Edge: Apache Death

"Cochise?" Edge tried again, with the same tone and still pointing. The brave held his silence. "English don't like talk," he continued after a moment. "Maybe you'll be meeting him in the happy hunting ground in the sky. You can have long silences together. But keep your back against a cloud."

Then he shot the Indian, firing from the hip with the Colt, grouping three bullets in the area of a silver dollar on the man's heart. After that he went to find the Englishman's, Winchester, unjammed it and fed the unused ammunition into his own gun. He took Lord Fallowfield's horse, too, because it was closest and had already been watered.

He rode north.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LORNA Fawcett was a beautiful woman. Even dressed in shapeless, undecorated squaw's garb, her hair matted and unbrushed, her face smudged by dirt and devoid of lipstick and rouge, the natural beauty of face and figure were evident. Her hair was the color of newly rusted metal and hung long to the middle of her back, the crowning glory of a face with green eyes, a rich, full mouth, and an unmarked complexion on skin sculptured by a fine bone structure. It was the face of a woman of twenty-five which until a few days ago had shown no marks of a single experience which could be termed bitter. But then Chief Cochise and a band of braves had attacked her father's farm. Now as she stood close to the slit opening of Cochise's tepee, looking across the Apache encampment set in the mouth of a wooded canyon, the horror of what she had seen and experienced that terrible day was like a dulling stigma on her every feature, emblazoning her mental anguish but unable to detract from the classic lines of her beauty.

They had come in the morning, as her mother was preparing breakfast. Her sister Rachel was still in bed and her father was feeding the livestock. The Apaches had approached stealthily and killed her father at the wire fence before he could do more than wing one of them. Lorna had been by the window and seen the arrow thud into his chest, then started to scream as a brave leaped from his pony to claim the scalp. Even before her mother had time to rush to Lorna's side twenty more braves, led by the tall, arrogantly handsome Cochise, had sprung into the house through doors and windows, whooping their triumph and brandishing knives dripping with the blood of slaughtered livestock. Two of them emerged from the bedroom carrying the screaming Rachel, their hands exploring her nakedness as lust contorted grotesquely daubed faces. As Lorna and her mother tried to rush across the room to Rachel's aid, Cochise restrained Lorna with an arm around her waist, while her mother was felled by a vicious slap across the face. Lorna began to struggle frantically, fear and rage exploding from her throat in a continuous, high-pitched wail which was drowned by the demonic laughter of Cochise and the jubilant whooping of the braves as they staked out Rachel on the floor and bound the girls’ mother to a chair.

Then the orgy began, as brave after brave dropped his breechcloth and threw himself upon the helpless body of a girl who had gone to bed a virgin. As the girls' mother pleaded for release from the torture, those braves who had spent themselves at the bloodied loins of the hysterical Rachel rampaged through the rooms, smashing, tearing and defiling everything which had made the house a home for the Fawcetts. As Lorna watched, she experienced a metamorphic transformation inside her mind, perhaps even her soul. She became quiet, almost docile, in the vice-like grip of the Apache chief and her throat, seared by the screams, blocked any further sound. Her bright eyes continued to stare, wide and pained, at the scene of savagery, but it was apparent that she had capitulated to the inevitability of what was happening. It was as if a shutter had been slammed down upon her will to resist and when the last brave had satiated his lust and two more leaped forward to hack off the breasts of their victim, Lorna could merely shudder at the sight and wince at the sound her young sister's screams. And when the tomahawk crashed down on to, and then through, the skull of her mother there were no more emotional reserves upon which Lorna could call. She watched the action and saw the great spurt of crimson blood with an expression of vacant acceptance, and the set of her features did not alter as the braves grouped before her and made their wishes clear with the lower parts of their naked bodies as they shouted to Cochise.