EDGE MEETS STEELE: DOUBLE ACTION

There was not a whole lot of talking going on …

On account the two up top—driver and guard of The Central Western Stage Line's Concord coach—were the strong silent type.

On account the younger woman inside was in deep mourning for her late lamented husband, the young man was of the Eastern and inscrutable persuasion, and the older woman believed in keeping herself to herself. Even if that was kinda difficult with the bucking, jolting stage throwing them all together.

And the six Ute braves, war painted and feathered, who ambushed them didn't have polite conversation in mind either. Just killing.

Two others who'd never been great on idle chatter: Edge and Adam Steele. Who just happened to be riding within hearing distance of the gunshots and the screaming and knew that the time had come for some actions that spoke louder than words.

Published December 01, 2023
Recommended Price: £2.50

61: THE RIFLE

Quite a gathering outside the church.

Not a smart, Sunday-best crowd though. More a weekday-shabby, work-stained bunch. But then Serrano Dinero was a pretty shabby kind of place. No gold in them thar hills any more. Just a bare living to be scratched from the land.

And if, looking at the meeting house, the man called Edge thought the citizens had the Old Time Religion, he was wrong.

Not a service but a sale. No preacher man but an auctioneer. All the worldly goods of a man called Seth Fry—who could let everything go to the poor on account he was due to die at noon.

A forced sale, vigilante law and a bunch of men getting liquored-up to face the hanging. Not a good time for a stranger to ride into town. And for Edge, things were about to get a lot worse fast.

Published March 01, 2024
Recommended Price: £2.50

60: THE BREED WOMAN

Even if a man like Edge felt like settling down, the two-street community of Ross, Oregon was not the place.

Once a gold town, till the lode was worked out, now a lumber town, but only till the timber was cut down, it was a wretched huddle of uncared-for shacks.

Nor was the meal of half-cold bacon and beans he'd just struggled through likely to let him settle for even one good night's sleep. In fact the only issue settled was that the owner of the Golden Eagle Saloon couldn't cook.

But most unsettling of all was the half-breed woman. Tall and flauntingly good-looking, Edge had seen her change hands in a poker game. Saw her look of resigned contempt when she went off with her new owners. Had even then an inkling that she was about to have a violently disturbing effect on his life in the near future ...

Published November 01, 2023
Recommended Price: £2.50

59: TERROR TOWN

Up to now the good people of Winton, Oregon, had done a lot of things right.

The town was prosperous, the buildings well-constructed and in a good state of repair. The law was upheld and all seemed orderly. The elderly judge was eloquent in his praise for the respectable nature of the citizens.

Trouble was, just before the man called Edge rode in to town, things had started to go all wrong. A woman had been brutally murdered and a man hurriedly tried and hanged. The wrong man.

And now a person or persons unknown had set up a protest movement. Not by waving banners but by setting up nooses. And beginning to kill, one by one, all the people responsible.

That was when bad law became lynch law and the formerly neatly swept streets became all littered with the bodies of those recently responsible people.

Published August 01, 2023
Recommended Price: £2.50

58: THE DESPERADOES

Like most banks, the Munro, Colorado branch of the Western States offered its customers a range of services. Like all banks, you had to pay for them.

Right now the man called Edge was availing himself of one of the facilities to wire $150 on to a sporting house woman he owed up in Cheyenne. Only one thing was holding up the transaction: the other customers, who were holding up the bank.

Four old-timers, they were overseeing the transfer of certain funds - the entire contents of the safe - to their saddlebags for onward transmission to their hideout in the woods.

Not a service willingly offered by the bank, nor one for which these customers looked likely to pay, but when a withdrawal demand is backed up by four Colt .45s, most any bank teller will do as she is told.

Published May 01, 2023
Recommended Price: £2.50

57: DYING IS FOREVER

So this was Utopia, Arizona-style.

The man called Edge looked about him. The Promised Land it wasn't: one army post, two saloons and three whores. Add in a couple of rundown stores and an even more rundown church with a whiskey-soaked preacher and that was about it.

Not that Edge had come looking for the perfect society. Just a man, officially dead, suspected of still living and certainly a father.

Leastways, the thin-faced woman with the squalling bundle in her arms had been sure enough about the last to put up the money for the search.

And now the peace of Utopia was about to be disturbed: some old wounds opened up by Edge's questions and some new and very bloody ones by his actions.

Published February 01, 2023
Recommended Price: £2.50

56: DOOM TOWN

Holderville, Texas was a dying town. Shuttered storefronts, derelict homes, half the population already gone, their property abandoned. Behind the stockade, the garrison of Fort Holder was getting ready to pull out. Even the town drunk had gotten on his mule and headed unsteadily on south to where the whiskey was cheaper.

So when the man called Edge rode into town it was pretty much of an unusual happening - and he was only meaning to pass through.

Still he did stay around long enough to discover that for a dying town, the gunplay was lively enough and killing looked like being a growth industry.

55: UNEASY RIDERS

She was one of those Liberating Women.

Right now it was horses she was trying to liberate. Two of them, rightfully the property of the lawmen who'd just awakened the man called Edge and to him that his horse had been liberated by a night-time thief who'd been liberated from Nebraska's Carlsburg Penitentiary by his brothers-in-outlawry.

Altogether too much liberation going on.

Edge liked at the woman. She'd ambushed them like a man, handled a rifle like a man. was dressed in a man's clothes - tho' she filled them like a woman.

There and then he decided that this Woman's Movement had to be stopped in it its tracks. Stopped dead if necessary.

54: BACKSHOT

The man was sick. The man was busy. Thin, hollow-cheeked, breathing heavy with a nasty cough, blood showing where he spat. Looked to be fifty going on seventy. But working. Digging, determined, near exhausted but full of purpose.

The man called Edge, riding easily down from the Rattlesnake Hills in Wyoming Territory, reigned in to watch him. Knew at once what was being dug.

A grave.

Later, when he hired on with the sick man's wife, he saw the other grave. The one with the elder son, already buried. Backshot, they said, by the younger son. Whose gave was being made ready for when his pa found him and killed him.

A family that didn't so much pray together as slay together.