Read Online Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 by George G. Gilman - Free Book Online Page B

on the doorframe and light his cigarette before he crossed the street to the livery. Here the forty years old, powerfully built, black bearded and bespectacled Dan Paine who had just opened up the place for the day’s business, set a fair price for the chestnut gelding that interested his customer. And he got an even better deal on a set of tack that, like the horse, had belonged to the late Billy Childs: the transaction sweetened by Paine throwing in for free the worse-for-wear but serviceable Winchester rifle that was in the saddle boot.
    ‘Does you buying this horse and the gear mean you’ll be staying around town?’ the liveryman asked as Edge began to saddle the gelding.
    ‘Don’t plan on doing that, feller.’
    Paine shrugged his broad shoulders and scratched in his beard. ‘It’s just that I know you arrived in Eternity aboard the train. And I figured if you was gonna leave, it’d be the same way. Man like you, though, be my guess that a train ain’t your preferred means of travel? So I figured maybe the notice I seen in this week’s paper got a buyer for the store and you’d be . . . ‘
    41
    Since the watershed of his life in the deadly aftermath of his final violent partnership with Adam Steele, Edge had spent much time in small towns. And so he had almost gotten accustomed to accepting, for most of the time with equanimity, the inquisitive nature of the people who lived in such claustrophobic communities. Occasionally he was irritated by their interest in his business but nowadays he was mostly able to keep his ill feelings hidden behind impassivity.
    ‘There’s no taker yet, feller. But you’re right. Whether I stay around one place for awhile or if I’m planning to cover a lot of country miles on the back of a horse is the way I like best to travel.’ He led the gelding outside, tossed away his part smoked cigarette, swung up into the saddle and asked the big man who had followed him from the livery:
    ‘Guess there are a whole bunch of chestnuts and bays with a white blaze in this part of the country and so – ‘
    ‘Ward Flynt already asked me about a horse like that, Mr Edge,’ Paine cut in as he shook his head. ‘Dozen or more in Eternity, I’d say. That I know of. Real sorry I wasn’t able to help the marshal out. I had a lot of respect for Doc Childs and I’d really like to do something to see that the cowardly sonofabitch who bushwhacked him gets what’s coming to him. And the killer took a shot at you, I hear tell?’
    ‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you, feller.’ Edge heeled his new mount forward and rode down to the bottom of Main Street then swung east on to the Dodge Trail, past the extensive spread of empty stockyard pens and headed out into open county. This piece of south western Kansas was not so flat and featureless as it appeared to be on first impression. Like a lot of the mid-west – as he well knew from being born and raised in Iowa and riding through most other states between the Mississippi and the Rockies
    – the rolling prairie had a share of low rises and shallow hollows, rock outcrops and isolated stands of timber.
    The Dodge Trail out from Eternity took account of such features of the landscape and occasionally curved to follow the easiest route. Whereas the men who laid the railroad track to the south of the trail had graded the terrain to keep the line arrow straight. So that sometimes the track, although not the row of telegraph poles that ran parallel with it, was lost to sight as Edge put his new mount to the test: by turns galloped, cantered and trotted the animal. Soon he felt as exhilarated as he knew the gelding beneath him was, man and animal alike relishing the freedom of being beyond the confines of the town. And for a short time he was tempted to just keep on going: to abandon here and now the mundane responsibilities that went with being a small town store-keeper. But reason prevailed. Initially because his belly began to feel the lack