Sundance 2

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  Sundance, the professional fighting man of the plains and the Baron from the Austrian Court made a deal. For $35,000 the big man with the bronzed face and the yellow hair would take the nobleman into deadly Apache territory to search for Emperor Maximilian of Mexico’s priceless treasure of lost jewels. Before it was over, Sundance would meet Cochise, chief of the Chiricauhuas, and together with a luscious young woman, face his closest crapshoot with death. And a score of men’s bones would bleach on the floor of Dead Man’s Canyon.

  DEAD MAN’S CANYON

  SUNDANCE 2

  By John Benteen

  First published by Leisure Books in 1972

  Copyright © 1972, 3013 by Benjamin L. Haas

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: November 2013

  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.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover image © 2013 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  All day long, he had seen the smokes—Apache sign. This far north, he figured, they were probably made by Tontos, Delt-che’s band. But maybe by Chiricahuas or Yavapais, possibly even by Mescaleros from farther east. Right now, every Indian in Arizona Territory was on the warpath, and even though he had lived among the Apaches and spoke their dialects, he kept to cover, taking advantage of every bit of broken ground the desert offered, careful never to expose or skyline himself. Nowadays, whites and Indians alike shot first at strangers and asked questions later.

  He was a big man, on a tall appaloosa stallion that he had got in Nez Perce country. He wore a battered sombrero, a red neckerchief, a shirt of fringed buckskin decorated with colorful Sioux beadwork, denim pants, and moccasins. His weapons were the most modern available: an 1866 Winchester rifle across his saddle, a Colt Army revolver converted from cap and ball to metallic cartridges—the same loads as the Winchester—on his hip. Behind it, in a beaded sheath, rode a Bowie with a fourteen-inch blade, especially made by a master craftsman in New Orleans for fighting. Looped to the horn of the big Mexican saddle was a short-handled hatchet, made for throwing. It was a lot of armament, but he had use for all of it and more in his trade; he was a professional fighting man. He called himself Jim Sundance.

  The afternoon sun was like a sledgehammer. Its heat pounded at man and horse alike, so Sundance reined in, swung down, allowed the stallion to rest awhile in the shade of an enormous boulder. Crawling to the crest of a ridge ahead, he reconnoitered. Below, the desert was like the grate of an enormous furnace, clumped with cacti and littered with rock. But, not too far away, shimmering in the heat, there was a mist of green: trees, water, the Agua Fria and Duppa’s Station.

  Sundance lay motionless, scanning the space between with eyes trained to read the country as a scholar might read a book. His eyes, jet black, did not move as he turned his head slowly from side to side—the Indian way of observing, which would catch any flicker of motion immediately. His face was the color of an old penny, the deep bronze hue of an Indian. His features were Indian, too: high cheekbones, strong beak of a nose, wide thin mouth, hard, solid chin. In startling contrast, the hair that spilled from beneath his hat down to his shoulders was as yellow as freshly smelted gold. The features were his legacy from his Cheyenne mother, the hair inherited from his white father. The combination had made him known from the Missouri to the Pacific coast, from Canada to deep Mexico, the territory he had ranged for more than thirty years.

  Smokes still arose from the distant hills, but even he could not be sure of their meaning. They were prearranged signals, changed from time to time, like a military code. He was, however, fairly sure that the way was clear from here to Duppa’s. He scrambled back down the ridge, returned to Eagle, the spotted stallion. He tightened cinches, checked the big buffalo-hide panniers behind the saddle in which were stored things of vast importance to him. Then he swung up, touched the horse with his heels. Eagle broke into a dead run from a standing start. The way to cross the open country down there was fast.

  Eagle understood that, too. Trained for both war and running buffalo, he stretched himself, hoofs pounding, long stride devouring ground with speed almost magical. Now that blot of green drew closer; a few meager cottonwoods and, beneath it, the outlines of a house. Sundance rode straight up, rifle at the ready, head swivelling constantly; every few seconds, he turned in the saddle to watch his back-trail.

  But he made Duppa’s station safely, pulled up the lathered appaloosa in the welcome shade. “Hello the house!” he yelled, but the sound of hoofbeats had already brought Duppa out, a Winchester in his hands. He stared, then grinned. “Jim Sundance!” he shouted. “Well, damn my eyes!”

  Sundance swung down, and they shook hands. Darrel Duppa was tall and burnt by life in the desert to the tough lean thinness of a slat. He was not much older than Sundance and had shaggy hair, but his narrow, weathered face was clean-shaven. He wore a dirty flannel shirt and grimy denim pants and high black boots; in addition to the Winchester in his hands, he was armed with two Remington pistols on his hips. “Jim, it’s good to see you again. Come in the house. My man will take care of your mount.” In contrast to the roughness of his appearance, Duppa’s voice was cultivated, with a slight English accent.

  House was far too grand a name for Duppa’s dwelling. Its walls and roof were of branches laced with rawhide thongs to slats and posts of cottonwood, then plastered with adobe. Inside, the floor was of dirt, and tarpaulins and gunnysacks had been hung along the walls to break the wind and catch the sand that blew in through the chinks. Guns, saddles, ropes, and belts of ammunition hung everywhere. In the center of the room, there was a long pine table, unpainted, a couple of benches. Save for some pots and pans around the fireplace at the end, the place contained no other furnishings. Duppa and his two men slept on the floor. So did the dogs that swarmed around the place.

  “You must be baked dry.” Duppa put out an olla and a dipper, then produced a bottle and two tin cups. “Sit down and drink, Jim.”

  Sundance swallowed cool water thirstily. Lowering the dipper he grinned at the other man. “They haven’t run you off, I see.”

  “Hardly!” Duppa laughed. “Oh, they keep trying, the Apaches, but I’m a stubborn man. I won’t let anybody dictate to me where I can live. That’s why I settled here to begin with, you know. They hit me at this river crossing, I fought them off, then built this ranch just to show ’em they couldn’t frighten me.” He poured whiskey, sobering. “But it gets rougher every year. Jim, Arizona’s a battleground.”

  “So I’ve heard. I’ve been up in Oregon, though, and . . . bring me up to date.”

  “Things were fairly quiet during the War. The California Column came in, chased out the Confederates, rounded up the Mescaleros and took them to Bosque Redondo over on the Pecos. Put them to farming there, and they seemed happy—until Kit Carson whipped the Navajos and brought them there, too. The Navajos and Mescaleros were old enemies—and the Navajos outnumbered them. So the Apaches left, went back to the mountains.

  “The Chiricahuas used to be fairly peaceable. Tried to get along with the whites so they could raid in Mexico and h
ave a place to come home to. Cochise even had a contract to cut wood for the Army.”

  Duppa laughed bitterly. “Then the Army arrested Cochise and his brother on some minor charge, killed the brother. Cochise barely managed to escape with his life. That put the Cherrycows on the warpath. And the Yavapais—they desperately tried to make peace, camped outside Camp Grant for months, while the Army shilly-shallied. Then a bunch of drunken whites and Mexicans hit them without warning, killed dozens, men, women, children—” He shrugged. “And so it’s gone. The country’s filling up with whites, especially toughs and hardcases run out of California by the vigilantes in the mining camps. The Indians are crowded, game running out; now they figure they have to fight or starve. They’re damned good at fighting and not much at starving. So the whole Southwest’s in flames. The Army’s helpless, the redskins ride rings around them. I understand they’ve sent a new general in to command the Department in Arizona. But if he’s like the rest, he’ll do no good.”

  “George Crook? He ain’t like the rest.” Sundance sipped whiskey. “I knew him up in Oregon. He’s learned Indian ways, taught himself to understand their problems, their thinking. If anybody can quiet ’em down and make peace, he can.”

  “One hopes so,” Duppa said. He took a long gulp of whiskey. Sundance, watching him, felt kinship with him, and not only because Duppa was a superb fighting man. Duppa came from a good English family; wild, a black sheep, he had been sent away, paid to stay out of England. Sundance’s father had been a remittance man, too. The difference was that Duppa had chosen the white man’s road. Nicholas Sundance—as he had called himself after adoption into the Cheyenne tribe, giving up his real family name forever—had taken that of the Indians, living among them as a trader, marrying the daughter of a Cheyenne chief. Maybe, Sundance thought, Duppa had been the smarter of the two. At least he wasn’t caught between two worlds, white and red.

  “What brings you down to Arizona?” Duppa asked, setting down his cup. “Things too hot in Oregon or out on the Plains?”

  “Things are hot everywhere,” Sundance said. “Sioux and Cheyennes and all the other horse tribes on the warpath, crowded by the railroad, settlers. They’ve made peace half a dozen times and the Army’s broken every treaty.”

  Duppa nodded. “Jim, there’s no doubt about it. The next ten years will decide the fate of the Indians. And between now and then, they’ll be a full-scale war from Canada to Mexico.”

  “That’s right,” Sundance said. “And—” He broke off, set down his cup, shoved back the bench, sprang up, reaching for his rifle.

  Duppa heard it at the same time, leaped to his feet, snatched up his own gun. The two men ran to the door, squinted out across the flats, which shimmered in the heat. Far out there, piling out of a deep draw, came fifteen riders, lashing their mounts—white men, twisting in their saddles to trigger shots. They made the flats, strung out, sending a great dust cloud boiling up behind. In it, Sundance saw more riders emerging from the draw—twenty, thirty of them, hard behind the others. And even at this distance he could see that the men of the second band were Apaches, Tontos.

  Sundance whirled. “Duppa! Get your men! As soon as they’re in range, we’ll have to cover them!”

  “Right!” Duppa yelled something; his two hands came running. Sundance’s mouth twisted: they would not be much help as fighting men—an old, lame, bearded cook and a wide-eyed young Mexican boy. The Englishman pointed. “Up there on the rise, Sundance. The stone barricades.”

  Sundance saw them, heaps of boulders piled up to make defensive firing positions. “Shoot for the horses!” he called out. “They make bigger targets!”

  Legging it up the rise a few dozen yards in front of Duppa’s house, he kneeled down behind the rocks, found a rest for the Winchester’s barrel, dug some extra cartridges from the belt around his waist. The two streams of dust out on the flats were drawing closer together, even as they made straight for Duppa’s station. The white men were firing as fast as they could work the levers of their weapons; the Indians were shooting back. Gunfire crackled like the sound of burning sticks, and powder smoke made white clouds like cotton tufts. Three minutes more, Sundance thought, two . . . then the Apaches would be in range.

  Nick Sundance, as a trader, had lived with every tribe of any consequence in the West, had been on good terms with all of them. More than once as boy and young man, Sundance had spent a summer in a Tonto Apacherancheria. Some of those braves down there might have been his playmates, hunting partners, friends. Right now, that made no difference. This was Arizona, this was war, and he knew that if the Apaches took Duppa’s station, his hair would go along with that of all the others. He did not intend to lose it.

  Notching front bead in rear sight, he judged that the Indians now were just within extreme reach of the Winchester. He selected his target: a brave on a white horse riding in the forefront. For a moment, the gunsight covered the man’s head, then Sundance dropped it lower, squeezed the trigger.

  The slug caught the horse in the chest, killed it instantly. It fell like a rock, its rider sprawling. The mounts of two more Tontos, pounding hard behind it, hit the carcass, went down in a plunging tangle.

  Now Duppa and his men were firing, too. Another horse went down, another. Sundance worked the lever of the Winchester, sent slug after slug lancing across the flats. Some missed, but most connected. Men and animals fell; and the fusillade had its effect. Under that hail of lead, the Apaches checked, sheered off, galloped hard out of range. Behind them, on the flats, the corpses of men and horses were dusty blots.

  That was the slack the pursued whites needed. They quit shooting, bent low in the saddle, lashed their mounts. Sundance, Duppa and the others continued to lay down a covering fire. The Apaches spread out, galloped into it again, lost another man, turned back once more. They dismounted, knelt, fired at the fleeing riders. One white man threw up his arms, pitched from his saddle, was dragged foot-in-stirrup for a dozen yards, then came loose, lay motionless on the dun-colored sand. The others, riding hard, gained the safety of Duppa’s station.

  They pulled up in a cloud of dust, lather flying from their horses, swung down. Sundance saw a big man with a carbine in his hands snap orders. “Jimson! You and Bailey hold the horses! Rest of you, spread out, them bastards come in again, blow the hell out of ’em.” He pitched down on the ground, lined his rifle. He was handsome, red-bearded, in black sombrero, blue shirt, leather shotgun chaps. A bandolier of rifle cartridges was slung across his barrel chest, and big Chihuahua spurs jingled on his heels.

  The Indians mounted, came again. Now, though, nearly twenty rifles sent a sheet of lead across the flats. Beneath the roar of guns, Sundance heard the big man laugh with the sheer joy of battle. Two more Apaches went flying off their mounts, landed like sacks of meal; again the Tontos whirled, fell back out of range.

  Out there, beyond gunshot, they conferred. Sundance smiled coldly, side-loading more cartridges in the Winchester. As well as if he stood among them, he knew what they were saying, what would happen next. Apaches were different from the Plains Tribes. A warrior of the Plains Indians fought for glory, was happy to die in battle, become a hero. Not Apaches. They fought for loot, always counted the odds. To an Apache, a man who threw his life away for nothing was a fool; their heroes were the braves who brought in the most plunder with the least risk.

  Right now, Sundance thought, they were tallying up the odds. Although they still outnumbered the men at Duppa’s station, the defenders had the edge. They knew Duppa, too, knew what a demon he was in a fight, how cool and clever and ruthless he could be.

  Sundance’s eyes counted corpses. Six dead men lay out there. He was not surprised when, suddenly, six warriors broke from the band and bent low in their saddles, suddenly charged back into gun-range. “Let ’em have it!” the red-bearded man roared; and his bunch resumed firing.

  Sundance raised his head: “Hold it!” he bellowed. “They’re only picking up their dead!”

&
nbsp; But his words were lost in the fusillade, and he could only hold his breath and watch admiringly as those warriors rode into the teeth of that storm of lead, retrieved the bodies of their comrades, rode out again. One man was wounded in the foray, but he made it to safety, clinging to his mount’s mane.

  Then it was over. The Apaches whirled, galloped off, headed for the draw out of which they’d come. The dust cloud they raised swirled, obscuring them. When it faded, they were gone. Suddenly the desert was very still. Above, vultures were black specks, already gathering to feast on horsemeat, and on the body of the white man that still lay sprawled out there.

  Duppa arose, dusting off his shirt. “That does it,” he said. “They’re gone. They won’t come back.”

  The red-bearded man got to his feet, spat into the dust, squinted out across the desert. “Wish to hell they would. I’d kill me some more redskins. All right, boys, on your feet. You’re Duppa, huh?”

  “I’m Duppa.” Then Sundance came up. “This is Jim Sundance.”

  Red-beard frowned. “Sundance? An Injun name, and—halfbreed?”

  “That’s right,” Sundance said thinly.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Duppa, I thought you hated Injuns. And here you got one in camp!”

  Duppa sucked in a long breath. “Sundance is my friend. He helped save your hide. Suppose you tell me who you are, what happened?”

  “Shore. My name’s Gannon. They call me Red.”

  Sundance saw Duppa stiffen. “Gannon, I’ve heard of you.”

  White teeth gleamed in Gannon’s dusty beard. “I reckon a lot of people have.” He jerked his head. “These here are my boys.”

  “Gannon’s Wolves,” Duppa said. Sundance noticed that he still gripped his Winchester.

  “They call my crowd that sometimes. But don’t worry, Duppa, we won’t give you no trouble. You got nothin’ here we want, and even if you did, every man in Arizona would be on our tail if we did harm to Darrel Duppa; I got sense enough to know that.”