by John Benteen
He glanced at Mercer, sleeping soundly. Then, catlike, he arose, slipped the quiver of arrows on his shoulder, picked up the bow and strung it. If, for any reason, he had to use a weapon, he did not want it to be one that would alert the sniper.
Another cautious look around, and then Sundance was out of the cleft, circling the big boulders, and climbing the slope to the high crest above, from which he could see a lot of country …
Chapter Six
He had traveled on foot like a lobo wolf, keeping always to cover, eating distance with a steady trot. Now, after an hour spent in scouting, working from one ridge to the other, he had the layout of this part of the Skull Mountains firmly in his head. And he had seen some bleak and barren, raw, forbidding terrain in his time, from Canada to Mexico, but this sun baked Nevada range was as mean as any he had ever run across. Given a supply of food and ammo, access to water, there were a thousand places up here in which the sniper could hide ... He had bitten off a big chunk, Sundance thought. Especially if the madman with the big fifty turned out to be Jeff Galax, who, after years of hunting buffalo, would be an expert at cover and concealment.
Now, he worked down a shallow, cactus studded draw that led him back to the cluster of boulders in which he’d left Mercer and the horses. Instinctively, he was careful to make no sound, keep hidden, though there was no chance the sniper could be around. He rounded a bend in the draw, and now he could see, in the distance and down the slope, the top of the huge boulder that marked their hiding place. He halted, again with that lobo wariness, listening. The silence of the mountains was profound.
And then suddenly was shattered by a woman’s high-pitched scream. “Damn you, let me go! Sundance! Sundance!”
For a pair of seconds, the half-breed stood completely frozen. A stallion screamed savagely, a deep-throated fighting challenge—Eagle! Sundance’s paralysis broke. His hand swooped back, pulled arrow from the cougar-skin quiver, nocked it to the bowstring. Then, soundlessly, bent low, he ran down the draw. Within fifty yards he halted, the rock-cleft and its boulders in full view, now; and his lips curled back in a snarl exactly like a wolf’s as he took in what was happening down there, only two hundred yards away.
There were five of them, shabby, bearded, trail-stained men, each hung with guns and knives. One held their saddle horses and two pack animals. Three others stood, thumbs hooked in gunbelts, watching, as the fifth shoved Billy Mercer from the rock-cleft, holding the kid’s arm bent back in a hammerlock.
Again that womanish scream broke from Mercer’s throat. “Sundance! Help!”
One of the watching men stepped forward, swung a big hand in a backward slap that rocked Mercer’s head around. “Damn you, younker, shut up! Ted, Bill, you two go out and scout. That Sundance may be the goddam sniper! Keep a sharp eye, anything moves, you blast it!”
“Right, Horseshoe!” Their voices carried clearly in the silence. One went out to the right, the other headed for the mouth of the draw in which Sundance crouched. And the half-breed stared. The man scrambling upward toward him carried a fifty-caliber Sharps and had a belt full of ammunition for it around his thick middle.
Sundance’s eyes narrowed. The man going out to the right was armed the same way. And in scabbards on the horses, there were more buffalo guns—so each member of the party had one.
“Now,” the man called Horseshoe said. Feet wide-planted, he stood before the pinioned Billy Mercer, whose face was contorted as the man who bent his arm wrapped another arm around his neck. “You cut out that screamin’, kid, you hear?” Horseshoe’s hand moved, and a Bowie’s long blade glittered as he held the knife point against Billy’s chest. “One more yawp outa you, and I’ll rip you open.”
Mercer, holsters empty, stopped struggling.
His handsome face was wholly drained of blood. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“We want the Lost Pistol mine, and we come all the way down from Green River to find it,” Horseshoe said. “We got a map, a good map, and we’re gonna find that mine, and no goddam sniper’s gonna stop us. We heard about him up in Elko, and we got all the hardware we need to take the bastard. Ain’t nobody gonna keep us from that silver, and we ain’t gonna let nobody find it first. Which means, we got to finish off anybody we find up here. Includin’ you, kid. But you don’t go until you talk. We wanta know everything you know about the Lost Pistol. You must know somethin’, or you wouldn’t be here. So you tell us. But first you tell us, who’s this Sundance you’re hollerin’ for?”
Sundance did not hear the rest. The man lugging the Sharps had entered the draw’s mouth, was scrambling upward toward him. Sundance faded around the bend, pulling the arrow to its head. Crouched there against the wall of the draw, he waited.
The man coming toward him knew nothing about keeping silence. Heavy, flat-footed, his boots crunched on rock and gravel with every step. Sundance’s lips peeled back in that wolf’s snarl. He raised the bow, waited. Now, the man was just around the bend …
Without a sound, Sundance moved out into the center of the narrow draw. The man lugging the Big Fifty came around the bend. He saw the figure there before him—the big man in buckskins, the drawn bow, the aimed arrow. His beard-stubbled jaw dropped. He straightened up, lifting the Sharps. Then, as Sundance loosed the arrow, he died.
The hard flint point smashed through the fellow’s skull, just above the nose. All that bone slowed the shaft down a bit: when the man fell backward without a sound, the feather part of the arrow was in his shattered brain, the bloody shaft and point protruding from the back of his head.
Dead before he hit the ground, he made not the faintest outcry. Sundance grinned thinly, whipped another arrow from the quiver, leaped over the motionless body, loped further down the draw.
Again he halted. Far beyond the boulders, the other lookout was scrambling up the slope. The horse holder was having trouble with the animals; Eagle was screaming and plunging in the rock cleft, but the tethered gelding held him fast. Horseshoe was intent on Billy Mercer, knife probing across the kid’s chest; the fourth man was holding the struggling youngster.
Sundance made his decision. If the other lookout gained the heights with the Sharps fifty he carried, he could dominate the ground. Sundance raised the bow, sighted along the arrow shaft, felt his thumb touch his cheekbone as he drew the arrow full. Then he loosed it.
The men down there by the cleft never even heard it pass over them. The man working up the slope simply fell forward as the arrow drove through his skull, entering from the rear. Unaware that both his lookouts were dead, Horseshoe raked the knife point across Billy’s chest. Then he stiffened. “What the hell!” he rasped. “Reese, hold that kid tight, you hear?” Then his hand darted out, ripped Billy’s shirtfront. Buttons flew.
Even Sundance stared at the strange binding, like a wide bandage, across Mercer’s chest. The knife blade flickered and the wrappings fell away.
“Well,” Horseshoe whispered, and yet the sound carried in the silence. “Well, I jest be goddamned. This ain’t no boy. It’s a girl!”
Sundance’s hand clamped tightly on the bow. He could see it, even from this far away: female breasts that had been tightly bound leaping free, not large, but round, definite, unmistakable, with large, pink points. Billy Mercer’s head turned away, eyes closed,
“A girl,” Horseshoe rasped again. “Got to be. Well … ” Holding the knife in his right hand, he unlatched Mercer’s belt with his left. Billy tried to kick: another backhanded slap stopped that. Then Horseshoe was tugging off the Levis. The long underpants came next and then there was no doubt. Almost naked, the girl writhed in Reese’s iron grasp.
Horseshoe pointed the knife down, and he drew one hand across his bearded face. “Well, we got a little extra bonus. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this before, but, by God, shed her clothes and she’s a looker, ain’t she? Awright, you slut, maybe you don’t die so quick after all. We can use a woman with us—but first you got to talk.” He moved in closer,
big hand seizing one of the girl’s breasts and clamping down hard. “You got to talk, you hear?”
“Please,” the girl moaned. “Please …”
“Come ’ere!” Horseshoe got his arm around her as the other man released her. He pulled her to him, ground his beard-encircled mouth down on hers. The man holding the horses let out a lascivious giggle. “Don’t use it all up, Horseshoe! Leave some fer me!”
Horseshoe raised his head. “There’ll be plenty to go around! But first she’s gonna tell us if she’s got a map, and she’s gonna tell us.”
Sundance had seen enough. Long before reaching his full growth, he’d learned to loose arrows from a bow as fast as an average man could get off shots from a revolver. Now his hands were blurs, functioning automatically, as he let the first arrow go, nocked another, loosed it, then another.
The first shaft drove into Horseshoe’s torso under his left arm, slid between the ribs, feathers disappearing. Horseshoe made a gurgling sound, stepped back, eyes wide, mouth open. Blood poured from it, and from his nose; the arrow had sliced both heart and lungs. He tried to speak, fell backwards, kicked twice, convulsively, lay still.
The man named Reese stared, whirled, hand diving for his gun. His turn brought him chest-on to Sundance, and the half-breed, even at that distance, could hear the solid whack! as the shaft drove in beside his breastbone. Reese’s legs seemed to dissolve and he pitched forward limply on his face.
The horse holder stared blankly, opened his mouth to yell. Instead, he made a weird gagging noise as the third arrow drove low into his belly, Sundance’s aim off just a trifle. Jaw dropping, he stared in horror at the shaft protruding just above his belt, seized it with both hands, instinctively tried to jerk it out, then screamed as he only pulled the barbed head back into his entrails. Sundance loosed another arrow. The scream died as it drove straight through the man’s head from one temple to the other.
The girl, naked save for the open shirt, dropped to the rocky ground, face a pale mask of shock and horror. The frightened horses, scenting blood, turned, stampeded down the hillside.
Holding another arrow on the bowstring, Sundance skittered down the wash. Everything, then, was hushed and still, save for the sobbing breath of the girl he had known as Billy Mercer. She looked up at Sundance blankly as he stood over her.
“All right,” he said harshly. “You’re all right. Get in the rocks, wait there until I get back.” He pulled her to her feet, picked up her clothes. She went numbly as, not too gently, he shoved her along. In the cleft, she sank down on the blankets.
Sundance untied the gelding’s reins from the restless Eagle’s saddle. Mounting the Appaloosa, he rode in pursuit of the stampeded horses belonging to the men from Green River.
Hampered by the rough ground, their dangling reins, they had not gone far. Quickly, Sundance rounded them up, led them back to the boulders. Quieted, now, they stood ground hitched, as he swung down. When he strode into the rock cleft, the girl was fully dressed, her guns in her holsters. Beneath the dust, her face was pale, and he saw the streaks of tears. Sundance faced her. “All right,” he said. “You’ve got some talking to do. And make it fast. I’ve got to get those bodies under cover before buzzards spot ’em and start circlin’ and draw Galax to us.”
She swallowed hard and her voice was shaky. “I told you,” she whispered. “Rock rats, lost mine hunters ... I told you how they were up here. That—” She gestured to the bodies out there on the slope “—is what I meant.”
“Yeah, silver fever. And they’d kill anybody in their way. But that doesn’t explain why you’re runnin’ around dressed like a man, packing guns ... Now, Billy, you’re gonna tell me what this is all about.”
“My name’s not Billy,” she said. “It’s not Mercer, either. It’s Belle. Belle Galax.” Her eyes met Sundance’s. “I’m Jeff Galax’s wife.”
Instinctively, Sundance’s hand swung near his Colt. He had not forgotten that, woman or not, she had gunned down two men and that she was armed. Seeing the gesture, she shook her head wearily. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not on his side. Not anymore. That’s why I came to Bootstrap, why I’ve been up here in the Skulls. To find and kill him.”
Sundance shook his head uncomprehendingly. “Galax’s wife? You’re too young.”
“I’m twenty-four. Dressed like a boy, I pass for younger. Anyhow, the story starts a long way back, and you’d better hear it all. Have you ever heard of a man named Clayton?”
Sundance dragged the name from his memory. “Yeah. MacLaurin told me about him. The man that originally found the Lost Pistol came back to look for it again and was shot up by Paiutes. Clayton took him in. When the hombre died, Clayton took the map he’d given him, formed a syndicate, came back here looking for the mine himself, and got killed in a gunfight before he located it.”
“Not killed,” Belle Galax said. “Murdered. And … ” She paused. “I’m John Clayton’s daughter.”
Sundance stared at her. “Go on.”
“The original finder of the Lost Pistol was named Fowler. The map he gave Dad was the only authentic one in existence. He’d rediscovered the mine again before the Indians got him, and he had a fresh chunk of ore to prove it. So, when Dad’s wagon train got to California, he got together half a dozen men he trusted, they formed a group, equal shares, except one extra one for Dad, equipped themselves to handle anything that came along, and returned here to the Skulls to find the mine. That was the last anybody heard of them until two years later—when a patrol of cavalry scouting up there came across a lot of scattered human bones—and six skulls, every one with a bullet hole in the back.” Her mouth twisted. “Which is how these mountains got their name.”
“Six skulls. But there were seven men.”
“One must have gotten greedy, killed the others, and stolen Dad’s map. No way of telling which one, because the bodies couldn’t be identified. But he outsmarted himself. Because the map was only a copy, and Dad had left off one key landmark—he kept that in his head. When he was killed, the murderer lost his chance of ever finding the mine.”
Sundance glanced through the opening of the cleft; Eagle stood placidly, showing no alarm. But the buzzards would be coming soon. An idea flickered in his mind. He tucked it away. “Go on, Belle.”
“Make it Billy. I’m more used to that by now.”
She had, she continued, been only a child when her father had disappeared. He’d gambled everything on the mine, and her mother had been left dead broke, working at anything and everything she could find to support her daughter and herself. “Oh, she had something worth a fortune—the original map Fowler had given Dad, the real map. But she said that was my inheritance, and when I grew up, I must find the mine myself.”
The map, the mine, Billy’s someday finding it, had become an obsession with the woman as they moved from mining camp to mining camp, trail town to trail town. “I never got a chance to be a girl,” Billy said with bitterness. “She raised me as a boy right from the start, passing me off as her son. Maybe it was just as well—the kind of places where we lived, I wouldn’t have had a chance as a girl, I’d have wound up in some saloon or cat-house ... Her idea was I had to learn to do anything a man could do so I could go after the mine ... But even up until last year, I wasn’t ready yet. I was no good with a gun—any kind of gun. And then Mother died and I was on my own in Dodge ... and Jefferson Galax came along.”
Her eyes shuttled away. “The first time I saw him, something happened inside me, something that had never happened before. He was so damned big and good-looking and … ”
“And you fell for him,” Sundance said.
“I fell for him. Without his knowing I was a girl, I signed on as cook for his hide-hunting outfit on its last trip down to Texas. And ... I wanted him. I wanted him so bad it hurt inside. And one day I told him ... and that changed things. The rest of the crew never found out ... but he and I would be together when they were out skinning, and …” Her face flushed.
“While we were on the hunt, he taught me how to shoot. Pistol, rifle, everything. He made me an expert with guns. He loved guns, it was pure pleasure to teach an amateur like me ... And then the hunt was over and we came back to Dodge and there were other girls and suddenly I was afraid ... and that was when I told him about the map. But I still didn’t quite bring myself to tell him where it was ... Then he proposed and we were married. And ... I gave him the map and we planned to come here to find the mine together. But two days later, when I woke up, he was gone, long gone, without a word or note.”
“And the map with him,” Sundance said.
“The map with him.” She rubbed her face. “Well, when I recovered from the shock, I threw away the woman’s clothes I’d worn since my wedding day. Then I was Billy Mercer again—my mother’s maiden name. I struck out for Bootstrap and the Skulls, and all I wanted was to find Jeff Galax and kill him. And by the time I got here, the sniping had started. I knew who it was, and I knew I’d caused it by giving him the map. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to get a gun on him and pull the trigger, and I didn’t care what happened. So I rode up here into the Skulls ...
“There’s a big spring back up here that’s one of the landmarks on the map. So well hidden almost nobody knows about it. I camped by it—and suddenly Jeff was there, with that Sharps aimed at me, he had me cold, I never had a chance to draw. And then —” She shuddered. “I realized that he was crazy, Sundance. He had found the mine and it was richer than he had dreamed and all that silver had driven him absolutely mad.”
Sundance glanced at the corpses outside the cleft. Silver could do that.