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what I’ve caught myself that’s worth a hundred dollars.”

     
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
     
     
    SHE wasn’t pretty.  Examining her through his narrowed eyes, grinding his teeth in an expression of anger at allowing the woman to get the drop on him, Edge thought she was downright ugly. She was tall, with a haggard, dirt-streaked face from which large, red-rimmed dark eyes looked at him with greedy interest.  Her mouth was a mere thin line, pale pink against her sun-darkened skin and her long hair, the color of dirty straw, hung limp and matted over her shoulders.  Her dress was nothing more than a shapeless piece of gray rag that fell from the neck to ankles offering no hint at the form it covered.  Only where it hugged the length of her long arms to be fastened at the wrists did it show her bone leanness. And the filthy hands below, curled around the gun she pointed at Edge, were just-skin-covered bones. She looked tired and weak, but her gun more than compensated for this at the distance she stood from Edge. It was one of the old Roland White Harmonica Rifles: a percussion repeater with a vertical sliding magazine.   A sporting gun, but as effective against a man as an animal.  And the woman held it like one not reluctant to use it. She stood beside a boulder behind which she had been concealed, lower down the slope from the point where Luke and Chuck had made their attack.  Edge guessed she had moved down during the fight.
    “Like what you see?” he asked.
    Her deep-set eyes fastened upon his face for several moments, then began to travel down, halted with a flicker of surprise at his chest before continuing down to his feet.  Then back to his chest.
    “Why’d you say you had a hundred on your head?” she asked. 
    Edge glanced down, saw the star still pinned to his shirt front.  He grinned, jerked a thumb at the bodies of Luke and Chuck.
    “Didn’t want them to think they died trying for zero,” he answered. “Friends of yours?”
    “I rode with them,” she said shortly.
    “Which one you sleep with?”
    She wasn’t insulted. “They took turns.”
    “I don’t see you shedding tears.”
    “Weeping women have no right in this part of the country,” she came back. “Will anybody cry for you if I shoot you?” 
    Edge liked the word if. He thought fleetingly of Gail back in Peaceville, felt an odd kind of resentment that she would mourn him. She was a link with the past and he was a man for whom the past was a dead thing. It did not exist, so therefore must be dead-unless there were memories to keep it alive. The thought of Gail triggered off other recollections and Edge suddenly shut his mind to them.  Now was what mattered: this woman with this gun discussing his death.
    “Nobody,” he answered.
    She nodded, happy with his answer.  Perhaps feeling less alone because there was at least one other fellow human being on earth in similar circumstances. She raised the rifle and her finger whitened on the trigger as she drew a bead on the star. Edge prepared his muscles for a sideways leap, but suddenly the muzzle dropped and the rifle crack sent a bullet thudding into the ground between his spread feet.
    “That’s to show I could have plugged you good,” she told him, holding the rifle in one hand, low at her side, offering no threat.
    Edge holstered the Remington and moved slowly across to her, grinning.  Not until he stopped immediately in front of her, his head at the same height as her own, did she recognize the expression as a parody, see the viciousness shining in the eyes. As one of his hands ripped the rifle from her grasp the other moved as a blur, back and forth, knuckles and palm slapping with force into each of her cheeks.  She accepted the beating without flinching, her eyes dull, lips set in a firm line that barred any sound of pain.  Finally, Edge stopped, breathing deeply from the exertion, watching the bruises rise on her thin face.
    “I met men like you before,” she said