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  Sundance rode right into the middle of the bloodiest feud in Arizona. Coffin City was split between gunfighter Tulso Dart and the murderous Cable clan. The Cables were backed by the crooked sheriff—Tulso Dart by a dying killer named Doc Ramsey. Sundance had his reasons for being there, but before it was over a lot of men would die in the dust.

  SUNDANCE 14: RIDING SHOTGUN

  By John Benteen

  First published by Leisure Books in 1977

  Copyright © 1977, 2016 by John Benteen

  First Smashwords Edition: September 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

  First he saw the buzzards.

  In the hard blue arch of the Arizona sky, they circled and swirled, dipping ever lower over something yonder near the stage road to Coffin City. The man on the big Appaloosa stallion, in the shelter of a rock not much smaller than a church, frowned. There were a lot of zopilotes—which meant a lot of something dead or dying down there two miles away. Cattle, maybe horses—but he did not think so. Hoisting in his stirrups, he took a careful look around.

  This part of the territory seemed as deserted as the moon—and as barren: all jumbled rock, gravel, sand, harsh thorned growth and dazzling, merciless sun. But Sundance was not deceived. The Apaches—Chiricahua, Warm Springs, Mimbreno: this was their country. As it was, it would take some luck to get through it safely to the town. Those circling vultures would attract the attention of every human being within miles. Drawing attention to himself by riding to where they edged warily down to some gruesome feast could be bad medicine.

  Keeping the spotted stallion tight-reined a moment longer, he considered: a tall man, inches over six feet, massive in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, long in the legs. He wore a battered sombrero with a beaded band, an eagle feather in it, and the hair that spilled from beneath it down to the collar of his fringed and ornamented buckskin shirt was blond, the yellow of pure gold, and his squinting eyes were hard and gray. But his skin was the color of a copper penny, and his features the craggy ones—hawk nose, high cheekbones—of a Plains Indian. A half-breed, his father had been white, his mother a Northern Cheyenne. Completing the mixture of white man’s gear and Indian garb, canvas pants were tucked into calf-high Cheyenne moccasins.

  Born of two different worlds, belonging wholly to neither, he made his living in both as a Fighting man; no other kind would have dared to travel alone in southern Arizona in 1871. On his gunbelt there was an Army Colt, converted from percussion to brass cartridge; the same belt carried a long-bladed Bowie in a fringed sheath. On his other hip was a sheathed hatchet, and its straight handle would have told a knowledgeable onlooker that it was made for throwing. There was a Henry rifle in a saddle scabbard and two parfleches, panniers of buffalo hide, behind his saddle, one long, cylindrical, the other disc-shaped and a yard across. There were more weapons in these that he could use when necessary, as well as certain other things important to him. His horse itself was one of the splendid animals bred to perfection through generations by the Nez Percé tribe of Washington and Idaho, and, a stallion, trained for war as well as running buffalo. It needed no signal but a touch of heel when, his decision made, he left the shelter of the rock, moving toward the circling vultures, but never neglecting to keep under cover, never failing to search even as he rode for any unsuspected sign of human life, white or Indian. He had friends among the Apaches—good friends; but he had enemies as well, and, of course, there were plenty of tribesmen who, though they might have heard of him, had never met him. Now, with their domain invaded by hordes of “white-eyes” flocking to Coffin City, they were ready to kill first and ask questions later. For that matter, so, likely, were the whites; a half-breed was fair game for either side.

  Which was why he’d stayed off the stage road, traveling cross-country, where he could choose his own gait and keep to cover. Now though there was no help for it; he must break into the open. There was still half a day’s ride to Coffin City. What had happened down there on the road might determine the route he should take, and the precautions; there was also the possibility that if humans were involved in the slaughter that must have taken place, some might still be alive. He was not the kind of man who could ride past coldly without giving what help he could to either white or red man.

  Presently he reached the edge of the broken country, where it fell away down a slope seamed with washes, littered with jumbled rock, to the road beneath. Swinging down off Eagle, the big stallion, he left the horse ground reined and edged forward in a crouch, rifle ready. Crawling the last few yards, he cautiously peered around the trunk of a fat saguaro, and now he could see what it was the carrion birds were after. “Hell,” he grated.

  ~*~

  The Concord stagecoach lay slantwise across the road, turned over on its side, its dead wheel horses already bloating in their harness, the other four of the six-horse hitch vanished. There were a few rags of cloth scattered around it, but there was more than that; sprawled in the road and on the farther slope were—Sundance counted—ten strange objects, gleaming a ghastly white in the brilliant sunlight. Sundance drew in breath. Those were the bodies of white people, the passengers and crew, stripped of every stitch—and it was on them and the two dead animals that the vultures now had already begun to feast.

  The man named Jim Sundance lay there behind the cactus for a full ten minutes, searching the surrounding hills for any sign of life, scanning the terrain Indian style, keeping his eyes fixed, moving his whole head to pick up any possible flicker of movement. At last, satisfied that there was none, he returned to the patient stallion, mounted, and rode warily down to the scene of slaughter.

  Frightened buzzards took noisy, reluctant flight at his approach. With the Henry up and ready, he circled the coach, reading sign, and he could almost see it happening. The Apaches, who never took unnecessary risks in warfare if they could help it, had done it neatly, efficiently, from ambush. Riflemen, firing from cover, had dropped the wheel horses in their traces, and when they had fallen the coach had twisted over. Thrown and stunned, the driver and the guard would never have had a chance, much less the passengers inside, or, for that matter, the two outriders which tracks told Sundance had accompanied the vehicle. They would have been dropped simultaneously with the horses, and then the Indians would have charged ... In minutes it must have all been over.

  The stallion was no stranger to the scent of blood, but even it snorted as Sundance rode grimly among the naked corpses. Cut down as they had tried to fight or run, eight were men. But there was a woman, too, in her thirties, and a young girl of not more than twelve.

  Sundance’s mouth twisted. In a sense, they had all been lucky, killed cleanly; the raid had taken place too close to town for the Indians to dare linger for the usual torture, mutilation, rapine. They had killed for loot and got it: four team horses and the outriders’ mounts; weapons’ clothes and trinkets, even opening the trunks of the passengers, cleaning them of everything an Indian could use or might be fascinated by, and butchering the wheel horses for meat to carry with them. Only one thing had
they overlooked, Sundance thought, after he had read the sign left by unshod ponies. A single arrow was still embedded in the door of the coach, and he knew at once that it had come from a Chiricahua bow. The massacre, he judged, had taken place at least two hours earlier; with a head start like that, they’d sleep tonight in Old Mexico, beyond the reach of U.S. troops, if there were any in the district.

  Then Sundance swore, jerking the horse up hard.

  What wild Apaches living in hell’s own wilderness did not need was paper money, a white man’s thing not many of them understood. And there beside the coach was the iron express box, its lock twisted open by sheer manpower—and it was nearly brimming over with crisp packets of green currency. Even without dismounting, Sundance could see that the box contained a fortune, the top layer hundred-dollar banknotes.

  Sundance swung down off the stud. Unslinging the cylindrical bag from behind his saddle, careful not to damage what it already held, he hurriedly crammed the free space inside with the cash. The pannier barely took it all, was fat and bulging when he finally closed it, lashing it back in place, leaving the strongbox empty.

  The half-breed, that done, raised his head. The vultures still circled. He frowned. Even if he had the tools, it would take half a day or more to bury all those corpses. Unlashing his reata, he shook out a small loop. He used the rope to drag the bodies one by one to the overturned coach. When they were all laid out there, he opened the door, which bore the legend: RAWLINGS BROS.—COFFIN CITY—ARIZ. TERR. By the time he had finished wrestling all the corpses inside the Concord, he stank of death himself. Closing the door tightly, he pulled the side curtains. Now, he thought, the buzzards were welcome to what was left of the two horses. Coiling the rope and lashing it, he swung up. Just as his rump hit the saddle, he heard the flat, ugly slap of a bullet ripping past where his head had been one half second earlier, and then the crack of the rifle echoing across the desert. The next instant, he saw the riders, a dozen of them, pounding down the stage road, coming hard.

  ~*~

  Reacting instinctively, Sundance swung the stud so hard it reared, touched it with his heels. The big horse lined out in a dead run, pounding up a wash, even as more rifles cracked. The range was long but there were good marksmen in the group; he heard the whine of slugs around his head, their screaming off of nearby rock. Cheyenne style, he slipped behind Eagle’s neck, clinging to the mane one-handed, thus simply disappearing, presenting no target to the oncoming riders. He knew what chance he’d have, a half breed, caught with that bull hide pannier full of greenbacks from the strongbox; there’d be no time for explanations before they killed him.

  And now he was under cover in the broken ground, and he returned gracefully to the saddle, Eagle never slowing. Some would halt at the coach, but most would take after him, and he needed all the head start he could get. The Appaloosa ran gallantly, steadily, but it had already come a long way today, this was uphill, and it could not keep up this pace forever. Already it had turned a yellowish-white, covered with lather, its rider also splattered. Though it would kill itself for him if he asked it to, he had no intention of doing that. After two miles, he reined up in the cover of a gravelly ridge. Rifle in hand, he crawled to the crest, found the shelter of a nest of rocks, and went to ground. From here he could command the wagon road.

  Down there a dozen men had reached the coach. As he’d expected, six halted, and the others without stopping pounded along his back-trail, rifles glinting in the sun. He watched them turn up the same draw he had followed, knowing his running horse had left sign they could follow at a gallop. He needed to buy time to cover his tracks; otherwise they would trail him in relays, like coyotes after an antelope, until his stud gave out and he was left on foot, easy prey. So he waited.

  Minutes passed; Sundance did not count, them, motionless with a patience bred into him in a Cheyenne camp. The riders had vanished, but presently they came into view again, much closer, coming a little slower, fanning out as the wash opened up. He gave them another minute for the range to close. Then he aimed and fired.

  Flesh and blood made a faint spray as the .44-40 slug raked the rump of the mount of the far left rider. The horse screamed, went to swapping ends and, caught by surprise, the man was thrown, landing hard. Sundance fired again at a pinto on the right. When the slug raked across its neck, it whinnied, reared, and raced back the way it had come as its rider fought unsuccessfully to control it.

  Two, he thought, and the Henry cracked again. This time either his aim was off or the horse had turned at the last instant. The slug plowed in behind its shoulder, and it pitched over on its side, pinning a rider who struggled like an injured bug to work free.

  The other three had seen enough. They whirled their mounts, racing for any shelter they could find. Sundance fired two rounds to speed them on their way, then ran back to Eagle. They would spend a lot of time stalking his position and come on slower now; for the price of a dead horse he had bought precious moments. He hit Eagle’s saddle without ever touching stirrup.

  ~*~

  There was no way they could catch him now, he told himself, three hours later, deep in the mazes of the broken country south of the road—not unless they had an Indian tracker with them, and even he would take a long time unraveling the trail Sundance had hidden in the time he’d gained. After sharing the last of the water in his canteen with the stallion, he rolled a cigarette, smoked it thoughtfully, touching the pannier behind the saddle.

  “By damn,” he said aloud, “if there ain’t at least fifty thousand in there, I’m a Tonkawa!” Fifty thousand dollars, and he knew how to put it to good use! And after all, Old Mexico was less than three dozen miles away ... It would be so easy to drift across the border through this jumbled malpais ... Inhaling smoke, he thought long and hard. And by the time he ground out the butt beneath his hard soled moccasin, he knew exactly what he was going to do, where he had to go. Mounting, he turned the stallion west. In that direction lay Coffin City, fifteen miles as the stage road ran, but a lot more in this kind of terrain. He went slowly, warily; and night had long since fallen when he reached the town.

  Chapter Two

  They had called Ned Rucker crazy, said he was a madman. Who else would prowl those barren hills out there in Apache country? “Ned, what the hell you aim to find out there?” And they had laughed when he had answered, “Gold. Gold and silver.”

  “Gold and silver? Hell, man, all you’ll find will be a coffin!”

  But the last laugh was Ned Rucker’s. He’d been right: those Southern Arizona hills were riddled with the precious metals. At long last, an old, burnt-out, sun-dried man in his sixties, he’d made the strike he’d sought so long, had risked his hair for, every minute he’d spent in Apache country. Rucker’s Strike was the biggest thing since the Comstock Lode, and almost overnight, Ned Rucker was a multi-millionaire. And then, of course, the rush had started. Where the Chiricahuas had roamed and hunted, together with the Ojos Caliente and the Mimbreno, the white men poured in and settled. Now Coffin City held nearly fifteen thousand people, and there were some who said its name was undignified for such a metropolis. But Rucker, deriding his critics, had laid that handle on it, and it had stuck. There were half a dozen mines now, but the Coffin was the biggest of them all, and as long as it produced, the town would keep its name.

  With no attempt at concealment, but with the utmost wariness, Sundance loped through the outskirts until he hit the broad, dusty main street of the place. And he saw at once that everything he’d ever heard about the town was true, and more besides. It was Hell with the lid off and running around the clock. With mines pumping out fortunes every day, it had to be, because they all flocked to the scent of money—the speculators and the gamblers, the whores and gunmen, the con men and the killers ... And with so many people concentrated in one place, there had to be beef and mutton to feed them, and so the cattlemen and a few sheepmen had come, too, raising stock on the sparse grama grass and even sparser water on the surroun
ding ranges. Texas cowboys, wild as the lean longhorns themselves, came to work the ranches. And the Apaches, whose land this had been for generations, suddenly found themselves pushed off it by white invaders who came in overwhelming numbers, with overwhelming firepower. But the Apaches were not tame Indians. They fought back ...

  Still, Sundance saw as Eagle single-footed down Rucker Street, the town’s main drag, they had not even made a dent in the numbers of the white invaders. Rucker Street swarmed; every other building was a bar or crib or both, and the shrill voices of the painted harpies mingled with the deep strange accents of the hard-rock miners, the “Cousin Jacks,” or Cornishmen, who wrenched the ore from shafts deep in the hills.

  ~*~

  The half-breed rode warily, hand close to his gun, but his gamble seemed to have paid off. The rescue detail sent out to find the stage had not yet returned. They’d had to right the coach, rig harnesses to saddle horses to bring it and its ghastly load back to town, and probably half of them were still scouring the hills for him. Anyhow, he’d beat them here. Otherwise, he’d already have been dragged off the stud and torn to pieces.

  There was no missing the place he sought. The sidewalks before it were jammed with people in range and town clothes, waiting tensely for news of the overdue stage. A big frame building with a complex of sheds and corrals behind it visible through an alley, it bore the sign RAWLINGS BROTHERS MAIL & TRANSPORTATION CO.—OFFICE AND WAITING ROOM. A strange hush seemed to grip the crowd as he swung down there, and he felt the pressure of its eyes upon him as he briefly watered Eagle, hitched him, and unlatched the pannier from behind the saddle. With that under his left arm, his right hand near his Colt, he approached the crowd, and something in his bearing parted a channel for him.

  The waiting area of the stage line office was also jammed. Sundance made his way through the crowd to where, separated from the crowd by a wooden rail, a clerk worked behind a desk, a man bending over in conference with him. “I’m looking,” Sundance said loudly, “for one of the Rawlings brothers.”