Read The Deputy - Edge Series 2 for Free Online

gunbelt and both men allowed them to drop to the ground.
    ‘I guess it’s just the woman you want?’ North asked as the wagon rolled to a halt about fifty feet away.
    Isabella caught her breath and clenched her fists.
    It was the driver of the rig who replied: ‘You are quite correct, Sheriff North. We require just Senorita Gomez to accompany us.’
    He was also Mexican. In his late thirties, he had prematurely grey hair and a ragged salt and pepper beard and a half closed right eye.
    ‘No!’ Isabella half screamed and dropped to her haunches: like she thought if she made herself small enough she could hide from the men who planned to abduct her.
    ‘Easy, lady,’ Edge said and held out a hand, offering to help her up. He looked between the riders and the older man up on the wagon seat and spread a quizzical expression across his face. ‘This ain’t what it seems to be, I figure?’
    He shot a glance at North, who shrugged again and looked perplexed. Then both of them peered at the wagon driver.
    It was not just because he was older than the others that he was so clearly the leader of the group. There was a suggestion of authority in his voice and bearing that singled him out as the top hand.
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    ‘You are quite correct, Senor Edge. I assure you we are most certainly not in the pay of Eduardo Martinez. And we mean Senorita Gomez no harm. If she will co-operate and enter into the rear of our wagon without a struggle, we promise there will not be the slightest bruise on her body.’
    ‘And if I do not come like a lamb to the slaughter?’ the woman challenged and pressed herself closer to Edge, eager for the token protection of mere proximity. The moustached man at the centre of the mounted trio said in a monotone that sounded more menacing than a snarl would have been: ‘Then I will fire a bullet into one of your feet. Which will make it much more easy for us to get you into the wagon, senorita.’
    He aimed his Colt at the target he had specified and she gulped noisily as she clung even more tightly to Edge, who advised:
    ‘Best you do like these fellers want, lady. They could have blasted our heads off easy. Still can.’
    North said: ‘They’re the only ones know what they have in mind to do, senorita. For now, it’s better we don’t try to find out what it is, maybe.’
    She twisted her head this way and that, frantically shifting her wide eyed gaze from the sheriff to Edge to the strangers on both sides of her: seeking to find a clue to her fate in the grim set of their faces.
    Then she stepped away from Edge and it seemed as if the tension that had held her inflexibly rigid for so long suddenly drained out of her body. Her decision was made and she uttered a low groan to try to clear her throat of the final vestiges of terror.
    ‘Okay.’ She had to gulp once more to get the croak out of her voice. ‘If these hombres mean what they say about not hurting me, I think I like their protection better than yours. There are many more of them! And they are all my fellow countrymen!’
    She whirled and strode purposefully toward the wagon, her hips swaying seductively, her head held proudly high and much of her silver jewellery glinting and clinking.
    Two men jumped down from the rear of the rig and it dipped a shade on its springs as they helped her aboard: the movement more pronounced when they 30
    clambered back in after her. Both were Mexicans: one of them fat in the face and at the belly, the other with a mangled right ear and two teeth missing at the upper front.
    The third man who had fired from the wagon had not yet shown himself. The two who had appeared were in the younger age group, and like the wagon driver and the three horsemen wore clothes styled north of the Rio Grande. The driver tipped his Stetson, turned the wagon unhurriedly and moved it off with the same lack of haste until it was a hundred yards or so down the trail. Here he brought it to a halt once more and the moustached spokesman for