"So I wasn't dreaming," he said, his voice still accented by a croak which detracted from his cultured tones. Her expression was no more friendly than that of the squaws.
"Don't you speak English, my dear?" he tried.
She moved her head in an almost imperceptible nod and he gritted against his pain to try to broaden his smile.
But when he attempted to raise himself into a sitting position one of the squaws forced him to lie down again. She did not have to exert very great effort. "Are you their prisoner, too?"
Again the slight movement of her lovely head encouraged the Englishman. "How long?"
Now she shook her head and he sighed.
"I suppose I'm for the high jump?" A quizzical expression caused him to amplify the remark. "They're only building, me up to knock me down. They'll kill me?"
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug and the movement raised the bodice of the unattractive smock to indicate the fullness of her breasts, unfettered beneath the drab material. The Englishman smiled his appreciation.
"I can see why the boss collared you for himself," he said.
"Aren't you afraid to die?" she said suddenly and seemed to be surprised by the sound of her own voice. They were the first words she had spoken since leaving the farm.
"It talks as well as walks," the Englishman answered, and adjusted his expression into one of sympathetic interest. "What's your name, my dear?"
"Lorna Fawcett," she told him, taking a step nearer to where he was lying. "They will kill you."
While one of the squaws stared hatred at Lorna, the other went to the flap and babbled in her native tongue.
"Don't you have' any influence with the big man?" For the first time there was a note of fear in the Englishman's voice and his smile was suddenly ragged at the edge. He sighed. "I suppose not—except flat on your back with your legs open. No use to me."
"I'm not here from choice," she told him. "They killed my family."
The flap was drawn aside and Cochise glowered into the tepee.
"We've all got our problems," the Englishman rasped as Lorna scuttled back against the hide wall.
Cochise regarded the Englishman in stony silence for several moments, then barked a command which sent the remaining squaw scuttling past him out of the tepee. Immediately, two braves rushed in, grasped the Englishman by his arm pits and dragged him off the settle and toward the flap. Cochise stepped aside and they pulled him outside. The chief turned to follow them, hesitated, then gestured with his head for Lorna to accompany him. She went, meekly, feeling the first stirring of human emotion since her ordeal had begun—trepidation not for herself but for the fate of the Englishman. And this turned to horror as she saw what the braves were doing to their prisoner.
The tepees of the camp had been set up in a circular pattern, with a broad open space at the center, surrounded by those of Cochise, his brother and other subchiefs and the shaman. In the middle of this space the two braves who had removed the Englishman from the tepee were staking out the prisoner, tying his hands and feet to four lances which had been driven into the ground at such a distance that his limbs were stretched to their extremes. The other members of the tribe were formed into two lines, facing the prisoner on each side, with a space left vacant at the center of one line to allow Cochise and his white squaw to view the proceedings. The chief sank into a cross-legged posture on the ground and gestured for Lorna to do likewise. But she was looking at the Englishman, whose face and naked upper body glistened with sweat from fear and the effort of trying to struggle against the tightly-knotted restraining ropes. Angered by the woman's non-compliance with his command Cochise chopped her viciously across the back of her knees and she sat down hard with a cry of pain. The rest of the watchers sank to the ground then, their brown faces showing varying degrees of eager anticipation for the entertainment to come.
High on the top of the canyon wall to the southwest Edge looked down at the Apache encampment and although he was too far distant to make a visual identification, he knew in his mind that the prisoner staked out between the lances was the Englishman. He had not followed the braves from any altruistic motives, but rather had taken the same route as they did because it followed the easiest course through the foothills of the northern mountain range and he surmised that the survivor of the bullion wagon escort would have taken the simplest way through. But when the braves had been challenged by two-more of their tribe and allowed to pass, Edge had, swung wide, guessing that the Apache camp was nearby and ringed by sentries.
He had missed the arrival of the braves and their captive at the camp, but had dismounted and crawled forward to the lip of the canyon in time to see the Apaches assemble in what was obviously the preparation for some ritual. Then the prisoner had been man-handled from the largest tepee in the camp and tied down to await his fate. At first Edge had been too impassively intent upon watching the Englishman to take note of anything else happening on the canyon floor, but then he did a double take at the woman who was violently dragged into a sitting position beside the chief. She was a red-head and in Edge's limited knowledge of the American Indian such a coloration was unknown. So he studied her more intently and even from a height of more than three hundred feet he decided that her skin tone was too light for an Apache. He recalled the sweet smelling nightgown at the Fawcett farmstead and his mind fastened upon a theory.
But then a shout from below captured his attention from the past and thrust it into the present as his hooded eyes raked across the canyon floor with its hundreds of lightly-garbed Apaches and the regular, conical shapes of the tepees. He saw a dust cloud moving fast between the tepees and then two mounted ponies emerged from it, ridden by braves who clasped decorated lances. While still more than a hundred feet from the captive Englishman they released the lances and the weapons slithered through the clear afternoon air, thudding, to an explosion of whooping, into the ground on each side of the prisoner's head with no more than an inch of space separating them from the vulnerable flesh. He saw the Englishman's body writhe up into an arch, but the ropes held firm.
While the sounds of appreciation were still echoing along the canyon two more riders approached at speed, this time from the opposite direction and twirling tomahawks above their heads. They rode close together, their legs almost brushing each other, until the final yard when they separated to go to each side of the spread-eagled man, The tomahawks were raised aloft and then sent spinning downward, burying their heads into the earth only a fraction of an inch from the hirsute armpits of the Englishman.
Much closer than Edge, Lorna Fawcett could see each movement made by the Englishman. She could see that every muscle in his sweat-soaked body was trembling; that as unshod hoofs again pounded the iron hard ground, the man contorted his face into a mask of terror, abandoning any attempt to meet death bravely. This time there was a lone rider who galloped directly toward the splayed V of the prisoner's legs, sliding an arrow from the quiver on his back and fitting it to his bowstring as he rode. The whooping rose to a crescendo as the brave urged his pony into a leap, lengthwise over the Englishman, and brought down his bow to send the arrow point-blank a half-inch from the prisoner's crotch. Although unharmed, the Englishman emitted a shriek and Lorna, fearing he had been hit, screamed. But her cry became a yelp as Cochise lashed out at her and smashed her back-handed across the mouth, drawing blood from a split lip.