Edge: The Loner

The lookout rose, his movements suggesting he was cramped from long hours in the same position. He whistled and a horse emerged from around a knoll. The man caught the reins, booted his rifle and started down the slope. Edge gave a grunt of satisfaction that his estimate about the man’s size had been more or less accurate.

“They hung Linmann yet?” the man asked as he got close enough to talk at normal conversational level.

Edge nodded.

The man spat with disappointment. “Why am I always stuck out here at point whenever anything interesting happens?”

He turned his back on Edge and put a boot in the stirrup. Edge whipped the Remington from under the cassock, spun it by the trigger and laid it with force along the back of the man’s neck.

“Guess you just been unlucky,” he said wryly, sliding to the ground as the unconscious man collapsed.

He stripped himself and the lookout; pleased the man was a conservative dresser. Grey pants, black shirt, white kerchief. And gray hat.

Nice quiet clothes to go visiting a girl.

CHAPTER TEN

EDGE took his time going back to town, safe from pursuit and unwilling to reach his destination before nightfall. So he rode slowly and easily, pacing his mount at an even walk, the beast proving herself obedient and eager to respond to the demands of her rider. Probably, Edge considered idly, she was grateful to be carrying a normal size man after her stint under the barrel named Brady.

After the trapped heat of the bowl in the gully, that poured down by the afternoon sun felt almost fresh. Edge breathed deeply of the fresh air and experienced a renewal of energy as the final shred of tension was eased from his mind and body. When he had been in danger, physically and mentally alert to the hostility of those around him, he had been unaware of the strain building up within him. There had been no time, let alone inclination, for him to sense the harsh coiling of nerve ends. Not until he was alone, able to relax from constant watchfulness, did the reaction set in. But immediately, as he realized his own invincibility to objective and subjective violence; the utter lack of emotion he felt towards it; his cool ability to deal with it, the after effects diminished, then disappeared.

He did not attempt to analyze the new character that had been born with the new name, Edge. He had seen and experienced much during the war between the States which had set a pattern for his future philosophy, but he had returned from the fighting with a firm intention to take up at the farmstead where he had left off. But then he had found Jamie and seen what they had done to his kid brother and the horror of the discovery had shattered the pattern, spreading it wide. What had been a frame of mind, malleable and capable of being influenced by extraneous circumstances was suddenly a physical force communicated to every part of his body, like the very blood in his veins.

But Edge’s thoughts were not running along those lines as he dawdled into Anson City. He simply knew that he felt hard and dangerous, as deadly and unemotional as his Henry repeater; and as capable, whatever the odds, of avenging Jamie’s killing. That was all he needed to know. Whatever component parts made up the whole were irrelevant. The utter completeness of the whole was what was important.

When he halted to drink from a stream and replenish his water bottles he caught site of his face in the rippling water, and ran a hand over his two-day-old stubble, contemplating his unsteady image for several moments. The horse, neck and head bent to drink besides him, looked at Edge with jaundiced eyes.

Edge grinned, the glinting eyes and bared teeth, crinkled skin of the cheeks and rippling of the water-beaded beard made him look meaner than when his features were in repose.

“So maybe I ain’t the most handsome man in the West,” he told the horse. “But it ain’t that kind of a date.”

The horse snorted and shook her head violently, as if making a comment on Edge’s remark. He laughed, took hold of the bridle and walked for a while, so that the pace was even slower than before. Edge began to think the sun would never complete its slow slide down below the western horizon. But it did, finally, as Edge sat at the foot of a bank off the trail leading into Anson City, chewing on a stale, many days old piece of biscuit he had found in the bottom of one of the saddlebags.