Sundance 8

by John Benteen

  Shielded by an outcrop of a butte, he watched the trail herd for a few moments longer. The smile that touched his face was grim. If those Texans knew how much money on the hoof was up here on this rise, they’d leave that herd, one and all, and come after him. After all, he was worth as much as three thousand head of longhorns delivered to the pens in Abilene.

  Presently he swung the horse and rode on, putting a ridge between himself and what men now called the Chisholm Trail, which, ironically, had first been marked out by a half-breed like himself. Old Jesse Chisholm had been half Cherokee. And his people lived not far from here, in the northern part of what was known now as Indian Territory.

  The country was rolling, well watered, with occasional timber. It had been set aside as a reserve into which various tribes were to be moved as their power was broken. But, barren as some parts were, much was good rangeland, and Sundance wondered how much longer the whites would let the Indians keep it.

  By coming nightfall, he was in sparsely settled country and extra wary. A few roads crisscrossed the plains, and here and there were little clusters of rude cabins, and a few better houses, even an occasional store. He did not dare let anyone get a glimpse of him; even at a distance, the Appaloosa was like a signboard proclaiming his identity. He had got it from the Nez Percé of Idaho and there was not another stud like it south of the Platte. He kept to the timbered creek bottoms, and at twilight, he holed up. Not long before midnight, he resaddled the spotted stallion and rode on, emerging from the timber into hilly terrain. There was almost no moon, but he needed none to find the single cabin he sought.

  It was in a little valley between two scrub-clad ridges. As he struck the wagon track leading toward it, a razorback hog scuttled into the brush. Somewhere ahead, a hound caught his scent and bayed. Then he saw the little two-room structure of chinked logs, with its shed and barn and pens, only a cube of blackness in a grove of walnuts. Sundance pulled his rifle from its scabbard and laid it across his saddle-horn.

  Suddenly the dog, a big bluetick hound, was in the path, baying thunderously. It circled the big stallion, keeping out of reach of the horse’s heels, and up ahead, as its bellowing shattered the silence of the night, a terrier yapped, too; and then, inside the cabin, a lamp was lit.

  Sundance reined in, giving John Canoe and his wife a chance to get dressed. Then he put the stallion forward at a walk, as the door swung open, silhouetting a stocky figure against the lamplight. It was a man who held a shotgun.

  His voice rang out in challenge. “Who’s out yonder?” He saw the rider, raised his weapon.

  Sundance halted again, calling out softly: “John. It’s Jim Sundance.”

  “Who?”

  “Jim Sundance.”

  “Jim— Well, I be damned.” John Canoe lowered the shotgun, took a few steps forward, stared. “It sure is, I’d know that big spotted stud anywhere.” He laughed delightedly. “Hell’s fire, Jim, come in the house.”

  “First, let me put this horse out of sight.”

  John Canoe’s stocky figure stiffened. “You wanted?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, that makes no difference. There’s an empty stall in the barn.” He came forward, as Sundance sheathed the rifle and swung down, a man not much over five feet five, wearing a nightshirt tucked into pants, his feet bare. Tucking the shotgun under his arm, he put out a hard, rough hand. “Jim, it’s good to see you.”

  Sundance shook his hand. “Likewise, John.”

  “Go in the house. Wilma’s dressed. I’ll take care of the stud. He knows me, don’t he?”

  “He knows you,” Sundance said, and he passed over the reins. Canoe led the horse away and Sundance went into the cabin.

  ~*~

  It had two rooms, and a single lamp burned on its rough table, filling the air with a rancid stench of what people called rock oil. It came up in a spring on John Canoe’s place, and he skimmed it off and burned it, cursing it for contaminating good water. The odor reminded Sundance that he had something to tell Canoe about the rock oil.

  As Sundance closed the door behind him, a slight, frail woman in her late forties came toward him, light from the lamp shining on her copper skin, her face deeply wrinkled. She put out both hands. “Welcome, Jim Sundance,” she said in Cherokee.

  “Thank you, woman of John Canoe,” he answered formally, then smiled. “Wilma, how are you?”

  “Pleasured by the sight of you.” She lapsed into English. “It’s been too long. You’ll eat with us? I’ve got fresh deer liver.”

  “Fine,” Sundance said. “How are the children?”

  “Almost grown. Asleep in there.” She pointed to the other room.

  “Don’t wake ’em,” Sundance said.

  “No.” She went to the fire, stirred it up, took down an iron skillet from a hook by the mantel. She moved slowly, awkwardly, as if she had rheumatism or arthritis. This was not a country that agreed with mountain Indians.

  John Canoe came back in, closing the door, sliding its wooden bar. He put the shotgun on pegs over the mantel, turned. He was in his early sixties, built like a bear, his hair cut fairly short and its raven black threaded now with silver. His eyes were like two jet beads, and his teeth were still good, white, when he grinned. “Damn, Jim, it’s been a long time since Pea Ridge.” He went to a cabinet, took out a fruit jar and two tin cups. “A drink?”

  “Would be good,” Sundance said and sat down on the split log bench by the table and watched John Canoe as he poured.

  Small and shabby as the man was, he came from noble ancestors. His great-grandfather had been Dragging Canoe, famous war chief of the Cherokees.

  Once the Cherokees had held all of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, the fastnesses of the Smoky Mountains studded with their villages. Among the most highly civilized of all the eastern tribes, they had lived by farming as much as hunting and had built log cabins long before the first white settlers learned the art. The great Sequoya had given them an alphabet and they could read and write their own language. But they had been among the first casualties of the westward thrust of white men.

  Treaty after treaty they had made had been broken. Time and again they were pushed deeper into their mountains. Then the arch-enemy of all Indians, Andrew Jackson, had become President, and he had decided to remove the Cherokees as an obstacle to westward expansion once and for all. He had sent the Army, and they had rounded up the tribe like cattle and, in the dead of winter, had marched them across the Smoky Mountains and out to Indian Territory. It had been a brutal march, a death-march, with men, women, children perishing on the way, from cold and starvation. A small remnant of the tribe, the Quallas, had managed to break away, and they remained in their ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains now, but most of the Cherokees had been settled in the west. Here, malaria and other lowland diseases had taken a dreadful toll. Still, they had survived, on land deemed worthless because even its water was polluted with the stuff called rock oil. There was so much rock oil, or petroleum as it was now beginning to be called, that crops would not grow on the soil allotted to them.

  John Canoe had been a child on that Trail of Tears, as the Cherokees still called it. He had made the long march over the mountains, had lost his mother and his younger brother. Yet, somehow, he had survived. But the memories of that ordeal were deeply engraved in his mind. He was known as a good Cherokee, he farmed well and traded with the white man and was always respectful. But, as Sundance well knew, he hated the whites with a passion he kept well concealed.

  Now he tossed off half the cup of whiskey and sighed. Sundance drank, too; it was corn, and very powerful. “So you’re wanted,” John Canoe said. “I figured you would be, sooner or later. You’ve been in their way too much, Jim. What kind of price they put on your head? Two thousand, three?”

  “A hundred,” Jim Sundance said.

  “A hundred dollars?”

  “No,” Sundance answered. “A hundred thousand.”


  John Canoe stared at him and his wife turned from the fire. For a moment, the room was silent. Then John Canoe laughed sharply, explosively. “You’ve been hurtin’ ’em!”

  “I guess I have.”

  “What’d you do and who—?” John Canoe leaned forward. He listened intently as Sundance told him all he knew. Then he sipped whiskey and shook his head. “Wild,” he said. “Plumb wild. And so you got to go to Abilene, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn, you know they’ll burn you down the minute you ride in on that spotted stallion and with that blond hair and blue eyes and skin your color—”

  “I know,” Sundance said. “That’s why I’m here, John. I need help.”

  “Well, hell, yes. I’ll be glad to flank you!”

  “Appreciate it, but not that kind.”

  John Canoe met his eyes. “Then you name it,” he said harshly. “Jim, you and me fought together at Pea Ridge under Stand Watie, with his Cherokee battalion, and we whipped the Yankees. You pulled me out of a tight spot then, when you coulda got your head blown off helpin’ me. There’s been more times than one since that you’ve pulled me out of a bad hole with a few dollars when I needed it. But it ain’t me that counts. It’s what you’ve done for the Indians, all the Indians, and what you can keep on doin’ for ’em. To me, that’s the most important thing.”

  He stood up, went to the fire, looked down into the coals. “You know,” he said, “I remember what it used to be like up in the Smoky Mountains. Big hills, big timber, clean and sweet and lots of game ... We coulda held that land, Jim. If we’d united with the Creeks and the Shawnees and the Tuscaroras, and we’d made one common cause, we coulda run the white men clean outa Carolina. But we didn’t. We fought each other, insteada fightin’ the real enemy. And, because we wouldn’t unite, the real enemy whipped us and took our land. Well ... it’s gone, now.”

  He turned. “And the same thing is happenin’ all over again out here. The Cheyennes fight the Crows and the Crows fight the Sioux and the Sioux fight the Blackfeet and none of ’em’ll git together. And so they let the white men pick ’em off one by one. But, if instead of fightin’, all the Indians would unite—”

  He came back to the table. “I’ve often thought about it. And when I do, I think about you, too. Your daddy was a white man, but he traded with all the tribes, they knew and liked him, from the Canadian border clean down into Mexico. You grew up among all of ’em, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Apaches, God knows how many others. You speak all their languages, you know their ways, you’ve been adopted into most of the bands.”

  He sat down again. “There are more Indians than there are white soldiers. I’ve always figured that if somebody could unite ’em, get ’em to workin’ together against the real enemy— Then, by God, if they couldn’t take their land back by force, they could make one hell of a bargain. I always figured that the one man who could bring ’em together was you. Jim Sundance, if he put his mind to it, could raise an Indian army that would whip the white man’s ass and good. Well, you ask me, I think somebody else is figurin’ the same way.”

  “Maybe,” Sundance said.

  “No maybe about it. That’s why they’re scared of you. Think what an army that would be—the Sioux and Cheyenne fightin’ societies, and the Crows and Blackfeet and Piegans! Maybe the Nez Percé, the Comanches, the Arapahos and Kiowas. The Apaches and the Navajos— A man like you could put together a force of a hundred thousand warriors, three times what there is in the whole United States Army! And they know it, Jim! Don’t you think they don’t know it!” He gestured. “And what about us, stuck on this damn rock-oil soaked land out here? The Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Osages, the Seminoles, the Delawares ... You think we’ve forgot how to fight?”

  “You proved at Pea Ridge you haven’t forgotten that,” Sundance said.

  “Sam Houston knew we hadn’t! He lived among us, old Sam did, he was a Cherokee, too, before he went on to Texas! But— Anyhow, Jim, that’s it. That’s why somebody will put up that much money. It’s comin’ to showdown now, soon, this year, next, the one after. They want you out of the way before it does.”

  He drained his cup. “Me, I’ll stick my hand in the fire to make sure they don’t git you, if that’ll help. What can I do for you, Jim?”

  Sundance grinned. Something in him unknotted. It was good to be with someone he could trust. “Well,” he said, “first of all, I want a haircut.”

  ~*~

  By the time John Canoe came back from the store, his wife, Wilma, had finished cutting Jim Sundance’s hair and rubbing into what remained the can of blacking he had produced from his panniers. She held a small, wavy steel mirror up before his face. “There. How’s that look? Only, I don’t know what we’ll do about them blue eyes.”

  “I’m half Mandan,” Sundance said. “From up on the Missouri River, understand? Lots of the Mandans have blue eyes. There ain’t many left, but enough so the story’ll hold water.”

  “I never heard of that.”

  “Well, it’s true. Some of ’em even had light hair. There’s an old story that they mixed in with a bunch of Welshmen or Norwegians that came here long before Columbus found this country.”

  “You know I never been to no white man’s school, Jim, I don’t know nothin’ about that. I only read the Bible in the Cherokee language. But if you like the hair, good. I—” She broke off as the buckboard pulled up out front.

  John Canoe came in, lugging a big bundle. “Jim, I bought everything you said. I hope it all fits.”

  “A half-breed’s clothes hardly ever do,” Sundance answered. He ripped open the bundle. “Let’s see.”

  He took out a black, high-crowned hat, settled it on his head. Next came the flannel shirt, the denim jeans, the black boots, with their low stockman’s heels, Then the coat ... “Let me use the other room,” Sundance said. When he came out of it, John Canoe grinned.

  “By God, you look like an agency Injun if I ever seen one!”

  “Half Mandan, half Santee Sioux,” Sundance answered. “Right common combination up in the Dakotas. I can’t speak Mandan, but I know the Santee dialect well enough. I’ll swing around and come into Abilene from the north. That’ll make the story look even better. But if I meet somebody on the way, maybe I won’t have to duck.”

  Gone was the long yellow hair, gone the buckskin shirt with the Cheyenne beadwork and the Cheyenne moccasins. The big, cheaply dressed man in the wrinkled clothes bore little resemblance to Jim Sundance as he had appeared the day before, especially with the yellow hair close-cropped and blackened. “What about the horse?” he asked.

  “You ride my personal mount, Deerchaser. Half mustang, half Morgan, not as big as your stud, and a geldin’, but he’ll go like hell in a short sprint and he’s got the bottom to carry a man your size all day long. We’ll keep the stallion until you come back for him, plus all your gear. You sure you don’t want to take that bow?”

  “I can’t afford to,” Sundance said. “I’ll wear my Colt, tote that old shotgun of yours, nothing else.”

  “It’s a muzzleloader.”

  “That’s all right, I know how to handle ’em.”

  “Well, I got plenty powder and lots of caps and buckshot. We’ll fix you up good. You sure you got to ride on today?”

  “I got to,” Sundance said.

  “And how you gonna call yourself if somebody spots you and asks?”

  “Why,” Sundance said, “the white folks call me Charlie. And the Santee call me Mewahtahne That’s Santee for ‘The Mandan’.”

  “‘Mewahtahne’,” John Canoe repeated. “If anybody asks, I’ll say it was my old friend the Mandan.”

  “And keep my Appaloosa under cover in the barn. He’ll get rank when he’s been shut up a while, but you can handle him if you wear my buckskin shirt.”

  “Right. My oldest boy has your horse saddled.”

  “Thanks, John.” Sundance walked with him to the door. There, Billy Canoe stood at the head of a horse
Sundance immediately appraised as small, but excellent. Sundance said, “Well, John—”

  “Jim, before you ride, there’s something I want to ask you. You know a lot more than I do, you got an eddication. A feller, a white man in store clothes, come through here last week. Said he wanted to buy my land.”

  Sundance turned on Canoe, looked at him sharply. “Did he say why?”

  “No, but he offered a dollar an acre. Jim, I own two hundred acres. That’s a powerful lot of money. And, like he said, it ain’t fit to raise a fuss on because the ground’s full of rock oil.”

  Sundance let out a long breath. “Don’t sell.”

  “But, Jim—”

  “The rock oil, don’t you see? John, up in Pennsylvania and out in Ohio, they’re taking that stuff out of the ground and selling it. Where do you think what they call coal oil comes from? It used to be that the only oil in this country came from whales, now the coal oil, the rock oil, is a lot better and cheaper for burning. People are making fortunes on it in the East.”

  “They are? It stinks like hell when you burn it in a lamp.”

  “Not if you distill it the way you would whiskey. John, that lousy rock oil of yours may make you rich someday, or Billy, here, anyhow. Someday, maybe, they’ll run trains on it instead of coal or wood. You hang on to this land.”

  “But, Jim … I’m hard up. I could use the cash.”