Sundance 11

by John Benteen

  Marauding Comanches had kidnapped beautiful Virginia Stevens. Her uncle would pay anything to get her back, and he knew Sundance was the only man who could bring it off. Not only did Sundance have the Comanches to contend with—he also had to beat the Comancheros to the girl. Sundance dyed his blond hair dark brown and made peace with his half-brothers before taking Virginia from them. She fought rescue for a while, but one night with Sundance in the warmth of his blanket softened her resistance.

  WAR PARTY

  SUNDANCE 11

  By John Benteen

  Copyright © 1974, 2016 by Ben Haas

  First Smashwords Edition: March 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Cover image © 2016 by Tony Masero

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author Estate.

  Chapter One

  Poisoned ... A hell of a thing, to die like a wolf that had gorged itself on strychnine-dosed bait!

  As Jim Sundance realized why his mind was becoming dull, his vision blurred, and his great, perfectly conditioned body numb, he swore bitterly, in a croaking voice, over the ignominy of a Cheyenne warrior, who had never been defeated by gun, knife or other conventional weapon, being murdered in such a Machiavellian manner.

  When he began to reel in the saddle, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay on the back of Eagle, his Appaloosa stallion, much longer. Robbed of his strength and coordination, he was unable to take his rawhide reata and tie himself on the handsome spotted horse. The man who had poisoned him—having slipped the drug into his coffee, certainly—would come after him to gloat over the death of the seemingly indestructible half-breed who was a thorn in the side of the nefarious Indian Ring. The bastard would find his lifeless body sprawled here on the road, unless—

  With a part of his mind that could still reason, Sundance turned Eagle off the road into a brush thicket. Instead of waiting to die like this, he would dismount at a likely spot and hope he would last long enough to try taking with him into eternity the man who had posed as his friend and then betrayed him.

  Within the thicket, he reined his mount and reached for his Winchester. His hand was so numb he was unable to lift the rifle from its boot. Giddiness assailed him, and he felt himself swaying back and forth … felt himself falling. He hit the ground jarringly, but his senses were so dulled he experienced no pain. He lay still, sprawled face down, for a long moment, quite willing to remain like that and let himself drift off into the big sleep.

  After a minute or two he began struggling to rise. He could not make it to his feet, but he managed to drag himself, snakelike, to a boulder ten feet away and then maneuvered his half-lifeless body to a sitting position with his back against the rock. He drew his long-barreled single-action .45 Colt’s revolver from its thonged-down holster but found it had grown too heavy for him to lift to shooting position. He dropped it to the ground. This failure touched off intense disappointment in him, for it meant that if he did stay alive until Pat Moran, his murderer, arrived, he would not be able to take his life. Since he was too weak to handle the six-shooter, he would not be able to use either the fourteen-inch Bowie knife or the Cheyenne tomahawk he also carried on his cartridge belts. As for using his bare hands, with which he could normally have broken Moran in two, they were no longer deadly weapons. Then, dimly, he remembered the derringer pistol.

  With an effort, he got the sneak gun from an inside pocket of his fringed and beaded doeskin shirt. He had taken it from a house dealer in a combination saloon and gambling joint at San Antonio two months ago, breaking the tinhorn’s arm in the process. He had also forced him to admit, by roughing him up, that he had hoped to kill Sundance and collect the bounty placed on his hide by the Indian Ring. Everywhere Sundance went these days, one or more men tried to cash in on the Ring’s offer to pay for his death. The lobby he financed in far-off Washington in hope of obtaining a fair deal for the Indians was getting to some members of Congress. Due to its efforts, the Senate was holding an inquiry into the Indian Bureau, which, being corrupt, permitted the Indian Ring, the members of which were those men who enriched themselves off the tribesmen held on reservations, to exist and flourish.

  The derringer was so small it became completely concealed in Sundance’s huge hand. He hoped that Moran would come soon enough and would venture close to do his gloating … The murderer would have to be very close, for the little gun was effective only at point-blank range. It was twin-barreled, an over-and-under weapon, so he would have two rounds, but only two, to fire.

  Sundance became dully aware that his numbness was growing into paralysis. His mind wanted to let go, but his indomitable will fought desperately to hold on—to buy time. He began to chant a prayer, not to the God in which his father, an English remittance man, believed, but the supreme deity of the Cheyenne squaw who had borne him.

  “Hai-vu, Mother Earth … Give me a little of your strength! Bear me up until my enemy comes. I beseech you, Mother Earth ... Do this for your dying son!”

  His voice was enfeebled, and strange sounding to his own ears. Mother Earth did not seem to hear it. He felt himself drifting off into what he supposed was the big, long sleep …

  But the Great Goddess must have heard, for he woke and found that he was still as he had been—alive, but barely. Several hours must have passed, for it had been hazy dusk when he sought cover here, and now it was long past nightfall with a nearly full moon bathing this mid-Texas plains country with bright, silvery light. He stirred slightly, testing his strength and finding it had waned almost totally. His dying was a slow process, perhaps because he was so big and rugged a man.

  Jim Sundance was dying at the prime of his life. In his mid-thirties, he was several inches above six feet in height and tipped the scale at two hundred pounds—all bone and hard muscle. His hawk-like face, with its gleaming black eyes, big nose, wide, thin mouth, was definitely that of a plains Indian. In contrast to his features and coppery skin, his hair, worn shoulder-length beneath his battered old Stetson, was soft and golden. His chest bore the scars of the Sun Dance ordeal, the ritualistic ceremony of self-inflicted torture that turned a Cheyenne youth into a warrior. But he was not an untutored Indian. Being a half-breed sired by a mountain man who had become a member of the Cheyenne nation, he had been taught the three R’s by his father who had received his education in England. He knew the white man’s ways as well as the red man’s, and if he felt more empathy for his mother’s people, it was because they, the weaker race, were the hapless victims of man’s inhumanity to man.

  He had on occasion, as a young warrior, painted his face, taken up his war shield and lance, and ridden against the Crows and other tribal enemies of the Cheyennes. Later he had served as a scout for the U.S. Army. But then, having matured and become aware of the injustice being done, he had on numerous occasions fought with his red half-brothers against the blue-clad soldiers. Finally, having seen the hopelessness of so few trying to stand against so many, he had become a loner and an unorthodox fighting man ... a professional gun-fighter, as it were. Now he hired out his skill as a dog soldier to those whites needing a troubleshooter. His services came high, but the money he earned—blood money, actually—was not used for his own aggrandizement. He sent it to his In
dian lobby in Washington, and one of his lobbyists was his wife, Barbara Colfax.

  By having laid his life on the line many times, he had over the years earned what must have been a small fortune. But he was dying a poor man. Poor in worldly goods, that is. He had lived a full, exciting life in his thirty-some years, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had tried his best to save the Indians from being totally subjugated to the greed of the Indian Ring. He had not succeeded to any great extent, but perhaps he had shown the way and someone else would take up the cudgel dropped by his weakened hand.

  Death was coming to him like sleep to a weary man. His entire being, body, mind and spirit, became utterly relaxed and seemed to cut away from the world of reality and drift pleasurably into some alien peaceful realm. He wanted nothing so much as to let himself go completely, and be gone forever. But some spark of his warrior spirit was reluctant to accept final defeat just yet.

  Wait … just wait a little longer!

  As he told himself this, he heard dimly what he had been waiting to hear: the rhythmic drumming of hooves heralding a horse being ridden at an easy lope. A late traveler on his way to Weatherford only a mile or so away? Pat Moran coming to gloat over his poison victim and maybe to lift Sundance’s golden maned scalp as evidence that he had done away with the Indian Ring’s enemy?

  Let it be that murdering bastard!

  So thought Sundance with the last remnant of his reasoning ability. He still held the sneak gun concealed in his right hand. He fought against his desire, his need to let himself drift away completely.

  His fear was that Moran would fail to see the Appaloosa standing in the thicket and continue on down the road. In that event, he would be denied his dying wish to take his murderer into eternity with him.

  But the drumming hooves ceased abruptly, and for a long interval Sundance, his once keen sense of hearing dulled, heard nothing at all. Then Eagle pawed the ground with a fore hoof, once, twice and a third time, in warning, and he knew the rider—Moran, certainly—was moving stealthily through the thicket on foot. He remained slumped in his seated position against the boulder, his head bowed so far forward that his chin rested on his chest. He wanted to appear not merely a dying man but a dead one, so Moran would come close enough for him to use the derringer.

  More minutes passed, then abruptly Moran came upon him from behind the boulder and kicked away the Colt’s revolver that lay beside him. His Stetson was knocked off his head, and a rough hand grasped his yellow mane of hair. His head was jerked back so that the moonlight shone on his face. Blurredly he saw the muzzle of Moran’s gun beading him from only inches away. He looked from it to the man’s pale, fleshy face. Sundance spoke in a weak, croaking voice.

  “Pat, you’ve done me in.”

  “So I have, Jim.”

  “And I thought we were friends.”

  “A good friend is like a good Injun—only really good when dead.”

  “I saved your life once, Pat.”

  “I didn’t forget that,” Moran said. “It’s just that the bounty on your hide is too big. Ten thousand dollars, half-breed!”

  He let go of the golden hair but Sundance managed to hold his head up and keep his failing eyes on the man who now moved back a step, the better to put a slug in him.

  “You saved my life, all right,” Moran said. “Eight years ago, when I was a trooper with Custer’s Seventh. My company was in a skirmish with some Cheyennes along the Platte. My horse was killed under me, and I was taken captive. Those red bastards were all set to torture me to death when you came along and called them off. I remember, all right. And I’m mighty sorry about this. It’s just that I’m gut-sick of being a bartender in a grubby saloon in a two-bit cow town.”

  “So you poisoned me.”

  Moran shook his head. “I only doped your coffee. When you came walking into the Longhorn, I saw you as ten thousand dollars on the hoof—waiting only to be beefed. There was just you and me, nobody else, and I saw how I could take you. You wouldn’t take more than two shots of rotgut, so I said I’d get some coffee.”

  “And laced it with poison.”

  “Not poison—laudanum. A painkiller. But I put enough of the stuff in to knock you out—or so I figured. Then I stirred in a lot of sugar, to deaden the taste. You kicked about the coffee being too sweet, but you drank it down. But you’re no ordinary hombre, Jim. The laudanum merely made you drowsy. You said you had to ride, couldn’t take the time to sleep, because you had to get to some ranch. And, by God, you went outside, got on your horse, and rode off. I had to get a mount and follow you, to make sure of you.” Moran tensed, steadying his gun so its barrel was lined on the space between Sundance’s eyes. “And now I’m making sure of you, by damn!”

  He was so sure that he had a helpless man for his target that he took his time about squeezing the revolver’s trigger. Maybe time enough, Sundance thought fuzzily, for him to cut loose with his sneak gun before Moran’s slug tore into him. Maybe …

  He gave it a try.

  Chapter Two

  Sundance’s hand responded sluggishly to his will, but its having moved at all, with a gun appearing in it as if by magic, was enough to distract Moran. Startled by the sight of the derringer, the would-be murderer jerked violently with a spasm of alarm. He fired his shot but his aim had been thrown off. The slug missed Sundance by a scant inch, striking the boulder and screaming as it ricocheted. Now the ’breed’s sneak gun roared, and its aim was true despite his blurred vision and unsteady hand.

  Hit dead center in the chest, Moran was reeled backward by the impact of the slug. His gun fell from a hand already becoming lifeless. The next instant he collapsed, sprawled loosely on the ground, still after a brief moment of writhing and twitching. Sundance lost his hold on his gun too, and with his warrior’s spirit no longer able to sustain him, he fell onto his side and lay as unmoving as the other man.

  The silence that followed the thunderclap reports of the two guns was total, and the thicket might have been a tomb. The smell of powder smoke lingered in the still air, only slowly dissipating. Finally the silence was broken by a movement of the Appaloosa. The stallion stamped, switched and tossed its head, seemingly with impatience. Warily it came forward, passing wide around the dead Pat Moran and prodding its master’s body with its nose. Unable to rouse Sundance, the fine Nez Percé-bred stallion remained standing by him like a faithful dog …

  ~*~

  For the first time in his life, Jim Sundance woke to find himself a sick man. His head ached throbbingly, from inside his skull, and his stomach churned with nausea. In his discomfort, he was dull-witted and slow to orient himself. Then, forcing himself to a sitting position, he saw the lifeless body of Pat Moran and remembered what had happened …

  Finding that he had survived what had seemed certain death, Sundance was quite willing to bear the residual effect of the overdose of laudanum with which Moran had laced his coffee. His spirits rose; they soared like an eagle from its cliff side eyrie. He was alive, and he still had his mission in life. He must, sick man or not, be on his way to … What was the name of the ranch? Due to the laudanum, a drug consisting mostly of opium, his mental processes were still laggard. Only after he had gotten to his moccasined feet, with great effort, and was reaching for the canteen hanging from the horn of Eagle’s saddle did he remember the name of the ranch.

  Snake-in-a-Hole Ranch ... so called because it was owned by Sam Owens, whose brand was an S in a circle. The spread was located in the Brazos River country, and according to the instructions Sundance had received, it was a long way from Weatherford. He had better start making tracks again.

  He drank from the canteen, and the water eased the churning in his stomach. He picked up his Stetson from the ground, poured some water into it, then held the hat so Eagle could drink. Putting the canteen back on the horn of the stallion’s saddle and the Stetson back on his golden-maned head, he looked around for his six-shooter. As he bent to pick the gun up, his head began t
o ache more fiercely. He knew he should rest until the effects of the laudanum wore wholly away, but time was pressing. He would have to take a chance on his headache easing off while he was on the move.

  He was about to mount the Appaloosa when the thought occurred to him that Pat Moran, even though a would-be murderer, deserved better than to be left lying there in the brush for the buzzards and four-legged varmints. He played out several coils of the rawhide reata from Eagle’s saddle and slipped its loop about the dead man’s ankles. Mounting the horse, from its right side in Indian-fashion, he took a dally with the reata about the saddle horn and dragged the body from the thicket to the road. With an expert flick of the rope, he removed its loop from Moran’s ankles.

  No one else was within sight along the road, but sooner or later somebody would come along and remove the dead man to Weatherford for burial. As he coiled his reata, Sundance found that he had no hatred for Pat Moran. The man’s betrayal of their friendship had to be blamed on the Indian Ring. Like all corrupt men, the members of the Ring corrupted others—and Moran had simply been one of their victims.

  As he rode down the road, in the direction away from the town of Weatherford, Sundance saw nothing of the dead man’s horse. Doubtlessly a livery stable nag, it must have made its way home sometime during the night.

  Having in mind all the miles he must travel to reach Snake-in-a-Hole, Sundance lifted Eagle to a lope. His headache gradually eased off, and at the same time his senses sharpened until they became as keen as always. After a couple of hours of riding, he was his usual fit and alert self. He was very alert indeed, for this was hostile territory.

  As he well knew, if a person took a map of the great state of Texas and drew a mark from north to south across it, at its midway point, that person would have marked off what was, in this year of 1873, the frontier. Here the Comanches, the so-called Scourges of the Plains, raided ranches to kill and burn, to take women and children captives, and to run off horses and cattle. Here too were equally dangerous gangs of outlaws, both Anglo and Mexican, who also preyed upon the ranchers and settlers who dared make their homes beyond the limits of the white man’s so-called civilization.