by John Benteen
“All right,” Yance said. But he kept a grim silence as the team began to trot again, and his eyes shifted warily to Sundance from time to time.
There was no blaming him, Sundance thought. In Yance’s place, he would have been just as wary, as suspicious. He did not know gunmen the way Sundance did. The Darts were hard and avaricious, but they had spent dangerous years building up their reputations as gunfighters and law-bringers. Not even a quarter of a million dollars would be enough for them to see those reputations smeared and ruined, to have themselves branded as common robbers. He had reached that conclusion after long, hard, consideration, before asking them to come to Martha Fenian’s. Now he was gambling on their pride—and their desire to control wholly Coffin City’s vice. He had, he thought, better be right.
They reached Station One without incident, and the team change was quickly made. There was once when Sundance was afraid Yance would break, pass the word to the hostlers about the men inside the coach. But the big man’s trust in Sundance held; he kept his silence and when the fresh horses were in their traces whipped them up.
The stage rolled out in a cloud of dust. “Now, by God,” said Yance savagely, “we don’t stop for the devil hisself until we hit Station Two!”
Miles rolled away behind them. Sundance sat high on the coach, eyes sweeping the terrain, rifle at the ready, shotgun across his lap. Now, he thought. Now it can come at any time ... As they reached the midpoint between the stations, his wariness was at its highest pitch.
Then, suddenly, emerging from a draw, the lone rider was there, in the road ahead of them. He turned his horse toward the coach, spurring hard, hand raised in a desperate signal.
“What the hell?” Yance blurted as both men recognized him. “That’s Art! Something’s up!”
“Don’t stop the coach!” Sundance yelled. “Don’t stop the coach for anything! Whip up the team!”
But he was too late. Yance was already leaning back, sawing at the reins. “Whoa! Whoa, damn you—” The leaders reared and plunged at the unexpected pressure on their mouths; the Concord lurched to a stop, dust swirling around it.
Art reined in, just in front of the horses, then walked his mount around the team. “Yance! Sundance! Hold up! I’ve just had important news!” His face was grim; sweat had cut channels in the dust that powdered it. Across his saddle, he held a double-barreled ten-gauge. Looking up at Sundance, he asked hoarsely, “Any trouble yet?”
“Not yet,” Sundance said, and turned the rifle, aiming and firing in one smooth motion. The bullet caught Art Rawlings in the chest just as he raised the shotgun and knocked him backwards, out of the saddle. He fell across the horse’s rump, hit the ground sprawling.
“Sundance!” Yance screamed and dug for his Colt. Sundance swung the rifle barrel and it slammed into his head. Yance toppled backwards off the seat, landing in the dust. Sundance seized the lines that dropped from his hand, let the rifle go, grabbed up the shotgun. At that instant, from the seamed network of draws ahead, gunfire broke out. The leaders squealed, fell dead in their harness as slugs smashed into them; the swing team and the wheelers plunged and tried to run, but they were anchored fast by the dead horses ahead of them.
Holding the shotgun, Sundance leaped, just as a bullet slapped by his head. He landed on the wagon tongue between the plunging wheelers, as lead poured overhead. Then they were coming, pouring from the draws, nearly a dozen men. Sundance crouched behind the dancing horses, waited, as, from both sides of the road, they converged on the coach, firing as they came.
A swing horse grunted, fell. Sundance dropped lower, balancing catlike on the plunging wagon tongue, and now they were within his range and he fired the right barrel of the shotgun beneath the wheeler’s neck. The nine buckshot plowed into a pair of oncoming riders; one pitched limply from the saddle; the other’s horse went down. Its rider rolled over, came to his feet, dragging sixguns. Sundance let him have the other barrel. Its charge cut him almost in two.
But the rest never faltered, were coming as he dropped the shotgun, dragged his Colt. Then, suddenly, from behind him, there was a thunder like the end of the world as two more shotguns opened up, the Darts breaking cover, Pliny firing to the right, Tulso to the left, from the stagecoach windows.
That hail of buckshot was like an invisible wall. The attackers seem to slam against it. Horses reared, went down; men screamed as double-zero slugs plowed into flesh. On both flanks, the charge faltered, broke. Only a big man on a sorrel horse came straight on, as if afraid of nothing, armored against all harm. He had a Colt in either hand. “Come on!” he roared. “Come on, you bastards! There’s a quarter of a million in that coach!” Then, spotting Sundance on the wagon tongue, he reined up the sorrel, left the horse in a leap, dropped to his knee, lining his right hand gun.
Sundance fired first. The slug caught the other in the throat, and his hand dropped, squeezing a shot into the ground by reflex. He toppled on his side, clutching at his neck, and Sundance shot him again, and now the Darts were out in the open, Pliny still using a shotgun, breaking, reloading, with amazing speed, Tulso standing coolly erect as he had at the corral, gun in each hand, aiming each shot, bringing down a target with each one. Then, with startling suddenness, the shooting tapered off, died out. A few riderless horses stampeded down the road. More, like their riders, lay dead or wounded. The wind blew a ground fog of powder smoke across the scene, then out across the desert.
“By God,” Dart husked, coughing from the smoke. “By God, it happened just like you said it would.”
Sundance, slipping around the wheeler, did not pause. “Yeah,” he said bitterly, “it did.” Then he was bending over Yance, tying the hands of the unconscious man with rawhide thongs.
A yell from Pliny brought him erect. “Look yonder! There’s one more! He’s gittin’ away!” Pliny dropped the shotgun, reached inside the coach, brought out a rifle. Sundance stared at the rider on the paint horse, fleeing across the desert. As Pliny brought the Henry into line, he knocked it up.
“No,” he yelled. “I want that one alive!” He whistled, and then Eagle was there, ears laid back, eyes rolling. Sundance hit the saddle without touching stirrup, turned the stud, and it stretched itself in a dead run.
The rider on the paint, small, clad in buckskin shirt and canvas pants, had a half mile’s head start. He pulled down his hat, bent low in the saddle, lashed the pinto with a romal. Sundance grinned tightly as Eagle, sensing the object of their pursuit, devoured the ground with long-legged strides.
The rider on the paint never had a chance. Like some avenging angel, Sundance on Eagle closed the gap. The rider turned, saw him coming, lashed his mount even harder, but remorselessly Eagle came on. Sundance, as the distance narrowed to two hundred yards, unlatched the sixty-foot rawhide riata from his saddle, shook out a loop.
A hundred yards now, and the short-legged pinto was faltering. Then fifty, and then only twenty, and then five yards less than that, and the paint’s rider turned in the saddle, raising a small, nickel-plated pistol. Sundance whirled the loop a single time and let it go.
Neatly it settled over the fleeing rider’s shoulders. Eagle dropped weight on his rear haunches, skidding to a stop. The shiny little gun went flying as the rider was jerked from the pinto’s saddle. So did a sombrero, revealing the huge mane of tawny-blonde hair tucked up beneath it that now cascaded loose. The girl named Ellie hit the ground hard, and Sundance was already off of Eagle and running down the rope. By the time she had breath enough to sit up, staring dazedly at him, lips peeled back in a snarl, he had her covered with his gun.
“All right,” he rasped. “On your feet. Now you’re going back to face Yance Rawlings—and tell him what this was all about.”
She struggled up. “You go to hell,” she snarled.
Sundance slapped her hard across the face, backhanded. “Baby,” he said, “you may be tough, but you ain’t that tough.” And then she looked into his eyes, and suddenly all resistance ebbed from her.
Keeping the rope around her, he loaded her on Eagle, and turned the stallion toward the coach.
When he reached it, Yance Rawlings was on his feet, leaning against it, raging incoherently, big wrists straining at the lashings Sundance had wrapped around them. “Goddam—” Then he broke off as he saw the girl. His jaw dropped. “Ellie,” he whispered.
Sundance swung down, dragging her with him. “That’s right. Ellie. Now. You tell him, girl.”
She stared at Yance. Sundance wrapped a hand in her hair. “Tell him,” he rasped.
“All right.” Her voice was choked. “Art said we’d have a lot of money ... more than you could ever give me. He said we’d have near a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, as soon as he pulled this robbery. Then we’d take off for ... for Frisco and catch a ship from there ... Australia, he said, until the heat died down. Then we’d come back ... New York or Chicago, I’d live like a queen … ” Her mouth twisted. “Damn you, you big fool, all you ever gave me was chickenfeed! But he was gonna make me rich—!”
Yance looked at her dazedly, wordlessly. He shook his head. “Art? My own brother? And you? I—” He broke off, voice clogged in his throat.
Sundance said gently, “That’s how it was, Yance. I started wondering when Tom Evans bushwhacked me out yonder in the desert. I made damned sure nobody saw me leave town, and nobody but you and Art was supposed to know where I had gone. But I backtracked Evans enough to see that he had been on the scout for me a long time. Somebody had to tip him off that I had ridden south to find Cochise. I was pretty sure it wasn’t you. Then Martha Fenian told me that Art was after Ellie behind your back and it made more sense.”
Sundance paused, rolling a cigarette to give Yance time to absorb the shock. “She was the hinge of the whole damned thing. You had her and Art wanted her so bad he’d do anything to get her. But she came high. So he hit on the idea of throwing in with Evans and the Cables to rob your own coaches to get the money he had to have to pry her away from you. Then, when I hit town and Dart—and Evans, too, likely—told him how thick I was with the Chiricahuas, he was afraid that if he didn’t hire me, I’d go find the Indians and learn the truth—that Cochise and the Apaches were never mixed up in it at all. So he took me on at my own price—to keep me where he could watch me and then rub me out. When I came into town the other night, he knew Evans had missed and must have sent word to the Cables right away, his first try at both of us havin’ failed in Lordsburg. He never counted on the Darts throwin’ in with me, but anyhow, he wanted me out of the way before this big shipment came along. And you, too. He already had a lot of gold stashed from his previous raids and this one would have set him up fine, even split with the rest of these gunhawks. Then, like she said, he’d take it all and her and head for Australia and the hell with the stage line business.”
He lit the cigarette. “Everything I could smell was bad—and it all pointed to Art ... or you, but mostly Art. Those outriders—they’d have been picked men who’d have blown you and me to hell if I hadn’t put my foot down on that. So he tried another angle. He knew the only man you’d stop this coach for was him, so he rode on ahead, with his men. The minute I saw that shotgun on his saddle, I knew I was right—he’d have pulled both triggers and blasted us both to hell, so I killed him first, then slugged you so I wouldn’t have to kill you. And—” He shrugged. “The Darts were my insurance. I sure wasn’t fool enough to try to haul a quarter of a million to Lordsburg with just you and me. But I didn’t want Art to know.” Moving slowly, he took the rawhide off the big man’s wrists.
Yance stood there dumbly, and tears ran down his cheeks, cutting channels in the dust. “So he turned rogue,” he whispered. “My own brother—God damn. And Ellie—!” He whirled on her, raising one big fist, then lowered it. “No,” he said, voice agonized. “I can’t. I can’t hit you. I just want you gone. I just don’t want ever to see you again. Can she go, Tulso?”
“If you want her to,” Dart said quietly. “But not back to Coffin City.”
Yance turned away, caught up in a couple of strides one of the loose horses that had been a raider’s. “Get on that,” he said in a strangled voice. “Get on that and ride.” He almost threw her into the saddle. “And if I ever see you again, I’ll break your neck with my bare hands!” He brought his big palm down on the horse’s rump; it broke into a run. Yance stood there, watching Ellie disappear into the distance, galloping toward the south. Sundance did not say what was in his mind—that in that direction were the Apaches.
Now Yance stood looking down at the body of his brother. He bent, gently lifted it with immense strength, put it in the coach. Then he dragged his hand across his face, turned to Sundance.
“Mount that stud of yours,” he said, voice stronger now, shoulders straight. “Catch up some more of them loose horses while we take the traces off the dead ones. We can rig a team to take us to Station Two.” He sucked in a long, shuddering breath. “God damn it, we still have a quarter of a million in gold to get to Lordsburg!”
Chapter Ten
Lying in the bed, Martha Fenian watched as Jim Sundance dressed. He cinched the belt of his canvas pants, pulled the buckskin shirt over his head, then took his weapons belt from the bedpost, buckled its heavy weight around his middle. “So you’re really going,” she said, voice tinged with sadness.
“Got to.” Sundance nodded. “My work’s all done here. And you read that letter.”
“Crook,” she said. “General Crook. What’s so special about him?”
“A lot of things. First of all, he’s the only officer in the whole damned Army that really knows anything about Indians. He likes ’em, sympathizes with ’em—in a way, he’s kind of an Indian himself, inside. The second thing is, he’s been sort of like a father to me, ever since I’ve known him; it was him who told me that if I really wanted to help the Indians, it had to be done in Washington, in Congress, which is why I hired that lawyer to lobby for ’em against all the railroad companies and land speculators and get-rich-quick bastards that just want to see ’em wiped out the quickest way. And the third thing—he’s got word he’s going to be assigned to the Department of Arizona, to take charge of quieting the Apaches. He wants me to ride up northwest and meet him and give him my recommendations. When he asks for me, I’ve got to go—no way around it.”
Martha swung out of bed, stood up, magnificent in her nudity. Sundance eyed her regretfully for a moment; then she slid into a robe. “But maybe you’ll be back? With Crook?”
“Not for a while. But someday.”
“Someday,” she said bitterly. “And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime,” Sundance told her, “there is a lot of man running the Rawlings Line all by himself. He’s got a lot of hurt to heal, too, and he’s gonna need some help. From a real woman, not another dance hall floozie.”
“We’ll see,” Martha answered. Then she said, “Damn it, Sundance—” And she came to him and kissed him hard on the mouth, touched his cheek with a hand. “Take care of yourself,” she whispered.
“I generally do the best I can.” Sundance grinned. “You do the same.” Then he picked up his rifle, the two parfleches, and went out, leaving her standing there in the middle of the room—alone.
~*~
As usual at this time of morning, Coffin City was quiet, subdued, save for the background hammering of the stamp mill at the mine outside of town, like the beating of a gigantic heart. Even the Darts would be sleeping now, Sundance thought, after a night of prowling the bars, sitting in the games. Well, they had what they had fought for: iron control over the rough element, the underworld, of Coffin City. They would take their graft, their pay-offs, thrive, and yet simultaneously make the town safe for decent people. After the fight at the corral, the slaughter on the stage road, the wild bunch would ride wide around Dart territory for a long time to come. In addition, there had been reward money on a lot of gunmen killed in both battles—not much per head, but in the aggregate a fat, round sum. Sundance s
miled tautly. Nor was Tulso one to miss an opportunity when it appeared. As soon as they had seen the gold safely delivered to Lordsburg, the Darts had organized a posse, led a raid on the Cable Ranch in the North End. The remnant of cowboys and owlhooters left there was too small to stand against their force; they had taken at least half a dozen more wanted men, garnering still more bounty money. And, at the same time, recovering maybe a third of the bullion lost in previous raids on the Rawlings Line.
Yet, Sundance knew, they would not be sorry to see him leave Coffin City, and there would be no farewells between them. The town was not big enough for two gunmen of the caliber of himself and Tulso Dart; inevitably, if he stayed, they would clash. There would be no profit in that for either of them, so it was as well that he was riding out.
Now he had reached the office of the Rawlings Line. All the clerks greeted him respectfully as he passed through to Yance’s private office. The waiting room was full of passengers, both for Lordsburg and the Tucson run, which shortly would be pulling out. Sundance knocked on Yance’s door, then entered.
Yance sat behind the desk, a man transformed by the experience of the past few weeks. He had shed a lot of weight; there were dark circles beneath his eyes; gone was all the blustering irascibility, the braggadocio which had made him such a handful in the beginning. But what had replaced it was something deeper, stronger; there was iron in his soul now, and you could sense immediately the new maturity within him. When Sundance entered, he grinned; “Jim.” Then he sobered. “Today’s the day, huh?”
“According to the contract.”
“Which you’ve fulfilled completely. And I owe you another ten thousand dollars.” Yance stood up, went to the safe. As Art had done, he shielded its combination with his body as he opened it, then closed it, turned, and dropped several packets of crisp currency on the desk. “There it is,” he said. “Ten thousand—plus another five I figure you’ve earned as a bonus.”