Sundance 2

by John Benteen

  “You do not understand,” Sundance said.

  “And you don’t, either. You do not understand what it is to be a chief, hold so much responsibility in your hand. Colyer comes to me, he says: ‘Cochise, we will give you the Dragoons and Huachucas for your own land. But you must not raid the Americans. We do not care how much you raid the Mexicans if you leave the Americans alone.’ And now, if I kill fifteen Americans—”

  “Who killed fifteen Chiricahuas,” Sundance said harshly.

  “Who should not have gone with you before talking to me. Who should not have drunk the tiswin. Who are dead and cannot be brought back.” Cochise gestured. “Look,” he said. “We camp with the Tontos and the Mescaleros. They are never safe from the Army, they live in fear. We Chiricahuas are stronger, fiercer, than they, and so the white-eyes bargain with us. The Tontos and the Mescaleros have nothing; we have the Dragoons and Huachucas, anyhow ...”

  “What you’re saying,” Sundance rasped, “is that you don’t want to give me any men.”

  “I’m saying,” Cochise told him, “that we have a chance to hold our land. Everything in me cries out for vengeance for Uklenni and the others. But I am a chief, and that is not an easy thing to be. I must balance one thing against another. This is something the Chiricahuas must stay out of.”

  Sundance, understanding, but astounded by Cochise’s self-control, sat up straight. “All right,” he said. “This is the country of the Tontos, anyhow. I will go to them.”

  “It’ll do you no good. They listen to me. I am trying to make peace for them also, save some land for them. I will tell them not to go with you. And the Mescaleros, too. Not now. Not right at this moment. It would turn over all our bargaining with the man Colyer from the Grandfather. It is not our medicine; it is white man’s medicine.” He laid down his pipe, looked at Sundance, grinned. “You see,” he said, “there is nothing I can do. Our people talk too much, drink too much, brag too much, and if we killed fifteen white men everyone would know it. But I do not drink or talk or brag too much, and neither do you. Suppose we two, only we, went on a hunt. And came back from it and said nothing.”

  Sundance stared at him. “Father,” he whispered, “do you mean—?”

  Cochise’s grin broadened. “Your father was my brother. Always you have been my son, and my heart is good for you.” He stood up. “Besides, being a chief and talking much is hard on the nerves. Sometimes a man needs excitement. And I did not get to be chief of the Chiricahuas because I am so gentle and such an old woman. Do you understand? Sundance, it has been long since we hunted together. I think we should hunt again.”

  Sundance looked at him in admiration. “The two of us? Against fifteen?”

  Cochise grinned. “Without help, you’d have gone alone, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Sundance said.

  “Then we’ve cut the odds by half.” Cochise laughed. “Now go rest. I’ve had a lodge prepared for you and your woman. Meanwhile, I’ll send out scouts to cut their trail. When I have news, I’ll let you know, and you and I will hunt together once again. And what game we kill, no one shall know but us.”

  It does not take long to make an Apache brush house; this one was brand new, spread with robes and bedding, food provided; venison, mescal, mesquite bread. When Sundance entered it, she was waiting, sitting cross-legged on a deerskin, her face grave. “They say that I am your woman.”

  “No,” Sundance said. “I already have a woman, with the Cheyennes.”

  Herta von Markau took off the sombrero, laid it aside, began to smooth her hair with a brush made from sacaton stems. It glistened as she worked the kinks from its dark lustiness. “Of course,” she said. “And you would not want to touch me anyhow, not after what I did.”

  Sundance looked at her. “I told you. It was everyone’s mistake.”

  “If I were an Apache, I would have my nose cut off.” She laid the brush aside. “And would deserve it. Christus knows, I would. And yet . . . suppose . . . suppose I had met you before I met Walther. Suppose I had met the one kind man I have ever known. I can’t get that out of my mind. If I had ever met a man really kind to me, in time—” Her voice harshened. “Sundance, you’re lucky you’re not a beautiful woman. Your life is simple.”

  Sundance sat down opposite her. He said: “You’re mixed up already. I don’t want to mix you up worse.”

  Herta looked down at the hide on which she sat. “Maybe it wouldn’t mix me up. Maybe it would straighten me out. I know it’s shameless, with Walther dead, and it my fault, but . . .” Her voice broke. “I don’t seem to be able to grieve for him anymore. He bought me like a cow at market, commanded me to love him, and I tried and . . . couldn’t. And now ...” She raised her head, eyes shining. “I would like to do one thing in my life,” she whispered, “that was right, and right because I knew it was. I would like to carry one memory out of here with me to offset all the rest.”

  And then she came to him. “Jim,” she said. “Jim, please.”

  Sundance looked into eyes that begged him. But that was not the point. The point was that he wanted her. At least for now. Maybe it would be bad for her or both of them, maybe good; he did not know. But for right now, this moment . . .

  He pushed her away, turned, pulled down the deerhide flap that closed the door. Then he turned again. Her face shone in the dimness. She lay back on the deerskin, and her hands went to the buttons of the shirt . . .

  Later, he knew that it had been good for her, purged her of something, maybe tension. She clung to him as they both dressed. Then he said, “Let’s walk around. I’ll be riding tomorrow, maybe. Cochise and I are going hunting.”

  “Hunting?” Her voice echoed disbelief.

  “Hunting,” Sundance said. “You’ll be here while I’m gone, so you’d better learn what’s expected of you. Come on.”

  Dressed again, but this time with Herta in a simple buckskin skirt that Cochise’s wives had given her instead of the vaquero outfit, they strolled around the camp.

  “The first thing to learn about Apaches,” Sundance said, “is that they never lie to one another and never steal from one another. They always keep their word and expect other people to do so, too. That’s why they’ve had trouble ever since the Spaniards came.”

  Cooking fires curled up from before the wikiups and the teepees. Children ran and laughed; from inside one lodge came the sound of chanting. “Medicine man,” said Sundance. “Somebody’s sick in there. He’ll use all the herbs and roots he knows of, and all the chants and prayers. And if they die, still, he’ll accuse some poor old woman of witchcraft, and if he can make it stick, they might burn her or stone her to death.”

  “Ghastly,” Herta whispered.

  Sundance’s mouth twisted. “Yeah. Did you ever hear of a girl called Joan of Arc?”

  “I have heard so many horrible things about Apaches ...”

  “All true,” said Sundance.

  “Killing babies . . .”

  “Yes. Kill all children too small to travel, when they take captives. Those big enough to keep up, they spare, adopt into the tribe. Same thing with women. They learned their lesson well, learned it from the Spaniards and the Mexicans—and the Americans. You know about the scalp bounties?”

  “No.”

  “Thirty years ago, Mexico put a bounty on Apache scalps. Men, women, children, it made no difference. Hunters went out after ’em. As a matter of fact, a lot of Mexicans died. You can’t tell one black scalp from another. But the Apaches learned from that. And the pinole feasts.”

  “The what?”

  “Pinole feasts. Pinole is a mush made from ground corn. The Apaches love it. The Mexicans, and the Americans, too, used to invite them to love feasts, served all the pinole they could eat. One little trick: the hosts put strychnine in the pinole. Poisoned dozens, hundreds, of Apaches at a time, before the Indians caught on.”

  “How ghastly,” Herta breathed.

  “Well, it taught the Apaches another lesson.” Sundanc
e paused, looked around the village. “They’re no better, no worse, than other people. They do unto others as others would do unto them. They value their women, chastity is important to them. You won’t find Apache whores hanging around trading posts. But, yes. They’re tough and mean. This is a tough land, a mean one; you know that by now.”

  They walked up a hillside; there, in the fading light, women still attacked the mescal plants. They stripped away the thorn-hooked, fleshy leaves, chopped off the stalks. Then they severed the body of the plant from its roots with pointed sticks, which they drove in with hatchets. The bulb, halfway between a cabbage and an onion, that was left, they carried down the hill. “Everyone works in an Apache camp,” Sundance said. “The men hunt, raid, make war. The women gather food. In this society, it takes a lot of work to stay alive. Nobody lives off of anyone else, unless he’s old or sick or crippled. And they worship all the Gods. If they kill a Christian, they’ll take his crucifix and wear it. No point in angering anybody. But the Mountain Gods, the Kan—they’re very powerful. You ought to see the ceremony. A great dance, goes on for days. The masks they wear are fantastic. The Apaches are a very religious, superstitious people. When Uklenni and I hunted the bear, we always had to be careful to call him Old Man Bear. A term of respect. If you’re not respectful, you lose your luck.”

  They swung back through the camp, paused to watch a Mescalero woman adjust the smokeflaps of her teepee. “Anyhow,” Sundance said, “one thing about being an Indian. You’re never alone and helpless.”

  “The whole tribe, it’s one big family?”

  “Yes,” said Sundance.

  “Nobody ever tries to get rich off of anybody else?”

  “They don’t even understand the idea,” Sundance said. “How can you cheat your brother?” He grinned. “Still, it gets tricky sometimes. An Apache husband must never meet his mother-in-law face to face. A mean mother-in-law can drive a man out of his mind, chase him all over the country, to keep from breaking that rule. But they say that if you never have to talk to your mother-in-law or even look at her, your marriage is happier.”

  Herta laughed bitterly. “As a woman once married, that I can understand.”

  Then they were back in the brush shelter built for them. Outside, it was nearly dark.

  “Jim,” said Herta. Her eyes were enormous, shining in the murky light.

  Sundance looked at her. “Yes.” She pulled the deerskin dress over her head. Her body gleamed in the dusk. “I am still your woman,” she whispered. “For a little while, anyhow.”

  Chapter Nine

  Cochise reined in his horse. “There,” he said. “You see?” Sundance saw, but no one not Indian-bred would have noticed the half dozen blades of grass turned the wrong way, dew glistening on their bottoms, not on their tops. “The ground is hard,” Cochise went on, “but our game went this way, I think.”

  “I think so, too.” They were in the high country of the Mogollon plateau, he and Cochise. The Chiricahua chief, mounted on a stolen Arabian, carried a Winchester across his saddle; his torso was swathed with a bandolier of cartridges, and the Colt was slung low on his hip.

  Sundance rode Eagle. Despite the great, scabbed wound on his hip, the stallion was still more horse than any other in the Apache remuda. He could depend on Eagle; besides, the exercise was good for the wounded animal, kept him from getting stiff. Sundance was still dressed Apache style, having added only a buckskin shirt to the rest of his gear. Cochise had given him a Winchester and a Colt and a knife made from an old brittle piece of steel, but he still wore the quiver of Cheyenne arrows on his back and the powerful juniper-wood bow slung across his shoulder.

  “Not far, either,” Cochise said. “They passed this way just before daylight this morning.”

  Sundance turned Eagle, looked at the high broken country of the Mogollons that lay before them. “Let’s move, Father,” he said. “Let’s keep on.” Eagerness fluttered within him. In a few more hours, they could overtake Gannon and his men.

  It had not taken long for the Chiricahua scouts to cut their trail. Fifteen men left a lot of sign behind, especially white men. Fifteen horses gave off a lot of droppings and urine puddles; and there were the stubs of ground-out cigarettes thrown aside. You could almost smell it, Sundance thought: the trail white men made going through a wilderness.

  Not that, by their lights, Gannon’s men were careless. They worked hard to disguise their passage, sent out flankers, scouts, rear guards. They were determined to ward against surprise; obviously, Gannon had traveled through Apache country before. He was good, but he was no Apache.

  And so, no matter how hard Gannon tried, Sundance and Cochise could follow him. When he struck a stream, led his band down its bed, the two of them split up, always found, sooner or later, where Gannon’s crew had emerged. When he took advantage of a lava flow or rock flat, shod hooves still left scars, turned over pebbles.

  And so there was no way he could escape. Like a pair of implacable hounds, Sundance and Cochise stuck to his trail.

  And gained. Gannon was not sure of his country. Sundance knew it fairly well; Cochise knew it as he knew his wives’ bodies, every fold, hollow, byway.

  They struck another stream—cold, shallow, swift-running—and the trail disappeared. Again, they split up. Sundance had not traveled fifty feet before he saw the blades of grass on the bank, ends cropped short by a horse’s teeth. Gannon, he thought, if you knew your business, you’d tell your men to keep the heads of their mounts up. Then he cawed like a jay to summon Cochise.

  The Apache chief splashed across the creek, rode up its far bank. Presently he reined in, grunted. Sundance crossed, saw the trail leading out. Water still gleamed in the hoofprints, though the wind blew dry and strong.

  “Not far now,” Cochise said. He laughed softly. “Sundance, I love to hunt. And this is the best hunting of all.”

  “Father,” Sundance said, “don’t get overconfident. These men are clever, dangerous.” He held Eagle in check, squinted at the jagged, piney ridges ahead. “Where are they bound now. Down into Deer Canyon?”

  “I think so.” Cochise wagged his iron-gray head.

  “As I remember,” Sundance said, “there are two rock towers where the trail leads down. A good place to set a rear guard, watch the backtrail.”

  Again Cochise nodded. “Yes. I had thought of that.”

  “One pile of rock to the right, one on the left,” Sundance said. “I should think at least one man on each. The trail goes between, leads down. Do you want the right or the left?”

  “It makes no difference,” Cochise said.

  “Only this,” Sundance answered. “We must make no noise. Nothing to alarm the rest.”

  The Apache chuckled. He drew a long knife from a sheath on his hip.

  Sundance touched his own. “Then let’s leave the horses here and go on foot.”

  They swung down, tied the mounts. Not to large trees, but to small ones. If something happened, if they did not come back, the horses could uproot those and go home. It was a little thing, but the kind of thing an Apache thought of. Then they fanned out, moving through the pines.

  Sundance’s moccasined feet made no sound on the carpet of needles. He went from trunk to trunk, pausing behind each to survey the land ahead. Overhead, wind soughed in the branches, sadly, cleanly, steadily. There was always a chance, of course, that Gannon might leave a guard where one was not expected.

  Sundance could no longer see Cochise, knew the Apache could not see him. Both of them traveled through the pine forests like wisps of drifting fog, just that quietly and insubstantially. Sundance crouched low behind the bole of a great tree, hundreds of feet high, centuries old. Ahead, the forest thinned, vanished suddenly. Clouds drifted level with the rim of Deer Canyon. And rearing high at the only passage over the cliff, was a vast pile of rock, a great, tortured jumble of it, like the watchtower of a castle he had seen in a picture in one of his father’s books.

  If Gannon were smart,
there would be a man posted there.

  Sundance grinned unpleasantly. His thumb ran along the blade, sharply honed, of the crude knife Cochise had given him. Then he veered off far to the right, dodging soundlessly through the dim forest. He ran a hundred yards, two hundred, and came to the canyon rim, where he threw himself flat behind a clump of brush.

  Below him, Deer Canyon spilled away in awesome immensity, a hole that some Eastern states could have been slipped into entirely. Its slopes and floors were thickly timbered. The outlet at its far end was a notch between high peaks. Sundance looked down on circling hawks and eagles, hunting the canyon floor.

  Then he slid over the rim.

  His soft-shod feet gripped an outcropping. The canyon’s wall was a steep cliff, save for the slope down which the trail that passed between the two towers led. From where he hunkered against the rock, Sundance could see that trail, caught just a flicker of motion as, at its end, men rode into the timber.

  Gannon. Well, his guards had to be put out of action before they could fire a rifle shot. You could hear a gunshot for miles in this echo-sounding-board.

  Sundance’s feet grasped the outcrop, moved along. He struck a ledge not more than a foot wide. Like a cat, he traversed it, laden as he was with guns, his shield, his bow, his quiver. He did not walk, he ran, surefooted and fearless when it came to heights. One misstep would have plunged him down into that great timbered, cloud-smoky hole. He did not even think about that as he worked along the cliff.

  Then, a few feet away, he saw the tower rearing high on the rimrock. And he saw, too, the man who lay behind the rubble, watching the backtrail. Saw him turn his head, rub his jaw restlessly, recognized the dark, black-mustached face of Jessup, Gannon’s second-in-command.

  Sundance had reached for the bow, but now he took his hand away. With the knife poised, he crept along just below the edge of the rimrock. Now he was under the rock tower. He looked up. Intent on the backtrail, Jessup dragged on a Mexican cigarette, pulled the butt from his mouth, tossed it out in space. Showering sparks, it sailed over Sundance’s shoulder. Sundance, knife tightly gripped, began to climb.