Seven Out of Hell (2 page)

“Hell, don’t scare ’em off, young feller,” Rose said hurriedly. “Big Valley ain’t bin this busy since the construction crews left.”

The wagon was coming from the other side of the valley to where Edge had rode out of the mountains and had. to bump across the track to enter the plaza. It was a flatbed with sides, driven by a young man. A woman, ten years his senior, rode as a passenger.

“Anybody around?” the man called anxiously as he brought the wagon to a halt.

Edge raised the canteen to his thin lips and studied the newcomers as he sipped at the tepid water. The man was, in fact, no more than a boy. He was about eighteen, standing two inches under six feet with a solid-looking, muscular body clothed in a brand-new, badly cut business suit. He wore no hat. His face was round, full of cheek and stubborn of jaw. His hair was the color of old hay and seemed to be of the same texture, worn long in a fringe that stopped short of his anxious green eyes. As far as Edge could tell, the boy carried no gun.

“Come on in and set a spell, my boy,” Rose croaked in his standard greeting. “And you, young lady.”

The woman matched her companion in height, but her build was thicker, generous with the curves of her sex which she exhibited proudly by wearing a white dress cut low at the front and hugging her tightly to the waist. Her long hair was jet black, falling to her shoulders from under the wide brim of her hat. The face, in the deep shade of the brim was too long and angular to be pretty but there was about its structure, the set of her full lips and carefully applied make-up around her grey eyes, an unsubtle sensuality.

She moved with a forced elegance as the boy helped her down from the wagon. But the sight of the dead horse and the feeding flies upset her composure and a sudden lack of gracefulness marked her hurried progress across the track and into the depot. And the grimace that painted her face as she caught the smell of the old-timer cut across all she had learned about being a lady.

“Jesus Christ, what a stink!” she hissed, then shot a hurried, anxious glance over her shoulder to where the boy was taking two valises from the wagon.

Edge nodded to Rose. “He ain’t much for bathing.”

The woman seemed about to pass another acid comment, but checked herself as the boy thumped the bags down behind her and grinned into the depot. Rose nodded a greeting but Edge’s cold expression did not waver.

“There’s a dead horse on the track,” the boy said.

“They must know that, Alvin,” the woman replied and her carefully modulated voice was as much a sham as the rest of her facade.

Rose sucked the last drop from the last bottle and slotted it into the crate. “Young feller wants to get aboard the train. Good a way as any to stop her. Set yourselves down.”

Alvin looked at the woman and licked his lips. She nodded and allowed him to escort her to the bench that was vacant. When she was seated, she took off her hat and began to fan herself with it. Edge looked for long moments at the rising flesh of her breasts exposed above the dress, then dragged his gaze away to stare out into the harshly sunlit plaza. The creaking of the loose floorboard again became the only sound in the heated depot.

“Can we buy tickets here?” Alvin said at length.

“No, sir,” Rose replied. “Railroad company reckoned I had no right to build no depot, so they wouldn’t grant me no franchise to sell tickets.”

Alvin looked confused. “What do you think, Beth?” he asked.

“The conductor will have tickets, dear,” the woman replied.

“Come far?” Rose croaked.

Alvin bobbed his head. “Redwood City, up north.”

“That’s mighty far,” Rose agreed. “More’n thirty mile, I reckon.”

Edge stood up and stretched. “You won’t be needing the team?”

Alvin shook his head. “I guess not. I thought I’d sell them and the wagon here in Big Valley.”

A cackle of laughter spilled from under the old-timer’s moustache. Edge ambled out into the plaza and stepped across the tracks. The two newcomers could not see him from where they sat and both started as the shots rang out.

“Don’t look like he’s got an ounce of kindness in him, does he?” Rose asked the couple. “But he’s a man with a feeling for horses. Don’t want ’em to die of thirst.”

As Edge came to stand in the doorway, he was feeding three fresh shells into the Winchester’s magazine. Alvin opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to protest. But Beth rested a hand on his arm and shook her head in warning.

A train whistle wailed, far off, and the sound had the timbre of an animal’s plaintive cry.

“She’s a-coming, folks,” Rose said, pushing himself up out of the rocker and moving wearily towards the doorway, staggering only slightly from the effects of the whiskey.

Edge crossed to the ends of the planking beside the track and hooded his eyes to stare into heat shimmer at the western approach of the valley. A tiny black speck with a plume of smoke hovering above it appeared at the extremity of the track, where the twin gleam of the rails emerged into a single thread of silver.

Rose stepped ponderously over the track and angled across the plaza towards the broad stoop of the mansion. The couple stood behind Edge, the boy holding a valise in each of his smooth, hairless fists.

“Guess I should thank you for putting the animals out of their misery, mister,” he said. “I ought to have done it. Only I don’t carry a gun.”

The woman placed a proprietary grip on his coat sleeve. “I’m not marrying you because you’re good with a gun, Alvin,” she assured the boy.

Edge turned a cold grin towards the woman, his narrowed eyes raking over her voluptuous body and settling for a few moments upon her sensuous features. Then he looked back along the track, to where the dot that was the locomotive had expanded and the smoke plume had darkened.

“A man’s gotta do what a man can do best,” he muttered. “One guy’s meat is another man’s Winchester 66.”

As Beth emitted an unladylike grunt of disgust, Edge continued to watch the approach of the train, recalling the last time he had ridden the railroad.

Chapter Two

T
HE
engineer was a small, rotund man with round eyes in a round face. His eyes were black and his face was very white. He had been happy that morning, driving the big locomotive and its swaying passenger cars south through the sunlit undulations of eastern Georgia. So had his crewman. Both were in high spirits because the South Western Railroad did not often give raises and when the company showed beneficence, this was a cause for celebration.

It was the summer of 1863 and had either of the men been concerned with the Confederate cause in the bloody Civil War that gripped the nation, their moods would have been a great deal heavier. It had been a bad year for the South. In May, General Stonewall Jackson had died of gunshot wounds accidentally inflicted by his own men. In the same month Grant had begun his siege of Vicksburg which in July he captured together with 30,000 Rebel troops. Port Gibson, Port Hudson and Gettysburg had also fallen to the Federal armies that year. True, Lee was moving north from Fredericksburg, launching a second invasion against the Yankee strongholds, but the omens were not good.

However, the ageing engineer and his younger colleague had no interest in the conflict. They operated their locomotive far from the battle zones and the closest they came to enemy troops was the daily halt at Anderson. And the wretched creatures fenced in behind the pine stockade and the cord marking the deadline of the nearby Andersonville Prison Camp posed no threat to the innocent employees of the railroad company.

Until that fine summer morning when Captain Josiah C. Hedges and six of his troopers broke free of the miserable squalor and killed the crewman as they commandeered the locomotive.*
(*See—Edge: The Blue, The Grey And The Red.)

Now, as the locomotive barreled along at increasing speed, leaving the stranded passenger cars far behind, the full horror of war made itself known to the sweating engineer. Quaking before the controls, eyes glued to the pressure gauges, he was awesomely aware of what was happening behind him on the footplate. Two of his captors were dressed in ill-fitting grey uniforms. The other five wore the blue serge and gold insignia of Union cavalrymen, ragged and dirt-streaked from the long weeks of incarceration in the hellhole that was Andersonville.

One of the men in grey was an officer. He was the tallest of the escapers but like them he showed the signs of his harrowing experiences behind the stockade walls -hollowed out eye sockets, sunken cheeks and pallid skin resulting from the meager prison regimen. The mere fact of being free and successfully stealing a train to speed them away from pursuit had, however, already begun to have an effect on the men. A buoyancy of spirit injected hope into their minds and this was reflected in a strange lightness that emanated from their eyes as they drank in the sights of freedom.

The officer showed this least of all as he stood immediately behind the trembling engineer, studying the technique of driving the locomotive. And it was he whom the railroad man feared most. He seemed to be the only one who was armed - with a razor sheathed in a neck-pouch which he could draw with lightning speed. And use with devastating effect, as he had revealed when he cold-bloodedly slit the throat of the crewman.

The man with the razor was Hedges. Behind him, cursing at the men to keep the firebox filled with logs, was Sergeant Frank Forrest, not quite so tall as the captain, but broader. He was the oldest of the men to break out of Andersonville and looked even meaner than Hedges when he cracked his lips to show crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.

The rest of the men were all in their early- to mid-twenties. The second man in Rebel grey was Hal Douglas who held the rank of corporal. Billy Seward, Roger Bell, John Scott and Bob Rhett were all troopers. With the exception of Rhett, the men had been molded through the burning heat of countless battles into vicious machinelike creatures existing solely to kill the enemy, often each indistinguishable from another when the call to action came. Rhett was the exception because he had been born a coward and the terrors of war served only to darken the fear that was his constant companion.

“We going to get to any spur that’ll loop us north?” Hedges roared in the engineer’s ear.

They had been speeding southwards for more than a mile and the sudden question caused the engineer to start. He looked over his shoulder and found his gaze captured by the slitted blue eyes of Hedges, contrasting so oddly with the Mexican cast to the rest of his lean features. He shook his head emphatically. “Not ‘till we hit Valdosta close by the Florida Stateline, mister. And we ain’t got firing and water enough to get that far.”

“Christ, Captain!” Forrest roared. “We’re goin’ like a bat outa hell. But we ain’t gettin’ no place.”

Hedges raised a dark-skinned hand and jerked the engineer’s attention back to the controls. Then he turned to treat Forrest to a cold grin. “I’m open to suggestions, Sergeant,” he called.

Forrest was a man ill-fitted for army discipline with its chains of command. He had come to the war after many years of bounty hunting in the south-western territories, where he had always been the one to give the orders and make the plans. But he had learned to comply with Hedges’ commands by gaining respect for the Captain: not as an officer but as a man - the first one he had ever met who he considered to be smarter than himself.

Hedges was aware of this; just as he knew that the other five men who had always been the nucleus of his Troop would continue to follow his orders only for as long as the relationship between their captain and their sergeant was maintained at the
status quo.
He was certain, as he had been from the very moment these men thrust themselves upon him on a scarred battlefield*, (
*See—
Edge: Killer’s Breed.
)
that Forrest could not be allowed to win the most minor confrontation. For if he did the group would degenerate into a vicious mob, ready to kill without purpose or profit. And although, on occasion, Hedges himself lost sight of the cause for which he was fighting, he could not condone bloodshed for its own sake.

Thus, alongside the battle he waged against the Rebels, the Captain had a constant struggle to contain his sergeant, who periodically chose to test his superiority. Because Hedges wanted earnestly to retain the group as a fighting unit - not out of respect for them as soldiers, but because he regarded the troopers as killers of a very special breed. And killing the enemy to win the war was his prime objective.