Edge: Arapaho Revenge

by George G. Gilman

  When she flicked open her eyes, they were momentarily filled with pain. Then, for an even shorter time, she expressed shame at being seen to indulge her suffering. And immediately she worked up a fresh anger toward the half-breed.

  "I do not know very many insulting names in your language, white eyes!" she rasped through gritted teeth that were pure white and perfectly formed. "I can call you a bastard and a son of a bitch. But if you think of the worst words that one of your kind can use against another, then that is how I feel about you. You are right. When I first spoke to you it was to call you every insulting name I was able to lay tongue to in my language. But to tell you what I said in your language would serve no pur­pose."

  "Lose something in the translation, uh?" Edge said. And offered her the canteen again. "You certain you wouldn't like a drink? Unless you took a bullet in the belly. In that case a drink can sometimes do more harm than good."

  "Where I was shot is my own affair, white eyes! And I have already told you I want nothing from you! Except for you to leave me and be on your way!"

  "So you can die," he said.

  "That is right."

  "Except when you forget your stupid pride and grimace with what's hurting you, you seem pretty healthy to me, girl."

  He put the stopper back in the neck of the canteen and left it on the ground within easy reach of her as he straightened up and looked around at the bullet-sprayed and fire-razed Arapaho encampment from within it. There was no actual stink of death yet, for the babies and the children and the women and the old men had not been dead long enough during a relatively cool fall day for their gunshot flesh to have decomposed to the point of becoming malodorous. But the mere fact of such whole­sale slaughter of defenseless people contribut­ed a certain indefinable element to the atmos­phere that was otherwise permeated only by the strong taint of old burning.

  Beyond the camp site to the west, the creek flowed in a series of sweeping curves along the valley bottom, fast and noisily in the surround­ing silence at its spring source, then more se­dately as it lengthened and broadened. On the other side of the camp the valley stretching to the east was not watered by any kind of river. Was lush with grass and timber and brush in the area of the camp by the spring, but soon became ruggedly rocky and aridly sandy. The kind of terrain he had been crossing for several days before he came over the ridge and into the valley. On the trail that ran arrow straight across the mile wide valley bottom and then curved to left and right and left again to get to the top of the high ground to the south—the land changing from verdant to scrub desert in this direction, too, as it rose and the distance from the water source lengthened.

  Edge took out the makings and rolled and lit a cigarette as he made his careful survey of his immediate and more remote surroundings. And as he arced the dead match to the side, heard the stopper being drawn from the neck of the canteen. Looked down at the girl and saw she had difficulty in raising and tipping the can­teen, one-handed, to drink from it. For she con­tinued to be in the prone position with her head twisted to the side. Like she was paralyzed everywhere except for her neck and her left arm. But her dark eyes, quick to lose the pained expression when she saw him looking down at her, challenged him not to offer her assistance.

  She got some water into her throat, gagged on it, brought the expression of challenge close to being a threat and then was able to swallow the water that she now trickled into her mouth. When she had a sufficient amount, she let go of the canteen and it fell on its side so that its contents began to spill out.

  "The water from the spring is cooler and sweeter, white eyes," she said after several moments when she seemed to have been wait­ing for Edge to speak first. "You can refill it there before you leave."

  "Had it in mind to do that. Can you roll over on your back by yourself. Or do you need me to help?"

  She gasped, and fear entered her eyes and compressed her lips again. "You said you would not. ..." Tears filled and then spilled from her eyes. And the paleness of terror was more draining than that of pain that had earlier marred her natural skin tones.

  "And you said you'd give me the clap if I did, girl," he told her coldly, moving to go around her and dropping down to his haunches on her blind side. "I was telling the truth and I figure you were speaking with the Arapaho forked tongue again."

  "It is the white eyes—" she started, angrily defensive. But then caught her breath as she felt his hands on her.

  "You can't give what you don't have, girl. And it's my guess you ain't never given the kind of performance that could get you clap­ped."

  After her initial shocked reaction to the touch of his hands on her left shoulder and hip, the Arapaho squaw became rigid and silent. And, but for the obvious softness of the flesh beneath the rawhide of her skirt and shirt, it might have been a time-stiffened corpse that the half-breed slowly raised on to her right side then gently lowered on to her back. He, too, could well have been among the unfeeling dead, if just his darkly-burnished and heavily-brist­led face was considered. For after he had voiced the wryly spoken comment his expression be­came entirely devoid of emotion—the ice cold manner in which he regarded the massive blood stain on the girl's shirt front, a true image of his lack of feeling over what had happened to her.

  "Going to cut your shirt now," he told her while she continued to give an appearance of being dead in all save the shallow rise and fall of her blood encrusted bodice. Remained in­flexibly unmoving in every other respect, with her lips compressed and her eyes—opened to their widest extent—staring fixedly up at the blue infinity of the afternoon sky. "Just like I turned you on to your back for a reason that has nothing to do with wanting to screw you,

  I'm not undressing you because I think you could have the greatest pair of—"

  "There were two white eyes traders," she said suddenly and, just as she kept the move­ments required to breathe to the very mini­mum, so her lips hardly moved to rasp out the words he had not invited as Edge drew the razor from the neck pouch and reached forward to begin slitting the fabric of the shirt—which could only otherwise have been removed by pulling it over her head. "They were friendly at first and offered us good deals. We trade with them and they stay with us in our camp through the night. Share our food and sleep in one of our lodges."

  She gasped again, and shot the briefest of glances at his face when the cutting open of the shirt was done and he cautiously folded it back at either side. So that she felt the coolness of the air and the warmth of the sun on the now exposed flesh of her body from waist to throat. Then she gazed at the cloudless sky once more, having seen neither lust nor horror in the lean face of the man who surveyed her nakedness. His impassive expression not altered by a single line as he looked at the firm mounds of her large nippled young breasts. The right one as smoothly unblemished as the hollows of her body above and below and to the side. But the left breast was made ugly by the entry and exit wound of a bullet that had penetrated the slope of the cleavage and blasted clear of the flesh on the outer and lower slope. A great deal of blood had seeped from both holes before the congealing process was completed. There was no sight or smell of infection yet—the discoloration to either side of the nipple's dark aureole caused by bruising.

  "Came along the valley from the east, looks like," Edge said to the girl as he rose to his full height. "Aboard a four-wheeled wagon with a four-horse team. Headed south across the valley on the trail after they were through here."

  "You can read sign as well as a brave, white eyes," the girl said. And when this drew no re­sponse, she looked to where he had been stand­ing. And was surprised to realize he had moved away. "Walk as stealthily as one, too," she added as she resumed her unblinking study of the featureless sky immediately above her, un­caring of where he had gone and what he was doing because there was no point in being other than resigned to whatever he had planned for her.

  "Yeah," he responded absently from way of I to her left, over near the spring source of the| creek. />
  By listening intently, she was able to visual­ize him moving about the destroyed camp, seemingly aimlessly. But this required consid­erable effort which she decided was not worth expending. And she returned to dull-toned talk as a means of easing her pain and assuaging jer shame as she lay half naked and helpless within the sight of a hated white man.

  “At dawn, when they thought that we Arapaho were all still asleep, they attempted to make their escape in secret. To fill their wagon with much more that they had bartered for and to steal away. I, Nalin, raised the alarm and for this must be blamed for the slaughter that fol­lowed. The two white eyes traders had rifles. Many more than one each. Loaded and ready to be used against the women and children and old men if just such a foolish Arapaho as Nalin did as she did."

  There were tears glistening in her eyes again. But they did not spill over her brown skinned cheeks this time as she continued in the same unwavering tone as before:

  "The white eyes ceased what occupied them, took up their rifles from where they were kept in readiness, and began to shoot us. Without fear and with no mercy. We wanted only to ask them to treat us fairly. To give us fair trade for what they were taking. But their only answer to our entreaties was to fire their rifles at us. And not to cease firing until they were certain all of us were dead. Be they Arapaho no more than ten moons of age or more than seventy summers. All unarmed and defenseless."

  "And when it was over, the white eyes con­tinued to do as they did before I raised the alarm. As silently as before. As though we Arapaho were all still sleeping in the lodges instead of being dead outside of them under the light of the rising sun. All except Nalin who lay as if dead, entreating the Great Spirits to speed the braves back here. So that the white eyes would be captured and punished for their crimes."

  "When do you expect them back, Nalin?" Edge asked. From the trail side of the camp now.

  "Perhaps before your shadow grows a grain of sand taller, Yellow Shirt will lead his war­riors over the ridge and into the valley, white eyes," Nalin warned, but in a tone that lacked the conviction to give the implied threat any weight.

  "Or maybe not until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, uh?"

  She blurted out a half dozen words in her own language that sounded as if they were more expletives. And then, as she ran out of dirty; words—or the energy to maintain her anger-she snapped her head to the side to look toward him. For several moments she was puzzled as she watched him. Down on his haunches again, on the trail near his horse, his hands busily engaged with some chore that was hidden to her by the intervening corpse and heaps of ashes. The hardly smoked cigarette still angled from a side of his mouth, bobbing a little when he spoke.

  "Hunting trip, Nalin?" he asked as he fin­ished what had been occupying him on the ground and straightened up—lifting the lashed-together, crossed-over-ends of the two poles of a crudely fashioned travois.

  "I wish to remain here to die with my own people!" she implored.

  “No you don't," he countered evenly as he hooked the tied together poles over the horn of his saddle, so that the other ends rested on the ground some five feet in back of the patiently standing gelding.

  "Who are you to tell me what I do not wish for myself, white eyes?" the Arapaho girl de­manded in the snarling tone of renewed, weary­ing anger.

  "Name's Edge, Nalin. Feller more than twice your age and a whole lot uglier. Not noted for the good deeds he's done in a lousy world."

  The lower ends of the poles were already link­ed by a length of rope. As he spoke, the half-breed began to stretch strips of canvas be­tween the poles. The fabric, like the poles and the ropes, either charred or sooted by burning for he had salvaged all the materials from the ruins of the encampment lodges. He had to cut holes in the canvas and thread short lengths of rope through these to knot to the poles. It was a time consuming task and when the travois was at last finished it offered nothing to the eye that was rewarding. But it was serviceable.

  "You do not do everything as well as an Ara­paho brave, white eyes!" Nalin announced in the tone of a taunt as Edge led the gelding with the travois behind toward her. Speaking for the first time in more than the thirty minutes it had taken the half-breed to complete his work, during which she had at first watched him and then returned to gazing up at the sky.

  "I haven't claimed anything for myself," Edge answered as he halted the gelding and shifted his hand from the bridle to the saddle. To reach down a charred blanket. "It's likely to hurt some when I move you." "I hurt not at all while I am here." She remained angry with him for a few mo­ments more, as he squatted down at her side and covered her with the blanket. But then, as he wrapped her in the blanket from knees to armpits, lifted her and carried her to the travois, she needed to devote her entire concen­tration to the single aim of not giving vocal release to her pain. And for several seconds after the half-breed had lowered her into the sagging strips of canvas, she needed still to struggle against the powerful urge to scream. And was as rigid as when he touched her, large eyes screwed tightly closed, lips pressed firmly together and nostrils flared to admit and expel air with quick, rasping sounds. Until the high point of agony was scaled and she started down from it. When her lips fell apart, her eye­lids flickered, her frame assumed a posture that followed the sagging lines of the canvas! strips and she whispered: "White eyes bastard son of a bitch pig." Her eyes came wide open and a glistening! tear of pain squeezed from each of them to run down her wan cheeks. She heard his footfalls and turned her head in time to see him reach the horse and hang his canteens back on the saddle, the water containers wet from being re­plenished at the spring.

  "I say you are a white eyes bastard son of a bitch pig!" Nalin repeated, more forcefully, as Edge wiped the moisture off his hands on his pants and struck a match on his Colt butt to relight the gone-out cigarette.

  “I heard,” he said as he blew out the match and flicked it away.”Recall a time when anybody called me names like that would have got something different than a helping hand from me, Nalin. Don't rile so easy these days."

  He slid his left foot into the stirrup and swung smoothly up astride the gelding. Glanced back and down at her to ask:

  "Ready to leave?" "You tell me what I have to do to make you angry enough to leave me here, white eyes?"

  Edge steered the gelding carefully among the corpse and the fire razed lodges to avoid jolting the wounded girl over much and to keep from stirring up clouds of choking ashes.

  "Can't do that, Nalin," he answered and, as he rode on to the trail, glanced down over his shoulder at her again. Saw that she was in pain but was withstanding it as a matter of pride.

  "You are full of shit!" she forced through her fine teeth clenched together. "Yeah," he allowed, facing front. A minute or so later, the girl in the travois attempted: "You are a no good skunk!"

  "Plus being full of shit and a white eyes bastard sonofabitch pig," he said evenly.

  "Oh, why do I not know every white eyes obscenity to speak to you? Why do I not have the means and the strength to make you do what I demand? Why was I not killed like the others? Why did this white eyes not go by thinking I was dead like the others? I wish­ed…"

  After she had switched from addressing Edge to making entreaties to whichever Ara­paho spirit was appropriate, the venom went out of her tone and depression became her dom­inant emotion as she lay in the slow moving travois. To the extent where it demanded out­let in tears of hopelessness that swamped her words.

  "Some days are like that, Nalin," Edge said against the soft sounds of her sobs. "Just one' lousy thing after another."

  Once more he looked back and down at her pathetically frail looking, blanket-wrapped form cradled in the crudely made travois. And, she was abruptly shamed again, to be seen with tears coursing over her cheeks. Hurriedly, and not without pain that was revealed in a series of wincing grimaces, she drew both arms from within the blanket and fisted her hands to rub the salt moisture from her red-rimmed eyes and
pale cheeks.

  "Since I do not know the words to say to you, white eyes, I have nothing to say to you!" she told him, with a tone of disdain that en­tirely negated the tear ravaged look of despair on her beautiful young face.

  "That's okay," Edge answered as the geld­ing started up the first curve of the trail out of the valley. "Won't make any odds to the horse, I guess. But if you quit with the talk, to me you won't be so much of a drag."

  Chapter Three

  THE GIRL spat out a stream of Arapaho obscenities as the half-breed turned to face front again. But quickly tired of drawing no response from him—or was exhausted by this new bout of ineffective rage. And fell into a silence that was as private as the one in which the man had wrapped himself.

  In recent times there were just two words which would arouse a vicious anger within the man called Edge. Mex or greaser—whether they be spoken of him or anybody else with Mexican blood in their veins. And a man or woman who used either of these derogatory terms within earshot of the half-breed was cer­tain to suffer for the sun. Just as surely as any­body who drew a gun against him twice after being warned the first time was doomed to die.

  Perhaps, he was prepared to admit, he had some other idiosyncrasies. But none to which his reactions were so consistent. It had not al­ways been thus—the rules by which he lived his life so clear cut. Paradoxically, when he had been a simple farmer on the Iowa prairie, he was a far more complex personality.

  He had been Josiah C. Hedges then, working alongside his crippled younger brother to make of the farmstead what their parents—buried on the property—had wanted it to be. Until the War Between the States erupted in the east with effects that reverberated across the entire country. There was little soul-searching to be done on the small Iowa farm. And there were no recriminations between the brothers any­way—after Joe left to become a Union cavalry officer while Jamie stayed.