Sundance 14

by John Benteen

  “All right,” he said evenly. “You whipped him—somethin’ nobody else has ever done. Let it end there.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it does. But he’d better not come after me again.” Sundance found his hat, clapped it on.

  “And you be here at nine tomorrow.”

  “After this?” Sundance stared at Rawlings who had pouched the gun.

  “After this. I said I’d take care of Yance. Everything I said still holds. Nine, Sundance?”

  “Nine,” the half-breed said wearily.

  “Good.” Rawlings smiled. “Now, you’d best get on down to Mrs. Fenian’s before Yance wakes up. He’s a tough ‘un to keep down.” And, picking up the pannier, he handed it to Sundance. “Like I said, it’s the big white on the left, end of Rucker Street.”

  Chapter Four

  “My name,” he said, “is Sundance—Jim Sundance. And I’d like a room.”

  The woman who had answered his ring at the boarding house door was not what he had expected. Almost as tall as he, with hair the color of a raven’s wing, eyes dark and lustrous, skin smooth and white, she was probably about thirty and more than handsome. Built on a large scale, her bosom stretched the fabric of the gingham dress, but she was not rawboned; her waist was slender, her hips curved, hands and feet surprisingly small. And she did not seem at all fazed by the appearance of this towering, dusty, bruised apparition at her door. Apparently men fresh from a fist fight were no novelty to Martha Fenian.

  “Yes,” she said, and he knew at once she was from the east; her voice lacked the twang of women born out here. “Yes, I’ve already heard about you. Well, I do have a room. Come in.” She looked him over coolly, judging him as he’d judged her, then stepped aside. “Two dollars a night, including breakfast. Other meals a dollar each. A hot bath’s fifty cents. You look like you could use one. Your room’s number seven, upstairs and to the right. Bath’s at the end of the hall. I’ll have it filled and waiting. It’s past supper time, but you’ll be wanting food, I guess. I’ll have a meal for you in your room by the time you’ve finished washing.”

  Grinning hurt, but Sundance managed it. “You’ve called the turn all along the line. Fine. Pay in advance, I reckon.”

  “Your credit’s good. They say you brought in all the money from the stage today—and did what you could for those poor people, too, that the Indians killed. That suits me.” She took a key from a bundle at her belt, gave it to him. Then she could restrain her curiosity no longer. “Who was it?”

  “Yance Rawlings.”

  She whistled softly. “He look as bad as you?”

  “Worse.”

  “Good.” Martha Fenian smiled. “You whipped him then. Lord knows, he was overdue. Now, you’d better get on upstairs while you can still walk. You want some whiskey on your tray?”

  “One drink.”

  “It’ll be there.” She watched as, lugging his gear, he ascended the steps.

  ~*~

  The room was small but spotless. The admiration Sundance had felt immediately for Martha Fenian increased. Mr. Fenian was a lucky man—but he’d have to be a damned strong personality to stand up to such a woman. Then, laying the panniers on the bed; he forgot her. Clumsily, hands still aching from the fight, he opened them, inspected their contents carefully to make sure they had not been damaged.

  The long one into which he’d crammed the money held a short, recurved bow of juniper, its string, woven of buffalo sinew, slack now. But when strung, it was immensely powerful: with it Sundance could drive an arrow clean through a bull bison—or drop a man at three hundred yards. He had, in his time, done both, and the bow was as valuable to him as any firearm he carried. Sometimes more so, because it made neither sound nor muzzle flash.

  With it in the pannier were the arrows, in a quiver made of panther-skin, the tail still attached. Two dozen of them, they were straight and perfect, painstakingly made by Sundance himself, fletched with feathers from the wings of vultures, tipped with barbed flint points. Most Indians nowadays used iron for arrowheads when they could get it; Sundance preferred stone points for their greater shocking power. He laid those aside, then took out a small bundle wrapped in otter skin.

  And that was what would have been profaned if touched by the hands of any other man—his medicine bag. It held things sacred to him, revealed to him in his dreaming as a Cheyenne youth, the medicine dream a boy must have after a long fast before becoming a man. Caressing it a moment, he carefully restored it to the pannier, which also held a gorgeous Cheyenne war bonnet, carefully folded and cased, and a pipe. His mouth quirked, a little bitterly. His medicine bag was a symbol of how much Cheyenne there was in him, blood of which he was proud. Yet, sometimes, the white man’s side of him dared to disbelieve ... It was not only a sacred symbol, it was also a symbol of how stranded between two worlds he was, neither one thing nor the other.

  Restoring everything to the parfleche, he only glanced inside the other one, flat and disc-shaped. What it held was his war shield, made of the thick neck hide of a bull buffalo stretched over a hoop, filled with a padding of grass and bull hair, covered with an outside layer of antelope skin on which had been painted a Thunderbird. Attached to its perimeter were six tufts of hair—three black, the others varying in color. Those were the scalps of the six men, Pawnees and whites, who had murdered his parents—the last scalps he had ever taken, though he had killed many, perhaps too many, men since then. Carefully he removed a picture from the wall, hung the parfleche with the shield on its nail instead. It would not stop a modern bullet, but it would turn an arrow or a musket ball—provided it did not accidentally touch the ground and lose the medicine that had been blessed into it in a long and complicated ceremony.

  Meanwhile there were footsteps in the hall; a youth’s voice tinged with Mexican accent said, “Bath’s ready, señor.”

  “Good,” Sundance answered. Carefully he locked the room. The tub was full, hot, and there were plenty of soft, clean towels. He stripped, revealing a scarred torso the color of bronze, with a particularly ugly scar on each breast just above the nipple. The rest were old wounds: those, though, were where they had run the rawhide ropes through in the Sun Dance ceremony, in which, entering manhood, he had danced and danced, dragging behind himself a pair of heavy buffalo skulls, until the skin of his chest had finally parted and released him.

  Gratefully, he sank into the tub. Mrs. Fenian really knew how to take care of her boarders. But even as he lathered up, his sixgun was by the tub, always within easy reach ...

  ~*~

  His body, honed to a razor’s edge of fitness, was resilient; the bath and the sumptuous meal, plus the one drink of whiskey waiting in his room restored him almost fully. Dressing in clean buckskins, locking the door behind him, he went downstairs. It was time now to see to Eagle. Normally the stallion came first, before himself, but after the fight his own need had been greater.

  He mounted, rode back to the stage line office, warily on the lookout for Yance Rawlings. Art was waiting for him on the sidewalk. Sundance kept the horse tight-reined. “Where’s Yance?”

  “Gone. Don’t worry about him. Ellie’s takin’ care of him.”

  “Ellie?”

  “Girl he lives with,” Art said, a touch of sourness in the words. “Come on, I’ll show you where to put the stud.”

  Sundance saw Eagle roll in the corral, then box-stalled with a feed of grain, a sheaf of hay bale. “You still don’t want to talk business tonight?” Art asked.

  “Tomorrow,” Sundance said. “At nine.”

  “Well, then, I might as well close down. Don’t come around for the stud in the middle of the night. We keep two guards on duty to watch the vault.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” Sundance promised and walked away, heading for the boarding house.

  Along the way, he passed three saloons. Sheer curiosity made him enter the last one, for it was bigger and gaudier than anything he had seen west of St. Louis, and the music coming fro
m it was that of a small orchestra, not merely a piano.

  Called the Occidental, it had a huge bar room with a stage at one end; lots of mirrors and painted nudes, and a gambling room off to the side. Despite the crowd that filled it, there were empty tables, and Sundance found one in a corner that would protect his back. He watched the percentage girls in their scanty clothes circulate in the crowd while a waiter went after the drink he ordered. The bourbon, when it came, was a decent one and he sipped it slowly, trying to add up the day’s events in his head. Something about all of them was out of kilter.

  Then a slender, almost wispy form in black frock coat, string tie, and white shirt detached itself from the crowd at the bar, made its way toward him. Sundance’s right hand dropped below the table top, close to his Colt.

  “Sundance,” Doc Ramsey said, halting opposite him. “Mind if I join you? Don’t worry. At a suitable distance. I won’t infect you.” He carried a bottle with a glass upside down on its neck.

  Sundance nodded. “Okay. Sit down.”

  Ramsey took the farthest chair from the half-breed across the table, poured himself a drink, tossed it off, poured another, drank half of that. His thin face was dead pale; save for fever spots on his cheeks. His sibilant voice, weakened by the ruination of his lungs, was rich with the accent of his native Georgia. “Hear you had a tussle with Yance Rawlings—and won. Congratulations.”

  “News travels fast.”

  “Yeah, Ellie told me.”

  “Who’s Ellie?”

  Ramsey grinned, jerked a thumb. “That’s Ellie. She’s Yance’s girl.”

  Following the motion of Ramsey’s thumb, Sundance saw her, surrounded by a crowd of men at the bar. Involuntarily, he let out a low whistle.

  The girl was in her early twenties, with a huge mane of tawny-yellow hair, vivid blue eyes beneath painted brows, a mouth like ripe scarlet fruit. The upper hills of big round breasts threatened to overflow the low-cut bodice of her scanty outfit; her long legs, in black stockings, were superb. Even at this distance, he could feel the waves of sex radiating from her like heat from a depot stove.

  “That’s right.” Doc’s mouth twisted. “Dangerous as a loaded pistol with a filed sear. The toast of Coffin City. And she don’t come cheap. Only a man with money like Yance’s got could afford her. Anyhow, she don’t like losers and she’s been spreading it around how you whipped Yance. That ain’t going to make him any happier with you.”

  “Which is Yance’s problem.” Sundance watched as Ramsey tossed off another drink, seemingly without effect upon him. For a moment, Sundance felt a touch of pity for the man, despite his repellent looks and reputation. In his late thirties, he had no hope of seeing forty; he was a walking dead man, and with a death sentence already laid on him by his own body, with no chance of fighting back, it was no wonder that all pity, all humanity, had been leeched from him. “You got somethin’ you want to say to me, Doc?”

  “Yeah. A message from Tulso. He’s changed his mind. You don’t have to stick around. In fact, it would suit him better if you’d ride on out of Coffin City.”

  “Is that a fact?” Sundance drained his glass.

  “Yeah. More—he said to tell you that if you stay on, you do so at your own risk.”

  Sundance grinned. “Doc, everything I’ve done since I was twelve years old has been at my own risk.” Then he sobered. “What’s the matter—Tulso afraid to deliver his own message himself?”

  “No. He’s in a high-stakes game over there in the gambling room and can’t pull out just now.” Ramsey tossed off another glass of liquor. “You know Tulso better than that. Say what you will about him, he ain’t afraid of anybody. And that includes the Old Scratch himself. It’s just that Coffin City don’t need another gunfighter right now—and especially not one like you.” Ramsey paused, then added in a burst of confidence, the whiskey finally reaching him, bringing out some hidden spite. “Tulso likes to be top dog anywhere he goes. He don’t want anybody makin’ him look bad. You did that today ... and he’s afraid you’ll do it in the future, you stick around.”

  “Meaning he can’t stop these stagecoach raids and he’s afraid I can.”

  “Meaning anything you care to—” Doc broke off as, outside on the street, there was the sudden approaching thunder of many hooves, a lot of riders coming fast. Above the noise in the saloon a wild yipping and whooping from outside rang out. “Uh-oh,” said Ramsey, turning in his chair.

  Then they were surging into the saloon, more than a dozen of them, sombreroed, chap-clad, booted, spur rowels jingling, and nearly every one of them wearing two guns. Among the miners and the townsmen, they stood out like cacti in a flower bed. Leading them was a tall, gaunt old man with a shag of graying hair, face seamed and shriveled by the sun, eyes the cold dead gray of a pair of bullets. A silence fell over the interior of the Occidental as they made their way to the bar.

  Ramsey sucked in breath. “Old Man Cable and his sons and their cowboys from up in the north end of the county. Come to town to raise some hell and—Damn, there’s gonna be action now. Look who they got with ’em. See the one in the yellow shirt? That’s Jared Curry!”

  Sundance stiffened. It was a name he’d heard before, one that had echoed down from the days of the raw warfare in Kansas and Missouri in which he himself had taken part. Like himself, Curry had come out of that a seasoned gunfighter, a trade to which he’d stuck. Mostly he operated in Indian Territory and the trail towns of Kansas; their paths had crossed, but this was the first time Sundance had ever seen him. “Doc—” he began, but Ramsey had already disappeared, fading into the crowd like a shadow.

  Old Man Cable was slamming a fist on the bar.

  “Awright, goddammit, let’s have some service here for a bunch of thirsty waddies! We been a long time ridin’ and ate a lot of dust! Git your butts movin’, you barkeeps, and set out the best you got for the C-Bar spread and all its friends! And if it’s got enemies here’s plague and destruction to ’em!” He seized an already open bottle on the bar, tilted back his head, drank long and deeply from it.

  But it was Curry Sundance watched. Redheaded, freckle-faced, he had blunt, ugly features, and the yellow flannel shirt had not been washed in weeks. Barrel-chested, short-legged, he wore two Remingtons strapped low, and his hands were never far from them. Unlike the others, wholly intent on whiskey, he turned, surveyed the barroom with pale blue eyes, like a wolf sizing up new territory for traps. For a moment, his eyes lingered on Sundance, then passed on. Still, he was wholly alert as he took the open bottle set before him with his left hand, drank lightly from it.

  And now the crowd in the Occidental was either drifting out or pulling away from the bar, so the Cable outfit had it to itself. Drawing back, the other patrons almost blocked Sundance’s vision. But he saw the velvet curtains part and, from the gambling room, Tulso Dart emerge—alone.

  The marshal had traded the range clothes worn earlier for a dapper black suit, white shirt, string tie, and bowler hat. But the two Navy Colts were still strapped around his waist, and his thumbs were hooked in his gunbelts as he strode forward, halting a short distance from the bar. Sensing his presence, Old Man Cable turned. “Well,” he blared. “If it ain’t the old he-wolf hisself! Hello, Tulso! Any objections to a bunch of hard-workin’ cowboys wettin’ down their whistles?”

  Dart’s voice was quiet, but it carried. “You behave yourself, Cable, you got the run of Coffin City like anybody else. But you’re travelin’ in bad company.” His eyes shifted to Jared Curry. “Curry. I hold a Federal warrant from Indian Territory for the murder of a U. S. Marshal there. You’re under arrest. And, Cable, if you try to interfere—”

  “Interfere? Hell, this gentleman just drifted in to our spread yesterday!” Cable laughed coldly. “What’s between you and him is your own affair. ‘Course, we told him you was the law here, but he said that cut no ice with him. He’s kinda like me, Tulso, he wasn’t raised to think a U.S. Marshal’s God.”

  Dart ignored that.
“Curry. Take off your guns, slow and easy, and raise your hands. You’re goin’ to the lock-up.”

  “Am I, now?” Curry had stepped away from the bar, hands dangling at his sides. “Me, I don’t think so, Dart. If I do, it’ll be feet first. Because I have been waiting a long time to come up against the great Tulso Dart. There’s some that’s fast and some that’s faster, and me, I think—”

  There was no change in his voice as he drew, hand blurring down. Dart did not appear to move. But suddenly the room was blasted by the thunder of guns; two white plumes of smoke appeared in front of Tulso Dart. Curry had his gun out and up, but he never got off a round. When the two slugs from the Navy Colt plowed into his chest they slammed him backwards as if kicked by some giant animal. He landed hard on the floor, raised his left hand languidly, as if very sleepy, let it drop, and then was dead.

  The smoke cleared, revealing Dart covering the group at the bar with his converted Navy Colts. “Stand fast!” he snapped. “If anybody else is figuring on buying in, Doc’s behind the curtain yonder with a sawed-off!”

  Old Man Cable eyed Dart coolly for a moment. Then he let out a hoarse, hacking laugh. “Hell, he warn’t no friend of ours. I done told you that. Don’t worry, Dart. If I ever come after you, it won’t be in no tinhorn way like that. I reckon the government will stand his burial. Me, I’m still thirsty. Come on, boys! Drink up!”

  The crowd moved away from Sundance. He stood up, drifted silently toward the door. All eyes focused on the dead man, no one paid him attention—save, perhaps, the girl named Ellie, whom he saw staring at him from amidst the throng. There was curiosity on her face, but when his gaze met hers, she looked away. Then Sundance was out in the open air.