The Guns of Seven-Hawks-Dancing

By Alex Stoffel

Book I of the SEVEN-HAWKS-DANCING Trilogy

A man who once befriended him is dry-gulched. The woman he wants for his wife is brutally kidnapped. Jed Church, raised by the Cheyenne as Seven-Hawks-Dancing and brother to the War Chief called Bear-That-Walks-The-Sky, is also the deadly gunman the territory knows as the Breed.

Jed Church, with a heart more Cheyenne than white, rides the vengeance trail, fighting to reach Molly, and to help his brother keep what remains of the Cheyenne spirit alive.

Standing in the way is a shadowy plot involving cattlemen, homesteaders, the Army, and the Cheyenne. Jed struggles to make sense of it all and to reach Molly before it is too late.

Seven and Bear ride the Wyoming Territory for justice, Cheyenne-style.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 11, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469712727

Alex Stoffel

The author lives in Northern Minnesota. However, he was born in the Black Hills, and having lived in Colorado, South Dakota, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana, his heart is in the West. His wife is an Eastern Girl (Grand Forks, North Dakota), but she is very pretty, so it's okay. (The author will pay dearly for having said this.)

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The Guns of SevenHawks-Dancing

Alex Stoffel

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Guns of Seven-Hawks-Dancing

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Alexander F. Stoffel

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse.com, Inc.

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Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

This is a work of fiction, and while reference is made to an occasional historical event, i.e., the George Armstrong Custer massacre and the discovery of oil in the Dallas field in Wyoming’s Wind River country, the characters and events depicted are ficticious and bear no intentional resemblance to persons living or dead. This is a work of fiction.

ISBN: 0-595-19155-X

ISBN: 978-1-4697-1272-7 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER I

He had been riding in a westerly direction all day, and all day he sensed that he was not alone. That meant trouble because no one, to the best of his knowledge, knew where he was or where he was going. He had taken great pains to keep anyone from discovering either his destination, or, for that matter, his absence from what some might consider his usual haunts.

He had found Martha’s letter waiting in Denver at the hotel he used as a mail drop. The letter spoke of trouble and begged–it was hard to think of Martha begging–him to come. She made no mention of Jack and nothing of the nature of the trouble, only that he should come in the back door. The rider smiled. The ‘back door’ was an expression of Jack’s which he frequently used to refer to sneaking quietly into a situation. Jack, as a town marshal, often used the ‘back door’ to subdue trouble makers without gun play, being on top of them before they knew that he was even there.

Yet it was strange that she write him. It had been eight years since he had seen Jack and Martha, eight long years of bitterness and hurt. The pain of the hard words had perhaps dimmed a little but it had not died, even after eight years.

The letter was dated some two months before he received it. He didn’t know if he was too late, he couldn’t tell from the letter whether Jack even wanted him to come. But he knew that he was going, and if Martha said to use the back door, it meant real trouble. The rider felt that he could not permit himself to be delayed. He could probably outrun whoever it was behind him, but he had to know why he was being followed. Well, he thought, the delay would not have to be long.

Looking ahead, he saw that if he continued his direction of travel, in another mile or so he would be leaving the brush-spotted hills of the sloped approach to the Medicine Bow range. Normally, he wouldn’t have chosen to ride so far to the west of the more direct route through Laramie, but because he didn’t want to alert anyone in the area of his presence, he sought to avoid communities where he might be known. He pulled back on the reins of the big grulla he was riding, bringing it to an unwilling stop. The grulla stomped and snorted and tried to ease up the gentle slope toward the cooler air of the high country he sensed ahead. The rider pulled him back again sharply, and reaching beneath his sweat-stained vest, he pulled out a cigar which he leisurely lit. Swinging his leg over the saddle horn, he smoked and looked at the country about him.

His casual air was deceptive, however. His sharp blue eyes searched ahead for a spot from which he could watch his back trail. He had the feeling that if anything was going to happen, it would be soon. After some minutes, he located the place he was looking for, at least, it would do. Ahead about a half-mile was the flank of a ridge rising from the slope before him. A hundred feet or so up the flank was a small patch of trees reaching down the slope from the top. If he could ride ahead, get past the ridge, ease off to the north a bit, then double back behind the ridge, he would have a vantage point from which he would have excellent coverage of his back trail.

Nudging the grulla with his spurless heels, he goaded the big horse into the normal mile-eating lope of the cross-country traveler. In a few minutes he had passed the ridge, and circled back up the side. He eased the grulla into the patch of woods which he found to be more dense than had appeared from below. He dismounted, pulling his saddle gun from the boot. He jacked a cartridge into the chamber of the Winchester Model 73 and eased the hammer forward. Then he looped the grulla’s reins over a low branch and pulled the Peacemaker .45 from the waxed tie-down holster strapped to his right thigh. He thumbed open the gate, spun the cylinder to check the loads, stopped the cylinder on the empty chamber that was usually under the hammer, and slipped in a fresh .45 load from his gunbelt. Then he closed the gate and checked the feel of the single action’s hammer. An observer might have noticed his nod of approval as he released the hammer and returned the colt to the holster.

Having assured himself that everything was in good working order, he eased into the trees and moved to a spot well back in the shade but forward enough to cover the country over which he had just ridden. He sat down and pulled forward the dark brown hat with the flat-crushed crown. The brim cut down the bright glare of the land before him. Only his eyes moved as he scanned every small ravine, every piece of brush, every spot where more than one tree stood. He heard again the sign of human presence in the wild–silence. Silence where only moments before some crows had been engaged in a shrill argument. Crows could fly away from most of the normal problems they might encounter, so they didn’t often get excited over a cougar or a bear or a herd of buffalo. But they would leave the presence of humans.

The same observer might also have noticed that everything about the man was sort of loose and easy, and yet filled with intensity. He wore the common western garb of denim pants and a dark blue wool shirt. His boots were spurless and lower-heeled than those of the Spanish and Mexicans to the south. His vest was of a sweat-stained ambiguous dark color. Around his neck was a black bandanna. The Colt was at home in the holster on the right, and a mid-size bowie was in the sheath fastened to the left side of his gunbelt. Actually, there wasn’t anything very remarkable about any of his clothing, it was neither new nor old.

It was the gun that distinguished him. It rode lower on his thigh than working cowhands normally like, and from the appearance of the weapon, it was obvious that he took exceptional care to see that it was in the best of working order. The grips of the Colt were of unmarked walnut, polished to a high sheen not by wood finishes, but by a hand which had gripped it countless times.

Except for the gun, there was nothing unusual about the man, that is, at longer distances. From up close, however, his physical appearance would have startled many a more genteel man.

Lean was a word others might use to describe him, and that would have been correct. He was a tall man, standing a bit over six feet, but not unusually tall for the plains. He carried quite a bit of his weight in solid shoulders and in a deep chest. His arms were well muscled, but it was not power or strength one thought of when looking at him, although there was plenty of that, too. It was more the litheness with which he moved. There was something of the sure movements of a big cat in his walk, and men either shied away from him or were drawn to him; few could remain neutral to his presence.

His sweaty light-brown hair, giving some evidence of being sun-bleached, stuck out from under the brim of his hat, and he had the appearance of someone who had not been in a barber shop for a few weeks. The skin of his face, neck, and hands was sun-darkened and leathery. He was not a handsome man, but his features might have been pleasant were it not for a jagged scar running from the corner of his left eye across his cheekbone toward his nose. He wore a fierce, full mustache and a five-day stubble on his chin.

Time had passed, and the rider was about to give up on his suspicions of following horsemen when a big buck moved out of a small ravine a hundred yards down the slope. It was followed by two does. He kept his frozen position while thinking that deer, especially bucks, tended to be smarter than humans and didn’t really like to go wandering around in mid afternoons of days when the temperature must be above 90. The man eased back the hammer on the Winchester and shifted his position so that he could swing the rifle up quickly to cover the mouth of the ravine. In a moment he was startled.

They were Indians, and from the way they rode and the marking on their buckskins, they were Cheyenne who really had no business being this far south. Since the late hostilities with the Seventh Cavalry some seven years back, what was left of the Northern Cheyenne was supposed to be on a reservation up in Montana. He wanted no trouble with Cheyenne, especially gun trouble. Blackfoot or Sioux were another matter, but he intended no harm to the Cheyenne. He slid the hammer of his rifle forward and lowered the muzzle. Even so slight a movement was instantly spotted by the Cheyenne who broke their ponies into a run, one to the left, two to the right.

Wondering what to do now, the rider considered calling out to them, but was given no choice. From the slope above him, he heard the crash of brush. Turning toward the sound, he was not prepared for the charge which came from his rear. Damn, he thought, I’ve been here before. Reluctantly, he turned, the Colt appeared in his hand almost without any apparent movement, and he swung the gun to cover the first of the four charging Cheyenne. The gun bucked in his hand once, he aimed not to kill but to disable, so he tried for a shoulder. But ten years of staying alive by being quicker and more deadly than others made it difficult. He felt sick at having to do so, but he aimed low this time as he tracked a second Cheyenne and the gun discharged again. He was lining up his sights on the third when he felt a tremendous blow to the back of his head, and all the light his eyes could see went black.

He thought he was in the bottom of a deep black well. He struggled to come up, to see the light, to open his eyes. His head hurt more than he could remember it aching before. He became aware of sounds about him, of movement and of words in Cheyenne which he could not hear well enough to understand. With his eyes still closed, he let his mind roam his body. He was not tied up. He couldn’t find any obvious wounds other than his throbbing head. So, after due deliberation, he decided the best thing to do would be to open his eyes, and he did.

The image his eyes were finally able to get in focus was of a powerful-looking Cheyenne who was gazing down at him gravely. In words completely free of any accent, the Cheyenne spoke. So, after only a few short years of white man’s living, my brother is taken by a child’s trick. Too, your aim is bad. A Sioux squaw would have had your hair. You are totally disgusting!

Let’s argue that when my head quits hurting, the man groaned. I should have figured your hand in this. That’s how we took out the Blackfoot sentries when we stole those ponies when we were what?–fourteen? The Cheyenne solemnly nodded.

The Cheyenne the rider knew as Bear-That-Walks-The-Sky, and whom he called simply Bear, reached out his hand with great apparent distaste and helped him to his feet. They stared at each other, each attempting to outglare the other. Finally Bear-That-Walks-The-Sky let his stern face break into a smile, and the rider broke out laughing.

CHAPTER II

The years rolled swiftly backward in the mind of the man who rode the grulla, and he was once again a nine-year-old boy living near the southern approaches to the Bighorns in Wyoming. With him were his seven-year-old sister, blond and with a sparkle in her eye, his mother, a kindly and gentle woman who was ageless in the eyes of the young boy, and a dark complexioned man who seemed to have all the strength in the world, and who was the boy’s father.

Three years before, his farmer father had taken his young wife and family to a new land to find a place where he could plant his feet and establish a new life. They had come from a small town in Illinois. Ephraim, although an excellent farmer with a second sense for weather and crops, owned no land and could only find work as a farm hand. What he earned was supplemented by what Elena earned as the school teacher in their small town, and somehow the family survived.

The day came when Ephraim could no longer pretend, either to himself or his wife, that eventually they would save enough to buy land, and his thoughts turned to the western country. There, he knew, there was land for the taking. The dangers were great–weather, Indians, the lawless element that had fled from more civilized parts, the cruelty of the large cattle barons who fought homesteaders to keep their rangeland–but Ephraim read the Homestead Act and made his decision. They would leave for Wyoming. What the family had managed to save was spent to outfit them for the wagon trip west.

And so it was that Ephraim took his wife Elena, his six-year old son Jed, his four-year old daughter Elizabeth, two oxen, a plow horse, and a wagon, and rode down the rivers to the sprawling city of St. Louis. There they joined a wagon train going up the old Oregon Trail. Their intention was to leave the train at Fort Laramie and to strike out on their own in a northwesterly direction until Ephraim found what he sought. It might have been better had Ephraim inquired about what the land was like before he chose this direction, but like so many other movers of the day, he was filled more with hopes, dreams, enthusiasm, perhaps even desperation, than with good common sense. The result was that the family found themselves alone, almost without money, and with no farmable land in sight.

Young Jed, of course, was impervious to this. It was all one great adventure. He could walk beside the oxen, chase prairie dogs when he found some, and retire to the arms of his mother when his world was unfriendly. He trusted his father to take care of them all, and his mother to hold them together with love. As a matter of fact, the only thing that bothered him was his name. He liked Jed all right, but his mother had the alarming habit of calling him by his full name whenever she was unhappy with another of his escapades. Sometimes the hills rang with JEDEDIAH SOLOMON CHURCH, you come here this INSTANT! But, one would have to say that on the whole, Jed’s world was not really very troubled.

In due course, Ephraim discovered that no matter his talents, he would not make a living farming in this country. It was at this moment that a miracle occurred, at least, that’s what Jed’s mother called it. A trader from Sheridan passed through and offered Ephraim a job. The trader needed someone to go to a small trading station in the south-west tip of the Bighorns to buy pelts and trade with the Cheyenne. The last man the trader had in that post was a bachelor who spent little time trading and much time drinking. Eventually his body quit and the Indians had reported him dead when the trader went to the post to find out why no loads had been sent out. The trader now thought that Ephraim, being a family man, might be a better risk.

It didn’t take the grown-up members of the family long to make up their minds. Elena was a religious woman who believed that God took care of His own. Jed jumped up and down at the idea of being on the trail again, and Elizabeth just picked wild flowers and ignored everyone. Ephraim, having conducted this family poll, concurred quickly, and in due course the family was living in a log cabin attached to a larger shed-like building that housed the trading materials and served as the trade center for the southern and western parts of the Bighorns.

As Jed remembered it, those were Elysian days (although ‘Elysian’ was hardly the word he would have used). The last of the mountain men came and went, Indians stopped to trade, and life settled into a comfortable routine marred for Jed only by the fact of his mother’s dedication to his education. This was not terribly new to him. Jed had been reading since he was five. Ephraim and Elena had made a space for a small library (consisting of some twenty-odd carefully-chosen books) on the trip west. One of those books was a lately published medical book which Elena pored over because she was fearful of something happening so far from a qualified doctor. This was to have no small significance for them all.

It was one year to the day after the family’s arrival at the trading post. It was a crisp fall day with leaves turning colors and the frosty white promise of an early winter strong upon the hills. With no warning, a group of Cheyenne appeared and camped in a clearing below the trading post. Indians coming to trade were common enough, but this was what looked like a substantial part of a tribe. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them–the warriors, women, children, and their old people. Their camp was the first chance for the Church family to observe the village life of the Cheyenne.

The chief, a large Cheyenne with a little gray in his hair, had a partly crippled arm, the obvious result of an old injury judging from the scars at the elbow. His name was Little Elk, and he informed Ephraim that they were moving south to follow the buffalo. In the meanwhile, they intended to stop for a few days and to let the children and old people rest before continuing their journey. For three days, the Cheyenne, who did not fear whites, and the trading family, who did not know enough to be afraid, stared at each other.

On the fourth day, a young boy of about Jed’s age was in the way when a partly-broken Indian pony reared. Before anyone could make a move, the pony had run into the young Cheyenne lad, knocked him to the ground, and stomped around in fury until the Indians could get him away from the young lad. When they finally extracted the young boy from under the hoofs, it was obvious that his leg was broken midway between the knee and the hip because it lay at a slightly unnatural angle to the rest of his body. The boy had passed out from the pain before his leg could be examined.

Elena, seeing it happen, rushed to his side, and was indeed the first person there. She was joined almost immediately by a distraught Indian woman whom Elena took to be the boy’s mother. Then Little Elk came over with anguish in his eyes, and Elena and Ephraim, who had just joined them, realized that this was the son of a Cheyenne war leader.

Perhaps it was the shock of the accident, perhaps the stunned anguish of the parents, but it was Elena who made the first move. She ordered Ephraim to get some straight, strong sticks and to bring them to the house. She ordered Jed to get the medical book out and to put it on the table in the one room of the cabin. She gestured to the gathering Cheyenne to pick up the boy and to bring him into the cabin.

Now, it is true, perhaps, that settlers and Indians did not always get along, there even being occasional trouble which might result in someone’s hair being hung in a Cheyenne lodge, or in the death songs of Cheyenne women being sung. But for some incomprehensible reason, the Cheyenne did what the woman wanted