Return to Massacre Mesa - Edge Series 5 (30 page)

‘Hey down there!’

He froze and peered upwards. Needed to blink several times to rid his eyes of the stinging blur of sweat beads, unwilling to let go a handhold to wipe away the salt moisture.

Just for a moment he was close to snarling a response, but realised it would be selfdefeating. For his situation and the state of his mind had surely caused the man’s voice 209

to sound to his ear much louder than it actually was. Then his vision cleared and he felt a momentary sense of elation when he saw he had made it to the halfway point of the gruelling descent. The halt provided a welcome rest as he directed his attention upwards to see heads and shoulders as no more than dark silhouettes against the bright blueness of the sky. Then the same man said in a harsh whisper: ‘The kid and me’ll be coming down there just as soon as you reach the bottom.’ It was Sam Tree. ‘The rest of them ain’t got the right build or the guts to try it.’

Edge let go with his free hand to signal a hurried acknowledgement before Lucy Russell complained:

‘Except for me and I’m not allowed to even try it!’

There was a brief, low toned argument that Edge ignored as he once more directed all his attention to the climb down the gully that would bring him on to the same level as the Indians and the army.

‘And then what?
’ He actually spoke the query aloud to himself through gritted teeth and needed to blink his eyes again to clear them of the blurring sweat of exertion and tension.

He was sweating a lot lately, damnit! Much more than he used to, even though in the old days he had spent as much time in the in the sweltering summer heat of the Southwest as the biting winter cold of the north and mid-west. But he hadn’t experienced the same level of nervous tension back then. Nor had his body needed to expend so much energy to accomplish whatever task he demanded of it. Another sign that he was getting old! Getting past the time when he should not be asking his protesting, sweat drenched, thickening physique to do this kind of stupid thing!

‘The hell with that!’
Again he involuntarily spoke his thought aloud. Which was maybe a sign of something a whole lot worse than the inevitable physical process of ageing? He shook his head to spray beads of sweat off his brow before they could trickle into his eyes that were narrowed into glittering slits while his mouth line formed 210

a scowl of contempt. He sure as hell wasn’t getting to be as crazy as Zane Slade had gotten to be!

He’d get down off this cliff face and when he did he’d figure out some way to keep the squaw from being killed in the impending battle. Which was the only reason he had for doing what he was. He admitted this to himself with relief that nobody had asked him what he had in mind. Mostly on account of the fact he had not given them the chance – the opportunity to call him crazy, damnit! The driving force for him doing this was to raise two thousand dollars owed him by a man now beyond his reach. Or was it? Wasn’t it the principles involved that were the most important factors motivating everything he had done since he rode out of Springdale, into Eternity and then on to Lakewood? And finished up in this present idiotic predicament: a stubborn man long past his prime halfway down a dangerous descent that would have taxed his abilities to the limit as a fit young man in his prime?

Yeah, for sure that was it. While the physical strength was being sucked out of him through the unavoidable natural process of ageing, he was still able to hold on to the principles he had evolved during his youth on an Iowa farm. Then while he grew into the man who emerged from the bloody Civil War and survived the violent peace that followed. He would not be cheated without doing something about it: never let anyone make a fool out of him without exacting a price. And if the price was impossible to collect then the next best option had to be sought. What had changed was that he no longer counted every price in the coinage of ultimate vengeance. He’d kill if he had to, but times had changed even more than he and it was no longer so simple to hunt down a man who owed him a debt, collect it and maybe blast a bullet into the heart of the sonofabitch for interest.

He reached the foot of the gully and crouched among the boulders, breathing rapidly but quietly. While he experienced a sense of something akin to elation at accomplishing a feat that in all truth he had felt for awhile could turn out to be beyond him. While he was recovering from the rigours of the descent he tried to judge the time it had taken. But he could be sure only that the morning was still brightly sunlit, the heat shimmer beyond the rock-strewn area was just as hazy and no battle had yet

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begun.

A pebble dropped and rolled to a stop a few feet from where he was hunkered down and he peered up into the gully. And watched impassively as Crooked Eye came down after him, moving with the agile grace of athletic youth as he swung from one side of the gap to the other, judging every move he made but doing so with smoothly consummate ease. But, Edge excused himself with a self-deprecating grin as he dismissed from his mind any sense of envy for the kid’s lack of years. The Comanche buck was unencumbered by a rifle, gun-belt and the riding boots of the white man. When the boy reached the ground and squatted beside Edge, his face was run with sweat and he breathed a little heavily. But his grin was as bright as the man’s was as he relished his own sense of achievement.

‘Pretty damn good, kid.’ Edge peered up into the gully again and saw the saloonkeeper turned part-time lawman was still at the top, showing no sign of lowering himself into the narrow defile and when he beckoned, Tree made an emphatic dismissive hand gesture.

Crooked Eye regained his breath and reported: ‘Mr Tree told me to tell you he thinks it best if he remains with the others who are not . . . ‘ The boy grimaced and shrugged his shoulders and the expression and gesture spoke a volume about Tree’s opinion of Goodrich, Dingle and Slade: maybe, too, of Crooked Eye’s opinion of Tree.

‘I get the picture, kid,’ Edge growled as he took the cigarette out of his shirt pocket and looked up once more just as Tree withdrew from sight. ‘I guess Mr Tree didn’t stick a gun in the back of your neck and tell you what his plans are?’

‘Mr Edge, I do not – ‘

‘Forget it,’ Edge broke in and showed the puzzled young Comanche a broad sardonic grin. ‘It’s not how I figured he’d do it, but I reckon Sam Tree just climbed down.’

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CHAPTER • 20

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STILL OOZING with sweat from every pore but breathing almost normally Edge
and Crooked Eye moved cautiously away from the foot of the gully, listening intently for any sound to signal Mountain Lion had ordered his battle-ready braves to launch an attack. But there was only solid silence beyond the unobtrusive noises of the setting down of their feet as the man and the boy zigzagged among the rocks and dropped into and came out of small hollows.

Once or twice Edge glanced up at the top of the bluff but set little store by how he saw no figures sky-lined there. Because his angle of vision was much narrower than that available to any cavalrymen or Comanche who chanced to peer in the same direction. Then he came to an abrupt halt and looked sharply to his left: saw Crooked Eye had stopped at the same instant, both of them alerted by the voice of a brave: now another. The Indians were some twenty yards ahead of them and slightly to the right, beyond a heap of large boulders that concealed them but did not entirely muffle their disgruntled exchange.

Edge eyed the boy quizzically and Crooked Eye nodded his understanding of what was required of him. And he came closer, taking more care than ever to set his moccasined feet down carefully while his head was cocked, listening to the talk between the two unseen braves. Edge stooped to put his head within six inches of the boy’s face and Crooked Eye cupped both hands to subdue his whispering voice.

‘They complain of the waiting and are angry at Mountain Lion for wasting time when all the braves are eager for the fight to begin.’

Edge made to straighten up, a sardonic half smile at the corners of his lips as he reflected that, whatever their heritage, soldiers were soldiers: griping about the top brass went with the territory of being a fighting man. Then there was a different tone in the Comanche exchange: and more than two braves could now be heard talking beyond the boulders. Crooked Eye grasped Edge’s shoulder, cupped his other hand around his mouth again and rasped with more urgency:

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‘Mountain Lion is almost ready, Mr Edge. The braves have been told to be alert for the signal to attack.’

Edge saw the worried expression on the squint-eyed face of the boy and recognised his Comanche blood was close to the surface of his consciousness as he struggled with a dilemma: should be help a white man while his own people waited to engage in deadly battle with other whites? The young buck realised he was being studied and although his face remained clouded by uncertainty, his nod was emphatic: signalled his determination to do as he had promised. Edge took a firmer grip on his Winchester and suddenly angled off to the side, leaving the boy to make up his own mind whether to follow. Trusted him not to betray their presence if even now he chose not to side with a white man. He never looked back as he swung in a wide circle toward the rear of the band of Comanche concealed among the boulders. Heading for the area where he last saw Rose Bigheart, he moved with quiet speed, the rifle angled across his chest in a double-handed grip, thumb hooked over the hammer behind the loaded breech.

There was no noise from behind but when he finally snatched a backward look he saw Crooked Eye was keeping pace with him, his stride purposeful but his expression revealing he continued to suffer nagging divided loyalties. So although he was reassured to see the young Comanche close by Edge kept it firmly in mind that Crooked Eye was just a single Indian who meant him no harm – maybe. There were more than twenty others who were certainly not troubled by the same kind of scruples that affected the boy.

Then the long awaited signal was given. And the once familiar blood-curdling shrieks of Indian war cries split the silence of the mountain morning: shattered it into myriad pieces. Each of which was the voice of another brave baying for blood, or the thud of heels into equine flanks, the crash of unshod hooves on hard packed ground or the snort of a pony driven from a standstill into an instant gallop. At the same moment that Edge spun around to check every direction and saw he was not in the path of a Comanche racing his pony into battle, he realised Crooked Eye had disappeared. Which was not difficult to do in this kind of terrain where there was solid cover on every side 214

within a half dozen strides.

A barrage of rifle fire exploded now, blotting out every other sound for stretched seconds as it acted to spur Edge into action. He broke into a loping run and veered one way and then another through the boulders while he struggled to keep his mind free of images of figures in bloodied uniforms slumping to the ground under the onslaught of the Indian attack. Achieved this by conjuring up a vivid picture of the Comanche squaw he needed to reach before . . . Then he rounded a final boulder and saw that Rose Bigheart had in fact been a prisoner of her own people. For her wrists were bound behind her and her ankles were lashed together. She sat with her back against a rock, deep terror contorting her scrawny, deeply lined features as she stared fixedly ahead, pressing herself backwards like she was trying to force herself into the solid sandstone. Crooked Eye was the source of the woman’s awesome fear as he approached her with measured strides: brandishing his hunting knife while his adolescent features continued to be formed into the familiar look of indecision when the squaw began to speak. Her tone was imploring while her head moved from side to side, either in disbelief of what was happening to her or denial of what the boy was saying. But then it became clear that, although Crooked Eye opened and closed his mouth, he was for the moment incapable of speech while tears spilled down his cheeks.

Edge endured stretched seconds of his own doubts then levelled the rifle from his hip and growled: ‘You best not cut anything but rope, kid!’

But his threat was swamped by another, more deafening barrage of gunfire. Much different in cadence from the opening fusillade: this new body of sound had a chattering resonance instead of being a series of rapid but irregular individual gunshots. Something he had not heard in a lot of years, ever since the days when he . . . Despite what was happening here and now, Edge felt gripped by a powerful sense of exhilaration such as he had not experienced since he had worn the blue uniform of a Union cavalry officer himself. For he knew for certain that the troopers were going to triumph over the Comanche and not the other way around: because the army was using the slaughtering fire of a Gatling gun against the suddenly ineffective repeating 215