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

upraised to aim a rifle at him. A shot rang out as Edge powered face down on to the muddy surface of the yard, the report followed by the sound of splintering wood as the bullet blasted through a panel of the fence. It missed its intended target and ricocheted off the discarded coffeepot. Next there was a shriek of fear from a woman who

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    had opened the door at the rear of the Ramsay Meat Market. And had unwittingly illuminated a killer intent upon claiming his third victim this night. Edge cursed again as he raised a hand and dragged the back of it across his mouth where his lunge to the ground had splashed mud into his face. The woman yelled: ‘Murder! There’s murder being done out here! Wyatt, get your scatter-gun, man!’
    The rifleman exploded a second shot that whined over the fence top and found no target close to Edge, jerked on his reins to wheel the horse and thudded his heels into the animal’s flanks. The woman’s scream held the tenor of terror rather than pain before the horse snorted and lunged into a gallop. Edge scrambled to his feet before a man showed in the lighted doorway, pointed a wavering shotgun over the threshold and squeezed the trigger. Buckshot peppered the fence and side of the stable across a ten feet wide alley and the woman, her back pressed against the wall beside the doorway, accused bitterly:
    ‘It’s too damn late now, you old fool! He’s got clean away.’
    ‘Damnit, Ruth!’ the man Edge knew to be Wyatt Ramsay complained. ‘You know I ain’t no hot shot with a weapon.’
    His scowling wife gestured with a dismissive hand at him and stared fixedly at where Edge peered after the long gone rider. ‘Are you all right, mister? He never – ‘
    ‘No sweat, ma’am.’ He told the short, broad hipped, generously bosomed woman. Her skinny, buck toothed husband turned to go back inside as he muttered sourly:
    ‘All this damn trouble! Never does rain but it don’t pour!’
    Edge scowled down at his mud-splattered clothing and rasped: ‘It sure has turned out to be a dirty night.’
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    CHAPTER • 4
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    A SCOWLING Ward Flynt was among the small group of worried citizens that formed behind the line of stores midway along the south side of Main Street in the persistently falling rain. He carried out his duties as the local lawman to the best he could but just as before, darkness and the sodden ground prevented any kind of useful search for the gunman who had twice shattered the peace and quiet of Eternity tonight. Then early next morning as a watery sun failed to create more than a vague impression of warmth in the damp, wood smoke tainted air, the Eternity marshal returned. And while Edge watched from the yard out back of the Quinn and Son store in the pallid light of the new day the only pieces of evidence Flynt was able to find in the mud of the alley were the two spent shell cases ejected from the repeater rifle. If Wyatt Ramsay’s shotgun blast had drawn blood, there had not been enough of it to visibly stain the sodden ground. Nor was it possible to see if the rider had unwittingly dropped anything incriminating in his hurry to escape. Because the undeveloped area of land between the fence in back of the Main Street stores and another behind a half dozen houses on the start of the California Trail a quarter mile away was littered with trash.
    ‘Long gone and not a sign to be seen of him,’ Flynt complained bitterly from the other side of the yard fence as he peered forlornly in the direction the gunman had fled. This was eastwards, to where Main Street ended at the meeting of the California and Dodge City Trails, across from the railroad depot. And beyond to the stockyards and out over the flat far distances of the Kansas prairie where, in the clear morning light, the horizon seemed to be further away than usual. ‘Damn shame!’ the tall, heavily built lawman added, sighed and shook his head.
    ‘I