by John Benteen
Sundance grinned. Then he yelled, “What tribe you from?”
“Tribe? I’m from no tribe!”
“You’re half Indian!”
“All right, I’m half Absaroka—Crow! But—”
Sundance yelled back, in the Absaroka language: “Hold your fire! I tell you, I’m a friend! My name’s Jim Sundance, and I’m half Cheyenne!”
There was a long, astounded silence. Then the man yelled back, in English: “Sundance! I’ve heard of you!”
“Good! Listen, one of those gunnies over yonder is dead. But the other’s only buffaloed, and he’ll be waking up any minute! We don’t have much more time to parley. If I stand up with my hands up, will you hold your fire?”
Another silence. Then: “Yes. But you’d damned well better have those hands empty.”
“They will be. Here I go!” Sundance put down his rifle, sucked in a long breath, then reared up slowly from behind the boulder, palms outward in the sign of peace, his hands high above his head.
He stood there for a seemingly endless moment, under the gun of the man down the hill. During that interval, with the hammer of the Colt at full cock, the Crow half-breed stared hard at Sundance. Finally, he lowered the gun. “All right,” he called. “Come on down.” Cautiously, he got to his feet, flicking a glance across the road.
Sundance went quickly down the slope, hands up. The other half-breed, gun dangling at his side, took a couple of steps to meet him. He was probably not more than twenty-five, not quite six feet tall, wiry and muscular. His features were cleanly chiseled, his eyes, instead of being black, were gray, and his teeth, flashing white again as he smiled, were regular and perfect.
“So you’re Sundance,” he said, his voice deep. “My name’s Whitewolf, Jesse Whitewolf.”
“We’ll talk later,” Sundance said. “There’s one of those drygulchers still over yonder in the mesquite. I slammed his head with a gun barrel, but he’ll be waking up soon.”
“Will he?” Whitewolf raised the Colt, thumbed back the hammer. “Not if I can help it.” All the good humor went off his face. “Dammit, here I was headed for Eagle Pass, mindin’ my own business, next thing I know, two guns open up at me from the chaparral, kill my horse, drive me to cover— My rifle was pinned when the horse went down and I was damned near out of ammo for my sixgun.” They went cautiously across the road. “Reckon that was the point of it. Wait until I’d burned up all my cartridges, then come and git me.” He shook his head. “Robbers, I reckon, though God knows I’m pretty slim pickin’s.”
“Not robbers. They thought you were me.” Sundance edged into the brush, drawing his Colt. He was aware that Whitewolf, coming behind him, moved in this thicket just as silently as he, and with the same grace. They reached the little opening where Clancy still lay unconscious, the body of Bushrod sprawled across his legs.
“By damn,” Whitewolf said, looking at Bushrod, “you sure took care of his head, didn’t you? Gonna take his scalp?”
Sundance stared at him. “Hell, no.”
“Ought to. You counted coup good on him. Well, let’s get this other bastard out in the open.” Whitewolf bent, seized Clancy under the arms, lifted him easily, showing amazing strength. As Clancy came to his feet, he revived a little, shook his head, groaned.
Sundance followed with a gun trained on him as Whitewolf dragged Clancy out of the brush, not gently and making no effort to keep thorns from ripping him. In the center of the dusty road, Whitewolf let the ambusher go. Clancy dropped to his knees, head sagging, and groaned again. Then he raised his face, stared dully at Sundance and Whitewolf. As consciousness returned fully, fear came into his eyes.
“All right,” Sundance said. “On your feet.”
Clancy looked at the muzzle of the gun, then rose unsteadily. His eyes went from Sundance to Whitewolf and back again. “Two of you,” he whispered, and he rubbed his face groggily.
“That’s right. Two of us. You and Bushrod picked the wrong one.” Sundance’s voice crackled. “Who sent you?”
“I . . . don’t know what you mean.”
Before Sundance could move, Whitewolf stepped forward. He slapped Clancy hard with the back of his hand. “The man asked you a question!” he grated. “Answer it.”
Clancy steadied himself. “Bushrod. Whur’s my brother Bushrod?”
“Dead,” Sundance snapped. “Like you’ll be if you don’t talk. Who paid you to fort up in the brush, cut down on a half-breed in a buckskin shirt?”
Clancy got hold of himself. He read what was in Sundance’s eyes, licked his lips. Then he let out a gusty breath. “Feller in San Antone. Name was Ransome. Paid us each a hundred, was gonna pay another when we brought back your scalp. We … rode all night to git ahead of you, laid up, waited. Along come some Injun in a buckskin shirt, couldn’t see the color of his hair, figgered it must be you … Opened up—But… but …” His voice trailed off. “I don’t know what happened, you see? One minute I’m shootin’, the next, I—” He lifted his hands helplessly. “What you gonna do with me?”
“That depends,” Whitewolf said before Sundance could answer, “on whether or not you keep on talkin’. Your horses. Where are they? I need a horse.”
“Back in the brush, yonder.” Clancy was trembling, and so was the hand with which he pointed.
“And the money this feller gave you—”
“Ransome,” Clancy husked. “Yeah, I still got it. So’s Bushrod. You can have it all if you’ll jest—”
“I’ll have it all, all right,” Whitewolf said. “I figure I got it comin’ after havin’ my horse killed. Fork over.”
“Oh, sure, sure.” Clancy’s voice quavered. He dug in his pocket, brought out five double eagles. “There.”
Whitewolf took them, thumbed them into his own pocket. “That’s better,” he said. He looked at Sundance. “You need him anymore?”
“No,” Sundance said. “All right, Clancy. Start walkin’. It’s a piece to San Antone. When you get there, tell Ransome I said that if he tries this again, I’ll find him and kill him.”
“You mean—” Clancy swallowed hard. “You mean I can—”
“Take off,” Sundance said, and pointed up the road.
Clancy’s relief was almost pathetic. His face worked, his mouth twisted. He turned eagerly, staggered away from them. Once he looked over his shoulder. Both had holstered their Colts and, reassured, he lurched on, half-running, toward the bend that would put him out of sight of them.
He was almost there when Whitewolf spat into the dust. “Hey, Clancy!” he called.
Clancy halted, turned.
Whitewolf’s draw was a marvel. One moment, his hand was empty. The next, it was full, the gun aimed, spitting fire and smoke, its thunder tremendous in the morning silence. There was no time for Sundance to stop what happened or for Clancy to be surprised by it. The slug caught Clancy squarely in the chest and threw him flat on his back in the road. One leg drew up quickly, slowly straightened out, and he was dead.
Sundance whirled on Whitewolf. “Dammit.”
Jesse Whitewolf flashed that dazzling grin, unruffled. He stood there with smoke curling from the bore of his Colt. “You didn’t think I was jest gonna let him walk away when the son of a bitch tried to kill me, did you?” Then he holstered his Colt. “You can have the hundred off the other corpse—you’re entitled to it. Me, I’m gonna go find his horse.”
Sundance stared at the body in the road, then at the Crow half-breed. He had met a lot of gunmen, many a Colt artist, in his time, but Whitewolf was far beyond the best of them. Sundance thought about that fantastic draw again, and his spine prickled. He was not sure that he himself could have equaled that.
Whitewolf’s eyes met his. “Well? Wasn’t he my meat?”
Sundance hesitated. “He was unarmed.”
“Which was the way they wanted me to be, when I ran out of cartridges.”
Again Sundance was silent for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “All right. He was your meat.
Drag him in the brush. And you can have the other hundred, too.”
“Good,” Whitewolf said promptly. “I been out of work a long time, and I can use all the cash I can get. Incidentally, Sundance, I didn’t say it, but—thanks for taking a hand. You saved my bacon.” With that, he turned, strode on down the road toward the body. Sundance watched him drag it easily across the dusty trace and into the brush. Then he turned and ran up the hill to reclaim his rifle.
By the time he was mounted again on Eagle and back in the road, Whitewolf was there waiting for him on a tall sorrel. “I unsaddled the other pony and let it go,” the young Crow half-breed said. “Hated to do it, it woulda brought a good price in Eagle Pass, but maybe caused too many questions.” He hesitated slightly. “You are headed for Eagle Pass, aren’t you?”
Sundance nodded.
“Mind if I ride with you?” Whitewolf grinned. “I got two hundred dollars in my pocket. That’ll give us a hell of a blow-out in Piedras Negras across the river!”
“You can ride with me,” Sundance said. “Come on.”
As if by agreement, both put their mounts into a hard run to get away from the scene of battle as quickly as possible. Whitewolf rode not like an Indian, Sundance saw, in the knee-bent, rather loose-jointed way, but like a cowboy, legs almost straight in the stirrups. He was, though, a superb rider, seeming to become part of the horse itself.
It was a good six miles before they reined in and let the horses blow, and during that time neither spoke. While the sorrel snorted and wiped sweat against its foreleg, Whitewolf curled a chap-clad leg around the saddle horn, took out tobacco, rolled a cigarette. Smoke dribbled from his nostrils as he looked at Sundance. “Like I said, thanks. But—I’ve been wonderin’. Just why did that feller—Ransome, wasn’t that his name—hire those two coyotes to cutbank you?”
“Let’s just say I’ve got enemies,” Sundance answered. What had transpired between him and Ransome was none of Whitewolf’s business. “He was one of ’em.”
Whitewolf nodded. “Okay. Let it ride at that.” He uncurled his leg from around the horn, put the sorrel into an easy walk, stirrup to stirrup with Sundance and looking at him curiously. Presently, Whitewolf said, “Like I said, I’ve heard of you. You’re half Cheyenne.”
Sundance nodded.
“Then you’ve fought the Crows in your time.”
“Yes,” Sundance said. “I’ve fought the Crows. Your people. Maybe you’ve fought mine.”
“Your people, my people.” Whitewolf spat again. “That’s a lot of bullshit. You know as well as I do, there’s no percentage in bein’ either one. The only thing is to be all white. We both missed the boat on that.”
The bitterness in his voice made Sundance look at him with narrowed eyes. “I’m not ashamed of my Cheyenne blood. I’m damned proud of it.”
“You can afford to be. That yeller hair of yours—that’s bound to take off some of the curse. And they say you got education. That helps, too, don’t it? Makes you a kind of ‘noble redman’ instead of just another lousy half-breed.”
“I’ve been called a lousy half-breed in my time,” Sundance said thinly. “The yellow hair doesn’t help all that much. You grow up with the Crows?”
“Yeah. My old man was named Whitewolf, he was the leader of their scouts. My mama was white; they took her in a raid a long time ago.” His voice grated. “She hated them. Never got used to livin’ like an Indian woman, in the same teepee with my father’s other two wives. Tried to escape over and over. If she hadn’t been such a beautiful woman, likely the old man would have killed her, she was such a hell-raiser. But he put up with her. So I was raised as an Indian until I was sixteen.”
“What happened then?”
“We took off,” Whitewolf said promptly. “Me and my mother. The Crows had finally made peace with the whites, and she took that opportunity to fog out to the protection of the Army. I went with her. She had told me so much about how white people lived, what a fine life they had—I had to try it.” He spat again. “Some life. She wound up a washwoman for the Army and a drunken sergeant beat her to death when he tried to rape her. And me—White? How can I live like a white man? All they can see is the half of me that’s Injun. A half-breed don’t count for nothin’, not as much as a full-blooded Injun, even, and Lord knows they’re small potatoes now. Instead of livin’ in some kind of paradise like she was always talkin’ about, I got kicked around until—”
“Until what?” Sundance asked.
“Until I got me a gun and made up my mind I wasn’t gonna be kicked around no more.”
“You’re fast with it.”
“I ought to be, as much as I used to practice. Yeah, I spent every nickel I could get for cartridges for a long, long time, until I was as good with a pistol as anybody I ever met. Only then did I get any respect. I tell you, that’s the only way a half-breed can survive in a white man’s world—with a gun.”
There was too much truth in that for Sundance to find an answer. “If you don’t like the white man’s way, you could always go back to the Absarokas.”
“Maybe I’d do that if they still lived free and hunted buffalo. I do get homesick sometimes. But they don’t live free any more. What thanks they got for helpin’ the whites against the Cheyennes and Sioux was to be crammed on a reservation like any other tribe with everything taken from ’em. Why go back to live in a sod hut worse than any white nester’s, starve on agency rations, and try to farm land that was never made for anything but grazin’ buffalo? No, lousy as livin’ in the white man’s world is, it’s better than bein’ an Injun on a reservation.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Sundance said.
“Well, hell …” Whitewolf grinned. “I didn’t mean to spout off about all my troubles. But only another half-breed would understand. Anyhow, I’ve got two hundred bucks, and a good horse, better than the one I had, and I’m gonna have me a time in Piedras Negras. I’ll start worryin’ again when the money runs out.” He paused. “And you—they say you’re a hired gun. You got business in Eagle Pass?”
“Maybe.”
“Wouldn’t be a job for two, would it?”
“No offense,” Sundance said, “but I always work alone.”
“They say you make a lot of money. I can’t figure why you don’t go East and lead a decent life.”
“I spend a lot of money, too.”
“Oh, I’ve heard that, but I didn’t believe it. On Injuns, they say. On a lawyer that tries to get a break for ’em.”
“That’s the size of it,” Sundance said.
“Then you might as well throw your money out there in the mesquite or drink it all up. Nobody’s
going to give any Injuns a break. You ought to know that by now.”
“I’ve got to keep on trying,” Sundance said. “If I don’t, nobody will.”
“It sounds like a sucker game to me, but that’s your business. Anyhow, I owe you a favor. Any time I can pay you back, just holler.”
“I’ll do that,” Sundance said. He touched Eagle with his heels. “Let’s move along. We hurry, we can reach town by nightfall.”
And he put the horse into a run.
Chapter Three
There were five of them in the back room of the bank at Eagle Pass, and they represented most of the power and wealth of this part of southern Texas. Sundance looked at them ranged around the board table. One was a banker, the other four ranchers; all were middle-aged or older, and there was not one of them without a rawhide toughness.
“The Chester brothers!” the old man at the table’s head rasped. Joe Tom Clinton his name was, and he owned an acreage of range in which some Eastern states would have been swallowed up. Not a day under eighty, Sundance guessed, but he still rode and was dressed for riding, in range clothes and shotgun chaps and high-heeled boots. “Joker Bob and Little Coy Chester, and they’re as mean a pair as ever come up from the Big Thicket country. They say one time in Dallas, Joker Bob took on Wes Hardin himself and backed
Wes down, though I don’t necessarily believe it. But this I know, them two owlhooters have got over a hundred thousand of our dinero, and we want it back!” He looked at Sundance with blue eyes like lakes in a wrinkled map of a weathered face. “And you look big enough and hard enough to git it for us!”
“I can try,” Sundance said, “if the price is right. Let’s have the whole story.”
“All right,” said Joe Tom Clinton. “The price of beef was sky high in Abilene. We all made good drives this year, brought the money back, stashed it in our bank here in Eagle Pass. Kearney over there in the monkey suit, the town clothes, he’s the President, but me, Shad, Sam, and Walt are board members and we put up the money to start the durned thing. Anyhow, the Chester boys and two other gunswifts sift into town three weeks ago early in the morning, hit the bank just at opening time, when there wasn’t any customers. It didn’t take ’em three minutes—walked in with sawed-off shotguns hid under their coats, Joker Bob and Little Coy did, never so much as said howdy-do. Just hauled ’em out, blasted the guard, the cashier, damned near got Kearney and his secretary, grabbed every bag they could lay their hands on and was headed for the river before folks got over their surprise. Got clean away—and took a hundred and twenty-five thousand, give or take a thousand, with ’em!” His eyes glittered. “We want that money back and we want the Chesters. Dead or alive—and dead’ll do just fine!”
Sundance nodded. “What about the Rangers?”
“They can’t cross the Goddamn river,” Joe Tom said disgustedly. “And they wouldn’t let us do it, either. The Mex authorities promised to run ’em down, but you know as good as I do, all the Chester boys had to do was shell out a thousand each to the officers of the Rurales and they’re welcome to stay in Mexico for the rest of their lives. Anyhow, we’re balked; the Rangers can’t get our money back and they won’t let us put together a posse and try it ourselves. So we sent for you.”
“Who recommended me? How do you know if I get the money I won’t hightail with it?”
Joe Tom grinned. “Recommendations don’t come no higher than the one we got for you. Seems you’re a friend of the Houston family, and it was ole General Sam’s son, Temple, who suggested we look you up.”