Sundance 19 Read online

  “I’ll be damned,” the General said. “I’ve never heard such talk in my life, not even in Ireland. “Frankly, I don’t know what to say. Tell me, man, are you really serious about all this fighting and killing?”

  One of the Canadian officers answered instead. “He’s serious, General. You can count on that as on nothing else in this world.”

  Middleton was still reluctant. “But I can’t make deals with these people,” he said to no one. “Anyway, it isn’t up to me. I can’t imagine what the Prime Minister will say if I forward such a message. ‘Dear Prime Minister Macdonald, the métis government has offered to make peace with yours.’ It’s ludicrous. It’s a political matter, and I want no part of it.”

  “Perhaps I’d better explain your position, General,” Dumont went on, as if Middleton hadn’t spoken. “Your men have fought bravely, but I think they have had enough of it. I know my people have. You still outnumber us, but soon you will be cut off from the south. A force of métis has already moved out. If the fighting continues, you will only lose more good men. Let me remind you, sir, that your men are not regular soldiers but volunteers, citizen soldiers, every man with a vote. Fathers, brothers, relatives with votes. The same is true of the men coming from the east.”

  “They will obey their officers.”

  “As long as it pleases them. If they find themselves bogged down in a hopeless war, you’ll see how long they obey their officers. The French-Canadians don’t want to fight at all. And then,” Dumont’s rough voice became soft, “you always have to consider the Indians, General. There are twenty-thousand Indians in the North West. The Crees and the Stoneys are already with us. So far, I have kept them under control. If they break loose, they will raid and burn from here to the Rocky Mountains.”

  “But that’s unthinkable, man. What I mean is, you are part white, aren’t you? You couldn’t turn loose the Indians.”

  “I can guarantee to control the Indians,” Dumont stated. “I give you my word on that. If I cannot keep my word, I will give myself up to be hanged. Now, General Middleton, we have talked of many things but not of peace. I would like to talk of it now.”

  Middleton whispered to Winfield, who nodded and spoke to the young Canadian officer who had brought Dumont and Sundance to the tent. He nodded, too, pleased to be so close to the General.

  “Come outside with me,” he said briskly to Dumont and Sundance. They waited in the sunshine for about ten minutes. Then Winfield pushed the flap aside and put his head out.

  “Bring them in, Parsons,” he said, “then wait until you are called!”

  The young officer looked disappointed. “Very good, sir,” he said.

  General Middleton looked a little more confident when they reentered the tent. He was holding his large liver-spotted hands over the charcoal brazier and looked up. “I still don’t know what the Prime Minister is going to make of all this,” he began.

  Winfield said smoothly, “I feel confident that he will see it as a wise decision on your part, sir. I’m sure the P.M. has no desire to become bogged down in a profitless and politically harmful war. But you were saying, sir—”

  General Middleton was almost genial; he saw a new role for himself as a soldier/diplomat “Now you must tell me what you want, Dumont. After you tell me, I’ll try to sort it all out. If some of your demands are too outlandish, I simply won’t relay them to Mr. Macdonald. I won’t be made a fool of. Suppose you begin. Captain Winfield will make a list. You might as well know that he has already made a list of those frightful threats you made earlier. I don’t know how the Prime Minister is going to react to all that. Before you start, however, I must ask you if you are empowered to speak for the métis. I have it on: good authority that Mr. Macdonald will have no dealings with Riel. If Riel is speaking through you, it’s all a waste of time.”

  Dumont said, “I am my own man, General.”

  “Proceed.”

  Dumont’s list was not very long. He used words sparingly and Captain Winfield was able to finish writing as soon as he finished a sentence.

  “The rights of the métis to their ancestral lands, to be guaranteed by act of Parliament,” Dumont said. “That lands taken from the métis be returned to them. That no new surveys of métis land be undertaken for any reason.” Dumont spoke for no more than twenty minutes. He could have finished sooner if he hadn’t been so deliberate, so careful to make everything clear. When he said that was all, Middleton looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “I am going to recommend that the Prime Minister ... well, I’ll be glad to see this damned war over with. As of now, a truce exists between our two forces. We won’t be the ones to break it. See that your people don’t. If they do, you can kiss your hopes goodbye. It’ll be all over for you. Just one more thing. I am going to move my men back down to the river road. You’d better go ahead and give your people the lay of the land.”

  As Dumont and Sundance walked away with the young Canadian leading the way, the métis leader said, “It will be at least three days before we know. If we can only keep the peace until then. Think about it, Sundance. In three days, our people may be on their way back to their families, their farms. It’s so close to the finish.”

  Walking silently, Sundance just nodded.

  About the Author

  Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. Records also confirm that, in 1958, McCurtin co-edited the short-lived (one issue) New York Review with William Atkins. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there. Additionally, McCurtin and his second wife shared their home in Ogunquit with a dog that also happened to be part wolf.

  McCurtin’s first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil’s Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first “Carmody” western, Hangtown.

  Carmody is, on the surface at least, just another trail-wise adventurer. Sometimes he is presented as an outlaw, sometimes as a gun-for-hire. Whatever his current occupation, however, Carmody’s eye is always on the main chance, as McCurtin’s tough, spare narrative frequently makes plain.

  Carmody’s exploits set the tone for most of the westerns McCurtin was to write over the next two decades. His view of the frontier is harsh and unforgiving, a place where a man with any sense looks to his own safety, and to hell with everyone else. McCurtin’s westerns are fast, violent and chauvinistic, but the violence and sex are seldom overtly explicit. McCurtin further distances his protagonist from other stock western anti-heroes by recounting the series in the kind of hard-boiled first-person style normally associated with the private-eye genre.

  McCurtin’s editor at Leisure Books remembers that he was “a terrific, fluent, natural writer of action, and a solid researcher for his westerns and mysteries. Leisure did not, in my time (1979-1981), let anyone else write under Peter’s name, but Peter wrote under other names in addition to his own byline. He was a real workhorse with, unfortunately, an alcohol problem (like so many), and without question the very best writer that Leisure was publishing at the time. Perhaps he could have been better and more prolific under better circumstances.” For a while, McCurtin himself also worked as an editor at Leisure Books.

  The author spent a prolonged spell writing various mercenary and Executioner-style anti-Mafia stories. His name appeared on the first of Manor’s Marksman books, Vendetta, leading many to speculate that he also wrote under the pseudonyms “Frank Scarpetta” and “Bruno Rossi” (author of the Sharpshooter series). He also provided a novelisation for the cult action classic The Exterminator.

  McCurtin returned to the western in 1979 to take over the Sundance series originally created and written by the late, great Ben Haas, under the pseudo
nym “John Benteen”. In McCurtin’s hands, however, Sundance -- a half-breed Cheyenne who undertakes various missions to raise funds to fight the corrupt Indian Ring -- became a colder, more impersonal figure, more violent and less credible.

  Midway through his tenure on the Sundance books, McCurtin wrote the adult western series Jim Saddler, under the name Gene Curry. This series returned him to the gritty first-person style of narration that made the Carmody books so distinctive.

  McCurtin produced one of his all-time best books in 1982 -- the powerful western Rockwell, which is a fictional retelling of the life of Orrin Porter Rockwell, the so-called “Mormon Triggerite” who upheld the law in Salt Lake City. Tough, vivid and compelling, the author’s strengths as a storyteller are shown here to their best effect.

  An acquaintance said: “When he wrote most of his books, he lived in a studio in Murray Hill, on 39th Street, only a few blocks from the New York offices of Tower Books, which at the time were located at 2 Park Avenue. His building was called the Tuscany Towers back then. It’s now a W Hotel. He had a Murphy bed, a kitchenette, and a desk with manual typewriter. There was no phone except for the payphone in the building basement. He liked eating at Automats, he went to the movies several times a week and spent a lot of time reading.”

  Peter McCurtin died in New York on 27 January 1997. His westerns in particular are distinguished by unusual plots with neatly resolved conclusions, well-drawn secondary characters, regular bursts of action and tight, smooth writing. if you haven’t already checked him out, you have quite a treat in store.

  SUNDANCE 19:

  DAY OF THE HALFBREEDS

  By Peter McCurtin

  First published by Leisure Books in 1979

  Copyright © 1979, 2017 by Peter McCurtin

  First Smashwords Edition: October 2017

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Cover image © 2017 by Tony Masero

  Check out Tony’s work here

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author Estate.

  The Sundance Series

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  Death in the Lava

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  Bring Me His Scalp!

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  War Party

  Run for Cover

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  Day of the Halfbreeds

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