by John Benteen
“Aye, Tom was a canny one, all right,” McCaig had said. “Anyhow ... ” His thick finger traveled along the rim. “Here’s the main trail down from the high country, the one we’ll have to move the sheep along when the time comes. No chance of that, now. It’s guarded, sewed up tight. But there are other trails that don’t show on this map. Some of them I’m pretty sure Barkalow hasn’t even found, yet. This is one Easy Dreamer and I’ve slipped in by to scout, and we’ve not had any trouble.”
Sundance had glanced at the Navajo, who nodded. “It’s a Tonto Apache trail. I found it, you’ll see it; to white men, it looks impossible, just another break in the rim.”
“You think I should use it?”
“I think so,” Easy Dreamer said.
“Then I will,” Sundance answered. “Soon as it’s dark, I’ll ease down the rim, scout the basin, and try to be back under cover at the foot of the rim come dawn. Lie low a day, finish my scout the next night and come back.”
“It’s so risky,” Delia said, a tremor in her voice. Sundance touched the pocket holding the bank draft she had given him for half the fifteen thousand dollars. “You didn’t pay me for hidin’ in a hole in the ground.”
Night, illuminated only by a sliver of a waning moon, settled over the highlands and the basin. Eagle picked his way carefully down the precarious trail that truly only an Indian could have spotted, and a mountain-trained horse negotiated. Sundance let him have his head, trusting him implicitly. His rifle in its scabbard, he rode with the quiver of arrows on his shoulder, the strung bow, an arrow nocked, in his hands—his best night-fighting weapon. But there was no trouble, and presently the stud reached the floor of the basin. Sundance reined him in under a grove of pinons, made a brief scout ahead on foot.
It was not time for either spring or fall round-up, and so there would be no gather of cattle anywhere in the basin to be watched by massed cowboys. Barkalow’s Texas longhorns would be strung out from hell to breakfast, grazing themselves fat on the lush grass, with no line camps necessary to keep them from straying; the walls around the basin were natural fences. The cowhands themselves would be fast asleep in bunkhouses at the ranch, in all likelihood, or gathered in the town. But Beecher Strawn and his gunmen were a different case. They’d be on patrol tonight, and every night, against sudden trouble from McCaig and his Navajos. Anybody abroad in darkness would be no innocent Texas cowhand, but a hired gunman to be eliminated, and likely they would be strung out on guard all along the eastern side of the valley, with the heaviest forces concentrated at the only trail down which sheep could be brought. Sundance went back to Eagle, mounted, put the big spotted horse forward at a walk. Together, they traveled like a pair of wolves, careful never to skyline themselves, taking advantage of every bit of cover, the half-breed sometimes scouting ahead on foot.
His mind mechanically memorized the terrain and other factors, too. The creek ran north and south; there were few cattle on this eastern side. Likely they were all held on the western side of the stream to give Strawn and his men fighting room in case of an invasion from above. Sundance’s mouth twisted. That was a mistake.
He worked his way across the basin until he reached the stream. There he scouted carefully on foot, then mounted and worked both north and south, along the eastern bank. As the map had showed, there were bluffs on this side, ground from which the western bank could be dominated. They were not high, like the bluffs at Little Big Horn, but they were high enough to make a difference. Whoever held them had an ideal defensive position, just as Reno and Benteen at the Little Big Horn had been able to save part of the Seventh Cavalry by reaching the same sort of ground. And according to the map they ran the entire length of the valley, which meant they could not be flanked. On the other hand, as Sundance well remembered—he’d been there, all right, as a Cheyenne warrior—Benteen and Reno had had several hundred men concentrated in a single defensive position. That was vastly different from about twenty Navajos, most of whom had not fought in years, to cover nearly thirty miles of defensive perimeter.
Well, he’d worry about that later. He continued his scouting of the east side of the basin. Tomorrow night, he’d check out the west side. Meanwhile—
All at once, he reined in. Even in the nearly total darkness, the man cresting the skyline as he mounted the bluffs stood out like a painted silhouette. Sundance could make out the rifle across his saddle bow, knew even as he reined in fifty yards away, that this was one of Strawn’s men. Himself in a hollow veiled by shadow, he slipped from the saddle, dropped the stallion’s reins, automatically testing the wind as he did so. It was neutral, blowing from the east, and the rider was to the north. If he could take one of Strawn’s men alive, force him to talk, give away Strawn’s dispositions of his gunmen, he would have paid for his trip.
Crouching low, the arrow nocked in the bow, he worked forward. The mounted man had kicked one foot from stirrup, bent his knee around the saddle horn as he, with his horse checked, rolled a cigarette and lit it. In the match’s flare, Sundance had a glimpse of a hard face with a nose gone bulbous from drink. He waited until the match light died, then moved forward another pace or two, always conscious of the wind.
But it betrayed him. Without warning, it shifted, bringing his scent straight to the nostrils of the gunman’s horse. The animal turned its head, pricked its ears, snorted. Instantly the gunman came alert, swung the animal, stirruping his foot, raising the rifle. His horse was like a pointer dog; given slack rein, it faced directly toward Sundance, who, working his way up the slope toward the bluff’s height, dropped flat, bow still clutched in his hand.
“Ahuh,” the man said aloud. “Somethin’ down there.” Rifle lined, he walked the horse down the slope directly toward the half-breed. And now there was no choice, no chance of taking him alive. A single rifle shot would echo all across the valley, alert every man in the basin. Even as he realized the dark blot he made against the ground had been spotted and the gun barrel came into line, he pulled the bowstring, rolling slightly as he did so. The thumb of the hand that held the string touched his cheekbone; then he let the arrow slip.
The rough, barbed flint point, driven by tremendous force, went in just above the bridge of the rider’s nose, smashing bone, destroying brain, emerging from the back of his skull. Killed instantly, the man never had a chance to make a sound. He simply dropped the gun, rolled from the saddle. One foot hung in the stirrup. The startled horse shied and nickered. Sundance was already up and running, and before it could gallop off, he seized it by the rein. The gunman’s boot came loose, his body flopped on the ground.
The arrow was valuable and could be saved. Instantly, Sundance pulled it on through the skull, knowing he could clean it later in the river. Panting, still holding the excited horse, he wiped his hand on bunchgrass, knowing that by tomorrow the man would be missed, his presence in the basin realized. Well, that was all right, too. Let them find him here, with that hole in his skull. It would do nothing for the morale of Strawn’s gunmen or Barkalow’s tough Texans. Anyhow, he’d seen enough. Combined with what the map had shown, he had his strategy well fixed in his mind. Finding a nearby mesquite, he tied the horse and then, easing to the stream, washed the arrow thoroughly and restored it to the quiver. Returning to Eagle, he mounted, and, despite a sense of urgency hammering in him, went slowly, warily back across the eastern half of the basin toward the old Apache trail that led upward.
Without any trouble at all, he reached the shaggy clump of pinons that marked its base at the foot of the rim, vanished into the cover of the grove. Now for a long, hard climb upward, both for the horse and for himself—
But then the stallion grunted, bucked and whirled. Simultaneously the grove of trees was lit with a white and dazzling light. Rays of it lanced at Sundance and the horse from every quarter of the compass—the brilliant, blinding glare of the sort of carbide lamps used by miners, and at close quarters they flared straight into his eyes, blinding him. He tried to raise the bow, could f
ind no target. Then a rope settled over his torso, jerked tight, binding arms to ribs and yanking him from the saddle. His bow went spinning, the nocked arrow dribbling from the string, and he hit the ground hard.
The stallion screamed, ready to charge whatever target it could find. Instinctively, Sundance yelled an order that froze it lest it be shot. The rope tightened, dragged him across the ground into the open, his six-gun slipping from its holster.
Then he was out of the trees, lying on his back. As he tried to rise, another rope settled around his neck, closing tightly, nearly cutting off his wind. He sank back, panting.
“Keep those ropes tight,” a deep voice ordered. He heard the squeak of saddle leather and someone dismounted. Then the dazzling light was out of his eyes; he blinked, his vision returned, distorted by whorls and zigzags; they cleared, and then he could see the man standing over him, legs wide-spraddled.
He was dressed in black from head to toe, to match the shag of black hair spilling from beneath his hat. His face was puffy, with bags beneath his eyes, a nose that had been broken more than once, a hard, cruel mouth. His eyes, black as hair and garments, had a strange quality to them as he looked down at Sundance; they showed neither triumph nor hatred; they were only cold and neutral, the disillusioned eyes of a man who played dice with death every day, who had looked into the future and seen his own doom—gunfighter’s eyes.
“Hello, Jim Sundance,” he said, voice toneless. Only the glitter of the cartridges in the two crisscrossed gunbelts that held his Colts relieved the raven color of his dress. “I’ve waited a long time for this meetin’. My name is Beecher Strawn.”
Six
Sundance struggled to sit up. Strawn planted a big booted, spurred foot in the middle of his chest, forced him down, bent and stripped him of knife and hatchet, tucked them into his own belt. Then he said, “All right. Leave the rope on his neck. Shake the other off.” To the half-breed: “Sundance, I wouldn’t try anything. You’d just git your head jerked off.”
Slowly, stiffly, the half-breed scrambled to his feet. In the lamplights, he could see that a dozen riders had him surrounded, one with the other end of the rope around his neck dallied to his saddle horn. “Well,” he said thickly, “you caught me dead. But I’ll be God damned if I know how.”
Beecher Strawn, as tall as Sundance, as wide in the shoulders, grinned; yet there was even something weary about his smile. He was a man who saw ghosts at night when he tried to sleep, Sundance realized instinctively: the ghosts of men gut shot or with throats slit or victims of even more horrible deaths. “You got your methods, I got mine,” Strawn said. “Let’s say I’m smarter than you and let it go at that, okay? After all, I been in this business a long time.”
“Maybe too long,” Sundance said.
“Shut up, damn you,” Strawn said and backhanded him across the mouth. Then, rubbing his knuckles, he said, “Anyhow, Barkalow wanted you alive, so we’re takin’ you in. It’s up to him what he does to you, but I don’t reckon it’ll be anything very pretty after the way you made him eat dirt in town the other day. Now. That damn Appaloosa stud of yours. Can you control him, or you want us to go ahead and shoot him? I’ll not have him breakin’ or takin’ a bite out of any of my men.”
“I’ll control him,” Sundance said. He coughed against the pressure of the rope around his neck, whistled softly. The stallion trotted toward him, wall-eyed, nostrils flaring, ready for combat, but Nez Percé words quieted him.
“See he stays that way,” said Strawn. “Otherwise, you get a broke neck and he gets killed. Now, mount up.” Sundance did, rope still around his neck, the scabbard beneath his thigh empty of its Winchester. “Okay,” Strawn said. “Head for town.”
Surrounded, Sundance set the stallion’s gait at a high lope to keep the neck-rope slack. Strawn fell in beside him, rolling two cigarettes, lighting one, passing the other to Sundance. “You understand,” he said, “the way I’d rather have it would be you and me straight up, gun-to-gun. They say you’re the best there is. Me, I always figured I was.”
“Nobody’s the best,” Sundance said. “They’re hatchin’ out all the time. They’ll practice six hours a day and burn up three hundred cartridges every day. They’re younger and they want to build a reputation and they’ll come at you for no reason at all. Except to say they were the ones that killed you.”
“I know,” Strawn said. “I had to lay out one like that in El Paso and another in Tucson in the past six months.”
“I had to kill one in Ellsworth.”
“They’re all fast,” Strawn said. “It ain’t being fast. It’s the first shot that hits that counts.”
Then, moodily, he fell silent. Despising the man as he did, Sundance knew the melancholy that rode him: the law of averages. A man could only buck it for so long; then it turned against you. In that regard, he felt a kind of kinship with Strawn: Only now, maybe it was the law of averages that had caught up with him. How the hell could Strawn have known exactly where he’d climb the rim again, be waiting there?
They mounted the bluffs, crossed the creek at an easy ford, and presently they had reached the town. Mostly it was asleep, but lights burned in the saloon where Sundance had had his run-in with Barkalow. Outside it, they dismounted, and Strawn pulled a six-gun with which he covered Sundance. With the rope still around his neck, in the hands of a tall, hard man, Sundance was marched inside.
“All right, Barkalow,” Strawn said. “I got him.”
There were only three men in the saloon. One was Barkalow, sitting alone at a table with a bottle and pretty drunk. At another table were two weathered Mexicans in work clothes. Barkalow drained his glass, stood up, short, thickset, cowhorn mustache bristling. His eyes lit at the sight of the roped half-breed. “By God, you did. Good work, Beech.”
“Yeah,” Strawn said. “Now that we got him, what you aim to do with him?”
“Kill him,” Barkalow said.
Strawn put the muzzle of the cocked six-gun against Sundance’s temple. “Fair enough.”
“No, no, put down that gun.” Barkalow marched out from behind the table. “Hell’s fire, you think I want him to go that easy? He had every man in town laughin’ at me, includin’ my own.” His face twisted. “No. He don’t git off like that. I got something special planned for him—and it’ll impress all those goddam Navajos up in the mountains, too. Once they see it, they’ll forget about this Basin. They know bad medicine when they run across it.”
Strawn slowly lowered the gun, eased down the hammer, holstered it. He helped himself to a long drink from Barkalow’s bottle. “Exactly what you got in mind?”
Barkalow laughed. “The sawmill.” He jerked a thumb. “That’s why I’ve got these two workers with me.”
Strawn let out a long breath. “The sawmill?”
“It’ll cut a pine log clean in two,” said Barkalow. “No reason why it won’t do the same to a man.” He laughed throatily. “The steam’s up in the boilers, the cuttin’ table clear. All we need to do is run him into that band saw blade. And the way I figure to do it is crotch-first, so he can feel it. He’ll be able to feel it right up until the band saw splits his head.”
“Jesus God Almighty.” Strawn dropped heavily into a chair, puffy face paling as he stared at Barkalow.
“What’s the matter?” Barkalow frowned. “You gone chicken-gutted on me? Cut him in half, clean as a whistle. Hang one half at that trail he aimed to climb, the other half where they would have to bring down the sheep. Those Injuns are so superstitious they’ll take their blasted woolies and head back for the reservation so fast they’ll burn the grass behind ’em when they see that.”
Sundance’s stomach knotted, and he felt cold sweat trickling down his torso. No! he thought. Before he’d go that way, he’d make a break, force them to shoot him!
Strawn took another drink. “Listen,” he said. “This ain’t no road show mellerdrama where the villain runs the girl into a saw and the hero comes in time. That’s a hell of a
way for any man to die.”
“I expect you’ve seen ’em killed worse ways,” Barkalow said easily.
“No, I ain’t.” Something haunted stirred in Strawn’s eyes. “Listen,” he said. “You want him killed, I’ll do it for you, gun or knife. What I’d like to do is give him back his iron and face him stand-up and bring him down that way. Anyhow, after he’s dead, you can slice him any way you please. But not runnin’ him into that saw while he’s still alive.”
Barkalow looked puzzled. “Beech, you’ve changed. Remember, I knew you back in the old days. Time was when you’d stop at nothin’.”
“Maybe that’s my trouble,” Strawn said. “Maybe there are some things I shoulda stopped at. Anyhow, I never come up against this before. No. I’ll kill him for you. But I’ll not be a party to this.”
Barkalow shrugged. “You don’t have to. You did a good job bringin’ him in, now you go git drunk. Just let me have two, three of your men to handle him. The Mexes here will handle the mill. And me, I’ll stand by and listen to him squeal.”
Strawn hesitated. Then, slowly, he stood up. “No. If it’s part of the job, I might as well be in on it. God knows, I’ve seen everything else in my life. And I thought I’d met all kinds of people. But you take the cake, Barkalow. When it comes to being mean-minded, you take the cake with all the frostin’. Still, I hired out to you and—” He shrugged. “Buck, Sam, Alec, you keep the rope on him and come along with us.” He glanced at Sundance. Almost apologetically, he said: “You know how it is. A man hires out—”
Sundance did not answer. He looked at Strawn contemptuously, and the black eyes shuttled away. Meanwhile, the half-breed’s mind was racing.
There had to be some way to make a break somehow to block this. He might not survive, but any death was preferable to that Barkalow had planned.
But there was no way, no chance. The rope around his neck and Barkalow himself covering him with a gun in each hand, with the warning: “You break, it’ll do you no good. I’ll just shoot you in the legs. You’ll still feel it all, you won’t miss a thing. I’ll see to that.” And Sundance knew he meant it.