The Arapaho chief made another demand—which took longer to express in a harsher tone than before. The girl's slender body stiffened as she listened. And her tone was tremulous when she warned:
"He says we have until the shadow on his pony's head grows shorter by the length of the ear."
"Edge?" Meek bellowed, sounding almost as angry as Yellow Shirt.
"Couple of minutes at the most, sheriff!" the half-breed shouted, without turning around. Then lowered his voice to accuse: "It's my belief you're lying to me again, Nalin."
"Never knew a woman that didn't do a lot of that," Marx put in evenly. But there was sweat on his face and the sun was not that hot.
"You just got to keep making with the mouth, don't you Eddie?" Spenser complained.
"If you think this of me, you have only to wait this short time for the killing to begin, white eyes!" the girl warned, voice harder than her expression.
"My guess is that the bodies strung up on the outside of that car are samples of what's inside of it."
"No!"
"Okay, move it again, fellers."
"Edge?" Marx asked, shrill with fear again.
"Come on, Eddie," Spenser urged as he started forward, onto the railroad crossing. "We got no damn choice!"
"I wish I was religious so I could pray," the smaller man moaned as he came up alongside his partner.
"Religious like a Trappist monk would be good," Spenser growled.
"Edge, I wasn't makin' no idle threat!" Cy Meek roared.
All this while the hand that Yellow Shirt had raised in the air remained poised, the Arapaho chief holding back from giving the signal until he was sure of Edge's intention.
Of the group of four at the intersection, Nalin was suddenly the most nervous. Certain that this situation was not as it seemed—and uncertain of how she should react to it.
"Girl!" Edge said, low but harsh, as the distance between the prisoners and the Arapaho narrowed to ten feet.
"Please!" she begged, and there was glistening moisture in her eyes.
"Mister?" Spenser rasped.
"Run like hell or go to it!" Edge said coldly, as he slid the Colt into his holster, shifted the aim of the Winchester away from the back of Eddie Marx and squeezed the trigger.
There was a smell of powder burn as the length of rope linking the two traders was blasted apart. At the same moment that the arm of Yellow Shirt streaked down, his hand curled to draw his rifle from the boot—as his braves made haste to get their rifles off their backs.
Spenser was the first to whirl and run back toward town, venting a string of curses. But his partner was close behind him, weeping and wailing. Both of them moving awkwardly, hampered by having their wrists tied at then-backs. The girl was the last to start to swing around—her look of anguish showing that she was still torn by indecision. But then the dilemma was solved for her—when Edge encircled his free arm around her narrow waist and raised her meager weight up off the crossing. Held her tight against his hip as he turned and lunged in the wake of Spenser and Marx.
All this in the space of no more than five seconds. Then the first shot fired in the wake of the one that blasted the rope apart sent a bullet cracking past Edge's head—from town toward the Indians. And just a part of a second later two fusillades of shots exploded a hail of bullets in both directions. But something close to a thousand yards separated the opposing groups. And there was something over half this distance between the Arapaho and their prime targets—lengthening by the moment as the three men, all hampered to some extent, ran for their lives while the Indians held back electing to fire over such a long range from the bases of stationary rather than galloping ponies.
Nalin began to struggle—wriggling her body, kicking her legs and flailing her arms. But she was facing away from the man who held her so easily and none of the attempted blows struck home with force. He could hear her voice, though, as she shrieked at him in her own tongue and in English—the words he understood certainly were curses.
Edge saw that the two traders were still on their feet and running—zig-zagging by design or perhaps made to stagger by not having the balancing influence of swinging arms. And maybe fear and lack of physical fitness also played a part.
The second volley of gunfire from behind the running men was less intensive than the opening one—the braves with the single shot rifles needing to take the time to reload. But there was a continuous barrage from the townspeople, as rifles and revolvers both were triggered, cocked and triggered again. Every barrel canted into the air to direct the blaze of fire high. To avoid hitting the lumbering runners whose retreat the constant shooting was designed to cover—but the rising trajectory upon which the bullets were started out also had the effect of lengthening their range through the always decaying arc of their travel.
But there was still little chance of even the best marksmen placing their shots accurately. And when Edge drew level with and went between Spenser and Marx with Nalin's attempts to tear free weakening, every Arapaho brave was still astride his pony. Their chief, though, had not given the command for them to advance into the hail of gunfire.
Edge, the Winchester clutched in his left hand while his right arm maintained its lock around the waist of the girl, got ahead of the two city-suited traders as they all drew level with the end of the depot platform. And he angled to the side of them, breathing hard and having difficulty in seeing clearly with eyes stung by the salt moisture of sweat. So he was careful to watch his footing as he went across the track, conscious of the danger of tripping on the rails or the ties. Then he was up on the platform, his booted feet thudding on the boarding. The sound echoed twice from behind as the other two running men followed his course.
The sound of gunfire seemed to fade into the distance—into two distances. The length of the platform, the twin rails gleaming in the sunlight and the trail—all converging in perspective—were blurred by sweat and darkened by the effects of approaching exhaustion. There was a very dark area beyond the end of the platform, the track and the trail. The darkness stabbed across with spurts of very bright color. And for an instant his mind grasped at the reality of the image that had to be the big gathering of Calendar people who were blasting a barrage of shots at the Indians.
But then the idea he had briefly touched was set free again. And he was concerned only with getting himself and his burden over the final few yards to the ornately gabled railroad station building.
And he was almost there....
The Indians were Arapaho, but that was immaterial to those white people who were directing a hail of gunfire at them. Calendar people nurtured a long-standing hatred for the Indians, whatever their tribe. So would welcome the opportunity to do just what they were doing now. That had been part of his plan. Part of his plan, too, had been to make the pair of traveling traders suffer for what they had done to the defenseless Arapaho at the Dora Spring encampment. Not by handing them over to the untender mercies of Yellow Shirt and his band of angry and grieving braves. But to get them up so they had a good chance of getting killed, and a better chance than the Indians they had slaughtered, of surviving. And in the process of this, he had to run the same risks himself.
He reached the station building, seeing only it and hearing just the thud of bullets into its walls. And then he was at the door at the center front of the building. Where he staggered to a halt, turned and fell against rather than charged at it. Felt it give way, folding back from him with an ease he had not expected. And he went across the threshold in its wake-one foot sliding to the left and one to the right. He went down hard and heavy—needed to use the rifle and his other hand to keep himself from crashing into a truck laden with crates, and could achieve this only by releasing his grip around the waist of the girl. She hit the floor with a cry of pain as he started to rise with a grunt of anger. Just as Jason Spenser and Eddie Marx plunged in through the doorway, to curse and shriek as, one behind the other, they tripped over the wr
ithing girl and pitched to the floor.
The anger of the half-breed as he swung around and took three strides to reach the open doorway was directed inward. It was crazy. It had been crazy at the start and it had got to be crazier as it went along. The Arapaho squaw was nothing to him, yet against her will he had helped her. She was still nothing to him and yet he had put his life on the line because of her ever since he reached this town. Making the bastards pay for the massacre at Dora Spring, hell. It was for hurting Nalin he had got himself involved. And it was to keep her from being hurt again—or more likely killed—by the Indian haters of Calendar that he had got himself even more deeply involved now.
For a beautiful young girl who was nothing to him. Meant nothing to him ... in the usual way of such male-female attraction.
"Shit!" he snarled against the continued barrage of gunfire with the occasional thud of a bullet into the outside walls of the safe refuge he had found for himself and his charges. And, as had happened so often during his life, he had the perfect outlet for an anger that otherwise might have turned from ice cold to white hot and exploded to no good account.
It had been inevitable that the man called Edge should abandon the girl rather than the Winchester after his crashing entry into the passenger waiting room of the station building. Inevitable, too, that he should recall despite the emotional turmoil within his mind that he had pumped the action of the repeater after firing the shot that severed the rope tying the two traders together. So that, as he stepped onto the threshold of the open doorway, the stock of the Winchester was against his shoulder, his cheek was resting on the stock and his forefinger was curled to the trigger.
He exploded a shot, worked the lever action and fired another. Then a third and a fourth. Too far away from the Indians to take careful aim. But satisfied to play his part in keeping them up near the bluff. Then driving them to take cover behind the corpse hung railcar after an occasional shot—whether from his rifle or the guns of the townspeople it was impossible to tell—had found human flesh and tunneled deep into it.
Here and there, a Calendar citizen had been hit by a stray bullet from an Arapaho gun. And this caused the whites to seek cover, too—behind and in buildings. So that the range was now almost impossibly long or there was no vulnerably visible targets to aim at. The barrage lessened, the shooting became sporadic and then finally ceased.
The silence that came to Calendar and the country to the north of it seemed to have a solid presence in the air, far less ephemeral than the gunsmoke that drifted through it and tainted it until the freshness of morning neutralized it.
"It is over now, white eyes," Nalin said, quietly and coldly after Edge had looked from the Indian positions to those of the whites. How long after the end of the gun battle he could not judge. Except that time enough had past for first a couple of whites then four Arapaho to venture out into the open and recover their respective dead.
"I wouldn't bet on it, girl," the half-breed answered as he made to glance over his shoulder at her. Then did a grimacing double take at her when he saw it was a statement she had made, not a question asked.
For a stretched second he thought she had been wounded again, for there was an ugly crimson stain on the frilled front of her rich woman's blouse. Blood on her hands, too. But then he saw the knife clutched in one of the blood-run hands. And his slitted eyes under their hooded lids looked to the left and right of where she knelt on the floor of the station waiting room in front of the crate-laden truck. Saw to her left Jason Spenser and to her right Eddie Marx. Both with their hands still tied behind their backs, both with their throats slashed open from ear to ear. The first killed without the second one being aware of what was happening. Each of them wearing a death mask of exhaustion to show that the end had come totally unexpectedly before they had time to recover from their dash to cheat it from another source.
"It is over, I say," she reiterated, without moving and without altering the look of mild satisfaction that was on her almost blemish-free face.
"They had their hands tied. I tied their hands, Nalin."
"The old men and the women and the children and the little babies did not need to have their hands tied to be helpless."
"Edge?" somebody shouted and the half-breed had to think for a moment to recognize the voice of Cy Meek.
"I have proved myself worthy to be an Arapaho squaw, white eyes!" She seemed oddly disappointed for a moment—perhaps because she was not able to inject as much vehemence into the claim as she would have wished.
"And proved me a bigger fool than I thought, Nalin," he answered. Then swung the rifle, pumping the action as he did so, and squeezed the trigger the instant it was aimed at her heart—as if he did not trust himself to make the right decision should he consider the problem a moment longer.
The bullet from such a high-powered rifle exploded over such a short range penetrated through her slender body, to burst free at the back and come to rest in the side of the truck. She had hit the truck with her back by then, bounced forward and then tilted to the side. Was dead with her beautiful eyes still open and the look of mild disappointment still spread over her lovely face.
"Edge, what the hell is goin' on down there?" the Calendar sheriff yelled, his anger expanding.
All attention—white and Indian—was focused on the open doorway of the station building during the several stretched seconds of silence that followed Meek's demand. Then guns were swung, fingers to the triggers, when movement was seen on the threshold. And a double chorus of chattering talk erupted at the north end of the two street and the vicinity of the railcar. Sparked by the sight of the sheepskin-coated, Stetson-hatted Edge emerging from the doorway. No longer carrying his rifle. Instead, dragging by the scruffs of their necks the bodies of Marx and Spenser.
For a second or so, all talk was curtailed. Then shock was vented by the whites as they saw the gaping wounds in the throats of the men. There was no audible reaction to the sight from the Indians.
"I warned you, Edge!" Meek roared. But the half-breed had turned his back on the town and the whites, as he released his hold on the two corpse and made two passes with the side of his hand across his own throat. Then pointed to the dead men sprawled at his feet on the platform and shouted:
"Nalin!"
Which was sufficient. For without taking the time to think about what he had seen and heard, Yellow Shirt ordered his braves to withdraw. Back the way by which they had come toward Calendar behind the hurtling locomotive under cover of darkness. Now leaving behind the railcar with its hanging dead as they galloped their ponies without stealth through the early morning shadow cast by Trio Bluff.
"Edge, damn you, I want an explanation!" Sheriff Cy Meek roared as he started to lead a group of men out of town. A far smaller group of citizens than had been ready and willing to kill the Arapaho. All of them, including the lawman, had put up their guns.
"Marx and Spenser just found out that dealing in Indian artifacts can be a real cut throat business, feller," the half-breed replied as he moved back into the station waiting room.
"Goin' to check out the railcar, mister!" Meek called in as he and his deputy Hans Linder and Cecil Downing, the undertaker, past by and headed on toward the bluff.
And came back a lot faster than they went out. All of them with the exception of the German bartender hurrying on by the depot, Cy Meek bellowing that he wanted volunteers to form a posse to go after Yellow Shirt and his band of murdering Arapaho.
From the doorway, the short and fat, pale and balding, sad-faced man asked:
"Tell me something, please?"
Edge was sitting on a chair, a cigarette not quite forgotten at the side of his mouth for it wisped smoke every now and then. The frail and beautiful Arapaho squaw now lay along three chairs that were placed side by side in front of him. He had closed her eyes, but had not covered her. He held her hand as he stared down at her lovely face, concentrating on the small scar that marred her com
plexion.
"How's that, feller," the half-breed asked without looking at the bartender with a large butted revolver pushed into a side pocket of his baggy pants.
"How is it you knew that the railcar held only dead and not living people, Mr. Edge?"
"About the only thing I knew that she didn't do well was to lie, feller."
"I see," Linder said, and this was also obviously a lie. Then the German become an American looked about himself, embarrassed for some reason and for another not able to move away. Asked: "You are all right?"
Edge stood up and carefully placed the dead right hand of Nalin on the left one in the bloodstained frills of the expensive blouse.
"She was just a kid," he said as hooves thudded on the street down from the depot and horses snorted their eagerness to be moving.
"Ja, das Kind," the man in the doorway agreed absently. Then added with a start in the language of his adopted country: "A little child."
"So I'm fine now," Edge said coldly through teeth clenched and slightly exposed in a brutal grin. He picked up his rifle from where it leaned against one of the chairs on which the corpse lay and turned for the door. "But for a time there I was feeling a little stiff."
Edge: Arapaho Revenge Page 13