Sundance 9 by John Benteen

Author:John Benteen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: indians, wild west, gunfighters, the old west, western ebook, john benteen, ben haas, jim sundance, cheyenne indians, western online, cowboy ebook
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Six

It was a weird, lost land into which they rode. Endless flats of creosote shimmered in the sun; great piles of rock towered in nightmare shapes; deep arroyos, bone dry at this time of year, sliced the earth like gaping wounds. Alternating with these were occasional thorny jungles of chaparral and the occasional scrubby skeletons of what had once been great forests, cut over and over again. The only inhabitants were occasional goat herders, whose huts they swung wide around. And if Sundance had any doubt about Whitewolf’s desert craft, it soon vanished. When he chose to be, the Crow was like a ghost, soundless, almost invisible. In addition, he seemed to have a nose for water, able to find a spring or trickle in what seemed wholly arid wastes. Sundance knew now that it was indeed only by a fluke that he had surprised Whitewolf instead of Whitewolf surprising him, and as he thought about that, he sometimes felt a curious prickle of the spine. Ransome’s words came back: Has it occurred to you that one of these days you’ll come up against somebody younger and just as fast? Watching the ’breed in operation, he was glad that Whitewolf was on his side.

On the afternoon of the second day, they pulled up in a wash shaded by mesquite and cat claw to rest their mounts. Whitewolf made a scout, came soundlessly back. “Over yonder,” he said, excitement suppressed in his voice. “A hell of a big mesa with somethin’ on top of it—and what looks like a village at the foot.”

“How far?”

“We could make it by nightfall.”

“No,” Sundance said. “We’ll wait here and scout it after dark.” He followed Whitewolf to the head of the draw and they lay flat on oven-hot rocks. Sundance put a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

It was going to be a tough place to crack. The officers of the Spanish Army of a century before had chosen their site for Fort Hell well.

The thing of it was, there was no cover anywhere around it. The mesa rose abruptly from the flats, its walls barren, naked, marked only by a winding track that led to the village below. On the shimmering tabletop of land, its thick mud walls unbreached and solid, a strong new wooden gate in place, the old fortress squatted, with guard towers at each corner from which watchers could see anything that moved on the shelterless desert below. The village itself was a miserable huddle of scattered adobe huts in the shadow of the mesa, with one wooden building that was obviously the only store and cantina.

“Man,” Whitewolf breathed. “Some hideout, eh?”

Sundance nodded. “Everything they want. Including women from that pueblo, I’d guess.”

“All the same, there ain’t but four of ’em. When it gets dark, we can move in, get over that wall somehow. Two to one ain’t such bad odds, not if we got surprise on our side.”

“We don’t know what the odds are,” Sundance said tersely.

“Hell, the two Chester brothers and their two understrappers—”

“And maybe they’ve picked up some more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.