by John Benteen
Sundance did not speak. He knew, though, exactly what Drury meant and did not doubt it for an instant. He knew, too, that never would Joseph consent to selling the Nez Percé stud to the very people who would use the Appaloosas to keep the Nez Percé in subjection.
He shook his head. “Sorry, Drury. No deal.” Drury carefully laid both big hands on the table. “Listen, Sundance. We know why you came to Deadwood. Joseph sent you—to meet somebody here who wanted to buy the horses. If you could get the right price, you were to go ahead and sell. In fact, we know everything. The man you were supposed to meet was from England, his name was Sir John Bucknell, and when he got the Appaloosas, he was to ship them home to England. Well, the American Army’s not gonna let that happen. It’s gonna keep those horses here, not see ’em go into the service of a foreign power. But we’re being reasonable, Sundance. We—I—am prepared to pay you twenty thousand dollars for the Appaloosas, five thousand down right now and fifteen thousand when you turn ’em over to my men. Twenty thousand dollars, Sundance, that’s a lot of money.”
Sundance only shrugged. “It could be double that, Drury, and I wouldn’t sell you the horses. Not unless Joseph told me to. And I know him well enough to know that he won’t.” He nodded. “Your information’s good. Yeah, I’m meeting Bucknell here, and if his price is right, he gets the stallions. And only him, nobody else. So go on back to Sheridan or whoever sent you and tell them—”
He broke off. A slow, humorless grin was spreading across Drury’s face. “Sundance,” Drury said and shook his head. “You won’t make no deal with Bucknell.”
Sundance sat up straight. “No?”
“Not unless they got banks in hell.” Drury’s grin widened. “Sundance, Sir John Bucknell’s dead.”
Chapter Three
Somehow, Jim Sundance felt no surprise. What he did feel, sitting there immobile, staring into Drury’s mocking face, was rage.
But his voice was soft. “Well, that’s convenient for you and the Army, ain’t it?”
“You might say so. After all, Bucknell was a greenhorn. He should have known better than to walk around Deadwood after dark. Somebody shot him in the back and took his money. That kind of thing happens every day in a town like this.”
Sundance said quietly, “All right, Drury. I’ll grant it does. But it don’t help you one bit, or the Army either. It just means you and me both had long rides for nothin’. Zero for me, zero for you, zero for Joseph, and zero for the Army.” His voice sharpened. “So you go on back to Oregon and forget the Nez Percé horses.”
“I don’t forget anything!” Drury’s voice crackled. “One way or the other, we aim to have those horses.” He pushed back his chair. “Okay, Sundance, I’m givin’ you one last chance. Twenty thousand and we make the deal right now. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise what?” Sundance almost whispered.
Drury stood up, towering, thick-bodied, hands close to his guns. “Otherwise,” he rasped, “I reckon I’ll have to beat some sense into your half-breed head with a gun barrel. I—”
His hand moved and Sundance turned the table over.
The rage in him now was like dynamite exploding. He could not contain it and his knees came up and hit the table and it slammed into Drury and Drury staggered back, and that gave Sundance the leeway he needed. He came off the chair against the wall, and as Drury wheeled, right hand swooping instinctively for his gun, Sundance, laughing, furious, hit him.
The half-breed’s big fist caught Drury squarely between the eyes. It was like hitting a brick wall. Sundance was already following with a blow to Drury’s gut, but the big man whirled aside, and Sundance’s fist missed by a quarter of an inch, and Drury laughed and said, “That way, eh?” and hit Sundance in the temple. Sundance was picked up by the blow’s force and slammed across the room until another table caught him. He shook a ringing head, blurred vision cleared, and he saw Drury, laughing once more, coming at him, great fists clubbed.
Sundance snorted and came off the table. He weaved aside, and Drury’s left missed and Sundance hit Drury low, halfway between gut and kidney, pivoted, and as Drury turned, off balance, smashed Drury’s nose with a cross-over right. Bone went beneath his knuckles, and Drury howled, and suddenly Drury’s chin and chest were covered with flowing scarlet. Sundance hit Drury again, an up-chopping blow deliberately designed to rip the flesh by Drury’s eye; it succeeded; Drury rocked back, bleeding from yet another wound, and Sundance gave him no mercy, came in fast. His next blow smashed Drury’s mouth. An old strategy and always effective, cut the soft parts, hurt the face and get the blood to running, send the victim into panic. Then he was easy meat.
But it didn’t work with Drury. He backed away from Sundance, keeping fists up, shook his head violently, slinging blood, cleared his vision. Something clicked in Sundance’s head, suddenly he knew he had met maybe the toughest opponent he’d ever faced. Because neither blood nor pain was scaring Drury. Again he shook his head and more blood flew, and then Drury came after Sundance, and for so big a man he was like a feather on his feet.
All right, Sundance thought. So it was going to be a fight. He laughed softly, not dismayed, and he and Drury came together.
Everybody in the room was watching now, from a safe distance. It was like the collision of two savage bull buffalo on the prairie. Bottles jingled on the shelves behind the bar and men drew in breaths of awe and Sundance and Drury, at close range, pounded each other savagely for a moment, neither feeling hurt, each only wanting to deal it. Drury smashed Sundance’s mouth this time and hit Sundance just below the rib cage, and then caught Sundance with a hammering right to the side of the head, but in the meantime Sundance had chopped three fierce blows into Drury’s gut and some of the breath and steam went out of the man. That was why the head blow did not kill Sundance; otherwise it might have.
As it was, it knocked Sundance down, and Drury, inches taller and pounds heavier and scarlet to his waist, was still on his feet, and he bellowed laughter and ran toward Sundance and kicked out. Sundance rolled, but the boot caught him on the thigh. He rolled again, beneath a table, as Drury kicked at his head and Drury’s other boot missed, and then Drury had picked up the table and thrown it aside, but Sundance was boiling up. The table crashed somewhere behind them, and as Drury clenched his hands again, Sundance hit him on the very point of the jaw with all the rising weight of arm and body.
He felt the blow vibrate through his whole being. Drury staggered back, stunned, as any human would have to be. Sundance came after him, panting, hit him again in the same place. The right blow there would drop any man, no matter how strong or tough; but he had not landed the right blow yet. Drury shook his head, hit Sundance glancingly on the shoulder, then brought up an amazing quick knee toward Sundance’s groin.
Sundance turned, caught it on his thigh, recovered balance and hit Drury on the jaw again, and then again, as Drury pounded him on the head and shoulders. The sound of the blows was like a strong axe man chopping wood. Drury’s head rocked back and sideways; suddenly the blows took effect.
“Jesus,” Drury said, or something that sounded like it. All at once his knees sagged. Sundance angled the next blow, snapped Drury’s head around with it.
Drury’s eyes went blank. He raised a hand, dropped it as if it weighed a ton. Then he lurched to one knee. Sundance hit him again and Drury sprawled on the floor, a sodden bloody mass, making a rasping sound through his battered nose and mouth.
Sundance stood over him, bleeding also, beginning to hurt, but feeling a wild triumph. “Drury!” he shouted.
Drury managed to raise his head, shielding it with a weak hand, made a sound.
“You tell ’em!” Sundance roared. “You hear? You tell Sheridan and you tell all of ’em! I’ll never give ’em the Nez Percé horses to breed up their remounts to fight other Indians! I’ll kill the goddam stud first if I can’t sell it somewhere else! You hear? You tell ’em that?”
Drury moaned something. He made a move Su
ndance did not like and Sundance bent painfully, pulled Drury’s Colts from holster, slung them across the room.
“You tell ’em, damn you,” he rasped, wiping blood from his own face on his buckskin sleeve. Then, on legs that wobbled, he backed out of the saloon.
Drury lay where he had fallen as Sundance shoved through the doors. They made a clattering sound. Sundance was on the sidewalk. Eagle, the Appaloosa stallion, scented his blood and snorted.
Sundance unlatched the reins of the big, strangely spotted horse, swung up on the right side, Indian style. At a heel signal, the horse backed, and Sundance watched the saloon doors for a moment. No one came through them. Then Sundance wheeled the horse, kicked it gently, and it went galloping through the deep mud down the Deadwood gulch.
~*~
Dark spruce boughs formed a canopy over Jim Sundance as, in a fern-bedded forest, he knelt beside a rivulet of icy water, sponging blood from his face. The cold liquid helped kill pain, but he would have a puffy lip for a day or two.
No one had interfered with him as he had ridden out of town. Clear of Deadwood, he had turned off on a trail he knew of old, one that had taken him through a notch in the hills away from the main road. Now, sitting by the swift-running creek on his spread-out blankets, he dried his face, made a cigarette and lit it.
He had some thinking to do, but first he must check his weapons. There was no doubt whatsoever in his mind that he would need them soon, all of them.
The Colt and the Winchester were easily taken care of, field stripped, cleaned, oiled, and, fully loaded, ready for action. Meanwhile, Eagle, the stallion, grazed nearby, unpicketed, unhobbled, ready to come at either a whistle or a slight clicking sound Sundance might make in his throat, a summons which could be given in secrecy. More than that, the big horse also served as watchdog; his nostrils and his ears would catch the approach of anyone long before even Sundance’s keen senses.
When he was satisfied with the guns, Sundance pulled to himself the two big panniers that had been tied behind the saddle cantle. One was long, cylindrical; the other shaped almost like a big disc. He opened the long one first, and very carefully removed the things it contained.
First he withdrew a short, recurved bow of juniper wood, tipped at its ends with notched bits of buffalo horn. He stroked it carefully, searching for any split, found none. His fingers examined as meticulously the string made from the back sinews of a buffalo cow, and it was all right. He strung the bow, pulled it experimentally. That took a lot of strength. He could send an arrow more than three hundred yards with this weapon, or, as he had done more than once, put one clean through a bull buffalo, or, for that matter, a man. It was a fine weapon, the first he had ever learned to use, and it had one great advantage over a rifle: the ability to kill from a distance with no flash, report, or powder smoke to betray from where its missile came.
He unstrung it, put it aside, then took the quiver from the parfleche. It held more than two dozen arrows, and Sundance took them from the panther-skin case, which still had the tail attached, and examined every one. Each was long and absolutely straight and the feathers, black, strong, durable, taken from vultures’ wings, were in order. Their points were barbed and razor sharp, some of hard flint and others of obsidian, black volcanic glass. In this era, that was unusual. Most Indians who still used bows nowadays preferred arrow points of iron. Sundance, however, stuck to the stone ones, which he chipped himself, meticulously working off flake after flake with a tool made from a notched elk-antler prong. The extra effort was worth it in his estimation: a stone arrow point made a much more grievous wound in flesh, had greater shocking power, and was nearly impossible to remove once imbedded. The way he lived, that was an advantage that was important.
When the arrows had been restored to their quiver, he drew from the pannier a small roll of otterskin and sat for a moment holding it in his hands. This was his medicine bag, and it held things that were sacred to him; it held his luck. The fact that he was still alive after all he’d been through was pragmatic proof to him of its power; as he held it, memories surged into his mind. He seemed to see once again a Cheyenne camp in the old days, the good days before the white men came, when the Cheyennes were still lords of the high prairie between the Rockies and the Black Hills. He saw ring after ring of teepees arranged in the sacred circle, horse herds that covered miles of plains, smelled the mingled smoke of burning wood and buffalo chips, with sweet grass laid in the fire to perfume it; he seemed to hear again the beating of drums, the chant of dancing Dog Soldiers, the most powerful and feared warrior society of any tribe ... For a moment, longing washed over him in a wave, and then came the bitterness. Those days were gone, vanished in a single decade. The Indians were no longer free, only prisoners on squalid, arid reservations far from home. Joseph had been the last, the very last …
Sundance laid aside the medicine pouch, and then from the pannier carefully withdrew a folded war bonnet encased in a muslin cover. Unsheathing it, he shook it out. Richly beaded and quilled at the headband, its bright eagle feathers fell into proper place, dozens of them, each earned the hard way in his youth by counting coup and officially awarded in council. Each conjured up its own memory of an enemy touched in combat while still alive, another killed, a successful horse-stealing expedition, a grizzly bear brought down with bow and arrow or lance ... He folded the bonnet, put it back in its sheath. He had not worn it since last year during those nearly six months with the Nez Percé. Maybe he would never have the chance to wear it again.
After that, he opened the other pannier, the round one. The main thing in it was his shield. Gently he took it out, careful never to let it touch the ground, for the shield was luck, too, like the medicine bag, and if it touched the ground its luck was gone and it would have to be reconsecrated in an intricate ceremony. It was maybe a yard or a little less in diameter, made of thick buffalo neck hide stretched tight over a juniper frame, a padding of grass, antelope skin pulled over that. Decorated with a thunderbird, it would stop an arrow, even turn an old-fashioned musket ball, but it would not stop modern ammunition. From it, as Drury had said, dangled six tufts of hair, three black, one blond, one brown, one red. They had come from the heads of the murderers of his parents; they were the last scalps he had ever taken, but he would not give these up.
Carefully, he replaced the shield and closed the pannier. Picking up the bow, he strung it, slipped the quiver over his shoulder. Leaving the horse to guard his other gear, he moved away through the woods, making absolutely no sound. He had not gone far before a bird fluttered up out of a clump of fern to perch on the lower branch of a spruce: a grouse, the stupid kind called a fool hen that seemed to have no fear of man. Sundance nocked an arrow to the bow, drew the feather to his cheekbone, let the shaft fly. The small obsidian point neatly severed the bird’s head; it came fluttering down and, without any noise to betray his hiding place, he had his supper.
Retrieving the arrow, he went back to the creek and built a fire of bone-dry squaw wood from the lower branches of the forest. Almost smokeless, it quickly built a bed of coals while he dressed the fool hen and rolled it in clay. Letting it bake, he leaned back against his saddle and thought about Drury and Bucknell and the Nez Percé horses.
Maybe, he thought, he had been too hasty, too edgy. But Drury had rubbed him the wrong way from the start, and then the news of Bucknell’s death ... And the fact that Drury made no secret that the Army backed him, that it was the Army that really wanted the Nez Percé horses ... Sundance understood the Army very well. He knew that it could not spend the money directly itself, twenty thousand for a handful of Indian ponies, as the press would call them if it found out. But it could easily guarantee a remount contractor far more than that in business if he would guarantee to get them and breed from them. Over the years, Drury would make far more than twenty thousand from the spotted stallions and their mares: he would make a fortune. Worse than that, the cavalry would use those very horses to keep the Indians who had bred
them in subjection ... Anyhow, it was no wonder that Drury was so hell-bent to get those horses. He was playing for high stakes, damned high stakes. Sundance did not think a beating in a fist fight would stop him, either.
Of course, if the Army really wanted Appaloosas, they were available at Lapwai. But the ones owned by the Christian Indians there were from a degraded line, their best stock sold off over the years. Only the Joseph horses were the old, pure strain, and surely by now every mare would have dropped a foal. Sundance had intended beginning the bargaining with the Englishman at no less than forty thousand dollars—
Eagle, the stallion, snorted.
Jim Sundance was on his feet in an instant. The big horse had swung to point his muzzle down the stream, head up, ears pricked forward. In the distance, there was the faint click of shod hooves on rock. Sundance grabbed bow, arrows, Winchester. One moment he was there, on his blankets; the next he had simply disappeared, melting soundlessly into the shadows of the big trees. Thirty yards from camp, he found cover, a big log, and threw himself behind it. From here he could command the clearing and watch the horse as well. He drew an arrow, strung the bow, waited. It could, of course, be Drury or someone hired by him, but he did not think so. These riders came too openly. Nevertheless, he would take no chances.
Now he saw motion between the trees. Then there were two riders coming single file, following a game trail along the water straight toward his camp. Sundance could not see who they were as yet for the screening brush, but in a moment they’d come into the open, into the clearing where his saddle and blankets still lay and Eagle stood tensely.
Then they were there, reining in their mounts, staring at his gear. Sundance frowned and, surprised, eased the bowstring.
