fieldstone church and marker-featured cemetery next to the clapboard school. And across from these a line of larger and better quality houses than the shacks on the California Trail. Then some offices, including that of the lawyer Arthur Colbert, next to Joel Gannon’s funeral parlour and several vacant premises that had never been occupied. Stores supplying the day-to-day necessities and a few luxuries for country town dwellers and out of town ranchers and farmers flanked the central stretch of the street. Vacant lots were not abundant here, but there were several empty stores. The law office and jailhouse was in this section of town, on the corner of the unnamed street that dead-ended at the house of the newly dead Childs father and son. On the opposite corner 32

was the office of the
Eternity Post Despatch
, immediately opposite Dan Paine’s livery stable: the area where Charles and Ethan Shelby had been shot down midway between these two buildings. A wagon repair yard was next to the livery, facing a coffee shop, a gunsmith, a bakery and two empty stores. Then came the Washington Memorial Theatre, a vacant lot and the Second Chance Saloon, across from the Eternity Hotel that was the only genuine two story building on Main Street. Next door to this was the First National Bank of Kansas that was in the vee where the street cut off at the meeting of the trails. The commercial buildings of the town were a mixture of brick and timber or both, almost all of them fronted by a porch or a sidewalk that was more often covered than not. Just the second floors of the hotel and the Childs house, the wooden tower of the church and the clapboard false front of the theatre reached above the single story rooflines of all the other buildings in town. Although the rain had eased off during the night and the day had dawned chill but bright, the town nonetheless smelled strongly of damp. And Edge was reminded yet again of the unpleasant taint of mildew in the air that had filled his nostrils to give him his first impression of a town in a state of decay when he stepped down from the train Sunday last.

Although it was still too early in the day for most businesses to be open, there was a scattering of obviously excited people on the street: all of them heading in the same direction as Edge. But when he halted outside the wide double door entrance of the livery, everyone else continued to converge on the depot where the westbound freight train would shortly arrive. If the engineer was able to coax enough power from a noisily failing locomotive that sounded less likely to haul its burden of boxcars and flatbeds into the town the closer it came to Eternity.

Dan Paine had a bright eyed, strong looking chestnut gelding for sale and Edge had been considering buying the animal ever since he realised he would need to spend more than a few days in this town. Because being without a saddle horse was a situation he had promised himself never to be in again: a vow he made after he was forced to do a considerable amount of walking in the vicinity of an Arizona town called Dalton Springs. But Paine was one of the local businessmen who had not yet opened up his premises. So Edge moved on down the street and became a part of the loose-knit group of townspeople gathering at the depot that consisted of a long, yellow brick building divided into various sections behind a low platform of warped and sun bleached planks. Some faces he recognised and he tacitly acknowledged those men and women who greeted him. Others eyed him surreptitiously while they tried to conceal their interest in a man who was a relative stranger to their community: and an unlikely looking one to have acquired a haberdashery-become-a-tailoring establishment in their town. 33

He reached the depot just as the train began to struggle alongside the platform, the shuddering locomotive angrily hissing steam out from more valves than it obviously should do if it was running at its best. For stretched seconds he felt strangely disconcerted and then was able to pin down the reason for this uncomfortable feeling when he recognised that most people at the depot were merchants. Which made him one with them: the owner of a store in this small mid-western town a long way from anywhere else who had come to meet a train. The arrival of which, although it was a regular event at least once every day, was arguably one of the few interesting experiences to be had in a place like Eternity. Joel Gannon asked: ‘Are you expecting a shipment of tailoring supplies, Mr Edge?’