Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (7 page)

‘Not me, feller, but maybe Quinn ordered some new stock in trade for the store.’

The tall and overweight, twinkling eyed undertaker nodded sagely. ‘As the new owner of that place after the untimely passing of the last one, I guess you’re still finding your feet, so to speak.’

‘I guess maybe I am,’ Edge agreed.

‘I don’t suppose Roy Sims is too much interested in his old place since he sold out?

Not that he was very much before in the recent past. The way his head’s gotten to be so full of all those pious imaginings of his.’

Edge confined his response to a slight shrug as the failing locomotive vented a forceful hiss of steam. Then its brakes squealed and a final blast of the whistle sounded as it shuddered to a halt at the head of a line of ten clanking flatbeds and boxcars and a caboose.

The worried looking engineer clambered hurriedly down and crouched to peer beneath the rasping, wheezing, steam leaking engine. Travis Hicks, the depot manager, emerged from the telegraph office and frowned as he scuttled to join the hunkered down man. While most of the group of townspeople converged on an enclosed car near the middle of the train and waited impatiently for the elderly brakeman to swing down from the caboose and amble along the platform to join them.

The marshal had followed Hicks out of the office and explained to Edge: ‘That’s our boxcar. Anything for Eternity is always shipped in that one.’

‘Not everything every time, Ward,’ a woman contradicted excitedly as she came out of the depot building through a doorway marked
LADY PASSENGERS ONLY.
She was tall and slender and had chestnut coloured hair that fell to midway down her back outside the bulky coat she wore against the cold of the early morning air.

‘How’s that, Beth?’ the lawman called to her as she quickened her pace toward the rear end of the train.

34

After a fleeting glimpse before she turned to hurry off, Edge saw she was thirty or so and attractive without being conventionally pretty, her somewhat gaunt face dominated by large blue eyes. From a slight family resemblance and the way they traded their given names, Edge assumed they were brother and sister for he knew for certain that a woman called Beth Flynt worked at the newspaper office.

‘Reckon she means him,’ Edge said as he noticed before the marshal did the man who had captured her attention.

He had risen from among a stack of timber planks loaded on a flatbed wagon two ahead of the caboose. Something over thirty, six feet tall and nearly as thin as one of the telegraph poles that lined the track, he was dressed in black from his battered Stetson to his scuffed riding boots: shirt, vest, pants and a mismatched jacket. He did not wear a topcoat for protection against the weather that must have been bitingly cold to a man riding an open car through the November night. He waved cheerfully to the woman coming toward him then ducked briefly out of sight to gather up his belongings and tossed them to the platform before he jumped down beside the bedroll, saddlebags and rifle: no saddle.

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ Flynt growled after he did a long double take at the couple now locked in a close embrace, alternately kissing and trading fast spoken words. ‘If that ain’t Clay Warner come back to town after so long away!’

The marshal looked like he wanted to hurry down the side of the train after his sister, but he held back, maybe dissuaded by their uninhibited display of affection. Edge muttered ruefully: ‘Whoever he is, he don’t look like the kind of feller who’d be interested in buying a store.’

‘Clay was making a living bounty hunting the last time I heard anything of him,’ Flynt said. ‘He was my deputy for a spell a few years back, until the wanderlust got to him. I didn’t know he was headed back this way, but it’s sure that Beth did. She and him are old friends. Like you can see for yourself, uh?’

The car that interested most of the people at the depot had been opened up and the brakeman who had clambered aboard paused for a moment in the doorway. Glowered at Warner and Beth as they strolled by beyond the eager group, the newly arrived man weighed down with his gear, the woman clinging firmly to his arm and smiling lovingly up at him.

‘Just where in tarnation did you spring from, mister?’ the railroadman demanded, angry that an illegal passenger had escaped his vigilance and stolen a free ride.

‘Back at the water stop this sick sounding train made at Scranton Tanks,’ Warner answered grimly. ‘But that’s no damn skin off your nose, buddy. Though there were times when it felt like the lousy wind and rain were tearing it off my entire face.’

35

Some of the people clustered at the open boxcar saw the man in black for the first time as the sour-toned exchange took place. And many of them turned to peer fixedly at Warner with the same kind of ill feeling as the brakeman. Which was an attitude far removed from that of Ward Flynt as the lawman extended his right hand to be shaken by the again broadly smiling Warner. The two men traded the platitudes of old friends meeting again after a long interval then Flynt gently chided his girlishly giggling sister for not letting him knew Warner was due back in town. And as they moved away from the depot and the stalled locomotive began to sound less on the point of total breakdown, Warner excused the woman’s secrecy on the grounds that when he wrote Beth he had not been sure he would reach Eternity today.

As a largely disinterested bystander, Edge registered that Warner was adequately armed for bounty hunting: his rifle was a fairly new looking Winchester and in the holster tied down to his left thigh was an older but far from decrepit long barrel frontier Colt. On his gunbelt to the right of his belly was a hunting knife in a sheath. Just for part of a second when they glanced at each other, Warner’s green eyes showed a degree of glittering ice coldness Edge recognised as a sign that this was probably another man who had no compunction about killing.

Only for that sliver of time did Warner’s eyes dominate a face that was long and thin and deeply lined and stained dark brown by the sun and wind from spending long periods in open country. When he had laughed and when his features were in repose, his wide mouth and aquiline nose, sunken cheeks and pointed jaw combined into a look of inoffensive reticence that was another asset for a man in his line of work. For allied with his less than powerful frame, the nondescript features would allow him to blend easily into the background of a crowd whenever that was necessary.

‘Well, Clay Warner, I do declare,’ Joel Gannon murmured to Edge in much the same surprised tone as Ward Flynt had used when he spotted the rider on the flatbed car. ‘Now whatever is that drifter planning on doing back here in Eternity, I wonder?’

The undertaker had been one of the first businessmen to take delivery of what he was expecting on the train and now he was struggling with a heavy packing case, prominently marked:
Top Quality Casket Handles.

Edge answered reflectively: ‘Looking to make some bounty money, maybe. If he’s still in the line of work Flynt said he was when last heard of.’

Gannon nodded, his heavily jowled face set in a quizzical frown. ‘That’s right. I heard Warner was in that trade. But business sure must be bad if he has to ride the rails. Like a hobo, so to speak.’

‘Sometimes a feller has to get where he wants to go any way he can,’ Edge replied

36

‘I guess so.’ The frowning, head-shaking undertaker hefted the weighty crate into a more comfortable position on his shoulder. ‘Sure is puzzling, though. Him turning up in Eternity this way.’

Edge showed a brief sardonic smile as he said: ‘I reckon Warner would be happy to know an undertaker can’t get a handle on him.’

37

CHAPTER • 5

______________________________________________________________________

EDGE WATCHED with a disconcerting sense of frustration as the clanking line of
freight cars was hauled out of the depot by a locomotive that sounded a lot more powerful than when it arrived. The term
wanderlust
that Ward Flynt used about Clay Warner had struck a chord that lurked not too deeply in his mind and reinforced an inclination to be on his way somewhere else. Any place where he would not feel an affinity with Joel Gannon and the rest of the townsmen now moving away from the depot with their share of the merchandise delivered on the train.

And he knew that in truth there was nothing to keep him from leaving Eternity whenever he chose – except for the principle of being owed money because of the dishonesty of a corrupt lawyer. Which paradoxically was an additional spur for him to leave this town with its pervading odour of decay. For when he finally did ride out of Eternity his intention was to track down Andrew Devlin and make the sonofabitch pay – in cash or kind

– for the hard time he had caused him. And
kind
could well mean the man’s life. So now he began to experience an uncomfortable mixture of anger and something akin to helplessness as he crossed the meeting of the trails and started up the curve of Main Street. Passed the Second Chance Saloon just as Buck Segal swung wide and fastened back the large doors to either side of the batwings. The handsomely sculptured face of the powerfully built saloon-keeper was set in a morose scowl as he swept his blue eyed gaze fleetingly over Edge like he was a total stranger newly arrived off the train. One who was not welcome in Eternity and certainly not in his establishment. Which suited Edge fine, for he was in no frame of mind to exchange any further pleasantries with anyone else for a while. But, indifferent as he was to the man’s resentful attitude, he recognised Segal’s ill feelings were not in fact directed at him. Instead, Segal’s mind still seemed to be preoccupied with somebody he disliked in the group of people about to pass out of sight around the curve in front of the theatre. The man confirmed this when he warned in a sour tone: ‘Take care not to tangle with that Warner guy who just got off the train, mister. He can be a real cold hearted, mean minded, evil intentioned sonofabitch if he even thinks he’s being crossed.’

Edge showed a brief grin that re-shaped his mouth but left his narrowed, coldly glinting eyes untouched as he replied evenly: ‘Nobody knows the type better than me, feller.’

38

He trailed the small crowd as it quickly shrank in size: the people with their packages collected from off the morning train that was now no more than a far off sound diminishing into the west, moving away to go about their daily business. And reached the building at the start of the unnamed side street that housed the
Eternity Post Despatch
as Flynt, his sister and Clay Warner entered the law office on the opposite corner. Edge stepped into the newspaper office that was comfortably stove-heated and smelled pleasantly of ink and polish and coffee. Where a middle aged, spade bearded, slightly built man who was seated at a desk behind a waist-high partition greeted him with a business-like enthusiasm.

‘Good morning to you, Mr Edge. How can I help you?’ He rose from where he had been poring over a large poster, shiny with wet ink, which promoted a forthcoming production of
Hamlet
at the Washington Memorial Theatre.

‘Like to know if there are any replies to my store-for-sale notice, feller,’ Edge told Bradley Frost, who was the publisher and editor of the town’s weekly newspaper. Frost clicked a thumb and finger. ‘Ah, yes, I remember. Miss Flynt usually takes care of that end of the business. I recall Beth wasn’t in the office when you came by to place the announcement and now . . . ‘ He shrugged and showed a wan grin. ‘Women: they always have so much else to do. Or so they would have we men believe. I’ll see to your requirements.’

He rose from behind the desk and went to a bank of numbered pigeonholes against a side wall, some with papers pushed into them, many more that were empty. And consulted a printed list tacked to the wall nearby, checked it twice and turned with a rueful shake of his head.

‘I’m sorry, sir. There are no prospective takers for the old Sims store yet. But it’s early days, of course. What we can do for you is run the announcement again in next week’s issue for half price? Be just twenty-five cents for us to do that?’

‘Then I figure that’s what I’ll do.’ Edge paid what had been asked as the door opened and the two old timers who were in the saloon last night entered the newspaper office.