Sundance 10 by John Benteen

Author:John Benteen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western ebooks, john benteen, western and american frontier fiction, jim sundance, western action and adventure, ghost dancers, sioux indians and ghost dancers, western ebook action and advenutre
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Six

Thunderbird.

Halting Eagle on a ridge crest, Sundance looked down at what he had built.

The home ranch lay cradled in the foothills of the mountains the Sioux called Paha Sapa, shielded from harsh winter by the rise of ground and heavy timber. The house and all the outbuildings were of logs, square-hewn, carefully mortised and chinked, solid and weathertight. The corrals were plentiful and spacious; in them Appaloosas, shaggy with winter hair, were protected from the wind. Across the long valley behind the house, big haystacks contained tons of rich dried grass to see cattle through the winter. It was a place of order, solidity, prosperity; Sundance and his wife had worked hard to make it that.

Then he touched the stallion with his heels and sent it rocketing down the slope, a shrill Cheyenne war whoop giving warning of his coming. Even before he pounded into the ranch yard, she had heard the cry and the house’s door was open and she was there.

Sundance pulled the stallion to a sliding halt, left the saddle in a single graceful motion. “Two Roads Woman!”

“Jim!” She ran to meet him, and he caught her, held her tightly. He kissed her long and hard, and she returned the kiss fervently, then broke away, laughing. “Come inside, we’ll freeze out here!”

Sundance looped Eagle’s reins on the rack, followed her through the door into the big living room. It was furnished with solid, comfortable things, resplendent with the Indian gear hanging all around the wall: Cheyenne war bonnet, the one Sundance had earned as a warrior and a Dog Soldier in his youth; his Thunderbird shield; a lance, coup stick, quivers of arrows, and some remarkable drawings and paintings of Indians by a young artist named Russell, whom he’d met in Montana and bought them from. A big fire blazed in a stone fireplace, a grizzly’s hide was spread on the floor before the hearth.

Two Roads Woman, Barbara Sundance, went to a table. “You must be freezing. A drink?”

“One.” Sundance watched her. She was almost a decade younger than himself, body trim from riding, yet full breasted and curved-hipped and wholly feminine, her movements graceful. Her hair was blonde as his own, her eyes blue, her lips full and red; and time had done no damage to the beauty of her face, save for a few faint lines at the corners of her eyes. She wore a leather riding skirt and a buckskin Cheyenne shirt, beaded and fringed like his own. She was the only woman he had ever met who was as much at home in a Cheyenne lodge as in a Washington drawing room.

That had been another world, he thought, the one in which the young daughter of the New York millionaire had been taken by Cheyennes en route to Santa Fe. He’d been hired by George Colfax, Barbara’s father, to bring her back, and he had done that, fulfilled the bargain, collected his enormous fee. But she had been captured by the Cheyennes

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