Sundance 10

by John Benteen

  “All right, big Texas man,” he husked, and he slammed Hoffman’s face forward into the dust again, and Hoffman’s whole body went limp beneath him.

  “The thing is,” he heard himself whisper, “to get it over with damn quick. When you’re an old man, see, Hoffman? You got to do it fast ... ” Trembling, he got to his feet. Hoffman, smashed face turning the dust red, lay still. Sundance turned away, gasping, chest heaving, fell against the warehouse wall. He leaned there for a long time, not moving; the world swam. Presently he straightened up. That was when Fain’s voice said his name.

  “Sundance.”

  Jim Sundance blinked. In his watery gaze, Fain, the hard old Texan, seemed to shimmer as he stood there over Hoffman’s body, thumbs hooked in gun belt.

  “Fain,” Sundance husked, “if that thing on the ground belongs to you, see to it.”

  “I aim to, in a minute. I always look after my own.” Fain’s voice was harsh. “But first... I gave you a warnin’ out there on the trail in and you disregarded it. You tried to cut the ground out from under me in that meetin’. It’s somethin’ I won’t forget, Sundance—no more’n Joe Bob will forget what you just done to him.”

  Sundance laughed shortly, not without effort. “He won’t forget, no. From now ’til the day he dies, he’ll remember every time he looks into a mirror.” Then he sobered. “Fain,” he said, “I got no desire to cross you, don’t want to have to say anything about your way of doin’ business. But you keep on deliverin’ those racks of bones instead of decent beef, we’re going to have another run in, just as sure as chalk’s white. All you got to do to keep me off your neck is fill your contracts with prime animals. You got plenty of ’em on your range. Instead, you bring up those Texas culls—”

  “My prime beef,” Fain said coolly, “I save for white men. Injuns get what they deserve.” He stared at Sundance a moment, blue eyes glittering. “Cheyennes,” he said. “Comanches. Sioux, Kiowas, Arapahos. In my time down in Texas and drivin’ up through the Nations, I’ve fought ’em all. They’ve tried to kill me, Sundance, and I’ve killed a mess of them. And I’ve seen more than one man I rode the river with down there chopped up into buzzard bait by ’em or spread-eagled out on the plains to die. I’ve seen families burnt out, white women and white kids massacred.” He spat. “I give the Injuns what they deserve, no more, no less; and if this winter wipes ’em all out, the grown ones and the nits, that suits me fine.”

  Sundance stared at him, and then went to his shirt and pulled it on, clapped his sombrero on his head. When he turned, Fain was bending over Hoffman, rolling the big man on his back. Even Sundance was awed and appalled by what he had done to Hoffman’s face; it was a wreck, plastered with mud and blood.

  Fain looked at that mess, bit his lower lip. He raised his head. “Joe Bob was my man,” he said. “I told you, I look after my own. This is another jot on the score we got to settle.”

  Sundance did not answer, only turned and walked away, all the exhilaration of the fight gone from him. He understood Fain’s bitterness now, realizing that in the Texan’s mind more than money was at stake. Thirty years, maybe more, of all-out warfare between red and white on the plains, savage warfare, atrocities committed casually and callously and over and over by both sides, neither without its burden of bloody guilt. Hatreds to match Fain’s blazed in plenty of Indians, too; and it might be that they were so deep on both sides that a hundred years would not erase them.

  Behind him, he heard Hoffman groan as Fain lifted him to his feet. He had planned to spend the night at the agency; now, though, he knew it would be courting more trouble. First, he thought, he would go to Royer’s house and get back his guns. Then he would ride from here straight to the Cheyennes.

  ~*~

  Dusk was still a few hours away as Eagle, the big Appaloosa stallion, pounded up the valley of a winding creek, headed northwest into broken country. A dozen miles from the Agency now, Sundance still watched his back trail, fully aware of Fain’s threat and of the crew of riders still at Pine Ridge to carry out any orders the Texan chose to give. But so far there was no cause for alarm, and presently he relaxed. As the spotted stud’s hooves devoured distance, Sundance felt eagerness. It would be good to spend a night in a Cheyenne lodge again.

  He had grown up in one of them. His father, disgraced black sheep of an aristocratic English family, had been a remittance man, sent to the United States and paid to stay there. Drifting west in the beaver trapping days, when, by and large, whites and Indians were still at peace, the Cheyennes unchallenged for possession of their hunting grounds, he had fallen in love with a chief’s daughter, married her, and had been adopted into the tribe. The first white man to be allowed to participate in their most sacred religious ceremony, the Sun Dance, he had given up the name he’d disgraced, and had been known from then on all across the West as Nicholas Sundance.

  Jim Sundance had grown up a mixture of white and Cheyenne in more ways than one. On the one hand, he had learned all the arts and skills and traditions of the Cheyenne warrior, and, as a Dog Soldier, had borne arms for the tribe in his share of its battles against its traditional enemies. On the other, Nick Sundance had been determined that his son would not grow up wholly Indian. Himself well-educated, with a keen mind and a thorough knowledge of white man’s weapons and warfare, he had taught the boy everything he knew, including the most important thing of all—to see the world, when he chose, with a white man’s vision and a white man’s way of thinking, which was vastly different from that of his mother’s people.

  Thus, from childhood, Jim Sundance could use a bow or rifle with equal facility, hunt a buffalo or parse a sentence. From the beginning he was a man of two worlds, wholly at home in either, but sometimes caught between both.

  Meanwhile, Nick Sundance became a trader, living among and liked by most of the tribes west of the Mississippi. Sundance’s horizons were broadened by that; he had the chance to learn the languages and customs of red people vastly different from the Cheyennes—Apaches, Modocs, Klamaths, Cherokees. He saw all the Indians in a way that no full-blooded Cheyenne could have—as one people, one nation, despite their differences ...

  And then his life had reached a turning point. He was not quite twenty when he went with his parents to Bent’s Old Fort on the Republican to trade. There was horse racing and excitement at the fort, and when the elder Sundances started north, back toward the Cheyennes, in a buckboard, he stayed behind. Later, riding hard, he caught up with them on the plains; or rather, he found their bodies, robbed, brutally murdered.

  To one trained as a Cheyenne warrior, the sign was plain to read—six horses, three of them shod. He remembered the three drunken Pawnees and the three white saddle tramps hanging out with them at the fort, and remembered, too, that they had left not long after his parents; and he knew then whom he had to find and kill.

  It took him a year. They split up, and he had six trails to follow. But, grimly, he stuck to them, and when he had reached the end of the last one, six scalps dangled from the Thunderbird shield that was his war medicine. By that time, though, he was in a sort of daze of blood-lust, a kind of insanity—and the Civil War was raging further east. All he wanted was more fighting; the guerillas and bushwhackers were doing plenty of that on the Kansas-Missouri border, and he joined them, switching from one side to the other as he took a notion. By the time the war ended, he was purged of bloodlust and he owned another skill. Those hard years had made him a master, an artist, with a six-gun.

  He could have gone the way, then, of his fellow guerillas, Frank and Jesse James; indeed, they implored him to join them. He chose instead to head farther west The railroads were chopping up the country, white settlers were pouring in, and the Indians were alternately bargaining and fighting to hold on to their lands, resist the white invasion. He had thought then that, as a man at home in both their worlds, perhaps he could serve as mediator, help find some accommodation so both races could live together in a vast land that still seemed rich
enough for everyone.

  But that was not the way the whites wanted it. Nothing less than all would satisfy them, and the wars that followed were savage, bloody. And it had been a General in the white man’s Army who had opened Sundance’s eyes—George Crook.

  Crook was, as Miles had said, like an Indian himself, a strange, cranky, generous-hearted, keen-witted man who loved the wilderness. From the time Sundance had first guided him on a hunting trip, the half-breed had felt as if he’d found another father. He still remembered the patient way Crook had explained it across a campfire:

  “The real war,” the General said, “isn’t being fought here. It’s being fought in Washington. The Senate, the White House—that’s where the fate of the Indians is being decided. And, except for a few church groups, the Quakers, some Lutherans, there’s no one to speak for them there. The land grabbers, the bankers, the railroad men, they have all the say. And unless someone begins to lobby for the tribes in Congress, they’ll decide what happens; the Army will only do their bidding.”

  Sundance had thought about this. “A lobbyist. Do you know a good man? An honest one?”

  “Why—” Crook was surprised. “Yes. A lawyer in Washington, one of the best.”

  Crook frowned. “Now, wait a minute. Do you know how much such a thing would cost? A fortune!”

  “I’ll hire him,” Sundance repeated. “I can make a fortune.”

  Crook stared, eyes narrowing. “How?”

  “With this,” Sundance said quietly, and he touched the butt of his holstered six-gun.

  ~*~

  Well, he thought, turning Eagle up a wide, shallow draw leading away from the creek, he’d made a fortune all right. In those turbulent times, a gunman could always find a job; and if he was good, he came high. Sundance had years of experience already as a professional fighting man, skill with pistol, rifle, Bowie, hatchet, bow, lance; he spoke a dozen different dialects and knew most of the important chiefs. He could undertake work that nobody else would dare attempt and name his own price. Time and again over the following decades he risked his life and time and again he won and drew his pay and sent it east. For, he had learned, justice had to be bought with hard, cold cash, and bought not just once, but over and over again. A fortune indeed, he thought bitterly, and what had it accomplished? The tribes had lost their lands, their best fighting men, their wealth; the buffalo were gone and they were beggars on remnants of what had once been their empire. And yet, he thought, he could take some credit that Indians still lived at all. Sherman, Sheridan: they had recommended in words almost like those Fain had spoken today complete extermination, and there had been a strong faction in the Government all for it. That faction he’d helped defeat, anyhow.

  There had been a few other minor victories, too, he thought. The Cheyennes with whom he’d spend the night—part of the Northern band, they’d been shoved south by the Army, penned up in Indian territory, far from their own hunting grounds. He’d managed to get them sent north here to Pine Ridge, to country more to their liking, and now they wanted to move west, join what was left of the other Northern Cheyennes on the Lame Deer Reservation in Montana on the Tongue, south of the Yellowstone. So far the Government had balked, and soldiers were keeping an eye on them lest they take off on their own. But wheels were still turning in Washington, and tonight, he told himself with a certain pride, he could at least give Little Chief some encouragement. If things went well, in the Spring the Cheyennes could go west again, to their own land.

  Then, suddenly he reined in the Appaloosa. The wind, changing, blew directly toward him; and now he heard the drums.

  A half dozen of them, surely; beating with the steady rhythm of a human heart, the sound rising from beyond a distant ridge. Sundance’s hand tightened on the reins. So, he thought They’re dancing it, too. Then he touched the stallion with his heels, sent it racing arrow-straight toward the ridge crest

  Two horse backers appeared over it, riding toward him, as he came. His eyes narrowed as he saw that they wore the crow-feather headdresses of the Dog Soldier society and that they carried rifles. The loose white shirts they wore stood out vividly against the dun prairie; so did the paint on their copper-colored faces. For a moment, he felt an eerie chill. Those two warriors seemed to be galloping toward him from out of a vanished past.

  They spread out, pulled up in the usual sliding halt of braves approaching a stranger. Sundance stopped the Appaloosa in the same fashion, then trotted it toward them, hand held out. “Hau, kola,” he said, grinning. Then he recognized them beneath the paint. “Whistling Swan. One Wolf.”

  At the same instant, their faces broke in smiles of recognition and they touched their mounts with moccasined heels. “Sundance!” They rode up alongside, put out their hands. They were neither young men nor very old ones; as boys not yet out of their teens they had fought against Custer at the Little Big Horn. So, for that matter, had Jim Sundance.

  The drums still sounded. When the greetings were over, Sundance looked at the shirts they wore: plain white muslin, fringed, headless, but painted with crosses, crescent moons, and stars. Eagle feathers dangled from the sleeves.

  “My brothers,” he said. “You wear your Ghost Shirts. And I hear the Ghost Dance drums. I did not know Little Chief’s people danced the dance.”

  Whistling Swan was short and squat, and his face was usually ready to break into a smile. But it was serious now. “We have begun to,” he said.

  “When I last spoke to Little Chief, he was against it!”

  “That was before,” One Wolf said. He was tall, raw-boned, with a lantern jaw. “Now we have visitors from the Minniconjou. Kicking Bear and Big Foot, the chiefs, and Yellow Bird, the medicine man. They have come to tell us about the Messiah and the Ghost Dance and we join them in it.”

  Sundance drew in a long breath. “I see… ” He lifted rein. “Well, I will have a look at this.”

  “Of course,” One Wolf said. “Come.” He wheeled his mount, led the way up the ridge.

  Below, in a wide valley split by the little creek, the Cheyenne village lay before them. A few tiny log cabins, crudely made, and a lot of teepees, tattered now and poorly patched, due to the shortage of good buffalo hides; these were scattered up and down both creek banks. Beyond, in the distance, the horse herd, a fraction of what it would have been in the old days, was tended by a few boys. But Sundance had seen all this before; what took his eye now was what was happening on the flat below, a mile from the village.

  There they had gathered, men, women, and children of the Cheyennes. Despite the growing chill, some of the men were naked to the waist, bodies painted; others wore white shirts like those of the two tribesmen with Sundance. All wore eagle feathers or war bonnets. And all, of every age and both sexes, were gathered in a circle, hand in hand, around the Indian in the middle who was praying.

  Sundance and the two Cheyennes put their horses down the slope at an easy walk. Whistling Swan pointed toward the praying man, tall, lean, sharp-featured, in a headdress of buffalo horn and hide and eagle feathers, his Ghost Shirt an almost solid mass of painted symbols. “Yellow Bird,” he said. “The Minniconjou preacher—”

  Yellow Bird’s arms were raised, his eyes focused on the sky. His voice was loud, carried to where Sundance and the others halted outside the rapt circle of Ghost Dancers. “Hear me, Great Wakan Tonka .. . Hear my prayer, oh, Great Father... Now we begin the dance as you have commanded us. Father, our hearts are good, We would do all you ask of us. Father, hear our prayer ... Give us back our old hunting grounds, and give us back our game; bring back the buffalo until the earth is black with them, and bring back the elk and deer and antelope ... Oh, Great Wakan Tonka, listen to me. Take those of us who do your bidding to see the far Shadow Land and their dead mothers, fathers, sons and brothers. Show them all the good things there and return them then safely to earth when earth is once again new and clean and the game is back. Hear us, Great Father and take pity on us, and in your name and at your bidding, we sh
all dance .. .”

  Suddenly he stopped speaking, began to sing, as the drums, silent during his prayer, began to beat again, “Someone comes to tell the news,

  Tells news—

  There shall be a great buffalo hunt …

  There shall be a great buffalo hunt …

  Make arrows, make arrows …

  The people are coming home …

  The people are coming home …

  My father says it, my father says it ...

  He went on singing. Then the dancing began. Hand in hand, the dancers, men, women, children alike, began to go around him in a circle. It was a dance wholly different from the old dances of the Sioux and Cheyennes, in which women had never participated with the men, a round-dancing, Paiute style, Shoshone style. The drums increased their speed, now the dancers went more swiftly. Some broke loose, began to dance inside the circle, others out of it Sundance saw bows waved and brandished and lances raised as, caught up in the rhythm of the dancing, some braves fell instead into the fast Cheyenne war dance. Now the drums hammered an even swifter rhythm; now there was shouting, shrieking, and a cacophony of war whoops from the circle. Yellow Bird had quit singing; now he was dancing, capering inside the circle, jerking, twisting, shouting, his long legged body almost a blur.

  Whistling Swan said quietly: “We danced all night last night; we shall dance again tonight. Yellow Bird says there will be no winter this year and we may dance all winter, and in the spring, the new land comes, wiping out the old, and we all go up to paradise to see our dead friends until that is done and the buffalo are back and the white men gone; only Kicking Bear says that those who wish may stay behind and fight the white men. It will be like a great buffalo hunt, because our Ghost Shirts will make us bullet proof and Ghost Shirts will not work for them.”