Edge: Apache Death

The room was small and ill-furnished and could have been as filthy as a pig-sty or as neat as a palace before the braves entered. Now, as the tall, lean man with the life-scarred face looked about, he saw only havoc, the result of an orgy of death and destruction. The woman was sitting on a ladder-back-chair, her ankles tied to the legs and her arms to the sides. The girl was spread-eagled on her back on the floor, arms and legs held wide by ropes fixed to nails which had been driven into the boards. The woman was fully dressed and her chin rested on her slack breasts, showing the gaping wound where a tomahawk had split her skull. The girl was naked and had no breasts, for when the braves had spent themselves on her captive body they had used their knives to satisfy a different kind of lust.

Edge went quickly toward a doorway at the rear of the room, choosing to go around the girl rather than to step over her. The door gave on to one bedroom which had been formed into two with blankets thrown over a rope strung along the ceiling. He took down two of the blankets and carried them out to the living room where he draped them over the bodies. His boots crunched on broken crockery and he had to move around overturned and smashed furniture. Then he went back into the bedroom and confirmed his first impression—there was a double bed on one side of the dividing line and two singles on the other. The Apaches had not bothered to wreck this room and from the night attire neatly laid out beneath the covers it was obvious the farmer and his wife had occupied the double bed and two girls had shared the area on the other side of the blanket partition. Edge held up first one plain white nightgown, then another, shop-bought and made of a softer, pink material trimmed with lace. They were both about the same size.

He caught a subtle fragrance from the more feminine garment and held the material against his face for a few moments, welcoming the subtleness of the perfume after the evil odor of death. Then he suddenly flung the nightgown back on the bed and strode out of the room, his face hardening as if annoyed and, perhaps, embarrassed by his own emotions.

Outside he stood for a moment, breathing deeply, then walked quickly around the house, searching for a fourth body. But he found only a mule with its throat slashed and a dog with an arrow in its side. The dog's death had been as slow and agonizing as that of the girl in the house. He unhitched his horse and mounted; sliding the rifle back into its boot. Then, he made a wider circle of the house, noting an infrequent patch of dried blood which he guessed had been shed by Apaches hit by the white family before they had been over-run. A final circuit, outside the boundary fence, showed that only Indian ponies had left the farmstead, in a bunch and making their escape through the gateway and riding north along a just discernible trail toward a line of blue-grey hills on the horizon.

"Guess they took the other girl with them," Edge grunted as he halted in the gateway and peered across the desolate terrain of south-east Arizona Territory.

The horse whinnied, as if in agreement and waited placidly for the wish of its rider. Edge took the makings of a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt and rolled a neat cylinder. He lit it and sat smoking, with a look of quiet contemplation, for several long moments. He was a tall man who rode ramrod stiff in the saddle, deceptively lean, for his frame was clothed in a muscular hardness that gave him a strength many men had found surprising: some had died for the simple mistake of underrating his power. In repose, his face could be handsome, a mixture of Scandinavian blood from his mother and Mexican blood from his father combining to form features which were regular, with pale blue eyes surveying the world from a background of darkened skin-tone burnt to a deeper shade by countless hours of working and riding in the hard glare of the sun. But those who took more than a passing look at the man could see that his face was a mere mask: that beneath the rugged exterior burned a fire, kindled by pain and fed with hate, ready to flare up to dangerous proportions at the slightest breath of ill-wind.