Sundance 8 Read online

  Not knowing that the cave was there, to the pursuers it must have seemed like a mountain lion going up a tree in desperation. He could not possibly climb that rock tower. All they had to do was be very careful and not get themselves shot and presently they would have him. Already, they were fanning out to encircle the butte.

  At the base of the gravel hill, Sundance swung down. “Eagle,” he whispered, “just one more good climb.” Bent low, leading the horse, he scrambled up the slope. The stallion came behind, grunting with pain. Below, the men closed in; a few fired their rifles, and bullets whanged off rock, but the range was great for saddle guns.

  And then Sundance reached the cave. Panting, he saw opening up the big hole beneath the shelf, huge enough for a horse to stand upright in. He led the stallion inside, knowing the danger from ricochets, but with no help for that. Eagle, in the shade and comparative cool of the shelter, dropped his head, and his breathing was like the pumping of a mighty bellows. Sundance uncinched two bull hide panniers from behind the saddle cantle, threw them down behind some rocks which made a natural barricade at the cave’s mouth. From the long parfleche, he withdrew the bow and quiver, hooked taut the string of twisted buffalo sinew, laid the arrows beside him. Removing his gunbelt for greater comfort lying on the rocks, he put it beside him, too, with the hatchet and his spare ammunition. Then, careful to keep sand out of the rifle, he burrowed down behind the rocks, prepared to sell his life. He did not know why those six pistoleros wanted it, but he knew this: before they had it, it was going to cost them.

  ~*~

  Again he noted their professionalism, as they settled down for a siege. One man took their horses out of range and picketed them. Two others kept up a steady covering fire while three more moved up the slope, into position behind the boulders. The beetle of rock above the cave’s mouth saved the horse and the barricade protected Sundance, but he could not raise his head, had no chance for a fair shot. When the first three were in place halfway up the slope, sheltered behind rocks big enough to hide them entirely, even standing, they laid down a barrage of their own with rifles, and the remaining trio came up and scattered out. Now all six were in place down there, in front and on the flanks, and their horses out of reach of either Sundance’s bullets or of himself if he tried to run for it. They had seen him roll into the cave; they knew it did not come out anywhere else on the butte; they guessed it was only a hole. They had him and they knew it.

  The day wore on, the heat ever more brutal, Sundance’s mouth as dry as if stuffed full of cotton. He improved his barricade, keeping low and working carefully to give himself the necessary field of fire. Down there on the slope, the six men waited with the patience of wolves. They occasionally pumped lead around their shelters to remind Sundance they were there. He fired only an occasional round in return, saving his ammunition. They made no demand on him to surrender, gave him no indication of why they had to have him dead. Nor did he yell down to ask them.

  If he’d been an outlaw with a price on his head, he could have understood it. But, although he had made a fair share of powerful enemies in his time, he was clean with the law; there was no bounty outstanding on him. No legal one, that is. But, with time to think, he began to understand. There was a bounty. Someone wanted him dead, and whoever it was had laid out enough money to pay eight men to come deep into the Texas desert and risk their lives to kill him.

  That would not be peanuts. That would be a lot of money. Men like these did not come cheap.

  Sundance tried to think of who might have posted such a reward. There were lots of possibilities. He had stepped on many powerful and sensitive toes in his career. The nature of his work made that inevitable.

  This was, after all, a time when possession of the West still hung in the balance. Now, in 1874, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, the Indians, the high plains tribes and the desert bands, still clung to their most valuable hunting grounds.

  The Sioux still claimed most of Dakota Territory as their reserve, including the fabulous Black Hills. The Cheyennes, Northern and Southern, allied with them, continued to rule parts of Montana, Wyoming, and hunted south as they pleased to the Canadian and Red Rivers. The Comanches held the Llano Estacado, the vast Staked Plains. West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona still feared the Apaches, who had made only a tentative and uneasy peace. Smaller, less powerful tribes held reserves of their own and defended them with arms: the Blackfeet, the Nez Percé, the Paiutes, and others. Meanwhile, land-hungry white men eyed their magnificent hunting grounds with greed. True, there were treaties, sacred promises of their governments. But treaties could always be rewritten or, for that matter, completely disregarded. The irresistible force of Westward expansion had run slam into the immovable object of Indian love of their traditional lands. And Jim Sundance, half-white, half Cheyenne, was caught square in the middle.

  In the beginning, it had seemed to him that there was plenty of room in this vast country for red and white to live together. He knew that each had culture and knowledge, as well as goods and products, that the other needed. In the beginning, he had dreamed of a peaceable intermingling of the races, founded on mutual respect and honesty, and he had worked hard to bridge the gap between them, to help each side as seemed necessary. When he had thought it furthered that dream, he had scouted for the Army. Just as readily, when they needed his help, he had ridden with the Indians. It was, to him, a matter of justice, of fairness to both sides. Because he understood both races, it had seemed to him he had a mission to bring them together in peace.

  Now, lying behind the rocks in the desert sun, his mouth curled in a savage grin not unlike a wolf’s. The dream was dead. He knew now that there would be no peace. What the white man wanted was everything the Indians had. And Jim Sundance was determined to do his best, use his brains and guns both, to keep them from getting it. He had not always been successful, but he’d had his victories, some in combat and some in the politics that went on behind the scenes, and those victories had cost a lot of powerful white men a great deal of potential profit.

  So it made sense that they were tired of him. They wanted him out of the way, once and for all. And that was why those men were down there, waiting, well hidden behind those huge rocks. He could think of no other explanation.

  He looked at the sky. The sun seemed pasted there, immovable. Maybe when darkness came, he would have a whore’s chance; maybe on foot he could slip down the slope and past them. But that would mean leaving the stallion behind, which would be like abandoning his brother. He would also have to leave his gear, and there were things in those parfleches that he valued almost as much as his life; indeed, they were part of it. The war bonnet with the eagle feathers he had earned in his youth for counting coups, the medicine bag, the sacred shield of buffalo skin; he could not take all of them along. And, likely, he could not make it anyhow. They knew their business, would be alert all night long for any such move. He might get past or kill two or three, but the others were bound to take him.

  No, Sundance thought, looking at the sun, there was only one way to save himself, and that was to kill them all.

  Chapter Two

  With that decision made, the next step was to figure out how to do it. For the moment, it seemed impossible, but so was escape, and he thus had no choice except to die himself.

  He had been in a lot of battles, in many different kinds of combat. His father, an English remittance man, had been a soldier once himself before becoming a trader among the Indians and taking the name Sundance. He had taught the son all he knew about the white man’s weapons and ways of fighting. Service as a Cheyenne Dog Soldier had taught Sundance everything about the Indian way. Then, there had been the Civil War: he had fought as a guerilla on the Kansas Missouri border, and that had made a polished gunslinger out of him. In the years that followed, he had been in more pitched battles than he liked to remember on one side or the other between Indians and soldiers. Now, he ran through his mind every way of fighting he had ever kn
own, every tactic he had ever seen used, every weapon he had ever encountered. He searched all his combat lore for any idea, any inspiration, that might yield him chance. But he found none. The way those men were forted up behind the rocks, there was no way of getting at them short of using a cannon, and a howitzer at that, one of those stubby guns that could throw a shell almost straight up and drop it behind a strong position on a hidden enemy.

  And, of course, he had no howitzer, so—

  Sundance’s prone body stiffened. Suddenly that wolf’s grin jerked at his lips again. All at once he forgot the thirst, the stiffness and fatigue, the ache of the bullet slash a ricochet had given him.

  Now he had a chance. Maybe a slim one, but—

  He eased his rifle forward, through the loophole he had made in the barricade. Suddenly he sprayed the slope with bullets. The thunder of the gun echoed and re-echoed in a drumming roar, lead screamed as it bounced off rock.

  Immediately the fire was returned. Sundance, cramming fresh cartridges into the gun, watched carefully. He had been pretty sure of each man’s position; now powder smoke verified them for him. One there behind the enormous boulder, another in that great rock burst, another behind that up jutting finger of thick sandstone, the other three in like cover, widely spaced around the gravel slope.

  All right, the man behind the big boulder first.

  When the gun was fully loaded, Sundance braced it in the loophole. He reached for the bow, laid out three arrows of the two dozen or more the quiver contained. Lying on his back, he nocked an arrow to his bow, drew the string, let the arrow fly. The long quilled shaft went up in a shallow, almost lazy arc. Before it had reached the top, Sundance had sent two more after it, distance nicely calculated, spread exact. He could place an arrow as easily and accurately as a rifle shot. Before the three shafts were coming down, he was at the loophole again with the rifle lined.

  He saw the arrows coming down, watched them disappear swiftly behind the huge rock, one after the other, two feet apart. He heard a man’s surprised yell, and then he had a target. As the arrows dropped in on the gunman hidden there, the man had to dodge. There was an instant when he exposed his shoulder, red shirt flashing into view behind the granite. Sundance fired.

  The bullet caught the shoulder joint: the gunman howled, spun into view, whirled by the impact. An arrow bristled from his other arm. Sundance fired again, and this time the slug caught the gunman in the chest. Its impact jerked him back and down; he landed on the gravel, kicked twice, rolled six feet and he was dead.

  “Curt!” somebody yelled. “What the hell?”

  But Sundance was already reaching for more arrows. He had the three arcing in a spread again toward the rock burst, the clump of shattered boulders, almost before the first victim’s body had quit twitching.

  “Curt!” the man in there shouted, and then his shout died in a strange choking sound. He jumped to his feet, reaching behind his head to tug at the arrow embedded in the back of his neck. Sundance shot him between the eyes. He fell forward across a boulder.

  Down there the slope exploded in gunfire. The four remaining killers grasped what was happening now. Lead screamed and whined off the brow of the cave and Sundance’s barricade. “That sonofabitch!” somebody hollered. “He’s droppin’ those Goddamn Injun arrers in on us!” But Sundance had three more in the air by then.

  As they soared up, the gunfire tapered off. Every man down there was watching those shafts rise and fall. A spread of three whistled down toward the tall finger of sandstone. The man behind it yelled something inarticulate and broke from cover before they landed. Zigzagging like a startled jackrabbit, he made for another rock. Sundance took a lead on him and fired. The bullet smashed the right leg of the running man and he fell, face plowing into gravel. He tried to rise and Sundance killed him. Then he grasped another arrow.

  Suddenly the slope was very quiet. Then a voice rang out. “Hey, Bascomb, you see that? Dead, three of ’em, Curt, Sandy, Jed! I’m gittin’ the hell outa range right now!”

  “No, you ain’t!” Bascomb screamed back from behind a boulder no smaller than a log cabin. “Dig in, damn it, dig in and—” But gravel already rattled. Sundance had an arrow on the string. Then he caught a flash of color. In panic, terrified of those silent killers descending from the sky, one gunman ran, keeping cover between himself and Sundance’s gun. But he had one short open space to cross, and— There was no time to reach for the rifle. Sundance brought the bow down, drew the string, aimed, let the arrow go.

  As the man dived between two rocks, it caught him, and with it buried in his flank, the head caught low in his entrails, he fell onto the gravel in the open, screaming horribly, clawing at the shaft, twisting and doubling like a worm on a hot stove. And now it was only two against one, and those odds were short enough for Sundance and he was tired of waiting. He threw back his head, and a sound even more awful rose above the screaming of the wounded—a Cheyenne war-whoop. Then, knowing this was the time, while they were demoralized, he grabbed the six-gun, swarmed over the rock barricade, and charged, shrieking that demonic cry.

  Zigzagging, he ran and slid at full speed down the gravel slope. He made a fine target, a beautiful one, Bascomb could not resist it. Clad in flannel shirt and chaps, Bascomb stepped from behind his rock, bearded face twisted in a snarl, rifle at his shoulder. Sundance did not even pause, and the Colt bucked in his hand as he ran on. The bullet zinged off the rock beside Bascomb’s head and Bascomb flinched and missed and Sundance fired again, and Bascomb’s face disappeared in a wash of scarlet, and now there was only one more, and he was not shooting at all. He was running as hard down the slope as his legs would carry him, tall, thin, tripping over his own spurs. Once he halted, looked back, face white with terror, started to raise his Winchester.

  It was a long shot for a Colt. Sundance took careful aim, arm straight out and locked. The kick of the Colt was solid against his palm, its roar like a blast of thunder. Powder smoke whirled and drifted: when it cleared, a long, thin body lay face down on the gravel. And, except for the diminishing howl of the man with the arrow in his gut, everything was terribly, dreadfully still.

  The reaction hit Sundance then. He had raced and fought for his life and had killed eight men since breakfast, eight strangers he had never seen before. All at once, his knees went weak beneath him, he felt hot bile rise stingingly in his throat. He sat down heavily, chest heaving as he swallowed hard and sucked in great lungfuls of the hot dry desert air.

  But he allowed himself only a moment to recover. The man with the arrow through him was still crying out. Shakily, Sundance arose, loped across the slope.

  The man lay where he had fallen between two rocks, and he was short and stocky and balding and pushing middle age, with the marks of a hard, violent career engraved on his contorted face. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth and through his nostrils, and he still clawed weakly at the arrow and drew his legs up in agony. When Sundance towered over him, he looked up dully at the half-breed.

  “Jesus, Injun—” he managed in a thick, gurgling voice.

  Sundance lined the Colt at his head. “I want to know,” he said. “Why? Who sent you?”

  “Who—?” Another spasm twisted the short man’s face.

  “Who sent you to kill me?” Sundance roared. “You’ll be a long time dying unless you tell me!”

  “I—” The man relaxed, gathered every tatter of his faculties. “Dunno. Bascomb. Made the deal.”

  “Where?”

  “Del Rio ... east of here.”

  “You don’t know who?”

  “I said no. Injun, in the name of God ... have mercy.”

  “Yeah,” Sundance said bitterly. “You boys were full of it. All right.” He lined the Colt and pulled the trigger. There was no other mercy at his command.

  Finding a canteen behind the rock the man had fled, he took a long drink and, with moisture in his mouth again, rolled a cigarette. He sat down with his back against the rock, looking
out at the limitless desert, still alert and not neglecting to reload the Colt with spare shells from his pocket. When the cigarette was gone and he was steady, he stood up. Already, black flecks, like tiny bits of soot, circled overhead in the scalding blue.

  Sundance went from body to body, checking pockets, searching Bascomb especially thoroughly. Each man had a lot of money on him, either in pockets, belt or poke. The average amount was five hundred dollars a man: Bascomb had a thousand, mostly in greenbacks. Eight men, Sundance thought, counting the two he’d dropped elsewhere. That came to nearly five thousand dollars. Likely the first installment of the bounty. And with probably as much or more payable when proof of his death was delivered; such deals usually worked that way. He frowned. That meant a minimum of ten thousand dollars as the price on Jim Sundance’s head. Somebody wanted him dead very badly and had the cash to pay the freight. But ... Del Rio? Who in that little nothing of a cowtown, which he had only visited once or twice?

  Sundance had no qualms about keeping the money, the price for his own head; and he had a good use to which he could put it. He roamed the slope, retrieved all the arrows he could find. They were precious; most Indians nowadays used steel arrowheads. He preferred the ones made of flint or obsidian, for they packed more shocking power, dealt an uglier wound, but they were hard to come by and took a long time to make. When he had them, he went back up the slope, with a load of canteens. At the cave, he let Eagle, unscratched further by all the shooting, drink sparingly. Carefully he packed and loaded all his gear and led the horse back down the hill of gravel. Those black birds dropping lower, plus the coyotes, desert wolves, and kit foxes would take care of the bodies.

  Eagle scented the hidden horses of the killers and led him to where they had been picketed. He unsaddled all but the best one and turned them free. The remaining one, a big sorrel with a cream mane and white right forefoot, he mounted. When he turned it east, headed toward Del Rio, Eagle followed without a lead rope.