Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 Read Online Free PDF

tries to stir up trouble hereabouts and pin a murder on somebody who didn’t do it, folks won’t be so easy as they have been on the doc, I reckon.’
    ‘I got no need to hear how people feel about strangers in a place like Eternity,’ Edge muttered as he recalled another small town where violent death had triggered the series of events that brought him to this one. The words were soft spoken as he watched the sodden suited Childs and Shelby, each toting a carpetbag, trudge out of sight around the bend in the street. And his sardonic comment was masked by the thudding hooves of a horse cantering up from the depot end of the street. The rider was enveloped in a

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    billowing, dark hued slicker with a hood that made him an ethereal, constantly changing form in the lashing rain.
    Edge turned up the collar of his own slicker, took a deep breath and stepped out on to the porch alongside the stretch of street that was deserted now. For the rider had gone around the curve beyond the two story, false fronted Washington Memorial Theatre. Then he came to an abrupt halt. And let out his breath in a resigned sigh, the soft sound lost behind a raucous barrage of six fast shots exploded from about the point where the rider had reached.
    ‘What the hell!’ Buck Segal vaulted over his counter, dashed between the tables and crashed through the doors. Skidded to an awkward halt just before he would have collided forcefully with Edge. ‘That sounded like shooting to me!’
    The big blond haired man held back in the shelter of the saloon’s porch and peered cautiously to left and right, his eyes narrowed as he tried to penetrate the curtain of teeming rain. ‘I don’t see a thing! But that was gunfire I heard, wasn’t it, mister?’
    Edge spit his cigarette butt into the street and stepped down off the porch as he replied sardonically: ‘I reckon, feller. Either that or forty five calibre thunder.’
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    CHAPTER • 3
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    EDGE TOOK long strides through the quagmire of Main Street with the beating rain needling into his face as his narrowed eyes peered through the lashing curtain. Then he heard hoof beats again and came to a tense halt before the Gothic styled false front of the theatre. It was the same horse as earlier – dark with a white blaze – which was spurred into a gallop back around the curve of the street. But Edge could not know if it was the same revolver clutched in the rider’s hand. The gun that had already exploded six shots and was empty? So, as the rider drew close and aimed the weapon at him, he re-acted with a well-practised instinct for self-preservation.
    He hurled himself to the side and cursed through gritted teeth as he misjudged the distance. And a boot heel caught on the lip of the lowest step of a flight of three and he crashed down hard: slammed a shoulder against the top step. But despite the pain he was able to slide his Colt clear of the holster, thumb back the hammer and draw a bead on the fast retreating rider who now faced forward, hunched low in the saddle. Then Edge was suddenly bathed in a splash of bright light that streamed from the flung open double doors of the theatre and a man threatened harshly:
    ‘Pull that trigger and you’re dead, mister!’
    Edge instantly froze, the walnut butted revolver still aimed along the street as the rider galloped his mount from sight around the curve.
    ‘I warn you fair and square! I damn well mean what I say, mister!’
    Edge slowly lowered the revolver as the boarding of the porch behind him creaked and a man whose grim toned voice he now recognised stepped out from the theatre. And a gun muzzle pressed against his neck between his upturned collar and Stetson brim.
    ‘No sweat.’ He pushed the Colt far out to the side so the man behind him could clearly see as he eased the hammer forward. ‘I know your word is law in this town.’
    ‘Edge?’ Ward Flynt sounded