by John Benteen
“Yeah,” said Sundance.
“My name’s Drury, Luke Drury. From Oregon. Maybe you’ve heard of me.”
Sundance’s eyes ranged over Drury. He was even taller than Sundance, about the same age, late thirties or early forties. He wore a weather-beaten black sombrero, and beneath it his face was leathery, tanned by sun and wind, lined and seamed. His eyes were gray, his nose big, his mouth wide, chin craggy. That face told Sundance immediately that he was as tough as an old boot. The big body and the way Drury wore his two guns bore it out. Drury’s shoulders were enormous, his chest thick beneath a flannel shirt and leather vest, his hips narrow, his legs long and bowed, horseman’s legs. His Colts were on two separate, crisscrossed belts, their holsters tied down. Sundance felt force, power, and self-confidence radiating from the man.
“Heard of you? Sorry.”
Drury grinned. “Well, now you have.” He turned, let out a bellow. “Frank, bring a bottle and another glass, and no rotgut, good whiskey!”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Drury!” the bartender called.
“You don’t mind if I sit down.” A statement.
“Help yourself,” Sundance said.
Drury hooked out a chair, dropped into it, took two black cheroots from a pocket of his vest, passed one to Sundance. Sundance accepted it, bit off the end, lit it, found it strong, but excellent. “Good cigar,” he said.
“Nothing but the best for Luke Drury.” Smoke drifted from the nostrils of the craggy, broken nose.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he added.
Sundance tensed. Nobody but Bucknell was supposed to know that he was coming to Deadwood. “Have you now?”
“That’s right,” Drury said. “Sundance, I’m in the horse business in a big way. I supply remounts to the Army. Sell horses to the stagecoach people, too, all up and down the west coast. I deal in nothing but the best ...”
He paused. The bartender brought the bottle and a glass, opened the bottle and poured a shot for Drury. When he left, Drury, looking straight into Sundance’s eyes, went on.
“That’s why I’ve spent a lot of time here in Deadwood, waiting for you to show up. Sundance, I want to buy the Nez Percé stallions.”
Jim Sundance drained his second drink and said, “Why, Drury, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Drury’s face did not change, but his eyes did, becoming as hard as flakes of granite.
“Don’t hand me that, Jim Sundance. You were with the Nez Percé last year during their war. You saved their horses, their very best studs and mares, and you’ve got ’em hid out somewhere. Six stallions and twenty-five prime mares, Appaloosas all. There ain’t no better horses in the world, and I’ve got to have ’em. So don’t look innocent. I’m offering you twenty thousand dollars for the Nez Percé stud. And by stud, I don’t mean a single stallion. I mean the whole breeding bunch. So now, suppose we cut the games and get down to business. I’ll give you five thousand now and fifteen thousand more when you deliver the horses to me at The Dalles. Right?”
“No,” Jim Sundance said quietly. “Wrong, Drury. Very wrong.”
Chapter Two
For a second or two, Drury’s face did not change. Then, to Sundance’s surprise, he smiled.
“They told me you’d be hard to deal with.”
“Who told you?”
“The Army.”
“Why,” Jim Sundance said, “the Army’s given you bad information, Drury. I’m not hard to deal with. It’s just that there aren’t any Nez Percé horses.”
Drury rolled his cheroot across his mouth, then sat up straight. “Sundance, I said, cut the games. I know all about you and I know all about those horses.” He leaned forward.
“Jim Sundance,” he said. “For God’s sake, you’re famous all across the West. Your daddy came out here from England years ago, a remittance man. He took up trapping and trading and married a Northern Cheyenne woman. He gave you a white man’s education, but you grew up among the Injuns, not just the Cheyennes, all the Injuns. Nick Sundance, as he called himself, traded with the tribes all the way from Canada to Mexico and you learned all their languages and customs, got yourself adopted into most of ’em. You’re a Cheyenne Dog Soldier in good standin’, but you can quote Shakespeare or the Bible if you got to, or rattle off Apache or Yaqui just as easy as Cheyenne or Sioux.”
“That’s a big rep you’re giving me,” Sundance said quietly.
“They say you’ve earned it. I’ve heard the story about the six scalps ...”
“Have you now?”
“It was in the early sixties, and you were shy of twenty at the time. Your old man and your mama went into Bent’s Fort to trade and you rode along. The tribes were in, and there was a fiesta and horse racin’ and you stayed behind for the fun when your folks struck out north again. When you caught up with ’em, you found ’em dead. Somebody’d robbed and killed ’em and on top of that, before they killed your mama—”
“That’s enough,” Sundance said in an iron voice.
“So ...” Drury nodded. “Three Pawnees and three drunk whites, and they split up to throw you off their trails. But you followed those trails, all six separate ones, until you ran ’em down to their end. It took you over a year, but— They say you got a war shield, like any other Injun. And there’re six scalps on it, three black and the others different colors—and none of the men they come from died easy.”
Sundance leaned back. “Who told you all this?”
“Phil Sheridan. Commander of all the troops in the West. He knows you well. Even, he said, used to like you.”
Sundance let his eyes narrow. After all, it was Sheridan who had made that statement about good Indians and dead ones ... “Go on,” he said. “What else do you know?”
“You were, the way I heard it, kind of crazy after that. You had a big mad still to work out, and you drifted east, got sucked up in the war along the Kansas-Missouri border. Rode with the bushwhackers there, didn’t really care which side you fought on. But you came out of that mess a prime hand with a pistol. You were already good with Indian weapons, that made you a first class pistolero.”
“Sheridan told you a lot,” Sundance said thinly.
“A lot of it just floats around, and a man picks it up.” Drury poured another drink. “You came back west with a crazy idea in mind ...”
“It didn’t seem so crazy,” Sundance said involuntarily.
“It seems pretty crazy now. You figured there was room enough for the whites and Injuns to live together out here. Thought that since you were both, you could help ’em work together. You even scouted for the Army for a while ...”
Sundance said, “I don’t have to explain anything to you, Drury. But since you seem to get around a lot and talk a lot, maybe I’d better give you the straight of it. Yeah, I thought the Indians and whites could learn to live together. A lot of both races thought the same. I went by the treaties, at first. If the Indians broke the treaties, I helped the Army against ’em—” He turned his empty glass in a circle.
“It didn’t take me long to find out it wasn’t the Army that needed help. It didn’t take me long to find out that the whites broke two treaties for every one the Indians violated—” His mouth twisted. “No matter what they said, all they wanted was everything the tribes had. I got wise after a while.”
“You sure as hell did. You’ve been fightin’ on the Indian side for years. They say you realized a long time ago the real war was in Washington and even hired a high-priced lobbyist to work for the Indians in Congress. They say you pay him by hirin’ out your guns. I’ve heard something else, too. That you were at Little Big Horn when Custer got rubbed out. Not with the Army, but with the Injuns. There’s even rumors that it was you yourself that shot Custer. You’d had a runnin’ fight with him for years.”
Sundance’s face froze and he said nothing. But, of course, it was true. Except for Sitting Bull and a remnant of the Hunkpapa Sioux living in Canada, most of the Indians who were at L
ittle Big Horn had come in, and, naturally, the word had spread …
“Anyhow,” Drury continued, “you’ve been mixed up in most every major Injun fight in the past ten years, one side or the other. And you were mixed up with the Nez Percés, too.”
He held out the bottle. “Have a drink, Sundance.”
Sundance looked at it, was tempted, shook his head. “No, thanks.”
Drury poured another one, tossed it off, leaned back in his chair, and an easy grin spread across his face. “Truth to tell, Sundance, I don’t blame you and I don’t really give a damn about the right and wrong of it. God knows, if I’d been Injun, or even part Injun, likely I’d have been right there with you. There are a lot of people out here who don’t approve of what happened to the Nez Percé. But that’s water over the dam right now. What matters is the Nez Percé horses.”
He leaned forward.
“Sundance, they say the Nez Percé are the smartest Injuns in the country. Up there on the Idaho-Washington line, they’ve been breedin’ horses in a way all their own—those big, strong mountain horses with the spots like somebody had throwed a bucket of paint all over ’em—the Appaloosas.”
He drained his glass. “The Appaloosas! They can run all day and night over country that’d break an ordinary cavalry mount’s heart in twenty minutes. Big barrels, deep chests, tremendous lungs and strong quarters—horses don’t come no better for this kind of country, for mountain fighting! And the proof of that’s what the Nez Percé did!”
He was a horseman, all right; his eyes were glowing.
“Last spring, the government voided its treaties with the Nez Percé. It told Joseph and his band they’d have to give up their home valley and come into the mission at Lapwai with the Christian Injuns! Joseph was mad as hell, but he finally agreed. Only, before they could get their stock rounded up, some of his young men went on a tear and killed some whites—”
“They killed some men,” Sundance said thinly, “who’d bushwhacked their fathers and their brothers—”
“It don’t make a damn what those men did. They were white, and that tore it. Joseph ran, and the Army took out after him.”
Drury’s big chest swelled. “Sundance, I was in the war, Fifth Michigan cavalry, and I know horse soldiers. Nobody, no cavalry in the world has ever done what the Nez Percé did. Every time the Army caught up with ’em, they fought it to a standstill! They led the soldiers on a chase all over the northwest, sixteen hundred miles; they crossed the Lolo Trail over the Bitterroots, men, women, children, the whole tribe, the trail so rough our cavalry couldn’t follow. It was their horses that made that possible. They were tryin’ to get to Canada and join Sittin’ Bull and his Hunkpapa Sioux up there, and they almost made it. They were only forty miles from the border when General Miles cornered ’em. It was cold and snowin’ and he had artillery and the Indians hadn’t had a chance to hunt— Even so, they fought for five days before Joseph surrendered. But before he did, the prime stallions and mares of the Nez Percé herd, their best breeding stock, vanished.”
Memories too recent and raw rose up in Sundance. Suddenly he was back in the camp on the bend of Snake Creek, shrapnel bursting overhead, women and children screaming, a whole family just buried alive by an artillery shell exploding directly on their front. While men tried desperately to dig them out, he had wriggled up to where Thunder Rolling in the Mountains, whom white men called Chief Joseph, lay with his rifle out before him and his stocky body swathed in a tattered blanket. Rifle fire snapped and whacked above their heads, the roar of guns was continuous.
“Thunder,” Sundance yelled. “I want to go out to Sitting Bull. I can make it in three days. I can bring back three hundred Sioux. Can you hold out that long?”
“I can if I want all my people killed,” Chief Joseph shouted. He was about Sundance’s age, but he looked a decade older from the weight of the responsibility laid upon him. Looking Glass and Yellow Wolf and Jim Sundance were his fighting chiefs— Sundance had spent years among the Nez Percé, had been adopted into the tribe, had status almost as high as Joseph’s own—but the responsibility for making policy lay on Joseph alone. A bullet snarled above their heads and both ducked ... “There is no hope. To save the women and the children, I must surrender.” He started to say something else, but his words were drowned in the roar of an exploding artillery shell. Somewhere within their fortress in the creek’s bend, a woman screamed and a child bawled, and both sounds were cut off sharply, as the people who made them died.
“You see?” Joseph said bitterly in the silence that followed. It lingered, almost eerily, in that bleak fortress in the mountains, with snow drifting down and the air bone-crushing cold.
Sundance looked toward the American lines not far away. The Seventh Cavalry, with a grudge to repay, the Fifth, elements of infantry, and that damned artillery. And Miles in command, and Sundance knew Nelson Miles. He was no truly great Indian fighter like George Crook, but he had learned something important about fighting Indians in the Northwest: once the snows set in, and Indians could not pitch their teepees nor hunt buffalo, they could not carry on war, either. Especially against cannons.
Sundance felt in his throat the bitter knowledge, like stinging bile, that Joseph was right.
“I will have to make the best peace I can,” said Joseph.
“Then I’ll help you.”
“No.” The chief turned toward him, eyes hard. “No, you must not stay here.”
“But—”
The silence held. Joseph’s words were clear in the cold air. “You are no ordinary Indian, and no ordinary Nez Percé. You know the white man’s ways and the white man’s laws and can speak to the Grandfather in Washington who has sent these people against us—”
He broke off as a stray bullet dug into the dirt of the gully used as a trench in which they were crouched. “Besides,” he went on coolly in a moment, “we are only Indians, but you are half white and a former Army scout. If they take us, we will live. But if they take you, they will hang you as a traitor.”
“I’m not afraid of that!”
“I am,” said Joseph. “If you die, who is to stand for us before the Grandfather in Washington, to whom we must surrender? You have a voice there, we have none. Whatever happens, you must stay alive and be behind us to help us when we need it in ways we cannot see now.” He paused. “Sundance, my mind is clear. I will not see more women and more children killed. I shall talk to Miles. But before I do, you must leave—”
“Joseph, my friend—”
“And take the horses with you,” Joseph said.
Bullets began to crack and splatter. Peering over the edge of the gully, Sundance caught occasional flashes of blue; he heated the barrel of his Winchester firing at them. Ducking, cramming new rounds into the weapon, he caught Joseph’s words.
“The horses,” Joseph said. “If you do not save them, the breeders, the Army will take them. Maybe, after we give up, they will send us back to the mountains, to our home, at least to Lapwai. Then you can bring the horses to us.”
In his handsome face, his eyes lit. “But the horses must be saved! The stallions and the mares to carry on the Appaloosa line, not the bad line at Lapwai, but the high mountain stock! Sundance, you must take the horses out!”
“Thunder—”
Joseph looked steadily at him. “I will have no argument. You will take Two Trees and Dead Man Walking, and tonight when it is dark you will leave, with the stallions and the best mares. You will take them and hide them somewhere and leave Two Trees and Dead Man Walking to guard them. Later, if we still live, when we know where we will be and what will happen to us, I’ll write you in the white man’s way at Fort Laramie and tell you what to do with the horses.” He paused. “Sundance, you’re Cheyenne, but you are also adopted Nez Percé. You know us, you know that our horses are our life. What I entrust you with is the life of the Nez Percé people, all we have left. In the name of Wyakin, do what I say, for the sake of the Tsutpeli, The People …
”
Sundance saw the pleading in Chief Joseph’s eyes, and he nodded. “All right. I’ll take them out tonight and find a place to hide them.”
“Yes. And no one must know where, not even I. There must be no way for the soldiers to get such information out of me or any of my people. They may torture us, or later we may be starving, hungry enough to sell our heritage. But we cannot if we do not know where you put the horses …”
“All right,” Sundance said. Then he ducked as another shell burst overhead …
~*~
“Like I was sayin’,” Drury went on as Sundance snapped back to awareness, “you couldn’t stay out of an Indian fight like the Nez Percé war. The Indians at Leavenworth and Lapwai both have talked. The Army knows you were there and it knows you took six fine Nez Percé stallions and twenty-five mares and got ’em out before the surrender. What it don’t know is where.”
“That’s too bad,” Sundance said.
Luke Drury’s face darkened. “All right, Sundance, there’ll be no more beatin’ around the bush. The Army didn’t send Joseph back to the Northwest, it loaded him and his people on flatboats and sent ’em south. They’re mountain Indians and they’ll never make it down in Kansas, they’ll die off like flies. But I’ll tell you this right now, they don’t have a prayer of goin’ home again unless the Army gits their breedin’ stock.”
His eyes glittered in his leathery face. “What the Army captured was only worn-out culls. There’s Appaloosas at Lapwai, too, but they’re like coyotes compared to wolves, stacked up against Joseph’s horses. The Army wants those stallions, Sundance, to breed up their remounts for the rough country up here, and you’d better get it through your head right now that it’s not gonna take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Sundance said, “Do you represent the Army? You speak for it officially?”
“Let’s just say that I know what the Army wants and I’ve got a lot freer hand to git it for ’em.” His lips pulled back slightly from his teeth. “Let’s say that I can do business in my own way and be a lot rougher than the Army without stirrin’ up any fuss, if it comes to that. But the Army’s there, Sundance, it’s behind me, and you can’t fight it. It’s too big even for you.”