by John Benteen
BRING IN GERONIMO!
They were called the Tucson Ring, and they were a group of greedy businessmen who were getting fat on keeping the Indian Wars alive in Arizona Territory. One of their plans was to keep Geronimo on the loose by supplying him with whiskey and ammunition.
But General George Crook had a plan to stop them, and Jim Sundance was the most important part of it.
His orders – to go to Arizona, find out who was selling whiskey and guns to Geronimo, stop them any way possible … and bring Geronimo in for good.”
It was a tall order. But if anyone could bring it off, it was the man they called Sundance.
THE BRONCO TRAIL
SUNDANCE 6
By John Benteen
First published by Leisure Books in 1973
Copyright © 1973, 2015 by Benjamin L. Haas
First Smashwords Edition: March 2015
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Cover image © 2015 by Tony Masero
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges ~ Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.
Chapter One
The dynamite, capped and fused, lay in a neat pile behind a rock to protect it from bullets, next to Sundance on the ledge. In this part of Utah the sun in July was like a furnace, and the rusted tin roof of the shack in the canyon below glinted dazzlingly in its rays. Sundance cupped his hands, put them to his mouth. “Fenner!” he bellowed, and his voice rang and echoed from rock to naked rock. “Jeremiah Fenner! You’re trapped now—and finished! You and your boys come out with your hands high!”
There was a long moment of silence while the echoes rang and died. Then, from the shack of warped boards and rusty tin, a deep voice yelled back an answer. “Sundance, you go to hell! You hear? You go to hell!”
This time it was Sundance’s turn to wait until the echoing faded. He lay flat on the wide ledge, high above the house, a big man, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, long in the legs, his sprawled length measuring inches more than six feet. He wore a battered sombrero, a buckskin shirt fringed and beaded in the Cheyenne way, denim pants torn and soiled by the long pursuit across the Utah badlands, and Cheyenne moccasins. Cartridge belts encircled his waist, and holstered on them was a variety of weapons—a Colt .45 worn low and strapped down to his right thigh; behind it a long-bladed Bowie knife in a beaded sheath; on his left hip a hatchet in a sheath of similar workmanship, its handle made straight for throwing. A Winchester carbine was cradled in his arms.
As he waited for Fenner’s answer to fade, he squinted black eyes against the tin-roofs glare. The bright light struck red gleams from a sweating face the color of old copper. It was an Indian’s face, a Cheyenne face, long and high of cheekbone, with a big, beaked nose, a wide, thin mouth and a strong chin. It was marked with years of hard living and exposure to the weather; every decade of a long career as professional fighting man had left its traces. In startling contrast to that coppery face, legacy from an Indian mother, was the hair inherited from his white father. It spilled from beneath his hat to the shoulders of the buckskin shirt, soft and yellow as freshly smelted gold, and gleaming like gold in the sunlight.
Now Jim Sundance licked lips cracked and blistered by heat and dry winds and cleared his throat. “One last chance, Fenner! Come out slick, no guns, hands high, and you got a chance to live!”
The laugh that jeered in answer was like a donkey’s bray. “You think I’m crazy? There ain’t but one of you, and I got my five sons in here with me! When we come out, we come out shootin’! You might get some of us, but we’ll get you before we die!”
Sundance waited again. When the canyon was very quiet, he called back, “So be it, Fenner.” Then he rolled over on his side, his mouth a hard, thin line, and picked up the first bundle of dynamite. Three sticks lashed together made a fistful.
Sundance drew in a long breath. Not taking his eyes off the shack below, he probed in his jeans, found a waterproof matchbox. He took out a wooden match and scraped it on the rock. It flared instantly. When he touched it to the fuse, there was a faint, deadly hissing and the stink of powder smoke.
He waited five seconds more, holding the dynamite bundle in his hand. Then, with strength and grace, he lobbed it into the air. It arced out, fell almost lazily, landed on the tin roof of the shack, began to slide toward the ground. It had just reached the eaves when it exploded.
The flash was tremendous, the flare of white smoke a fog instantly covering everything. A great roar came a fraction of a second later, and, trapped in the canyon, the thundering sounded like the end of the world. It boomed and echoed and re-echoed. Sundance lay tensely with his rifle at his shoulder, staring at the white fog below and waiting for it to clear.
Then a hot breeze from up-canyon pulled tatters of it away. Sundance made a sound in his throat.
He would need neither the second bundle nor the rifle. The shack was a splintered, flattened wreck, the shreds of sun-dried boards dancing with flickering flames. Inside the rubble he saw bright patches of color that were cloth; and other, brighter ones that were bloodied flesh. Sundance swallowed hard as hot bile rose in his throat. It was not a way of killing that he liked, but it was not as bad as the way Jeremiah Fenner and his sons, in their time, had killed. For men like them it was a fitting end. The long trail that had led him for months through the endless badlands stopped here, in that wreckage.
Slowly, cautiously, Jim Sundance sat up. He waited a moment and still nothing moved down there in the wreckage. Now the smoke had cleared completely. He swung his long legs over the brink of the ledge and slid down. Then, in a shower of dirt and rocks, gun ready, he skittered down to the canyon floor.
The stench of powder was strong down there. A piece of ripped tin flapped and squeaked in the breeze. Sundance went in a crouch toward the blasted shack, finger on the Winchester’s trigger. Except for the noise of the shattered tin, the silence in there was like a graveyard.
Sundance advanced through outflung, splintered boards to the pile of rubble. He stepped gingerly over something raw and gruesome that lay among the shattered planks; it was a man’s arm. Then he looked down into the wreckage, and what he saw brought the hot bile to his throat again. The dynamite had done its work too well. It was hard to count the bodies. ...
Sundance turned away, spat green fluid into the sand and straightened up. How he identified the faint tick of sound against the squeaking of the tin he’d never know. But something was triggered in his brain; he whirled and snapped the carbine to attention.
A body had risen amidst the rubble. Its face was streaked with blood; so was the long, iron gray beard that dangled almost to its waist. Out of that bloody mask hard blue eyes stared at Sundance with hatred. Then Jeremiah Fenner, who should have been dead, pulled the trigger of the six-gun in his hand.
A half-second sooner and the slug would have caught Sundance in the back. As it was, he heard the hot lead rip past his shoulder, and in the same smooth motion that dodged the bullet, he lined the carbine and pulled the trigger. The .30-30 slug caught the old man in the chest, knocking him backward. Fenner fell against a propped-up board, a bloody parody of a man. He sat there a second, mouth sagging, eyes still staring at the man in buckskins. He croaked three last words: “Goddamn you, Sundance.” After that he
died.
Sundance went carefully through the rubble. Convinced that no life lingered on among it, having accounted for all six bodies, he turned away and sat down on a rock. With trembling hands he rolled a cigarette, then smoked it. Then he stood up, ground it out, went about the hard and gruesome work that yet remained.
When he had assembled the blasted bodies and buried them under enough rocks to keep the buzzards, coyotes and kit foxes off, he climbed the cliff again, lit the other bundle of dynamite and threw it out wide to explode harmlessly in the air. After that he went up over the canyon wall to the spot where he’d tethered the big Appaloosa stallion. Mounting the spotted roan, he touched it with moccasined heels, and the long-legged stud fell into a ground-devouring lope that would have him in Salt Lake City in thirty hours.
~*~
Brigham Young had been dead for nearly a decade. The man who sat behind the desk in the city of the Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as Mormons, was one of Young’s many sons—a big, rugged man of middle-age with a long, ginger-colored beard. In the privacy of his office, he looked at Jim Sundance in appraising silence. Then he nodded. “Yes. It’s all been verified. Our man found the bodies— what was left of them—just as you said.”
“Then,” Sundance said, “I’ll take my money now.”
“Of course,” Young answered, rising. He left the office, returned in a moment with a canvas sack, passed it to Sundance. “I think you’ll find it all there, but please count it. That’s good business,”
“Yes,” Sundance said. He took out packets of green bills, fingered them. In a moment, he raised his head. “Thirty thousand dollars. Right on the button.” He put the money back in the sack. “Now, if you’ll let me have the contract, a piece of paper, and a pen.”
Young opened his desk drawer, took out a precisely hand-written document, shoved it toward Sundance. Sundance lifted a pen staff from a holder, dipped its point in ink, wrote in large letters across it: Paid in Full, J. Sundance, July 8, 1886. Then he handed it back to Young. After that he wrote for a moment on a sheet of paper and passed that to Young, too. “I’m keeping a thousand in cash. I want the other twenty-nine transferred to the account of Miss Barbara Colfax in Washington, D. C, at the bank named there. If you’ll do that and give me a receipt.”
Young’s brows arched. “Miss Barbara Colfax—?” Then he nodded. “Yes, of course. I understand, now. Be glad to.” He took the pen, wrote, passed Sundance a slip. Sundance put that and a thousand dollars in his pocket. Then he started to rise.
“Mr. Sundance,” Young said. “Just a moment, please. I’d like to talk to you a minute.”
Sundance dropped back into the chair. “All right. Go ahead, talk.”
“First, I’d like to express our satisfaction at the service you’ve given us.” Young leaned back in his chair, stroked his beard. “Jeremiah Fenner and his five sons were apostates—what you gentiles call jack-Mormons. They withdrew from the Church, turned outlaw, rogues. They’ve blazed a trail of death and destruction all across Colorado, Utah and Nevada. Murdered and robbed their own people ... and until we hired you to run them down, no one could catch them.”
“It took me awhile,” Sundance said. “Two months, to be exact. But that’s my business. Not necessarily bounty hunting. But whatever comes to hand that pays big—and nowadays mostly what pays big are jobs you do with this …” He touched the butt of his holstered Colt.
“Yes, I’m aware of what you do for a living. In fact, I know a great deal about you; we investigated you before we hired you. Your mother was a Cheyenne Indian, your father an Englishman from a good family who came west in the early days, fell in love with the Cheyennes and the way they lived, married the daughter of a chief. You yourself grew up as a Cheyenne. As a young man you lived a warrior’s life and were even a member of the Dog Soldiers, their foremost fighting society.”
“That’s right,” Sundance said quietly, his face hardening.
“But your father was a man of education, and he passed that along to you. He was also a trader, and he traveled among and lived with a great many tribes—Cheyennes, Sioux, Apaches, Shoshones, Bannocks.”
“Yes,” Sundance said.
“So you grew up in various Indian camps, learned the ways and languages of many different people. Then something happened to your parents …”
“They were murdered,” Sundance said harshly. “We went to Bent’s Old Fort to trade. I stayed on awhile after they started back to the Cheyennes. When I caught up with them, they were already dead. Killed and robbed by three drunken Pawnees and three white drifters who’d fallen in with them.”
Young nodded. “The legend is that you followed six trails. And that after a year you had taken six scalps in revenge.”
Sundance smiled without any mirth at all. “That’s no legend. That’s fact. I had to have those scalps, and I got them. But they were the last I ever took.” He sat up straight. “Mr. Young—”
“Please, hear me out. Then the Civil War started. You fought on the Kansas-Missouri border, guerrilla warfare, first on one side, then on the other.”
“It was a sort of craziness, a reaction.”
“Yes. Shock, grief. But when you came out of that, you were acknowledged as one of the foremost gunmen of the time.” He cleared his throat. ‘My point is, Sundance, expert as you were with both white and Indian weapons, you could have gone rogue yourself. Surely, with your skill and Indian craft, you could have become an outlaw terror worse than the James boys—or the Fenners, for that matter—ever were.”
“My stick didn’t float that way,” Sundance said.
“No. And that’s what has aroused my—our—interest in you. As we understand it, you came out of the war with a dream. The railroads were coming west, bringing settlers, the Indians were feeling pressure. We felt some of that same pressure ourselves; we’ve fought our own battles to hold on to our lands. Anyhow, your idea was that there was enough for all, that whites and Indians could live together and teach each other things of value.”
“I was wrong,” Sundance said in a hard voice.
Young nodded. “Perhaps. Certainly, the Indians have lost every battle. Only Geronimo and a handful of Apaches are still fighting. All the rest are on reservations.”
“Or slaughtered,” Sundance added harshly. “Massacred.”
“Yes. And through it all, you’ve gone on hiring out your gun, making vast sums of money, sending it all east. You have a lobbyist in Washington, don’t you? A lawyer working with Congress and the President to influence them in favor of the Indians.”
“Washington,” Sundance said. “That’s where the real war was fought all along. In this country, it looks like justice is dished out according to how much money you can put up. Yeah, Mr. Young, I support a man in Washington, and a woman—Miss Colfax. She lived with the Cheyenne for years herself. Now she’s in Washington, too, doing what she can for them.”
He paused, drew in a long breath. “But it’s all come to nothing. In the beginning, I worked with the Generals—Sherman, Sheridan, Crook. They came to me for advice about Indians because I knew all the tribes and they knew me. I gave them advice and they used it to destroy the tribes. None of them ever played fair with me but Crook. He’s the only one who ever gave a damn about the Indians, saw them as human beings. And in the end he’s done more damage than any of the other generals. The Indians could fight rings around the others, but Crook fought in their own way. And he’s the one who brought most of them in, put ’em on the reservations. He meant well—but he’s been betrayed, too. By the people who want all the Indians wiped out.”
“So you hate Crook, too, now?”
Sundance shook his head. “I don’t hate him. I just don’t want any more to do with him. Or the U. S. Army. All I’m trying to do now is swing what weight I can to see the tribes get a fair shake on their reservations. And that takes a lot of money. There’s a fortune to be made in cheating Indians who can’t fight back, and the Indian Ring in Washington is p
ulling strings to sop up the gravy. Anyhow, what is it?”
Young held up his hand. “Very well. I’ll get to the nub. Sundance, you’re approaching middle age; certainly you’re not a young man any more. Have you given a thought to your spiritual well-being?”
Sundance’s jaw dropped. “What?”
Young smiled faintly. “Your salvation. Sundance, why don’t you join our church? The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints has need of you.”
Sundance only stared. “Me? Me become a Mormon?”
“Why not? Once you were no longer a gentile, you would enjoy all the benefits. We’d give you land, or you could go into business, and you’d be free to take as many wives as you preferred. But what we’d really like to have you do, once you’ve been converted, is head our program among the Indians.”
Sundance was still looking at him. blankly. “Be a ... a missionary?”
“Why not? According to the Book of Mormon, the Indians are the descendants of the Lamanites, an ancient race who fought against the defenders of the good. They are fallen souls, but they can be redeemed. To that end, we’ve established a strong missionary program among them—the Utes, the Shoshones, the Bannocks. Once you were an Elder of our church, you’d be just the man to head it, to bring them into the true belief, to save their souls. You know them, they’d listen to you.”
The man, Sundance saw, was absolutely serious. Sundance scrabbled for words with which to answer him. Finally he shook his head. “No,” he said gravely. “I couldn’t join your church.”
“Why not? What do you believe at present?”
“What the Cheyennes believe. What most Indians believe. That the world is made up of circles and all things come back to the beginnings. That there is a balance and a center to the world, and that life comes from the Great Father, the Sun. And that nothing, dead or living, is ever wasted.”
“Touching, but pagan. Surely you realize the penalties you’ll incur in the afterlife if you don’t—”
“Mr. Young,” Sundance said gently. “I don’t want to argue with you about religion. I did a job for you and I’ve got your money, and now I’ve got to go find another job that pays as well. And—”