It was a two story, frame built house with a low pitch roof. Built directly onto the western side of the trail some twenty yards back from the river bank, where a pier as wide as the trail jutted out into the water. The ferry boat, which was nothing more than a log raft long and wide enough to accommodate a wagon and four-horse team with a rope rail at either side, was moored fore and aft alongside the pier.
"Why you people stop back there?" a man who spoke English with a stronger accent than Nalin called.
And caused both Edge and the girl to wrench their gazes from the crudely constructed ferry to the house which a long time ago had been a fine home, before the combined effects of the elements and neglect had attacked its timbers and paint and glass. So that now, from the viewpoint of Edge and Nalin, the only window that was not broken and boarded up was the one with the light in back of it. There was an unpatched hole in the roof shingles and the stoop had collapsed along almost its full length. Not a single square inch of any part of the building's fabric gleamed with recent painting. And there was a dry smell of decay emanating from the place.
"Either of the traders talk like that?" the half-breed asked of the girl as he directed his unblinking gaze at the boarded up window from which the query had been shouted—on the other side of the door to the window that continued to spill lamplight across the trail.
"No," she answered and there was still fear in her voice. But she released the grip she had fastened tightly to his arm when the man had announced his presence in the house.
"You want to get across the river, Maziol will take you! Fifty cents for each passenger! The horse is for nothing!"
He sounded foreign, elderly and eager to please—perhaps frightened and ingratiatingly anxious to perform his service and be rid of the strangers. Maybe a little drunk.
"You live alone here, feller?" Edge wanted to know.
"Yes, yes! Maziol the Frenchman has lived alone all his life in your country!"
"Can you walk?" the half-breed asked of the girl, while he continued to watch the house.
"I think so."
He went along the side of the horse on the right and took hold of the bridle with his left hand. Murmured a word of encouragement to the animal and then led him over what was left of the trail to reach the front of the house. He could hear the moccasined feet of the wounded and weakened young girl shuffling and dragging on the ground behind him. He halted immediately outside the door of the house, ten feet from it, in the wedge of light from the window. Looking and listening and ready to respond in a split second to the merest hint of the suspected threat being proved.
"Hey, why do you act like there is something to be afraid of at Maziol's place?" the man behind the boarded up window asked, sounding even more nervous now. "You are making me frightened, you know that?"
"I know that," Edge answered. "But you have nothing to worry about, feller. If you just step outside and take us over the river."
"Sure, sure. I will do that. It is why I am here."
The door and flanking windows were all in the front wall of the same room. Edge could see the light in the crack at the foot of the door—and also between two boards at the broken window after Maziol moved away. Two bolts had to be shot before the door could be dragged open on its sagging hinges and the ferryman stepped across the threshold and halted abruptly. Frowning his terror as a sound from behind him caused the tall, lean man on the trail to become visibly tense, obviously within a hairsbreadth of streaking a hand to his holstered revolver.
"Alone but for my mules, monsieur!” Maziol shrieked, his gaze held firmly in the trap of that from the slitted, lamplight glinting eyes of Edge.
Then the animal-like snort sounded again and the Frenchman bent slightly back from the waist, at the same angle as the half-breed leaned toward him. And Maziol uttered a choked cry of alarm as Edge sniffed—smelling the malodorous air that was wafting out of the doorway behind the frightened man. Air strongly permeated with the stinks of animal droppings and wet.
Nalin came to a halt alongside Edge and vented a tense laugh of relieved tension. Which drew the gaze of the ferryman toward her, his fear also suddenly draining away as he eyed the Arapaho girl's beautiful young face and undisguised appreciation.
Edge growled: "Mules? In the house?"
"Some people I have known had dogs or cats or cage birds in their houses," the Frenchman answered, smiling now as he shifted his gaze up and down Nalin, apparently assessing the shape of her body beneath the shawl-like blanket.
He was about sixty, a match for the half-breed's height but much thinner in build and face. He was almost bald, with just a half circle of gray hair around the back and sides of his ridged skull. The skin hung on his face was crinkled and mottled. He had small, deep set eyes and a small mouth under a prominent nose. Bristles sprouted patchily over his lower face and throat, like some areas of the skin were dead. His hands and feet were bare and filthy. His pants and the upper portion of his long-johns were patched and darned in many places.
"And, of course," Maziol went on after he had completed his survey of the girl and vented a soft sound of approval, "the most fortunate men of all get to share their houses with a woman. Although few have the good fortune to be favored with a woman as beautiful as this. She belongs to you, monsieur?"
"No, feller."
The ferryman had showed little of his decayed teeth when he had first smiled. But now he displayed their discolored lengths from uneven tops to shrunken gums as he blurted excitedly:
"She is not for sale?"
"Yeah," Edge told him evenly.
And the girl vented a gasp of shock and flinched away from him as her eyes, with reproach displayed by horror, turned their stare from the Frenchman to the half-breed.
"How much you want for her?" The Frenchman's deep set dark eyes glittered almost as diamond brightly as those of Edge.
"Yeah, she ain't for sale, feller."
Nalin sighed, but continued to hate the Frenchman—and also Edge for causing her this latest experience with fear. And she murmured bitterly and hardly audibly:
"White eyes bastard son of a bitch pig."
While Maziol struggled to conceal the extent of the anger he was feeling toward the other man.
Edge said: "You want the dollar in advance, feller?"
The ferryman came close to losing the temper he was suppressing only by tensing every muscle in his body. And this showed in the robot-like stiffness of the way he swung around and was heard in the harshness of his tone when he muttered:
"You pay me when we get to the other side, monsieur. I will put on my boots. You will prefer to wait outside the house, I think?"
"Yeah, we prefer to wait outside," Edge answered.
The tall, thin, ugly, bad smelling ferryman reentered his badly neglected house that gave shelter to himself and his animals. And made more noise than was necessary, to the accompaniment of a string of obscene sounding words in his native language, as soon as he was out of sight of the couple out on the trail.
"Perhaps the mess made by the mules inside does not smell so bad—" the Arapaho girl started to say as she peered across the threshold of the now empty doorway. But cut short the intended taunt against Edge when she sensed, rather than saw, that he had moved suddenly away from the side of the gelding.
She snapped her head to the side, big eyes widening to their fullest extent as she saw where he had gone and what he had in mind to do. And her mouth was suddenly also gaping wide, to give vent to a scream of terror and horror when a gasp from the doorway caused her to wrench her attention back there. In time to see the emaciated and dissipated Maziol start out of the house in a lunging run—canted forward from the waist and with both arms held stiffly down so that his hands were at the same level as his knees. Both hands clenched, the left one fisted around the butt of a revolver and the right to the handle of a long-bladed, one-sided, sharply-pointed knife. While on his slackly skinned face with its strange pattern of
bristles and areas of dead looking tissue was an expression of lustful evil intent that lasted for no more than a half second—the time it took for the Frenchman to see that Edge was no longer standing in an attitude of apparent casual indifference beside the beautiful young Arapaho girl.
In that time, he saw not only that the half-breed was out of sight. He saw, also, the horrified expression which abruptly became fixed to Nalin's lovely face, and the direction in which her gaze had gone to look at Edge. Then the gun exploded. Perhaps with an intentional shot or maybe because it was old and had a sensitive action that was triggered by accident out of fear as Maziol faced up to the unknown consequences of his error of judgment. Whichever, the elderly Navy Colt discharged a bullet that missed the head of the suddenly screaming girl and entered the head of the bay gelding below and behind the animal's right eye. To kill him in an instant before it was deformed under the top of the skull.
What had started as a gasp of alarm in the throat of the Frenchman was suddenly a shrill shriek of mortal fear. For the momentum of his lunge could not be halted and he was across the threshold, his leading foot among the weather and termite ravaged timbers of the collapsed stoop. Going through the rapid motion of thumbing back the hammer of the Colt while pertain it would be to no avail. Just as he made to turn the knife and his body in the futile hope of plunging the long blade into a vulnerable area of the half-breed's belly or chest.
It was to the right side of the doorway, from the man's point of view, that Maziol turned the knife, his body and his head. And started to swing the half-cocked Colt, too. But froze in the part turn, the sound of terror dying on his lips the Frontier Colt of Edge drew a bead on his face—the revolver in the brown skinned hand held out at arms length with the unwavering muzzle just an inch from the bridge of the petrified man's nose. The half-breed's left hand held the threat while he remained flattened to the front wall of the house beside the door, head turned so that he could sight along the rigid length of his arm and the barrel of the gun into the ugly face of Maziol.
The dead horse made no sound outside those of his collapse to the hard packed trail as he died. And in the immediate wake of this series of thuds there was a moment of utter silence that was almost painful in its intensity. Until Edge said flatly:
"At least the horse was well shod, feller."
"Pardon?" Maziol answered, pronouncing the single word to make it from his own language. And opened both his hands, to release the knife and the gun—winced when the butt of the big Colt banged him hard on the bare left foot.
"Out here in this country, it's supposed to be better to die with your boots on, feller."
Both the Frenchman and the Arapaho girl caught their breath—he held in the frozen attitude still while she straightened up after almost hurling herself to the ground when the horse was shot.
"Monsieur, I am no longer armed!" Maziol squeezed out of his fear-constricted throat. And some saliva trickled out over his lips with the words.
"You want to answer me a question?" Edge asked as he folded away from the wall while he kept the gun firmly aimed at the pale face of the Frenchman.
And it was almost as if there was an invisible extension to the barrel of the revolver to which the man's head was skewered. For Maziol moved only his small eyes in their sockets to seek the girl and plead:
"Mademoiselle, I am an evil man! Perhaps driven mad by the loneliness of my wretched existence at this place where my skill with the ferry is called upon so seldom! I beg your forgiveness and ask humbly that you tell the man with you to please spare my life! You are so beautiful and it has been so long for Maziol! I was a fool but I do not deserve to die for this! You will please speak to him, mademoiselle! I have nothing to offer but my gratitude! But in the hours and days and weeks and years to come you will always think well of yourself for saving the life of an unfortunate soul who was so moved by your beauty that he came close to death to—"
"Frenchman," Edge cut in, his tone of voice and his expression still totally lacking in emotion. And, when the small, fear-filled eyes redirected their attention, he went on: "There ain't no way you can give an answer unless you listen to the question."
"You cannot kill such a pathetic old man, Edge." Nalin said.
"You will spare me if I answer truthfully, monsieur?" Maziol asked eagerly.
"Have you seen a bunch of Arapaho braves around here recently, feller?" Edge countered.
The Frenchman appeared to want to shake his head vigorously, but could not move it even fractionally in front of the gun in the rock steady fist. He blurted, as eagerly as he had pleaded his case to the girl:
"Non, monsieur! I know of the band you speak of, though! They are to the north of here so you have missed them! I ferried two men across the river this afternoon! Men who trade with the Indians! They have on their wagon many artifacts for which they have bartered with Arapaho band! The mademoiselle, she is lost from her people and you are seeking to return her to them! My shame is the greater to know that I considered adding to the suffering of this poor lost creature! How may I—"
At his mention of the two traders who he had taken across the river, Nalin turned to peer in the direction they had gone—and began to mutter a string of obvious invectives across the night-cloaked country in their wake.
"Much obliged, feller," Edge said and although there was no change in his tone or his expression, the Frenchman knew it was almost over for him. Sensed the approach of death as those who are mortally sick can sometimes feel how close they are to the end.
"But I answered you truthfully!" the doomed man wailed, and tears spilled from his small eyes. "You must spare me!"
He raised his hands, elbows close to his sides, palms uppermost and fingers splayed.
"Promise you one thing, feller."
Nalin now became aware of impending death and curtailed her cursing of the two men far beyond the river to stare with awe at the two just a few feet from her.
"Monsieur?" Maziol managed to force through his discolored teeth as little more than a rasping exhalation of his breath.
"Treat your mules better than you treated my horse."
The Frenchman brought up both his hands, fingers still splayed but curled into hooks now to fasten over the Frontier Colt and the wrist behind the hand fisted around the butt. Although his eyes continued to glisten with the tears of the doomed, his face was contorted into a gargoylish expression of depthless hatred for the man who was to kill him. So that he looked not quite human during the two seconds it took him to fasten his grip and drag down on the gun and the hand that held the gun.
Then Edge, whose total impassiveness was in its way inhuman to behold, squeezed the trigger of the revolver. And kept his arm rigidly out in front of him as the Frenchman tightened his double-handed grip—needing the support of the half-breed to remain on his feet as the strength went out of him. Draining from his muscles as fast as the blood that gushed from the exit wound at the back of his neck. And then he was dead, the shock of his nervous system of the point blank range shot—tunneling the bullet into, through and out of his flesh killing him long before he would have drowned in his own blood or been suffocated by his inability to breathe.
His hands released their grip and his arms fell to his sides. He thudded down hard onto his knees and his thighs folded toward his calves. But his head lolled to the right and this acted to alter the direction of the fall—caused him to sprawl out onto his side across the threshold of his foul smelling house.
The half-breed had lowered his left arm by this time, and had brought across his right hand to thumb open the loading gate of the Colt so he could tilt the gun and turn the cylinder to extract the spent cartridge case. While he did this, the Arapaho girl, a look of revulsion distorting her beauty, muttered sour words in her own language. Then she recalled Edge could not understand what she was saying and translated:
"To kill him like that, you are no better than those who slaughtered my people. I know he tried to kil
l you. And that if he had done so, it would have been bad for me. But to shoot him down like that. ..."
She could not think how to finish this in English. And allowed a shudder that shook her from head to toe to express her feelings. This as Edge slid a fresh shell into the chamber and returned the Colt to the holster tied down to his right thigh, then dropped to his haunches, gripped one of the Frenchman's wrists and rose. Backed away to drag the corpse out of the doorway.
"You have nothing to say, white eyes?" she demanded when he had let go of the lax wrist which thudded back to the ground.
"Not for me, not for you, girl," he answered flatly, and shifted the gaze of his hooded, glinting eyes from the shocked face of the Arapaho squaw to the dead gelding in back of her.
"Just because your horse—" she began.
And Edge drew back his thin lips to display his teeth in a vicious grin that gave him the look of an animal about to bay in triumph at the kill. Instead, he rasped softly:
"I got a frog in the throat."
Chapter Five
THERE WAS an ancient buckboard parked at the side of the house facing the river, the rig as neglected as the house and the man who had owned both of them. Its timbers were dry and warped, its metalwork was rusty, one of its wheels was buckled from having a broken spoke and its axles and springs creaked from lack of greasing. But it rolled without collapsing and the harness was good enough to take the strain of the wagon, two people and the gear of one of these. Hauled by a pair of mules who, unusual for their kind, went to work with a will. First took kindly to being led from the spartanly furnished house and hitched to the buckboard. Then moved obediently out on to the pier. Waited patiently for Edge to cast off one mooring line so that the raft-like ferry swung around on the sluggish current until it was end-on to the pier, when they moved without instruction to roll the wagon aboard, responding to familiar circumstances without need of orders.
Edge: Arapaho Revenge Page 4