EDGE: The Blind Side Page 5

  The Englishman vented a strangled cry that became a sob. And managed to choke out before his stored up misery was released in full flood: "Dear God, you certainly can see through people!"

  To which Edge answered evenly: "Well, I ain't blind.

  Chapter Six

  The Englishman took a long time to expend his grief and misery at being blind. Or maybe it wasn't long at all for a man to come to terms with such a disability. Edge allowed, as he watched the dawn of a new day break. A day that gave early promise of being grey and sun­less, but would still be a whole lot better to see than to be blind to.

  "God, I'm sorry, Mr. Edge," Rochford said after several minutes had passed since his final, body-shuddering sob.

  "No sweat."

  "Thank you for understanding. A man like you must find that difficult to do."

  "Maybe a man that never cried is less of a man because of it, feller."

  "Your wife made you weep, Mr. Edge?"

  "Losing her did. And speaking of wives, we've just found yours."

  "Is she . . . ?"

  Geoffrey Rochford sounded emotionally drained and physically exhausted as he spoke the query in a rasping whisper from the covered rear of the wagon. And Helen Rochford looked to be in a similar state of near collapse.

  Since the light of breaking dawn had first started to drive back the darkness of night, Edge had paid particular attention to a stand of timber that was some three miles distant when he first saw it. Did not entirely ignore the terrain to either side of and behind the slow, quietly rolling wagon but was unable to rid himself of a conviction that if he and his blond charge were not alone in this mountainscape, company waited in the trees. Which was an in­tuitive impression he would have given no cre­dence to had not the flanking country and that behind been an expanse of rolling hills of soft rock eroded by weather to a series of smooth, almost featureless slopes among which no one who posed a threat could be concealed at close quarters to the trail. Maybe the woman was out there in the hills, but she alone was no danger. Whereas every enemy the half-breed had ever made and allowed to live could have, with ease, been hidden among the pinion and brush into which the trail plunged after run­ning through these near-barren southwest foot­hills of the Gila Mountains. And so it was that Edge looked more often at the trees than elsewhere, his right hand ready to move fast to where the stock of the Winchester jutted out of the boot on the saddle against which he rested his leg. But he felt unfamiliarly uneasy as, while he talked with Rochford, he saw the Englishman's wife appear on the trail—and had to admit to himself that his intuition had been right.

  "She's on her feet, feller. She's looked a whole lot better, but I'd guess your wife's in finer shape than you are."

  He was seeing the woman over a distance of some three hundred yards when he told this to Rochford, she having emerged from the timber to the right and moved out of the stand to halt on the center of the open trail, emphatic in her determination to stop the rig or else be run down by it.

  She was totally naked and made not even a token attempt to cover any part of herself with her hands and arms that hung loosely at her sides. She had moved in an awkward gait, a stiff-legged stagger, and when she came to a halt she planted her feet firmly on the ground and swayed for several moments before she was able to hold still. Many of what at first ap­peared to be dirt smudges on the pale skin of her body were seen as the wagon closed with her to be bruises, ugly dark in hue: on her breasts and shoulders, her thighs and belly. Her face was unmarked by physical abuse, but there were areas of darkness beneath her blue eyes that were red-rimmed, and her cheeks looked hollower, her mouth almost lipless in a leaden mask molded by a harrowing experience with evil. Her honey-colored hair was tangled and matted, caught with the debris of a forest floor.

  Even as he hauled on the reins to bring the wagon to a halt, the dipped head of the chest­nut gelding just six feet from where the naked woman stood, Edge continued to distrust the brush thickened timber behind her; he re­mained tensed to slide the rifle from the boot at the first sign that Helen Rochford was an en­forced part of an ambush.

  "Whatever you do to me, it will be nothing compared to—" the Englishwoman began in a tone even more lackluster than the expression on her gaunt face, looking across the animals and up at the half-breed in a fixed stare not un­like that he had seen in the sightless eyes of her husband peering uselessly up at the night sky. But then she saw movement at the same mo­ment Edge heard it, and incredulity abruptly showed through the hopelessness and exhaus­tion in her blue eyes when they shifted direc­tion, and she cried, "Geoffrey? Geoffrey ... oh dear God in heaven ..."

  "Helen! Helen, my darling! Come to me, please!"

  "I thought I'd—"

  "And I thought we would never—"

  She started around from the front to the side of the animals in the traces, as Edge leaned out to look back at where her husband was feeling his way forward—one hand on the wheel and then the timbers of the wagon while the other was outstretched, eager for the first contact with his wife.

  "You're blind, Geoffrey?" she almost screamed, and glanced up at Edge.

  "Like love is, they say, lady," the half-breed murmured, but was not heard as Helen Roch­ford quickened her pace and flung her arms about her husband.

  She sobbed and struggled to babble out a tearful explanation in answer to his tremu­lously voiced questions about her nakedness, her presence so far from the night camp and what she had first said to the half-breed when the wagon came to a stop. Edge heard only the first few stumbling queries and hardly any of what the woman started to reply—then nothing at all after he had climbed down off the wagon and moved, Winchester canted to his shoulder, along the trail and into the trees. Where he found the spot in the brush Helen Rochford had been before she moved out into the open when the wagon approached. Nothing bad had happened to her here, and there was no layer of loose dust on the hard packed dirt of the trail to hold impressions of her bare feet and show in which direction she had come to get here. But maybe she had stumbled between the trees through the brush. Edge did not con­sider it worthwhile checking this out. For he was merely killing time beyond earshot of the husband and wife until they were through with what they had to say to each other, and going through the motions of making sure the man—or men—who attacked her were not nearby.

  Abruptly he sighed with a sound that had the tone of a low curse, and leaned the rifle against a tree trunk as he sat on a prominent root and took the makings from his shirt pocket. Turned the collar of the sheepskin coat up around his neck against the chill of the morning air once the cigarette was lit. Going through the motions of doing anything for the benefit of other people's sensibilities was some­thing else that was not characteristic of him. The sooner they reached Tucson and he could part company with the Rochfords the better. Favor repaid with favor and nobody owning a part of anybody else. Except for the husband and the wife, of course, but that was nothing to do with—

  "Edge!"

  The cigarette was smoked down to the small­est of butts when this calling of his name jerked the half-breed out of another morose reverie: and he dropped it to the grass and stepped on it as he rose from the tree root, scooping up the Winchester to cant it to his shoulder. His face, thickly covered with more than twenty-four hours of grey and black bristles, was in its usual impassive set. But perhaps the glint in the slitted eyes beneath the hooded lids was a fraction icier than was usual—in response to the way Geoffrey Roch­ford had snarled his name. In the same tone his wife had often used, but yelled much louder than she ever did—to imply a command from a man in authority to one of lesser rank.

  "Edge, can you hear me!" the Englishman demanded with even more impatient insistence as the half-breed stepped out of the pinion and halted on the same spot where the woman had waited. The woman who now, her nakedness enveloped in an all-black dress, came from around the rear of the wagon, finger-combing pine needles and dead leaves from her hair until she caught hold of
her husband's arm to shake it and rasp anxiously:

  "Geoffrey, he's here!"

  "Four of them, Edge! One of them a Negro! Bearded and stinking from not washing! All of them wearing coats to their ankles that were once white! Each of them with a horse! You'll take Titus and go after them, Edge! And you'll kill them! Then bring back their coats to show to Helen! So she'll know you've killed them!"

  He stared in frantic blindness from side to side, head cocked to the side to listen for Edge to make a move and both arms outstretched to touch him.

  "I will, feller?" the half-breed posed evenly.

  "I will pay one thousand dollars per coat, sir!" Rochford vowed, his head still and his arms down at his sides.

  The tall, slightly built Englishman was still dressed only in his nightshirt, which was something Edge had not taken note of until now. For earlier, when Rochford had appeared at the side of the wagon eager to hold his wife and on this occasion when he needed more desperately to buy vengeance against the men who violated her, the powerful intensity of his bullet-scarred and blind-eyed face caused everything else about him to withdraw into out-of-focus insignificance. Until, as he waited for the half-breed to reply, he feared a refusal. And realized that if this came, he was totally helpless in such a situation as he found himself. So the demanding demeanor was suddenly gone from his face, to be replaced by an expression of pathos, the extent of which was deepened and broadened by the man's unsuitable clothing on this dull-skied, cold-aired morning. Just as another con­tribution was made by the way in which Rochford cocked his head to one side again, in the listening attitude of a dumb animal anxious for the reward of a kind word for a task done.

  "Please, Mr. Edge," the misused woman asked, her voice husky with controlled emo­tion. "I know I have no right to ask the smallest favor of you. But after what I have done to poor Geoffrey . . . ?"

  "I don't kill people for money, feller." Edge said.

  "Then capture them and bring them to the justice of the law!" Rochford said quickly, encouraged that he had received a qualified response from the half-breed. And needing to work at keeping in check a natural urge to be­come domineering again.

  "No!" his wife exclaimed, and of a sudden there was bitter vindictiveness in her tone, her face and even the way her body became rigid.

  "Helen?" her husband asked, puzzled, turn­ing his head to look blindly back at her."I wish to be certain they pay with their lives for what they did to me," she replied to the questioner but stared at Edge. "So capture the scum and bring them to me, Mr. Edge. So that I may put them down like the animals they are. If you cannot deal with them in such a way yourself."

  "Helen, you don't know what you're saying!" Rochford warned, shocked now as he turned to face the half-breed as if he hoped Edge would support him. While his wife stood to the side and slightly behind him, looking capable of committing far greater carnage than the gunning down of the four men who raped her.

  And it was easy for Edge to think, as she stared fixedly at him, that she was contemplat­ing a much worse fate for him should he side with her husband and refuse the new deal.

  "Four thousand dollars," she urged. "Merely for rounding them up and bringing them in, Mr. Edge—to use one of your western expres­sions. And I will attend to the slaughtering myself. Make you perhaps the most highly paid hired hand who ever rode—"

  "Helen, we are both overwrought now," Rochford put in anxiously, struggling to regain his composure. "It is only natural after what has happened to you. But it is not cattle you are speaking of and when they—"

  There was a smile of malevolent evil on the gaunt face of the woman as she said with slow, soft spoken sincerity: "No, my dear. 1 feel it ... I know … that as time passes, my resolve to kill those animals will only harden."

  "Edge, explain to her that these men will—"

  "I only ever worked but once in the cattle business, lady," the half-breed said across Rochford's plea. "Even that time, I had more dealings with the men than the steers. So I don't figure I'll have much trouble in rounding up and bringing in four cowpokes."

  Chapter Seven

  If the distraught Helen Rochford had not mis­heard the talk among the men and they did not alter their plans, the task of finding the quartet of rapists was not going to be difficult. But as he rode into the timber, away from the stalled wagon beside which the English couple were fixing a fire on which to boil water for their morning tea, Edge made no presumptions. At first attended to the reaching of an understand­ing between himself and the chestnut gelding which was not supposed to be the best riding horse in the southwest. Then, after this rapport was established, he spent some more time in relishing for its own sake the sense of freedom that came with being alone again. And not only this—being alone astride his own saddle cinched to the back of a horse. A horse that would have been fine even if he was the meanest sonofabitch that was ever broken-in—to a man who seemed to have spent half a life­time on a buckboard and then a covered wagon.

  Not so long, really. Just since a lusting Frenchman who operated a ferryboat shot his last mount. The object of the ferryman's lust was a young Arapaho girl who ... But that was all in the past and the past should be left in peace unless there were lessons to be learned from it. Or good times to be recalled, maybe. And there was nothing good to be reflected upon between the time he found Nalin after the brutal slaughter of so many of her people, and this gray morning when he rode away from the wagon. Just the one lesson, perhaps, which it seemed he was incapable of learning—that if he truly desired total freedom, he should avoid every last one of his fellowmen like each of them was infected with the bubonic plague. And ride the widest swing around those who were in trouble.

  But a man had to eat and to feed his horse, needed to clothe himself and replace his gear from time to time. And in this country where the frontiers of civilization and the conventions it brought with it closed tighter around a man with each passing day—or so it seemed—he needed to have money in his pocket to pay his way. Unless he was a thief, needed to earn the money. As he was doing now—the bidding of another man, and so was unable to enjoy the brand of consummate satisfaction that came only with total freedom. That had not been his lot since the pall of smoke against a bright blue sky signaled the end of his lone ride from Wy­oming to the border of the Indian Country with New Mexico Territory and he found Nalin . . .

  He reached the fork in the trail of which Helen Rochford had spoken and reined in his new mount: dismissed from his mind all thoughts of what once might have been to devote his entire attention to what was neces­sary now as he swung down from the saddle to look closely at the trail. At the point where it reached a towering pinnacle of granite and divided into two, heading southeast and south­west. In the densest section of the timber he had ridden through since he entered the forest perhaps a mile and a half to the north.

  This was where the woman had been forced to suffer her ordeal of repeated rape by the four men who were camped on the grassy area at the base of the rearing crag in the fork of the trails. It was a long time since she had run away from the other camp under another bluff in the hill country, she said. But it seemed a long time, too, before the wagon came into sight at the beginning of the day. She had no thought of ever seeing the wagon and its driver again, though, while she made her exhausted and shivering way out of the hills and into the timber. Maddened by grief because she was certain she had killed her husband. And terri­fied that Edge would seek her out and punish her for trying to kill him.

  She was on the verge of collapse when she saw the glimmer of firelight through the trees. But was disorientated and hysterical. For a second she was sure she had doubled back on herself in the darkness, to stagger toward instead of away from the place where her husband lay dead and a stranger prepared to kill her. And despair became mixed in with the other powerful emotions that had served to keep her running through the night. Caused something to snap in her mind so that, just for a moment, she was deranged—and she began to s
cream. Another moment later, sanity returned and she realized that escape to safety depended upon silence: at the same time be­came aware she was in the forest instead of among barren hills.

  But it was too late. Men were yelling, at first disgruntled at being rudely aroused from their sleep in the cold early hours of the morning. Helen Rochford stayed rooted to the spot, praying to hear the voice of a woman among those of the men. Or, if not, that the men would return to sleep—each cursing the other for hav-1 ing a nightmare.

  Her prayer was not answered for, just as she had glimpsed the glimmering firelight which had brought her to a halt, so one of the awakened men caught sight of the ghostly whiteness of her frothy nightgown beyond the fringe glow of the campfire.

  This man came for her. A man who snarled at the other three to be quiet and go back to sleep. While he went to get himself a woman. They had snarled at him in turn, and accused him of being crazy—of having a dream and yelling aloud in it to wake them.

  "I was too terrified to move a muscle, but I was able to think more clearly than I ever remember before," Helen Rochford told her hus­band and Edge while the half-breed was preparing the chestnut gelding to leave and pick up the trail of the rapists. "And it is all fresh in my mind now. I remember thinking that some evil deity must have intercepted my prayer—about the nightmare, you see?

  "But then my nightmare while awake began. The man came to me and asked me what I wanted. The others had seen where he was going and seen me by then. And were quiet. I started to tell him I was running away after I had killed my husband but he would not allow me to finish. He interrupted me to say that he meant what kind of sexual experience I wanted. He did not use the term sexual ex­perience, you understand? He was a good deal cruder than that. The others laughed. He asked me if I wanted to be taken here, or here, or here. Did I want to have one man at a time or more than one. That since I had come to their camp, a woman dressed only in what I was wearing, I was obviously in search of sexual experience.