by John Benteen
And it covered acres, a hundred of them, more. To go in there after Ravenal would be damned stupid—he with a Colt and five cartridges, Ravenal with a long gun and a belt full of short ones. But all right, he didn’t feel smart today. He thought of Taylor, thought of Silent Enemy and the dog, and all the dead Cheyenne warriors and the raped and murdered woman, and it all came back to Ravenal, and that white-hot hatred sizzled in him again, cauterizing all his caution, and he swung up on his horse, put it in a run, and then, hooking a heel behind the Army saddle, getting a grasp with his left hand on its mane, he swung himself down behind its neck, in position to fire under its throat, Cheyenne style, and kept on going.
He almost made it to the hayfield’s edge before the inevitable happened. From deep within the dry, tall grass, a rifle roared. Sundance’s horse grunted, fell, and the half-breed kicked loose, rolling free. He brought up in a shallow depression in the earth, just as another shot kicked dirt near his head. Then, from deep within the grass, Ravenal’s voice rang out. “All right, Sundance! Come ahead, goddamn you! You do and I’ll kill you! And bring the troopers, too! Because, by God, if I go out, I’ll take a lot of Yankee bastards with me! You understand? Those blue uniforms make damned fine targets! That I know of old!”
Sundance didn’t answer. But one thing was certain—Ravenal meant it, and to try to go in there after him, armed as he was almost surely meant death.
He lay motionless for a long minute, thinking. In the distance, he heard a bugle call. He was barely twenty yards from the grass’s edge, and—his eyes came to rest on a clump of bunch grass that grew on the rim of the slight hollow in which he sheltered.
There were half a dozen like it, making a welcome screen.
Sundance reached out and touched it. Dry, it crackled beneath his fingers. His lips curled back in a wolfish snarl. Then, with his hands, he began to dig.
As the grass moved, Ravenal sent another shot at him from within the hayfield. Sundance kept low, continued working. Within a pair of minutes, he had two of them—bunches of dry grass with fist-sized clods of heavy earth clinging to their roots. “Sundance,” Ravenal yelled, as the bugle sounded closer. “You tell ’em! You tell ’em if they come in here, I’ll kill a mess of them!”
The half-breed made no reply. He was rolling over, digging in his pocket for some matches. He brought out a block of lucifers, pried one free, snapped it on his thumbnail. When he touched the flame to a clump of grass, it caught at once, and even as fire crackled up the stems, Sundance, holding the clod, lobbed it high and hard.
He did not even look up to see the results. Instead, he ignited the second bunch, threw it after the first, a fireball arcing through the air. Only then did he dare edge high enough above the rim of the hollow to take a look.
The first fireball had fallen just short of the beginning of the hayfield, but it had landed in grass there, igniting that. The second had gone farther, landed in the hayfield itself, and from where it hit a coil of smoke rose high and suddenly, as the tall dry grass itself ignited, there was a rushing sheet of flame.
Sundance heard Ravenal’s startled shout. Desperately the man would be rushing toward that fire, trying to put it out. Sundance yanked another clod free, fired and lobbed it accurately into another quarter of the field. It caught at once, and another sheet of orange billowed up. Sundance laughed shortly, and it was not a pleasant sound. There’d be no putting it out now, and the wind was right. In a moment, that small valley would turn into an inferno, and Ravenal would either have to run or burn.
He’d seen tall-grass prairie fires before, and it was always awesome how fast they spread. Shoved by the remorseless wind that always blew across the plains, the flames could outpace a running horse. Already the hayfield burned all along its front, and sparks carried by the wind ignited patches far away. A vast roaring hell of a fire, and Ravenal would be running now, his only thought to escape it. Running with him too would be whatever game the field concealed. Prairie chickens were already taking to the air.
“Sundance!” The shout made him roll and turn. Bourke had galloped up, a troop of soldiers at his back.
Swinging down, the captain handed reins to an orderly He stared at the flaming field. “He’s in there?” he asked in awe.
“He’s in there. And I want a horse and a long gun.” Sundance scrambled to his feet. “Send the troopers out around the valley—but tell ’em to be careful. He’ll come out shooting.”
“Right!” Bourke snapped orders to his sergeant, who called up the trumpeter. The bugler turned his horse over to the half-breed, along with the Springfield and a belt of ammunition. The half-breed swung into the McClellan saddle, from that height appraised the fire, now halfway across the valley, and put the horse into a run. The troopers circled out, surrounding the hayfield, rifles ready, holding their mounts well back from the fire.
Sundance’s horse galloped east. There the valley pinched out in the bottomlands of the Platte. All the animals would run that way, and so, if he had any sense, would Ravenal, because the quartering of the wind made it the logical exit. The horse made good time through the lowland cottonwoods, and in a few minutes Sundance reined up at the valley’s mouth, dropped the lines, went into hiding in the cottonwoods.
Already, animals were emerging from the low end of the hayfield, heading instinctively toward the water. Rats and mice, kit foxes and coyotes, awkward badgers, even lobo wolves and deer that had lain hidden in that cover, bounded out. Some of them, the smaller ones especially, were on fire, and Sundance’s mouth twisted with sympathy. But many were probably rabid, and there was nothing he could do—they would have all been burnt out eventually.
Maddened, they rushed on past him, heading for the river. As the valley turned into one vast roil of flame, he let them go, watching for one quarry only. Five minutes passed, another three, as the fire leaped down the valley and suddenly Sundance began to wonder. Maybe he’d chosen the wrong spot, maybe Ravenal would head up the valley wall—
Then he saw him, the crouched figure in Confederate gray, coat smoldering, face blackened with soot. Like the coyotes, the foxes, Ravenal was headed for the river. Sundance raised the Springfield—the man was an easy target, though he had a six-gun in either hand. But before he could fire, he saw Ravenal turn his head, looking back over his shoulder in panic. Then he saw the reason why.
The wolf, although its fur was burning, was coming fast—disregarding the pain it could not feel. Sundance saw the slaver and the foam trailing from its jaws, and saw too that all it cared about was the motion ahead of it—the running man. Even as he lined the Springfield, he held his fire.
“Damn!” he heard Ravenal scream, aware of the animal rapidly overtaking him. He saw the man turn, line a six-gun, fire; but at that instant the lobo leaped and Ravenal’s shot went wide.
Then, before he could fire again, the wolf had him. Mindlessly, fur smoldering, totally rabid, it slammed into itself at Ravenal and the impact of its nearly one hundred pounds knocked the man flat on his back in the grass among the cottonwoods. Ravenal screamed again, but by then it was too late. Though he threw up an arm to shield his throat, the wolf’s jaws chopped into it, and as Ravenal tried to scramble up, the wolf found his face and throat. Fangs raked across Ravenal’s cheeks, cutting in white bone, then buried themselves in the soft tissue of the throat. Ravenal cried out and put his gun against the wolf and fired, and the animal fell over dead. Ravenal staggered to his feet, arm, face, and throat bleeding. For a moment he looked down at the dead animal in horror. Then Sundance called, “Ravenal!”
The man turned, a singed and bloody ghastliness. “Sundance?” He sleeved blood from his eyes. “Goddamn you, is it you?”
“It’s me,” Sundance said, sheltered behind the bole of a huge cottonwood.
Ravenal stood motionless. “There’s too much blood in my eyes,” he said, “for me to see you. Where are you?”
“Under cover.”
“You saw what happened?”
; “Yes.”
“The wolf was mad,” said Ravenal. “It bit me.”
“Yes,” Sundance said.
“There really isn’t any cure.”
“No,” Sundance said.
Ravenal threw his six-gun into the grass. He had already lost his rifle somewhere in his flight. He spread his arms. “God damn you, Sundance,” he said. “You ruined it all. Everything I had planned. I wanted to be the biggest man in the country of the Platte. A good Indian war would have done it, made me a fortune. I was going to build myself an empire and have Madge Benson share it with me. And now there’s nothing left ahead for me but hydrophobia. The worse way of any to die.”
“Yes,” Sundance said.
“I hate your guts, and you hate mine. But, you red bastard, I’m going to ask a favor.” He stood there as the fire consumed the rest of the field. A deer bounded past him.
“Yes,” Sundance said.
“It’s no way for a member of Hampton’s cavalry to go. I confess to everything. Silent Enemy, and all the rest. The money I put up for the reward is in the hands of the town council. You’ll get it anyway. Sundance, for God’s sake, will you—?”
“Yes,” Sundance said.
Ravenal stood motionless, arms outstretched, face a bleeding horror, white bone shining along the jaw and where the forehead had been ripped. “Then go ahead,” he said.
“All right,” Sundance said, and lined the Springfield and shot him through the heart.
Chapter Ten
Having received the message relayed through the Red Cloud Agency, the Cheyennes came in. Tall Calf, Two Moons, Little Chief, Dull Knife—or Morning Star as he was known among the tribe: they came with half a thousand warriors at their backs. They could have done to North Platte and its meager post exactly what they had done to Julesburg—burned it to the ground. Instead, after Crook had made them welcome and given presents, Sundance interpreting, the warriors camped out on the plain beyond the post. Only the chiefs came into Fort McPherson.
Captain Schulz, the surgeon, had laid the body, preserved in a watering through with an improvised cover in its bath of brine on sawbucks, where they could all see it as they filed through. Tall Calf stood looking bleakly down at it after all the rest had passed. “It’s he, all right,” he told Jim Sundance. “Silent Enemy. So—it was exactly as you guessed. Except that there was a white man in it, too.”
“The white man’s dead,” Sundance said, “and his death was not an easy one. All the mad animals have been poisoned or burnt out. The plague is over. Crook, Three-Stars, says you are welcome at McPherson or the North Platte post any time. He wants very much to talk with you about peace.”
“Well, we’ll talk. But—” Tall Calf looked at Sundance. “How can there be peace? More come every day, the white men. More Long-knives to the forts. Still, talking is better than fighting. We’ll listen to what Three-Stars has to say.”
“He asks no more than that,” Sundance said.
“But if it comes to war, remember—”
“I’m still a Dog Soldier. Yes. I won’t forget.”
“Don’t.” Tall Calf clamped a hand on his shoulder, looked into his eyes a moment, then turned away.
Behind Sundance, Crook said, “Well, will they talk?”
“They’ll talk.”
“I’ll do my best for them. I hate these violations of the treaties. But Washington—”
“Yeah,” Sundance said. “Washington.” His voice was bitter.
“Don’t sound like that. You’ve got your full reward. And a complete report’s been forwarded to the War Department. I understand that fifteen thousand isn’t much for what you’ve been through—”
“It wasn’t the money. But the money helps. It’s already on the way to buy some Congressmen.”
Crook looked at him a moment. “Jim, I wish—”
“So do. I,” Sundance answered tersely. He looked at the pickled corpse in brine. “I wish a lot of things. I—” He broke off as Bourke strode into the surgery, where the corpse had been laid out.
“Jim,” the captain said. “This has just come from Washington.” He held out a transcript of a telegram.
Sundance took it, read it, and something within him unknotted.
“From Barbara,” he said. “Barbara Colfax, Two Roads Woman. She’s had all of Washington she can take, too. She wants me to meet her in Omaha. Then we’ll come back by train to North Platte.”
Crook looked startled. “North Platte? Why here?”
“Because,” Sundance said, “she wants to join the Cheyennes, Tall Calf’s band, for the fall buffalo hunt. She wants to go back to the People for a while. And so do I.”
“Of course,” Crook murmured. “Well, I’ll be glad to see her, and—” He broke off. Sundance had turned, left the surgery and the gruesome remains of Silent Enemy. Outside, he stood with head lifted, as if testing the wind from the north, the Yellowstone, from home. Then, as Crook watched, he hurried after Tall Calf, in whose lodge he would sleep tonight.
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