As Sawyer shouted obscenities at his men, urging them to free the tangled metal, braves streamed in through the gateway again, losing some but getting a great many into cover. The detachment of soldiers on the wall had been reduced to ten men without even a non-com to lead them. While inside the fort the Apache infiltrators ceased their warcries and crept stealthily into and over buildings to strike silently.
A trooper's head rolled out from a doorway and was kicked viciously into the center of the compound by a moccasined foot. A terrified child scooted out into the open, chased by his hysterical mother and both pitched forward with arrows growing from their backs. Knives flashed and tomahawks thudded, arrows swished and captured rifles cracked. Upon the wall four men died in as many seconds and the remaining six tried to make the foot of the stairway on the run, blasting as they went. A dozen braves spilled out their lives in blood, but only one soldier reached the compound, there to be ripped apart by the chattering fire of the Gatling as the mechanism came free.
"Cease fire!" Sawyer shrieked in terror as he realized the machine gun was no longer of use, its deadly spray not differentiating between friend and foe. It was his final command. An arcing arrow bored a course downward through his right cheek and into his throat. "Oh, mother!" he managed to sigh before he died, pitching forward off the arsenal roof.
Seven braves scrambled up on to the roof and threw themselves at the gunnery detail, who had no time to snatch up their rifles or draw revolvers. Edge picked off three with the Winchester, then another a moment after the brave had slashed the throat of a trooper. An army boot smashed into the groin of an Apache and then became separated from the leg as a tomahawk hacked through the ankle. The trooper's scream was curtailed by a knife in the heart and his murder died as Edge sent a bullet into the brave's heart. The last trooper was locked in a deadly wrestling match with two braves and managed to turn the knife of one and drive it into the Apache's belly. An instant before the other brave could bury his tomahawk into the exposed skull of the trooper, Edge's Winchester cracked again, smashing the wrist of the hand clutching the weapon. The trooper snatched up the axe and swung it with all his strength, burying the entire blade into the Indian's stomach and shoving the blood dripping body across the roof and over the edge.
"Thanks!" the soldier said, drawing in a large breath. It was his last. The arrow came up from the compound and entered the back of his neck, the point emerging through his mouth like a metal tongue speckled with blood. Then the blood gushed, like crimson vomit, in a powerful arc that reached across the roof to spray on to Edges face and chest.
"Just thanks would have been enough," Edge muttered with distaste as he wiped the warm stickiness from his lips and started to turn to survey the main battle arena.
He saw perhaps fifty braves advancing upon two men, and a boy who had emerged from the cookhouse doorway, the men holding their hands high above their heads, the boy pathetically waving a stick with a once-white, blood-stained handkerchief tied to it. He heard Cochise' bark an order. He raised his Winchester and fixed the chief in the sight. Then another figure staggered into his line of fire and he recognized Lorna Fawcett. She was naked and carrying something in her hands: something which dripped blood into dust already spattered with red. It was her own right breast, still linked to her body by a flap of skin. An arrow thudded into the gaping wound and she fell, giving Edge a clear line of fire at Cochise.
But the shot he heard was not his own and the Apache chief continued his advance as Edge felt a rearing pain at the back of his neck. "Christ, I've bought it," he said as he pitched forward and the sun went out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DEATH and smoke were an acrid stench that was sucked down his throat and into his lungs, causing his stomach to rebel with a dry retching that thrust him back into consciousness. The sun was high, beating down upon him unmercifully and he was sure if had burned a hole in the back of his head. But when he cracked open his eyes and saw the sprawled bodies of the troopers and Apaches spread around the Gatling Gun he recalled the shot and the pain. His fingertips delved beneath the long black hair at his neck and felt the rough texture of encrusted blood tracing the course of a three-inch long furrow.
Then he stopped the exploration and remained utterly immobile as he heard a sound, distant and unidentifiable at first. But as it became louder he realized that a wagon was approaching, slowly with its springs creaking and its shaft horses tiring under a heavy load. He raised his head then, gritting against the pain, and looked across the compound within the fort. It was littered with more than a hundred bodies, troopers, civilians and Apaches alike, which had long ago ceased to gush blood; interspersed with the already bloating carcasses of Indian ponies. All had died violently, many agonizingly, but none more than the two men and small boy who had been suspended by their thumbs beneath the wall staging and had fires lit beneath them. It was the odor from their blackened bodies which had wafted across the death-strewn compound to wake the man called Edge. He grimaced at the sight and looked out through the incinerated gates of the fort and down the main street of Rainbow, over the bodies of many scores of Apaches to where the wagon was approaching. It was a flatbed, with just one man sitting on the box and behind him was a cargo concealed by a canvas sheet. Not a big cargo in terms of bulk, but vast in value, Edge realized, as the wagon rolled in through the fort entrance and he recognized Wyatt Drucker.
The face of the big rancher was set in an expression of stark horror, the lines of which seemed to deepen as each new facet of the violent, battle was revealed to him. He steered the team of four horses with the reins held in one hand while the other was curled around the breech of the Englishman's Winchester.
Edge grunted and felt around for his own rifle as Drucker halted the wagon in the center of the compound. But there was no gun, on the roof—not even his Colt, which had been taken from its holster. He glanced across at the roof of the arsenal, then quickly down into the compound. He grunted again. Chief Cochise had got his Winchesters and every other weapon in Fort Rainbow. Edge felt for his neck again, but not for the wound, and discovered he still had the razor. But Drucker was too far away for this to be of any use. Then he looked again at the arsenal roof and his lean face broke into a cold grin, narrowing the eyes to slits of blue and curling back the thin lips to show an even row of teeth. There was still one gun left at the fort.
He pulled himself up on to all fours and fastening his eyes on Drucker, began to move slowly toward the side of the roof. Once there he relaxed his vigilance of the rancher to survey the six foot gap separating the bunkhouse from the arsenal. He went up into a crouch, backed off two yards and then broke into a short, ambling run. The sound of his feet thudding on to the opposite roof snapped up Drucker's eyes. The rancher dropped the reins, threw up the Winchester and loosed off a shot. The bullet gouged a furrow across the stomach of one of the dead braves. The wound was red but there was no blood: the Apache had been dead for too long.
"Hell, I thought you was Injun!" Drucker shouted as he saw Edge in a crouch a few feet from the Gatling. "Didn't hit you, did I?"
"You found it?" Edge asked.
"Anyone else left alive?"
"Just you and me."
Drucker had started to lower the Winchester, but now he raised it again, a suspicious frown on his leathery features. "Who are you?" he demanded.
Edge inched closer to the gun and shot a side-long glance into the hopper. It was more than half full. "Guy you stole from," he answered. "You want to get down off that wagon and go home to your ranch?"