Sundance 6: The Bronco Trail

By John Benteen

They were called the Tucson Ring, and they were a group of greedy businessmen who were getting fat on keeping the Indian Wars alive in Arizona Territory. One of their plans was to keep Geronimo on the loose by supplying him with whiskey and ammunition.
But General George Crook had a plan to stop them, and Jim Sundance was the most important part of it.
His orders – to go to Arizona, find out who was selling whiskey and guns to Geronimo, stop them any way possible ... and bring Geronimo in for good.”
It was a tall order. But if anyone could bring it off, it was the man they called Sundance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311415875

John Benteen

John Benteen was the pseudonym for Benjamin Leopold Haas born in Charlotte , North Carolina in 1926. In his entry for CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS, Ben told us he inherited his love of books from his German-born father, who would bid on hundreds of books at unclaimed freight auctions during the Depression. His imagination was also fired by the stories of the Civil War and Reconstruction told by his Grandmother, who had lived through both. “My father was a pioneer operator of motion picture theatres”, Ben wrote. “So I had free access to every theatre in Charlotte and saw countless films growing up, hooked on the lore of our own South and the Old West.” A family friend, a black man named Ike who lived in a cabin in the woods, took him hunting and taught him to love and respect the guns that were the tools of that trade. All of these influences – seeing the world like a story from a good book or movie, heartfelt tales of the Civil War and the West, a love of weapons – register strongly in Ben’s own books. Dreaming about being a writer, 18-year-old Ben sold a story to a Western pulp magazine. He dropped out of college to support his family. He was self-educated. And then he was drafted, and sent to the Philippines. Ben served as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army from 1945 to 1946. Returning home, Ben went to work, married a Southern belle named Douglas Thornton Taylor from Raleigh in 1950, lived in Charlotte and in Sumter in South Carolina , and then made Raleigh his home in 1959. Ben and his wife had three sons, Joel, Michael and John. Ben held various jobs until 1961, when he was working for a steel company. He had submitted a manuscript to Beacon Books, and an offer for more came just as he was laid off at the steel company. He became a full-time writer for the rest of his life. Ben wrote every day, every night. “I tried to write 5000 words or more everyday, scrupulous in maintaining authenticity”, Ben said. His son Joel later recalled, “My Mom learned to go to sleep to the sound of a typewriter”.

Book preview

BRING IN GERONIMO!

They were called the Tucson Ring, and they were a group of greedy businessmen who were getting fat on keeping the Indian Wars alive in Arizona Territory. One of their plans was to keep Geronimo on the loose by supplying him with whiskey and ammunition.

But General George Crook had a plan to stop them, and Jim Sundance was the most important part of it.

His orders – to go to Arizona, find out who was selling whiskey and guns to Geronimo, stop them any way possible … and bring Geronimo in for good."

It was a tall order. But if anyone could bring it off, it was the man they called Sundance.

THE BRONCO TRAIL

SUNDANCE 6

By John Benteen

First published by Leisure Books in 1973

Copyright © 1973, 2015 by Benjamin L. Haas

First Smashwords Edition: March 2015

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.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Cover image © 2015 by Tony Masero

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Series Editor: Ben Bridges ~ Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

Chapter One

The dynamite, capped and fused, lay in a neat pile behind a rock to protect it from bullets, next to Sundance on the ledge. In this part of Utah the sun in July was like a furnace, and the rusted tin roof of the shack in the canyon below glinted dazzlingly in its rays. Sundance cupped his hands, put them to his mouth. Fenner! he bellowed, and his voice rang and echoed from rock to naked rock. Jeremiah Fenner! You’re trapped now—and finished! You and your boys come out with your hands high!

There was a long moment of silence while the echoes rang and died. Then, from the shack of warped boards and rusty tin, a deep voice yelled back an answer. Sundance, you go to hell! You hear? You go to hell!

This time it was Sundance’s turn to wait until the echoing faded. He lay flat on the wide ledge, high above the house, a big man, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, long in the legs, his sprawled length measuring inches more than six feet. He wore a battered sombrero, a buckskin shirt fringed and beaded in the Cheyenne way, denim pants torn and soiled by the long pursuit across the Utah badlands, and Cheyenne moccasins. Cartridge belts encircled his waist, and holstered on them was a variety of weapons—a Colt .45 worn low and strapped down to his right thigh; behind it a long-bladed Bowie knife in a beaded sheath; on his left hip a hatchet in a sheath of similar workmanship, its handle made straight for throwing. A Winchester carbine was cradled in his arms.

As he waited for Fenner’s answer to fade, he squinted black eyes against the tin-roofs glare. The bright light struck red gleams from a sweating face the color of old copper. It was an Indian’s face, a Cheyenne face, long and high of cheekbone, with a big, beaked nose, a wide, thin mouth and a strong chin. It was marked with years of hard living and exposure to the weather; every decade of a long career as professional fighting man had left its traces. In startling contrast to that coppery face, legacy from an Indian mother, was the hair inherited from his white father. It spilled from beneath his hat to the shoulders of the buckskin shirt, soft and yellow as freshly smelted gold, and gleaming like gold in the sunlight.

Now Jim Sundance licked lips cracked and blistered by heat and dry winds and cleared his throat. One last chance, Fenner! Come out slick, no guns, hands high, and you got a chance to live!

The laugh that jeered in answer was like a donkey’s bray. "You think I’m crazy? There ain’t but one of you, and I got my five sons in here with me! When we come out, we come out shootin’! You might get some of us, but we’ll get you before we die!"

Sundance waited again. When the canyon was very quiet, he called back, So be it, Fenner. Then he rolled over on his side, his mouth a hard, thin line, and picked up the first bundle of dynamite. Three sticks lashed together made a fistful.

Sundance drew in a long breath. Not taking his eyes off the shack below, he probed in his jeans, found a waterproof matchbox. He took out a wooden match and scraped it on the rock. It flared instantly. When he touched it to the fuse, there was a faint, deadly hissing and the stink of powder smoke.

He waited five seconds more, holding the dynamite bundle in his hand. Then, with strength and grace, he lobbed it into the air. It arced out, fell almost lazily, landed on the tin roof of the shack, began to slide toward the ground. It had just reached the eaves when it exploded.

The flash was tremendous, the flare of white smoke a fog instantly covering everything. A great roar came a fraction of a second later, and, trapped in the canyon, the thundering sounded like the end of the world. It boomed and echoed and re-echoed. Sundance lay tensely with his rifle at his shoulder, staring at the white fog below and waiting for it to clear.

Then a hot breeze from up-canyon pulled tatters of it away. Sundance made a sound in his throat.

He would need neither the second bundle nor the rifle. The shack was a splintered, flattened wreck, the shreds of sun-dried boards dancing with flickering flames. Inside the rubble he saw bright patches of color that were cloth; and other, brighter ones that were bloodied flesh. Sundance swallowed hard as hot bile rose in his throat. It was not a way of killing that he liked, but it was not as bad as the way Jeremiah Fenner and his sons, in their time, had killed. For men like them it was a fitting end. The long trail that had led him for months through the endless badlands stopped here, in that wreckage.

Slowly, cautiously, Jim Sundance sat up. He waited a moment and still nothing moved down there in the wreckage. Now the smoke had cleared completely. He swung his long legs over the brink of the ledge and slid down. Then, in a shower of dirt and rocks, gun ready, he skittered down to the canyon floor.

The stench of powder was strong down there. A piece of ripped tin flapped and squeaked in the breeze. Sundance went in a crouch toward the blasted shack, finger on the Winchester’s trigger. Except for the noise of the shattered tin, the silence in there was like a graveyard.

Sundance advanced through outflung, splintered boards to the pile of rubble. He stepped gingerly over something raw and gruesome that lay among the shattered planks; it was a man’s arm. Then he looked down into the wreckage, and what he saw brought the hot bile to his throat again. The dynamite had done its work too well. It was hard to count the bodies. ...

Sundance turned away, spat green fluid into the sand and straightened up. How he identified the faint tick of sound against the squeaking of the tin he’d never know. But something was triggered in his brain; he whirled and snapped the carbine to attention.

A body had risen amidst the rubble. Its face was streaked with blood; so was the long, iron gray beard that dangled almost to its waist. Out of that bloody mask hard blue eyes stared at Sundance with hatred. Then Jeremiah Fenner, who should have been dead, pulled the trigger of the six-gun in his hand.

A half-second sooner and the slug would have caught Sundance in the back. As it was, he heard the hot lead rip past his shoulder, and in the same smooth motion that dodged the bullet, he lined the carbine and pulled the trigger. The .30-30 slug caught the old man in the chest, knocking him backward. Fenner fell against a propped-up board, a bloody parody of a man. He sat there a second, mouth sagging, eyes still staring at the man in buckskins. He croaked three last words: Goddamn you, Sundance. After that he died.

Sundance went carefully through the rubble. Convinced that no life lingered on among it, having accounted for all six bodies, he turned away and sat down on a rock. With trembling hands he rolled a cigarette, then smoked it. Then he stood up, ground it out, went about the hard and gruesome work that yet remained.

When he had assembled the blasted bodies and buried them under enough rocks to keep the buzzards, coyotes and kit foxes off, he climbed the cliff again, lit the other bundle of dynamite and threw it out wide to explode harmlessly in the air. After that he went up over the canyon wall to the spot where he’d tethered the big Appaloosa stallion. Mounting the spotted roan, he touched it with moccasined heels, and the long-legged stud fell into a ground-devouring lope that would have him in Salt Lake City in thirty hours.

~*~

Brigham Young had been dead for nearly a decade. The man who sat behind the desk in the city of the Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as Mormons, was one of Young’s many sons—a big, rugged man of middle-age with a long, ginger-colored beard. In the privacy of his office, he looked at Jim Sundance in appraising silence. Then he nodded. Yes. It’s all been verified. Our man found the bodies— what was left of them—just as you said.

Then, Sundance said, I’ll take my money now.

Of course, Young answered, rising. He left the office, returned in a moment with a canvas sack, passed it to Sundance. I think you’ll find it all there, but please count it. That’s good business,

Yes, Sundance said. He took out packets of green bills, fingered them. In a moment, he raised his head. Thirty thousand dollars. Right on the button. He put the money back in the sack. Now, if you’ll let me have the contract, a piece of paper, and a pen.

Young opened his desk drawer, took out a precisely hand-written document, shoved it toward Sundance. Sundance lifted a pen staff from a holder, dipped its point in ink, wrote in large letters across it: Paid in Full, J. Sundance, July 8, 1886. Then he handed it back to Young. After that he wrote for a moment on a sheet of paper and passed that to Young, too. I’m keeping a thousand in cash. I want the other twenty-nine transferred to the account of Miss Barbara Colfax in Washington, D. C, at the bank named there. If you’ll do that and give me a receipt.

Young’s brows arched. Miss Barbara Colfax—? Then he nodded. Yes, of course. I understand, now. Be glad to. He took the pen, wrote, passed Sundance a slip. Sundance put that and a thousand dollars in his pocket. Then he started to rise.

Mr. Sundance, Young said. "Just a