Sundance 3

by John Benteen

  Sundance fought down his melancholy and his doubts. For what lay ahead, doubts were bad medicine. He kneed Eagle and rode to join the other chiefs.

  They covered the distance between the Dakota village and the valley of slaughter at a measured gait, lest they arrive too early. Scouts went on ahead, looking for any patrols the Hornes might have sent out to watch their flanks. Apparently, though, the men from Wichita put their whole trust in the Gatling gun and the hundred riflemen in the wagon train, for none was encountered.

  The sun went down; a sickle moon came up; the plains were bathed in feeble silver. An unusual silence fell upon them. There was only the occasional bellow of a buffalo, and only a few coyotes or wolves yapped or howled. Sundance thought he knew the reason. The slaughter yesterday had frightened the buffalo off this range; and all the wolves and coyotes for miles around would be gathered for a feast of prairie beef—good meat that should have gone to fill the bellies of hungry Sioux instead of scavengers.

  Thinking of that waste, Sundance felt a cold, remorseless hatred, and his hand caressed his knife and axe. The Hornes. He wanted nothing more than to come face to face with them. The Indian part of him was wholly in ascendance then, and there was no mercy in him for them.

  He had been right about the wolves and coyotes. Gall was the first to pull up his horse. “Listen.”

  Though it came from miles away, it could still be clearly heard—a hideous, blood-chilling uproar of growls and snarls and howling. Awesome in its intensity, that was the sound of hundreds of animals fighting over the richest feast they had ever known. Sundance nodded. “It’s good. It’ll drown out any sound we make. Come on.”

  Now, according to plan, the war party fanned out, riding wide on either flank, moving into position to encircle the valley. Accompanied by a few Dog Soldiers, Sundance, Gall, Crazy Horse and Rain-in-the-Face rode straight ahead. The howling and snapping rose to crescendo. Then suddenly it was overridden by another sound—the harsh, steady chatter of the Gatling gun. And all at once the air was full of howls of pain and the ki-yiing of wounded animals.

  Sundance reined in Eagle, cursing softly. This was something he’d not counted on. All that noise had kept the camp awake; now they were using the machine gun to rake the carcasses and frighten away or kill the scavengers. That meant that everyone in the outfit would be wide awake, especially the man on the gun. It also meant that the volume of noise which might have masked their movements would be considerably less.

  But there was no help for that; there could be no waiting. Everything was in motion, dawn was coming; and the battle must be fought by then.

  Another mile, and he pulled up Eagle in the bottom of a draw. The Gatling gun had done its work; save for scattered yapping and the whimpering of wounded animals, the night was silent—too much so for Sundance’s taste. Wordlessly, he and the others dismounted, turning over their horses to the Dog Soldiers who had accompanied them. Then they squatted, patiently waiting for the Sioux cavalry to encircle the valley.

  A half hour passed, and no one spoke. Sundance squinted at the moon, the stars, got to his feet. He shifted the bow and quiver on his shoulders so it would ride more easily. Peeling off his war bonnet, he left it with the horses. The three others followed suit.

  In the starlight, they seemed to be wearing masks, for they had painted their faces with charcoal, and Sundance had rubbed it into his blond hair until it was as dark as any Dakota’s.

  “Hoka-hey,” Sundance said; and they moved out.

  On foot and soundlessly they edged forward, a few dozen yards apart, bent low, taking advantage of every bit of cover. Ahead, the ground swelled in the high ridge which formed one long wall of the valley in which the buffalo had been slaughtered. On that ridge’s crest, at its highest point, was the gun, mounted to command the valley and the wagon train and the other valley wall beyond, as well as the prairie across which Sundance and the other three now scuttled. There would be rifle pits all around the gun, with guards; and other sentries along the ridge and on the one opposite. And now, thanks to the wolves and coyotes, they would all be awake, alert.

  Sundance moved along by himself, headed for the highest ground. Not even the arrows in his quiver rattled; they had been stuffed tight with cloth and hide to insure against even that much sound. His gun was on his hip, tied down, his bow over his shoulder, but what he carried now was the long-bladed Bowie in one hand, the hatchet in the other: silent weapons.

  The moonlight made a tricky checkerboard of silver and shadow. Sundance slowed; now it was absolutely necessary to stay out of the light where he could be seen by guards watching the forward slope. Crazy Horse, Gall, and Rain-in-the-Face had vanished. Sundance dodged or crawled from shadow to shadow, not hurriedly, always taking time and with infinite patience.

  Now he was where the ground lifted, the slope rising above him for a good four hundred yards. Except for tufts of sage and grass, that quarter of a mile of uplift was almost devoid of cover—surely not enough to hide a man. But in this moment, Sundance was not a man. He was as much a prairie animal as any wolf or rattlesnake, and that was how he went up the hill, slowly, on his belly or hands and knees, always in blackness.

  Then he tensed. From somewhere to his left, midway up the slope, there was a sound: rock clicked against rock.

  Sundance fell flat behind a clump of sage, hugging the ground, moving not a muscle.

  A voice came from the ridge crest, soft, low: “Leroy.”

  “Yeah?” Leroy Horne’s reply was irritable.

  “Leroy ... I think I saw somethin’ move down there.”

  Silence for a moment. Then Leroy again: “I don’t see nothin’.”

  “Damn it, I coulda swore—”

  “Hell, those shadows play tricks.”

  “I know, but I saw—” Sundance could see him now, a man in a rifle pit on the forward slope. Moonlight fell on him, revealing only sombreroed head and shoulders. “I heard somethin’, too.”

  Leroy grunted. “Likely only another Goddamn coyote.” He paused. “What the hell, we got plenty of ammo. Git your head down. I’ll rake the hill.”

  “Good!” The head and shoulders disappeared. Now Sundance could see a blot on the ridge above: the gun behind a barricade of earth and rocks, and men moving about it. They turned its short thick barrel, depressed it.

  “All right, Thad. Here she comes!”

  Hard on the heels of the words, the Gatling gun came to life, multiple muzzles blazing in the darkness as Leroy turned the crank. Sundance sucked in breath, pressed closer to the ground, heels flat, head turned to present a smaller target. He heard Leroy laughing with delight as the gun traversed, raking the hill, beginning far to the left, bullets screaming over or walking along the ground. Lead whined in a deadly hail down the slope, and the gun’s bores swung slowly, inexorably, in Sundance’s direction.

  Then slugs chopped the sage only a fraction of an inch above his skull; the savage burr of bullets was like the snarling of an animal or the quick ripping of cloth. Lead chunked into the ground, screamed off rocks. Sundance bit his lip and held his breath, exerting all his will power to keep from moving, breaking, running. He had never been under such terrible fire before.

  And then, like a traveling storm, it passed, as Leroy Horne turned the gun farther to the right. Fire blazed from the Gatling on the ridge crest for a moment more, bullets ricocheted off the slope. Suddenly the shooting ceased; Sundance’s ears heard a dry click.

  “That magazine’s gone! Thad! Help me slip in another. This bum arm of mine—”

  That was when Sundance charged.

  He was on his feet in a quick, lithe motion, running up the slope, bent low, knife in one hand, axe in the other. He heard a muffled exclamation from the man in the rifle pit; then he was on that guard. The man called Thad came up out of the hole, staring at the shadow that materialized in front of him. Eyes widened, mouth opened wide. He raised his gun.

  Sundance threw the axe.

  The sound it m
ade striking Horne was not a pretty one. Thad fell back, limp, and Sundance dodged close by the body, reached out, wrenched free a blade sunk deep in bone. Then he ran on, and now he knew the others were charging, too. He caught a glimpse of Rain-in-the-Face far out to his right pausing to draw his bow, heard another guard scream as the arrow went home.

  Then everything happened at once. Leroy Horne, up there on the ridge, not fifty feet away, made a startled sound. “Thad, Goddammit!” All at once the Gatling gun flared to life again. Its muzzles seemed pointed straight at Sundance; he was staring into a circular pattern of winking flame as he scrambled up the last steep rise. Lead whined past him, and in another second Horne would traverse the gun and surely cut him in two—

  He threw himself down, under the very muzzles of the gun. Its slamming in his ears deafened him, its barrel-blast almost singed his hair. Bullets screamed past him furiously, and then he rolled aside and was on his feet again and made one last lunge.

  The man named Thad came forward to meet him, a Colt in hand.

  “Christ, Leroy!” he yelled. “Injuns!”

  Those were the last words he would ever form. Sundance’s left hand, holding the axe, knocked the gun aside. Then he threw the knife, hard, underhanded, from his right.

  Thad made a strange, gurgling sound. He backed a step, gun sagging, his other hand clutching at the Bowie’s hilt protruding from just below his breastbone. There was no time to wait for him to die. Sundance swung the axe once, wrenched it free, and pivoted.

  Leroy stood behind the breech of the Gatling gun, face limned in moonlight. His right arm, in a sling, was useless, but his left clutched the crank of the weapon. Then his astonishment broke. He jerked the gun around, centered its many muzzles on Sundance’s belly, and turned the crank. The Gatling gun spewed flame and lead.

  Sundance threw himself sideways. Fire raked along his flank, the muzzle-blast searing skin and flesh. Leroy’s eyes shone wildly in the moonlight, his bared teeth gleamed. One-handed, he sought again to turn the gun. But then Sundance threw his body over the scalding barrel and knocked it down, and Leroy swore and backed away, and now his left hand flashed down for his Colt. “You red nigger—”

  Sundance did not even feel the burn across his belly. He jerked up and charged, head down. His skull caught Leroy in the stomach, and Leroy staggered back and went down. At the same moment, farther along the ridge crest, there was an unearthly scream of agony. Sundance sprawled across Leroy, his weight blocking the man’s draw. He stared straight into Leroy’s wide, terrified, doomed eyes. Then he raised the hatchet high again and brought it down hard, and rolled away.

  On his knees, he was behind the Gatling gun. Behind him, he heard Leroy’s feet rattle stone and soil as they kicked out once, twice, then stilled. Down below, in the circled wagons, there was shouting. Sundance seized the weapon’s hand crank and, leaning on it, hoisted himself erect. His whole flank was blistered from the muzzle-blast he’d taken, and he felt a warm trickle of blood from where one round had sliced his skin, but he ignored that. The gravity feed was still clipped into the Gatling’s barrel. Sundance heaved at the trail of the carriage, turned the gun, seated between two big ammunition boxes on its caisson.

  He had seen this gun in operation once: Sherman himself had called him to Fort Leavenworth on the Kansas border, desperately in need of advice about an obscure tribe called the Modocs, locked in a ferocious war with the Army in the lava beds of northern California. With an eye toward the fact that Sundance would spread the word among the tribes, he had made sure that Sundance saw how effective this weapon was. What he did not realize was that Sundance missed no detail of how the gun was operated, watching closely with a professional’s lust for information about any new and more effective weapon. And Sundance still remembered. His hand went straight for the latch that freed the weapon to elevate and depress manually, and then he dropped the barrel.

  For a moment he held his fire. Down there at a rifle pit on the slope toward the wagon train, two men struggled. Then one cried out, sagged, clutching at his throat. The other scrambled up the hill toward Sundance, clutching a bloody knife. “Washtai!” Crazy Horse panted. “That’s all of them.” Other movement in the darkness; then Gall and Rain-in-the-Face were there. Gall made a delighted sound. “We’ve done it! We’ve got the gun!”

  “Yes,” Sundance said. He lined the barrel, seized another magazine from the boxes on the carriage. Down at the wagon train, all hell had broken loose. In the moonlight, Sundance saw armed men leap across the tongues of the circled wagons. Spreading out in a skirmish line, they ran toward the hill, led by a blocky, bearlike figure.

  “Leroy!” Horne shouted. “Leroy, for God’s sake, what’s going on?”

  Sundance grinned. Then he began to turn the crank.

  The Gatling gun hosed bullets down the hill toward that skirmish line. Men fell. Horne’s voice rang across the valley as he threw himself to the ground. “Leroy, what—?”

  Sundance stopped shooting. He cupped hands to his mouth, shouted back: “It’s not Leroy, Horne! It’s Sundance! Leroy’s dead, and I’ve got the gun! I told you not to come to Dakota Territory!”

  “Sundance—” Horne’s voice was a strangled cry of rage.

  “God damn you—!” He sprang to his feet. “Back to the wagons!” he shouted. “Take cover! It’s Injuns! They’ve got the Gatling gun!”

  The remnant of the skirmish line turned, fell back, shooting. Sundance lined the gun again, worked the crank. Horne was the last to dodge behind the wagons, firing steadily as he retreated, oblivious to the bullets that whined around him, dropping men on either side. Give him this, Sundance thought: he had guts.

  What was left of them were under cover. At least fifteen bodies lay sprawled on the ground outside the wagon-corral, dark shapeless blots in moonlight. But at least eighty riflemen still holed up behind those big wagons, and they threw a withering fire up the hill. Lead chunked into the wooden ammunition boxes on the carriage, sang overhead, plowed into the dirt, whined off the carriage tires.

  “The signal!” Sundance rasped. He lined the gun, turned the crank furiously, spraying bullets into the wagon train. As hundreds of slugs laced into the wagons and between and under them, the shooting down there tapered off. Beside him, Crazy Horse jerked a piece of dried antelope skin from his breech-clout. It had been soaked in buffalo fat; now he slid an arrow from his quiver, wrapped the hide around its point, held it in the Gatling gun’s muzzle-blast. It burst into flame, and the Sioux chief nocked the arrow to his bowstring. He drew the bow, pointed straight up, and loosed the shaft.

  The flaming arrow soared nearly four hundred yards into the sky. It seemed to poise there, against the dark, velvet blue, like a star; and then, a meteor, fell in an arc, burning out as it reached the ground.

  From behind Sundance, hoofs thundered. Up the ridge came fifty riders, with Red Cloud in the lead. At the same instant, the valley rim opposite came alive with Indians, and more swung down the valley from the north, entered it from the south. Sundance bent low over his gun, keeping the crank turning. Red Cloud’s horsemen swept past him, fanning out, making room for Sundance to keep on firing straight into the wagon train. As quickly as one Bruce magazine was emptied, Sundance slapped in another.

  The whole thing had been planned carefully. This time there would be no typical Indian circling of the wagon train. From every quarter of the compass, the Sioux charged, bent low, hanging behind their horses’ necks, firing as they rode, and they thundered straight toward the corralled wagons. Meanwhile, Sundance used the Gatling gun to cover them; in its terrible fusillade, the white defenders were pinned down.

  The Indians were almost at the wagon train, the coordinated assault closing smoothly. In a moment more, the Sioux would be in line of fire. Sundance turned the crank twice; then ceased firing. He whirled: the Dog Soldiers were there with their horses. Eagle whinnied with the smell of battle in his nostrils.

  “Stay with this gun!” Sundance snapped to
the half dozen warriors. “Guard it with your lives!”

  The leader of the soldiers muttered assent. He and his men unwrapped the ropes from around their waists, hammered in the stakes that would hold them there until victory or death. Sundance hit Eagle’s back in a running leap, jerked his Winchester from its scabbard. Beside him, the chiefs were mounting up. Sundance gathered Eagle’s jaw bridle. “Hoka-hey!” he bellowed. “Let’s go!” Then he hooked a foot through the saddle rigging, wrapped an arm around Eagle’s neck and dropped low. Riding like that, he and the three chiefs thundered down the hill.

  When the Gatling gun ceased firing, the buffalo hunters came to life again. As the first Sioux put their horses over the wagon tongues, gunfire erupted in a thunderous burst. Horses screamed, went down; men cried out. But still the Sioux came on, and now they were inside the corral.

  Eagle’s long legs ate up distance. Crazy Horse, Gall and Rain-in-the-Face fell behind slightly, but Sundance heard their exuberant war whoops. A high-pitched, gobbling Cheyenne yell broke from his own throat. “Come on, brothers!” he howled. “It’s a good day to die!”

  Lead whined around him as Eagle neared the wagons. He held his fire: the space inside the corral was a seething mass of Sioux and whites, locked in hand-to-hand combat. Ahead, a gap between the wagons loomed. The tongue of one, run under the back axle of another, still left room for a horse to jump. Sundance touched Eagle on the neck, and Eagle soared in a mighty leap.

  Between the wagons, a human form reared up. Sundance saw the white blur of a face, wide eyes, mouth open, the muzzle of an aimed Winchester. Then Eagle’s more than half a ton slammed full into the man, and he vanished under flinty hoofs without a sound. Sundance was inside the circle of wagons. He left Eagle’s back and the appaloosa dodged back outside the circle.