Sundance 4

by John Benteen

  Roane was in his late thirties, maybe early forties. His face was rough-featured, craggy, like something hewn out of hardwood with a dull chisel. Sundance could feel the force and power that radiated from the man. Before he could answer, a woman cried out: “Glenn!”

  Sundance shot a quick glance to the porch. Susan Wade ran toward her husband, face pale. She was in her late twenties, and not even the drab gingham she wore could mask her beauty. Taffy-colored hair fell down around her shoulders; her eyes were blue, wide now with relief at the sight of her husband. Her lips were full, red. The breasts beneath the tight gingham were high and round, her waist slender, and Sundance guessed that she had long legs, for she was taller than average for a woman. “Thank heavens you’re back!” she said.

  “You’re all right?” Wade reached out with one hand, touched her head. But he did not take his eyes off Roane. Sundance put the appaloosa up alongside the mule, watched the trio intently, forgetting Susan Wade. The lanky man— He had it, now.

  “Yes, I’m all right. Only, I was so worried when you didn’t come home . . .”

  “I had a little business in Hell, Yes! Now, go back up on the porch, honey.”

  White-faced, she obeyed. “Well, Roane?” Wade said.

  “Where were you last night, Wade?” Roane’s voice was deep, slow, with a space between each word, as if talking were something he was not good at.

  “You heard me. At Hell, Yes! What business is it of yours?”

  “I lost a man last night,” Roane said.

  “You what?”

  “Bill Evers, one of my riders. Got tired of stock vanishing. Put him on patrol over near the lava beds. We found him this mornin’ early with a bullet in him. Found sign, too, where somebody butchered another cow.”

  Wade let out a long breath. “Don’t lay it on me, Roane. I’ve got a witness as to where I was last night.”

  “Have you, now?” Roane swung his big head to stare at Sundance. “Who’re you?”

  “I’ll tell you who he is.” The lanky man spurred forward. “His name’s Jim Sundance.” He had a narrow face, with a drooping blond mustache beneath a broken, twisted nose. His eyes were pale blue, and his right thumb was hooked in his gunbelt near a holstered Remington.

  “Hello, Coulter,” Sundance said. “You’re off your home range. Thought you were riding with the James boys.”

  “Jim,” Coulter said, “me and Frank had a fallin’ out. With him and Jesse against me, figgered I’d see what the country out here was like.” He smiled faintly. “Been a long time, Sundance.”

  “Sundance,” Roane said. “I think I’ve heard of you.”

  “Me and Sundance rode together with some bushwhackers on the Kansas border back durin’ the War,” Coulter said. “Confederate guerrillas. Sundance left to join up with Stand Waitie and his Cherokees just before Pea Ridge.”

  “Hardcase,” Roane said. “That it?”

  “Hard as they come,” said Coulter. “Maybe.” He looked at Sundance narrowly. “You’ve built quite a rep for yourself, Jim. Still use them Indian weapons? Bow and arrow, tomahawk, that sort of stuff?” His eyes went to the hatchet and the bull hide panniers behind Sundance’s saddle.

  “When I need to,” Sundance said.

  “There was a time,” said Coulter, “when I figgered on trying you out, Jim. But you left before I could.”

  “Don’t,” Sundance said. “I got nothing against you, Coulter.”

  “That ain’t the point,” Coulter said. “The point is, I always figgered I was faster.”

  “Leave it!” Roane snapped. “Carson. I want you to ride to Hell, Yes! Find out if Wade was there last night.” His gaze went back to Wade. “God help you if you weren’t,” he said hoarsely. “Evers worked for me for five years, and the Lazy R looks after its own.”

  Wade shifted the shotgun subtly. “Roane, you’re on my property. Clear out.”

  “Your property now. But I’ll remind you, there’s a payment due next month. I’ve been easy with you, Wade, but if that money ain’t there on the dot, I won’t be easy anymore. I’m tired of losin’ cows, and whoever bushwhacked Evers just piled the last straw on the camel. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Wade said. “Ride.”

  “In a minute.” Roane looked at Sundance. “You, ‘breed. Where you stand in this?”

  “Me?” Sundance said. “Why, I’m a man that owes Glenn Wade a favor. A damned big favor. You crowd him, you’re crowdin’ me.”

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll wipe that slate and haul your tail,” Roane said.

  “I’m kind of stupid,” Sundance said. “I expect I’ll be around for a while.”

  Coulter put his tall sorrel forward. “No,” he said thinly. “No. I don’t think you will. Ride out, Sundance.” He had pulled his thumb loose, now, and his hand was very close to his gun.

  “Coulter,” Roane snapped, “I told you—”

  “Ease off, boss. I’m gonna do you a favor now. It’s somethin’ that’ll hafta be done sooner or later, and I’d as lief make it sooner.”

  “Coulter, I said—” Roane started to pull his horse around, face scarlet.

  Wade said, “Stand hitched, Roane.” He swung up the shotgun. “You, too, Carson.” Then he said, “Coulter, you’d best lay off.”

  “That’s a good idea, Coulter,” Sundance said. The pressure of his knees kept the big stallion still as something carved from marble.

  “No,” Coulter said. “I want this over, done with, now. I’m in a new country. I need a new reputation. Sundance is worth money to me as a notch. The man that kills him, he draws down a premium on a gun job. And besides, for nigh on eight years, I’ve wondered—” He smiled faintly. “It’s a awful thing, the kinda itch I got. I been waitin’ to scratch it for eight years, Jim. I’ve beat some good ones in my time. But you’re the one I’ve laid awake at night thinkin’ about, wonderin’ about, hopin’ our trails would cross again so—” Even as he spoke, Sundance saw the change in his eyes, and Sundance drew.

  Coulter’s hand was already hauling the Remington from leather. Sundance did not have to think about his draw, his hand had a life of its own. Neither his own body nor the stallion moved, only his right arm. He brought the Colt up and out and lined it and fired before he had any conscious realization of what he was doing; only when it thundered and bucked in his palm did brain catch up with reflex.

  Coulter caught the heavy slug in his chest. Its impact knocked him sideways from the saddle, and he fell on the sorrel’s off flank, boot hooked in stirrup. The horse reared, stampeded, as Coulter’s gun went off, the bullet whining wild into the dust. The sorrel galloped through the trees with Coulter’s corpse bouncing along behind.

  “The damn fool,” Sundance said, swinging the smoking gun to cover Roane. Roane’s eyes had widened; then they narrowed.

  “Jesus,” Roane said. “You’re fast.”

  Sundance did not answer that. He said, “Carson. Go after Coulter’s horse. Bring it back, and the body.”

  Carson, younger, snub-nosed, was white-faced. “Boss. . .”

  “Go get him,” Roane rasped. He sat his saddle motionless, hands held high. Carson galloped off. Roane looked at Sundance steadily. “All right. It was self-defense; Coulter crowded you. I can’t fault you for taking him. All the same, Sundance, watch yourself. You’re throwing in with the wrong crowd. If it’s a job you want, I need a replacement for Coulter.”

  Sundance shook his head. “I’m not throwing in with any crowd. But when I owe a man a favor, I pay it back.”

  “Well.” Roane let out a gusty breath. “You’ve been warned. Both of you.”

  Wade pulled back the hammer of the right barrel of the shotgun, with a dry, loud click. “And so have you, Roane. Ride out.”

  “Yes,” Roane said quietly. “I’m going. The fifteenth of next month, Wade. Two thousand dollars.”

  “Ride!” Wade snapped. Roane wheeled his bay gelding around, touched it with his spurs, galloped afte
r Carson. He rode straight up in the saddle, unafraid. Sundance and Wade watched until he had vanished in the trees along the river.

  Then Wade let out a long breath, eased down the hammer of the twelve-gauge. His eyes glittered as he looked at Sundance admiringly. “You are one fast man with a gun. I’m damned glad you’re on my side and not against me.”

  Chapter Four

  The inside of Wade’s ranch house was as shabby and poverty-stricken as the outside, sparsely furnished, unpainted, but determinedly clean. Susan Wade had made a concerted effort to take the curse off it with bright curtains of cheap cloth, but the effect was more pathetic than anything else. Wade had introduced her to Sundance, told her about last night at Hell, Yes!, carefully minimizing the danger he had put himself in, the odds he’d faced, on Sundance’s behalf. Nevertheless, her eyes clouded and small lines of worry appeared at the corners of her mouth. Her only comment was, “Mr. Sundance still shows the effect. I think I’d better apply some liniment.”

  “The name’s Jim,” he said. “And I’ll be all right.”

  “Jim, then. And don’t argue with me. You need some treatment.”

  Wade laughed, squeezed her. “One thing you’ll learn, Sundance. When she wants her way, she gets it. Better peel off your shirt.”

  Sundance did so. Wade stared at his bronze torso, rippling with muscle, while his wife went to get first-aid materials. “Scars,” he said. “A lot of scars. A lot of fighting, Sundance.”

  Sundance nodded, shrugged. “And those two on your chest. The biggest ones. How’d you collect those?”

  “Not fighting,” Sundance said as Susan came back into the room with pan of warm water, cloth, liniment bottle. “Dancing.”

  “What? Dancing?” She set down the stuff on the table, ran her eyes over his muscle-banded chest. On either side of it, there was an ugly pucker of scar-tissue almost the size of a man’s palm. Around his neck, between them, hung a small bag of otter skin on a rawhide thong.

  Sundance nodded. “Cheyenne Sun Dance ceremony, their most sacred religious rite. That’s why my father took the name Sundance; he was the first white man they let participate. Later on, my time came, too. They cut the skin, run wooden pegs underneath, with rawhide trailing from ‘em. Tie buffalo skulls to the other end, so they drag behind. You dance until the skin rips and the pegs come out.”

  Susan frowned. “What an awful, pagan thing—”

  Sundance smiled faintly. “White people worship saints who’ve been through worse.”

  Susan smiled, face reddening. “I never thought of it that way. And that little bag—?”

  “Medicine bag,” Sundance said.

  “Good luck charm, you mean?”

  “Maybe you could call it that.” There was no way to explain to a white. The white half of him did not even particularly believe in it; sometimes it seemed to him that he was a man with two different personalities housed in one body. One was Anglo-Saxon, logical, hardheaded and rational; the other was Cheyenne, bound to tradition, dreamy sometimes, inclined to superstition. There were times when they conflicted with each other; but there was nothing he could do about that.

  So, although the bag held the sacred things of his childhood puberty dreaming, he let the explanation go, leaned back as Susan began to swab his battered body with warm water. Wade paced the floor, smoking, occasionally glancing out the window. “Looks like Roane’s gone. How long had he been here when we came?”

  “He’d just ridden up.”

  “He didn’t—?”

  “No. No, he didn’t say anything or try to put his hands on me.”

  “If he had,” Wade rasped, “I’d have killed him.”

  “Please,” Susan said. Sundance caught the edge of despair in her voice. “Please, Glenn, don’t talk like that. Maybe if Mr. Sundance—Jim—can get the Modocs out of the lava beds, if they can be taken away from here, Don Roane will ease off on us. Once he stops losing cattle ...”

  “He can’t have lost too many,” Sundance said. “Five Modocs can’t eat a whole lot.”

  “One or two a week, believe it or not—yearlings, mostly. They slaughter ‘em, butcher ‘em on the spot, then haul everything into the badlands. That’s eight a month, over four months, thirty-two cattle, it’s a sizable amount of beef. They seem to pick on Roane; maybe that’s because he was one of the leaders of the original bunch of ranchers that rode with the Army to put the Modocs off their land when the shooting started.”

  Susan Wade’s hands were gentle. She dried Sundance’s chest, swabbed him down with liniment. “Well, you’re in no shape to go prowling around the lava beds today,” she said. “You need some rest.”

  “I’ll rest at night,” Sundance said. “Lay around in daytime, I might get soft.” He smiled. “I’d like a cup of coffee, though. After that, I’ll probably ride around the lake, look for sign in the tules. You need me, Wade, fire three shots. I’ll come running.”

  “I don’t think we’ll need you. Hell, Yes! and Roane both will take a spell to simmer down. All the same, Sundance, watch your step. You’ve become mighty unpopular on this range all of a sudden.”

  “I’m always careful,” Sundance said. “Always.”

  Wade laughed. “Like last night at Hell, Yes! One against fifteen, twenty.”

  “Well, maybe I slip sometimes,” Sundance grinned.

  While Susan made the coffee, he brought in the bull hide panniers from behind Eagle’s saddle. One was long, cylindrical; the other was round. He opened the longer one first, as Wade watched, and from it he took out a juniper-wood bow, short and well-curved, lashed with buffalo sinew and tipped with horn. He checked its stave for any split or fault, ran his fingers over the bull shoulder tendon sinew that made the string. It was sound. He laid it aside.

  “I guess you know how to use that,” Wade said with a certain awe.

  “Before I ever touched a gun.”

  “It looks powerful.”

  “I’ve driven an arrow clean through a running buffalo with it. Most good Cheyenne bowmen can. And it pulls enough to reach about three, four hundred yards. Fair range, longer than a sixgun. Quieter, too, when you need quiet. It makes no flash if you use it in the dark, there’s no powder smoke if you use it in daytime.”

  “I see. For a man like you, that could be an advantage.”

  Sundance nodded, took the quiver from the pannier. It was of panther skin, the long tail still attached. In it rattled two or three dozen shafts, fletched with buzzard-feather, tipped with sharp, flint points.

  Wade frowned. “I thought Indians used iron points nowadays.”

  “Most do,” Sundance said. “I don’t. Flint stops a man quicker, makes a worse wound. Sometimes that counts a lot. Enough, anyhow, so that I’m willing to pay the old men who know how to make these stone arrowheads for me. Or, I make ‘em myself. Nothing much to it if you know how, you work ‘em with a piece of deer antler or the like, flake off the rock bit by bit.”

  He checked the arrows, laid the quiver with the bow. Susan came back in with coffee, poured two cups full. By then, Sundance had opened the other pannier, the round one. From it, he took his shield.

  First a hoop of juniper, thick, strong buffalo hide shrunk over that. Then padding of grass and a layer of antelope skin, painted with the sacred Thunder-bird. There was a loop to hold the shield on the left arm, and the successive layers of hide and padding would stop an arrow or even a musket ball, though not a modern high-powered slug. That was not the point. The point was that a shield was big medicine, like the bag around Sundance’s neck. It was its luck that protected its wearer, not the thickness of it.

  Susan let out a breath as Sundance held up the shield, inspected it. “Those,” she whispered. “What are those?”

  “Scalps,” Sundance said tersely, looking at the dangling tufts of hair attached to the shield. There were six of them, three black and coarse, three lighter and silky, one red, one brown, one yellow as his own.

  “You mean—” Her voice caught in
her throat.

  Sundance satisfied himself that the hoop of the shield had not cracked or split. His voice was flat, toneless. “The last six I ever took, a long time ago. My father and my mother and I went into Bent’s Fort to trade. They started back to camp while I stayed to join the horse racing, figuring to catch up with ‘em later.”

  He slipped the shield back in the pannier. “I caught up with ‘em, all right, thirty miles north of the Arkansas. They were dead.”

  “Oh,” Susan Wade gasped.

  Sundance nodded. “Three drunken Pawnees, three white saddle-tramps ridin’ together. They jumped my parents out there, shot and robbed my father, and ... and abused my mother and then killed her. After I buried ‘em, I struck those murderers’ trail. They split up, each on his own.” He laced the pannier strings. “It took me quite a while—a solid year. But these were scalps I had to have. I’ve taken none since.”

  Susan was silent for a moment. Then she asked, a little tentatively, “Isn’t it hard for you, caught ... well, in between two worlds? Especially now that it’s come to open war between the Indians and the whites?”

  Sundance nodded, almost wearily. “Some. I’m like the people back on the Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil War. Not knowing which way to go, which side to give allegiance to. Finally, they chose; I guess I’ll have to choose, someday, too. Meanwhile, I know how the whites feel, hungry for land, needing it to live; I know how the Indians feel, too, being robbed, their way of life uprooted. I reckon there’ll be one last final battle someday, and then I’ll be on one side or the other. But I don’t know which side yet.”

  He smiled, then broke the silence in the room. “Let’s have the coffee. Then I’ll go see what sign of Modocs I can find.”

  He spent the rest of that day riding three quarters of the way around the lake, circling its margins from one flank of the lava beds at its south end to the other. He did not enter the lava; he was not ready to do that yet. Instead, he watched its shallow edges, full of the tall reeds called tules, for signs of digging. The Indians grubbed the roots out, roasted them or made flour from them. The siege in the lava earlier this year would have almost exhausted the supply on the southern shore adjoining the badlands, and he was not surprised when he indeed found signs of digging further up the lake. The Indians had tried to disguise it, obliterate all trace, but a gap here and there in the tules where there should have been none, a few splatters of dried mud leading up the bank—these told Sundance what he wanted to know. There were Modocs in there, all right.