Sundance 11: War Party

By John Benteen

Marauding Comanches had kidnapped beautiful Virginia Stevens. Her uncle would pay anything to get her back, and he knew Sundance was the only man who could bring it off. Not only did Sundance have the Comanches to contend with—he also had to beat the Comancheros to the girl. Sundance dyed his blond hair dark brown and made peace with his half-brothers before taking Virginia from them. She fought rescue for a while, but one night with Sundance in the warmth of his blanket softened her resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310304101

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

Marauding Comanches had kidnapped beautiful Virginia Stevens. Her uncle would pay anything to get her back, and he knew Sundance was the only man who could bring it off. Not only did Sundance have the Comanches to contend with—he also had to beat the Comancheros to the girl. Sundance dyed his blond hair dark brown and made peace with his half-brothers before taking Virginia from them. She fought rescue for a while, but one night with Sundance in the warmth of his blanket softened her resistance.

WAR PARTY

SUNDANCE 11

By John Benteen

Copyright © 1974, 2016 by Ben Haas

First Smashwords Edition: March 2016

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.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Cover image © 2016 by Tony Masero

Series Editor: Ben Bridges

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Published by Arrangement with the Author Estate.

Chapter One

Poisoned ... A hell of a thing, to die like a wolf that had gorged itself on strychnine-dosed bait!

As Jim Sundance realized why his mind was becoming dull, his vision blurred, and his great, perfectly conditioned body numb, he swore bitterly, in a croaking voice, over the ignominy of a Cheyenne warrior, who had never been defeated by gun, knife or other conventional weapon, being murdered in such a Machiavellian manner.

When he began to reel in the saddle, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay on the back of Eagle, his Appaloosa stallion, much longer. Robbed of his strength and coordination, he was unable to take his rawhide reata and tie himself on the handsome spotted horse. The man who had poisoned him—having slipped the drug into his coffee, certainly—would come after him to gloat over the death of the seemingly indestructible half-breed who was a thorn in the side of the nefarious Indian Ring. The bastard would find his lifeless body sprawled here on the road, unless—

With a part of his mind that could still reason, Sundance turned Eagle off the road into a brush thicket. Instead of waiting to die like this, he would dismount at a likely spot and hope he would last long enough to try taking with him into eternity the man who had posed as his friend and then betrayed him.

Within the thicket, he reined his mount and reached for his Winchester. His hand was so numb he was unable to lift the rifle from its boot. Giddiness assailed him, and he felt himself swaying back and forth … felt himself falling. He hit the ground jarringly, but his senses were so dulled he experienced no pain. He lay still, sprawled face down, for a long moment, quite willing to remain like that and let himself drift off into the big sleep.

After a minute or two he began struggling to rise. He could not make it to his feet, but he managed to drag himself, snakelike, to a boulder ten feet away and then maneuvered his half-lifeless body to a sitting position with his back against the rock. He drew his long-barreled single-action .45 Colt’s revolver from its thonged-down holster but found it had grown too heavy for him to lift to shooting position. He dropped it to the ground. This failure touched off intense disappointment in him, for it meant that if he did stay alive until Pat Moran, his murderer, arrived, he would not be able to take his life. Since he was too weak to handle the six-shooter, he would not be able to use either the fourteen-inch Bowie knife or the Cheyenne tomahawk he also carried on his cartridge belts. As for using his bare hands, with which he could normally have broken Moran in two, they were no longer deadly weapons. Then, dimly, he remembered the derringer pistol.

With an effort, he got the sneak gun from an inside pocket of his fringed and beaded doeskin shirt. He had taken it from a house dealer in a combination saloon and gambling joint at San Antonio two months ago, breaking the tinhorn’s arm in the process. He had also forced him to admit, by roughing him up, that he had hoped to kill Sundance and collect the bounty placed on his hide by the Indian Ring. Everywhere Sundance went these days, one or more men tried to cash in on the Ring’s offer to pay for his death. The lobby he financed in far-off Washington in hope of obtaining a fair deal for the Indians was getting to some members of Congress. Due to its efforts, the Senate was holding an inquiry into the Indian Bureau, which, being corrupt, permitted the Indian Ring, the members of which were those men who enriched themselves off the tribesmen held on reservations, to exist and flourish.

The derringer was so small it became completely concealed in Sundance’s huge hand. He hoped that Moran would come soon enough and would venture close to do his gloating … The murderer would have to be very close, for the little gun was effective only at point-blank range. It was twin-barreled, an over-and-under weapon, so he would have two rounds, but only two, to fire.

Sundance became dully aware that his numbness was growing into paralysis. His mind wanted to let go, but his indomitable will fought desperately to hold on—to buy time. He began to chant a prayer, not to the God in which his father, an English remittance man, believed, but the supreme deity of the Cheyenne squaw who had borne him.

Hai-vu, Mother Earth … Give me a little of your strength! Bear me up until my enemy comes. I beseech you, Mother Earth ... Do this for your dying son!

His voice was enfeebled, and strange sounding to his own ears. Mother Earth did not seem to hear it. He felt himself drifting off into what he supposed was the big, long sleep …

But the Great Goddess must have heard, for he woke and found that he was still as he had been—alive, but barely. Several hours must have passed, for it had been hazy dusk when he sought cover here, and now it was long past nightfall with a nearly full moon bathing this mid-Texas plains country with bright, silvery light. He stirred slightly, testing his strength and finding it had waned almost totally. His dying was a slow process, perhaps because he was so big and rugged a man.

Jim Sundance was dying at the prime of his life. In his mid-thirties, he was several inches above six feet in height and tipped the scale at two hundred pounds—all bone and hard muscle. His hawk-like face, with its gleaming black eyes, big nose, wide, thin mouth, was definitely that of a plains Indian. In contrast to his features and coppery skin, his hair, worn shoulder-length beneath his battered old Stetson, was soft and golden. His chest bore the scars of the Sun Dance ordeal, the ritualistic ceremony of self-inflicted torture that turned a Cheyenne youth into a warrior. But he was not an untutored Indian. Being a half-breed sired by a mountain man who had become a member of the Cheyenne nation, he had been taught the three R’s by his father who had received his education in England. He knew the white man’s ways as well as the red man’s, and if he felt more empathy for his mother’s people, it was because they, the weaker race, were the hapless victims of man’s inhumanity to man.

He had on occasion, as a young warrior, painted his face, taken up his war shield and lance, and ridden against the Crows and other tribal enemies of the Cheyennes. Later he had served as a scout for the U.S. Army. But then, having matured and become aware of the injustice being done, he had on numerous occasions fought with his red half-brothers against the blue-clad soldiers. Finally, having seen the hopelessness of so few trying to stand against so many, he had become a loner and an unorthodox fighting man ... a professional gun-fighter, as it were. Now he hired out his skill as a dog soldier to those whites needing a troubleshooter. His services came high, but the money he earned—blood money, actually—was not used for his own aggrandizement. He sent it to his Indian lobby in Washington, and one of his lobbyists was his wife, Barbara Colfax.

By having laid his life on the line many times, he had over the years earned what must have been a small fortune. But he was dying a poor man. Poor in worldly goods, that is. He had lived a full, exciting life in his thirty-some years, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had tried his best to save the Indians from being totally subjugated to the greed of the Indian Ring. He had not succeeded to any great extent, but perhaps he had shown the way and someone else would take up the cudgel dropped by his weakened hand.

Death was coming to him like sleep to a weary man. His entire being, body, mind and spirit, became utterly relaxed and seemed to cut away from the world of reality and drift pleasurably into some alien peaceful realm. He wanted nothing so much as to let himself go completely, and be gone forever. But some spark of his warrior spirit was reluctant to accept final defeat just yet.

Wait … just wait a little longer!

As he told himself this, he heard dimly what he had been waiting to hear: the rhythmic drumming of hooves heralding a horse being ridden at an easy lope. A late traveler on his way to Weatherford only a mile or so away? Pat Moran coming to gloat over his poison victim and maybe to lift Sundance’s golden maned scalp as evidence that he had done away with the Indian Ring’s enemy?

Let it be that murdering bastard!

So thought Sundance with the last remnant of his reasoning ability. He still held the sneak gun concealed in his right hand. He fought against his desire, his need to let himself drift away completely.

His fear was that Moran would fail to see the Appaloosa standing in the thicket and continue on down the road. In that event, he would be denied his dying wish to take his murderer into eternity with him.

But the drumming hooves ceased abruptly, and for a long interval Sundance, his once keen sense of hearing dulled, heard nothing at all. Then Eagle pawed the ground with a fore hoof, once, twice and a third time, in warning, and he knew the rider—Moran, certainly—was moving stealthily through the thicket on foot. He remained slumped in his seated position against the boulder, his head bowed so far forward that his chin rested on his chest. He wanted to appear not merely a dying man but a dead one, so Moran would come close enough for him to use the derringer.

More minutes passed, then abruptly Moran came upon him from behind the boulder and kicked away the Colt’s revolver that lay beside him. His Stetson was knocked off his head, and a rough hand grasped his yellow mane of hair. His head was jerked back so that the moonlight shone on his face. Blurredly he saw the muzzle of Moran’s gun beading him from only inches away. He looked from it to the man’s pale, fleshy face. Sundance spoke in a weak, croaking voice.

Pat, you’ve done me in.

So I have, Jim.

And I thought we were friends.

A good friend is like a good Injun—only really good when dead.

I saved your life once, Pat.

I didn’t forget that, Moran said. It’s just that the bounty on your hide is too big. Ten thousand dollars, half-breed!

He let go of the golden hair but Sundance managed to hold his head up and keep his failing eyes on the man who now moved back a step, the better to put a slug in him.

You saved my life, all right, Moran said. Eight years ago, when I was a trooper with Custer’s Seventh. My company was in a skirmish with some Cheyennes along the Platte. My horse was killed under me, and I was taken captive. Those red bastards were all set to torture me to death when you came along and called them off. I remember, all right. And I’m mighty sorry about this. It’s just that I’m gut-sick of being a bartender in a grubby saloon in a two-bit cow town.

So you poisoned me.

Moran shook his head. I only doped your coffee. When you came walking into the Longhorn, I saw you as ten thousand dollars on the hoof—waiting only to be beefed. There was just you and me, nobody else, and I saw how I could take you. You wouldn’t take more than two shots of rotgut, so I said I’d get some coffee.

And laced it with poison.

Not poison—laudanum. A painkiller. But I put enough of the stuff in to knock you out—or so I figured. Then I stirred in a lot of sugar, to deaden the taste. You kicked about the coffee being too sweet, but you drank it down. But you’re no ordinary hombre, Jim. The laudanum merely made you drowsy. You said you had to ride, couldn’t take the time to sleep, because you had to get to some ranch. And, by God, you went outside, got on your horse, and rode off. I had to get a mount and follow you, to make sure of you. Moran tensed, steadying his gun so its barrel was lined on the space between Sundance’s eyes. And now I’m making sure of you, by damn!

He was so sure that he had a helpless man for his target that he took his time about squeezing the revolver’s trigger. Maybe time enough, Sundance thought fuzzily, for him to cut loose with his sneak gun before Moran’s slug tore into him. Maybe …

He gave it