The Bells of El Diablo Read online

  James slid his rifle into the saddle boot, then quickly tied the croker sack around the horn. The sack was heavy, the coins bulging through the bottom. Vienna stood behind him, staring back toward the roadhouse, where more and more shouts rose on the quiet night. There was the flash of Mangham’s rifle, but the shots were dropping wide; because of the darkness or his own drunkenness, the outlaw leader had lost track of his quarry.

  James stepped into the leather and then reached down and took Vienna’s hand and swung her up behind him. “Where we going?” she said, a nervous trill in her voice as James ground his heels into the chestnut’s flanks.

  “Denver City!”

  “That’s the first place he’ll look!”

  “No choice—I left Crosseye there!”

  “Crosseye?”

  James didn’t answer, for just then there was an especially loud string of shouted epithets that were quickly drowned by the rataplan of rifle fire—several rifles now fired quickly in the general direction of James and Vienna, though only a few shots kicked up dust and gravel anywhere near the fleeing pair. The chestnut was tearing up the ground in the direction of Denver, putting the cutthroats farther and farther behind them.

  James turned left at the fork in the trail, and the dark structures of Auraria began appearing around him, cabins and corrals and privies hunching darkly. Then he rode between the taller business structures sheathing the trail from both sides of the wide trail that had become the town’s main street. The chestnut’s hooves clomped over the wooden bridge of Cherry Creek, the narrow stream of oily dark water glistening wanly in the starlight between the brushy banks, and then Denver pushed up around James and Vienna, the only sounds a couple of cattle braying from some distant stock corral.

  All the houses and business establishments were dark—all, that is, except for one white frame house sitting along the right side of the town’s broad main drag. A window was lit in the house’s second story, and from the same window James could hear a man talking drunkenly, slurring his words, while a girl bathed his voice in drunken tittering, as though the man were telling her the funniest story she’d ever heard.

  He turned right and followed the north-angling side street for fifty yards. His and Crosseye’s hotel sat on the right side of the trail, near where the side street dwindled off into the buck brush and sage of the prairie. The two-story adobe-brick building was dark. So, too, was the livery barn that sat on the opposite side of the street and nearer to James and Vienna by one block.

  James turned the horse toward the barn. He’d stable the chestnut before taking Vienna to the hotel. True, Mangham’s men would eventually look for them there, but James doubted that he and his men would do much searching tonight, when they were all drunker than peach-orchard hogs. They’d wait for morning to turn the town inside out, and by that time James intended to be gone—him, Crosseye, and Vienna. They’d have to find somewhere else to hole up until James could figure out a way to get Vienna back home to Rose Hill.

  In front of the barn, James swung his leg over his saddle horn and leaped to the ground. He walked over to the big double doors and slid the left door open two feet before he saw a bulky figure standing before him, just inside the barn. James stepped back with a startled grunt and snaked his right hand across his belly for one of his cross-draw .36s.

  He left the Griswold in its holster when he heard a familiar voice rasp, “Ain’t safe here, Jimmy.” Crosseye shoved the left door open wider, and then the starlight shone on his bulky, big-bellied frame and broad-nosed face under the pinned-up brim of his gray sombrero.

  James’s heart thudded. He’d never known a man, even men several inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, more furtive than Crosseye Reeves. “Goddamnit, what are you doin’ sneakin’ around out here, you old miscreant?”

  Crosseye grabbed the chestnut’s reins and led the horse, with Vienna on its back, into the barn. James walked in with the horse. Crosseye quickly drew the door closed, then said softly in the darkness relieved by an oil lamp guttering at the far back of the place, silhouetting ceiling posts and stable partitions and hanging tack in front of it—“Stenck’s at the hotel.”

  Vienna gasped as she swung down from the chestnut’s back. “Stenck?”

  Crosseye looked at her, frowning befuddledly as he looked her up and down, then, recognizing her, quickly doffed his hat. “Why, Miss Vienna…Law!”

  “Hello, Mr. Reeves. It’s been a while.”

  “Why, I ain’t seen you since you was…” Crosseye held out a hand to indicate how tall she’d been when he’d last seen her.

  Vienna cut him off with “Did I hear right—Stenck is at your hotel?”

  “That’s right, Miss Vienna,” Crosseye said in the almost somber, faintly beseeching tone with which the mountain folks addressed the landed gentry. “You know Stenck, do you?”

  “Only too well.”

  James peeked out the crack between the closed doors. “How many men does he have with him?”

  “I saw ten ride into town.”

  “Ten, eh?”

  “Don’t worry—he has more than that. He keeps them spread out all over the place, mostly looking for gold shipments out of the mountains.” Vienna looked at James, incredulous. “What’s he doing in your hotel?”

  “I didn’t get time to tell you before,” James said, “but I’ve already had the pleasure of making his acquaintance.”

  “Him and his men was ridin’ up to the hotel about three hours ago, when I was headin’ back there after…” Crosseye glanced at Vienna, winced, and added haltingly, “…After I was done seein’ a man about a…uh…about a business proposition.”

  “I still don’t understand what he’s doing at your hotel,” Vienna said again, persistently.

  “It’d be nice to stand here an’ palaver all night,” Crosseye said, snugging his hat back down on his head and grabbing the Spencer repeater resting against a square ceiling post, “but we’d best light a shuck. He mighta seen the two of you ride into town.”

  “Where’s your horse?”

  “Out back.”

  “Let’s go.” James took his reins from Crosseye and followed the older man down the barn’s central alley, the horse’s hooves clomping on the hard-packed earthen floor. James could hear the livery barn’s proprietor snoring off in a side room cloaked in darkness. Vienna hurried along beside James, sort of skip-hopping to keep up, her black ponytail curling forward across her shoulder.

  They walked past the lantern hanging from a nail, and followed Crosseye through the rear double doors and into the paddock beyond. There were several horses out here, and a couple snorted as the trio and the chestnut angled toward the side of the corral before Crosseye opened the gate, and they all moved through it. Crosseye closed the gate, then reached for the reins of his roan tied to one of the corral poles.

  “There!” a man shouted.

  James had just turned to the chestnut when he spied a shadow running toward him from along behind the dark buildings to the south. A gun flashed and roared. “Oh!” Vienna cried, grabbing her upper right arm and stumbling back against the corral.

  “Goddamnit!” James rasped, gritting his teeth as he raked a .36 from its holster.

  He clicked the hammer back and fired.

  Chapter 13

  The running man screamed, bent forward, fell, and rolled.

  “Nice shootin’, Jimmy. Someone taught you good!” Crosseye said, heaving his bulky frame onto his roan’s back, the saddle squeaking beneath his girth. “How’s Miss Vienna?”

  “I’m all right,” Vienna said, once more heaving herself to her feet and taking her right hand away from her other arm. “It’s just a graze. Mostly tore my poncho.”

  “You sure?” James asked her quickly, holstering his pistol while holding his jittery horse’s reins taut with his other hand.

  Vienna nodded. He couldn’t see her expression, but he took half a second to notice how unexpectedly tough this former Southern belle had
become. Life with Mangham must have been to her what the war had been for James.

  “More comin’,” he said, stepping into the leather and hearing gravel crunching under running feet somewhere behind the man he’d just dispatched.

  He took Vienna’s hand and swung her up behind him. She’d barely gotten seated before he curveted the chestnut and galloped off after Crosseye, who was heading straight out and away from the rear of the livery barn, past a long L-shaped stack of split firewood and a small log cabin attached Southern-style by a dogtrot to a stable.

  The cabin door squawked open and an old man in a nightshirt and a night sock on his head looked owlishly out, holding a shotgun in his hands. “What in blue blazes…?”

  James hunkered low as the chestnut shot past the old man, then turned the horse right to follow Crosseye along a side street, mostly a two-track wagon trail amongst cottonwoods and frame houses positioned willy-nilly with buggy sheds and privies.

  “You know where you’re goin’?” James yelled.

  “Does it look like I know where I’m goin’?” the older man returned.

  Half an hour later, well south of Denver City, they slowed their horses and curveted them on the well-worn wagon trail they’d picked up once they crossed Comanche Creek, and followed it through a long, flat stretch of wild grass, sage, and prickly pear. A low, razor-backed ridge paralleled the trail on their left, shaggy with cedars and pines. They’d passed a couple of small ranches hunched in the darkness, but they’d seen no one out and about.

  And the few times they’d stopped to check their back trail, they hadn’t heard the telltale rumble of approaching riders. Now they continued riding ahead until they came to a dry creek bed. Leaving the tableland, they followed a game trail to the bottom of the ravine, and traveled along its winding course into a low jog of hills about four miles west of the wagon trace.

  Their horses were blown out and sweat-lathered, so they set up camp against the ravine’s high west wall. Light was beginning to show a wash in the west, beyond the razor-backed ridge. When they’d tended their horses, James went over to where Vienna sat with her back to the bank, arms wrapped around her upraised knees.

  “Let me look at that arm.”

  “Just tore my poncho’s all.”

  James knelt beside her, touched a hand to her arm. The serape was torn, but it was also wet. She flinched.

  “It did more than tear your poncho,” he said in a castigating tone, removing his red neckerchief and tying it around the girl’s arm, over the graze.

  She stared straight ahead. In the faint wash of light, he could see that she had no expression on her pretty, fine-featured face. “How’d you get to be so tough?” he said, knotting the ends of the neckerchief.

  “I’m not so tough.”

  “Tougher’n I remember, all decked out in them frilly dresses, ridin’ in that leather buggy, twirling a parasol over your shoulder. You was even afraid of the sun, as I remember.”

  “Those frilly dresses, and you were afraid of the sun,” she corrected him. “Willie was a better speaker.”

  “Willie was better at pretty much everything.”

  “But not better at fighting, I reckon,” she said sadly.

  James sat back against the bank, raised a knee, and rested his arm across it.

  “I’m sorry, James.” She slid a comforting hand up and down his upper arm. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t you who killed him. It was the war who killed him.”

  “No.” James shook his head. “It was me, all right.”

  Vienna leaned her head on his shoulder. It seemed as though the weight of her head had joined his guilt, making a weight as heavy as the earth itself.

  After a time, James heard footsteps, saw Crosseye’s bulky figure moving toward him from the tableland they’d just traversed, holding his Spencer repeater straight down in his right hand.

  “Any sign of ’em?” James asked.

  “Nah. We might’ve lost ’em. Best hole up here for a time, though. Rest the horses.” Crosseye turned and walked away. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  When the older man was gone, Vienna stood and, the hem of her long serape billowing around her denim-clad thighs in the breeze, stared over the ravine’s bank toward Denver City. “Tell me how you know Stenck.”

  James told her about his involuntary visit to the man, and about how he’d been about to be shot like a chicken-thieving cur before Crosseye had saved his bacon.

  “So he’s still looking for me,” she said of Stenck. “I’d thought he might be.”

  “What does he want, Vienna?” James rose to stand before her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “What’s been happening out here? You, Mangham, Stenck…Mustang Mary…?”

  Vienna turned away from him and knelt down, untied the neck of her croker sack, rummaged around inside, and pulled out a book. She straightened and walked back over to James, holding up the cloth-bound tome. By starlight, he read the gold-embossed title on the cover—The Count of Monte Cristo. “My uncle Ichabod’s favorite novel.” She opened the book and pulled out a heavy sheet of parchment folded three times lengthwise. She handed the paper to James and set the croker sack and the book down beside her.

  James opened the paper, scratched a sulfur-tipped match to life on his thumbnail, and looked it over. It was a crude but fairly detailed map, with simply but clearly sketched mountains, rivers, villages, trails, and canyons. There was a broken line at the top that indicated the border between the Arizona Territory and Mexico. The names labeling the land formations and villages were all in Spanish.

  James’s eyes briefly took in everything on the map except the box drawn beside a series of irregular triangles indicating mountains. Inside the box were a bell and the almost comical, horned face of a devil. At the bottom right corner of the page, a name was scrawled; it stood out not only because it was printed in bold pencil, whereas the rest of the map had been drawn in blue-black ink, but because of the nickname that preceded it—“Apache Jack” Davis.

  “The treasure you mentioned at Mangham’s,” James said, tossing the match away suddenly when the dying flame nipped his fingers.

  “It belonged to Uncle Ichabod.” Vienna took the map, sort of waved it in the air for emphasis, her eyes regarding James with gravity. “It’s for this map that Stenck killed him and my aunt Elise, cousin Kate, and their Indian housemaid, Verna White Feather.”

  Vienna swallowed and looked forlornly down at the map in her hands. “Uncle Ichabod couldn’t afford a secretary, so I volunteered. This was before the baby came, and I needed something with which to occupy myself, to keep from worrying about Willie and the war at home. I couldn’t just lie around in bed.”

  “You said your uncle was in railroad speculation?”

  “He’d been out here since just before the war, trying to buy up land he thought the Union Pacific would eventually purchase for laying their rails on. He’d started in the business with his friend Jefferson Davis.”

  James looked at her. She nodded. “That Jefferson Davis. President of the Confederacy.”

  James whistled.

  “Uncle Ichabod and Mr. Davis had a third partner,” she said. “Richard Stenck.”

  “Stenck?”

  “They all had been friends and business associates before the war. My uncle and Stenck had ended up out here, trying to raise money with which to buy up land they’d learned would soon be bought by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Of course, the war halted the railroad, and Uncle Ichabod found himself in hard times. He was about to return to the South and take a position in Mr. Davis’s cabinet, when he heard from yet another adventurous friend, who was also the stepbrother of Mr. Davis—‘Apache Jack’ Davis. Apache Jack was the black sheep of the Davis family. He’d left the South many years ago to prospect for gold and to look for hidden treasure in Mexico. That’s when he heard the legend of three golden bells, and he set his hat for those bells. Well, according to a letter and a map he sent to my uncle, he’d found th
e bells a ways from a little village in the Sierra Madre known as Tres Campanas, Three Bells.”

  Again, James whistled and kneaded his forehead, trying to absorb all facets of the complicated story.

  “He wrote to his brother and to my uncle, asking for help in getting the bells out of Mexico. He intended to donate the bells to the Confederacy, to help out with the war effort.”

  James said, “Did anyone wonder if Apache Jack might have gone a little off his nut?”

  “Of course,” Vienna said. “But along with the map and a detailed letter to both my father and his brother, Jefferson Davis, he sent each a pound of pure gold, which he said he’d shaved off one of the bells. Uncle Ichabod showed me the gold.”

  “And you believe it’s from one of the bells.”

  “I have no reason not to believe it. Uncle Ichabod believed it, and so did Mr. Davis. Enough so that Mr. Davis made my father a member of his cabinet, and brevetted him a major general, whose sole duty was to locate and retrieve those three bells and get them to Richmond. They speculated the bells would be worth around a hundred thousand dollars, even more in England where they intended to purchase guns and ammunition, as well as mercenary soldiers.

  “Uncle Ichabod managed to fund one trip, but before he could find Apache Jack, he ran into some nasty Apaches of the more authentic, brown-skinned kind and lost four of his seven men. All were hideously tortured. He came home with the intention of raising more money for an armed party…and that’s where he hitched his star to Richard Stenck.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Uncle Ichabod was a bit naive, I’m afraid. He didn’t realize until they were finally acquiring the men needed to get the gold out of Mexico that Stenck had no intention of taking it to Richmond to help with the Confederate war effort. Stenck wanted it all for himself, to use for buying up every parcel of land he could between Denver and Julesburg, because that’s where the Northern Pacific had intended to lay track before the war, and where Stenck still figured they’d lay track after the war. Thank God Uncle Ichabod hadn’t yet given Stenck a copy of the map.”