Sundance 3

by John Benteen

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  The big strike had hit the Dakota Territory and Sundance found himself hip-deep in the action. A money-hungry head of a band of buffalo hunters swore he would grab the lion’s share of the loot. Before Sundance faced him in a showdown, he would tangle with General George A. Custer, a kill-crazy Sioux medicine man and Lucille, the beautiful, hot-blooded boss of the Hills’ wildest saloon.

  DAKOTA TERRITORY

  SUNDANCE 3

  By John Benteen

  First Published in 1972 by Leisure Books

  Copyright © 1972, 2014 by Benjamin L. Haas

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: March 2014

  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.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2013 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  Sundance smelled Wichita before he saw it.

  Approaching from the west, he rode full into the prairie east wind, at this time of year a furnace blast. And on the wind was the scent of death, decay, a reek that turned the stomach, compounded of rotting flesh and fat and hide.

  Eagle, the big appaloosa stallion, snorted as the stench hit his nostrils. He jibbed, but Sundance touched him with moccasined heels, and the spotted horse went on. They topped a rise, and the town, its railroad, and its cattle-shipping pens along the Arkansas River lay spread out before him.

  Black eyes narrowed in a disgusted frown, and he pulled his red neckerchief up to shield the nostrils of a hawk like nose from the smell. In his early thirties, he had the face of a Plains Indian—Cheyenne or Sioux—and the skin: a dull copper the color of an old, much-handled penny. But the long hair that spilled from beneath a battered sombrero down to broad shoulders clad in a beaded, fringed, buckskin shirt was, in startling contrast, bright yellow. The skin color was a legacy from his Cheyenne mother, the hair from his father, who had been born in England. He himself had been born in a Cheyenne village near the Yellowstone.

  Presently he touched the stallion—which he had picked up from the Nez Percés—with his heels again and rode on down the hill, sitting the big Mexican saddle in the Indian style, every motion one with that of the horse. A big man, he stood well over six feet, and he weighed nearly two hundred pounds, without an ounce of fat. Below the beautifully worked leather shirt, he wore brown denim pants and elk hide moccasins. A Colt single-action was belted on his right thigh, holster tied down; behind it rode a Bowie in a beaded sheath, its blade a full fourteen inches long, its handle especially made for fighting. On his other thigh—where, if he had been a two-gun man, there would have been another pistol—a sheathed hatchet dangled from his belt. It had a straight handle, for easy throwing, and he could hit what he wanted to at sixty feet with it. In a saddle scabbard was a Winchester carbine, its stock well worn with use.

  A lot of weapons, but there were more behind his saddle, in two big buffalo-hide bags, lashed there with his bedroll. He had use for all of them; he was a professional fighting man and they were his stock in trade. He had come to Wichita not to fight, however, but to gamble, for he needed money, a lot of it in a hurry, and now that the Texas trail herds were coming in, this was where the money was.

  He could see them, south of the Arkansas, scattered out across the prairie—thousands of cattle waiting their turn to be loaded in the cars. Trailed up from San Antonio across the Red River and through the Indian Nations, the lean, long-horned brutes were no wilder than the cowboys who held them in check. Looking at them, Sundance’s mouth twisted. There were too many of them; they were competing with the buffalo. Just as it seemed that the West, enormous as it was, still lacked room for both red and white men to live together, so too was it with the longhorns and the great, humped, shaggy wild cattle that were the mainstay of the Indians. As things were shaping up, one or the other had to go. And that explained the awful stench polluting the clean prairie wind.

  Entering town at a high lope, he saw them near the shipping pens, the great piles of buffalo hides brought in by the hunters. Mountains of them, each representing an animal slaughtered and, once flayed, left to rot, thousands of pounds of good meat wasted, food only for coyotes, wolves and vultures. Sundance fought down a growing fury at the sight and smell. Most of his life he had lived with Indians, and it was bred into him as deeply as the color of his skin that meat was life, and neither should be wasted. But to white men, money was life, and buffalo hides were money.

  Past the pile of skins, was a building, a long, low, adobe structure with a sign: HORNE HIDE & CATTLE CO. After that, the smell vanished, and he pulled down the neckerchief. Entering Douglas Street, he slowed the stallion. He began to feel better. Despite his contempt for money, he had to have some, and there was no doubt that it was here for the taking.

  Wichita swarmed, boomed. Cowboys were everywhere, and soldiers; sodbusters, too; and settlers brought out by the railroad. Honky-tonk music jangled from a dozen saloons—gambling halls and deadfalls that never closed—mingled with the high-pitched laughter of whores and percentage girls. Yes, Sundance thought; the smell of money was as strong as the smell of bison hides.

  He went first to a hotel, the Riverside. The clerk told him that every room was full. Sundance slipped the clerk ten dollars extra and got a fine one on the second floor. After he had put Eagle in the livery corral himself—warning the hostler that the stallion was a one-man horse and pitching hay to it—he lugged his gear upstairs.

  In the room, he stripped and washed, his red body rippling with muscle and crisscrossed with scars. The two worst ones were on his chest, right and left, where, when a youth, his flesh had been cut and rawhide thongs slipped beneath the skin. That had been at the Sun Dance, the great sacred ceremony of the Plains Tribes, and he, still in his teens, had danced all day and night, with heavy buffalo skulls trailing behind him at the end of rawhide ropes, until at last his flesh had torn and set him free. But he bore the marks, too, of arrows and bullets, scars acquired over long years of roaming from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast, fighting wherever it was profitable.

  When he was clean, he dressed again. Then, sitting on the bed, he took out a tobacco pouch, cigarette papers, and rolled a smoke. After it was lit, he counted his money: his whole capital was two hundred dollars. Well, it would have to do. He stashed the double-eagles in a buckskin poke, then picked up his bedroll, opened it, and took out what it contained.

  First, a Cheyenne war bonnet, resplendent with eagle feathers, beadwork and ermine. Each feather represented a coup Sundance had counted in his youth in war against the Crows, Piegans, Assiniboines or Shoshones, horse-stealing, or killing dangerous game. He shook the bonnet out, and the feathers rustled, gleamed. Then he folded it, laid it aside.

  He picked up a long, cylindrical parfleche pannier. Unstrapping it, he took from it first a bow, short, curved, of prime juniper wood reinforced with sinew wrappings and tipped with horn. He checked its stave for splits, found none, ran his hand over the string made of buffalo bull shoulder tendon. It was all right. Sundance laid the bow aside, took the quiver from the bag.

  Made of panther skin, tail still attached, it held three dozen arrows. Fletched with buzzard quills, they were long and straight, brightly painted, and bearing the blood grooves i
n the old style. Those grooves extended up into their sharp, flint heads, cruelly barbed, lashed on with sinew. Most Indians now used arrowheads of iron, but stone points made a deeper, more dangerous wound, packed more stopping power. That was important to Sundance, and he paid a premium to the older arrow makers of the Cheyennes for such points; when he could not get them, he chipped them himself. Using the short bow, he could drive one of these shafts clean through a running buffalo at ten yards, or hit what he aimed at up to four hundred.

  He took time to check each shaft for warp and split; all were perfect. Then he laid the quiver aside, picked up the other pannier. This was round, over two feet in diameter. He unlaced it, took out the shield.

  First he had steamed juniper into a circle. Then that had been covered with the iron-hard shoulder hide of a buffalo bull, next grass padding, and then a topping of antelope hide, painted with a Thunderbird. The shield had a loop to fit the biceps of the left arm, and it would turn an arrow or a musket ball, though it was useless against the higher-powered ammunition everyone used now. But that was not the point. The point was that it was sacred, big medicine, and if properly used and honored, would protect its bearer in combat even against a cannon, not through strength, but through magic. The white part of Sundance knew there was no basis for that belief; the red part of him knew how much he had come through unscathed with that shield on his arm. He was careful of it.

  He held it up, and when he did so, the six scalps fastened to it dangled. Three of them were coal black, the coarse hair of Indians. But the other three were silkier, one red, one brown, and one as yellow as Sundance’s own. They were nearly twelve years old now, and though he had killed many men since, they were the last scalps he had taken. But these he never looked at without satisfaction.

  The panniers held other things, too: his medicine bundle, his pipe, spare ammunition for his guns. But those he let go for now, content that his weapons were in order. Carefully, he repacked everything. Then he ground out his cigarette, picked up the pouch of gold, and went out to see the town.

  Six hours later, in the gambling hall called the Gold Rooms, Sundance, with four thousand dollars in double eagles stacked in front of him, looked at the man across the table. “All right, Chessman,” he said, “it’s up to you.”

  There was no one else in the poker game. But a crowd had gathered around the table, sensing the imminence of a showdown. The man opposite Sundance looked at his cards. In his late thirties, face burned by sun almost as red as Sundance’s own, he wore a big, ten-gallon hat tipped back on his shag of silver-threaded dark hair. A neckerchief covered most of the front of his double-breasted woolen shirt, and his legs were clad in fringed leather shotgun chaps. Big spurs jingled on his high-heeled boots, and he wore two guns crisscrossed around his middle. He was as tall as Sundance and bulkier through the shoulders and chest, and trail boss that he was, three months of driving cattle had not left any fat on him, either.

  He was a little drunk. He took the cigarette from his mouth, knocked back a shot of liquor. Then he counted double eagles. He shoved them forward and said, “Five hundred to you, half-breed.”

  Sundance said mildly, “My name is Sundance. Jim Sundance, in case you’ve forgotten. Your five hundred and another five.” He put in coin.

  A sigh went up around the table as men looked at the huge stack of gold in its center. “Boss,” one of Chessman’s cowboys behind him said warningly. That single syllable told Sundance something he had guessed at but had not known until now. This was not Chessman’s money he was playing with; the proceeds from the sale of a herd, it belonged to the cattle’s owners back in Texas. Chessman, a professional drover, was not one of those.

  But that couldn’t be helped now. Sundance waited tensely. Then Chessman snorted. “That five and a thousand more.”

  “Goddammit, Boss,” the cowboy said.

  “Shut up,” said Chessman. “Well, half-breed?”

  Sundance had a notion that he did not want this to go farther. There was plenty of other money in Wichita, and he had a stake now. “Just call,” he said, and took some time counting out the stacks. He shoved them in. “Let’s see it.”

  Chessman grinned. “Four whores.” He slapped down his cards, and Sundance looked at all the queens.

  “No good,” Sundance said, and laid down four kings.

  There was total silence in the room; even the other games—faro, chuck-a-luck, mustang—had stopped for the moment. Chessman stared at Sundance’s cards, and his face turned pale beneath the tan. “Why, you lousy blanket-back,” he rasped.

  Sundance said, quietly: “Careful.”

  “All right!” Chessman snapped. “You win. Deal the goddamned cards.” He turned to the impassive houseman.

  “No,” Sundance said. “Game’s over. I’m through.”

  Now Chessman’s face was dull red. “Through? Hell, you can’t quit when you’re seven thousand into me!”

  “We’ll try it again tomorrow maybe,” Sundance said, “when your luck has changed.”

  “Tomorrow, hell! I aim to get even tonight!”

  “I said I’m through.” Sundance reached out to rake in the pot.

  Chessman’s chair scraped back. “I’ll be damned! We’ll play ’til I’ve had a fair shake!”

  “Five hours is a fair shake,” Sundance said. His hands were absolutely still in the middle of the table, big, scarred.

  “I’ll play twenty-five, if that’s what it takes—!”

  “No,” said Sundance. “Not with me.”

  Chessman stared at him. Then he slowly got to his feet. Without turning his head, he said, “Harvey. Wes. Back me.” Then he went on. “Stack your money, half-breed, and buckle down.”

  Sundance kept his hands where they were, turned to the house dealer. “I’m gonna need a bag to tote this.”

  Chessman made a strangled sound. “Why, you blasted gut-eater!” His right hand moved.

  Two things happened simultaneously: Sundance’s left hand flipped up, spraying a shower of double eagles full in the face of Chessman and the two cowboys behind him. His right hand did something else as the men dodged back. Nobody saw what it was, but he leaned forward across the table with a Colt .44 in his hand, hammer eared back, its bore menacing. “Chessman,” he said softly, “don’t finish reaching.”

  Chessman stared at that gun. His mouth worked. But slowly, his hand came away from his own pistol’s butt. “Harvey, Wes,” he murmured. “Stand fast.”

  “Smart advice.” Then, to the dealer, without turning his head. “Get me that bag.”

  The man swallowed audibly. “Yes, sir!” He scrambled up.

  Sundance slid back his chair slowly, until his back was against the wall. His revolver never wavered. The houseman came back with a canvas bag. Sundance said, “Pick up the money on the floor, put it in, then put in my stake. Keep out twenty for yourself.”

  The houseman nodded. Chessman was like a statue, his pale green eyes glittering. “This ain’t over yet,” he whispered.

  “It will be,” Sundance said, “if you speak again.”

  Then the big bag of gold was before him. He rose slowly. “Now,” he said to the dealer, “take their guns.”

  The man hesitated. Sundance repeated the order. The man reluctantly moved behind Chessman and his two cowboys. When he had pulled their Colts from holster, Sundance ordered: “Put ’em in this bag.”

  The dealer did so. That made the bag very heavy, filled it to the brim. “Better,” Sundance said. He slid around the table, gun still trained. “Next time, Chessman, don’t play if you can’t afford to quit.” He crossed the room, edged along the bar toward the front door. Nobody moved. Sundance backed through; then he was out on the street.

  He took the Texans’ Colts from the bag, threw them down the street. He stared at the crowd that had surged to the door of the Gold Rooms. “Everybody stand fast,” he said. Nobody moved. Then he turned, strode down Douglas Street, gun in one hand, bag in the other. He went not toward hi
s hotel, but toward the railroad station.

  Nobody followed him, though people looked at him curiously. Wichita was a town where you could see anything.

  The reek of rotting buffalo hides was thick around the boxlike little station; the telegrapher dozed in his chair. Sundance entered and the man came awake, squawked as he saw the drawn gun.

  “Ease off,” Sundance said. “No holdup.” He clunked down the bag of coins. “I want to store this in your safe until tomorrow morning. I’ll have a receipt, if you please.”

  The man’s hand shook as he worked the combination, put away the gold, wrote out the receipt. Sundance pocketed it. “I’ll pick it up in the morning when the bank’s open.” He slid his Colt in leather, turned, went out.

  And that, he thought, was that. Seven thousand profit clear for an evening’s work, and tomorrow he’d send most of it on to Washington. He halted on the platform, looking at the lights of Wichita, and his face was hard. But by now Chessman and his cowboys would have their guns, and Texans didn’t give up when they had a grudge. He shrugged. He was not a man who sought out trouble; trouble was his business, and he got enough of it as it was. But he did not sidestep it, either. If the Texans wanted to try to take him, that was their worry.

  For himself, he’d put in a long night of hard work and total abstinence. He was due some relaxation. He’d walk across the bridge into Delano—the real hell’s broth over the river from Wichita—have the two drinks that were his limit, watch the action, size up the women. It had been a long time since he’d had a woman, red or white, but he did not think it likely he’d find one in Wichita or Delano that he wanted. His taste did not run to the painted sluts who catered to the Texas trail hands.

  He paid the toll and crossed the bridge, drifting like a shadow, careful to step wide around the drunken cowboys who thronged the streets here, lurching in and out of saloons and brothels. He found a bar that looked interesting, entered, edged through the crowd until he located an empty table, sat down at it with his back against the wall. “Bring me two drinks,” he told the waiter. “The best bourbon in the house. If I try to order another one after those, don’t serve me. More than two, I might try to take this place apart.”