Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (16 page)

Then, when there had been no sounds from anywhere in the trees for maybe a half minute, he checked on Strachen: and saw that the federal marshal was as dead as any man can get. Next while he listened hard and often looked up from what he was doing, Steele hitched the reins to the handrail at the side of the seat and clambered awkwardly over the backrest on to the rear of the flatbed. He quickly found what he searched for among his few belongings that were stowed under a tarpaulin sheet – the knife in the boot sheath that was customarily strapped to the outside of his lower right leg.

Now he drew the weapon, wedged the handle between his knees and used the blade to saw through the rope that bound his wrists. And when he was free he located his Colt Hartford rifle under the tarp, checked that there was a bullet in all six chambers, fixed the knife in the sheath to his leg and swung down off the wagon. Then with the rifle canted to his shoulder he moved along the trail in the direction from where the shot had been fired. And some forty yards beyond the wagon his leading foot hit something in a patch of deep moon shadow.

He stooped to pick it up with his free hand and carried it forward a few paces into full moonlight. And saw clearly that he was holding a second Colt Hartford revolver action sporting rifle, not quite identical to the one sloped to his shoulder. For although there was an engraved gold plate fixed to the right side of the butt, the polished wood of the second rifle was not scarred by the flames of the fire that had burned down the Steele plantation house a whole continent away and many years in the past. Then he heard a man drawl from close by:

‘How’re you doing, Reb?
Not so good from what I saw, uh? But better, now you got
back the rifle?’*

*** *** ***

They had ridden slowly for a considerable distance from the stalled wagon before each was
aware of the broad details of how the other had gotten to be at the scene of the killing. And
Edge had admitted he knew the true story of
th
e
second Colt Hartford – that it was not the
weapon Adam Steele had inherited from his father. After a lengthy, unstrained silence
between them, the Virginian said:

‘So we’re both on the run again, Yank?’

*
This is how Steele #49 The Long Shadow concluded
.

He stroked his beard with a buckskin-gloved hand in a way that seemed to age him for
the brief time he did it. And this made Edge glad he had not finished growing the one that
had got started by neglect. He replied:

‘Seems like we’ve come full circle, Reb.’

‘Right.’

‘Hell of a thing, ain’t it?’

‘So what you reckon we should do now?’

‘Go to South America, maybe?’

‘That’s been done. We both used to be originals, right?’

‘That’s right. So I guess Europe’s out, too?’

‘Why?’

‘I heard that’s where that hotshot kid they called The Undertaker . . . ‘*

Barnaby Gold was his name,’

‘Yeah, Barnaby Gold. That’s where he finally went to.’

‘I was told he was killed by the army down in the Mojave.’

Edge lit the cigarette he had just rolled, the match struck on the jutting butt of his
holstered Frontier Colt. ‘Maybe we should just stick around, uh?’

‘But drop out of sight, I reckon?’

‘Fine.’

‘Even if the books aren’t balanced?’

‘Even if they’re not, the accounts have to be closed.’**

*** *** ***

*
The eponymous hero of a third George G. Gilman series.

They rode on in another easy silence; Edge smoking his cigarette and Steele by turns scratching in the depths of his beard and rubbing one or other wrist where they itched from being tightly roped together. Eventually the shorter, older looking man with solid black eyes said in a tone that had not quite lost its Virginia drawl:

‘You really took all that trouble to find me so you could try to figure out how someone like me could make out as a stuck-in-the-rut horse rancher?’

Edge’s thin lips parted to show perfectly formed white teeth and the brief smile even put a light that was not frosty in the slits of his ice blue eyes. ‘I guess it’s the first time you ever thought of yourself as setting a good example to anybody?’

Steele seemed suddenly self-conscious about how he needed to keep his glove hands busy, placed them both firmly on the reins and vented a snort of dissatisfaction.

‘I reckon maybe if I sat down and thought about it hard enough, there were more peaceful times than troubled ones after I settled at Trail’s End. But me taking on Al Strachen as a short-term hand without knowing what he was - and then finding out the hard way . . . Well that certainly wasn’t the first time trouble dropped in for a visit since I went in for breeding horses.’

‘But you stuck at it, feller: whatever rough times came your way.’

‘I surely did. Guess the wanderlust I used to have was maybe taken over by my ornery determination to do things my own way once and for all: whatever happened . . . ‘ He grimaced. ‘But it surely wasn’t by my own choice that I’ve left Trail’s End for good and all.’

‘And that is surely what you’ve done and no mistake,’ Edge said. ‘Are you going to hold it against me?’

Steele’s attitude was noncommittal: ‘I reckon there was more than one way to get me loose from Strachen. And it seems to me you took the easiest route.’

‘I can’t argue with that, Reb.’

‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful to be free so I’m not about to criticise how you brought that about.’

‘Much obliged.’

‘There’s no need to be. It’s me who’s beholden to you. Even if Strachen was alive with no more than an ache in his head there’d still be no chance of me going back to Trail’s End and picking up the pieces.’

‘If you say so.’

‘So, as far as you’re concerned, it was a waste of time and trouble you tracking me down. I never was going to be a respectable rancher for what’s left of the rest of my life: an example to the likes or you or anyone else?’ He shot a quizzical sidelong glance at Edge, saw the taller, more powerfully built man riding to his left remained impassive and went on: ‘I can’t deny I killed Jim Bishop back in Virginia. And the fact that I’ve killed a whole lot of other men since then never went any way toward getting me off the hook for that murder. I was bound to pay for it, one way or the other.’

Edge shrugged.

‘And if I have to square the debt by keeping on the move and watching my back all the time and never being the kind of man I thought I was at Trail’s End . . . ‘ He vented a harsh guffaw that expressed black humour: ‘Hell, it seems like maybe you’ll have to be an example to me. Now that I need to relearn how to get by without having a comfortable bolt hole to run to whenever the going gets tough?’

‘A feller like you doesn’t need anyone to tell you something like that.’ Edge pinched the fire out of his cigarette butt and tossed it away. ‘I figure living that way is like riding a horse: once you’ve learned how to do it you never forget. Every lousy break you get is different, but it doesn’t take much to figure out how to handle each one of them. As long as you don’t allow any to get the better of you.’

‘Don’t they say much the same thing about women, Yank?’ Steele’s sardonic humour was in a lighter vein now.

Edge replied in the same wry tone: ‘Neither of us have enough years left for me to try to teach you how to handle that kind of troublesome animal, Reb.’

A comfortable silence enveloped them once more for perhaps two minutes until Steele asked: ‘Did you make any plans for after you got me loose from Strachen?’

‘The first lesson in living the way I do: if you make plans without knowing something about the situation you’re getting into, the chances are they won’t work out. Ain’t nothing much changed in that areas since you gave up drifting.’

‘Yeah, I have to admit that most of those I made when I only thought I had all the facts never did pan out. Not for too long. So you reckon we should just ride on down this trail and see what turns up?’

‘This is your part of the country, Reb . . . Shit, the lousy war’s been over a long time. This Yank and Reb stuff just points up how damn old we’re getting to be.’

‘Fine with me, Edge. But the older a man gets to be, the harder it is to break the habits he has, I reckon?’

‘That sure is right. So: like I say, it’s your neck of the woods. All I know is in back of us there’s a dead federal lawman and a whole lot of people who know you were his prisoner. So riding in the opposite direction seems like a good idea. Unless you figure there could be some others folks ahead of us gunning for you?’

‘None that I know of. Until the word gets spread. But we can do something about that right now.’ The Virginian reined in his horse and pointed up at the length of telegraph wire stretched between two poles.

‘No sweat.’ Edge halted his mount and angled the animal toward a nearby tree with an overhanging branch that arced close to the top of one of the poles. And by standing in his stirrups he was able to reach up and take a two handed grip on a lower branch.

‘Something we ought to have thought of before, I guess.’ He tested his weight on the branch, then hauled himself aloft and said breathlessly as he stretched up to grip the higher branch. ‘Getting weak in the head, maybe?’

‘I don’t know about that but the way you’re wheezing it sounds like you’re getting too old and feeble to be climbing trees.’

Steele punctuated the lightly spoken jibe with a rifle shot and Edge froze. Then cursed and jerked his hand away as the bullet blasted the wire free from the top of a pole and it sprung forcefully to the ground.

‘Sonofabitch!’ Edge manoeuvred back along the branch then had to drop to the ground because his horse, startled by the gunshot, had moved away.

Steele slid the Colt Hartford back into the boot: ‘One lesson I don’t have to learn, Edge. Whatever kind of life he leads, the older a man gets the more he needs to find the easiest way to do things.’

Edge reached down to massage an ankle pained by the drop then waited until he was back in the saddle before he responded sardonically: ‘And the more he needs to prove he’s still as good as he used to be at what he was always best at?’

Steele laughed shortly. ‘And if he can kill two birds with one shot, that means he doesn’t have to over exert himself?’

Edge sighed and reached down to rub his ankle once more as he allowed grimly: ‘Ain’t that the truth?’

They started along the trail again and after awhile Steele began to toy with his beard then growled pensively: ‘Most of the travelling I did away from my place was down toward San Francisco and out to the coast. I’m not too familiar with this part of the country but I do know Sacramento is somewhere down this trail. And there’s a one-horse town called Brogan Falls not too far off. Had occasion to go there one time. To look at some stock on the ranch of a man named Nelson. So it’s best I make a detour around that place.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘As I recall, there’s a fork in the trail a little way ahead. The spur swings wide of the Stony River Valley and Brogan Falls. Heads up into the mountains where there used to be some lumber camps and mine workings. Then the trail loops back down again and joins the Sacramento Turnpike short of a place called Pine River Junction. We won’t run into anyone along the spur unless maybe an old prospector.’

‘That sounds like it’s the way we should go.’

‘Like attracts like, uh?’

‘How’s that?’

‘If we run into a man like that, we’ll be among our own kind. You’re still pretty much the loner you always used to be, I’d say?’

‘Look what’s happened when I tied up with you again, feller,’ Edge countered. ‘I killed a US marshal. Other people ain’t nothing but trouble.’

‘It could be you tie up with the wrong kind of people, maybe?’

‘Yeah,’ Edge allowed grimly.

‘Did I hit a raw nerve or something?’

‘I figure that’s another lesson you don’t have to learn, feller: just need to be reminded of,’ Edge rasped through gritted teeth. ‘You know already that if you meet up with the right kind of people something bad happens to them. Which means I sure as hell hope I ain’t the right kind of man for you to be riding with.’

‘Likewise, Edge. But in case I start taking a shine to you as something more than just a good example to me, I reckon it’ll be best if we go our separate ways just as soon as the chance presents itself?’

‘No sweat. Since there’s nothing to keep us together, as far as I can see?’

‘There only ever was trouble that did that in the past.’

There was another lengthy hiatus in the exchange, until they rode to within sight of the fork in the trail. The turnpike staying broad and hard packed, heading in a straight line: while the track that curved away, rutted from long ago use, was featured with tufts of grass un-trampled in recent times.

‘As far as anyone knows, you didn’t have anything to do with Strachen’s killing, Edge,’

Steele said evenly. ‘So this could be a good spot for us to go our separate ways?’

‘Maybe,’ Edge replied pensively. He was riding on the left and made the first move: tugged on his reins to head the gelding on to the narrower track. ‘But each of us has run into more trouble on our own than we ever had time for when we rode together, it seems to me?’

‘So we have nothing to lose either way, you reckon?’ Steele finger-combed his beard again.