Sundance 15 Page 3

  “I know,” Sundance said, and told Crook about the wolf and the coyote.

  “Which now makes it almost impossible to get anyone to take the field and run him down. The Cheyenne scouts won’t do it—and neither will the local law, or any white scouts I could hire. Just sleeping on the prairie, right now is as risky as being in combat.” He grimaced. “I’ve two men in the hospital who were bitten in the face by hydrophobic skunks while they slept, out on patrol. Poor devils—they’d be better off if we could put bullets through their heads, but Army Regulations says they have to go through all the agony. Anyhow, the morale of the soldiers here at McPherson and at the North Platte post just outside the town’s at rock-bottom, as you can well imagine.”

  Crook paused. “Rabies or no, Sundance, this murdering bastard must be caught! Every time I take one step forward toward making peace, he strikes and pushes me two steps backward. If my negotiations don’t succeed, there’ll be a full-scale offensive against the Cheyennes, the Sioux’ll be drawn in, the other allied tribes, and there’ll be hell to pay! That’s why I’ve sent for you. I want his head!”

  “A tall order, Three-Stars.” Sundance’s face was grim.

  “Yes. But I know of no one else who could bring it off. When he can surprise a Cheyenne warrior or a seasoned soldier the way he does, he must be a superb fighting man. Anyhow, he’s like a ghost ... he strikes and then seems to vanish into the mist. Frankly, my theory is that he’s a half-breed Pawnee who knows how the Indians and whites operate, alike. You know how the Pawnees hate the Cheyennes—and they’ve done a lot of scouting for the Army. I’ve talked to Major Frank North about it—he’s the leader of the Pawnee scouts—he knows more about the tribe than anybody. He’s investigated, but gotten nowhere so far. Anyhow—” He gestured. “I’m at the end of my rope. Jim, you’re my last hope. If you can’t run him down, nobody can.”

  Sundance stood up. “I appreciate your confidence, but this rabies thing complicates matters. I’ve got no more hankering to go roaming around out there and maybe get bitten or have my stallion bitten than anybody else. Three-Stars, I don’t know—”

  “I never saw you flinch from anything before.”

  “Bullets, arrows, they’re one thing. That biting sickness is another. Everybody has to sleep, and while you’re sleeping, anything can come along. A skunk, a ferret, a coyote—when they’ve gone mad, they have no fear of man. And even one scratch, much less a bite—” He broke off. “You can predict, maybe, what a man will do. But hundreds of animals infected with rabies—no man can guard against them all. Hell, even the game you kill might have it. Anything that’s warm-blooded carries it.”

  “I know,” Crook said, his shoulders slumping. “And I can’t say I blame you. But it means war or peace, Jim. And besides—there’s money for the man who catches him. Big money—fifteen thousand dollars.”

  Sundance whistled. “Where’s that coming from?”

  “The town of North Platte’s put up five thousand. The Union Pacific has matched it with another five, as a goodwill gesture. And I’ve persuaded General Sheridan to put up another five from funds for this Division to sweeten the pot. If it weren’t for the rabies epidemic, this whole area would be crawling with bounty hunters right now. Not to mention the Indians themselves looking for him. But they’ve all moved camp north for the time being, after killing off all their dogs.”

  Sundance was silent for a moment. “Maybe by this time he’s been bitten himself. When was that corporal killed?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Maybe he’s pulled in his horns, afraid to go out there himself. Maybe—” He broke off as someone hammered at the door.

  “Come in,” said Crook testily.

  The man who entered was Captain John Bourke, Crook’s aide, a sardonic, keenly observant, and highly competent officer. He and Sundance knew each other of old, but Bourke wasted no time on greetings. “Sir.” His mustachioed face was grim. “Word just came from the North Platte Station. We’ve lost another man.” He handed Crook a telegraph flimsy.

  The General read it aloud. “Private James Rogers this command apparently attempting to desert found dead by scouting detail five miles downriver. Body contained two Cheyenne arrows, mutilation extensive. Local doctor says death probably occurred no less than twenty-four hours ago. Unable to find any visible trail or sign in area of body. Request instructions.” It was signed by the captain commanding the one-company post of North Platte Station just outside the railroad town.

  Crook made a sound in his throat. “There you are, Jim,” he said harshly. “If he’s been bitten, it hasn’t caught up with him yet.” He paused, looking at Sundance keenly. “Well?”

  Sundance hesitated. Then he said, “Wire Captain Taylor to hold the body until I get there tomorrow afternoon. I’ll want to take a look at it. But it’s a twenty-mile ride, and Eagle’s already done in. I won’t start until tomorrow morning.”

  Crook’s thin, hawk-like face relaxed. “You’ll take the job?”

  Slowly Sundance nodded. War or peace, he thought; and there had been too much killing on each side already. More: that fifteen thousand. It was badly needed back in Washington by the lobbyist he maintained. His spine crawled at the thought of the hazards he would have to face—not at the prospect of tracking down the killer, but doing it through a country full of rabid animals. Nevertheless, his voice was steady when he said, “I’ll take the job.”

  “Thank God. Jim, the town will be like an anthill somebody’s kicked with his boot. The civilians there will be furious at the sight of anybody with red skin. I’ll write you a commission as a civilian scout directly under my authority. You have any trouble, you show it immediately. Otherwise, you might get hurt. Or—” he grinned “—more likely, you’ll have to hurt somebody else.” And he sat down at his desk, dipped pen in inkwell and began to write.

  Captain Bourke turned to Sundance. “I’m glad,” he said softly, “that you’ve come. The Old Man wouldn’t have asked for you if it hadn’t been necessary. But, Jim, watch yourself. This rabies epidemic—”

  “How bad is it, really?”

  Bourke’s face was grave. “I’ve seen it happen two or three times at different places I’ve served, but I’ve never seen it this bad. We’re holding all scouting and patrolling to a minimum, to lessen exposure to our men. Still, as I’m sure the General told you, we’ve had two bitten—and there’ve been several civilians bitten in North Platte and on outlying ranches. Hell, they say the mad wolves and coyotes come right into town. They’ll walk right into a house’s front door if anybody is fool enough to leave it open. Same way with the kit foxes and the skunks and all the other critters ... ”

  “All right,” Sundance said. “Then I’m not going to expose Eagle to that. I’ll expect the Army to furnish me with a mount—the best you can scrape up.”

  “Don’t worry,” Crook said, blotting what he had written. “You’ll have it. And a pair of jackboots, too—heavy leather. They’ll be more protection than those Cheyenne moccasins. And anything else you may ask for.” He passed the sheet of paper to Jim Sundance. “This will also insure complete cooperation from Captain Taylor and any other members of my department at North Platte Station.”

  “Thanks.” Sundance took the paper, folded it.

  “And, Jim,” Crook added. “Watch yourself. You’re out to kill a mad dog, not to let a mad dog kill you.”

  ~*~

  At daylight next morning Sundance rode out of Fort McPherson, rifle across his saddle bow. The tall chestnut gelding beneath him was one of Bourke’s personal mounts, clean-limbed and strong; Crook himself preferred mules and rode one whenever possible. The sandy table-land around the post had been cleared of all cover in case of attack and the grass burned over to eliminate small rodents and the like which might carry rabies. He could, for the moment, partially relax, search his memory to see if he could find the thing which, beneath the surface, had been tugging at it for an hour last night before he had drifted off to
sleep on the cot in Bourke’s quarters. There he had tried to make sense of what the officers had told him: there was someone who hated the Cheyennes and the Army impartially, preyed on both. On civilians, too—but he had never killed a Sioux, Arapaho, or a member of any other tribe.

  “Only the Shyela,” Bourke had said, using the Sioux word for Cheyenne. “Seems odd, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Sundance had answered, and that was when the thing in his mind had begun to stir.

  He descended to the river, forded to Brady Island, where normally hay was raised for the command; it, too, had been burned off to clear it of animals. Then across to the north bank and warily through the undergrowth along the river until on the high ground he reached the right-of-way of the Union Pacific railroad. He would have preferred to have loaded the horse on a train and made the journey to North Plate that way, from McPherson Station, the railroad stop, but there would be no westbound train until late this evening. So he rode on upriver, toward where the North Fork joined it and a boomtown had been foaled by the iron horse.

  Following the twin threads of steel, he remembered bitterly how it had been before the coming of the railroad. Then this had all been totally the domain of the Indian; now it was split in two. So was the Cheyenne tribe, and the herds of buffalo they hunted. The so-called Southern Cheyennes had been allotted a reservation in Indian Territory, but refused to go to it. The Northern Cheyennes drew their treaty compensations from the Red Cloud Agency, which also served the Sioux. The Platte had always been a dividing line, but now the steel rails and the strings of forts which had grown up along them had made it a formal one. Only five or six years ago, it had been very different. Six years ago, when the last great ceremony of the Renewal of the Arrows had been held—

  Sundance stiffened in the saddle. Suddenly he heard that husky voice again. Tell them ... it doesn’t matter ... how many of them I kill. Cheyenne or white, it makes no difference now—they’re all fair game. Tell them to remember that, and that they’ll hate the day they let me leave this camp alive ...

  And then that beaten figure clinging to its horse’s mane, skylined for a moment as it crested the divide...

  Sundance reined in his horse. Cole Maxton—Silent Enemy. Was it possible? A man who hated both Yankee soldiers and the Cheyennes ... but, good God! Maxton had been near death, riding off alone like that, naked, unarmed, beaten to a pulp. Sundance had never heard of him since, in all his roaming of the West—neither the Cheyennes or any whites he’d met had ever spoken either name the man went by. In fact, it was assumed by the People that Maxton could not have lasted twenty-four hours, though no one had ever found his body, so far as Sundance knew. But then, no one had looked for it.

  Maxton—he filled the bill, all right. You had to be a superb warrior to be a member of the Shield Society, good enough even to take other Cheyennes by surprise. And of course, a lone white soldier would be easy prey; most of the enlisted men were new to the West, knew little about it, and even less about Indians. If it were Maxton he was going up against, Sundance told himself, he’d have his hands full all right, would be contending with an enemy fully his equal in either Cheyenne or white man’s warfare. But if Maxton were still alive, how had he managed to vanish so completely all these years—and why had he surfaced just now?

  A lot of unanswered questions, but a place to start. Assume the killer was Silent Enemy, or someone like him. Then match your thinking to his—Cheyenne-white against Cheyenne-white. But first reach the town of North Platte alive. He put the bay gelding into a lope along the wagon road that paralleled the railroad tracks, and never relaxed his watchfulness.

  Chapter Two

  A man in his trade became hardened to death. He had seen a lot of corpses in his time, including those of his own parents, murdered out on the prairie by three Pawnees and three drunken whites who had followed them from Bent’s Old Fort, where they had gone to trade. He himself had picked up the six trails, and although it had taken him a year, had followed each to its end—and when he had caught the killers, they had died hard. And he had fought in the guerrilla wars along the Kansas-Missouri border, first on one side, then on the other, trying to blot out that memory, a little crazy for a while. That was where he had perfected his skill as a paleface style gunman. Ever since, he had been hiring out his gun on behalf of his dream of peace between white and red, and when you hired your gun, you killed. But even after all that, he was still a little queasy as he and Captain Taylor, commandant of the tiny post adjoining the town, closed the door of the storehouse where what was left of the murdered private had been laid out.

  Taylor was young for a captain and fairly new out here, and once in the fresh air he made a retching sound. Recovering, he said, “Pretty typical case of Indian-style torture, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No, not typical,” Sundance answered harshly. “It’s the kind of thing either a madman or somebody with a special grudge does when he gets his hands on an enemy—or what the women do to the wounded and the dead sometimes after a big battle. But it’s not your usual warrior’s practice, though white men like to think it is.”

  “I understand General Crook is investigating the Pawnees.”

  “It’s not a Pawnee, either. A Pawnee might use Cheyenne arrows to throw off suspicion, but Cheyennes have died, too. And the killer has never hit a Sioux, and the Pawnees hate the Sioux even worse than they do the Cheyennes.” Sundance paused. “Tell me, have you ever heard of a man named Cole Maxton—a half-breed?”

  “No.”

  “Or under his Indian name—Silent Enemy?”

  Taylor shook his head. “I know everybody in North Platte. Nobody by either name around here. Matter of fact, most of the half-breeds around town have taken to the tall timber since this started. Especially since Ravenal’s wife was killed.”

  “Ravenal?”

  “Marsh Ravenal. About the richest man in North Platte just now, I guess, and the most powerful. He’s the contractor who furnishes all the supplies to us and McPherson. He’s Southern, originally from Charleston, South Carolina, I believe, and his wife was, too, and she was a beauty. But a strong-willed woman. Ravenal was crazy about her, but she insisted on riding around the countryside alone every morning and he couldn’t stop her. Then this killer struck. One day she didn’t come home, and later a search party found her five miles outside of town.” Taylor spat. “The killer did to her just about what he did to Rogers in there—except, according to the doctor, he raped her first. Anyhow, Ravenal went out of his mind for a while. He’s a bad man to cross, and he raised so much hell with everybody with any Indian blood that all the half-breeds cleared out.” He looked at Sundance sharply. “If you intend to go into town, you’d better find Ravenal first and show him that commission from General Crook. Otherwise, he might give you the same treatment.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Sundance said. “But before that, I want to see where that private’s body was found.”

  “Very well, I’ll show you personally. Frankly, I wouldn’t ask any man to volunteer to ride with you just now. The whole area’s infested with mad wolves and coyotes. Rogers was a misfit all along, and I guess he figured now was the time to make his try at desertion, because with all the mad animals out there, we wouldn’t try very hard to follow him. He didn’t count on meeting a human mad dog. Suppose we ride immediately. It’s not far, and we’ve just got time to make it and return before dark.”

  ~*~

  An hour later they turned off the wagon road into the lowlands along the Platte. Both men rode warily, rifles at the ready. Presently Taylor reined up in a grove of huge cottonwoods not far from the water. They had shaded out all the underbrush, leaving only grass, making a clearing perhaps an acre in extent, rimmed on three sides by a dense growth of willow, briar, and box elder. “We found him staked out here,” Taylor said, dismounting.

  Sundance followed suit, his movements a little awkward in the unaccustomed jackboots which reached above the knee. “All right. You keep an e
ye out while I read the sign.” With Taylor standing guard, he circled the grove like a questing hunting dog, covering every foot of it, then edging along the rim of brush. There were tracks, all right—but only of the cavalry detail that had found the body. Sundance rubbed his face. The killer, whoever he was, had expertly, erased all sign. Which eliminated any white man. He could conceive of no white man who could defeat his Cheyenne tracking skills.

  Then, in the brush, he saw it, the limb turned backward, the leaves turned the wrong way. Somebody or something had passed through here. Sundance knelt, examining the willow branch, peering into the tangled thicket beyond. His eyes searched the ground for tracks, peered into the brush for more sign. Carefully, he turned the willow limb back, stared at the earth beneath it, thought he saw the faint outline of a moccasin track ...

  “Sundance!” Captain Taylor roared. Behind him, a gun thundered. Sundance was on his feet immediately, whirling. The wolf had burst out of the brush from only a dozen yards away, its chopping jaws trailing foam. At a dead run it came, then launched itself into a leap before Taylor could get another shot into the chamber.

  A huge gray lobo, its attack was aimed at Sundance’s throat. He reacted instinctively, in the pair of seconds in which time seemed to freeze. His hand flashed down, and then the Colt was in it, booming, bucking against his palm. The heavy slug tore into the throat of the leaping, slavering wolf, deflected its charge. It landed on its side, writhed, even as Sundance got off another shot straight into its head, only inches from his boots. Though the bullet went dead home, the wolf snapped and writhed again and its jaws closed on Sundance’s foot.

  But not with the usual power that could break the haunch of a bull bison. Lax in death, fangs slipped off the heavy leather of the jack boots, though they would have quickly penetrated his usual moccasin. He felt the pressure of their bite, then the relaxation.

  Stepping back, he stared at it, at the strings of foam along its jaws. His hand trembled slightly as he holstered the gun. If not for those leather jackboots, that dying bite would have penetrated moccasins, broken the skin, condemned him to a dreadful death.