The Bells of El Diablo Read online

  “No, James!” Vienna stared at him, eyes flashing fire. “Think of your home. Our home! Think of what the Yankees will do to us if they win that war!”

  “It’s too late, Vienna. The war’s all but over. Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed”—he pulled on his chains again with a grunt—“we’re not goin’ anywhere.” He looked at the colonel. With Apache Jack dead, no one was going to find the gold. The map wasn’t detailed enough, though obviously the colonel didn’t know that. James doubted that Jack had told Salsidio about the boy. He’d have taken that secret to his grave, no matter how much pain he’d endured first. “I’ll get you the map, but first you gotta turn me and my friends loose.”

  Salsidio tossed back the last of his brandy. He set his cigar in the empty glass with a soft sizzling sound, gently set down the glass on the earthen floor, then quickly cut a notch in the top of Vienna’s chemise.

  “No!” the girl screamed as Salsidio dropped the knife, then ripped the chemise down the middle with a savage tug of both his hands.

  He pressed his face between the jutting orbs of Vienna’s breasts, drew a long, deep breath, as though drawing in the very essence of her, then pulled his head away from her chest and smiled at James. “That’s not good enough, amigo. If you don’t tell me where I’ll find the map in the next five seconds, I and my men will do something most foul to your precious chiquita, and then we’ll throw her and you and your fat friend over there to my hogs!”

  Toli had been laughing hysterically, bent forward at the waist, resting his good hand on his knee. But he stopped laughing so suddenly that all eyes in the barn turned toward him. He groaned and stumbled forward, and his lower jaw dropped as he raised an ear-rattling scream to the rafters.

  He fell forward, howling and writhing, and the handle of what appeared to be a corn knife to James’s Confederate eyes jutted up from between his bloody butt cheeks.

  Chapter 24

  All the rurales including Salsidio jerked toward the shrieking Toli—looking around, tensely incredulous. Salsidio barked orders and the rurales glanced around at each other, hesitating. Salsidio barked more loudly, angrier, and the six lower-ranking rurales ran out the front of the stable into the street, looking around warily, dropping to a knee, and raising their rifles, some turned one way, others another.

  Salsidio walked up in front of Toli, whose wails were growing softer as he writhed belly down on the stable floor, reaching back with both hands as though to dislodge the knife sticking out of his butt. Salsidio shouted something at his men, who merely stared up and down the street, shifting around, rifles jerking.

  James glanced at Vienna, who arched a curious brow at him. If she felt self-conscious about having her breasts and the mustang tattoo bared, she didn’t show it. Crosseye spat. “Sure wish that son of a bitch would quit screamin’ so I could hear myself think. Pardon my French, Vienna.”

  “Why, when you speak it so well?” she returned softly, staring out the open doors, where ambient light reflected off the rurales’ gray uniforms.

  As though on command, Toli stopped screaming, dropped his head to the dirt, and lay still.

  The colonel stepped around him, unholstering a pistol, the ratcheting of the hammer being cocked sounding loud in the sudden heavy silence. He moved cautiously, one step at a time, into the street, holding the pistol barrel-up. His boots crunched softly in the dirt and straw.

  James stared, waiting, wondering…

  Something flashed brightly. It looked like the moon exploding. A quarter second after the first flash, a thunderous rattling sounded. It was like a thousand sticks of dynamite rolling down a rocky cliff, exploding.

  Only a Gatling gun could kick up that much racket.

  The ground beneath James’s boots shook. He tightened his jaws against the raging cacophony. The rurales in the street jerked and screamed, some doing a bizarre dance pirouette, tossing their rifles in the air and jerking as though struck by lightning. Salsidio dropped to a knee and fired his pistol to the right, in the direction from which the flashes came, but then he, too, was stood up and blown back to the left of the doors, his boot heels rising a good two feet above the ground.

  James didn’t see him drop, but he heard the dull thud and the clipped groan.

  And then, as fast it had started, the rattling stopped.

  A rurale lying twisted in the street groaned. The Gatling gun went rat-tat-tat! and the rurale was rolled over and silenced. Smoke wafted like mist, faintly obscuring the stars. James stared, riveted, heart thudding anxiously.

  Boots lifted a rataplan in the street. A silhouetted figure in white slacks ran toward him from the street’s other side—a hobbling, shuffling figure in what appeared a long serape and a steeple-crowned, straw sombrero.

  James’s gut tightened apprehensively as the figure half dragged one awkward, lumpy foot around a dead rurale, then disappeared behind the stable’s wall to the left of the doors. When he reappeared a moment later, crouching, he was holding a bloody bowie knife in his right hand. Blood dribbled down from the red-coated steel. The light revealed the rawboned, sweating face of the clubfooted friend of Apache Jack whom Sister Larena had berated for bringing Jack a bottle of forty-rod in his room at the mission church.

  Clubfoot’s open serape revealed two more knives wedged behind a burlap sash, another jutting from a sheath sewn inside the poncho’s left flap. He had an oddly shaped, apish face with a single black brow. He looked around quickly, eyes wide, as though expecting more rurales to descend on him from the shadows.

  James heard the hoof thuds and the clatter of a wagon rising somewhere out in the dark night. A man yelled, “Free the Rebs, Vincente!”

  The command caused James’s heart to leap, and, jerking on his chains, he looked at the clubfooted gent, whose eyes had now caught on the bare-breasted Vienna. “Check Salsidio for the key!” James yelled, jerking on the chains once more, unable to restrain himself.

  Their knife-wielding benefactor limped back behind the front wall of the stable once more. In the meantime, two mules appeared, angling toward the barn’s open doorway. The mules pulled a stout-wheeled, spruce-green wagon with a Gatling gun jutting like a giant mosquito above the box. Driving the wagon was a hulking form in what appeared to be a short bearskin vest and a low-crowned black sombrero trimmed with silver talismans. James blinked at the man riding to the left of the hombre in the bearskin vest, eyes riveted on the bloodstained white bandage wrapped around the old, wizened fellow’s eyes, beneath a red bandanna wrapped over the top of his head and knotted on the left side, the knot hanging over his ear.

  “Jack?” James blurted.

  “Dunn? That you, boy?” Apache Jack stood uncertainly up in the driver’s boot as the hulking creature in the bearskin vest reined the mules to a stop just outside the stable. The big man had long, drooping black mustaches, coal black eyes beneath the black sombrero’s brim. A long, thin cheroot drooped from a corner of his broad mouth, the coal glowing as he drew on it.

  Vienna leaned forward, smiling with relief. “Salsidio said he’d killed you!”

  “Is that that purty Vienna—belle of the ball?”

  “Yes!” the girl cried as the clubfoot, Vincente, moved as quickly as he could toward her, ignoring James, who was chained nearest the door.

  “Come on, Vincente, get them folks loose. There’s another rurale outpost about a mile out in the desert, and the night’s so damn quiet they might’ve heard my friend Chulo’s Gatlin’ fire!” He turned his head this way and that, listening. “Where’s Pablo? I told him to fetch your horses.”

  The boy’s voice rose on the night somewhere to the left of the open doors.

  “Pablo, you little scudder!” Jack intoned, cackling like an ancient witch and nearly falling out of the driver’s boot. He placed a hand on the shoulder of the big man in the bear vest to his left and looked over his right shoulder. “You got the Rebels’ mounts?” He repeated the query in Spanish.

  “Sí, sí!” came the excited
, high-pitched reply.

  A horse whinnied. James heard hooves thudding, sandals slapping. Vicente openly ogled Vienna’s breasts between the flaps of her torn blouse as he unlocked her shackles, then stepped back with a ragged sigh, glancing at her once more and then turning away, sweat dribbling down his broad, oddly shaped face.

  Vienna shook back her hair, grabbed the key out of Vincente’s hand, and quickly unlocked James’s shackles. He drew his arms down, rubbing his wrists.

  “Are you all right?” she said, drawing her blouse closed.

  James gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then grabbed the key and ran over to Crosseye, who was staring at Apache Jack and the hulking man in the bearskin vest as though not sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. “Been through a lot—you an’ me, Jimmy,” he muttered as James unlocked the big oldster’s left-hand shackle. “But I don’t know quite how to play this one.”

  “I reckon it’ll come to us,” James said as the frontiersman’s beefy right fist dropped from the shackle. The younger man crouched, wrapped Crosseye’s right arm around his shoulders, holding him up. “Can you make it?”

  “Hell, I can make it.” When James released him, Crosseye staggered backward as though drunk. Getting his feet under him, he groaned and touched a hand to the back of his head, where the rurale had kissed him with his rifle butt.

  James looked around. Vienna had just dropped her serape down over her head. Now she slid her hair up out of its neck to let it fall down her back and glanced at a support pole on the far side of the stable. “Our guns!”

  James followed her gaze to the post. He was still seeing nearly double from the braining he’d taken. He ran over to the post, stumbling, chickens scurrying out of his way, and saw his and Crosseye’s and Vienna’s gun belts hanging from the same rusty spike, pistols jutting from their holsters.

  Crosseye’s Spencer repeater leaned against the near side of the post. James’s Henry rested against the post’s opposite side. The new weapon must have looked so foreign to the rurales, more accustomed to the older, cruder muskets they’d been wielding, that none had appropriated it.

  James quickly wrapped his Griswolds around his waist, positioned the holsters low on his hips, and grabbed the Henry. Crosseye had draped his bandoliers over his chest, the Lefaucheux around his neck, and was checking the loads in his Leech & Rigdon .36, making sure the caps and nipples were still set and ready to fire.

  “Come on, you Rebel devils!” shouted Apache Jack, hooking an arm to beckon them toward the doors. “We ain’t got all night! Pablo’s done brought your hosses!”

  The hulking man in the bear vest was backing the mules away from the barn. The Gatling gun jounced in the box, squawking on its unoiled swivel. As the formidable-looking driver turned the wagon around to head back in the direction from which he and Jack had come, James ran on out of the stable to see little Pablo sitting a beefy mule and holding the reins of the Southerners’ mounts, including those of their packhorse.

  “How in the hell did the kid know which horses were ours?” James called, shoving his Henry down in his saddle boot.

  “Pablo knows everything there is to know about everyone and everything in Cordura!” Apache Jack replied, laughing.

  As though he’d understood, Pablo grinned, showing his large white teeth against his dark face beneath his straw sombrero, and tossed James all four sets of reins.

  “Gracias, amigo!” James tossed Crosseye and Vienna the reins to their respective mounts and climbed into his saddle, wincing at the throbbing the maneuver kicked up in his head. Vincente was already sitting a steeldust stallion near Pablo, holding a Maynard carbine barrel up on his thigh and staring cautiously down the dimly lit main street of Cordura.

  Apache Jack and the hulking man in the bearskin vest rattled eastward along Cordura’s main street, and Vincent turned the steeldust to ride just off their left rear wheel. Pablo yelled at his mule and batted his sandals against the beast’s ribs, and the animal lunged into a ground-eating gallop with a single bray.

  Vienna ground her heels into her own mount’s flanks, and Crosseye did likewise as James glanced around at the dead rurales littering the street and the mostly dark buildings hunched beneath the glittering stars. No one seemed to be out and about, but most likely there were more than a few spectators peering out from dark windows or even darker alley mouths.

  Chickens clucked and pecked and one of the goats sniffed a hat of one of the dead men.

  Satisfied no one near had taken umbrage with the demise of Salsidio and his contingent of rurale policemen, and was about to start flinging lead at his back, James put the chestnut on up the trail. He caught up to the others as they followed a bend around the trail that formed a pale line through the brushy, rocky desert in the darkness, the hooves of the galloping mounts hammering loudly in the quiet night.

  The wagon rattled raucously, the Gatling gun bouncing around in the box, and James was worried the cacophony would draw every Apache within fifty miles. He supposed they didn’t have much to worry about, however. The Gatling gun was a formidable weapon, and James wondered where Apache Jack had acquired it.

  The big man slowed the wagon’s two-mule hitch after a short time, and they rode at a little more leisurely pace. Vincente continued to ride beside the wagon’s left rear wheel. Pablo followed directly behind the wagon. James, Crosseye, and Vienna rode about fifteen yards behind Pablo.

  No one said anything. There were plenty of questions, but they figured they’d get their answers soon enough, when they’d put enough distance between themselves and any further trouble back in Cordura.

  When they’d ridden for half an hour, the big man whom Jack had called Chulo pulled the wagon off the trail’s left side and into the mouth of a steep-walled canyon. He stood in the driver’s boot and grunted loudly, bizarrely, as he whipped the reins against the mules’ backs, trying to get them moving on the rougher trail. When the wagon was bouncing along at a regular pace, the stout, iron-shod wheels ringing off rocks, James looked around to see the cliffs on each side of the trail rising darkly, ominously.

  They must have been nearly two thousand feet high in places. On the right side of the trail was an arroyo sheathed in boulders and paloverde trees.

  The trail rose gradually, and short, wiry pines began to appear. The night air grew cooler. There was a distant, angry screech of a pouncing wildcat.

  After another hour of hard riding, the wagon stopped near the base of a towering sierra, the steep slope of which the starlight showed strewn with large boulders. About a hundred yards out from the mountain’s base, a stone hovel crouched, its brush roof touched with the light of a rising sickle moon. A corral flanked the cabin. Lights shone in the shack’s windows—at least the two from which the shutters had been thrown back. Shadows moved behind them.

  James walked his horse up to the side of the wagon and stopped just off its right front wheel. Apache Jack and the big driver sat facing the shack, the big man studying it carefully, nostrils expanding and contracting like those of some stalking beast. Jack had turned his head to one side, listening.

  “It’s occupied,” he said to the big man, who sat with his elbows on his knees, holding the reins lightly in his gloved hands.

  The big man said nothing. James could hear him breathing. Something told James he couldn’t speak, though he apparently understood English.

  “La Croix’s bunch,” Jack said, making a sour expression. “I can hear that striped skunk’s voice from here…goin’ on about his latest woman.” The old desert rat spat a tobacco quid over the side of the wagon; a good bit of it dribbled down the wheel. Turning back to the big man, he said, “I reckon you know what to do, Chulo. But don’t use up too much ammo. We’re gonna need it for the Apaches.”

  Chulo nodded, then flicked his reins over the mules’ backs. As the wagon continued forward toward the cabin, Apache Jack turned to James and the others, grinned devilishly, ran a hand across his mouth, and said, “Wait here.”

&nb
sp; He repeated the order in Spanish for Vincente’s and Pablo’s benefit.

  James sat the chestnut, letting the mount crop grass around the base of a boulder and watching the wagon jounce and rattle slowly into the yard. When it was thirty yards from the hovel, Chulo turned the mules back around to face James and the others, while the Gatling gun faced the cabin. When the wagon had started turning, Jack started shouting in Spanish, and men in the cabin began shouting back at him, their shadows jostling in the windows.

  Jack jumped down and stood beside the wagon box, gesturing broadly as a tall man stood crouched in the cabin’s low door. They made several friendly-sounding exchanges in Spanish, laughing with a little too much exuberance, before the man in the doorway stepped out into the yard, canting his head to one side as he walked slowly, a little apprehensively, toward the wagon.

  Three more men came out of the cabin and spread out in front of it, near the door, two holding rifles, one holding a pistol down low along his right leg clad in silver-trimmed leather chaps. They were dressed in various types of serapes and dusty Mexican trail clothes, with pistols and knives hanging off their hips and jutting from the wells of their boots.

  None was wearing a hat. They’d settled in for the evening.

  When the tall man had come to within twenty feet of the back of the wagon, he stopped suddenly and pointed angrily at the Gatling gun he must have just then picked out of the shadows in the wagon’s rear. He prattled off a handful of curses. The others lurched forward, also cursing, and began bearing down on the wagon with their weapons. Jack threw his head back, laughing, and a half second later the Gatling gun began its ugly song.

  Knives of fire careened from its maw.

  The men standing between the wagon and the brush-roofed hovel had no chance at all. They did a dance similar to that of the rurales, and in less than five seconds three of the four were heaped on the ground, the fourth one having been blown back into the cabin through its open door.

  Vincente, sitting his steeldust, cut loose with a short, victorious, coyotelike yowl.