“My name,” he said, “is Sundance—Jim Sundance. And I’d like a room.”
The woman who had answered his ring at the boarding house door was not what he had expected. Almost as tall as he, with hair the color of a raven’s wing, eyes dark and lustrous, skin smooth and white, she was probably about thirty and more than handsome. Built on a large scale, her bosom stretched the fabric of the gingham dress, but she was not rawboned; her waist was slender, her hips curved, hands and feet surprisingly small. And she did not seem at all fazed by the appearance of this towering, dusty, bruised apparition at her door. Apparently men fresh from a fist fight were no novelty to Martha Fenian.
“Yes,” she said, and he knew at once she was from the east; her voice lacked the twang of women born out here. “Yes, I’ve already heard about you. Well, I do have a room. Come in.” She looked him over coolly, judging him as he’d judged her, then stepped aside. “Two dollars a night, including breakfast. Other meals a dollar each. A hot bath’s fifty cents. You look like you could use one. Your room’s number seven, upstairs and to the right. Bath’s at the end of the hall. I’ll have it filled and waiting. It’s past supper time, but you’ll be wanting food, I guess. I’ll have a meal for you in your room by the time you’ve finished washing.”
Grinning hurt, but Sundance managed it. “You’ve called the turn all along the line. Fine. Pay in advance, I reckon.”
“Your credit’s good. They say you brought in all the money from the stage today—and did what you could for those poor people, too, that the Indians killed. That suits me.” She took a key from a bundle at her belt, gave it to him. Then she could restrain her curiosity no longer. “Who was it?”
“Yance Rawlings.”
She whistled softly. “He look as bad as you?”
“Worse.”
“Good.” Martha Fenian smiled. “You whipped him then. Lord knows, he was overdue. Now, you’d better get on upstairs while you can still walk. You want some whiskey on your tray?”
“One drink.”
“It’ll be there.” She watched as, lugging his gear, he ascended the steps.
~*~
The room was small but spotless. The admiration Sundance had felt immediately for Martha Fenian increased. Mr. Fenian was a lucky man—but he’d have to be a damned strong personality to stand up to such a woman. Then, laying the panniers on the bed; he forgot her. Clumsily, hands still aching from the fight, he opened them, inspected their contents carefully to make sure they had not been damaged.
The long one into which he’d crammed the money held a short, recurved bow of juniper, its string, woven of buffalo sinew, slack now. But when strung, it was immensely powerful: with it Sundance could drive an arrow clean through a bull bison—or drop a man at three hundred yards. He had, in his time, done both, and the bow was as valuable to him as any firearm he carried. Sometimes more so, because it made neither sound nor muzzle flash.
With it in the pannier were the arrows, in a quiver made of panther-skin, the tail still attached. Two dozen of them, they were straight and perfect, painstakingly made by Sundance himself, fletched with feathers from the wings of vultures, tipped with barbed flint points. Most Indians nowadays used iron for arrowheads when they could get it; Sundance preferred stone points for their greater shocking power. He laid those aside, then took out a small bundle wrapped in otter skin.
And that was what would have been profaned if touched by the hands of any other man—his medicine bag. It held things sacred to him, revealed to him in his dreaming as a Cheyenne youth, the medicine dream a boy must have after a long fast before becoming a man. Caressing it a moment, he carefully restored it to the pannier, which also held a gorgeous Cheyenne war bonnet, carefully folded and cased, and a pipe. His mouth quirked, a little bitterly. His medicine bag was a symbol of how much Cheyenne there was in him, blood of which he was proud. Yet, sometimes, the white man’s side of him dared to disbelieve ... It was not only a sacred symbol, it was also a symbol of how stranded between two worlds he was, neither one thing nor the other.
Restoring everything to the parfleche, he only glanced inside the other one, flat and disc-shaped. What it held was his war shield, made of the thick neck hide of a bull buffalo stretched over a hoop, filled with a padding of grass and bull hair, covered with an outside layer of antelope skin on which had been painted a Thunderbird. Attached to its perimeter were six tufts of hair—three black, the others varying in color. Those were the scalps of the six men, Pawnees and whites, who had murdered his parents—the last scalps he had ever taken, though he had killed many, perhaps too many, men since then. Carefully he removed a picture from the wall, hung the parfleche with the shield on its nail instead. It would not stop a modern bullet, but it would turn an arrow or a musket ball—provided it did not accidentally touch the ground and lose the medicine that had been blessed into it in a long and complicated ceremony.
Meanwhile there were footsteps in the hall; a youth’s voice tinged with Mexican accent said, “Bath’s ready, señor.”
“Good,” Sundance answered. Carefully he locked the room. The tub was full, hot, and there were plenty of soft, clean towels. He stripped, revealing a scarred torso the color of bronze, with a particularly ugly scar on each breast just above the nipple. The rest were old wounds: those, though, were where they had run the rawhide ropes through in the Sun Dance ceremony, in which, entering manhood, he had danced and danced, dragging behind himself a pair of heavy buffalo skulls, until the skin of his chest had finally parted and released him.
Gratefully, he sank into the tub. Mrs. Fenian really knew how to take care of her boarders. But even as he lathered up, his sixgun was by the tub, always within easy reach ...
~*~
His body, honed to a razor’s edge of fitness, was resilient; the bath and the sumptuous meal, plus the one drink of whiskey waiting in his room restored him almost fully. Dressing in clean buckskins, locking the door behind him, he went downstairs. It was time now to see to Eagle. Normally the stallion came first, before himself, but after the fight his own need had been greater.
He mounted, rode back to the stage line office, warily on the lookout for Yance Rawlings. Art was waiting for him on the sidewalk. Sundance kept the horse tight-reined. “Where’s Yance?”
“Gone. Don’t worry about him. Ellie’s takin’ care of him.”
“Ellie?”
“Girl he lives with,” Art said, a touch of sourness in the words. “Come on, I’ll show you where to put the stud.”
Sundance saw Eagle roll in the corral, then box-stalled with a feed of grain, a sheaf of hay bale. “You still don’t want to talk business tonight?” Art asked.
“Tomorrow,” Sundance said. “At nine.”
“Well, then, I might as well close down. Don’t come around for the stud in the middle of the night. We keep two guards on duty to watch the vault.”
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Sundance promised and walked away, heading for the boarding house.
Along the way, he passed three saloons. Sheer curiosity made him enter the last one, for it was bigger and gaudier than anything he had seen west of St. Louis, and the music coming from it was that of a small orchestra, not merely a piano.
Called the Occidental, it had a huge bar room with a stage at one end; lots of mirrors and painted nudes, and a gambling room off to the side. Despite the crowd that filled it, there were empty tables, and Sundance found one in a corner that would protect his back. He watched the percentage girls in their scanty clothes circulate in the crowd while a waiter went after the drink he ordered. The bourbon, when it came, was a decent one and he sipped it slowly, trying to add up the day’s events in his head. Something about all of them was out of kilter.
Then a slender, almost wispy form in black frock coat, string tie, and white shirt detached itself from the crowd at the bar, made its way toward him. Sundance’s right hand dropped below the table top, close to his Colt.
“Sundance,” Doc Ramsey said, halting opposite him. “Mind if I join you? Don’t worry. At a suitable distance. I won’t infect you.” He carried a bottle with a glass upside down on its neck.
Sundance nodded. “Okay. Sit down.”
Ramsey took the farthest chair from the half-breed across the table, poured himself a drink, tossed it off, poured another, drank half of that. His thin face was dead pale; save for fever spots on his cheeks. His sibilant voice, weakened by the ruination of his lungs, was rich with the accent of his native Georgia. “Hear you had a tussle with Yance Rawlings—and won. Congratulations.”
“News travels fast.”
“Yeah, Ellie told me.”
“Who’s Ellie?”
Ramsey grinned, jerked a thumb. “That’s Ellie. She’s Yance’s girl.”
Following the motion of Ramsey’s thumb, Sundance saw her, surrounded by a crowd of men at the bar. Involuntarily, he let out a low whistle.
The girl was in her early twenties, with a huge mane of tawny-yellow hair, vivid blue eyes beneath painted brows, a mouth like ripe scarlet fruit. The upper hills of big round breasts threatened to overflow the low-cut bodice of her scanty outfit; her long legs, in black stockings, were superb. Even at this distance, he could feel the waves of sex radiating from her like heat from a depot stove.
“That’s right.” Doc’s mouth twisted. “Dangerous as a loaded pistol with a filed sear. The toast of Coffin City. And she don’t come cheap. Only a man with money like Yance’s got could afford her. Anyhow, she don’t like losers and she’s been spreading it around how you whipped Yance. That ain’t going to make him any happier with you.”
“Which is Yance’s problem.” Sundance watched as Ramsey tossed off another drink, seemingly without effect upon him. For a moment, Sundance felt a touch of pity for the man, despite his repellent looks and reputation. In his late thirties, he had no hope of seeing forty; he was a walking dead man, and with a death sentence already laid on him by his own body, with no chance of fighting back, it was no wonder that all pity, all humanity, had been leeched from him. “You got somethin’ you want to say to me, Doc?”
“Yeah. A message from Tulso. He’s changed his mind. You don’t have to stick around. In fact, it would suit him better if you’d ride on out of Coffin City.”
“Is that a fact?” Sundance drained his glass.
“Yeah. More—he said to tell you that if you stay on, you do so at your own risk.”
Sundance grinned. “Doc, everything I’ve done since I was twelve years old has been at my own risk.” Then he sobered. “What’s the matter—Tulso afraid to deliver his own message himself?”
“No. He’s in a high-stakes game over there in the gambling room and can’t pull out just now.” Ramsey tossed off another glass of liquor. “You know Tulso better than that. Say what you will about him, he ain’t afraid of anybody. And that includes the Old Scratch himself. It’s just that Coffin City don’t need another gunfighter right now—and especially not one like you.” Ramsey paused, then added in a burst of confidence, the whiskey finally reaching him, bringing out some hidden spite. “Tulso likes to be top dog anywhere he goes. He don’t want anybody makin’ him look bad. You did that today ... and he’s afraid you’ll do it in the future, you stick around.”
“Meaning he can’t stop these stagecoach raids and he’s afraid I can.”
“Meaning anything you care to—” Doc broke off as, outside on the street, there was the sudden approaching thunder of many hooves, a lot of riders coming fast. Above the noise in the saloon a wild yipping and whooping from outside rang out. “Uh-oh,” said Ramsey, turning in his chair.
Then they were surging into the saloon, more than a dozen of them, sombreroed, chap-clad, booted, spur rowels jingling, and nearly every one of them wearing two guns. Among the miners and the townsmen, they stood out like cacti in a flower bed. Leading them was a tall, gaunt old man with a shag of graying hair, face seamed and shriveled by the sun, eyes the cold dead gray of a pair of bullets. A silence fell over the interior of the Occidental as they made their way to the bar.
Ramsey sucked in breath. “Old Man Cable and his sons and their cowboys from up in the north end of the county. Come to town to raise some hell and—Damn, there’s gonna be action now. Look who they got with ’em. See the one in the yellow shirt? That’s Jared Curry!”
Sundance stiffened. It was a name he’d heard before, one that had echoed down from the days of the raw warfare in Kansas and Missouri in which he himself had taken part. Like himself, Curry had come out of that a seasoned gunfighter, a trade to which he’d stuck. Mostly he operated in Indian Territory and the trail towns of Kansas; their paths had crossed, but this was the first time Sundance had ever seen him. “Doc—” he began, but Ramsey had already disappeared, fading into the crowd like a shadow.
Old Man Cable was slamming a fist on the bar.
“Awright, goddammit, let’s have some service here for a bunch of thirsty waddies! We been a long time ridin’ and ate a lot of dust! Git your butts movin’, you barkeeps, and set out the best you got for the C-Bar spread and all its friends! And if it’s got enemies here’s plague and destruction to ’em!” He seized an already open bottle on the bar, tilted back his head, drank long and deeply from it.
But it was Curry Sundance watched. Redheaded, freckle-faced, he had blunt, ugly features, and the yellow flannel shirt had not been washed in weeks. Barrel-chested, short-legged, he wore two Remingtons strapped low, and his hands were never far from them. Unlike the others, wholly intent on whiskey, he turned, surveyed the barroom with pale blue eyes, like a wolf sizing up new territory for traps. For a moment, his eyes lingered on Sundance, then passed on. Still, he was wholly alert as he took the open bottle set before him with his left hand, drank lightly from it.
And now the crowd in the Occidental was either drifting out or pulling away from the bar, so the Cable outfit had it to itself. Drawing back, the other patrons almost blocked Sundance’s vision. But he saw the velvet curtains part and, from the gambling room, Tulso Dart emerge—alone.
The marshal had traded the range clothes worn earlier for a dapper black suit, white shirt, string tie, and bowler hat. But the two Navy Colts were still strapped around his waist, and his thumbs were hooked in his gunbelts as he strode forward, halting a short distance from the bar. Sensing his presence, Old Man Cable turned. “Well,” he blared. “If it ain’t the old he-wolf hisself! Hello, Tulso! Any objections to a bunch of hard-workin’ cowboys wettin’ down their whistles?”
Dart’s voice was quiet, but it carried. “You behave yourself, Cable, you got the run of Coffin City like anybody else. But you’re travelin’ in bad company.” His eyes shifted to Jared Curry. “Curry. I hold a Federal warrant from Indian Territory for the murder of a U. S. Marshal there. You’re under arrest. And, Cable, if you try to interfere—”
“Interfere? Hell, this gentleman just drifted in to our spread yesterday!” Cable laughed coldly. “What’s between you and him is your own affair. ‘Course, we told him you was the law here, but he said that cut no ice with him. He’s kinda like me, Tulso, he wasn’t raised to think a U.S. Marshal’s God.”
Dart ignored that. “Curry. Take off your guns, slow and easy, and raise your hands. You’re goin’ to the lock-up.”
“Am I, now?” Curry had stepped away from the bar, hands dangling at his sides. “Me, I don’t think so, Dart. If I do, it’ll be feet first. Because I have been waiting a long time to come up against the great Tulso Dart. There’s some that’s fast and some that’s faster, and me, I think—”
There was no change in his voice as he drew, hand blurring down. Dart did not appear to move. But suddenly the room was blasted by the thunder of guns; two white plumes of smoke appeared in front of Tulso Dart. Curry had his gun out and up, but he never got off a round. When the two slugs from the Navy Colt plowed into his chest they slammed him backwards as if kicked by some giant animal. He landed hard on the floor, raised his left hand languidly, as if very sleepy, let it drop, and then was dead.
The smoke cleared, revealing Dart covering the group at the bar with his converted Navy Colts. “Stand fast!” he snapped. “If anybody else is figuring on buying in, Doc’s behind the curtain yonder with a sawed-off!”
Old Man Cable eyed Dart coolly for a moment. Then he let out a hoarse, hacking laugh. “Hell, he warn’t no friend of ours. I done told you that. Don’t worry, Dart. If I ever come after you, it won’t be in no tinhorn way like that. I reckon the government will stand his burial. Me, I’m still thirsty. Come on, boys! Drink up!”
The crowd moved away from Sundance. He stood up, drifted silently toward the door. All eyes focused on the dead man, no one paid him attention—save, perhaps, the girl named Ellie, whom he saw staring at him from amidst the throng. There was curiosity on her face, but when his gaze met hers, she looked away. Then Sundance was out in the open air.
Striding warily toward the boarding house, he told himself that he had underrated Dart. Whatever else he might be, he lived up to his reputation as a gunman and then some. Sundance had never seen a faster draw, nor a man cooler in a gunfight. Tulso Dart was not someone to be taken lightly.
~*~
“Mr. Sundance.”
He had just closed the boarding house door behind him and started for the stairs when the woman’s voice halted him, a door opening, light spilling from a room. Martha Fenian’s tall figure was silhouetted in the doorway of what appeared to be an office. “I heard shooting,” she said. “What happened?”
Briefly, Sundance told her. “Oh,” she said disgustedly. “Those Cables ... ”
Martha Fenian hesitated. Then, standing aside, she gestured. “Maybe you’d like to come in for a nightcap. There are probably a lot of things you ought to know about Coffin City, including the Cables.”
“I can use all the information I can get. But Mr. Fenian—”
“There is no Mr. Fenian,” she said tautly. “The Garfield gang killed him in a stage hold-up nearly a year ago.”
“Oh,” Sundance said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He didn’t amount to much. I was looking for a big man, one that could handle me. He was big, all right, but only on the outside. There wasn’t much to him on the inside. Come on in.”
Sundance entered the room. Once inside, he saw that it was equipped not only as an office, it served also as a bedroom. It held the spice of a woman’s presence, the perfume.
Martha Fenian sat down in a chair by a roll top desk, motioned him to take the other. There was a bottle already open on the desk, a half-full glass. From a drawer, she took another glass and filled it. Sundance accepted it, knowing he’d had a lot by his standards today, first with Rawlings, then in his room, then the saloon. But most of it had burned out of him. Settling back, he was not surprised when Martha Fenian rolled herself an expert cigarette, put it in her mouth and lit it, savoring the smoke. Then she raised her glass. “To your health.”
“And yours.” They both drank. Then Sundance said, “The Cables.”
“Yes. Well, they drifted in from Texas two years ago, about the time Coffin City started to boom, with a herd of longhorns—the old man and his three sons, Ash, Mort, and Phil. Got run out of Texas, the story goes; anyhow, they’re as mean a bunch of snakes as you’ll find. But this town needs meat, and they’re the ones that furnish it—they set up a big ranch in the north end of the county. I don’t know how many men it takes to run maybe a thousand head of cattle but there are never less than thirty or more out there at the C-Bar, people say. They say it’s a way-station, too, for every drifting gunfighter and outlaw that comes through. In fact, there’s rumors that the Garfield gang used it as a base before Dart cleaned ’em out.”
She drained her glass, helped herself to more. Sundance shook his head when she offered him a refill. “Anyhow,” she said, “this town’s split into two factions. One’s headed by Sheriff Whitfield, who’s a politician pure and simple, never was a lawman, never has been, and he’s got the backing of Cable and his cowboys and a lot of other politicians here in town. The other’s headed by Dart, with the backing of the Rawlings brothers and some other businessmen who want to see the town tamed down, crime stamped out. And they’re deadly enemies—there’s nothing Cable would like to do more than see the Dart brothers and Doc Ramsey killed, and the Darts are just itching to wipe out the Cables.”
She laughed harshly. “Not that the Darts are angels. What it really boils down to is a fight over graft and rake-offs. Sheriff Whitfield gets the lion’s share of that right now and the Cables have the guns to back him up. The Darts and Ramsey want to bring him down so they can have a free hand at the gravy bowl. But, having to choose, I’d choose the Darts.
“Anyhow,” she added, “there’s going to be a hell of a showdown here in Coffin City between the Darts and the Cables one of these days. How and when it’ll come, no man knows. But if Dart can ever get any evidence at all against the Cables that’ll allow him to use his Federal authority, you can be damned sure he’ll bring it on as quick as possible. If I were you, I’d stand clear of both sides, try not to get caught in the middle.”
“The advice,” Sundance said, “is appreciated. Dart’s already suggested I get the hell out of town.”
“You’d be smart to,” said Martha Fenian. Then her eyes met his. “But I hope you don’t.”
For a moment, there was silence in the room as she looked at him steadily, with a significance in her gaze that could not be mistaken. Then she turned her face away, set down her glass. “Maybe I drink a little too much,” she said. “Maybe talk too much, too. It comes from being lonesome.”
“In a boarding house?”
“Lonesome for a man, dammit,” Martha Fenian said. “Don’t you ever get lonesome for a woman?” She stood up, towering over his seated figure. “Look at me. Tall, big. And all around me,” she said contemptuously, “little men. Big on the outside, like my husband, maybe, but little on the inside. It ever occur to you how much trouble a woman like me might have in finding a man that’s a match for her, that she can ... look up to? They don’t come along very often. And when I find one, I guess I ... Well, I can tell it and something happens inside of me. And maybe then I sort of ... lose control.” She drew in a breath that made her breasts rise. “But I guess you’ve already got a woman.”
“Yes,” Sundance said. He thought of Barbara Colfax, felt a surge of longing.
“Indian or white?”
“White. She’s in Washington, D.C., right now.”
“Washington? Then it’s been a long time since you’ve seen her.”
“Four months,” Sundance said.
“A long time,” Martha said. “A damned long time.”
“Yes,” Sundance said, the whiskey burning in him. He arose. “I think I’d better go to bed right now.” He turned.
“Sundance.” Her voice halted him. Once more he faced her.
She was unbuttoning the taut gingham dress. Her eyes fixed his. “There’s no need to climb the stairs,” she said. And now the top of the dress was down. He saw the upper mounds of white breasts above the camisole she wore, and then as she reached behind herself, unsnapped something, the top of that fell down and her breasts leaped free, like animals just released from a cage. They were huge, yet firm and high, their nipples the size of silver dollars, the points of them erect. Her lips were parted. “You’ll have to help me out of the rest of it,” she said.
“Yes,” Sundance said. “I’ll do that.” And he went to her, a lust to match her own flaring in him, knowing that taking her would not be something that touched what he felt for his own woman so far away—and knowing that if he did not take her he would make an enemy he could ill afford in Coffin City.