He put the stallion up a pine-clad hill, crested the rise, started down the rock-strewn reverse slope. Then they were there, the three men, materializing from the woods like ghosts, silent in their moccasins as fog. All three had guns trained on him, but when they recognized him, they lowered them. “Sundance,” Easy Dreamer said. “You’ve come back.”
“I’m back. Hello, Broken Gun, Mountain Cat.”
The other two Navajos nodded. “Everything’s been quiet,” Easy Dreamer said. “We did like you told us, pulled way back in the hills. I guess Barkalow and Strawn thought they’d scared us away. Anyhow, the white woman and Bible Man have been impatient, waiting for your coming. Bible Man was not sure you would return. I told him not to worry; that the man named Sundance never broke his word. Do you have news for us?”
“Good news, I think. I’ll tell it where all can hear. Lead me to the main camp.”
Mountain Cat disappeared into the pines, returned with ponies. They mounted and Easy Dreamer led the way into country even more broken than Sundance had already traversed. He found the two thousand sheep scattered out in a long, dirty white string at the bottom of a rough-walled canyon, through which flowed a stream. Only Navajos, Sundance thought, could have got sheep into such a place; only Navajos could get them out again.
Long before they reached the main camp, upstream of the flock, word had been passed by lookouts, and McCaig and Delia were waiting tensely by the wagons as Sundance and the three Indians loped up. Most of the other herders had come in, too. At the sight of Sundance, McCaig’s face lit, and so did Delia’s. “So you did come back,” the Scotsman said.
“I told you he would. Sundance, what’s the news?”
Dismounting from the stallion, he stretched stiff legs. “The news is, we’ve got about sixty days at the outside to clear Barkalow and his outfit out of the Basin without interference from the Army.”
Tersely, he told them what had taken place between Moore and himself. McCaig frowned. “Bribery. A nasty business.”
“No nastier than Coy Garvey and his men,” Delia cut in. “Who, incidentally, are all safely buried. Anyhow, this means—”
“Let’s tell all the Diné what it means,” Sundance said and made a signal for them to gather around. They did, hard men with all the fat long since burned off of them, their legs saddle-bowed, their clothes a strange mixture of white man’s and Indian garb, glinting here and there with turquoise and silver. Sundance sought command of his little-used Navajo, found it and addressed them.
“The time has come to fight,” he said, and a kind of sigh went through the group. One or two of the hard-bitten faces even broke into a grin. “These are your sheep, and the basin we take them to will be your range. But first we have to drive the white men off it. They must go—either alive or dead.”
“Dead is better,” Easy Dreamer growled. “They’ve already killed two of our people.” He raised his head. “But what about the Army? Won’t they stop us?”
“No. I’ve fixed it with the Army so that we have two moons to do what we have to do. Let’s hope it won’t take that long. Anyhow, it’s something we must do ourselves. There will be no white men hired to do it for us.”
“The People have not forgotten how to fight,” Mountain Cat said. “If it can be done without the Long-knives butting in, then we’ll do it. Haiiyaa! I have a thirsty knife! When do we start?”
“All in good time,” Sundance said. “First, you must ask Bible Man if he will let me be the chief in this and give the orders. There cannot be two chiefs on a war party. And if I am the chief on this one, every man must do what I say, when I say it and without question.” He turned. “McCaig?”
The Scotsman’s face was grim. A man of strength, authority, himself, he hated, Sundance saw, to yield command to a stranger. For a moment he was silent.
Delia seemed to have followed the drift. “Andrew?”
McCaig bit his lip. “If you say yes. You’re the one who pays the bill, lass.”
“Then I say, yes. Anyhow, remember Coy Garvey. We’d all be dead now if not for Sundance.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Then McCaig relaxed. In Navajo, he said, “It shall be as Sundance puts it. There will be only one chief, and it is he. From now on, you take orders from him.”
“Good,” said Easy Dreamer. “Well, we can leave a few men with the sheep, load our guns, move out.”
“Not so fast. You’ll stay here a couple of days more, anyhow. I need time to scout the basin. I’ve seen part of it, but not all of it. Before we go in, I want to know every blade of grass and tree down there. No one fights in another man’s territory unless he knows it well, or he’s beaten before he starts.”
“Of course. I’ll go with you,” Easy Dreamer said. “When do we leave?”
“Not we. I go alone.”
Easy Dreamer looked disappointed, then nodded. “As well, I guess. One man alone has no partner to worry about.”
“Tonight I rest. Tomorrow night I drop down across the rim. Only be patient for a few days more.”
McCaig said, “Delia and I know the Basin. We can save you a lot of trouble.”
“I need to see it all myself. She’s looked at it as a cowman’s wife, a woman; you have looked at it as a sheepman. Now I have to look at it as a fighting man. But if you’ve got a map, it would help.”
“I’ve got one. The Army made it when they fought the Tontos.”
“Then I’ll look it over when we eat,” Sundance said. “Now, everyone—” he addressed the Indians again “—get back to your flocks. Be patient. But make sure your guns are clean and your knives are sharp. It won’t be long, I promise you.” He picked up the stallion’s reins and mounted.
“Now where’re you going?” Delia asked.
Sundance grinned. “Up the river to take a bath. I’ve been traveling hard for the past three days and haven’t had a chance. And we Cheyennes like to bathe every day, if we can. It keeps us from smelling like white men.”
“Well, of all the—” Delia began, but Sundance had already touched the stallion with his heels and was galloping out of camp.
Up-canyon, he found a clear, deep pool well-shielded by brush and isolated from everything. He himself had no false modesty, but nakedness, he knew, offended Navajos; they were even prissier than whites in that regard. He stripped not only himself but cleared the stallion of all its gear, and the two of them plunged in together, savoring the cool, clean water on their skins. Anchored by one arm to a rock, he lay floating on his back, staring up at the arching sky, and then the horse snorted and suddenly something else splashed in the pool, something large. Sundance came up immediately, treading water, and stared. Swimming toward him with easy strokes was Delia Gannt, as naked as himself, her skin a glistening pale ivory. Nearing him, she seized the same rock, brought herself upright, green eyes glinting, red lips smiling, and black hair plastered to wet shoulders. Sundance’s eyes slid down to ripe breasts, wholly visible beneath the surface, their nipples large, pink, and hard. “What the hell—?”
Thumbing water from her eyes, she laughed. “The great gunfighter. And you didn’t even hear me come up, didn’t know I was here until I dived.”
“It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting,” he said wryly.
Delia laughed again. “No. I didn’t think so. But after all, it’s hard for me to get a chance to bathe, too. I was afraid if I didn’t get a swim pretty soon, I’d start to smell like a white man. So I decided to join you. After all, I’ve been married and Tom and I used to swim together all the time like this.” Something moved in her eyes and she put out a hand, touched the hard muscle of a sloping shoulder, a heavy bicep. “You are a man ... But so many scars ...”
“In my job, you collect ’em.”
“But these—” She indicated two great, ugly puckers on his chest, one above each nipple.
“The Sundance. It’s an important Cheyenne ritual. And part of becoming a warrior. They slit the skin there, slid in pegs of wood. There was a rawhide rope tied to each peg, and, at the other end, a heavy buffalo skull trailing on the ground. I danced until the skin broke and the ropes came free. It took over twelve hours.”
“Good heavens. And that’s how you got your name?”
“No, it’s how my father got his. He was the first white man the Cheyennes allowed to join the Sundance. He needed a new name in order not to embarrass his family back in England, and that was the one he took.”
A kind of shiver went over her naked body. “Savagery ...”
“Oh?” His brows lifted. “Why, McCaig worships a man who was nailed to a cross through his hands and feet and left to die there.”
She didn’t answer that, only moved her hands across his chest. Then she pushed herself closer to him. “Jim ...” Her lips were parted, eyes lambent. “Tom’s been dead so long, and ...”
The touch of her naked body against his was like an electric shock. “A long time for me, too. I’ve got a woman, but she’s in Washington and I haven’t seen her in six months ...”
“Then we both need the same thing, don’t we?” she whispered.
Sundance didn’t answer that, only brought his mouth down hard on hers. In the water, she strained against him, and her tongue was hungry, darting. His arousal was instant, complete. Her legs came up to encircle him as his arms went around her, and the entering of her was easy, natural. She kept one arm around the rock to anchor them as they made love there in the pool, slowly at first, then with hard, thrusting urgency that made her moan softly, mindlessly, then cry out.
That was the first time. The second was on a blanket she had brought, spread out in the concealment of the brush beside the gear he had offloaded from the stallion. Presently, both satiated, they broke apart, and Sundance picked up his war shirt, found makings, rolled a cigarette. Voice drowsy, yet touched with curiosity, Delia rolled over, touched the beaded parfleche , the panniers made of the thick neck hide of a buffalo bull. “I’ve been wondering. What’s in these?”
“Some things you can see, some that are personal to me.” He opened the long, tubular bag. From it he took a neatly folded, carefully packed Cheyenne war bonnet. Each eagle feather on it meant a coup counted in his warrior days—a horse stolen, an enemy touched before being killed, the kind of deeds of valor esteemed by the Northern Cheyenne. Not a feather there lightly earned or at less than the risk of his life ...
She gasped at its magnificence, but he laid it aside. The next thing from the pannier was the bow, short, recurved, of juniper tipped with buffalo horn, its string of interwoven back-sinews of buffalo. With it was a panther-skin quiver full of arrows, fletched with the wing-feathers of buzzards, barbed tips made of flint. She examined one curiously. “The Navajos use arrows made with iron points.”
“So do most Indians nowadays. I stick to the flint ones, make ’em myself if I can’t get ’em elsewhere. The stone points have a lot more shock and stopping power.”
“You mean a gunfighter like you still uses bow and arrows?”
Sundance laughed. “I’ve put an arrow like that clean through a bull buffalo—and I can drop a man at three hundred yards just as easy as with a gun. Besides, bows make no sound, no muzzle flash, no powder smoke. Especially at night, they don’t advertise where the man who’s usin’ them is hidin’.” He began to restore the items to the pannier.
“And this other one.” She touched a disc shaped bag a yard across.
“My war shield,” Sundance said tersely. It had been dedicated in a sacred ceremony, and there was no need for her to see it—or the six scalps dangling from it, taken from the murderers of his parents—the last scalps he had ever taken. Closing the panniers, he stood up, whistled for the stallion, which came obediently. “They’ll be waiting for us back at camp. Besides, I want to see that map before it gets dark.”
Delia stood up, body rich, magnificent, breasts full, waist slender, hips curved, legs long and shapely. Without embarrassment, she began to dress. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Andrew McCaig keeps a very close watch on me.”
“Does he, now?”
“Yes. He feels so responsible for everybody and everything in this fight. He’s tormenting himself now over having made such a mistake in hiring Garvey. Anyhow, he worries about me as if I were his own daughter.”
“All right, then,” Sundance said. “Let’s ride.”
~*~
With the details of McCaig’s map burned into his mind after long study, he had spent most of the next day working through the broken high country toward the rim above Bloody Moon Basin. Once he had reached his destination along the rim, he holed up patiently in timber, rested, waited. He mulled over the map and his own recollection of the basin while he smoked a cigarette and checked his weapons—white man’s and Indian’s alike.
“You can see,” McCaig had said. “It’s roughly oval and split right down the middle by Bloody Moon Creek, which runs fresh and full all year. The ground rolls, and there are bluffs along the creek on this, the eastern side. Everything else is across the creek to the west, closer to the road to Prescott and the other towns. Ganntsville, which Tom Gannt founded, the saw mill and the logging operations he set up, and the ranch he built, about three miles from town ... there. Barkalow uses it as his headquarters now.”
Sundance had nodded. “Gannt was more than just a cowman, then.”
“He was a builder, a dreamer,” Delia put in, a catch in her voice. “He wanted to see the town grow. He knew it would take more than just cattle, and there’s so much timber in these hills—and maybe gold and silver. He even talked himself about bringing in sheep along with cattle ...”
“Aye, Tom was a canny one, all right,” McCaig had said. “Anyhow ... ” His thick finger traveled along the rim. “Here’s the main trail down from the high country, the one we’ll have to move the sheep along when the time comes. No chance of that, now. It’s guarded, sewed up tight. But there are other trails that don’t show on this map. Some of them I’m pretty sure Barkalow hasn’t even found, yet. This is one Easy Dreamer and I’ve slipped in by to scout, and we’ve not had any trouble.”
Sundance had glanced at the Navajo, who nodded. “It’s a Tonto Apache trail. I found it, you’ll see it; to white men, it looks impossible, just another break in the rim.”
“You think I should use it?”
“I think so,” Easy Dreamer said.
“Then I will,” Sundance answered. “Soon as it’s dark, I’ll ease down the rim, scout the basin, and try to be back under cover at the foot of the rim come dawn. Lie low a day, finish my scout the next night and come back.”
“It’s so risky,” Delia said, a tremor in her voice. Sundance touched the pocket holding the bank draft she had given him for half the fifteen thousand dollars. “You didn’t pay me for hidin’ in a hole in the ground.”
Night, illuminated only by a sliver of a waning moon, settled over the highlands and the basin. Eagle picked his way carefully down the precarious trail that truly only an Indian could have spotted, and a mountain-trained horse negotiated. Sundance let him have his head, trusting him implicitly. His rifle in its scabbard, he rode with the quiver of arrows on his shoulder, the strung bow, an arrow nocked, in his hands—his best night-fighting weapon. But there was no trouble, and presently the stud reached the floor of the basin. Sundance reined him in under a grove of pinons, made a brief scout ahead on foot.
It was not time for either spring or fall round-up, and so there would be no gather of cattle anywhere in the basin to be watched by massed cowboys. Barkalow’s Texas longhorns would be strung out from hell to breakfast, grazing themselves fat on the lush grass, with no line camps necessary to keep them from straying; the walls around the basin were natural fences. The cowhands themselves would be fast asleep in bunkhouses at the ranch, in all likelihood, or gathered in the town. But Beecher Strawn and his gunmen were a different case. They’d be on patrol tonight, and every night, against sudden trouble from McCaig and his Navajos. Anybody abroad in darkness would be no innocent Texas cowhand, but a hired gunman to be eliminated, and likely they would be strung out on guard all along the eastern side of the valley, with the heaviest forces concentrated at the only trail down which sheep could be brought. Sundance went back to Eagle, mounted, put the big spotted horse forward at a walk. Together, they traveled like a pair of wolves, careful never to skyline themselves, taking advantage of every bit of cover, the half-breed sometimes scouting ahead on foot.
His mind mechanically memorized the terrain and other factors, too. The creek ran north and south; there were few cattle on this eastern side. Likely they were all held on the western side of the stream to give Strawn and his men fighting room in case of an invasion from above. Sundance’s mouth twisted. That was a mistake.
He worked his way across the basin until he reached the stream. There he scouted carefully on foot, then mounted and worked both north and south, along the eastern bank. As the map had showed, there were bluffs on this side, ground from which the western bank could be dominated. They were not high, like the bluffs at Little Big Horn, but they were high enough to make a difference. Whoever held them had an ideal defensive position, just as Reno and Benteen at the Little Big Horn had been able to save part of the Seventh Cavalry by reaching the same sort of ground. And according to the map they ran the entire length of the valley, which meant they could not be flanked. On the other hand, as Sundance well remembered—he’d been there, all right, as a Cheyenne warrior—Benteen and Reno had had several hundred men concentrated in a single defensive position. That was vastly different from about twenty Navajos, most of whom had not fought in years, to cover nearly thirty miles of defensive perimeter.
Well, he’d worry about that later. He continued his scouting of the east side of the basin. Tomorrow night, he’d check out the west side. Meanwhile—
All at once, he reined in. Even in the nearly total darkness, the man cresting the skyline as he mounted the bluffs stood out like a painted silhouette. Sundance could make out the rifle across his saddle bow, knew even as he reined in fifty yards away, that this was one of Strawn’s men. Himself in a hollow veiled by shadow, he slipped from the saddle, dropped the stallion’s reins, automatically testing the wind as he did so. It was neutral, blowing from the east, and the rider was to the north. If he could take one of Strawn’s men alive, force him to talk, give away Strawn’s dispositions of his gunmen, he would have paid for his trip.
Crouching low, the arrow nocked in the bow, he worked forward. The mounted man had kicked one foot from stirrup, bent his knee around the saddle horn as he, with his horse checked, rolled a cigarette and lit it. In the match’s flare, Sundance had a glimpse of a hard face with a nose gone bulbous from drink. He waited until the match light died, then moved forward another pace or two, always conscious of the wind.
But it betrayed him. Without warning, it shifted, bringing his scent straight to the nostrils of the gunman’s horse. The animal turned its head, pricked its ears, snorted. Instantly the gunman came alert, swung the animal, stirruping his foot, raising the rifle. His horse was like a pointer dog; given slack rein, it faced directly toward Sundance, who, working his way up the slope toward the bluff’s height, dropped flat, bow still clutched in his hand.
“Ahuh,” the man said aloud. “Somethin’ down there.” Rifle lined, he walked the horse down the slope directly toward the half-breed. And now there was no choice, no chance of taking him alive. A single rifle shot would echo all across the valley, alert every man in the basin. Even as he realized the dark blot he made against the ground had been spotted and the gun barrel came into line, he pulled the bowstring, rolling slightly as he did so. The thumb of the hand that held the string touched his cheekbone; then he let the arrow slip.
The rough, barbed flint point, driven by tremendous force, went in just above the bridge of the rider’s nose, smashing bone, destroying brain, emerging from the back of his skull. Killed instantly, the man never had a chance to make a sound. He simply dropped the gun, rolled from the saddle. One foot hung in the stirrup. The startled horse shied and nickered. Sundance was already up and running, and before it could gallop off, he seized it by the rein. The gunman’s boot came loose, his body flopped on the ground.
The arrow was valuable and could be saved. Instantly, Sundance pulled it on through the skull, knowing he could clean it later in the river. Panting, still holding the excited horse, he wiped his hand on bunchgrass, knowing that by tomorrow the man would be missed, his presence in the basin realized. Well, that was all right, too. Let them find him here, with that hole in his skull. It would do nothing for the morale of Strawn’s gunmen or Barkalow’s tough Texans. Anyhow, he’d seen enough. Combined with what the map had shown, he had his strategy well fixed in his mind. Finding a nearby mesquite, he tied the horse and then, easing to the stream, washed the arrow thoroughly and restored it to the quiver. Returning to Eagle, he mounted, and, despite a sense of urgency hammering in him, went slowly, warily back across the eastern half of the basin toward the old Apache trail that led upward.
Without any trouble at all, he reached the shaggy clump of pinons that marked its base at the foot of the rim, vanished into the cover of the grove. Now for a long, hard climb upward, both for the horse and for himself—
But then the stallion grunted, bucked and whirled. Simultaneously the grove of trees was lit with a white and dazzling light. Rays of it lanced at Sundance and the horse from every quarter of the compass—the brilliant, blinding glare of the sort of carbide lamps used by miners, and at close quarters they flared straight into his eyes, blinding him. He tried to raise the bow, could find no target. Then a rope settled over his torso, jerked tight, binding arms to ribs and yanking him from the saddle. His bow went spinning, the nocked arrow dribbling from the string, and he hit the ground hard.
The stallion screamed, ready to charge whatever target it could find. Instinctively, Sundance yelled an order that froze it lest it be shot. The rope tightened, dragged him across the ground into the open, his six-gun slipping from its holster.
Then he was out of the trees, lying on his back. As he tried to rise, another rope settled around his neck, closing tightly, nearly cutting off his wind. He sank back, panting.
“Keep those ropes tight,” a deep voice ordered. He heard the squeak of saddle leather and someone dismounted. Then the dazzling light was out of his eyes; he blinked, his vision returned, distorted by whorls and zigzags; they cleared, and then he could see the man standing over him, legs wide-spraddled.
He was dressed in black from head to toe, to match the shag of black hair spilling from beneath his hat. His face was puffy, with bags beneath his eyes, a nose that had been broken more than once, a hard, cruel mouth. His eyes, black as hair and garments, had a strange quality to them as he looked down at Sundance; they showed neither triumph nor hatred; they were only cold and neutral, the disillusioned eyes of a man who played dice with death every day, who had looked into the future and seen his own doom—gunfighter’s eyes.
“Hello, Jim Sundance,” he said, voice toneless. Only the glitter of the cartridges in the two crisscrossed gunbelts that held his Colts relieved the raven color of his dress. “I’ve waited a long time for this meetin’. My name is Beecher Strawn.”