Edge 47 The Moving Cage by George G. Gilman

Author:George G. Gilman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: NEL
Published: 2017-07-11T23:00:00+00:00

The Vengeance Guns

Memories of Emma Diamond were still fresh in the mind of Edge and he had yet to have his run-in with a fat man called Sullivan when the following events took place. Thus, they occurred while he was heading away from the Rio Grande where it flows south of the Santiago Mountains in Texas (Ashes and Dust) and toward Fort Waycross, Territory of Arizona (Sullivan's Law).

THE half-breed dismounted from the trail-weary black gelding in the front yard of the big house at the eastern end of the street and went to the well. The rusted handle squeaked when he cranked it, and he could hear that the bucket leaked as he winched it up the shaft. But it was still more than half filled with cool, clear, sweet water when it reached the surface.

He drank with cupped hands, and when his thirst was slaked he held the bucket out for the horse.

At no time since swinging down from the saddle did he relax his cautious surveillance of his apparently deserted surroundings. Seeing at close quarters the community he first spotted two hours earlier. Then just as a blurred image in the far distance of this piece of desert on the New Mexico-Arizona border. A huddle of dark shapes gradually becoming more distinct as the slick-looking heat shimmer of midmorning retreated before the advance of the slow-riding man. No smoke smudged the perfectly blue sky above the town as he approached it from the east; and at midday, when he rounded the corner of the two-story house which faced along the single short street, he was convinced that no one lived here anymore.

But that did not necessarily mean he had the place to himself, so he continued to mistrust the utter silence and total lack of movement that a man with imagination might regard as eerie. And the glinting slits of his ice-blue eyes missed nothing, while in back of his seemingly casual attitude he was constantly poised to respond in an instant to the first sign of danger.

Like the brief, fast series of metallic clicks that he recognized as the sounds of a shell being levered into the breech of a repeater rifle. His eyes raked toward the source of the sound and he saw the sun-glinting barrel of the rifle as it was jutted through the glassless window of the weather-ravaged Golden City Saloon, three hundred feet down the street to his right.

He saw the puff of white muzzle smoke as he fisted a hand around the frame of his own Winchester where it jutted from the boot hung on his saddle. Heard the report of the gunshot as he flung himself backward: away from the gelding and onto the ground in the cover of the three-foot-high wall encircling the well shaft. His rifle was clear of the boot and he had a double-handed grip on it: needed only to thumb back the hammer because there was already a shell in the breech.

The crack of the gunshot masked the thud of the bullet's impact.

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