Edge: Ten Grand

Edge rose, draped the blanket around himself and started down the slope. He didn’t even glance at the bodies as he crossed to the cleft, discovered it had been the bay the marshal had spooked to try to flush him out. He found his Remington and walked slowly down to where the lawmen’s two horses waited patiently. He selected the big chestnut mare with a new saddle. Each horse carried a canteen, both half full and he tipped one into the other. Then he reloaded both the Remington and the Henry and mounted, urged the animal forward, south again.

 

Oh beat the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly

Play the dead march as you carry me along.

 

He tried to finish the song which Amy had sung, but could not recall the final lines, so hummed it to its conclusion.

“Five more including two lawmen,” he said pensively to his inattentive horse. “Guess I must be piling quite a bounty on my head. Be glad when I cross the border.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

 

HALF a night’s ride ahead of Edge, El Matador and his bandits approached the Mexican village of San Murias in the cold early hours. It was the way of their brutal leader to attack his objectives such a time.  For, he reasoned, that at such an hour a raid was never expected, and those who might attempt retaliation were at their most unready.  Sleep robbed a man of his defenses and in the few seconds it took him to realize his danger, a bullet or a blade could dispatch him with a simplicity that placed every advantage with the attacker.

Matador and eighteen of his men went into the village on foot, leaving two to attend the horses. There were not more than a dozen buildings in the settlement, most of them rude shacks providing squalid living quarters for the poor peasants who sweated to earn a living from the arid soil to the west.  One, a little larger, was a cantina and another, larger still, a storage barn for farm produce. The reason the settlement had been built in that particular place was a well that had been bored down in the very center of the square around which the building rose.

Not a light showed as the bandits crept into the square, forming a group around the well. And they made not a sound, their leader indicating with a stab of his finger his plan of campaign. As their turn came, each bandit broke from the group and moved swiftly over to a house until each door was flanked by dark, evil looking figures, rifles at the ready. Finally, Matador was alone in the square’s center and as he stopped to haul up the bucket from the well the bandits leapt in front of the doors and kicked them open, firing at random into the inky blackness beyond.

Cries of alarm and screams of agony echoed the cracks of rifle shots as the bandits crashed into the houses.  While, in the center of the square as if in the heat of a peaceful summer’s day, Matador pulled the bucket clear of the well and pressed his face into it, sucking up the icy, clean tasting water. As he drank, his eyes watched over the rim of the bucket and he saw a naked man run from an open doorway, a shot from inside whining over the head of the retreating figure. Without interrupting his drinking, Matador swiveled his right holster and squeezed the trigger of the Colt. The man flung forward his hands and went to the ground, lay unmoving. Matador, his thirst assuaged, dropped the bucket and heard it splash into water far below.  Then he spun slowly on his heels, eyes going from one doorway to the next around the square as the surviving occupants of the houses were herded outside. There were men, women and children showing varying degrees of terror. More women than men, most of them young for not all the shots had been wild ones. A few children because some of the bandits retained a streak of sentimentality.

When he had turned full circle, Matador went halfway round again, his eyes fastening upon a tall girl of some sixteen years with long black hair and a beautiful face marred by a red welt on her cheek.  He strode arrogantly across to her, found his face came on a level with the breasts which thrust forward under the rough thickness of her long nightgown. She looked down at him with fear-filled eyes. He stepped back a pace, hooked the muzzle of his blunderbuss under the hem of the gown and raised it as high as her stomach. The girl’s legs trembled as the bandit leader examined her body with lustful interest.

“Your name, girl?” he demanded, letting the gown fall back, feasting his eyes upon the still-concealed breasts.

“Maria,” she said hoarsely. 

“Pretty, like you.  Except for the mark. Who hit you?” 

The girl glanced to her left, where her father stood, frustrated anger twisting his handsome face.

“I did,” he blurted out, taking a step forward. “For showing her body to another pig of a man last night.”

Matador raised the blunderbuss, halting the man.

“Who?” 

“Filipe Manola.”

“He is dead,” a woman cried from across the square.