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

incredulous.
    ‘You got something right, marshal.’ Edge turned his head to look up at the figure stooped over him and the lawman removed the threat of the gun, straightened and stepped back.
    Flynt was wearing what was surely his best suit for a night at the theatre. He was a year or two over fifty, tall and heavily built with a round, ruddy complexioned face decorated by a thick black moustache that like his hair showed not a trace of grey. He had 22
    soft brown eyes that seemed incapable of expressing rancour, but his mouth line looked like it could more than compensate for this when he needed to convey displeasure. Now, as he backed off another half pace, glanced to left and right and over his shoulder to where questioning voices were raised, he expressed embarrassment.
    ‘What happened out here?’
    He lowered the revolver to his side as Edge rose gingerly to his feet, holstered his Colt, grimaced, massaged his pained shoulder and started to explain:
    ‘I figure some bad trouble, marshal. A feller just rode up the – ‘
    Raucous disembodied voices babbled from out of the wet darkness beyond the curve of the street.
    ‘Hey, somebody better get the marshal!’
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘Two guys have just been gunned down, Goddamnit!’
    Flynt came off the porch fast and snarled a curse when his expensively shod feet sank into the sucking mud.
    ‘Hey, one of them is . . . Yeah, it’s Doc Childs! Looks like the poor bastard’s done for!’
    The grim pronouncement abruptly silenced the raised voices beyond the curve as some two dozen people spilled out from the theatre. A few of them were men who were as formally garbed as Flynt. More were women, attired in their finest gowns. Some men lunged immediately out into the rain and mud without pause, while all the women held back in the shelter of the porch as they hurriedly donned topcoats and raised umbrellas. Edge began to move off in the same direction as everyone else, until somebody in the crowd darted up alongside him and tugged at his slicker.
    ‘It’s Mr Edge, isn’t it?’ she asked tentatively.
    He touched a forefinger to the brim of his sodden Stetson. ‘That’s right, Miss Spencer.’
    She was a slimly built, forty years old woman with slightly concave cheeks and deepset pale blue eyes. She had a wide mouth with perfect teeth, her nose was almost aquiline and her brown hair was short cut and sculpted to her head with bangs. Maybe her ears stuck out a little over much but Edge had liked the way they did that from the first time he saw her at the railroad depot when he arrived in town.
    She swallowed hard and looked on the point of tears. ‘That’s what I thought I heard the marshal call you. And did I hear somebody say Doctor Childs had been – ‘
    She curtailed the tensely spoken query as an answer was unwittingly supplied from further away than Edge. When a woman screamed above the babble of talk along the 23
    street: the shrill cry silencing the many other voices before she shrieked: ‘It’s the doc, sure enough! And he’s dead!’
    Now a half sob exploded from deep within Sue Ellen Spencer and she lunged forward, hoisting the hem of her long skirt to keep herself from tripping as she ran toward the people gathered into a loose-knit group on the centre of the street out front of Paine’s Livery Stables.
    The crowd parted to allow her through and she dropped to her knees between the two slumped forms, uncaring about the mud as she reached out to search for a pulse at the neck of one of them.
    A man rose from squatting beside the other inert figure and announced morosely:
    ‘And this one, marshal. He’s a goner as well.’
    ‘That’s a guy named Shelby,’ the solidly built, grey moustached John Dickens revealed. ‘He was a buddy of the doc’s from way back. Used to be a police detective in New York City I heard him say in the saloon.’
    ‘Ain’t much that you and the colonel don’t hear about what goes on around Eternity!’
    a woman