Sundance didn’t take the time to inspect the cave for water. At a lower elevation, and in country that wasn’t so dry, a drip of water from high up could sometimes be found. Not here. There was no water anywhere except in the canteens of Bannerman’s men.
The sun was going down, and he wondered if some of them would try to come after dark. There was no way to tell. A man or men coming up the hill couldn’t do it without making some noise, but most of that would be covered by the ever-present wind. The mouth of the cave and the country below it took on a red glow as the sun went down. Now was the time to get some sleep, Sundance decided. A night attack wouldn’t come so soon. Probably it wouldn’t. Sundance closed his eyes and was asleep.
He slept for little more than an hour, but it was the sleep of a man who had taught himself to sleep without fear or anxiety. The mountains had been blood red when he fell asleep. Now they were a ghostly white as the moon came up. From the gully came the glow of several fires. It was cold and the wind had an edge in it. He heard the stallion breathing in the darkness of the cave. It would soon be time to shoot the magnificent horse that had served him so well. The water was gone, and so was hope. If he let the great stallion live, they would take him and kill him with ropes and whips and cruelty, because they could never break his spirit. A bullet was better than that, but he would wait until daybreak.
He stayed awake, completely rested by the short sleep. He lay flat in the mouth of the cave, with the Winchester and the Colt loaded and ready. The bow and quiver were within reach. In the gully the fires continued to flicker, throwing shadows. He could see the smoke in the moonlight. Suddenly rifles opened up from two sides, and from the center of the gully itself. They had come out of both ends of the gully and were attacking that way. Lead spattered and whined. A fragment of lead sliced through the top of his ear, bringing a trickle of blood. There was no pain, just the blood. They were trying to bury him with lead, trying to drive him back into the cave. He fired and killed a running man, and then another, and still they kept coming. He swung the Winchester, looking for Bannerman. He shot another man instead. Now they were coming at the hill from both sides, while the shooters in the gully tried to keep him pinned down with heavy fire. The gun flashes were orange in the moonlight.
They were trying to come along the side of the hill, climbing up as high as they could. He had to risk being hit by the fire from the gully. He jumped to his feet and started shooting right and left. Two men were hit and went rolling down the hill in a tangle of arms and legs. A bullet made a hot furrow in the muscle of Sundance’s right shoulder, but he kept firing until the firing pin dropped on an empty chamber. He pulled the Colt and emptied it, dropping two more men. Then he drove them back. They retreated on two sides, but didn’t go back to the gully. There were two .44 shells for the Colt, about half a load for the Winchester, three shells for the Remington.
During the night they attacked again. He killed one man before they retreated. Now all the ammunition was gone except for the two bullets in the Colt. As the night wore on, they kept up a steady sniping that was supposed to set his nerves on edge. It didn’t. The mouth of the cave was narrow and didn’t offer much to shoot at from a range of three hundred yards. The firing went on as he waited for first light. He hated to kill the big stallion, but he forced himself not to think about it. It would be done when the time came to do it.
He picked up the ash bow. It was perfectly strung, a silent instrument of death. He nocked an arrow and tested it, then replaced it in the quiver. Everything was ready for what would be the last attack.
Cold morning light flooded the mountains. He got up but kept back from the mouth of the cave. He looked out at the beautiful, desolate world of the Sierra Madre. It would be there a million years after this day, after he was gone. It wasn’t so hard to die once you knew it had to be done. Death could have claimed him so many times in the past, but he had gone on living on borrowed time. Now, at last, the debt was being called.
He took the Colt from its holster and walked to the back of the cave. Eagle whinnied and looked at him with reproachful eyes. ‘Life wasn’t so bad, was it, boy?’ he said. The Colt was already cocked. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger. He raised the pistol.
A sound at the mouth of the cave spun him around and he fired at a man who was bringing up a sawed-off shotgun to his waist. He fired fast and hit the man in the chest, but he didn’t go down. The barrel of the sawed-off came up again.
Sundance fired the second bullet and the man fell backward from the cave mouth, the shotgun discharging both barrels in the air. The dead man, with a rope still looped around his middle, went rolling down the hill.
Sundance picked up the bow and quiver. They were coming in for the attack, what was left of them, maybe five or six. More than enough to finish him. The man with the shotgun had been lowered from the rock face above the cave. So they were up there too. While he waited Bannerman climbed out of the gully along with two men. Bannerman stood watching while his men moved in for the kill. Sundance counted six men running, driven forward by Bannerman’s shouted commands.
The first of them reached the bottom of the hill. Sundance loosed an arrow that would have pinned the man to the ground if the ground hadn’t been rock. He had to stand up and show himself to use the bow. They would hit him in a minute. They advanced at a dead run, firing as they came. Then a rifle cracked and a man died. The rifle—heavy caliber—boomed again. Another man dropped in his tracks. Sundance saw Bannerman wheel in surprise and bring up his rifle. The hidden rifleman fired again and Bannerman jumped down into the gully. Now the attackers, caught between the hidden rifleman and Sundance’s deadly bow, turned and tried to go back the way they had come. Sundance killed one with a steel shaft in the spine. The rifleman killed another. And then Sundance saw George Crook rise up from behind a rock with a big English bolt-action sporting rifle in his hands. Crook shouldered the big bore hunter and dropped another slaver. Crook, wearing his famous canvas coat and flat crowned hat, waved at Sundance. Sundance waved back. Crook pointed toward the gully.
Still holding the bow, Sundance ran down the hill and made for the gully. It was long, narrow and snaked away for hundreds of feet on both sides. Up ahead he heard Bannerman scrambling over rocks, trying to make for the horses. He wheeled and fired at Sundance, then went around a bend in the gully and kept on running. Bannerman had reached the horses and was in the saddle when Sundance got around the bend. Bannerman raised the rifle and fired. Sundance didn’t even think about the bullet or the rifle. Steadily, deliberately, he raised the bow and put an arrow through Bannerman’s heart. The force was so great that he was knocked out of the saddle as though pulled by a rope. Sundance turned back to greet Crook. It was over.
It was night and they were sitting at a campfire on the lower slopes of the Sierra. Meat hissed in a skillet on the fire. Crook filled two tin cups with boiling-black coffee. Their horses and two pack mules grazed nearby. Crook lit a long black cigar with a burning brand and tossed it back into the fire before he lay back against a flat rock. ‘Ah, there’s nothing like eating meat you shot yourself,’ he said. ‘One thing I can’t stand—hunters who let good meat spoil.’
Sundance wasn’t thinking about food of any kind. He was thinking about chance. If that man hadn’t come down the cliff on the rope when he did, at exactly the moment he did, the stallion would be dead now. If Crook hadn’t arrived in Las Piedras a few hours after he shot Cajun … What was the use of thinking about it. Yet the thought persisted.
Crook knew what was in his mind. ‘I knew something was wrong when I arrived,’ he said. ‘I asked at the hotel where you were. The boy, Anselmo, wanted to help, but his father ran him off. I don’t think he knew. Finally, the only one who spoke up was the Chief of Police, Montoya. He said he had figured out what you were doing. He said it was a crazy plan. Montoya was right. It was a crazy plan. But it worked.’
‘It didn’t work, Three Stars,’ Sundance said. ‘Except for you my bo
nes would be bleaching by now.’
‘Nonsense,’ Crook said. ‘But after what Montoya told me I had to go up in the mountains and see if I could lend a hand. You and our late friends had a fair start on me, but I kept coming. It was an easy trail to follow.’ Crook smiled grimly. ‘I could have followed it just by looking for bodies. Bannerman wasn’t the kind to bury his men. Lord, Jim, you killed an awful lot of men since you started out from that town. Wish I could have been along for those fights. Not a man you killed I wouldn’t have been proud to kill myself. Slavers! After all the world’s been through, Civil War, everything, we still have men trying to make slaves of other men. Well, I tell you, it won’t happen again. That fat Indian crook, Diaz, won’t dare let it happen again. Too bad your friend Calderon had to die. He must have been quite a feller.’
‘Yes,’ Sundance said, ‘quite a feller.’ Crook looked at Sundance. ‘Well, Jim, we finally got to go on this hunt. You know, you damned halfbreed, I’d have taken it very personal if those slavers had killed you. Yes, sir, I would.’
Sundance grinned. ‘Why is that, Three Stars?’
‘A simple reason,’ General Crook said. ‘I’d have to break in a new hunting companion. I can’t see a better reason than that. Can you?’
‘I never argue with a general,’ Sundance said.
About the Author
Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. Records also confirm that, in 1958, McCurtin co-edited the short-lived (one issue) New York Review with William Atkins. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there. Additionally, McCurtin and his second wife shared their home in Ogunquit with a dog that also happened to be part wolf.
McCurtin’s first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil’s Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first “Carmody” western, Hangtown.
Carmody is, on the surface at least, just another trail-wise adventurer. Sometimes he is presented as an outlaw, sometimes as a gun-for-hire. Whatever his current occupation, however, Carmody’s eye is always on the main chance, as McCurtin’s tough, spare narrative frequently makes plain.
Carmody’s exploits set the tone for most of the westerns McCurtin was to write over the next two decades. His view of the frontier is harsh and unforgiving, a place where a man with any sense looks to his own safety, and to hell with everyone else. McCurtin’s westerns are fast, violent and chauvinistic, but the violence and sex are seldom overtly explicit. McCurtin further distances his protagonist from other stock western anti-heroes by recounting the series in the kind of hard-boiled first-person style normally associated with the private-eye genre.
McCurtin’s editor at Leisure Books remembers that he was “a terrific, fluent, natural writer of action, and a solid researcher for his westerns and mysteries. Leisure did not, in my time (1979-1981), let anyone else write under Peter’s name, but Peter wrote under other names in addition to his own byline. He was a real workhorse with, unfortunately, an alcohol problem (like so many), and without question the very best writer that Leisure was publishing at the time. Perhaps he could have been better and more prolific under better circumstances.” For a while, McCurtin himself also worked as an editor at Leisure Books.
The author spent a prolonged spell writing various mercenary and Executioner-style anti-Mafia stories. His name appeared on the first of Manor’s Marksman books, Vendetta, leading many to speculate that he also wrote under the pseudonyms “Frank Scarpetta” and “Bruno Rossi” (author of the Sharpshooter series). He also provided a novelization for the cult action classic The Exterminator.
McCurtin returned to the western in 1979 to take over the Sundance series originally created and written by the late, great Ben Haas, under the pseudonym “John Benteen”. In McCurtin’s hands, however, Sundance -- a half-breed Cheyenne who undertakes various missions to raise funds to fight the corrupt Indian Ring -- became a colder, more impersonal figure, more violent and less credible.
Midway through his tenure on the Sundance books, McCurtin wrote the adult western series Jim Saddler, under the name Gene Curry. This series returned him to the gritty first-person style of narration that made the Carmody books so distinctive.
McCurtin produced one of his all-time best books in 1982 -- the powerful western Rockwell, which is a fictional retelling of the life of Orrin Porter Rockwell, the so-called “Mormon Triggerite” who upheld the law in Salt Lake City. Tough, vivid and compelling, the author’s strengths as a storyteller are shown here to their best effect.
An acquaintance said: “When he wrote most of his books, he lived in a studio in Murray Hill, on 39th Street, only a few blocks from the New York offices of Tower Books, which at the time were located at 2 Park Avenue. His building was called the Tuscany Towers back then. It’s now a W Hotel. He had a Murphy bed, a kitchenette, and a desk with manual typewriter. There was no phone except for the payphone in the building basement. He liked eating at Automats, he went to the movies several times a week and spent a lot of time reading.”
Peter McCurtin died in New York on 27 January 1997. His westerns in particular are distinguished by unusual plots with neatly resolved conclusions, well-drawn secondary characters, regular bursts of action and tight, smooth writing. if you haven’t already checked him out, you have quite a treat in store.
The Sundance Series
by John Benteen
Overkill
Dead Man’s Canyon
Dakota Territory
Death in the Lava
Taps at Little Big Horn
The Bronco Trail
The Wild Stallions
Bring Me His Scalp!
The Pistoleros
The Ghost Dancers
War Party
Run for Cover
Blood on the Prairie
Riding Shotgun
Silent Enemy
Gunbelt
By Peter McCurtin
Manhunt
The Nightriders
Day of the Halfbreeds
Los Olvidados
… And more to come!
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