Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 by George G. Gilman Page A

and slender and had chestnut coloured hair that fell to midway down her back outside the bulky coat she wore against the cold of the early morning air.
    ‘How’s that, Beth?’ the lawman called to her as she quickened her pace toward the rear end of the train.
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    After a fleeting glimpse before she turned to hurry off, Edge saw she was thirty or so and attractive without being conventionally pretty, her somewhat gaunt face dominated by large blue eyes. From a slight family resemblance and the way they traded their given names, Edge assumed they were brother and sister for he knew for certain that a woman called Beth Flynt worked at the newspaper office.
    ‘Reckon she means him,’ Edge said as he noticed before the marshal did the man who had captured her attention.
    He had risen from among a stack of timber planks loaded on a flatbed wagon two ahead of the caboose. Something over thirty, six feet tall and nearly as thin as one of the telegraph poles that lined the track, he was dressed in black from his battered Stetson to his scuffed riding boots: shirt, vest, pants and a mismatched jacket. He did not wear a topcoat for protection against the weather that must have been bitingly cold to a man riding an open car through the November night. He waved cheerfully to the woman coming toward him then ducked briefly out of sight to gather up his belongings and tossed them to the platform before he jumped down beside the bedroll, saddlebags and rifle: no saddle.
    ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ Flynt growled after he did a long double take at the couple now locked in a close embrace, alternately kissing and trading fast spoken words. ‘If that ain’t Clay Warner come back to town after so long away!’
    The marshal looked like he wanted to hurry down the side of the train after his sister, but he held back, maybe dissuaded by their uninhibited display of affection. Edge muttered ruefully: ‘Whoever he is, he don’t look like the kind of feller who’d be interested in buying a store.’
    ‘Clay was making a living bounty hunting the last time I heard anything of him,’ Flynt said. ‘He was my deputy for a spell a few years back, until the wanderlust got to him. I didn’t know he was headed back this way, but it’s sure that Beth did. She and him are old friends. Like you can see for yourself, uh?’
    The car that interested most of the people at the depot had been opened up and the brakeman who had clambered aboard paused for a moment in the doorway. Glowered at Warner and Beth as they strolled by beyond the eager group, the newly arrived man weighed down with his gear, the woman clinging firmly to his arm and smiling lovingly up at him.
    ‘Just where in tarnation did you spring from, mister?’ the railroadman demanded, angry that an illegal passenger had escaped his vigilance and stolen a free ride.
    ‘Back at the water stop this sick sounding train made at Scranton Tanks,’ Warner answered grimly. ‘But that’s no damn skin off your nose, buddy. Though there were times when it felt like the lousy wind and rain were tearing it off my entire face.’
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    Some of the people clustered at the open boxcar saw the man in black for the first time as the sour-toned exchange took place. And many of them turned to peer fixedly at Warner with the same kind of ill feeling as the brakeman. Which was an attitude far removed from that of Ward Flynt as the lawman extended his right hand to be shaken by the again broadly smiling Warner. The two men traded the platitudes of old friends meeting again after a long interval then Flynt gently chided his girlishly giggling sister for not letting him knew Warner was due back in town. And as they moved away from the depot and the stalled locomotive began to sound less on the point of total breakdown, Warner excused the woman’s secrecy on the grounds that when he wrote Beth he had not been sure he would reach Eternity today.
    As a largely disinterested bystander, Edge registered that