by John Benteen
Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!
It was the fall of 1875 and all the Plains tribes were at peace. The best Cheyenne hunting grounds were under Army control. But then General Custer found gold in the Black Hills and set out to stir up a war to save his prestige.
Sundance got involved when Custer locked him into a filthy prison for four months, and when he got out, his hatred for Custer was like a burning flame. Sundance was all Cheyenne when the Indians faced Custer – he vowed to have his revenge, and if he did, Custer would never leave Little Big Horn alive.
SUNDANCE 5: TAPS AT LITTLE BIG HORN
By John Benteen
First published by Leisure Books in 1973
Copyright © 1973, 2014 by Benjamin L. Haas
Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: November 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.
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Cover image © 2014 by Tony Masero
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This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.
Chapter One
The charging grizzly took them by surprise.
They had been working down a brushy draw through which one of the feeder creeks of the Powder River ran when the deer broke cover ahead of them. A big buck, it darted and leaped with amazing speed out of a hollow in the valley wall, making straight for the dense willow scrub along the little stream. Fast as it was, though, the bearded man on the mule was faster. Kneeing his mount around, he lined his Winchester, tracked the animal, squeezed off a single round. The slug caught the buck cleanly behind the left foreleg, dropped it without a kick at the very edge of the brush.
Jim Sundance reined his appaloosa stallion around, lowered his own upraised rifle: “Good shooting, Three Stars.”
“Just luck,” the bearded man said modestly. Middle-aged, sharp-featured, he had a long, forked beard that gave him a peculiar satanic look. Otherwise, in his battered Army hat, his canvas jacket, and rumpled, dirty pants, he could have been one of the down-and-outers who hung around western forts, cadging meals and drinks. Actually, George Crook was a general in the United States Army, Commander of the Department of the Platte, and, Sundance knew, the most effective officer against Indians on the plains. It was Crook who had tamed the Oregon hostiles and the Apaches in Arizona. A man without pretence, he had studied Indians and learned their ways, was as much Indian himself as a white man could be. He was also a dedicated hunter, and he could not keep a gleam of pleasure at his excellent shot out of his deep-set eyes. “Probably couldn’t do it again in a million years. Well, let’s get the hide off and butcher the carcass. We’ll have liver for supper tonight and pack the rest back to Fort Fetterman.”
“Right.” Sundance tightened his grip on the lead rope of the packhorse, and they loped across the narrow defile to where the dead buck lay, almost in the shadow of the willows. There Sundance swung down, ground reined the stallion, and drew a Bowie with a fourteen-inch blade from the sheath that rode just behind the Colt single-action .45 on his right thigh.
A big man in his middle thirties, he stood better than six feet, he had wide shoulders, a deep chest, narrow waist and long, lean rider’s legs. His features were those of an Indian: eyes black, nose a hawk’s beak, cheekbones high, mouth wide and chin solid. His skin was the dull copper of an old penny. But, in startling contrast, the hair that spilled from beneath his battered sombrero down to the collar of his beaded, fringed buckskin shirt was yellow as new wheat. There was no taking him for anything but what he was—a half-breed.
He squatted and deftly bled the deer, then began to skin it, while Crook kept watch, scanning the rim of the draw ceaselessly, with eyes that missed nothing. This part of Wyoming was theoretically under control of the Army, but it was still a kind of no-man’s land, claimed as hunting grounds by Crows, Cheyennes, and Sioux alike, and though the tribes were supposedly at peace now, in the fall of 1875, Crook was too old a hand to let Indians of any nation come up on them by surprise.
In only a few minutes, Sundance had the deerskin off. He cleaned the Bowie on a tuft of grass, sheathed it, then took from a scabbard on his left hip a hatchet, beautifully balanced and razor sharp, a straight-handled weapon made as much for throwing as for this sort of work. He was an expert with it at distances up to sixty feet, but now he used it to dismember the buck. Before he started that, he took a look around, eyes flickering to the stallion. The big, spotted horse was trained both for hunting and for war, and its nostrils were keen as any watchdog’s. But it grazed peacefully, detecting nothing to cause alarm, the packhorse’s lead rope dangling from the horn of the big Mexican saddle where Sundance had lashed it. Satisfied, Sundance knelt over the flayed carcass, raised the hatchet. That was when the great bear came.
There was no warning, no crack of twig, no rustle of brush. Stalking them, the wind in its favor, the huge silvertip must have moved through the willow thickets like a gray ghost. One moment, there was only the pleasant sound of trickling water, the breeze faintly touching foliage; the next, Eagle reared and whinnied shrilly and the silence was shattered by a terrible, ear-splitting roar. Sundance’s head jerked up; he stared incredulously at the monster grizzly rushing toward him from the willows not ten feet away.
There was one frozen second in which he stared straight into gaping, white-fanged jaws, saw with terrible clarity the red mouth, the curved, snarling black lips—and the festering porcupine quills that made a pincushion of the creature’s muzzle. Then the bear was on him.
At the last instant, his paralysis broke, he threw himself aside, heard those lethal jaws click on empty air beside his head. But he was not quick enough to dodge the lashing forepaw with its quintet of razor sharp claws, and it was as if he had been speared and mule-kicked simultaneously. The force of the blow picked him up, still clutching the hatchet, slammed him through the air. He landed hard, as the bear checked its charge, pivoted, and came at him again.
Its head, big as a whiskey barrel, loomed over him, its open jaws seeking to fasten in his face. Sundance yelled, struck with the hatchet. He felt the blade sink into flesh and bone, and its impact saved him. The bear roared, a sound to freeze the blood, drew back, reared up on hind legs, towering over Sundance, the ax embedded between its eyes but balked by the great buttress of bone there from penetrating the brain deeply enough to kill it. In that endless second, as the huge animal’s nearly eight feet of height seemed to blank out the very sky above him, Sundance rolled, right hand reaching for the Colt. Just as the bear came down again, he got it free, thumbed back the hammer. But he knew, despairingly, that the pistol would never stop the silvertip in time to save his life. He fired pointblank into the creature’s chest, once, twice, as it fell, but the heavy slugs might as well have been biting gnats. Again the great jaws sought to engulf his skull with a grizzly’s favorite hold, but just before they closed, a rifle roared.
The bear’s head was knocked sideways with the impact of a bullet. Its jaws clicked like a trap. The gun roared again, and part of the creature’s skull flew off, spattering Sundance with brains and blood. Then the silvertip rolled sideways, lashing out with all four paws, bellowing in agony. Once more, claws snagged Sundance’s shirt as he himself rolled desperately away, sprang to his feet. In the same, smooth motion, he was firing the Colt, triggering off its
last three rounds into the animal.
And still the creature would not die. It scrabbled to its feet, stood there trembling, mouth open. Once more, with a vitality almost incredible, it lunged at Sundance, just as the hammer of the Colt clicked on an empty chamber. There was a nightmare second when he was sure it had him. Then, from behind him, the Winchester’s sound was one continuous long report, as Crook worked the lever and the trigger with desperate speed. A stream of lead, Gatling-gun swift, hosed into the charging animal, and suddenly it was if the bear hit an invisible, yet solid wall. Its onslaught checked, it fell forward, its half ton of weight slamming against Jim Sundance and knocking him over again, burying him under rank-smelling fur, pinning him to earth. The big jaws closed on his shoulder but without force enough to penetrate his buckskin shirt; a kind of tremor swept over the carcass, and then it was still.
Unable to move, Sundance lay beneath all that burden with eyes closed as he gasped for breath. For a second, he could hardly believe he still lived. Then Crook’s voice was in his ear, frightened, frantic. “Jim. Jim—”
“I’m all right,” Sundance croaked.
He heard the outrush of Crook’s breath. “Thank God,” the General whispered. “I’ll get him off of you.” The bear’s carcass moved slightly as he began to tug at it. Sundance summoned all the strength of whipcord muscles and pulled himself from beneath the crushing weight. Shaking, he got to his feet. Crook ran to him, put an arm around him, as his knees threatened to buckle. “Let’s have a look at you,” the officer said. “You’re bleeding.”
“He raked me.” Sundance was steadier, feeling the warm trickle of blood down his flank, a burning across his ribs, but knowing from experience with wounds that this one was not serious. He took time to retrieve the Colt and cram fresh rounds into its chambers—the first law of survival on the plains—before shrugging off the shirt.
His coppery torso was layered with muscle, crisscrossed with old scars. He was a professional fighting man, and these were the badges of his trade, the puckered marks of arrow, bullet, knife. None of those, however, had made the two big scars on each side of his chest. Those had come from his first Sun Dance, the sacred ceremony of the Cheyennes and other Plains Indians. To mark his coming of age as a warrior, they had slit the skin in those places and run rawhide ropes through them, and he had danced for hours, until the weight of the heavy buffalo skulls trailing at the rope ends had ripped the rawhide free of flesh.
Crook dabbed at five bleeding slits across Sundance’s ribs with his neckerchief. “Not too bad. That leather shirt saved you. If you’d been wearing cloth, he’d have taken out your guts.” He went to his saddlebags, got out a bottle of whiskey and a clean shirt. He disinfected the wounds with whiskey, bandaged them with strips of cloth, stepped back. “Ought to do it.”
Sundance nodded, put the ripped shirt on again. “Thanks. Three Stars. For everything.”
Crook shrugged. They turned to stare down at the dead grizzly. “Look at how those quills have festered,” the General said. “Poor devil, he was crazy with pain and hunger too, likely. That’s why he stalked and charged us. Usually he’d have been long gone at the sound of the first shot. Well, let’s get the hide off of him.”
That was another way in which Crook was more Indian than white, Sundance thought, as together they set about the heavy work of skinning. Indians hated waste and so did Crook. Even though it was getting late and both were exhausted, the General would not leave without salvaging the hide, even though the meat, fevered by infection, was past saving.
At last they had the weighty skin off, rolled up and tied. Eagle and Crook’s mule had stood, even during the bear’s charge, and the tethered packhorse had not been able to break free. They got the bearskin on it, the deer hide too, and the venison. “I guess we’d better ride,” Crook said, casting an eye at the sky. The sun was a sullen glare on the horizon, the wind freshening and turning chill. “This wouldn’t be too good a place to camp, not after all the rounds we’ve fired. The sound of those shots’ll carry a long way, and no telling who they might bring. We’ll be better off somewhere else. Let’s go.”
“In a minute.” Sundance took out his hatchet.
Crook stared. Then he said, comprehending, “Oh,” as Sundance began to hack at the carcass’s neck. It took several minutes to get the huge, shattered head loose from the body. When he had it free, Sundance lugged it into the brush and carefully lodged it in the fork of the highest willow there. Addressing it, he said, “I am sorry, Grandfather, that I had to kill you. Forgive me.” He spoke in Cheyenne. Then he sacrificed a little tobacco to it, sprinkling it around the base of the tree. When he turned, wiping bloody hands on his canvas pants, Crook was looking at him strangely.
But there was no need for Sundance to explain or apologize. Crook, he knew, understood that no one who had grown up as a Cheyenne brave could have left the bear without performing this necessary ritual; it was something as engrained in an Indian as his color—this need to be one with the land and everything that lived on it. Still, Crook’s face was thoughtful as he swung up on his mule while Sundance mounted the appaloosa stud. Then they rode south, looking for a better, more sheltered, safer place to camp.
They had known each other a long time and had hunted together often, and they divided the labor of getting fixed for the night automatically. In a sheltered draw nearly ten miles from where they’d killed the bear, Crook broke out the coffee pot and frying pan while Sundance gathered buffalo chips and made a fire, not the big one of the white man, who liked lots of flames, then had to sit far from the heat, but the small one Indians preferred, over which they could hunker for maximum warmth while conserving fuel. The wind was blowing harder, and the night was cold, so both men had wrapped themselves in blankets. Crook put the deer liver on and poured whiskey in two tin cups, passing one to Sundance. They drank, savoring the warmth it kindled in them. Then the General lowered his cup.
“Winter’s coming,” he said. “Have a hunch it’ll be a rough one.”
Sundance nodded. “Signs point that way, including that silvertip pelt. It was a lot thicker, primer, than usual for this time of year.”
“Where do you aim to winter, Jim?” Crook looked at him across the fire. “Be glad to have you join me at Laramie.”
“No,” Sundance said. “I’ll winter with Tall Calf’s band up on the Yellowstone.”
“The Cheyennes. Yes. You. have a woman with them, don’t you? A white woman.”
“Barbara Colfax.” Sundance nodded. “The Cheyennes call her Two Roads Woman.”
“Yes. The white man’s and the Indians. I remember the story. Her father’s a rich New Yorker, banks, railroads. Few years ago, he sent money to Santa Fe by wagon train to open a bank there. She went along with it. But the gunmen he’d hired to guard her and the gold turned rogue, massacred the whole train to steal the money. Tried to make it look as if Indians had done it. Only, then, they ran into a band of real Cheyennes.”
“Right. The Cheyennes wiped out most of those gunslingers, captured Barbara. Her father hired me to get her—and the money—back. But by the time I found her, Tall Calf had adopted her as his daughter, and she liked the Indian way so much she didn’t want to go back.”
“Strange how common that’s been among white captives,” Crook mused. “Sometimes I wish, myself, that—” He broke off. “Well, anyhow, you took her back and claimed the reward her father offered.”
Sundance grinned. “That’s what I’d hired out to do. But nothing was said when we made our bargain about not helping her to escape her father and go back to the Cheyennes again. She’s been there ever since.”
Crook stroked his beard. “I’ve met Colfax; I don’t blame her for wanting to get away from him. She hasn’t seen him since?”
“No,” Sundance said. “You know how I work, Three Stars. I travel everywhere, hire out my gun. It’s the only way I know to make a lot of money, and I need a lot of money—and you know why. But I always come back to the
Cheyennes, and when I do, she’s there, waiting. Once or twice a year, I hold out some cash and she and I go east, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans. She gets a chance to live like a white woman awhile and me to live like a white man.” He grinned crookedly. “It don’t take long for either of us to get fed up and come back to the Cheyennes again.” He sobered. “This time, I’ve been down in Mexico, a matter of some Yaqui silver. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her—or the tribe. So North is where I’m bound, the unceded lands, Indian country, the Yellowstone.”
Crook did not answer for a long while. Across a ridge, a bull buffalo bellowed deeply; farther away, there was the mournful howl of a lobo. The General said, almost with sadness: “Very well. Enjoy it, Jim. It may be the last free winter the Cheyennes have.”
Chapter Two
Jim Sundance stared at that lean, hook-nosed face in flickering firelight. Crook’s expression did not change as he looked back. Then Sundance set aside his cup. “Go on,” he said tautly.
“Jim,” the General said, “we’ve known each other for a long time. I know all about you, what makes you tick. Your mother was Cheyenne, your father an English remittance man who came out here in beaver days, liked the way the Cheyennes lived, married a chief’s daughter and settled in with ’em. Discarded his real name, took the name Sundance.”
“Three Stars,” Sundance began impatiently, but Crook held up a hand.
“You grew up with the Cheyennes. Learned the Indian ways, became a full-fledged warrior, a Dog Soldier. But Nicholas Sundance was an educated man, and he gave you a white man’s education, too, taught you everything you needed in case you chose to live and prosper as a white instead of as an Indian.”
Again Sundance started to cut in, but Crook motioned him to silence. “Let me lead up to this in my own way. Your father was a trader. He traveled and lived among all the tribes from Mexico to Canada, they all knew and trusted him. You grew up among all sorts of Indians, learned to speak their languages and know their ways, and they trust you, too.”
