Sundance 4

by John Benteen

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  The land echoed with the thundering hooves of Modoc ponies. In minutes they swooped down and captured the wagon train and its cargo of gold. But an Indian could not spend stolen gold in the days when Captain Jack ruled the Modoc tribe. So they buried it deep in a cave in the lava beds at Tule Lake.

  Now the big half-breed they called Sundance was going after it. And he swore nothing would stand in his way—not Indian savagery, the vicious gunfighters of the town named Hell, or a beautiful rancher’s woman with a roving eye.

  DEATH IN THE LAVA

  SUNDANCE 4

  By John Benteen

  First Published in 1972 by Leisure Books

  Copyright © 1972, 2014 by Benjamin L. Haas

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: July 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2014 by Tony Masero

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  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  The Modocs knew what was going to happen this morning, and in the big stockade in which they were penned up like cattle, they began to chant a death song. The wailing drifted in through the windows of Post Headquarters at Fort Klamath, rising above even the hubbub of the crowd of spectators come to watch the hanging. The adjutant, a burly captain, emerged from the Commandant’s office, shut the door behind him, and looked at Sundance with narrowed, speculative, hostile eyes. “All right,” he said harshly, “the General will give you five minutes. But you’ll have to take off those weapons before you go in.”

  Sundance glanced at a clock on the wall. Nine sharp. One hour until— He nodded, unstrapped the belt that held the sixgun, the Bowie with its hilt and guard especially made for fighting, the sheathed hatchet with the straight handle designed for throwing. Wordlessly, he passed them over to the captain.

  “Wait a minute,” the officer said. He laid the belt aside, went to Sundance. Tall as he was, Sundance was taller, standing two inches above six feet in his Cheyenne moccasins. He wore a battered sombrero, a fringed buckskin shirt beautifully decorated with Cheyenne beadwork, brown denim pants. His shoulders were wide, his chest deep, his waist and hips slim, his long legs lean from a lifetime spent on horseback. His size and dress alone would have singled him out in a crowd, but his features were even more arresting. In his thirties, he had the hawk-nosed, high-cheekboned face of a Plains Indian, eyes jet black, skin the color of an old penny; yet the hair which spilled all the way to his shoulders from beneath the hat was soft and as yellow as freshly minted gold. It was the heritage from his English father, just as the Indian looks and color had come from his Cheyenne mother; there was no mistaking that he was a half-breed.

  Which, of course, was one of the reasons that the captain frisked him so carefully, probing for any hidden weapons. Finally, the soldier backed away. “All right,” he said, “you’re clean. Go on in.”

  Sundance entered the general’s office. The general’s name was Jefferson C. Davis, and he was Commander of the Department of the Columbia. Since the Civil War, the general had come to be a little ashamed of his name, because he had served long and well in the United States Army for years and was no relation to the former president of the Confederacy. In fact this morning, Sundance thought, the general looked ashamed of a number of things. He was not in a good temper, and a hard-faced man in blue, he did not rise to greet Sundance.

  “General Davis. I’m Jim Sundance.” The half-breed put out his hand.

  “I know who you are.” Davis took it briefly, released it, motioned to a chair. “Sit down. Please be brief. I’m very busy this morning.”

  “I know. I tried to get here earlier; I’ve come all the way from Washington. After I got off the train, I rode all night . . .” Sundance rubbed tired eyes. Then he took from beneath his arm a big manila envelope. He thrust it forward. “General, these are petitions—”

  “Petitions.” Davis’ voice was harsh. He laid the envelope aside without looking at it. “I know. There’ve been plenty of petitions. It’s too late now for any more to make any difference.”

  “These will. You look at the names on them. Senators, Congressmen, people of influence. They’re already in President Grant’s hands. He promised there’d be a decision on them by the time I got here.”

  Davis leaned forward across his desk. “Mr. Sundance, I am familiar with your reputation, which, from my standpoint, is less than savory. I know that you are half-Indian, half-white and that you are an expert on the Indians of the West. My understanding is that, when you were a child, your father, a white man and a trader, lived among most of the tribes, and that you learned their customs and their languages. I know, too, that for that reason you came to the attention of Generals Sheridan and Sherman, for whom you’ve scouted and interpreted, and that they’ve consulted you often and that you wield considerable influence with them, and in other quarters in Washington.”

  “Then—” Sundance began.

  Davis raised a hand, cut him off. “You have hired a lobbyist in Washington to use his influence with the Congress, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Government in general, on behalf of the Indians. That costs money, Mr. Sundance, a lot of money. What disturbs me is how you get it.”

  He leaned back in his chair, face set, eyes opaque. “You’re a gunfighter. You earn that money as a professional fighting man, undertaking jobs nobody else will do. You’ve got a reputation as a hardcase and a killer that’s spread all across the West. But that’s not the worst of it. You pretend to be friendly with the whites, but the truth is, you’re hand-in-glove with the Indians. A renegade.”

  Except for the Modoc death song, the general’s office was silent for a few seconds. Then Sundance said, wearily: “General, I’ve explained this a lot of times to a lot of people. I grew up among the Cheyennes, yes; I’m a Cheyenne Dog Soldier in good standing. But my father was a white man, an educated man—”

  “A remittance man from England. Black sheep of a good family. So wild they sent him to the States and paid him to stay away, wild enough to take up with the Cheyennes and live with them as a member of their tribe. To take an Indian name—Sundance—and to raise his son as an Indian. Do you think that counts—”

  “I’ve lived as a white man, too,” Sundance snapped. “That’s the thing about it, I understand both sides, their weaknesses and strong points, their grievances and rights. I’m not against either whites or Indians. Dammit, General, all I’m trying to do is help work out some way, some system, in which they can both live together! This is a big country, there ought to be room enough in it for everybody, white and Indian both! There’s a lot the Indians can learn from the whites, but there’s a lot the whites can learn from the Indians, too! And if—”

  Davis made a short gesture. “Spare me the lecture. I’ve heard it from the bleeding hearts before.” He leaned forward again and now his words were like ice. “Mr. Sundance. Those Indians out there, the Modocs, cost the United States a half million dollars and the lives of a lot of good soldiers. More than that; they murdered, by treachery and in cold blood, two Peace Commissioners who had come to them under a flag of truce. One of those Commissioners was my predecessor, General Canby. They shot him down like a dog while he was talking peace. Canby was a friend of mine, we served t
ogether ... The Modoc War was the longest, most costly Indian battle the United States Army has ever fought, and—”

  “And what really hurts,” Sundance said thinly, “is that they made fools out of the Army. That’s it, isn’t it? Fifty men and a little over a hundred women and children, and they stood off a thousand soldiers for more than half a year. And the Army can’t stand the embarrassment. You used everything you had, artillery, infantry, cavalry, and they still fought rings around you.”

  Davis did not answer, but his face turned red.

  “And all they wanted,” Sundance said, “was a lousy little reservation six miles square. And the Government wouldn’t give it to them. It put them on a reservation up here in Oregon with the Klamath tribe and—”

  “The Klamaths and the Modocs are of the same strain—”

  “But they hate each other and the Klamaths outnumbered the Modocs and stole from them and wouldn’t let them cut wood or raise crops and made life unbearable, so they went back to their old place on Lost River. And they didn’t bother anybody there. Not until after years had passed and somebody decided they ought to be rounded up, and the Army was sent in to move ‘em by force off land the ranchers wanted—”

  “I’m not prepared to argue any of that. Maybe you forget how the Modocs massacred seventy-five men back in the 1850s.”

  “After their camps had been attacked and burned by miners. Besides, the man who led that massacre, Schonchin, wasn’t even in this war at all, he’s still living up there on the Klamath reservation and nobody’s bothered him.”

  “Sundance, get to the point! I’ve got some men to hang this morning.”

  Sundance sucked in a long breath. “The point is, General, that there ought to be some sort of message coming to you from the President. If it hasn’t arrived, it’s on its way. And if you hang these men before it gets here ...”

  Davis smiled coldly. “Save your breath. That message came yesterday.”

  Sundance came erect. “What did it say?”

  “Its contents are secret. I’m not prepared to divulge them to anybody, least of all you!” Davis rose, went to the window, looked out. Sundance, eyes following him, saw the scaffold out there on the parade ground, new lumber gleaming in the morning sun. “Six men,” Davis said. “Six leaders of the Modocs have been tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to hang. Six men, I assure you, will go to the gallows in exactly fifty-five minutes. That is all I have to say. Your time is up, Sundance. Good day, sir.”

  Sundance sprang to his feet. “General—”

  “I said, your time is up!”

  They stared at one another for a long moment. Sundance’s fists clenched, unclenched, and for a few seconds he was totally engaged in fighting down a sudden surge of savage rage. Then he got control again. “All right,” he rasped. “But I want to see Kintpuash.”

  “Who?” Davis blinked. “Oh, you mean the chief, Captain Jack. No. It’s impossible. He’s to have no visitors, except the minister, who’s there with him now.”

  Sundance said, quietly: “If he’s going to be hanged in less than an hour, he’s entitled to make his last requests in his own language to somebody who understands it and will see that they’re carried out.”

  “I told you—”

  “And I’m telling you, General.” Sundance’s voice was like iron on iron, that hard and cold. “These men were tried without defense counsel. Most of them didn’t understand enough English to know what was happening. They weren’t even tried for making war on the Army or even for killing General Canby, but on a trumped-up charge of murdering some ranchers before this war ever started. Now, I intend to see Captain Jack. And if you keep me from him—” He picked up the manila folder. “I told you, there are some important names on those petitions. Important enough so there’ll be more hell on the telegraph from Washington to you than you can handle if I choose to—”

  “You’re threatening me,” Davis rasped.

  “Telling you,” Sundance said.

  Again they stared at one another. Davis’ face was pale. He looked at the envelope in Sundance’s hand. Then, slowly, he nodded. “Very well. Three minutes with him—under guard. And, Sundance—”

  “Yeah,” Sundance said thinly.

  “Your weapons are impounded here until after the hanging. You can reclaim them then and not before.”

  Sundance nodded. “I expected that,” he said. “Now, give the orders. Time’s running out.”

  Three armed soldiers escorted him warily across the parade packed with spectators, dominated by the gallows, and past the pen like stockade with its rude barracks in which a hundred and fifty Modoc men, women, and children were penned like animals. He tried not to hear the death song, which followed him as they approached the guardhouse. Instead, he thought bitterly how futile it all had been. Six square miles on the Lost River: the donation of that postage-stamp reservation would have saved dozens of lives.

  He thought, too, of the jumbled lava beds south of Tule Lake in Northern California, just below the Oregon line. When the Modoc tribe, tired of abuse by the Klamath on the Oregon reservation, had gone back home to the mouth of Lost River where it entered Tule Lake, they had expected trouble. Secretly, Kintpuash, whom the whites called Captain Jack, had ordered supplies and ammunition to be cached in what was an impregnable fortress. The lava beds, an area about eight miles long and four wide, were a weird, great mass of natural fortifications—trenches, caves, cones, peaks and buttes. When the Army had tried to move them off their land, a gun battle had flared; one soldier killed, seven wounded, and about a like number of Indian casualties. Then the tribe had fled into the lava. There, its handful of warriors waited for the fight they knew must come.

  It had come, all right, the Army moving in with infantry, cavalry, and artillery. And it had stretched out for six long months, as the Indians, well-supplied and holed up in terrain that they knew intimately, chopped down patrol after patrol, until soldiers flatly refused to enter that barren moonscape they called hell with the fires out. Then another attempt had been made to negotiate a peace; that was when the Modocs had made their big mistake. They had used treachery, all right, had seized the opportunity of the parley to shoot General Canby and the minister named Thomas. But, Sundance knew, by then they’d been desperate; naively, they had hoped that if they could kill the leader of the soldiers, the rest would go away, leave them alone, and that would end the bloodshed. Instead, General Davis had been brought in, and the force of soldiers doubled. Under pressure from the furious War Department, the reluctant troops finally penetrated the lava beds, captured the Modocs’ ammunition.

  After that, the Modoc resistance had dwindled; finally they had all come in, surrendered, before General William T. Sherman’s order to exterminate them could be carried out. But the whole affair had been handled so ineptly, the Modocs treated so shabbily from the beginning, that there had been surprising sympathy for them in the East. Sundance had spent a frantic six weeks in Washington mobilizing it, using all his influence with Sherman, Commanding General of the Army. That had turned out to be not much, though they had been friends in the past. Sherman was a soldier, and the Modocs had made a laughingstock of an Army outnumbering them ten to one. And so, Sundance thought now, all that time, effort, money had been wasted. The leaders of the Modocs were bound to die.

  The guardhouse was a long, squat building of stone on the far corner of the parade. A strong force of soldiers surrounded it, as if they expected its six inmates to rip down the walls barehanded and attack again. The Captain of the Guard read Davis’ scrawled chit dubiously, then reluctantly, with drawn gun, led Sundance inside. “He’s in the first cell. No tricks, you understand?” He lifted the Colt significantly.

  Sundance went to the barred door. Inside the cell, a short, thick figure sat on a cot. Dressed in outsized coat and pants and work shirt, Kintpuash, Captain Jack, listened impassively to the gaunt man in the black suit who stood before him, Bible in hand.

  “... and soo
n you will be in Paradise,” the preacher said, “if only you will repent your sins.”

  Kintpuash’s broad, dark face broke slightly in a smile. “This Paradise,” he said in English, “purty good place, huh?”

  “Beautiful,” the preacher said. “Beautiful beyond any earthly land. Those who repent and are saved dwell there eternally, in wonderful joy … ”

  Slowly Captain Jack, chief of the Modocs, stood up. Gently, he put a hand on the minister’s shoulder. “Preacher,” he said, “we make a deal, huh?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “This Heaven you talk about, you like it?”

  “Why … why, of course.”

  “Fine,” Jack said. “Tell you what. You go there in my place, I give you twenty-five horses.”

  “Captain Jack! I—”

  Kintpuash’s smile was ironic. “No deal? Well, I go myself. Every man, he hafta die. See you there later, huh? Now, you leave me by myself.”

  The guard captain said, “Reverend, Jack’s got another visitor.” He unlocked the cell.

  The minister walked out, face flaming. “Very well. I’ve done my best. Let his sins be on his own head.” He ran hostile eyes over Sundance as he went down the corridor to the next cell.

  “Kintpuash,” Sundance said.

  Captain Jack stared at him. Then his face broke into a grin. “Sundance!” he cried out. “My friend!”

  Sundance entered. He spoke in Klamath, which he knew well, and which was almost like the Modoc dialect. “I’m sorry. I’ve done everything I can for you. I want you to know, though, that there are many white people on your side. Many worked for your release. But—”

  Kintpuash shrugged. “Then thank them for me,” he answered in the same language.

  “Look here,” the captain snapped. “You two speak English.”

  “Go to hell,” Sundance said, without even turning.

  But Jack said, softly: “Please. It much easier to say goodbye to friend in my own language.” Then he lapsed back into dialect. “I make them angry, but what can they do? Hang me for disobeying?” He laughed, then was sober. “Sundance, I do not care about myself. What about my people?”