For M.H.
who was in at the start but is
now with the opposition.
WARNING!
This is not for the fainthearted reader!
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is a fictional story set against a background of the American Civil War which did, of course, actually happen. Although the sequence of actual events is correct, it has been found necessary to alter certain details so that the man now called Edge could play his part in the battles of the Shenandoah Valley, Bull Run and Shiloh. I trust war historians will forgive me.
CHAPTER ONE
THE man called Edge was sick and he was tired and as he crossed the Kansas-Missouri Stateline he thought he might die before he reached the place that had once been his home. He couldn't recall how long he had been riding on the box seat of the flatbed wagon: how many hours, days, weeks, he had looked at little else but the hindquarters of the four big horses which had valiantly hauled him all the way from the massacre at Rainbow towards a dream that had turned into a nightmare. Once the wagon had been weighed down on its springs by a fortune in Mexican gold, but the army had not allowed Edge to claim it for his own. The cavalry troop which had galloped into Rainbow too late to prevent its annihilation by Apaches had seized upon the gold as a substitute victory, the commanding officer hopeful that Washington would accept a million dollars worth of bullion as a fair if not humane exchange for the lives of eighty troopers and their officers and every citizen who had lived in Rainbow, Arizona Territory.1 (1 See - Edge: Apache Death)
Edge, the entire back of his head seeming to be on fire from the blood-encrusted furrow which a bullet had gouged across his neck, and surrounded by a company of cavalrymen suspicious of the reason for his survival, was in no position and had little inclination to argue his case. If he were a man to have any belief in the vagaries of fortune he might have considered himself lucky to be allowed to leave Rainbow with the wagon and horses and a Winchester 66 with a full load of ammunition. In point of fact, being the kind of man he was, he felt that the circumstances in which he left the ravaged town were the best that he could expect.
It was not the first time he had been within moments of obtaining a fortune only to have it snatched from him and he had .learned to accept such defeat philosophically. He was alive when all the rest were dead and. if this were not enough, the future held as many alternatives as a man had time to explore them. So Edge drove the wagon and team away from Rainbow with a mind which had already blotted out all thoughts of what had happened and what he had lost there. He was a man alone again—the way he preferred to be—and if, as he headed north over the arid mountain country, a mind vacated by the past did not concern itself with the future and the courses it opened, this too was characteristic of the man. For, in truth, he had nothing to live for, unless it be the day, and this day was fined with pain.
The pain got worse, spreading like a flame to engulf his entire head and as the days passed it ate its way downwards, through his shoulders and chest and into his stomach. Then numbness set in and he could bathe the bullet wound without setting off fresh waves of agony. For a day and a half as he crossed the Continental Divide in the northern region of the New Mexico Territory and started down towards the Rio Grande, experiencing the falling temperatures of approaching winter, he felt almost fit, but refused to allow himself to acknowledge hope. For he knew that the wound, untreated except by un-boiled stream water and the application of a soiled kerchief, had become gangrenous. His exploring fingers could feel the ugly swelling of poison at the edges of the wound, and his nose could detect the stink of it.
The searing pain had begun shortly after that, and rode with him like a demon spirit across the southeastern comer of Colorado and into Kansas. The further north he travelled the lower the temperature dropped and Edge knew this, despite the fact that his own body was burning with fever, for as the sweat formed on his body it was immediately chilled by the brisk air. He was on the plains now, the great sprawling flatlands of the Middle West: cattle and farming country and the settlements and towns became more numerous as the land became richer. But Edge, ignoring them, sometimes drove the team through them, blind to the curious stares of bystanders; otherwise he skirted them. For his dream had been born. Created by lightheadedness and fed with involuntary, disjointed memories of inter-mingled peace and violence, it was a vision of home. A beautiful Iowa landscape peopled with wonderful parents and a hero-worshipping kid brother contributing to a rich and full life for a man named Josiah Carl Hedges. Although Edge struggled to hold on to this mind picture, the blood from a hundred gaping wounds kept washing across it to the sound of gunfire and the swish of a flashing blade. He saw his parents dead, countless mutilated men in uniforms of blue or gray, a man who was no longer a man swinging at the end of a rope, a woman's crumpled body at the foot of a cliff, another woman with bloodied patches where her young breasts had been, the head of a man with no body and no eyelids swinging in the morning sunlight.
Then, finally, as the blood was wiped clean, he saw the farm again, but not as it used to be before the war and the aftermath of violence. Now it was merely a burned-out shell of a house surrounded by vast expanses of fired wheatfields. This was a picture to which the tortuously sick Edge could cling, for he was determined to see it in reality. This was his dream, for he knew that the pain which rode the wagon with him was a messenger of death and before he died he wanted desperately to see the place where, in life, he had been most happy.
He did not trouble to eat or rest any more as he felt the time running out and it was an instinct, like that of a wounded animal, which communicated his desire to the team as it toiled due north out of Missouri and into Iowa.
The fever increased, spreading across the man's pale face a waxy redness out of which his blue eyes shone with a brilliance too bright, too intense so that those who saw the wagon roll past were certain it was driven by a man who was insane. With this sudden, dangerous rise in temperature, there came also a fire in his mind, at first flickering, then bursting into a raging flame. Edge was willing himself not to die and with this determination the dream became a nightmare, not springing from the past, but threatening from out of the future. He wanted to live because now he was certain that if he could get back to the farm, he would have a chance to start afresh. It seemed an eternity ago that he had last ridden towards the farm with hope filling his heart: an earnest desire that there he could forget the horrors of war and revert to the man he had once been. But violence had preceded him and he had gone forth to reap revenge with like violence. His lust for vengeance had been assuaged now and from the depths of his sickness he saw a chance to turn back the clock and grasp again at the opportunity for peace.
But the nightmare of death threatened to rob him and in a mind contorted by fever he was certain that death would be defeated if only he could reach the farm in time. He was unable to reason out an explanation for his faith but he had never been more certain of anything in his life before. When the rain came, gusted across the rolling plain by a north wind and lashing directly into his face, he experienced it only as a further weapon in death's armory and he urged the team into greater efforts, cursing at the almost exhausted beasts as they strained to force themselves and their burden through the mire into which the rain had transformed the grassland.