The Deputy - Edge Series 2 (5 page)

He had a bad complexion and was the shortest and scrawniest of the trio. 28

The third man suffered from a nervous tic in his right cheek. Although probably in his early twenties, he looked like he did not yet need to shave. He vented a short giggle that maybe was a release of tension and added: ‘So long as it is not our own.’

‘Please do not attempt anything heroic!’ Isabella pleaded as she rose unsteadily to her feet, a hand fastened to her throat. She wrenched her head from side to side to share an imploring gaze between Edge and North.

‘You sure changed your tune,’ the Bishopsburg lawman said as he and Edge traded fleeting glances and each saw the almost imperceptible shrug of the other’s shoulders.

‘Where there is life there is hope, is that not so?’ Isabella asked rhetorically. North allowed his rifle to fall and began to work at the buckle of his gunbelt. Edge unfastened his own gunbelt and both men allowed them to drop to the ground.

‘I guess it’s just the woman you want?’ North asked as the wagon rolled to a halt about fifty feet away.

Isabella caught her breath and clenched her fists.

It was the driver of the rig who replied: ‘You are quite correct, Sheriff North. We require just
Senorita
Gomez to accompany us.’

He was also Mexican. In his late thirties, he had prematurely grey hair and a ragged salt and pepper beard and a half closed right eye.

‘No!’ Isabella half screamed and dropped to her haunches: like she thought if she made herself small enough she could hide from the men who planned to abduct her.

‘Easy, lady,’ Edge said and held out a hand, offering to help her up. He looked between the riders and the older man up on the wagon seat and spread a quizzical expression across his face. ‘This ain’t what it seems to be, I figure?’

He shot a glance at North, who shrugged again and looked perplexed. Then both of them peered at the wagon driver.

It was not just because he was older than the others that he was so clearly the leader of the group. There was a suggestion of authority in his voice and bearing that singled him out as the top hand.

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‘You are quite correct,
Senor
Edge. I assure you we are most certainly not in the pay of Eduardo Martinez. And we mean
Senorita
Gomez no harm. If she will co-operate and enter into the rear of our wagon without a struggle, we promise there will not be the slightest bruise on her body.’

‘And if I do not come like a lamb to the slaughter?’ the woman challenged and pressed herself closer to Edge, eager for the token protection of mere proximity. The moustached man at the centre of the mounted trio said in a monotone that sounded more menacing than a snarl would have been: ‘Then I will fire a bullet into one of your feet. Which will make it much more easy for us to get you into the wagon,
senorita.’

He aimed his Colt at the target he had specified and she gulped noisily as she clung even more tightly to Edge, who advised:

‘Best you do like these fellers want, lady. They could have blasted our heads off easy. Still can.’

North said: ‘They’re the only ones know what they have in mind to do,
senorita.
For now, it’s better we don’t try to find out what it is, maybe.’

She twisted her head this way and that, frantically shifting her wide eyed gaze from the sheriff to Edge to the strangers on both sides of her: seeking to find a clue to her fate in the grim set of their faces.

Then she stepped away from Edge and it seemed as if the tension that had held her inflexibly rigid for so long suddenly drained out of her body. Her decision was made and she uttered a low groan to try to clear her throat of the final vestiges of terror.

‘Okay.’ She had to gulp once more to get the croak out of her voice. ‘If these
hombres
mean what they say about not hurting me, I think I like their protection better than yours. There are many more of them! And they are all my fellow countrymen!’

She whirled and strode purposefully toward the wagon, her hips swaying seductively, her head held proudly high and much of her silver jewellery glinting and clinking.

Two men jumped down from the rear of the rig and it dipped a shade on its springs as they helped her aboard: the movement more pronounced when they 30

clambered back in after her. Both were Mexicans: one of them fat in the face and at the belly, the other with a mangled right ear and two teeth missing at the upper front.

The third man who had fired from the wagon had not yet shown himself. The two who had appeared were in the younger age group, and like the wagon driver and the three horsemen wore clothes styled north of the Rio Grande. The driver tipped his Stetson, turned the wagon unhurriedly and moved it off with the same lack of haste until it was a hundred yards or so down the trail. Here he brought it to a halt once more and the moustached spokesman for the trio of riders said:

‘I regret we must take your rifles and pistols,
senors.
Then we will escort the wagon. The weapons will be left where they will be easily found?’ There was a quizzical tone in his voice, a question in his eyes.’

North nodded and side stepped away from his rifle and gunbelt as he said:

‘We got no choice, Edge.’

‘No sweat.’ Edge backed off a couple of paces.

Although the man had spoken of rifles in the plural, Edge deliberately did not look to the right where his and Isabella’s geldings waited contentedly some fifty yards away.

‘Bueno
,’
the Mexican murmured and continued to divide the aim of his Colt between Edge and North as the men flanking him slid cautiously down from their saddles and moved to gather up the discarded rifle and gunbelts. Then the mounted man spoke a terse command in Spanish and Edge groaned inwardly as the one with his gunbelt loped off toward the bolted horses. Where he paused for just long enough to slide Edge’s Winchester from the boot. When all three young Mexicans were back in their saddles, two of them burdened with confiscated weapons, their spokesman tipped his hat and said evenly:

‘If you feel the need to attempt to follow us, we will feel the necessity to kill you. Which will be little trouble for us to do, since you are now unarmed?’

North sighed and shook his head ruefully.

Edge sent a stream of saliva at the ground and nodded.

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Then spurred heels were thudded hard into horseflesh and the three riders raced away at the same time as the wagon was once again jolted into a fast start. Trail dust was flung high into the night air and settled slowly back down as the sound of the departing wagon and horses faded into the darkness and distance.

‘That was one hell of a thing to have happened,’ Edge growled as he bleakly eyed the two surviving horses while the dejected North squatted to remove his saddle and accoutrements from the dead animal.

‘Can’t argue with that,’ the dour lawman said as they turned away from the carcase. ‘Reckon I’m going to be in all kinds of trouble for letting them grab my material witness in a murder trial.’

Edge pointed out: ‘There’s a bright side.’

North grimaced. ‘Damned if I can see one from where I’m looking at things.’

‘Being in trouble is better than being dead, feller.’

The other man nodded his baleful qualified agreement as he gazed over his shoulder and along the now deserted trail that bisected the valley floor and muttered: ‘We got took bad, mister.’

Edge showed a mirthless smile as he glanced in the same direction and rasped: ‘Yeah, it sure does make a feller feel sick.’

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CHAPTER • 5

___________________________________________________________________

THEY CAME upon their rifles and gunbelts with revolvers replaced in the holsters
heaped in the middle of the trail about three miles from the scene of the ambush. A folded sheet of grubby paper was lodged securely under one of the Winchesters, a message printed in pencil on it:
WAIT IN TOWN. YOU WILL HEAR FROM US.
But when they rode to within sight of Bishopsburg they saw signs that George North had more to do than hang around waiting for a promised explanation of the kidnapping of Isabella Gomez.

For although it was after one o’clock in the morning as they approached the small, widely scattered community the two riders saw that many lights continued to burn. Closer still they saw several people were moving on the broad main thoroughfare that ran north to south for about a mile before it became an open trail again.

‘I guess the place ain’t always this busy at this time of night, sheriff?’ Edge said. North did not interrupt his deeply concerned survey of the town when he answered absently: ‘It never was before.’

‘Something, sheriff?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Whatever all the excitement’s about, you won’t forget you owe me another five bucks?’

North shot him a sidelong glance that contained remnants of the scowl he had been directing toward Bishopsburg. Then he held out a hand with the palm cupped as he said:

‘You did all that I asked of you, mister. Deputy’s job is over, so I’ll take the badge back now. I’ll see to it you get the second half of your pay if you stop by my office. Corner of Main Street and Mossman Road. Down on the left. But not tonight, uh?’

He dropped the surrendered badge into his shirt pocket and used the same hand to point along the street. ‘Where the crowd’s gathering is where I can usually be found.’

‘No sweat, sheriff,’ Edge said as he looked toward where several men were converging on the corner. ‘At the same time I’ll drop off this Winchester you borrowed for me from the marshal in Railton City?’

The trail had become Main Street between a neat schoolhouse in a yard surrounded by a recently painted picket fence and a less than well cared for building with a weathered sign on the roof that proclaimed it to be
WHITMAN’S LIVERY STABLE AND CORRAL.
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‘Good luck to you, feller.’ Edge reined his horse to a halt out front of the livery.

‘Appreciate your help,’ North answered morosely, his mood a match for that of the twenty or so men who had formed a group to wait in melancholic silence further down the street.

If the liveryman was in the crowd he did not consider attention to his business took precedence over whatever trouble awaited the sheriff.

Edge dismounted, opened the stable door and led his gelding inside without hindrance. And from within the redolent with horses interior of the building, adequately illuminated by moonlight through a large window in the rear wall, he heard a sudden chorus of raised voices: men competing to tell the newly returned George North the cause of the unusual late night activity in Bishopsburg.

Maybe that advance news of the abduction of Isabella Gomez had reached town, Edge wondered as he unsaddled and en-stalled his horse. A jailbreak by the Martinez boy?

Or could it be . . ? He abandoned idle lines of thought because he knew little of anything concerning this town outside of the rape and killing of a young girl and the forthcoming trial of the young man arrested for the double crime.

Tonight’s excitement could be totally unrelated to any of this and in any event whatever the cause it wasn’t any of his business. All that ought to concern him right now was finding a place to bed down for the night. Somewhere to sleep peacefully and wake up rested and ready to face the familiar challenge of another day with just a few dollars in his pocket and no prospect of a job to supplement his meagre stake. There was less noise from down the street when he emerged from the livery, saddle and gear on a shoulder and saw the crowd on the corner had shrunk to half of its former size.

He headed in the direction of the cluster of hurriedly dressed, weary but agitated men huddled before the stone and timber, single story L-shaped building with a door set at an angle on the corner of two streets.

‘Be ten cents a night for stabling, five a day for feed and water,’ a broadly built, black bearded, bespectacled man of sixty or so announced tersely when Edge joined the fringe of the group.

Some of the others glanced irritably at the speaker and then quickly returned their intense attention to the lamp-lit glass panel of the door and a window beside it in the section of the building that was on Main Street.

Through these, George North could be seen: standing with his rump resting on the front edge of a desk. And the back of the head of a man who was in a chair before him. 34

The seated man was talking while the dour faced sheriff listened and occasionally asked a question.

Edge thought North had probably never looked so grave faced in his life. Nothing of what was being said in the office reached out to the intently interested group.

‘No sweat.’ Edge reached into a pocket. ‘You’re Whitman, I guess?’