Sundance 13 Page 10

  As nearly as he could tell, he was just below the crest of these barrier hills. To cross them at night, under cover of darkness, and enter the Hole-in-the-Wall would be comparatively easy; but he could not afford the luxury of waiting. Crazy Horse would be here soon, and when Crazy Horse struck he must be in position ready to move. So he had to cross in daylight, and that meant that first of all he had to find Steelman’s guards.

  With his pocket telescope, he scanned the terrain above him. But of course a man could stretch out on a rock up there, like a marmot in the sun, and be wholly invisible from below. Still, if he were Clay Steelman, he would post his guards on the highest ground, and carefully, patiently, he scanned the highest point of every ridge.

  Then he tensed, making a sound in his throat. It had been sheer luck that he’d played out when he had. Otherwise he would certainly have ridden smack into range of a Raider’s rifle.

  Another eye, less used to seeing what it looked at, might have missed that flicker of motion up there in a nest of rocks on the skyline, half a mile away, or perhaps tagged it as the scuttling of a gopher or a lizard, then ridden on. But gophers didn’t dig on ridge crests and lizards were too quick, and besides, whatever had moved across that narrow gap between two boulders had been black. The black, Sundance thought, of a man’s boot. As if someone had changed position up there, and he had just caught the last movement of the foot of a man crawling.

  Well he would know in due time. It was midday now, and brutally hot up there in the full blast of the unshielded sun. Besides, there were damned few white men who had the patience to hold one position longer than fifteen minutes. All he had to do was stay out of sight here at the edge of the rock shelter, and wait.

  Minutes ticked by. He never took his eyes off that clump of boulders. As a matter of fact, full twenty minutes passed before he was rewarded. Then, briefly, a tiny figure at that distance, a man stood up to full height, looked around, saw nothing to disturb him, stretched luxuriously, and disappeared once more into the rocks.

  Sundance’s mouth thinned. This was luck, better than he’d dared hope for. He went to Eagle, spoke to him softly in Nez Percé. Then he drew his rifle from the saddle scabbard, unlooped the sheathed hatchet from the saddle horn. The horse stood patiently as its master edged out of the shallow cavern, and disappeared into a wash that led up the ridge.

  Sundance knew it would be one of the hardest stalks he had ever made. But he’d had the kind of training which taught young Cheyenne men how to creep up on feeding deer with only a knife, make a final leap, and get the meat by cutting the quarry’s throat. It was not something you did by hurrying. It was something to be brought off with infinite patience and an absolute understanding of the uses of every scrap of cover and concealment.

  He expected it to take him a full two hours to cover that half mile, and it did, and a few minutes more. Literally inch by inch, foot by foot, he worked his way up that ridge, sometimes freezing where he lay for as much as ten minutes at a stretch. Five times during that one hundred and twenty minutes, the Raider up there arose, looked carefully around, then settled down once more. But he never saw the lean man in buckskins who seemed to have become part of the rocky ground itself, and who had carefully chosen his terrain so that, lying flat, he would always be wholly or partially out of the guard’s line of sight.

  By now Sundance felt as if he almost knew the man. The fellow was short, thick-bodied, in blue shirt and leather Mexican vaquero pants. But he was not a Mexican: his hair and beard were as yellow as Sundance’s own. He was a man cursing the hot sun, keeping to what shade he could find, and counting the minutes until he was relieved. He wore two guns and had a rifle in his arm’s crook, and Sundance could use those extra weapons.

  Now Sundance was only twenty feet below the crest, almost under the guard, his concealment a narrow shelf of overhanging shale. The guard stood up and took his look around. His eyes did not even touch the area close to him: it was down the slope and at the distant hills that he squinted. Sundance heard him spit and curse softly. Then he sat down again, facing east. Sundance waited a moment. Presently he arose, soundless as a cat, the hatchet unsheathed now, in his right hand, the Winchester in his left. The hand axe’s blade glinted in the sun as slowly, very slowly, and with infinite care, Sundance covered that last six or seven yards.

  It took him ten full minutes to make that distance, an excruciating length of time, standing at full height, seeking each foothold with patient care, eyes never off the man in the rocks.

  Then he was on the crest, and only five yards separated him from the unwary guard. That was close enough. Skylined like this, there was no time to waste. He raised the hatchet and tensed for the throw.

  At precisely that instant the guard grunted, stood up, turning. He saw Sundance. His mouth dropped open, his eyes widened. He started to raise his rifle. Sundance threw the hand-axe.

  A spinning blur in sunlight, it had terrific velocity. There was a dull, ugly sound as its blade sank deep between the eyes of the gaping guard, chopping through the skull, sinking deep into the brain and cleaving it. Dead in that instant, the man collapsed soundlessly, face covered by a sheet of blood, and Sundance fell forward in the same motion flat on the ground, getting off the skyline.

  Hurriedly he wriggled forward, disappearing into the boulders. It took all his right hand’s strength to wrench the hatchet free from its lodgement in the skull. He made a sound in his throat of satisfaction. His bow and arrows were in the pannier on the saddle, and an arrow was soundless too. But you could never be sure of its killing quickly enough to choke off a yell. For utter silence, if you could get close enough, with a fair throw at the head, nothing beat the hatchet.

  The nest of boulders offered fine concealment. Turning the body face down so he would not be distracted by the bloody face, he cleaned the hatchet blade and waited. Three hours on and then relief—that would be about right. He had spent nearly that much time on this stalk, and it had been obvious the man was growing impatient. With luck he would have a chance to use the hatchet one more time, and cut down the odds against him even further.

  Minutes crawled by. Flies settled, buzzing, on the corpse. Like a chuckwalla on a rock, Sundance waited. Meanwhile, he reconnoitered the ground below.

  The ridge’s forward slope dwindled into a vast, rough patch of rough ground, cut and seamed by washes, strewn with shale and boulders. Far below, Sundance could see the valley of the Hole-in-the-Wall, with a small, nameless creek crawling through it, and, beyond to the north, the main red wall of naked rock that made a barrier in that direction. Down there by the creek, where it made a bend, there was greenery: grass and scrub. Sundance tensed. Down there, too, were scabby flakes of brown: tarps pitched as shelters; and there were nearly smokeless fires, and a lot of horses and mules feeding by the stream—the mounts of the Raiders and the animals stolen from Andre’s outfit.

  Even as Sundance watched, he could see tiny figures, hardly more than grains at this distance against the massive backdrop of the landscape, moving—Steelman and his men. He took out his telescope, shielding its lens with his palm, lest the sun flash off it. Then he sucked in breath. Under one of those tarps he caught a flash of scarlet. Andre’s tunic. The Duke was down there, and yes, it moved, he was still alive.

  Some of the fear that had knotted Sundance’s belly seeped away. If Steelman had already killed Andre, the fat would have been in the fire. Crook would have faced a court-martial for letting it happen and war with Russia—and the Sioux—would have been inevitable. At least now there was a chance.

  He settled back, even dared to smoke a cigarette. He had just ground it out when he heard the click of shod hooves on stone nearby. Somewhere down the slope, out of his sight, a man had ridden up, halted, dismounted. Rocks rattled as the man came up the slope, careless of how much noise he made. He was even singing.

  “Don’t you monkey with my Lulu gal Or I’ll tell you what I’ll do ...

  I’ll cut you up with my Bow
ie knife And shoot you with my pistol, too Sundance gathered his feet beneath him, wiped sweat from his hand on his buckskin shirt, and seized the hatchet handle.

  “Hey, Ferd, you about ready to knock off?” The new guard came in sight over the brow of the hill, a canteen slung around his shoulder. Without the slightest fear or caution he came on to the nest of boulders. “Anything goin’ on to break the monotony? Ferd?” He grunted. “Goddammit, sun got you?”

  Then he was there, looming over Sundance, and Sundance came to his feet. “You ain’t Ferd!” the man blurted, and those were the last words he ever said. He threw up an arm to fend off the stroke, but he was a fraction of a second too late. Sundance’s left hand grabbed his shirt, jerked him forward; the right brought down the hatchet. The man’s rifle fell, clattering on rock, as the fine-honed blade chopped through the wool of his slouch hat as if it were not there, smashed through bone, and killed him.

  Sundance dragged his body across the boulders and threw it across the other corpse. Taking both men’s six-guns, he made sure they were fully loaded and rammed them in his waistband. Selecting the best rifle he picked that up as well. He sheathed the hatchet, stuck its haft in his belt. Then he slid across the rocks, skidded down the slope, and ran to where he had left Eagle. Three hours from now he had to be in position.

  He was not worried about other guards. Steelman did not have that many men. Most of his force, anyhow, would be focused on the real Hole that came through the wall of rock to the north. Steelman ... as he thought of Warren, Vasili, even Shurka, the helpless cook, Sundance’s throat was thick with rage. He wanted Steelman, and whether he got him this time or not, he would make it his business sooner or later to take him, no matter how far he had to follow him. But for the moment Andre came first. And since there was no longer any guard here, it was a simple matter to lead Eagle around the foot of the ridge, down a deep wash, thread a labyrinth of other washes and thus, invisibly, approach the floor of the valley of the Hole-in-the-Wall.

  Beneath another overhang of rock in a narrow canyon, he and the stallion went to ground. Sundance drank from the canteen he’d taken from the second guard, gave the rest to Eagle, and settled down to wait. A few hours before dark, the next relief would find the dead men at the guard post and give the alarm. But by then there would not be enough daylight for a thorough search. In this maze of badlands, it would be sheer luck, their good and his bad, if they found him before the light faded. And unless he missed his guess, come dawn tomorrow Crazy Horse would attack. Until then it was only a matter of lying low. Since he and Eagle both had had water, they could go without the food they needed till later; that was something they had done many times.

  More waiting. Once Sundance thought he heard a yell: that would be the relief discovering the hatcheted corpses. Later he crawled out, looked down at the valley floor, used his telescope. There was confusion down there, but he saw no search mounted. In Steelman’s place, he would have used the same tactics—draw all men in as defense against any possible attack, not scatter them on a wild goose chase in the badlands this late in the day.

  Light ebbed, painting the raw grandeur of the vast, bleak basin with deceptively gentle and lovely colors as the sun went down. Coyotes yapped, lobos howled as darkness settled. Sundance analyzed every call instinctively but he was sure all of them were genuine. It was too early yet for Crazy Horse. The day’s brutal heat dissipated; the night turned chill. Sundance wrapped himself in a blanket and dozed, trusting to Eagle’s ears and nostrils.

  Chapter Eight

  He came out of sleep, awakened by the stud’s deep and violent snort, and instinctively he brought up the rifle. For him there was no groggy moment of transition to full consciousness; he was at once totally alert. Eagle snorted again. The stars showed that it was nearly four in the morning. Sundance followed the pointing of the stallion’s ears toward the east, and grinned as he heard the long, ululating howl of a lone wolf hunting.

  Instantly he was on his feet, rolling his bed and lashing it behind the saddle. The wolf howl died. A man less experienced might have taken it for genuine, but no human being could really duplicate a lobo’s song, and good as the imitation was, Sundance had caught the false note in it. He knew now that Crazy Horse had arrived, and his warriors had worked into position.

  Time to go. He checked his weapons, mounted Eagle, threaded down a draw toward the floor of the long, winding valley. He could only guess at what tactics Crazy Horse would use, but the chances were that the Sioux leader would have sent small bands on fast horses around to create diversions to the south and east. Then, with his main forces, he would charge from the north, fighting through the notch between great pillars of rock that led directly into the valley. After all, he had Steelman’s Raiders outnumbered ten or twenty to one, and though the ground was in Steelman’s favor and he could mount a terrible defense there at that notch, sooner or later the Sioux would break through, especially when the diversions began and smaller bands of Sioux hit Steelman from behind.

  Now Sundance reached the valley floor, dismounted in the shelter of the arroyo’s mouth, and stood by Eagle’s head. What he had to do would require split-second timing. And the moment would come very soon; another wolf call in the distance told him that. For the Indians, dawn was close enough; they would try to break through the notch while bad light rendered fire from Steelman’s guards uncertain, and once inside the valley, mop up in daylight.

  Sundance waited, the vast bleak valley spread out before him. Minutes crawled. Over there across the stream he could see, a mile or so away, faint red glows that were campfire embers. Again he marveled at Steelman’s choice of a hideout. This walled-in basin could be breached only by a force that would totally disregard its casualties. It was Steelman’s bad luck that the Sioux were such a force: once committed to battle, they fought with total recklessness. A Sioux warrior who died in combat achieved glory. So, unlike the Apaches, for instance, who considered a man a fool who took unnecessary risks and only fought for loot, or an American posse or military unit, the Sioux would keep on coming. But, Sundance had a hunch, Steelman’s men would not be the last bunch of buscaderos to use Hole-in-the Wall.

  Then it came: suddenly, without warning, the spatter of gunfire far away, from down the valley around the notch in the wall. Sundance swung up on the Appaloosa, held the stallion checked. Out there on the valley floor, fires blazed up suddenly. Voices drifted through the night, startled, excited. “Clay, what the hell—?”

  Then Steelman’s deep, unruffled voice, full of authority. “All right! Fred, you, Sam, Mart, Phil—let’s mount up! Sounds like we’ve been hit by Injuns! Some goddam war party must’ve picked up our trail. Well, we’ll make ’em sorry they ever did! Take plenty of ammo! Once we’re on the high ground up yonder along with Ned and Lew, we’ll blast hell out of ’em! Clancy, you and Jones and Tom stay here and guard that Russian. And don’t git spooked! Nobody’s gonna git into this valley, and that Duke’s worth a quarter of a million dollars on the hoof! You let anything happen to him, I’ll skin the three of you alive.”

  Sundance’s mouth twisted in a wolfish grin as Steelman and the others mounted. He held Eagle steady while they pounded down the valley toward the Hole. So far it was working. Another wolf call sounded in the hills behind him. But from now on everything had to click, because in minutes there would be more Sioux pouring in this valley from behind—and before they got here, he had to get Andre and be long gone.

  He put the big horse into motion. Eagle crossed the valley at a walk. Ahead, the men Steelman had left behind were building up the campfires even higher. Up the valley, to Sundance’s rear, a coyote yapped. The smaller bands Crazy Horse had sent out and around were in position now, Sundance knew. Any minute they might charge.

  Now he was only half a mile from Steelman’s camp. Gunfire at the Hole suddenly swelled to a steady sullen thunder. Mingled with it was the fearsome sound of Sioux war-cries coming from a hundred throats. Sundance fought back the impulse to
increase Eagle’s pace, and kept him walking.

  Now only a quarter of a mile separated him from Eagle’s camp. He could see the three men ranked before the tents, staring fearfully out into darkness, rifles ready. They were spooked, and no wonder. Sundance grinned, checked the horse, put its reins between his teeth. Then he drew two Colts, his own and one taken from a guard. With a six-gun in either hand, he touched Eagle with his heels and charged.

  The big horse launched itself lance-straight for Steelman’s camp. The gun thunder at the Hole drowned its rolling hoof beats. And then, from the valley’s other end, there came suddenly a burst of spine-chilling gobbling yelling, and even Sundance’s short hair prickled as Eagle thundered through the night. The Sioux who had infiltrated the valley behind him were charging now as well, and he was between them and Steelman’s men.

  There was no more time for thought, only action, and Eagle soared out into space, leaping the creek and coming down almost squarely in the camp. For the first time the guards became aware of Sundance. He caught a glimpse of a startled face, saw a flash of gun flame, heard the whip of a bullet past his ear. Then he thumbed off a shot and the man screamed and dropped to his knees and tried to raise the gun once more, but Sundance rode him down. There was a short cry of agony as he went under Eagle’s hooves, and then Sundance checked the stallion and turned it, as a bearded man in a blue shirt lined his rifle. Sundance’s left Colt bucked in his palm, and the man fell backwards, gun-muzzle pumping a bright flame skyward. The third man stood there, head twisting, staring first at Sundance, then up the valley toward the charging Sioux. They had come into sight now, in the first light of false dawn, still two, three miles away, two bands of them, a dozen warriors each, one driving from the south, the other from the east, on a merging course, both pointed toward the camp. Sundance shot the guard while he stood there gaping like a fool hen in a spruce.