The Deputy - Edge Series 2 (23 page)

And after watching the riders gallop off into the moonlit darkness it was even clearer to him that something was very wrong tonight. Then he decided he could well profit from this situation – provided he took the proper course of action. If only to get his hands on another bottle of whiskey like the one that Sheriff George gave him the last time he told the lawman where to find the Mexican woman?

So, perhaps a full minute later, after the group had ridden beyond earshot and out of sight with no sign of any pursuit from Bishopsburg, Billy Injun stepped out of his shack and started southward. At first he walked, until he was over the rise and on the downward slope, then he broke into a loping run, faster than a walk but not so fast as to tire him much more than a brisk stroll would do. And at this pace he was easily able to read the clear sign left by the riders who galloped away far ahead of him. Back in Bishopsburg an air of despondency hung over the town in mourning for the dead George North as most people began to bed down for the night. Ted Straker was not one of these: and in the dimly lamp lit law office the deputy had assumed the sheriff’s chair behind the desk. Sat there in glum faced slumped dejection, the strain of keeping his emotions in check making him look like a man who had not slept in many nights.

Although he had not felt able to assist with the removal of North’s body from where it had fallen, few of his fellow citizens commented on this while Edge lent a hand. Saw to it the bloodstains on the street were masked with dust while Clyde Grover and Otis Logan supervised the removal of the corpse to Grover’s undertaking parlour. But he sensed a degree of resentment in the air and the fact there was too much fulsome praise for what little he was doing signalled a degree of reproach for Straker. When he entered the law office and leaned his back against the wall between the door and the window his fellow deputy looked up with a glower and asked in an embittered tone:

‘Anybody actually call me yellow out there?’

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Edge began to take shells from the loops on his gunbelt and push them into the chambers of the walnut butted Colt. ‘Not that I heard, feller.’

‘But I guess there’s a lot of them thinking that’s what I am?’

Edge thrust the revolver back in his holster. ‘There’s a lot of bad feeling in town but I’m not a mind reader. I guess though that most of it’s for North’s killers.’

‘Any talk of getting a posse together?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ He dug out the makings.

‘But I got to raise one, that’s for sure?’

Edge shrugged and started to roll a cigarette. ‘Like North told you a couple of times lately, enforcing law and order in this county is going to be up to you now he ain’t around any more.’

‘Unless folks want to elect a new man?’

Edge toyed with the unlit cigarette and checked an impulse to irritation with the selfdeprecating, self-pitying young man slumped in the chair behind the desk. Spoke in a controlled tone and was impassive when he responded: ‘Snap out of it, feller. You were close to North. He was your stepfather. Guess anyone with any kind of common sense ought to realise why you didn’t want to put your feelings on show all over town.’

‘I don’t know if there’s too many people around here will think – ‘

‘Which doesn’t make you yellow,’ Edge pressed on. ‘Just a man grieving over the loss of a close friend. And, yeah, I think you ought to go after – ‘

‘That’s right, I got to get on to raising a posse, that’s for sure!’

‘There’s you and there’s me,’ Edge said. ‘Which maybe is better than a whole bunch. More chance of us being able to move up on Bryce and the rest without them knowing we’re around.’

‘And when we catch up with them we’ll likely be out-numbered,’ Straker complained.

‘And I don’t mean three of them against the two of us. Bryce and Harvey could have joined up with old man Martinez’s crowd.’

‘We’ll have to take care of that when we see what we’re up against, feller. At least we’ll only have our own skins to worry about.’ He took out the sheriff’s star he had removed from North’s shirt and rubbed clean of blood. ‘Won’t have to watch that a bunch of amateurs keep their heads down when the shooting starts.’

He pushed away from the wall and went to the desk. Dropped the dead man’s badge on the blotter in front of the apprehensive Straker.

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The young man held back from picking it up. ‘That’s all very well, mister, but I’m no hotshot tracker in open country. And like I told you out front awhile ago, I ain’t so brilliant with a gun.’

Edge scowled and lit his cigarette. Said on a stream of exhaled smoke: ‘No sweat. If you really are that damn useless you better stay here in town with your wife and kids. Maybe I’ll see you when I get back.’

He swung around, went to the door and jerked it open.

‘Hey, I’m in charge of the law here, just like you said. ‘And if anybody’s going to go

– ‘

‘Fine, so do your job,
sheriff!
The feller who had it before you hired me on as a deputy. But if you want to fire me, it won’t make any difference to what I plan on doing. Because I’m short a horse Bryce stole and I don’t intend to let that pass without doing something to – ‘

He broke off as a body of fast rising sound reached in through the open doorway. It was the clatter of many hoof beats on the street from the east: the riders pushing their mounts to a gallop that then became a canter, next a trot, finally a walk. A series of sounds that on a normal night may not have aroused much curiosity in Bishopsburg, but on this night while the rest of the town continued to seem unnaturally quiet, it registered as excessively obtrusive and many doors were swung open.

‘Not more trouble?’ Straker groaned the rhetorical question and came out of the chair fast, scooped up the sheriff’s badge from the blotter and grabbed his Winchester that leaned against a side of the desk.

Edge stepped out on to the porch and Straker joined him to wait for four horsemen to ride off Mossman Road on to the intersection and halt.

‘Buenos tardes, Senor
Edge,’ Raul Alvarez greeted as he and three other Mexicans first seen on the trail from Railton City then at the Brady place expressed grimaces to signal the greeting was not to be taken literally – because for these men it obviously was not a good evening.

Edge was impassive, the cigarette angled from the side of his mouth as he acknowledged rhetorically: ‘How are you fellers doing?’

‘You want to introduce us, deputy?’ Straker asked sardonically, scowling as he fumbled to exchange his badge for that of North on his shirt pocket. Then he looked away from the calmly smoking Edge toward the troubled Mexicans as they swung wearily down from their saddles.

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‘Sheriff Ted Straker,’ Edge supplied and gestured toward the new arrivals. ‘The feller with the beard is Raul Alvarez, the top hand of the bunch. That’s Paco Diego to the right and Pedro Sanchez and Ricardo Zamorra to the left. All of them dirt farmers turned bandits.’

‘Not from choice it is important that you understand,
senor,’
Alvarez interjected.

‘
Amigos
of the late Rubio and Filipe Rodriges,’ Edge went on. ‘And of Francisco Gonzales who sold out to Eduardo Martinez and – ‘

‘Late?’ the short and skinny Diego rasped. ‘Both of them? You are saying that Rubio is also dead,
senor
?’

There was a babble of shocked exchanges in harshly spoken Spanish, ended when the youthfully good-looking Sanchez demanded:

‘How do you know about Filipe being killed by that
traidor
Gonzales?’

Alvarez wanted to know: ‘Why is
Senor
George North no longer the sheriff in Bishopsburg?’

Straker snarled: ‘Look, what I want to know is – ‘

Edge interrupted evenly on a stream of exhaled smoke: ‘Rubio Rodriges and North were killed by a pair of hired killers named Bryce and Harvey: before and while they were breaking the Martinez kid out of jail.’

He dropped the cigarette butt and ground out the glowing embers under a heel.

‘They used Isabella Gomez as a decoy. That’s the lady you let get away from the ferryman’s place on the Rio Grande. Where you were supposed to be holding her until the trial?’

‘We were betrayed!’ Gomez excused bitterly.

‘It was her told us about Gonzales selling out to old man Martinez and killing the second Rodriges brother.’

‘
Senor
Edge, I think we should go inside?’ the suddenly drained looking Alvarez suggested. ‘There is much to discuss, is that not so?’

‘There sure as hell is!’ Straker snarled. ‘But time we waste on talk is more for those cold blooded killers to get away with the Martinez kid!’

The squint eyed Alvarez looked askance and his men fired off questions in Spanish. Then all of them gazed at Edge – a man they knew – rather than the bewildered and angry Straker.

Edge gestured down Main Street and drawled: ‘They went that-a-way.’

‘This happened recently?’ Alvarez asked thickly.

‘Less than thirty minutes ago, I guess.’

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Diego urged: ‘Then we should get after them,
pronto!’

‘It’s not easy to track in the dark of night,’ Sanchez pointed out dejectedly. Straker blurted: ‘Look, I’m the damn sheriff here now! And I say who goes and when we go!’

‘We are in your debt,’ Alvarez said and ensured he addressed himself equally to both the indecisive newly promoted lawman and the unruffled part-time deputy. ‘We allowed ourselves to be betrayed by one of our own and also we were stupidly outwitted by the woman. We would consider it a great favour if you allow us to help recapture Isabella Gomez and the murderer she is to be a witness against.’

‘And the two sonsofbitches who murdered George North,’ Straker reminded grimly. Edge said: ‘I figure these fellers will be more help in a shoot out than local men.’

‘But I’m still not so sure about this,’ Straker complained, shaking his head. ‘Riding out into open country at night.’

Edge stepped down off the porch as he said: ‘There ain’t too many sure things in this life, feller. Sometimes we have to take chances. Like you could’ve taken that long shot awhile back.’

Straker reminded bitterly: ‘I told you, I ain’t no sharpshooter! And I don’t gamble with people’s lives!’

Edge shrugged. ‘We all bet on different things with different stakes. Me, I had a horse in the first place. And I aim to be on him again.’

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CHAPTER • 15

_________________________________________________________________

SOMETIME AFTER midnight Billy Injun began to regret his self-imposed mission to
help out Sheriff George in the hope of being rewarded with another bottle of rye. He was tired, hungry and thirsty - more thirsty for water than whiskey despite the cold of the Texas night as he came up to the camp beside a clump of mesquite where the four people he had tracked for so many miles were bedded down. Saw that even the man supposed to be on watch was soundly sleeping beside the dead ashes of a long ago doused fire

They had supplies, these three men and a woman. Trail rations from which they had filled their bellies and slaked their thirsts and so eased themselves into a contented frame of mind for deep sleep.

The mixed breed’s stomach rumbled with emptiness and his throat felt like it had been turned inside out to expose it to long hours of arid dust and blistering sun. And the part of his being that craved whiskey caused his hands to shake and a tic to attack his scarred cheek.

So on top of all else he again began to worry about the terrors that Doc Friday had warned were sure to attack men who drank far too much than was good for them. But he knew he must maintain a firm grip on his self-control: not surrender to his body’s demands for the most basic of comforts.

And after perhaps a minute of inner struggle as he moved cautiously closer to the sleeping group, he achieved this. Accepted the challenge and called upon those traits of his character that were innate to the part of him that was Navajo. Shed, at least for awhile, the veneer of the white eyes he acquired while he lived for so many years among them, adopting their self-indulgent ways. But he did not delude himself into thinking he was the Indian he once had been before he was banished from his tribe. He kept it firmly in mind that he was much older now. And acknowledged that in addition to the debilitating effects of advancing years there was also the dissolute way of life he had led latterly.

He moved closer with even greater caution: at first in a low crouch then completely down on his belly. Conscious of his racing heart and needing to assure himself the thudding sound of blood pumping through his veins was audible only in his own ears. 136