Edge: Killer's Breed

For M.H.

who was in at the start but is

now with the opposition.

WARNING!

This is not for the fainthearted reader!

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

This is a fictional story set against a background of the American Civil War which did, of course, actually happen. Although the sequence of actual events is correct, it has been found necessary to alter certain details so that the man now called Edge could play his part in the battles of the Shenandoah Valley, Bull Run and Shiloh. I trust war historians will forgive me.

CHAPTER ONE

THE man called Edge was sick and he was tired and as he crossed the Kansas-Missouri Stateline he thought he might die before he reached the place that had once been his home. He couldn't recall how long he had been riding on the box seat of the flatbed wagon: how many hours, days, weeks, he had looked at little else but the hindquarters of the four big horses which had valiantly hauled him all the way from the massacre at Rainbow towards a dream that had turned into a nightmare. Once the wagon had been weighed down on its springs by a fortune in Mexican gold, but the army had not allowed Edge to claim it for his own. The cavalry troop which had galloped into Rainbow too late to prevent its annihilation by Apaches had seized upon the gold as a substitute victory, the commanding officer hopeful that Washington would accept a million dollars worth of bullion as a fair if not humane exchange for the lives of eighty troopers and their officers and every citizen who had lived in Rainbow, Arizona Territory.1 (1 See - Edge: Apache Death)

Edge, the entire back of his head seeming to be on fire from the blood-encrusted furrow which a bullet had gouged across his neck, and surrounded by a company of cavalrymen suspicious of the reason for his survival, was in no position and had little inclination to argue his case. If he were a man to have any belief in the vagaries of fortune he might have considered himself lucky to be allowed to leave Rainbow with the wagon and horses and a Winchester 66 with a full load of ammunition. In point of fact, being the kind of man he was, he felt that the circumstances in which he left the ravaged town were the best that he could expect.

It was not the first time he had been within moments of obtaining a fortune only to have it snatched from him and he had .learned to accept such defeat philosophically. He was alive when all the rest were dead and. if this were not enough, the future held as many alternatives as a man had time to explore them. So Edge drove the wagon and team away from Rainbow with a mind which had already blotted out all thoughts of what had happened and what he had lost there. He was a man alone again—the way he preferred to be—and if, as he headed north over the arid mountain country, a mind vacated by the past did not concern itself with the future and the courses it opened, this too was characteristic of the man. For, in truth, he had nothing to live for, unless it be the day, and this day was fined with pain.

The pain got worse, spreading like a flame to engulf his entire head and as the days passed it ate its way downwards, through his shoulders and chest and into his stomach. Then numbness set in and he could bathe the bullet wound without setting off fresh waves of agony. For a day and a half as he crossed the Continental Divide in the northern region of the New Mexico Territory and started down towards the Rio Grande, experiencing the falling temperatures of approaching winter, he felt almost fit, but refused to allow himself to acknowledge hope. For he knew that the wound, untreated except by un-boiled stream water and the application of a soiled kerchief, had become gangrenous. His exploring fingers could feel the ugly swelling of poison at the edges of the wound, and his nose could detect the stink of it.