Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT ISSUE
For R.H. for taking care of Edge’s hard life
CHAPTER ONE
It was early spring in the Dakotas and weak sunlight sparkled on the breeze-ruffled surface of Spear Lake. It did little to warm the ice-cold water, and the biting air drifting from out of the north protected the frost which powdered the frozen ground of the surrounding hills. So it was that the grey wood-smoke whipping from the chimney of the cabin by the lake acted as a spur to the drivers of the half-dozen assorted buggies and buckboards converging on the shore. For smoke meant a fire to warm chilled flesh: and probably steaming hot coffee to chase out the cold which seemed to penetrate bone deep.
Five of the drivers were ruddy-faced farmers, uncomfortable in their Sunday-best suits, tight-fitting polished boots and stiff-collared shirts decorated with bootlace ties. Beside them, pleased by the opportunity to dress, in their carefully preserved finery, were the men’s wives. On rear seats rode the children: as spick-and-span as their parents. Whether they shared their fathers’ discomfort or their mothers’ pleasure depended upon either their ages or their inclinations.
Preacher Dawson, a widower for many years and childless, rode alone in his buggy, on the trail that connected Spearville with the lake for which it was named. He reached the shoreline and halted the buggy to wait for Jed Hayhurst to bring his buckboard down the slope of the trail which snaked away through the hills to his farm, almost five miles away. That five miles, plus the four more from the lake into town, was Jed’s excuse for only going to church for the christening of a new offspring.
That had meant the stern-faced Hayhurst and his thin, old-before-her-time wife had worshipped publicly a mere five times in the past seven years. As the buckboard drew level with the buggy and stopped, Bertha Hayhurst was nursing the two youngest children on her bony knees. The other three sat stiffly erect in the rear. The woman’s sparse figure was beginning to thicken and the preacher sighed inwardly as he touched his hat-brim to her. He judged the family would be requiring his services long before summer was out.
“Morning, reverend,” Hayhurst greeted. “Nice day for a wedding.”
“Every day is fine for the Lords’ work,” the preacher replied in the censorial tone which was a constant feature of his speech.
He was a tall, thin man with aquiline features and skin the color of fresh-made dough. The paleness of his complexion was emphasized by the clerical blackness of his suit and frock coat which, in its turn, seemed to underscore the grubby grayness of his collar of office. There was not a woman in Spearville or within fifty miles of the town who was not of the opinion that it was time the preacher took a new wife to care for him.
Hayhurst ran a work-roughened hand over the stock of the Henry repeater rifle resting on the seat beside him, then nodded to the Winchester propped up in one corner of the buggy. “You reckon He’s working on the Sioux so we won’t have no need to use these?” he asked.
“Jed!” his wife hissed in rebuke.
“We are all God’s creatures,” the preacher intoned. “He moves in mysterious ways and we cannot try to understand His every act. We should only pray for His protection when certain of His creations fail to follow the path of righteousness.”
He slapped the reins over the back of the horse and drove his buggy on ahead along the shoreline towards the cabin.
“And carry a rifle to blast the cruds if they hit the path of war,” Hayhurst muttered, setting the buckboard moving in the wake of the buggy.
“Jed - the children!” his wife chided.
On the other tracks from the out-lying farms, which all linked with the main trail into town at the side of the lake, the rest of the adult wedding guests also experienced more than a little anxiety tempering their anticipation of the nuptial celebrations. Jim Striker drew his buggy alongside George Cain’s wagon and there was a rapid exchange of polite greetings.
“Heard the Injuns burned out a spread east of Deadwood couple of days ago,” the fair-headed Striker said.
Cain was embarrassed when his wife put her hand under his, but he did not pull it away. He was prepared to allow public displays of trust and affection until they had been married a full year. “Heard that, too,” he replied. “And that another bunch massacred an army patrol up to the north of here.”
Striker nodded sagely. “Story goes the whole Sioux nation’s fixing to meet up at a place on the South Fork River,” he supplemented.
Mrs. Cain squeezed her husband’s hand tighter and glanced over her shoulder. The Striker boys - ten and twelve - were listening to the exchange of scare rumors with mounting apprehension.
“Can’t we just forget about Indian trouble for today?” she pleaded, shooting a sidelong glance towards Mrs. Striker and receiving a nod of agreement.
“Weddings ought to be happy occasions,” Sarah Striker pointed out.
Striker was twice the age of his twenty-eight year-old, unattractive wife, but his cynicism made him seem even older than that. “Only happy thing about today is that we’ll all be together,” he said solemnly. “So if the savages attack, we’ll be able to give them a big dose of their own murdering medicine.”
He clucked to his horse and the buggy re-started down the trail, with George Cain’s buckboard lumbering along behind.
Ed Johnston, driving his wife and three children, was the first to halt his buckboard in the neatly fenced yard at the side of the cabin. Both the Johnstons nodded formally to Mr. and Mrs. Ross as they arrived and climbed down from their buggy. The sour-faced Ephraim made a move to lift his Winchester from out of the back, but his duskily handsome wife shook her head emphatically. Young Danny Ross eyed Mildred Johnston in tongue-tied surprise, marveling at the difference six months and a store-bought dress had made to a girl he remembered as a skinny, spotty-faced kid. Mildred blushed scarlet and refused to meet the boy’s highly interested gaze.
“Do we go on in, or wait for the others?” Ross wanted to know.
“I think Reverend Dawson should make the introductions,” Mary Johnston suggested, frowning at the Ross boy’s frank admiration for her sixteen-year-old daughter. “After all, he’s the only one out of all of us who’s met the new folks.”
This was true. The couple who were to be married that morning had arrived in Spearville only two weeks previously. The woman had put up at the Dakota Star Hotel while the man had made enquiries for a suitable spread and paid cash-on-the-line for the old McCord place: the cabin on the lake shore with its forty acres of good growing land which had lain empty and uncared for since the bank had foreclosed on the drunken old man’s mortgage eighteen months ago.
When the couple had approached the preacher to ask him to marry them, it had been the Reverend Dawson’s suggestion that the occasion be used to introduce the newcomers to their neighbors on the other isolated farmsteads east of town. There were few opportunities for social gatherings among the farmers and their families so, despite the bitingly cold weather and the increasing number of stories about Indian attacks in the territory, every invitation had been taken up.
At the window of the small living room of the cabin, a man and a woman watched the approach of their guests. She was a slender red-head of twenty-
five, high-breasted and narrow-waisted. Her well-formed features, dominated by expressive green eyes, were just beginning to lose their girlish prettiness in favor of womanly beauty. She was dressed in a store-bought white gown, cut modestly high at the neck and nipped in only slightly at her waist so that it hinted at, rather than emphasized, her figure.
She was tall for her sex, but the height of the man at her side underplayed her stature. He stood six feet three inches and had a lean look, despite the fact that he packed almost two hundred pounds of body weight. But this was mostly strong bone and supple muscle, outlined today by a dark blue New York tailored suit and sparklingly white shirt complete with a broad, conservative necktie. His clean-shaven and lightly talced face was in drastic contrast to the pale and delicate lines of that of the woman. His complexion was burnished by Latin blood and exposure to every type of weather. Against this, his light blue eyes, surveying the world coldly from under hooded lids, seemed an incongruity. But not so much as they would have done had his Swedish mother not passed on the high cheekbones, determined jaw line and thin lips of a European heritage to match the eyes: to set against the skin tone and thick black hair that had come from his Mexican father.
He was the man who had come to be known as Edge. The woman at his side was named Elizabeth Day. As they waited for their wedding guests to arrive, there was nothing in their attitudes or expressions to hint at the tragic circumstances under which they had met and the violent aftermath of their meeting.* (*See Edge: Bloody Summer and Edge: Violence is Black) Edge, unusually well-groomed and neatly dressed, was experiencing the normal degree of apprehension for a man about to be married. Elizabeth, for her part, viewed the scene in the yard with concern for two reasons. One of these was the customary trepidation of a bride-to-be over whether she had made the right choice for a husband. And the other was caused by the fact she had arrived at the cabin unchaperoned. Such a situation would have drawn criticism in her native Philadelphia: but out here in the wilderness of the Dakotas, among strait-laced country folk, it could mark her for life as a brazen woman.
“Oh my, they’ve all come!” she said in a hushed whisper.
Edge showed her a cold smile, of the type that curled his lips back over his teeth but failed to reach his eyes. It was one of the many things about the man which Elizabeth had vowed to herself she would change. His inability to express amusement in the conventional way - perhaps even an incapacity to feel it - had been born out of the horrors of the Civil War and the violence which had been such a large part of his life since. But she was determined the future was going to be vastly different from the past.
“Chance of free food and drink is something not many people turn down,” he replied and glanced over his shoulder, across the sparsely furnished but neat and clean living room through the open doorway into the kitchen. In there, a trestle table sagged under the weight of food carefully prepared by Elizabeth and bottles Edge had bought at The Crazy Lady Saloon in Spearville.
“I don’t care if they hate the food and don’t touch a drop of the liquor,” Elizabeth said. “Just so long as they like us.”
Edge ran a scrupulously clean finger around the inside of the stiff shirt-collar, seeking relief from the unaccustomed constriction. His fingertip touched the cord attached to the pouch hanging from the nape of his neck. In the pouch was a cut-throat razor which had brought death and agony to countless men. He realized how unnecessary it was to carry the weapon on this of all days, but it had been with him so long it was almost a part of him - he would have felt naked without it.
Elizabeth drew in a deep sigh and went towards the door as the final buckboard halted in the yard and the guests moved as a group in the direction of the stoop. “Here they come,” she said with a tremor in her voice.
“You sound like you wished they were going,” Edge replied.
She shot a glance at him and saw his eyes were no longer cold as they drank in the sight of her. “I’ll be glad when it’s over,” she agreed.
“Me, too,” he told her, his voice and expression heavy with meaning.
Elizabeth blushed, and smiled coyly. “Have patience,” she chided good-naturedly.
“Poker’s my game,” he answered as a heavy fist rapped on the door. “You’re showing a pair and I don’t want any full house around when I see what you’ve got in the hole.”
Her color deepened and she patted her hair with a trembling hand as she pulled open the door.
“Ah, good morning, Miss Day,” the preacher greeted, making a valiant effort to brighten his normally solemn tone. “All ready to complete the match?”
Edge kept his voice low so that those outside could not hear what he said. “It’s a game preacher. Let’s get this deal over so we can change it to stud.”
CHAPTER TWO
The two Sioux braves stayed in the cover of the large expanse of spruce trees for a long time after the wedding guests had filed into the cabin. The sudden appearance of the wagons and buggies on the hill trails had surprised them and the braves whispered rapidly to each other as they watched the families and the preacher converge on the tiny house by the lake. One of the young warriors had scouted Lake Spear earlier in the week and seen just a lone man working on the old McCord place - fixing the hole in the roof, putting new glass in the broken windows and repairing the picket fence around the yard.
The word had been sent out to every Sioux in the Dakotas - hit the white man whenever and wherever he was vulnerable. Burn, pillage, rape and slaughter in every part of the territory. So that when the uprising took place the whites would be weakened and terrified: almost powerless to retaliate against the might of the massed Sioux nation.
But they were just two braves, decked out in feathered headdresses and with garish war paint streaked on their faces and naked chests - prepared and well able to claim the life of a single white man. But now there were seven men in the house and the new odds of better than three-to-one against were unappealing to the braves.
So they stayed crouched among the timber which almost completely covered the rising ground behind the cabin and discussed whether to abandon their planned raid or to seek the glory of seven male scalps and the pleasure of as many women.
What finally decided them was the liquid courage drawn from a bottle of corn-juice stolen on their last raid; and the memory of the boasts they had made to the old men and squaws back at the teepees. So, after making sure their piebald ponies were securely tethered, they took final swallows of cheap liquor, tossed away the empty bottle and started silently down the open slope towards the rear of the cabin. Each carried a Winchester rifle across the front of his vividly decorated body and had a tomahawk and knife slotted through the belt of his buckskin pants.
The approach of the braves was unseen, for everyone was crowded into the small living room at the front of the cabin, listening in reverent silence to the measured tone of the preacher’s voice.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” he finished, snapping closed his prayer book and hanging a broad smile on his wan face. He looked quickly around at the guests, noting the boredom of the children, the moist eyes of the women and the impatience of the men. “Mr. Hedges, you may kiss Mrs. Hedges,” he announced after a suitable pause to separate the solemnity of the marriage service from this incitement to indulge lust.
Lack of composure was not one of Edge’s failings. It had been, as a boy, of course. But war had transformed an immature and artless youth into a self-possessed and supremely confident man virtually overnight. And it was largely because of his composure and life-hardened ability to act coolly in all situations that he had survived the intervening years. But now, as he sensed the gazes of the guests upon him, and saw the beaming face of the preacher and the shining eyes of his brand-new wife, he experienced the full depth of discomfort into which embarrassment could sink the human mind and physical being.
He leaned forward and brushed his lips quickly over those of Elizabeth, then swung around and grinned foolishly at t
he onlookers. Elizabeth had warned him he would be expected to make a speech after the ceremony and a thousand things to say had run through his mind. All of them he had now forgotten and an interminable length of time seemed to pass before he spoke:
“Obliged to you folks for coming,” he said hoarsely. “Miss Day - I mean my wife - and me’d be glad if you’d stay for awhile and eat with us.”
There was another pause, as the expectant guests waited for him to continue. One of the two horses in the small corral behind the cabin whinnied nervously. Mrs. Hayhurst, recognizing Edge’s discomfort, started to applaud. The other guests followed her cue and the sound of the clapping masked the squeals of the two horses as the braves plunged knives into the animals’ throats.
The horses keeled over into death, great gouts of blood splashing to the frost-covered ground and starting to form scarlet patches of ice.
In the cabin, the new bride’s and groom’s neighbors pushed forward to kiss Elizabeth and pump Edge’s hand. Then the women formed a chattering group around Elizabeth while the men urged Edge into the kitchen to open the imported champagne and Kentucky bourbon and rye. Danny Ross found the courage to start up a conversation with Mildred Johnston and the Reverend Dawson beamed at the couple, wondering how long it would be before he was asked to officiate out at the Johnston place. The younger children crowded into the kitchen doorway, craning their necks to see between the legs of the men - to catch a glimpse of the piles of food on the table.
“Look, a funny man!” three-year-old Matthew Johnston exclaimed, pointing towards the kitchen window.
Twelve-year-old Mark Striker glanced in the direction the toddler had indicated, but saw only the pastureland below the tree line. The Sioux brave who had chanced to peer in through the window had instantly bobbed out of sight when he saw the group of men at the table.
“Drinks coming up, ladies!” Ed Johnston announced, the prospect of so much free liquor putting him in an unusually expansive mood. “To toast the health of the happy couple.”
Sioux Uprising (Edge series Book 11) Page 1
