Edge: Ten Grand

PEACEVILLE, Arizona Territory had lived up to its new name during the four weeks in which the man called Edge had been temporary sheriff. As the days went lazily by, the physical and mental wounds Edge had suffered in avenging the death of his brother had healed. (See: Edge: The Loner.)  He spent his days either behind the desk in the sheriff’s office, or patrolling the two streets that formed the town. He spoke little to anyone and his demeanor was such that few were moved to open conversations with him. He ate regularly, three square meals a day, at the restaurant owned by the Mexican nicknamed Honey and the only relationship he had with anybody in depth involved Gail, the beautiful waitress who tended tables at the restaurant. It she was who became a willing receptacle for his infrequent bouts of sexual passion. It was her softly firm body, large-breasted, narrow-waisted and strongly-hipped that suffered the savage onslaught of his hard maleness: submitting with the compliance of a deeply eager love to a man she knew to be devoid of emotion.

For Edge was a man who only took and never gave. He was as content as such a man could ever be; eating, sleeping, loving and getting paid three dollars a day for work that was never more demanding than a simple nightly task of arresting the town drunk and throwing him into one of three cells at the rear of the sheriff’s office. Until El Matador and his group of twenty bandits crossed the border from the Mexican province of Sonora and blew a hole in the rear safe of Norman Chase’s bank.

They came at dawn, riding at a gallop until they sighted the town, its buildings rising up off the desert floor to provide a man-made scar on the desolate landscape. They were all big men, except one. Dressed in white pants and shirts, crisscrossed by heavily-laden bandoliers, with mustached faces shaded by large sombreros, they rode with rifles carried in hands and many sported naked swords slid through waistbands. The small man was the leader, El Matador—The Killer. He was no more than five feet tall, with a stocky build that hinted at a wiry strength without advertising aggression. But his young face—he was not yet twenty-five—mirrored the events of a crowded and violent youth that had earned him his nom de guerre. It was a face of undisguised evil, evident in the widely-set eyes and, twisted mouth, the firm jaw-line scarred by a diagonal knife wound and the overall set of the features aged into a permanent expression of hate for everything and everybody.

He rode a magnificent white stallion at the head of the column of men and was dressed like the others. But his weapons were different. He carried a Turkish-made blunderbuss with a rosewood stock beautifully inlaid with silver and in holsters at each hip were slung twin American Colt Army Model revolvers.

As soon as she saw the buildings of Peaceville take form in the grey light of dawn he raised a hand and his men obediently slowed their horses to the pace set by the white stallion. Miguel, who was an enormously fat man with bulbous cheeks and a gold ring in his right ear, and acted as El Matador’s lieutenant, cantered forward from the column to ride beside his leader.  

“How much you think is in the Peaceville bank?” he asked in Spanish.

Matador drew in his cheeks and sucked upon them for a few moments, staring ahead. “A great deal,” he replied at length. “The gringos in Washington offer much money to bounty hunters who capture outlaws. The hunters demand quick payment. They will not wait. Much money will be there.”

Miguel laughed raucously, “But it will not be bounty hunters who get it, El Matador.”

The bandit leader seldom laughed and when Miguel recognized upon the evil face an expression which indicated El Matador was thinking, he reined in his own horse, dropped back to his position in the line. When the group were within a quarter mile of the town their leader signaled they should dismount and the men did so, listened attentively to the instructions they were given. Then they split into three groups, two of nine and one of three: the smallest comprised Matador, Miguel and an older, pock-marked man named Torres. One of the large groups moved off first, leading their horses at a steady run in a wide circle that would take them to the other side of Peaceville. When they had almost reached their position, the trio set off in a direct line for town and as Soon as they were seen to reach the wall of the first building the second large group closed in.