Return to Massacre Mesa - Edge Series 5 (23 page)

‘And?’ Dingle prompted.

‘Yeah, get to the goddamn point why don’t you!’ Conners urged. 157

‘I followed them to the place I will take you to after we have recovered the remains of Miss Lucy’s lieutenant.’

‘Where the hell is that?’ The intensity of Conners anger had risen to the extent where he seemed poised to launch a physical attack on the squaw if she did not give him an immediate answer.

‘In the cave at the – ‘

‘Damnit, woman: Ches means where’s the money hid!’ Dingle snarled.

‘I figure that it’s buried at Mesa Desolado, too,’ Edge said quietly on a stream of tobacco smoke from a newly lit cigarette. And just for part of a second he traded a knowing glance for an intrigued look from Rose Bigheart.

‘What?’ Dingle rapidly switched his intense gaze between Edge and the squaw and failed to spot the tacit exchange of signals.

Conners likewise missed the covert sent and received messages as he growled:

‘Yeah, what the hell do you know about it, Edge?’

Rose was at once as impassive as Edge when she nodded and confirmed: ‘Yes, the government money is hidden at Mesa Desolado.

Lucy unwittingly contributed to the deception. ‘Of course, that has to be so!

Those men who stole it would hide it there! Near to where the massacre happened it’s the last place anyone would think to look! Just as they first hid it inside Fort Chance where nobody would ever - ’

‘That is exactly where they hid it,’ Rose said. ‘Where the massacre of the officers took place.’

Conners and Dingle cursed in unison then Conners struggled awkwardly to his feet and snarled: ‘Okay, so let’s get going!’

Dingle remained seated as he said: ‘Hell, it’s been there for fifteen years, Ches.’

He tasted a spoonful of food and grimaced that it was cold then reached forward to 158

pour himself a cup of steaming coffee. ‘We’ve already agreed how a little time one way or the other isn’t important.’

Conners stayed tight lipped and hard eyed but abandoned haste as he went to prepare his horse for leaving camp. The others took their time without wasting any unduly and some fifteen minutes later they all swung up into their saddles. Crooked Eye again rode behind Edge on the chestnut gelding. There was no talk for maybe a half-hour as they moved through the rising heat of morning in the same formation as yesterday. Then as they entered a narrow ravine flanked by thirty feet high, almost sheer sandstone cliff faces, Conners complained in the tone of a man thinking aloud:

‘There’s something that’s bothering me.’

‘What’s that, feller?’ Edge asked, clearly indifferent to the man’s worry.

‘If the squaw has known all along where Uncle Sam’s silver dollars are hid, why has she left it so long to come get them? For years before now she could have kept the whole bundle for herself and so why - ’

Dingle seemed to be even more pre-occupied than his partner as he muttered:

‘What’s troubling my mind is why that bunch of cavalry’s heading in the same direction we are, Ches. At the same time as us, damnit!’

‘I did not have need – ‘ Rose abruptly checked her indignant response to Conners’

veiled accusation when she saw Edge turn his head to look back beyond the boy sharing his horse, to peer between her and Dingle as he mouthed an unspoken oath.

‘What’s up?’ Dingle demanded and like the rest twisted his head around to gaze fixedly over his shoulder.

‘It seems we got us some company back there again,’ Edge replied. ‘More than just the one this time.’

They all reined in their mounts and some gave vent to shock - gasped or 159

muttered curses as they saw three rifle toting Comanche braves, faces and chests daubed with paint, ride slowly into view: a hundred yards away.

‘Mr Edge, look there!’ Crooked Eye pointed in the opposite direction. ‘Ahead of us, too.’

They all switched their attention toward the west and saw three more mounted Comanche blocked that end of the ravine, some two hundred yards away. These also wore garish war paint and carried cocked rifles, fingers curled to the triggers.

‘Mountain Lion is in the centre,’ Crooked Eye explained grimly as Rose caught her breath, Lucy uttered a strangled cry, Dingle a louder curse and Conners made to draw his revolver.

Both trios of braves closed inexorably in on the stalled riders. Edge rasped: ‘No guns!’ Then added at a lower pitch: ‘Yet.’

The Comanche chief was the eldest of the menacing looking braves: maybe fortyfive while the others were in the twenties and thirties. His headdress of feathers and the painted designs on his ruggedly formed features and muscular body were the most elaborate and he was the only one of the six who had a gunbelt buckled around his waist, with a revolver butt jutting from the free hanging holster. He thrust his Winchester high into the air in a single handed grip and as all the braves began to halt their ponies he spoke harshly in his own language.

Crooked Eye waited until all the Indian ponies had been reined in before he answered Mountain Lion and the same degree of cold animosity was heard in the voice of the young buck as had sounded in that of the chief. Then there was a sudden vicious snarl in Mountain Lion’s tone when he interrupted what Crooked Eye was telling him. Edge asked: ‘What’s the problem?’

Crooked Eye said sullenly: ‘I am instructed to return to the lodge of the women who have been taking care of me!’

‘Or there will be bad trouble,’ Rose added, her tone and expression both ominous. 160

‘It sounds to me like it’ll be best for all of us if you do like the top man wants,’

Dingle urged, a tremor in his voice while he blinked rapidly to further emphasise the depth of his fear.

‘Not best for me!’ Crooked Eye countered defiantly.

Mountain Lion began to shout again, a shriller, more threatening note in his voice. The two braves who flanked him and the three at the other end of the ravine released the rope reins of their unsaddled ponies and levelled their rifles from the shoulders.

‘Edge?’ Lucy Russell pleaded haplessly.

The young buck clung more tightly to the man in the saddle in front of him.

‘I don’t like the look of this,’ Dingle croaked.

‘And I don’t reckon there’s anyone here who’ll be thinking otherwise, John,’

Conners rasped while both men swung their heads back and forth as they tried to keep all the war-painted, rifle-aiming Comanche in sight at the same time. Rose spoke rapidly to Crooked Eye in their native language and heeled her horse forward. The boy did not move a muscle for stretched seconds, then muttered a terse word and swung lithely to the ground from behind Edge. He began to shuffle with impotently defiant reluctance alongside the squaw’s mount toward the end of the suddenly claustrophobic ravine where the scowling Mountain Lion and two of his braves waited, rifles levelled in unwavering grips. The trio of glowering Comanche covering the eastern length of the defile moved their ponies closer.

‘What’s happening, Edge?’ Lucy asked, her fear expanding fast.

‘Nothing we can do anything about right at this moment, lady.’

‘Mister, it looks to me like the savages are getting their own kind out of the line of fire.’ Dingle said and licked his dry lips.

Conners snarled: ‘And I ain’t gonna die without putting up a fight!’ He streaked a hand toward his holstered Colt.

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Edge lunged sideways off his horse as he slid the Winchester from the boot with one hand. His other arm curled around the waist of Lucy and he swept the woman bodily out of her saddle. She shrieked with shock that became pain when the two of them slammed forcefully to the rock hard ground as a fusillade of gunfire exploded: the violent sounds amplified and the acrid taint of black powder smoke made more pungent by the closeness of the flanking rock walls.

Dingle screamed: ‘My God, this is utter madness!’

Edge winced with the pain of the impact as he disentangled himself from the writhing, wailing woman and drawled through gritted teeth: ‘It sure is, feller. And we’re a long way from any kind of asylum.’

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CHAPTER • 15

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SADDLE HORSES and bare backed Indian ponies bolted along the ravine,
snorting in panic as their pumping hooves billowed up clouds of choking red dust that mingled with drifting gun smoke for long moments and made it impossible to see beyond more than a few feet. But in those frantic stretched seconds the immediate danger was over. And their surroundings within the stiflingly hot confines of the ravine began to come into focus for Edge, Lucy Russell, John Dingle and Chester Conners. As they silently and tentatively raised their heads and cracked their eyes to peer to left and right, then came up gingerly up on to their haunches. First they saw that the three braves who had been astride ponies behind them were now sprawled on the ground under the settling dust: totally inert except for the slow trickling of blood from ugly wounds torn into their flesh by the hail of bullets. They were spread-eagled in the prone position and so it could be seen that each had been back-shot several times.

As Edge impassively helped the trembling Lucy to rise unsteadily to her feet and the softly cursing Dingle and Conners came fully upright and leaned gratefully against the rock wall the three men who had gunned down the braves came into view at the mouth of the ravine. Black powder smoke no longer spilled from the muzzle of the Winchester rifle that each levelled from a hip as they advanced slowly on foot toward the sprawl of bullet riddled corpses. To the west the ravine was empty: Mountain Lion and the two braves who had flanked him, Rose Bigheart and Crooked Eye, the loose horses and ponies were all gone from sight beyond the towering cliff faces.

‘How you doing, Lucy?’ Sam Tree called his tone as cheerful as his smile. ‘Seems to me you’re looking pretty good, all things considered?’

‘It’s the guy who runs the Lakewood saloon, damnit!’ Dingle’s voice was shrill with relief.

Conners muttered: ‘Yeah and I reckon we all owe him and his buddies a drink.’

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The medium height, broadly built, square featured Tree hooked a thumb to stab at the star pinned to his left shirt pocket and explained: ‘When I’m not keeping the Wild Dog I’m a deputy sheriff. Along with Brod Goodrich and Frank Shaw here. Most of the time Brod is the Lakewood liveryman. Frank’s the town barber when he ain’t fulfilling a lawman’s duties.’

The obese, ginger goatee-d Goodrich was to Tree’s right and the stoopshouldered buck-toothed Shaw on the other side of him. Each man nodded curtly when he was named, neither of them so outwardly at ease as Tree. All three were adequately garbed for travelling through the open country of the Southwest. Like Tree, the other two Lakewood men wore badges and carried handguns in tied down holsters. After Lucy jerked free of his supporting grip Edge dug out the makings. And the saloonkeeper explained in the same prosaic manner as before - that suggested he was no stranger to violence:

‘The three of us are formed into a legally constituted posse that’s empowered by Sheriff Billy Russell to track down his kidnapped daughter. And bring her and her abductor back to town - Billy being indisposed, as you all well know? I guess you been told what happened to your pa, Lucy?’

‘You are surely making some kind of inept joke, Mr Tree!’ the woman accused thickly as she hand-brushed dust off her mourning dress. ‘And yes, I did hear that my father shot himself in the foot.’

The tall, broad, heavily sweating Goodrich was breathless from recent excitement and exertion and present fear. ‘Miss Russell, we just killed three renegade Injuns and I don’t reckon they’d think any of us was in a joking mood when we done that.’

‘Time was when it would have been a pleasure.’ The skinny, sunken eyed, hollow cheeked town barber exposed his prominent teeth when he giggled to release high tension. ‘Seeing as how those guys we shot were Comanche. But now we all got to have a more enlightened view about such matters.’

‘So why don’t you adopt such a more enlightened attitude, Mr Shaw?’ Lucy 164

snapped.

‘Uh?’

Goodrich explained: ‘I guess Miss Russell means don’t shoot any more Injuns, Frank.’

Shaw shrugged. ‘Just because they happen to be Injuns, right? He swung his gaze between the two men alongside him and the three men and a woman loosely grouped in front of their still levelled rifles. ‘Looked like them savages were just about to seriously harm you, Miss Russell. And we got the right and a sworn duty to protect you from any man of any race who’s intending to do that. Ain’t that so, Sam?’

Away from his barbershop and wearing a lawman’s star on the front of his shirt, Shaw showed no sign of his customary subservience. Edge finished making his cigarette and lit it.