Sundance 14: Riding Shotgun

By John Benteen

Jim Sundance rode right into the middle of the bloodiest feud in Arizona. Coffin City was split between gunfighter Tulso Dart and the murderous Cable clan. The Cables were backed by the crooked sheriff—Tulso Dart by a dying killer named Doc Ramsey. Sundance had his reasons for being there, but before it was over a lot of men would die in the dust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Aug 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310922657

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”.

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Sundance rode right into the middle of the bloodiest feud in Arizona. Coffin City was split between gunfighter Tulso Dart and the murderous Cable clan. The Cables were backed by the crooked sheriff—Tulso Dart by a dying killer named Doc Ramsey. Sundance had his reasons for being there, but before it was over a lot of men would die in the dust.

SUNDANCE 14: RIDING SHOTGUN

By John Benteen

First published by Leisure Books in 1977

Copyright © 1977, 2016 by John Benteen

First Smashwords Edition: September 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

First he saw the buzzards.

In the hard blue arch of the Arizona sky, they circled and swirled, dipping ever lower over something yonder near the stage road to Coffin City. The man on the big Appaloosa stallion, in the shelter of a rock not much smaller than a church, frowned. There were a lot of zopilotes—which meant a lot of something dead or dying down there two miles away. Cattle, maybe horses—but he did not think so. Hoisting in his stirrups, he took a careful look around.

This part of the territory seemed as deserted as the moon—and as barren: all jumbled rock, gravel, sand, harsh thorned growth and dazzling, merciless sun. But Sundance was not deceived. The Apaches—Chiricahua, Warm Springs, Mimbreno: this was their country. As it was, it would take some luck to get through it safely to the town. Those circling vultures would attract the attention of every human being within miles. Drawing attention to himself by riding to where they edged warily down to some gruesome feast could be bad medicine.

Keeping the spotted stallion tight-reined a moment longer, he considered: a tall man, inches over six feet, massive in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, long in the legs. He wore a battered sombrero with a beaded band, an eagle feather in it, and the hair that spilled from beneath it down to the collar of his fringed and ornamented buckskin shirt was blond, the yellow of pure gold, and his squinting eyes were hard and gray. But his skin was the color of a copper penny, and his features the craggy ones—hawk nose, high cheekbones—of a Plains Indian. A half-breed, his father had been white, his mother a Northern Cheyenne. Completing the mixture of white man’s gear and Indian garb, canvas pants were tucked into calf-high Cheyenne moccasins.

Born of two different worlds, belonging wholly to neither, he made his living in both as a Fighting man; no other kind would have dared to travel alone in southern Arizona in 1871. On his gunbelt there was an Army Colt, converted from percussion to brass cartridge; the same belt carried a long-bladed Bowie in a fringed sheath. On his other hip was a sheathed hatchet, and its straight handle would have told a knowledgeable onlooker that it was made for throwing. There was a Henry rifle in a saddle scabbard and two parfleches, panniers of buffalo hide, behind his saddle, one long, cylindrical, the other disc-shaped and a yard across. There were more weapons in these that he could use when necessary, as well as certain other things important to him. His horse itself was one of the splendid animals bred to perfection through generations by the Nez Percé tribe of Washington and Idaho, and, a stallion, trained for war as well as running buffalo. It needed no signal but a touch of heel when, his decision made, he left the shelter of the rock, moving toward the circling vultures, but never neglecting to keep under cover, never failing to search even as he rode for any unsuspected sign of human life, white or Indian. He had friends among the Apaches—good friends; but he had enemies as well, and, of course, there were plenty of tribesmen who, though they might have heard of him, had never met him. Now, with their domain invaded by hordes of white-eyes flocking to Coffin City, they were ready to kill first and ask questions later. For that matter, so, likely, were the whites; a half-breed was fair game for either side.

Which was why he’d stayed off the stage road, traveling cross-country, where he could choose his own gait and keep to cover. Now though there was no help for it; he must break into the open. There was still half a day’s ride to Coffin City. What had happened down there on the road might determine the route he should take, and the precautions; there was also the possibility that if humans were involved in the slaughter that must have taken place, some might still be alive. He was not the kind of man who could ride past coldly without giving what help he could to either white or red man.

Presently he reached the edge of the broken country, where it fell away down a slope seamed with washes, littered with jumbled rock, to the road beneath. Swinging down off Eagle, the big stallion, he left the horse ground reined and edged forward in a crouch, rifle ready. Crawling the last few yards, he cautiously peered around the trunk of a fat saguaro, and now he could see what it was the carrion birds were after. Hell, he grated.

~*~

The Concord stagecoach lay slantwise across the road, turned over on its side, its dead wheel horses already bloating in their harness, the other four of the six-horse hitch vanished. There were a few rags of cloth scattered around it, but there was more than that; sprawled in the road and on the farther slope were—Sundance counted—ten strange objects, gleaming a ghastly white in the brilliant sunlight. Sundance drew in breath. Those were the bodies of white people, the passengers and crew, stripped of every stitch—and it was on them and the two dead animals that the vultures now had already begun to feast.

The man named Jim Sundance lay there behind the cactus for a full ten minutes, searching the surrounding hills for any sign of life, scanning the terrain Indian style, keeping his eyes fixed, moving his whole head to pick up any possible flicker of movement. At last, satisfied that there was none, he returned to the patient stallion, mounted, and rode warily down to the scene of slaughter.

Frightened buzzards took noisy, reluctant flight at his approach. With the Henry up and ready, he circled the coach, reading sign, and he could almost see it happening. The Apaches, who never took unnecessary risks in warfare if they could help it, had done it neatly, efficiently, from ambush. Riflemen, firing from cover, had dropped the wheel horses in their traces, and when they had fallen the coach had twisted over. Thrown and stunned, the driver and the guard would never have had a chance, much less the passengers inside, or, for that matter, the two outriders which tracks told Sundance had accompanied the vehicle. They would have been dropped simultaneously with the horses, and then the Indians would have charged ... In minutes it must have all been over.

The stallion was no stranger to the scent of blood, but even it snorted as Sundance rode grimly among the naked corpses. Cut down as they had tried to fight or run, eight were men. But there was a woman, too, in her thirties, and a young girl of not more than twelve.

Sundance’s mouth twisted. In a sense, they had all been lucky, killed cleanly; the raid had taken place too close to town for the Indians to dare linger for the usual torture, mutilation, rapine. They had killed for loot and got it: four team horses and the outriders’ mounts; weapons’ clothes and trinkets, even opening the trunks of the passengers, cleaning them of everything an Indian could use or might be fascinated by, and butchering the wheel horses for meat to carry with them. Only one thing had they overlooked, Sundance thought, after he had read the sign left by unshod ponies. A single arrow was still embedded in the door of the coach, and he knew at once that it had come from a Chiricahua bow. The massacre, he judged, had taken place at least two hours earlier; with a head start like that, they’d sleep tonight in Old Mexico, beyond the reach of U.S. troops, if there were any in the district.

Then Sundance swore, jerking the horse up hard.

What wild Apaches living in hell’s own wilderness did not need was paper money, a white man’s thing not many of them understood. And there beside the coach was the iron express box, its lock twisted open by sheer manpower—and it was nearly brimming over with crisp packets of green currency. Even without dismounting, Sundance could see that the box contained a fortune, the top layer hundred-dollar banknotes.

Sundance swung down off the stud. Unslinging the cylindrical bag from behind his saddle, careful not to damage what it already held, he hurriedly crammed the free space inside with the cash. The pannier barely took it all, was fat and bulging when he finally closed it, lashing it back in place, leaving the strongbox empty.

The half-breed, that done, raised his head. The vultures still circled. He frowned. Even if he had the tools, it would take half a day or more to bury all those corpses. Unlashing his reata, he shook out a small loop. He used the rope to drag the bodies one by one to the overturned coach. When they were all laid out there, he opened the door, which bore the legend: RAWLINGS BROS.—COFFIN CITY—ARIZ. TERR. By the time he had finished wrestling all the corpses inside the Concord, he stank of death himself. Closing the door tightly, he pulled the side curtains. Now, he thought, the buzzards were welcome to what was left of the two horses. Coiling the rope and lashing it, he swung up. Just as his rump hit the saddle, he heard the flat, ugly slap of a bullet ripping past where his head had been one half second earlier, and then the crack of the rifle echoing across the desert. The next instant, he saw the riders, a dozen of them, pounding down the stage road, coming hard.

~*~

Reacting instinctively, Sundance swung the stud so hard it reared, touched it with his heels. The big horse lined out in a dead run, pounding up a wash, even as more rifles cracked. The range was long but there were good marksmen in the group; he heard the whine of slugs around his head, their screaming off of nearby rock. Cheyenne style, he slipped behind Eagle’s neck, clinging to the mane one-handed, thus simply disappearing, presenting no target to the oncoming riders. He knew what chance he’d have, a half breed, caught with that bull hide pannier full of greenbacks from the strongbox; there’d be no time for explanations before they killed him.

And now he was under cover in the broken ground, and he returned gracefully to the saddle, Eagle never slowing. Some would halt at the coach, but most would take after him, and he needed all the head start he could get. The Appaloosa ran gallantly, steadily, but it had already come a long way today, this was uphill, and