Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (12 page)

‘Did you tell the marshal?’

Hicks made a dismissive hand gesture. ‘No. I just told him how it was Billy and me got into the fight. For the way he cussed Annie. It was all the marshal asked about.’

‘Ward Flynt is a man who’s easily satisfied as far as doing his job is concerned,’ Annie said scornfully. ‘On account of how he’s such a lazy, good-for-nothing so-and-so. But if he don’t know about Billy Childs and Olivia Colbert pitching woo one time, he’s the only person in Eternity who doesn’t, I reckon.’

Edge rose from the comfortable chair in front of the warm stove, put on his hat and said: ‘Much obliged for the information, feller. And you, too, ma’am’

Annie got up from behind the desk and Hicks heaved himself reluctantly out of his chair with a bleak eyed look at the papers strewn over his desk.

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‘Was a pleasure, Mr Edge. Anything’s a pleasure if it gets me out of reading and writing damn fool dockets for a spell.’

‘At least you do your job as it ought to be done,’ his wife excused. ‘You maybe do it late sometimes but you don’t shirk it like some folks I could name.’

‘Did Billy Childs do a good job?’ Edge asked as he went to the front door and peered out through the now rain-spotted window at where a newly risen wind was swinging and squeaking the depot signboard on its rusted brackets.

‘Best telegraph operator there’s ever been here in my time up until a few weeks ago. And he was pretty damn conscientious to boot. The way he took the wires out to whoever they were meant for, regular as clockwork.’

‘And sometimes he’d visit when he didn’t have no messages for them,’ Annie said pointedly from the rear doorway of the office.

Edge paused beside the front one. ‘How’s that, Mrs Hicks?’

‘Billy had a regular run twice a day. Just like a big city mailman. Times when he’d shut up his office and go out to deliver the messages to those folks that didn’t stop by to see if there was anything for them. That’s how we first got an idea about him and Olivia. It seemed that most days he’d go out to the Colbert place. And everyone knew there weren’t that many telegraphs for the Colberts or the men who work for them.’

‘Why, woman, I recall a time when I’d make any excuse to visit with you,’ Hicks said with a nostalgic grin. ‘The boy was smitten by Olivia and it was only natural he – ‘

‘Oh, get back to your dockets, Travis,’ his wife chided with a brighter smile. ‘As I recollect, it wasn’t so much me you made excuses to come to the house for. More often than not it was for my ma’s cooking.’

Hicks looked at Edge and broadened his grin. ‘Well, a growing boy needs sustenance if he’s to perform his duties in every respect, ain’t that right, Mr Edge.’

The woman’s reference to food had again pushed thoughts of breakfast to the forefront of Edge’s mind as he pulled open the door to let a blast of cold, damp air into the warm office and replied: ‘Reckon so, feller.’

‘And Annie’s ma could roast any kind of meat and cook dumplings in gravy better than any woman I’ve ever known.’

‘And you ate like a pig while I had to wait for any kind of attention from you.’ His wife complained pensively as she went through the rear doorway.’

Edge showed a wry expression to the still grinning Hicks as he suggested: ‘I hope after you’d eaten your fill you got your just desserts?’

63

CHAPTER • 8

______________________________________________________________________

EDGE HAD a solid breakfast at a corner table in the Grossman Coffee Shop
and
Restaurant situated between the newspaper office and a gunsmith’s premises. It was unusually late in the morning to eat the first meal of the day and too early for the next one. And today nobody was interested in the ten-cent coffee and cake special. So he had the small, immaculately clean, ten-table establishment to himself: apart from the matronly owner who expertly cooked and cheerfully served him with the ham and eggs he had ordered and then returned to the kitchen. Her name was Maggie Grossman and she was a deaf mute who could probably lip read better than most people in possession of all their faculties were capable of listening.

It was a little after eleven when he left the warmth and shelter of the Grossman place, his belly full enough so the aroma from the bakery next door but one no longer set his gastric juices running. He unhitched the chestnut gelding, swung up into the saddle and rode along Main Street as the light rain seemed to drift rather than fall from the gunmetal grey sky. And was aware of being watched as he moved passed the law office. Then a door rattled open but a moment later was slammed closed again. Opposite his unwanted, difficult-to-sell store he stooped low to peer in through the less cluttered of the two display windows. Saw the place was empty of customers and Roy Sims was bent over the counter, deeply engrossed with a sketchpad. A couple of minutes later he crossed the warped plank bridge that spanned the shallow but fast flowing Eternity River. And soon the wind began to blow intermittently again from the north: but it was never so strong as to make the ride out along the Wyoming Turnpike too uncomfortable. Just every now and then a gust added force to a brief shower of heavier rain. Some two miles beyond the town limits, after the Eternity skyline was lost to sight behind intervening terrain at his back, he saw far off to the right the dark shapes of buildings that he guessed were the never used and now derelict slaughterhouse and canning plant. A little later a line of fence posts marked the horizon directly ahead of him and closer he saw that these stout timber uprights were tautly strung with three stands of barbed wire. Then the turnpike was blocked by a pair of timber and barbed wire gates with a professionally painted sign hung on one of them:

THE COLBERT RANCH

Visitors on genuine business please enter

Kindly close the gates

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Edge couldn’t know how the Colberts would view his reason for calling as he dismounted and did what was asked with the gates. And continued along the trail he guessed would no longer have its
grandiose
name now it traversed private property. At first the terrain was little different on this side of the fence than the other. Then it gave way to well tilled fields, some sub-divided by fencing identical to that which marked the property line and elsewhere with straight rows of long-established and carefully clipped hedges.

Men were working in some of the fields: two ploughing and hoeing with horse drawn equipment and a half dozen more with hand tools. Each of them looked up briefly to peer toward the lone rider but none of them offered a gesture of greeting before he returned to his labour.

Close to where the symmetrically divided fields ended at what looked like an extensive stand of timber into which the trail ran a man using a long handled hoe was close enough to be within earshot and Edge reined in his horse to ask:

‘How you doing, feller?’

The field worker gave no sign he had heard as he continued with his weeding chore.

‘I’m here to see Olivia Colbert. Guess the house is through the timber?’

The taciturn man waved his free hand in a way that could equally well have been a dismissive gesture or a signal that the stranger should keep on going in the direction he was headed.

Edge heeled his mount into the stand of trees that were almost bare at this time of year and became aware of a dank smell from the carpet of sodden leaves on all sides that reminded him of the atmosphere pervading Eternity. Not until he emerged after thirty yards or so from the trees on the far side did he recognise that they had been planted with the same careful regard for neatness as the fields. And formed a circular screen that served to set the crop fields apart from the house and its gardens. As if the brother and sister who lived in the three story
antebellum
mansion had no desire to witness the sweat and toil that needed to be expended to keep them living in what was surely a high degree of luxury. In a tradition set by their parents, Edge acknowledged, as he recognised the gardens had been landscaped many years earlier. Within the circle of trees were well mown, weed-free lawns criss-crossed with gravel walks and featured with evergreen shrubbery and newly dug beds and borders that in spring and summer would doubtless be filled with displays of colourful flowers. The house was of mellow, dull red brick with white painted Georgian windows on all three floors and a marble pillared
porte
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cochere
sheltering the end of the driveway and a broad step up from the gravel. The massive front door was shiny back, studded with polished brass. Once he had inexorably run the gauntlet of silent hands working the crop fields, Edge had not sensed anyone watching him. But as he finished securing his horse to a hitching post within the elaborate porch and had set a foot on the raised cement area, the big door swung open.

‘You got some kind of business here, mister?’ The brusquely spoken man was as tall as Edge, but broader with what seemed to be a muscular torso closely contoured by a blue and white check shirt above off white pants. He was a lot younger, maybe twenty-five or six, and good looking with red hair that was as neatly trimmed as his moustache. His eyes were green. He had very white teeth and his burnished complexion showed he did not usually work indoors. His turn out, from polished boots to brushed hair, was immaculate and Edge was struck by the notion that the Colbert place seemed to be run on the lines of a well-disciplined military establishment.

‘If I came out here for pleasure I figure it would have been a wasted trip,’ Edge said as he started across the elegant porch that kept off the rain but did not bar the gusting wind.

The well-built man darkened his scowl and kept hold of the door with one hand as he moved the other to hook it loosely over the buckle of his belt, within six inches of the highly polished sixgun jutting from his hip holster. ‘That’s no answer of the kind I want to hear.’

Now he stepped fully into the gap between the door and the frame.

‘The name’s Edge. I’m here to see Miss Colbert.’

‘Miss Olivia didn’t say she was expecting anyone.’ He spoke at a constant pitch: his attitude studiedly emotionless yet made threatening because of the cold light in his unblinking green eyes. ‘And that being so, she sure ain’t expecting you.’

He made to draw back and close the door but halted the move when Edge stepped up close to him. Then he started to grin and reached for his holstered revolver with an over-confident, deliberately unhurried action. And his expression became a smirk of contempt when Edge raised both hands as if in surrender. But he suddenly realised he had misread the situation. And he began to warn in a rasping tone: ‘Not so damn – ‘

Edge’s right hand streaked to the nape of his neck and sprang away even faster, an open straight razor fisted in it. At the same time his left hooked around the back of the younger man’s neck and bunched the shirt collar in a firm grip: this as he pressed the flat of the finely honed blade against the throat of the startled man. The triumphant smirk of the man on the threshold had become an expression of wide-eyed terror as he held his 66

breath and froze his every muscle, including those of the hand wrapped around the butt of the still holstered sixshooter.

Edge murmured flatly: ‘It could be that the lady would maybe welcome getting a surprise caller, do you figure, feller?

The man tried to peer down his face to see what kind of blade threatened to slit his throat. But it was not possible unless he bent his head forward and increased the risk of being cut.

Edge said in a tone that was now as ice cold as the look in the glittering slits of his eyes: ‘Do you want to let go of the fancy Colt, feller? Or do you want to spill some blood on the Colberts’ fine looking carpet?’

The man allowed the pent-up breath to trickle out through his flared nostrils. Perhaps was afraid even to open his tightly compressed lips in case the trapped air rushed out in a violent burst that could be interpreted as an aggressive sound. At the same time he moved his arms slowly: brought them up until they were stretched far out on either side at shoulder height to show his hands were empty.

Edge released the scruff of his neck, backed off half a pace, reached between himself and the terrified man and hooked the revolver out of its holster.

‘Move into the house and take it easy.’ Edge pitched his voice evenly now as he withdrew the threat of the razor, folded the blade into the handle and returned it to the pouch hung from the back of a circlet of Indian beads worn around his neck. Then he motioned with the Colt but did not cock the hammer when he said: ‘I don’t reckon the folks who own this classy mansion would like their nice floor covering to get stained with any of your bodily fluids? How about you?’