Sundance by David Fuller Read Free Book Online Page A

watching for any sign of the cook and the man named John. He turned the horse to retrace his steps but heard the sound of what was now unmistakable even to him, an automobile engine coming up the rise, from the direction he had been headed. His first thought was that it was the posse, but he set that aside as unlikely.He waited in the road and a motorcar with shovels, rakes, and brushes, as well as suitcases, lumbered around the bend.
    A gentleman in shirtsleeves and wearing a waistcoat was alone at the wheel and pulled alongside Longbaugh and stopped. He had a friendly face, but Longbaugh sensed a cool tension that ran below the surface.
    â€œYou pass a woman and girl?” said the gentleman.
    â€œJust did.”
    â€œMy wife and daughter. Figured it couldn’t be much farther.”
    Longbaugh understood. A white man with a Cheyenne wife and half-breed child could not let down his guard.
    â€œOn our way to the dig,” said the gentleman.
    â€œDig?”
    â€œThe excavation. Dinosaur bones. My daughter wanted to see the land where they come from. Figured we’d camp overnight.” He waved his hand at the suitcases with an embarrassed smile. “My wife decided to bring everything we owned.”
    â€œYou do the digging yourself?”
    â€œWell, some, but mostly my workers. I’m a paleontologist.”
    Longbaugh did not know what that was, but the word was long enough to impress him.
    â€œDaughter was a little motorcar sick, so we stopped. Then I realized, after making sure I’d loaded all the suitcases, I’d forgotten my tools. Thought it better if they waited out here rather than endure the back-and-forth.”
    Longbaugh guessed they had driven up from Jensen. “Motorcar sick. New industry, new ailment.”
    â€œYes.” The gentleman smiled. “I suppose that’s right.”
    â€œThis road. I remember when it was a trail.”
    â€œLot of people working in there now.”
    Longbaugh nodded. He kept thinking about the two imposters. He should have heard them by now. But with the gentleman on his way back, he thought the women would be all right.
    â€œBetter get along, then,” said the gentleman.
    Longbaugh tipped his hat.
    But he stayed in the road, sitting in the saddle, listening as the sound of the motor was lost in the wind. He waited another minute or more, then rode after the motorcar.
    Before he reached the camp he heard a shotgun blast, then a second one. He spurred the horse and rode fast around the elbow in the road and saw it, the result of everything that had happened during the previous ten minutes.
    The Cheyenne woman had a swollen eye and a cut lip. She sat on the ground, holding a blanket closed at her daughter’s neck to cover the girl’s body. The twelve-year-old fought to control her weeping, but every other courageous breath was followed by a cascade of sobs. Scraps of torn blue clothing were lying on the ground, and he remembered blue as the color of her dress. The girl shifted when she saw him, and the blanket briefly bowed open and he glimpsed blood on her inner thigh.
    He took in what was left of John, facedown, the back of his head blown off by a shotgun blast that exposed his useless brain. John was naked from the waist down. His pants might have been anywhere, tossed aside in his grimy lust. He was unlikely to cause Longbaugh any more trouble. He stared at him, pressed flat against the sandstone that, below him, held millions of years of dinosaur bones, and he thought of how puny and insignificant John was lying there. Except to that girl.
    The gentleman was tying off the end of a rope on the rear bumper of the motorcar loaded with tools and suitcases. The rope looped over a stout branch that had earlier held the white sheet, some eight or ten feet off the ground. The rope came down the other side of the branch, where it was noosed around Sandy the cook’s neck. Sandy the cook’s hands were tied behind