Sundance 3

by John Benteen

  They looked into each other’s eyes. Single Moon’s screaming had died to a thin, awful whimpering by now. “You cannot kill me,” Lame Bear hissed between clenched teeth. “I am immortal.”

  Sundance did not answer, only used all strength, all breath, to force that knife back and higher. He could hear Lame Bear panting, feel the small spurts of hot breath in his face. He made one last, ferocious, supreme effort. Lame Bear grunted; his arm went up, and then the blades slipped free, and Sundance, with his beneath, was in position to slash first and drove his home.

  It sank into Lame Bear’s chest, hit the breast bone, slid aside. Lame Bear gagged strangely. His own knife came down, slicing the buckskin shirt, raking Sundance’s arm. Then he staggered back. Sundance struck again, lower this time, ripping up.

  Lame Bear made a gurgling sound, dropped to his knees. His knife fell. He clamped a hand over each wound and looked up at Sundance with dull, astounded eyes. Sundance, panting, lowered the Bowie.

  Lame Bear licked lips from which blood oozed. “He . . . lied,” he gasped.

  “Yes,” said Sundance.

  “He told us ... to follow . . . kill . . . you. That you could not . . . hurt us. That with his . . . lightning paint on us ... we were . . .”—Lame Bear doubled over—“safe.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sundance said. “I did not want to kill you.”

  Lame Bear did not answer. The life ran out of him, and he fell forward, sprawled.

  Sundance stood over him for two long seconds, then turned to Single Moon, still alive, whimpering thinly. Sundance looked down at the wound he had inflicted, and his mouth thinned. Nothing could be done for the man.

  Except this.

  He knelt beside Single Moon. Eyes rolled to stare at him, not fearful now, but pleading, welcoming, as he raised the knife. He brought it down, hard, straight through the jagged yellow streak that crossed Single Moon’s heart. Then he stood erect. He was panting and trembling slightly. “God damn him,” he said in English. “Goddamn that crazy son of a bitch.” After that, he looked up at the moon. Nearly full, it stared back, a pale, silver, unwinking eye. Sundance, standing in its light, head thrown back, began to sing a Sioux death song.

  He chanted it for a long time, in a minor key, there in the tortured folds of the Badlands. Then he buried them as best he could, with their weapons, in the bottom of a wash, tramping down dirt and rocks and ancient bones from overhead to entomb them. After that, he saddled his horse, strapped on his gun, and rode hard out of the Badlands and on across Dakota Territory.

  Bismarck was another town enjoying a railroad boom. Added to the steamboat traffic up the Missouri, the track had enabled settlers to swarm in, their eyes fastened on the great tableland of Dakota. Swedes, Germans, even a few Russians, they looked at that high prairie and thought of fields of waving wheat, and refugees from countries where they had no hope of ever owning land, they would do anything, risk anything, to get it.

  In the shadow of the bluffs above the river, Sundance rode into Fort Abraham Lincoln, station of the Seventh Cavalry. It took some doing, but presently he entered Post Headquarters, and after waiting in an outer office awhile, he jumped to his feet as three men entered.

  Dressed in buckskin shirts and cavalry pants and boots, there was a family resemblance among them. They were coated with dust and the one in the lead, with long, flowing yellow hair and a great yellow mustache beneath his beaked nose, halted, staring at Sundance. He slapped his boots with a riding whip. “Tom, Boston,” he said. “Hold on a minute. You, there, don’t I know you?”

  Sundance smiled faintly. “We’ve met before. My name’s Sundance.”

  George Armstrong Custer’s dusty, freckled face twisted. “Sundance. Yes. Fort Harker, down in Kansas.”

  “That’s right. I whipped your bully-boy, your Sergeant O’Malley.”

  “O’Malley’s dead. Killed by Indians.”

  “Is that a fact?” Sundance said tonelessly.

  “Your name was linked to the death.”

  Sundance smiled. “I wouldn’t know a thing about it. But it was bad medicine for O’Malley to throw in with that whiskey-peddler who tried to poison the Cheyennes and infect them with smallpox.” Then his smile went away. “General, I’ve got business with you.”

  Beneath his mustache, Custer’s lips compressed. “I don’t do business with half-breed renegades. Besides, I’m tired. My brothers and I have just been hunting with our hounds.”

  Sundance said quietly, “Sherman and Sheridan don’t think I’m a renegade. And I don’t care how tired you are. I think you’ll do business with me”—He took the letters and messages from his pocket—“when you see these.”

  Custer stared at him a moment. Then he said, “Tom, you and Boston go clean up. Meet me at my quarters later. We’ll have a drink together.” He stood silent, motionless, until they went out. Then he said, “What have you got there, Sundance?”

  Sundance glanced at the lieutenant who served as adjutant behind the desk. “Let’s go into your office and I’ll show you.”

  “Be brief.” Custer went ahead, unlocked a door. Sundance entered and Custer came behind, closed the door, put his big, non-regulation sombrero on a rack, dropped into a chair behind his desk. He propped booted feet. “All right, half-breed. What’s all that stuff?”

  Sundance grinned. “One, a message from General Sheridan. Two, a message from General Sherman.”

  Custer’s feet came down, he sat up straight. “Let me see that.”

  Sundance passed over the papers. Custer’s eyes flicked across them. Then he looked at Sundance, face pale beneath its freckles. “You. Where did you hear about my proposed announcement? Who told you?”

  “A friend of yours named Horne. Fellow you owed a lot of gambling debts to.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “A number of things. For instance, you peeled off an Army Gatling gun to him.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Maybe. The point is, General, here are direct orders from your superior officers. The first one is to make no announcement of any sort about the presence of gold in the Black Hills. The second is that you are to use every bit of force at your command to keep intruders off of Sioux land. That means all of western Dakota.”

  Custer grinned slowly and sardonically. “Too bad, half-breed. But I released word yesterday to the newspapers. No way to call it back. You’re a day late and a dollar short. Anyhow, the American public is entitled to know that a lot of good land is being wasted on a bunch of stinking Indians—land full of gold. Two days, and the headlines will be full of it, from New York to St. Louis to San Francisco. The telegraph works fast.”

  Sundance fought back the desire to smash that arrogant, smiling, handsome face. “You’ve violated a treaty obligation of the United States of America.”

  “Nothing in the treaty about not reporting the presence of gold in the Black Hills,” Custer said smoothly. “Not a word.”

  Sundance paused until he had his temper under control. He gestured to the telegrams. “All right. But the treaty requires you to keep whites off of Indian lands. And those orders command you to enforce the treaty.”

  “Of course. But they’re not formal orders; they didn’t come through channels.”

  “Formal orders are on the way.”

  “When I receive them,” Custer said casually, “I’ll take appropriate steps to carry them out. But, of course, channels are slow. It may be a while before I get them. Quite a while.”

  “Long enough, for your buddy Horne to start wiping out the buffalo and get himself established?”

  Custer’s smile lingered. “I have no connection with a man named Horne, Mr. Sundance. What he does is of no concern to me until written, signed orders from my immediate superiors arrive in the proper form through the proper routing.” He rose. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, my brothers and I had a very exciting wolf hunt up along the bluffs, but it was strenuous and dusty.”

  Sundance did not move
. “Custer, if you disregard these telegrams, I’ll do everything I can to get you busted and removed from command for insubordination. I have connections you maybe don’t know about—”

  “Oh, really? Well, I have a few myself. I’ll take that chance, Sundance. I’m not terribly worried about getting disciplined because a half-breed doesn’t like the way I run my command.”

  They looked at one another for a moment, Custer still smiling faintly and with confidence. It took all of Sundance’s self-control to keep from leaping across the desk after him. “That’s your final word?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Custer.” Sundance’s voice was low, cold, like steel on steel. “Custer, let me tell you something. You’ve just triggered the biggest Indian war this country will have ever seen. And don’t think the Sioux and Cheyennes and all the rest won’t know who’s responsible. I’ll give you one little tip. If you value that pretty yellow hair of yours, don’t ever ride west of the Missouri again.”

  Custer’s pale eyes hardened. “I will not be threatened by a man like you. One more word, Sundance, and you’re under arrest. They say you’re pretty good with your gun, and I’ve seen you use your fists. But not even you can fight the whole Seventh Cavalry single-handed. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Very clear,” Sundance said.

  “Then, good day, sir.” Custer turned away.

  Sundance stared at his back a moment. Then he wheeled, strode out. Mounting Red Cloud’s tall bay, leading the other horse, seething inside, he rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln and crossed the river to Bismarck. There he sent more telegrams, ones so fiery that the telegrapher was hesitant to send them.

  He wasted no more time in Bismarck. There was no more time to spare. Even now, Horne would be wending his way up from Kansas with his wagon train— and unless there was to be slaughter on the prairies and in the Black Hills, Sundance had to ride, hard and fast.

  He did, pushing the Indian horses to the limit. Fast and wiry as they were, neither was the equal of the big appaloosa. He took no time to hunt, hardly to eat, making his meals of wane, the rich Sioux pemmican.

  The buffalo were everywhere. Once a single giant herd had ranged from Canada to Mexico; the Overland Trail and the railroads had split it. Now, as civilization pressed out on either side of the steel tracks devouring buffalo range, the northern herd had become compressed, thousands of animals, millions, jammed into ever-smaller territory. The plains were black with them, dotted with their wallows, beaten down with their trails, littered with their droppings and their bones. The last great herd, Sundance thought, riding around and through them deftly. The last resource standing between the Indians and the poverty of the reservations, the greed of their agents, and the broken promises of a great nation.

  There was, he thought, much that could be faulted about the Indian way of life. It was a feast or famine way of living, and entire white cities could subsist on the farm land and range that it took to support one buffalo-eating Sioux. It was a way that sometimes bred a cold, casual brutality to anyone outside the great family of the tribe; almost every Indian nation called itself The People and believed itself chosen by and favorite of the Gods; anyone not of The People was not necessarily human at all and could be fair game. He had seen Indians do things that had revolted him, turned his stomach, disgusted him. Sometimes he wearied of them and fighting in their behalf, for they bickered and argued among themselves and seemed unable to unite. If, he thought, they had forgotten their rivalries and made a common front, there would still be no whites west of the Mississippi, save on Indian sufferance and with Indian permission. That was something they were coming to now, uniting—but too late, too ineffectually.

  Still, he thought determinedly, it was a way of life that must not be allowed to vanish. If white men would only pay attention to it, there was so much that they could learn from it. Among the Sioux, there were no locks, because there were no thieves; without written contracts, a man’s word must be good unto death, and liars were despised. There were, except where whites had corrupted them, no prostitutes, and no child or old person was ever neglected or left to starve. Most important, the Indians demanded no more from the land than the land could give. They took what they needed and left the rest to grow, as white men left money in a bank. But the great white tide flowing westward saw the land as something to be raped, from which everything it possessed must be wrung as quickly as possible, regardless of the damage. They slaughtered the buffalo that could have provided, with proper care, more and better meat than any breed of cattle; they dug out the mountains and fouled their streams with the tailings of their mines and the filth of their towns; they cut down the timber and plowed up the grass, with no thought for the future consuming the heritage of their own children, and their children’s children. And unless they learned from the Indians, someday they would regret it; someday they would find themselves masters of a desert, a barren land bereft of grass and trees and water; they would be living in a hell they had made for themselves.

  And so it was important for more than one reason that the Indians keep their land, at least until the whites could learn from them what people like the Sioux had themselves learned from generations of living on it: how to take a living from the West without destroying it. And if this land were to be wholly ruled by the Government of the United States, it was important, too, that promises be kept and justice done to everyone, or else that Government was a mockery.

  This time Sundance swung wide around the Badlands; by now, the Sioux would be moving out to hunt, beginning south of the White. And if Horne were coming, that was where the Indians and the buffalo hunters would collide.

  He crossed the White in darkness; dawn found him still riding, his tired horses going slower now. He wound between high bluffs, came out onto the prairie. Rolling, split occasionally by hills clad with scrubby pine or great wind-tortured buttes, it was dark with buffalo. Sundance followed a long ridge, careful to keep behind its crest, not skyline himself.

  Then he reined in hard.

  At this distance, the sound was not much louder than the clicking of a telegraph key, and with the same staccato rapidity. It came from far to the west, maybe three miles, four. Sundance sat the horse rigidly, motionless, for a long minute, his face warping into a mask of savagery. He cursed softly. Then he loosened his Winchester in its saddle scabbard and turned the horse west and rode on slowly, cautiously, leading the extra mount.

  An hour later, after he had tied both animals and crept up a sandy ridge, he saw a sight that sickened him and etched itself on his mind forever.

  The valley below stretched north and south, wide at the upper end, narrower at the lower, like a funnel, and on a knoll down there where it narrowed they had set up the gun. Then it had been like an Indian hunt, riders circling out until they found the herd, chasing it on horseback, stampeding it. A thousand buffalo, maybe more, made thunder that shook the ground as they lumbered into the wide north end of the valley, trying to escape the whooping, shouting white men, at least a hundred of them, who drove them on with rifle fire. Once in the valley, they followed it like cattle in a chute—straight into the brutal, hammering, unending fire of the Gatling gun on the hill above. And at the valley’s lower end, there was a scene of chaos unlike anything Sundance had ever witnessed before.

  As the frightened animals thundered through the bottleneck, the automatic weapon mowed them down like wheat before a scythe. Sundance saw great bulls rear and paw and drop, cows plow forward, digging horns into the dirt, calves fall. Already the Gatling gun had plugged the valley with their carcasses, a wall, a barrier of dead buffalo. The rest, coming at full speed, tried to halt, turn, but the tail of the herd slammed into them. They piled up on the corpses of their fellows, tried to scramble over, and fell before the hosing stream of lead. And as the mountain of carcasses increased in size, the stampeding herd hit it and began to mill, and thus made even easier targets. The air was hideous with the bawling, bellowing and moaning of the liv
ing and the wounded, and through it all, harsh and merciless, sounded the chatter of the gun, its position on the knoll almost obscured now by the cloud of white smoke that swirled around it.

  Watching from behind a clump of sage, Sundance saw a huge old bull hit the pile of slaughtered animals, rebound, then as if sensing from where the bullets came, turn toward the knoll, put down his head and charge. He made ten feet before a stream of lead chopped him down; immediately he was trampled by the others behind him. At the same time, a yearling calf went under, unhit by lead, but smothered in the press of bodies. Sundance thought he heard its agonized blat before great hooves smashed it.

  The slaughter seemed to go on forever, the confused animals milling in the plugged valley like ants from a kicked-over hill. Some did manage to turn, charge out the north end; Sundance felt like cheering for those who made it past the hunters’ Winchesters and Sharps. Not many did, though—only a trickle compared to the dark, shaggy stream that had entered that valley of death.

  And then, abruptly, the killing stopped. Maybe the gun had overheated and must have time to cool. Maybe it was because there was already two days hard work for a hundred skinners. But suddenly the Gatling gun was silent; and now there was nothing but the moaning, bawling of the wounded. The hunters fell back, let the rest of the herd, what there was of it, lumber north, through the gap and out onto the plains. Then a cry drifted across the valley: “All right! Bring up the wagons!”

  Sundance’s mouth was a thin gash. Well, he had made it back from Bismarck just in time. By tomorrow or the next day, enough meat to feed the whole Oglala tribe would be lying out there rotting, and the sky would be black with vultures overhead and the ground swarming with wolves, coyotes, and kit foxes. It was a sight that would enrage any Indian, a scene of slaughter unmatched even in the days before the coming of the horse, when hunters on foot had driven herds over cliffs. Even then, the meat had been saved: this would be wasted. And the Indians had committed such mass slaughter only rarely; Horne and his Gatling gun would do it every day. And if they got away with it, the idea would spread; there would be others, not only here in Dakota Territory, but on the ranges of Montana and northern Wyoming. At such a rate, it would not be long before nothing was left of the great northern herd but its bones.