by John Benteen
It hadn’t worked out that way, for all his efforts on behalf of both sides. Now the Indians had lost, were on reservations, poverty-stricken and exploited. Their lot could only be eased by Congress, the government in Washington—and there were powerful interests with plenty of money back there working against the Indians. So he’d hired a topnotch lobbyist of his own to work for them, and he earned the money to pay that man by hiring out his gun …
He had a woman, too, Barbara Colfax, a white woman who had lived with him among the Cheyennes, shared his love for the Indian way of life, his rage at the injustices they had suffered. She was in Washington as well, adding her efforts to those of the lobbyist, and though he loved her, it had been months since he had held her in his arms. So he was acutely aware of the clever hands of the girl who called herself Kelly Lacey as they traveled up and down his body, massaging, kneading, stroking ...
“A girl doesn’t see many men like you in a stinking dump like this,” she went on.
“That works two ways,” he said. “You’re as out of place as a saddle on a buffalo. How come you’re in Bootstrap?”
Kelly Lacey laughed. “How come anybody’s anywhere? I knew Ron MacLaurin in California. When he built this town, he wrote me all sorts of wild lies about what a fortune I could make here. They were fixing to run me out of Frisco anyhow, so what the hell? I came here, brought some girls, hired some others, took a half interest in the Bootstrap Bar, and I get along. But I’m like Ron, like everybody. Waiting for somebody to find the Lost Pistol and make things really boom. Then I’ll be in on the ground floor. It’s worth a gamble, anyhow. If they do find that mine, things will blow wide open, I’ll make a fortune quick ... and then maybe I’ll turn respectable again.”
“Which you were, one time?”
“Roll over,” she said.
Sundance did, one hand clasping the Colt he’d laid on the bed before submitting to the massage. He had no intention of being caught anywhere naked and unarmed.
She looked down at him, smiling. “Yeah, I was respectable once. About a hundred years ago, it seems. Where, and how I wound up like this ... Well, that’s none of your affair, big man. Let’s just say I’m a long way from where I started out.” She straightened up, drying her hands on a towel. “That ought to do it. Want a drink?”
“Yeah.”
She went to a table, poured whiskey in two glasses, handed him one, sat down on the bed by him, as unashamed at seeing his nakedness and as natural as he was lying there naked before her. “You hired out to catch the sniper,” she said. “MacLaurin told me. In fact, I put up some of the extra money. I was a little doubtful at the time. Now I think it’s a good investment. If a man like you can’t, nobody can.”
Sundance sipped the whiskey.
“You’d better,” she went on, “or I’ll go broke. A lot of my business comes from the ranches west of here. The cowhands won’t even ride in any more. Afraid of that bastard dropping them with a fifty caliber bullet from so far out they can’t even see him. This town’s dying on the vine. Way things are going, I’ll never make my pile, I’ll be in this racket until the day I die.”
Sundance said, “A woman like you’ll hear things no man ever would. You got any ideas?”
Kelly looked at him a moment, sipping her own drink. “Yeah, I’ve got some ideas. But —” she smiled faintly, “they’re not all about the sniper. And the ones I’ve got about him can wait. Right now, I don’t feel like the others can.” Her eyes ranged up and down his body, and she put out a hand and touched him.
Sundance drained his glass and grinned.
The massage had revived him, and he could wait, too—for the talk. Arising from the bed, gun still in hand, he went to the door, made sure it was locked. When he turned, Kelly had already shed the dress. There had been, as Sundance had guessed, nothing but woman underneath it.
She stood there by the bed, nude, lamplight glinting on ivory curves, the sleek rounds of large breasts, firm and pink-tipped. Slowly, seductively, she ran her hands over her body, displaying it for him. “Do you like me?”
Sundance slid the gun in holster, hung it on the head of the bed within easy reach. “Yeah,” he said. “I like you.” He pulled her close to him, and she came quickly, urgently, grinding her nakedness against him, her mouth open beneath his lips. Her arms were tight around him, her nails digging into flesh, as, together, they sank down on the bed.
~*~
Later, much later, Kelly Lacey, head pillowed on Sundance’s arm, stirred drowsily. “Ummmm. That was fine, wonderful … ” She nuzzled his chest, stroked his long torso. “I wish I could lie here with you like this all night. But, damn it, I have to get up and dress and tend to business. It’ll be dawn before I can get back to bed. I’ll try not to wake you up ... too soon, that is.” And she smiled, her hand continuing its caressing.
“I won’t be here,” Sundance said.
“What?” She sat up. “Wait a minute.”
He got up, went to his clothes, began to dress. “I don’t sleep in any room a stranger has the key to.”
“Stranger?” There was anger in her voice. “After what we just did?”
“If that made us old friends, I know women that could get elected President of the United States tomorrow.” He smiled. “As long as every old friend voted for ’em. Thanks, Kelly, and I don’t mean any insult, nothing personal. But there’s too much coming and going in a place like this, and … ”
“And we’re a lot alike,” she said. “In this business, I’m particular who I trust, too. Okay, I don’t blame you. I don’t suppose you got those scars by being careless.”
“Some I did. I learned from those.” He poured himself a drink, watched her bathe at the washstand, as he lounged in a chair, savoring a cigarette. “Now. You said you had some ideas about the sniper.”
Kelly turned, drying herself with a towel. “I don’t know whether it’s ideas or only gossip. But ... have you ever heard of a man named Jefferson Galax?”
Jim Sundance sat up straight, eyes narrowing, and put down the glass. The sudden fury, savagery, on his face made Kelly step back a pace, staring at him. “Yeah,” Sundance said. “Yeah, I have heard of him.”
“Who is he, to make you look like that?” Kelly whispered.
Sundance stood up, began to pace the room like a restless cougar. “In the War,” he said, “Galax rode with Quantrill.”
“You mean the Confederate raider who burned Lawrence, Kansas, and shot down innocent women and children along with men?” Quantrill’s name and the atrocity at Lawrence were bywords on the frontier, even now, years afterward.
“Quantrill wasn’t a Confederate, he was a guerilla,” Sundance said. “And Galax was one of his right-hand men. I ... was in another guerilla outfit, and I met him after the raid.” He remembered the young, handsome rangy man, eyes glittering, standing at the campfire in the hidden valley where the two outfits had come together, joining forces temporarily. And he heard Galax’s bragging again: The Yankee bitch was down there on her knees, beggin’! And I shot her smack between the eyes at sixty yards with a Colt Navy ... “Galax used the women and the kids for target practice when they hit Lawrence,” he went on. “Even Quantrill finally kicked him out. Galax turned his stomach … ”
“I see. You’re old enemies, then?”
“Except that once, I’ve never even seen the man. But he has other accounts to pay, yeah. After the war, he went to hunting buffalo. The hide hunters wiped out all the herd above the Arkansas. They weren’t supposed to hunt below it, down in Texas, by treaty with the Comanches and the Kiowas. That didn’t stop Galax. He moved his outfit south, broke the treaty, the agreement—and all the other hide hunters followed. And they wiped out the Texas herds, too. And any Indian that rode into the sights, friendly or not … ”
Picking up his glass, he took a sip of whiskey. “They say Galax killed more buffalo than any other hunter in the West. Two bucks a hide, and he took the hides and left the carcasses to rot, tons o
f meat wasted. They said that where Galax had hunted you could walk for miles on buffalo carcasses ... and he made a fortune. But now the buff are all killed off, except for a few up north, and—what have you heard about Jeff Galax?”
“There were two drifters in here a week ago. They’d been buffalo hunters, too, down in Texas. And when they heard about the sniper, one of ’em said, Hell, nobody shoots like that but Jeff Galax. That must be him and Juanita.”
“Juanita?” Sundance turned. “He had a woman with him?”
“No. Juanita was what he called his gun, they said. A Big Fifty Sharps, with a telescope sight, specially made for him to his own requirements. They said no man in the west could outshoot him at long range when he used Juanita.”
“Go on.”
“There’s not much more. Naturally, I picked them for all the information I could get. They met Galax in Dodge City four months ago. Said he’d gone flat busted, lost a fortune at the faro tables. They were bound north to hunt up around the Yellowstone, tried to get him to go along. But he refused, said there weren’t enough buffalo left up there, and besides, he had something better lined up, something to make him rich again. So they left without him, but he was right. There weren’t enough buffalo. So they were drifting on to California, where everybody goes when his luck’s run out somewhere else, and they stopped off here ... That’s all I know.” She reached for her dress. “I hope it’s of some use.”
“Maybe,” Sundance said. He saw again the saddle horn exploding under the impact of that slug, heard the whack of a bullet by his ear. Saw Crippled Hand, in the karnee, die before his eyes, heard the wailing of the woman and the children. Jefferson Galax ... his already superb marksmanship honed to a fine point by the killing of thousands of buffalo, and a woman or a child no more to him than an animal when it came to slaughter. “Maybe,” he said again, pulses quickening. “Did you tell MacLaurin?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
Kelly frowned. “Maybe he was afraid Galax’s reputation would scare you off.”
“Maybe.” He waited until she had the dress on. “Another thing. I want some information about the women in Bootstrap. You know ’em pretty well?”
Kelly’s laugh was brassy. “Even the snooty ones that think my kind of girl’s dirt. Their men come here without their knowledge. And they tell us things that would curl your hair about those respectable dames. What do you want to know?”
“How many women are there in Bootstrap?”
“Not many, now. My girls, some of those townspeople’s wives, a few pioneers’ women, like so much sundried leather. Maybe fifty, sixty, all told left in town. There were more, but their men sent ’em away after the sniper killed those two.”
“All right. Think hard. Suppose ... suppose a woman was mixed up with the sniper. Met him up there in the Skulls. Maybe kept him supplied. Who would she be?”
Kelly froze, staring at him. “You mean a Bootstrap woman going up in the Skulls to meet him? Up there in the mountains?” When Sundance nodded, she shook her head. “No. No, that’s out of the question. No woman could ride out of town toward the mountains without being seen and everyone would wonder why ... Anyhow, there are so few, she’d be missed. And anyhow, every woman left in town’s afraid even to hang out the wash in daylight any more. No chance, Sundance— unless maybe it was a Paiute squaw. Nobody keeps any track of what they do.” Her eyes narrowed. “You think Galax has got a woman up there with him?”
“I don’t think anything,” Sundance said. “I don’t even think it’s Galax, until I find some sign to prove it.” He put on his hat. “Okay, Kelly. Thanks for everything. I’m going, now.”
She came to him, held his arms. “Jim, I’m the one to thank you. Hargitt used to come in here drunk, rowdy, beat up the girls, refuse to pay. Now you’ve taught him a lesson. And ... when I saw you take him, I knew a man like you wouldn’t come along once in a blue moon, and that I had to know you better ... I was right. I’ve never met anybody like you before. Jim ... take care of yourself.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You do the same.”
Her lips brushed his. “Where’ll you sleep tonight?”
“That’s something nobody will know but me. But where I’ll be safe.”
“Good. If anything happened to you, I’d be ... upset. Come back. Come back any time.”
“Likely I will. Good night, Kelly.”
She opened the door for him. Cautiously he checked the hall, found it clear, went down the stairs, through the bar, and out on the street, nearly deserted now. Keeping to the shadows, he went to the livery stable. There, waking the night hostler, he rented a box stall full of clean, dry straw. Then he led Eagle, the Appaloosa stallion, in from the corral. They shared the stall, Sundance’s blankets spread on the straw in one corner, the big stud standing guard over him like an enormous dog, ready to sound the alarm and fight if anyone tried to harm its master in his sleep. But no one did, and Sundance did not awaken until well after dawn.
Chapter Five
Just when Bootstrap should most vigorously have gone about its business, it was deadest. At nine in the morning, a pall of fear and silence lay over it, and the main street was empty. Sundance himself dodged quickly across from the restaurant to MacLaurin’s office.
The mayor greeted him with a wry smile. “Well, I slept better last night than I have in weeks knowin’ that we’d hired you, at least somethin’ was bein’ done. You ready to take Mercer and head out for the Skulls?”
“Not yet. I’ll need an outfit first. Today I put it together; tonight we travel. MacLaurin: you said you’d confiscated every Sharps Big Fifty and all the ammunition in the area, right?”
“Right. They’re locked up tight in that storage closet yonder—seven rifles and maybe three hundred rounds of ammo. Two of ’em brand new, from the store, the rest used.”
“I want one, and some ammunition. Open up, I’ll pick the best one and pay you for it.”
MacLaurin frowned. “Sundance, I can’t.”
“The hell you can’t.”
“Nobody, and I mean nobody, is supposed to have a Big Fifty and ammo in his possession. Under any circumstances. Not even you.”
Sundance drew in a long breath. “A man can reach out and kill you at a thousand yards, you got to have something to reach back with. A .44-40 won’t do it.”
“True enough. But you got to look at it from our point of view. We’ve worked hard to round up all these guns and ammo and make sure the sniper can’t get his hands on ’em. We can’t turn any of ’em loose even to you. And Sundance, maybe it’s as much for your own good as ours. The way people feel in this town right now, if we had another killin’ and it was known you were out yonder with a Big Fifty at the time, they might come after you. They ain’t in much of a mood to stop and think right now—you saw that yesterday.”
“Yeah,” Sundance said grimly. “All the same—”
“And finally,” MacLaurin cut in, “suppose you take those weapons and instead of you gittin’ the sniper, he gits you? Then he’s got an extra gun and that much more ammo. We can’t take that risk. I know it’s hell, goin’ up against a gun that can pick you off long before you see who’s holdin’ it, but that’s why we hired you. You’re supposed to be Injun enough to cancel out that advantage. Anyhow —” there was finality in his voice “—none of those guns leave my office.”
Sundance stared at him a moment, and then he nodded. “All right. Have it your way. Now, let me see Mercer.”
“Right.” MacLaurin opened the door to the cellblock. “Billy. Jim Sundance wants to see you. Come alive.”
~*~
The boy had been sleeping on the cot. Now he sat up, rubbing his eyes, hair tousled. When he saw Sundance, he came to the bars. Sundance wondered if sleep accounted for the sullen cast of his face.
“Hello, Mercer. MacLaurin tell you that you’re to be released in my custody? We’re gonna take a little trip up in the Skulls.”
Bi
lly Mercer said, thinly: “I ain’t goin’.”
“Oh?”
The boy’s hands clasped the bars. “MacLaurin’s got no right to hold me here and he’s got no right to force me to go anywhere with anybody. And I sure as hell ain’t goin’ up yonder in the Skulls with you and risk gettin’ my head shot off. Nobody’s got a right to ask that of me.”
Sundance said, “You’ve changed your tune. You were right grateful when I saved you yesterday from stretchin’ hemp.”
“I still am. But I ain’t nobody’s private property, to be traded to you like a goddam cow.” Pride made the boy’s voice shrill. “These people got no call to keep me locked up. All I want is for them to turn me loose, no strings. I—”
“You wouldn’t last a minute,” MacLaurin cut in fiercely. “Kid, you listen. You had two illegal cartridges on you. That ties you to the sniper—and yesterday there was another killing—Charlie Crip, the Paiute. He got it through the back of his own lodge. Charlie was a good Injun and people liked him. This town’s stretched to the breakin’ point and not only the white folks, but the Injuns. Whether I keep you in jail or turn you loose, you ain’t got a chance in hell on your own. There’s sentiment out there already for takin’ you out of here and swingin’ you, and when Wolf Hargitt gets back on his feet, there’ll be more—”
“When Wolf—? What happened to him?”
MacLaurin told him, tersely. Billy looked at Sundance with a strange expression. “So you took Wolf … ”
