Ten Grand by George G. Gilman

wryly. “You just been screwed by Henry,” he said.
    “You kill me,” she muttered, stepping forward.
    “Yeah,” he said, rolled on to his side and kicked out.  His boots hooked around her calves and she stumbled forward, a scream of alarm leaping from her throat as she went off the shelf, smashed her skull on a projection of rock and cartwheeled down to the floor of the gully, the snapping of bones accompanying the dull thud of her body as it completed each turn.
    “Have a good trip, Amy,” Edge murmured when the final thud announced her fall had ended.
    The silence then was solid enough to cut with a knife.  The cold bit deeper and Edge wrapped the blanket around his body more securely, prepared to wait for as long as the marshal deemed safe.
    “Edge?”
    It wasn’t what Edge wanted to hear.
    “Edge, you up there?”
    Edge grinned into the darkness. He kept his breathing low and did not move a muscle. There was a vocal sound from below: one word that was inaudible in meaning but said in a tone that meant the marshal had cursed.  Silence for long moments, then a slap of hand on horse flesh, a whinney and pounding of hoofs. One of the animals, either the bay or the piebald, galloped away down the gully.  Edge didn’t look to see which one. It wasn’t the right sound. Then, after another long pause, came the unmistakable crunch of a human footfall on hard rock. Pause. Another footfall. The marshal was making slow progress out of the cover of the cleft of the rocks. Edge raised his eyebrows in surprise, figured the lawman had taken no more than fifteen minutes to make his move.  But Edge remained absolutely immobile, knowing that nervous eyes would be focused upon the shelf, an anxious finger curled around a trigger.
    Then the footsteps sounded closer together as the man moved more quickly. Then they stopped and Edge counted to three and shot himself forward on his elbows, angling the Henry down the steep slope. The marshal heard the sounds and came up from his stoop over the woman, face clouding with horror.
    “Drop it,” Edge commanded and the man complied, his rifle thudding to the ground.
    “You pushed her?”
    “She didn’t have a lot to live for. Who put you on to me?”
    “Liveryman recognized your picture on the wanted poster,” the marshal answered. “Waitress at the restaurant said you’d headed north. Her boss backed her up. We figured they were lying.”
    “Obliged,” Edge said and shot him, cleanly through the heart. The man collapsed on to the woman in an embrace of death.
    Edge rose, draped the blanket around himself and started down the slope. He didn’t even glance at the bodies as he crossed to the cleft, discovered it had been the bay the marshal had spooked to try to flush him out. He found his Remington and walked slowly down to where the lawmen’s two horses waited patiently. He selected the big chestnut mare with a new saddle. Each horse carried a canteen, both half full and he tipped one into the other. Then he reloaded both the Remington and the Henry and mounted, urged the animal forward, south again.
     
    Oh beat the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly
    Play the dead march as you carry me along.
     
    He tried to finish the song which Amy had sung, but could not recall the final lines, so hummed it to its conclusion.
    “Five more including two lawmen,” he said pensively to his inattentive horse. “Guess I must be piling quite a bounty on my head. Be glad when I cross the border.”
     

     
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
     
     
    HALF a night’s ride ahead of Edge, El Matador and his bandits approached the Mexican village of San Murias in the cold early hours. It was the way of their brutal leader to attack his objectives such a time.  For, he reasoned, that at such an hour a raid was never expected, and those who might attempt retaliation were at their most unready.  Sleep robbed a man of his defenses and in the few seconds it took him to realize his danger, a bullet or a