Sundance 16 by John Benteen

Author:John Benteen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: piccadilly publishing, tales of the old west, john benteen, jim sundance, western fiction ebook, wild west ebook, american range wars
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Six

Sundance struggled to sit up. Strawn planted a big booted, spurred foot in the middle of his chest, forced him down, bent and stripped him of knife and hatchet, tucked them into his own belt. Then he said, “All right. Leave the rope on his neck. Shake the other off.” To the half-breed: “Sundance, I wouldn’t try anything. You’d just git your head jerked off.”

Slowly, stiffly, the half-breed scrambled to his feet. In the lamplights, he could see that a dozen riders had him surrounded, one with the other end of the rope around his neck dallied to his saddle horn. “Well,” he said thickly, “you caught me dead. But I’ll be God damned if I know how.”

Beecher Strawn, as tall as Sundance, as wide in the shoulders, grinned; yet there was even something weary about his smile. He was a man who saw ghosts at night when he tried to sleep, Sundance realized instinctively: the ghosts of men gut shot or with throats slit or victims of even more horrible deaths. “You got your methods, I got mine,” Strawn said. “Let’s say I’m smarter than you and let it go at that, okay? After all, I been in this business a long time.”

“Maybe too long,” Sundance said.

“Shut up, damn you,” Strawn said and backhanded him across the mouth. Then, rubbing his knuckles, he said, “Anyhow, Barkalow wanted you alive, so we’re takin’ you in. It’s up to him what he does to you, but I don’t reckon it’ll be anything very pretty after the way you made him eat dirt in town the other day. Now. That damn Appaloosa stud of yours. Can you control him, or you want us to go ahead and shoot him? I’ll not have him breakin’ or takin’ a bite out of any of my men.”

“I’ll control him,” Sundance said. He coughed against the pressure of the rope around his neck, whistled softly. The stallion trotted toward him, wall-eyed, nostrils flaring, ready for combat, but Nez Percé words quieted him.

“See he stays that way,” said Strawn. “Otherwise, you get a broke neck and he gets killed. Now, mount up.” Sundance did, rope still around his neck, the scabbard beneath his thigh empty of its Winchester. “Okay,” Strawn said. “Head for town.”

Surrounded, Sundance set the stallion’s gait at a high lope to keep the neck-rope slack. Strawn fell in beside him, rolling two cigarettes, lighting one, passing the other to Sundance. “You understand,” he said, “the way I’d rather have it would be you and me straight up, gun-to-gun. They say you’re the best there is. Me, I always figured I was.”

“Nobody’s the best,” Sundance said. “They’re hatchin’ out all the time. They’ll practice six hours a day and burn up three hundred cartridges every day. They’re younger and they want to build a reputation and they’ll come at you for no reason at all. Except to say they were the ones that killed you.”

“I know,” Strawn said. “I had to lay out one like that in El Paso and another in Tucson in the past six months.

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