Overkill (Sundance #1)

by John Benteen

“Plenty hungry. It’s good to be back. I’ve been out among the white men.”

  Walking Bear’s grin vanished. “White men!” He spat. “I think when the hunt is finished, we’ll kill some white men! Did you hear what they did to us at Pawnee Fork, how they came to talk peace, but pointed their big guns at us and burned our lodges?”

  “I heard,” Sundance said.

  “Since then, I believe nothing a white man says. Except you, of course. Because you are a Dog Soldier and my friend and your heart is good. But I would never believe the speech of anybody else with yellow hair.” He laughed, mood changing. “Except for her, of course. You’re not the only yellow-haired Cheyenne, you know, since we took the woman.”

  Sundance looked at him sharply. “What woman?”

  “We took her at the Springs of the Cimarron, a young white woman. Her white name I cannot say, but now she is called Two Roads Woman, and she is a member of the tribe.”

  “She wasn’t hurt?”

  “No, we did her no harm. She is in the lodge of Tall Calf, now, and is as his own daughter. She’s a good woman and very beautiful.” He grinned, nudged Sundance. “In fact, I think I’ll talk to Tall Calf about her myself. Then maybe there will be more little Cheyennes with yellow hair, eh?” And he slapped Sundance on the thigh and rode off to finish a bull standing spraddle-legged, pin cushioned with arrows bristling from hump and flank.

  Now there was much hard work to do. The women, old men and young children came out in groups on horses dragging travois to skin and butcher. Braves rode among them, making sure all animals were dead. Sundance went from carcass to carcass, retrieving arrows and donating the meat to various families. He knew most of the women and the old men and they were glad to see him.

  Presently his quiver was nearly full again, and he halted to put up the bow and rebridle Eagle. When the stallion had taken the bit again, Sundance swung back into the saddle. And that was when he saw her.

  A few hundred yards away, a little knot of women had gathered around the carcasses of two slain animals. The long rays of the sinking sun touched them, and the light glimmered suddenly on golden hair. Sundance sucked in a long breath, shaded his eyes. Then there was no doubt about it, and he touched Eagle with his heels and galloped forward.

  Closer to her, he pulled up; and now he could see her clearly. Despite sunburn, her skin was light enough to stand out among the others, and hair the color of his own fell loosely about her shoulders. She wore moccasins and a long dress of buckskin, and she wielded a knife, slashing doggedly away at the tough hide of a buffalo. As she worked, she talked to the other women. Even with face smeared with blood and grease, she was very pretty, and when she laughed, which seemed often, she showed white teeth. The other women laughed with her. Sundance frowned. He had come expecting to find a captive still terrified. Instead, except for blond hair and light skin, she could have been any Cheyenne girl perfectly at home among her own people.

  He did not approach her, and she did not see him. After a while, he turned Eagle and rode west, headed for the great camp of Cheyennes, the smokes of which he could see in the distance.

  Even though Hancock had burnt so many lodges, enough bands had come together so that there were still more than two hundred teepees strung out in an intricate pattern in the broad, timbered valley of a wide, but shallow stream in which warriors returning from the hunt washed off dust and sweat and splashed and roughhoused and laughed among themselves. In the dying light, the cones of buffalo skins gleamed white, except for the colorful pictures and decorations ornamenting them. Across the river, the horse herd, two thousand strong, was scattered over the gentle hills—a crazy quilt of animals ranging from spotted mustangs to captured Army mounts and fine Spanish stallions. The herd’s wranglers, boys too young for hunting, called back and forth and sang about what they would do when they were old enough to run the buffalo. The whole village was a beehive of activity, as those women who were not on the prairie butchering worked furiously to set up racks on which to cure the meat or brought in wood with which to smoke it. Sundance’s nostrils caught all the familiar, characteristic smells of an Indian camp: wood smoke and horses, rawhide and cooking meat, trampled grass and running water. Laughter drifted up to him, and shouting; someone beat a drum and sang of the successful hunt. Weary braves filed in on dead-beat horses, and the women came jubilantly with travois-loads of meat and hides. Men of the various fighting societies—Dog Soldiers, Kit Fox Men, Bowstrings, Red Shields, and others—patrolled the camp and kept watch along the horizon. Sundance guessed that fully half of the Hevataniu, the Southern Cheyennes, were gathered here; and as he rode down to join them, he had a sense of coming home.

  Walking Bear joined him as he galloped toward the river. “Haul Sundance. You’ll spread your robes in my lodge tonight, eh?”

  Sundance said, “The yellow-haired woman is in Tall Calf’s lodge, is that not so?”

  Walking Bear pulled up his horse. “It is so.” He looked at Sundance with narrowed eyes. “Why?”

  “I will spread my robes in your lodge, friend. But I must speak to her.”

  Walking Bear was silent for a moment. Then he said, “My friend Sundance, I told you a little while ago that I thought I might talk to Tall Calf about the Two Roads Woman. I was not joking; I was serious. I see her every day and I look at her and she looks at me, and I have already sung songs and played my flute outside Tall Calf’s teepee. I have no woman, and she would make a good one for me.”

  “She is not Cheyenne,” Sundance said. “She is white.”

  “You are wrong. She is Cheyenne. Tall Calf has made her his daughter.” He kept on staring at Sundance. Then he said, “I see. I see, now. You have come to take her home. To her own people.”

  “Her father has sent me,” Sundance said frankly. “He’ll give many presents, pay many horses, to get her back.”

  Strangely, Walking Bear smiled. “I do not think there are that many horses.”

  Sundance began to walk Eagle to cool him before he drank. Walking Bear rode his own spotted mount alongside. “She is only another white woman taken captive,” Sundance said. “I don’t want her for myself, but her people want her back. I have bought many of her kind in the past; just as I have bought red women and children back from the whites. I am sure Tall Calf will want many horses for her, but I’m prepared to pay. Her father is a very rich white man and—”

  “I do not think that matters,” Walking Bear said. “I do not think that you will take this one.” His voice was dead serious.

  Sundance looked at him. “My friend,” he said, “you are not threatening me?”

  Walking Bear drew in a long breath. “I don’t intend to make it a threat. Three months ago, before we took her, if someone had told me that you and I might fall out over a white-eye woman with yellow hair, I would have told him he was a fool and crazy. But I say this! I, Walking Bear, do not intend to let her leave. I hope you will listen to me when I say it.”

  A chill came over Sundance. Thinly, he said, “I believe that is for Tall Calf to decide, if she’s his captive. If he chooses to sell her to me, that’s between me and him.”

  “True.” Walking Bear nodded. His face was very grave. “And once she is yours, if I choose to take her from you, then she is my captive, and that is between you and me.” And Sundance saw his hand come to rest on the receiver of the Sharas rifle cradled across his horse’s withers.

  He reined Eagle around to face his friend. “I don’t like this talk,” he said. “You and I have been friends too long for talk like that. Besides, you know the law. If I kill you or you kill me because of her, neither of us will be able to live with the Cheyennes again. We would have to go and live with the Sioux or the Arapaho. Never again with our own people.”

  “And maybe the Two Roads Woman is worth even that,” Walking Bear said. “Maybe I think she is. I wonder if you are so much white man that you would think so, that it would be worth that to you to take her back to her father and get the gold fro
m him which he must have promised you.”

  They looked at one another tensely for a moment. “I love her,” Walking Bear said. “She is a good woman and she has my heart. I am as old as you and I have not seen in all that time another woman I wanted. Now that she is here, I will not let her go, no matter what I have to do to keep her. I only wanted to say that, so you will hear me and be warned.”

  This was a complication Sundance had not foreseen. He felt a heaviness, a kind of coldness within him. “I have signed a paper with her father that I would bring her back. The paper with the white man is big medicine, a sacred promise.”

  “It is only another treaty. We sign papers with them all the time and they break their promises.”’

  “Maybe they do,” Sundance said. “I don’t.”

  “Nor do I,” said Walking Bear. “And I have promised that you will not take her.” He looked at Sundance a moment more. “I think it would be well if you spread your robes in some other lodge until this is settled.”

  “I think that also,” Sundance said.

  “Then do it,” Walking Bear said thinly. And he kicked his pony and rode toward the river.

  Sundance watched him go. As Walking Bear and his horse disappeared in the cut down the river bank that led to water, Sundance sighed and sat up straight in the saddle and turned his head to look around the camp. Then he stiffened. Two horses entered the village, pulling heavily laden travois. He recognized the woman on the spotted one as Magpie Wing, Tall Calf’s woman. The girl beside her on the bay had yellow hair. She was Barbara Colfax. He saw them halt before a big, heavily decorated lodge; that would be Tall Calf’s. The girl had seen him now, saw his own yellow hair glinting in the sun. She went rigid in the antelope-hide saddle, stared, her blood and grease-smeared face punctuated with wide blue eyes. She said something to Magpie Wing, and Magpie Wing spoke back. The girl put her hand across her face, then turned away from Sundance.

  He frowned. Then Eagle snorted, thirsty, unwilling to wait longer for water. He was cool enough now, and Sundance pulled him around and rode him to the river, while the girl disappeared inside the teepee.

  The whole tribe of Cheyennes, split into Northern and Southern Divisions, consisted of ten bands, and each band elected, for a term of ten years, four chiefs. There were, in addition, four more head chiefs, and the leaders of the fighting societies ranked as war chiefs. Add to those the medicine men and prophets and the old men who, without holding office, had wisdom and experience that was highly valued, plus a few women who were allowed to speak in council, and any serious discussion was a cumbersome and long-winded matter in which many people had to have their say.

  There had been such a council tonight in the lodge of Tall Calf, one of the four head chiefs, to hear what news Sundance brought. He told them about the fighting along the Bozeman Trail, where the Army, in violation of treaty with the Sioux, was building forts to protect gold seekers bound for the Montana diggings; how Cheyennes and Arapaho had allied themselves with Red Cloud and his Oglalas to wipe out those forts, and how they had already killed eighty soldiers under a brash captain named Fetterman outside of Fort Phil Kearny. The chiefs nodded approval at that news.

  They were bitter about the so-called peace expedition Hickok had told Sundance of in Ellsworth. Remembering the slaughter of Black Kettle’s people at Sand Creek by the Colorado Cavalry just after Black Kettle had made peace with the Army, they had feared for their women and children when General Hancock and Custer menaced them with cannons and surrounded them with horse soldiers. So they had fled; and the Army had burned all their lodges and goods and left them in poverty; and now, as soon as enough buffalo had been killed to replace the lodge skins and the bed robes, they were ready for war in earnest.

  “We do not want war,” Tall Calf said. “All we want is for the white-eyes to keep their promises. But we will not talk to Hancock or Custer again. If the Grandfather in Washington truly has a good heart for us, he will have to send better men.”

  Sundance listened keenly. “If a better man came, a man with a good heart, would you talk to him before making all-out war?”

  “Except for the Cheyenne agent, Wynkoop, we have not met such a man.”

  “There is one,” Sundance said. “His name is Sherman, and he commands all the soldiers in the West, and his heart is good and his words come straight. If he asked you to talk, would you come and hear him and deal with him? Perhaps make peace?”

  “On decent terms, and if we like this man, yes.” Tall Calf’s eyes glittered. “But we are not women. We are tired of being lied to and tired of having the white men shoot our young men like coyotes whenever they meet them. If the Big Soldier will talk, we’ll listen. But this time the words must be good and the promises kept.”

  Sundance nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe that can be arranged.”

  Then the council was over, for everyone was very tired from the day’s hunting. The chiefs filed out, leaving Sundance and Tall Calf.

  The Cheyenne was a man in his forties, with a face that had seen it all—wise, cynical, hard, yet compassionate. When the others were gone, he and Sundance smoked in silence for a moment. Then Tall Calf said, “We have a white woman in camp. Walking Bear has talked to me and tells me that you have come to buy her and take her back.”

  “That is true,” Sundance said.

  “I cannot sell her to you,” Tall Calf said. “Walking Bear has tonight already spoken for her and I have given my consent. Besides, she is no longer the white man’s daughter. I have taken her for my own.” He shook his head. “I am sorry, but she may not go with you. A man does not sell his daughter to the white men.”

  Sundance carefully masked his disappointment. He read in Tall Calf’s face that the man was not merely bargaining, but meant what he said. Sundance nodded. “Then I have come a long way for nothing. Still, I may get some good out of the trip if you will tell me how you took this woman. The information is important to me.”

  Tall Calf nodded, a strange expression on his face. “I think it might be. But I think also it would be better if she told you herself.” Then he shouted something. Sundance turned as the bull hide cover of the teepee doorway was lifted, and the blond girl came in.

  Sundance got to his feet, looked at the girl. She had bathed in the river, combed her hair, and she was, he thought with a quick intake of breath, very beautiful. But there was no welcome in her gaze, her mouth was set, her blue eyes hostile.

  “So you’re the one who’s come to take me back,” she said in English. “Well, I’ll tell you something right now, Mr. Sundance. I have no intention of going with you. This is where I belong, and this is where I’m going to stay.”

  Chapter Six

  There was silence as Sundance and Barbara Colfax stared at one another. Then Tall Calf arose. “Magpie Wing has things to do in here, and I am not as young as I used to be. I crave my bed. I have told Walking Bear that the two of you must talk, and that he is not to interfere.” The Cheyenne gestured. “I think you should walk down by the river. There is no wrong in it; she is wearing the rope.” He meant the chastity belt of the Cheyennes, wound around the waist, through the crotch and wrapped around the thighs; all unmarried young women wore it to guard their purity, more valued among Cheyennes than any other tribe. “Talk as much as you like, but bring her back here when you are through. I think you will want to talk American, and it makes me nervous to hear a lot of talk that I do not understand, so go.”

  “Yes.” Sundance hitched at his belt, adjusting the weight of the Colt and knife. “You heard him, Barbara. Will you go with me, talk to me?”

  She looked reluctant, but she nodded. “Yes.”

  Outside, the village was flooded with moonlight, the lodges cones of silver, their owners’ prize horses tethered outside them. Dogs slunk hither and yon, and the women and children guarding racks of fresh meat from their depredations threw chunks of wood at them. Voices murmured in the surrounding teepees, and probably there would be other couples walking
by the river.

  Barbara fell in step beside Sundance. “They’ve told me all about you,” she said. “My father sent you to bring me back.”

  “That’s right. He gave me money to buy you from them.” They nodded to two “half-men half-women” who were giggling outside a lodge. There were a few in every band, men who chose to live as women and wear women’s clothes and do women’s work; and they were considered sacred. “You say you don’t want to go. Suppose you tell me why.”

  “Of course. But I’ll have to go back a long way. You’ve met my father . . . and my stepmother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you ought to understand already.” She broke off as a man painted red from head to foot, carrying a strange bow strung with two strings, one end extended into a lance, crossed their path, smiled at them in the moonlight, and said: “Good morning.” He was an Hohnuhke, a “Contrary,” who had taken a sacred vow to do everything backward. There was room in the Cheyenne philosophy for all sorts of people, and Contraries were big medicine, too. When he had passed, Barbara went on.

  “My mother, my real mother, was a wonderful woman. When she died ten years ago, I missed her very much. Then there was a whole parade of nurses and governesses.” Her voice was bitter. “They were all the parents I had after that. My father was too busy making money to have time for me.”

  “I see.”

  “Oh, I had everything he could give me, except himself. An enormous ball when I was eighteen, all the money I could spend, and every day there were a lot of well-dressed, polite young men calling on me. Even during the War. Because we lived in the North—New York—a man who didn’t want to be drafted could hire a substitute to fight for him for three hundred dollars. And they had lots of money, so of course they didn’t have to go to war.”

  They were out of the camp now; near the river. On the opposite bank, while the boys and men who stood guard gathered to watch, two stallions fought. Their whickering and screaming filled the air; then a couple of Dog Soldiers rode into the battle, savagely beat them apart with quirts.