Sundance 14

by John Benteen

  Dart took it. “Fair enough. They’re a nest of snakes and they got plenty guns. This whole town’s scared of ’em and when they come, it’ll probably be just the four of us against God knows how many of them. Anytime you need us against the Cables, holler. And we’ll do the same.” He withdrew his hand, grinning now. “Another round?”

  “No thanks.” Sundance stood up. “I’ll be headin’ for the boardin’ house now.”

  “My regards to Mrs. Fenian,” Dart said. But even as he spoke, his blue eyes were leveled on Ellie, locked in an embrace with Yance.

  ~*~

  “What’s in this again?” Martha Fenian asked, drawing deeply on the cigarette.

  “Marijuana,” Sundance said. “I told you, I can’t take but so much whiskey. But one of these eases me down after a rough time.” He grinned, running his eyes over the magnificence of her lush nakedness as she lay back on the bed. “Trick I picked up from the Mexicans.”

  Martha giggled, a strange sound coming from so large a woman. “You know a lot of tricks. Indians, white, Mexican ... Damn, this stuff tickles me inside, it’s the strangest thing ... Sundance ... ” The giggle went away, she licked her lips, beckoned to him. “Come over here. Come over here and show me some of your tricks.” Once more the giggle, and she winked. “And I’ll show you some of mine ...”

  Chapter Seven

  Last night had been quite a party; today his head was clear, Martha Fenian forgotten as he rode deeper into the desert southeast of the stage road. He had no idea where to find Cochise: the chief could be anywhere—in the Chiricahua Mountains, or the Dragoons, or the Dos Cabezas. The Chikonens, the tribe’s own name for itself, had strongholds in all those ranges as well as elsewhere. But he was not worried about finding Cochise; all he had to do was stay in the desert long enough and the Apaches would find him. And if, in their present state of fury, they did not kill him, they would direct him to the chief.

  The horse he had borrowed from Art Rawlings was a good one, strong, desert-bred, with plenty of endurance and speed. He had decided not to ride Eagle for several reasons. The stud had put in a lot of hard travel lately, needed a rest. But the main thing was, it was simply too magnificent an animal not to tempt an Apache beyond all self-control. There would be bargaining to do, not only with the Chikonens, but perhaps with the Warm Springs and Mimbrenos, the Bedonkohes, the Nednis, maybe even the Aravaipas. All these desert tribes were inter-related, with a culture of their own considerably different from that of the Apaches of the plains, like the Mescaleros, Lipans, Jicarillas and Kiowas. The white men called them all simply Apaches, without understanding their subtle differences. Anyhow, he did not want to have to bargain Eagle off for the Rawlings Brothers stage line—or have some avaricious young bucks tackle him to get the horse.

  He made no attempt to hide himself or his trail, wanting to be found. Indeed, he was hungry to be among Indians again. He’d had enough of white men for a while—men like the Darts or the Cables, who schemed and lied and killed one another to gain power. Savage the Apaches might be, and often cruel, but as long as they were not drunk or at war against you, they never lied, stole, nor killed each other for self-advantage, and their women made the most upright white women look like floozies when it came to chastity and virtue. That was the thing about Indians—any Indians: once you were accepted among them, you always knew exactly where you stood, and once under a tribe’s protection, you never had to watch your back.

  They had been, he thought, before the coming of the white man much like the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table of whom his British father had told him around a Cheyenne campfire. Among themselves their code of honor was relentless; against enemies who wronged them they showed no mercy. Now tribe after tribe was being corrupted by the white man’s way and the white man’s whiskey, and in a few more years they would be a different kind of people entirely. And maybe he was a fool for trying to stave off the inevitable, salvage something for them, bring peace between cultures represented by men as different as Cochise and Ash Cable, for instance, but nevertheless he had to try ...

  During the hottest part of the day he nooned in shade cast by a canyon wall, as the sun eased, he moved on, almost aimlessly crisscrossing this bleak, thorned waste. At least that was what it appeared to a white man’s eyes—to those of an Indian, there was food and drink aplenty if a man knew the plants and animals of the country, had the patience to find and use them. Which was why white men rarely could catch Apaches in hot pursuit across the desert—the whites had to carry their food and water with them or stick to water holes or stop to hunt big game ... When darkness came, Sundance had already dined—Indian style, on roasted rattlesnake, cooked seeds from the cache of a kangaroo rat, and the rat itself, and the fruit of prickly pear. To conserve the water in his one remaining full canteen—the horse would need that—he had cut with the hatchet a tall but comparatively thin saguaro, one of the great treelike cacti that studded the desert, propped each end on a pile of stones and made a small hole in the middle, where the trunk sagged of its own weight. Putting a canteen’s mouth beneath this, he built a fire at each end of the cactus. The heat drove the water it had stored to the center, where it dripped out of the hole while he ate, refilling the canteen with a clear, though brackish water.

  The smoke from the fires coiled high into the twilight sky. He did not worry about that, indeed, it suited him. When darkness fell and a bone-chilling cold replaced the day’s blazing heat, he wrapped himself in a blanket, waiting. Presently he dropped off to sleep, but as a wild animal sleeps, with its senses still alert.

  The gelding’s snort brought him awake, bolt upright. Deliberately, he kept his hands in plain sight, away from his weapons. There was no sound but that of the wind. He said, in the Apache language, “It’s I, Sundance, godson of Cochise. Don’t shoot. I come as sikisn, as a brother.” Nothing moved out there in the darkness, and still there was no sound, but he knew they were there.

  “Come,” he said. “We’ll drink tu-dishishn, coffee, together, with sugar, and I have tobacco and we’ll smoke. I am here to find my godfather, Cochise.”

  Again the silence, save for the blowing of the wind.

  Then a voice came from the darkness. “Here speaks Kodehne. Kodehne remembers Sundance. They once shared an experience. If you are really Sundance, you will remember it. Man there in darkness, what does the Arroyo of the Antelope mean to you?”

  Sundance grinned. “Kodehne and Sundance were fifteen, had passed all their manhood tests. They were hunting together in Antelope Arroyo when a flash flood came. Sundance was almost washed away. Kodehne caught his hand, pulled him up the bank. But, that day, we both nearly drowned.”

  There was one more minute in which the wind kept up its incessant blowing. Then, from the darkness, a figure materialized, right hand up in the peace sign. Instantly, Sundance was on his feet. “Kodehne, sikisn!” He threw dead ocotillo canes on the embers of his fire, they flared up instantly.

  “Sikisn!” said the short, squat man standing there, and he and Sundance clasped hands, and then the rest of them emerged from darkness, nine more Chiricahuas, armed with bows and arrows or rifles, forming a circle around the two men who had not seen each other for over fifteen years.

  ~*~

  Commanding his tribe in war, Cochise was on the move along with all the rest. A temporary rancheria had been set up in a well-hidden canyon watered by a small stream—forty of the rounded wikiups housing perhaps two hundred Indians. There were other camps in similar far-flung places, but Sundance did not ask the old man where they were. Nor would Cochise have told him if he had.

  The most famous war chief of the Apaches was getting old, now, hair graying, face deeply lined, but still with the firm jaw, the intense black eyes Sundance remembered so well. Sitting in the shade of a cottonwood beside the stream, he let out a puff of smoke from the cigarette Sundance had rolled for him and violently shook his head. “No!” he said. “It was not us! Not any bands of the Chikonen, nor the
Ojo Caliente, nor any that made the bargain with the white men called Rawlings and Evans! As Usen, the great spirit, is my witness, they kept their word and we kept ours!” He stood up, tall for his race, and powerful. “We have made war against the white-eyes, yes! And we’ll keep, on making war against them! They talked peace to me and asked me to council and took me prisoner, and I escaped only by trickery! Mangas Colorado, you will remember, was not so lucky! They asked him to council, then took him, tortured him, and finally cut off his head. After which—” Cochise’s lips curled “—so I have heard, they measured it to see if it was big as a white man’s. Then they took the brain out to see if it was as big as a white man’s. Then they boiled the meat off the skull and sent it east to where their White Father lives to put it on show for all the white-eyes!”

  Sundance nodded. That all was true: the skull of Mangas Colorado even now was on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. The brain removed from it had been enormous.

  Cochise shook his head. “For a long time we tried it, living in peace with the white-eyes, but there’s been no peace. You know how coyotes tear at the carcass of a deer. Well, our land’s the deer and the white-eyes are the coyotes and each day they rip away a little more—and if we don’t fight, soon there’ll be nothing left but bone! So we have killed the white-eyes where we find them! But we have not made war against the house-that-rolls, the stagecoaches of the Rawlings white-eyes. Those of the others, yes, the people called Wells-Fargo. But not the ones you speak of.”

  Sundance also arose. “I saw with my own eyes the Apache sign, and the Chikonen arrow in the coach. And there have been those who escaped the two other raids and swear that it was the Chiricahua.”

  “Then they lie,” Cochise said. “It may be that white men have stolen the presents the Rawlings people put out for us. We don’t know, we have not been in that part of the country for a long time. But I’d know if any of our bands had broken the peace we made, even if it was just a few young men! And certainly I would know if they had taken so much gold and silver! With that we could buy rifles—there are white-eyes who would sell them to us to use against their own kind! No one in any of the Apache bands would have dared take that and not bring it to me or tell me where they hid it!”

  Sundance rubbed his face. “Then none of it makes sense.”

  “Oh, it makes sense all right!” Cochise’s mouth twisted in contempt. “Trickery! It is a specialty of the white man! Look to the white-eyes for the answer, not to us. As long as the presents are put out, we will collect them sooner or later and leave the Rawlings people in peace. But—” His face softened and he put his hand on Sundance’s shoulder. “You know me too well, my son. You know that I do not lie to you.”

  Sundance said quietly, “I know that, my father.”

  “Then go back and tell your white-eye friends. It was not Cochise, nor any of the Apache tribes. Tell them, too, that we’ll keep on making war, though, against the rest of them for as long as we can. And that they should leave our country, or we shall kill them all!”

  “I’ll tell them that,” Sundance said. “What good it’ll do, I don’t know.”

  Cochise’s hand dropped away; he shrugged, his face bitter. “I know,” he said thinly. Then he smiled. “Let’s talk of more pleasant things. Will you stay with us? Why not stay forever and fight with us against the white-eyes? We’ll make you a war chief!”

  “Father, thank you, but it’s impossible. I can’t even stay another day. The Apaches are getting blamed for something they haven’t done—”

  “Not unusual,” Cochise put in bitterly.

  “And I’ve got to make the white-eyes see the truth. Don’t you see—if I can prove to them that if they keep their promises the Apaches will keep theirs, this could be the beginning of something. Maybe others will follow the Rawlings brothers, and a peace of some kind can be made.”

  “I’m afraid you have too big a dream. But go and follow it—and tell them we have never raided their stage line. But that we’re fighting men, and if they don’t stop fighting us, we’ll keep on fighting back.” He gestured to another Indian nearby. “I will have your horse brought up. Meanwhile, we’ll have one more smoke.”

  ~*~

  He pushed the gelding hard, traveling back to Coffin City more directly through the wasteland than he had come. Never relaxing his alertness, nevertheless his mind chewed the puzzle, sought the answer. He came up, by the time he’d traveled half a day, with two that were possible. Either Chiricahuas were raiding the Rawlings’ line without Cochise’s knowledge or—

  The first one he rejected. Moccasin telegraph they called it, the white men; actually it was a combination of drums, signs, smoke signals, logic, and, on occasion, inexplicable prophetic dreams, a sixth sense Indians retained that white men had long since lost. But nothing could have happened among the Chiricahuas or any of their allies without Cochise’s knowing of it somehow; and Sundance was sure the old Apache had not lied to him. Yet at least the one raid he’d discovered had been a genuine Chiricahua operation; his own reading of the sign had satisfied him wholly of that. Which left only the second answer. And the truth or falsity of that he’d discover as soon as he reached Coffin City. He urged the gelding on, making it give a little more—and was within ten miles of town with hours of daylight left when suddenly the horse screamed, reared, fell over backwards. Simultaneously, from a ridge not far away a rifle cracked.

  As he felt the horse plunge backwards, Sundance kicked feet from stirrups, jumped, and just in time. The gelding crashed to earth, dead before it hit the ground. Sundance landed hard just beside it, rolled, reaching instinctively for his Colt, knowing already that it had fallen from its holster. The rifle cracked again, blasting his face with sand and dust, and once more he rolled, then, catlike, another slug whining by his head, jumped, landed in the shelter of the dead gelding, now lying on its flank. A bullet thudded into saddle leather just as he made that cover.

  Cursing, he hunkered there behind the gelding’s carcass, hand scrabbling beneath the horse’s body for the rifle in his saddle scabbard. But it was pinned beneath more than a thousand pounds of dead horseflesh, and in such a way that not even his strength could pull it free.

  “And his Colt—desperately he searched the surrounding terrain for it with his eyes. Heart sinking, he realized the horse must have landed on it, too. That sniper on the ridge had him cold, pinned down here like a rat in a corner, with only hatchet and Bowie knife for weapons. And in a few minutes, maybe more, the unseen marksman would shift position, draw a fresh bead on him, and finish him, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing that he could do about it except—

  Then he remembered the pannier, the long parfleche tied behind the saddle. Not daring to raise his head, he groped for it, praying that its contents had not been crushed in the fall. Then his mouth curled in a wolf’s snarl. No, the Apache Mountain Gods must have been on his side—the cantle of the saddle had protected it. Even as another bullet slapped by close enough for him to feel its wind, chugged into the sand inches from his body, he drew the Bowie, cut its lashings free, pulled it to him.

  Now the rifle fire from the ridge had ceased. Sundance knew why—the unseen sniper was changing position, moving to a new one where he could fire directly down on him. No matter how fast he was, that would take a minute, maybe two. Now Sundance dared to raise his head, look around. That no shot came confirmed his guess. And there it was, fifty yards away, the pile of boulders, large and small, that the gunman had let him pass before the first shot. If he could make that—

  He tucked the parfleche beneath his arm, was up and running like a jackrabbit, dodging this way and that as he crossed the open. The gunman saw him, sent a frantic shot, another. One plowed dirt at his very heels, the second ripped on past, whanged off a boulder. Then Sundance was diving into the rocks like a gopher into its burrow, even as more lead screamed off their flinty surface.

  Dropping well into their cover, he twisted his mouth in that
wolf’s snarl grin again, emphasizing an old scar on his cheek made long ago by a Blackfoot arrow. Now it was going to be a brand new game. Yanking the drawstrings, he dug into the pannier, pulled out the Cheyenne bow, deftly strung it. From the quiver he dragged half a dozen of the flint-tipped shafts, laid them out in easy reach. He was armed again, in cover, and, he hoped, had surprise on his side this time; no one in Coffin City knew what was in that bull hide bag. Sooner or later the gunman up there would have to make a decision—give it up as a bad job or come after him. Sundance hoped now that it would be the latter.

  Silence stretched tautly across the desert. The ridge from which the sniper fire had come shimmered in the heat waves. Nothing moved up there. Patiently, Sundance waited, pebble beneath his tongue to stave off the approach of thirst. Then, close at hand, he heard a faint, dry slithering. Slowly, very carefully, he turned.

  He had deadly company in the rocks. The first sidewinder was less than a yard away, crawling toward him from the shelter it had taken from the desert sun in a cool hollow beneath a boulder. Behind it, looped in scaly coils were two more of the small, horned rattlesnakes. Disturbed by Sundance, their vibrating tails filled the air with a dry buzzing sound.

  No time to think about the sniper now! His hand flashed down, unsheathed the hatchet, threw it. It severed the snake’s head, blade biting on into the gravel. The rest of the rattler’s body threshed violently, and that disturbed the other two and they left their shelter, hitching with that peculiar sideways crawl, toward Sundance, heads up, tongues flickering, tails buzzing.

  Quickly he snatched up the hatchet. Out there somewhere a murderer was stalking him with a rifle, but this threat was more immediate, just as deadly. As the pair of snakes emerged from their shelter, Sundance threw the hand-ax again. Once more he cut off a rattler’s head, but this time the remaining one stopped, coiled to strike, and he dared not reach for the hatchet; it would surely hit his hand. In fact, it could reach his left arm from where it was right now.