The Bells of El Diablo Read online

  The eye before him—the familiar orb he’d know anywhere, for it owned the familial blue of his mother’s eyes…the blue of even his own eyes—dulled. It was like a lamp being turned down in the one lit window of a house he’d just recognized.

  Quickly, he grabbed the handle of his knife and pulled. When it slid free of the young lieutenant’s chest, he released it, letting the creek take it. The man before him groaned, winced, and bobbed toward James in the current that carried them both downstream. The Union soldier opened his mouth, gasping.

  Only vaguely, James heard the rifle shots of his own men behind him. They were trying to ignite the dynamite. The pops and booms dwindled quickly as the current carried him farther away from the bridge. Just as vaguely, he was aware of the explosion of the dynamite, saw the orange radiance push back the darkness around him and reflect like rubies off the black water.

  “Little brother,” he wheezed, now pulling the Union officer toward him, kicking his legs to keep them both afloat as the man became nearly a deadweight in his arms. “Ah, shit, Willie.” His voice rose shrilly, cracking as he started to maneuver toward the creek’s left bank. “Willie!”

  Chapter 3

  James felt the creek bottom thrust itself against his kicking feet, and he set both feet down, finding himself in hip-deep water, ten yards from shore.

  The young Union officer—who unbelievably appeared to be one and the same Willie Dunn, James’s brother two years his junior, though with an unfamiliar patch over his left eye—slumped down on his knees in the shallow water, head hanging. His longish blond hair was pasted to his neck and cheeks and the black eye patch.

  “Willie,” James said, breathless. “Willie…”

  James dragged his brother to shore, back-and-bellied him up onto the steep bank, and collapsed beside him. He vomited water, brushed his forehead against his arm, and then turned to the young man, who he was still hoping was not really his brother but only another soldier who merely looked like Willie Dunn.

  After all, it had been three years since they’d last seen each other right before Willie had packed a satchel and ridden off on his Morgan-cross in the wake of their long, heated argument in their father’s study back at Seven Oaks….

  “Willie!”

  James pushed the lieutenant’s left shoulder up. The man’s blond head lolled back, and the single eye met James’s. Even in the darkness, the dark blue orb betrayed a confused, puzzled expression. Then gradually, just as James himself realized, horrifically, that he really was in the presence of his brother—a man he’d most likely mortally wounded—young Willie’s lips stretched in a wry smile of recognition. He blinked his lone eye, shook his head.

  “Well, well—Forrest’s Rapscallion.” Willie chuckled raspily. “Fancy meetin’ you here, James.”

  James pushed himself up on an elbow, thrust his brother’s shoulder back farther until Willie reclined against the soggy, fern-cushioned ground on his back, wincing and grunting, flat belly expanding and contracting wildly as he tried to catch a breath. James looked at the blood pumping from the two wounds in his brother’s chest. It was frothy, and it came in dark spurts, trickling down the soaked tunic toward the ground.

  James’s mind spun. The horror of what he’d done had a taut grip on his mind while the rational part of him tried to figure out what to do about it.

  James had heard of such a nightmare happening before, and at times he’d imagined what it would be like to meet his younger, more idealistic brother on the field of battle. But those had been anxiety-inspired fantasies. Surely, it would never happen!

  But it did, and James could not shake the feeling that it was all merely a nightmare. He could not maneuver through the shock and confusion that visited him now for the first time after three long years of bloody war, after three long years of cold, efficient killing.

  His own brother, little Willie, lay before him dying from wounds that James himself had inflicted!

  Willie was quivering. James pushed himself up higher on his elbow and looked into Willie’s young face. No, he was not quivering. He was laughing, lips stretched back from his teeth, tears running down from his single blue eye. Then, suddenly, Willie Dunn pushed up on his own elbow and leaned forward, coughing raucously, dark blood spitting from his mouth and both nostrils.

  James’s blood ran cold. He’d punctured one of Willie’s lungs.

  “Damn near got the war won,” Willie said, still laughing bizarrely, “and my dear old grayback brother goes and kills me!”

  Someone called James’s name. The shout sailed out over the creek and across the canyon, echoing. James had recognized the voice. “Crosseye, over here!”

  “Crosseye?” Willie looked up at him, frowning. “You gotta be joshin’? He’s with you?”

  “What’d you think—he’d join the Union? Just like me—and you—he was born a Southerner.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t surprise me ole Crosseye signed up with ole Jeff Davis. Just like you, he didn’t want no Yankee tellin’ him what he could or couldn’t do—no, not even when it came to using men as slaves! I’m just surprised the old bastard’s with you—here…not to mention still alive.”

  “Nothin’ can kill that old bastard. You know that.”

  “Not bears, not Injuns…” Willie was talking memories now, memories he shared with his older brother while a fond look of reflection passed fleetingly across his otherwise pain-racked eye. “Not the whole Union army!”

  James called for their mutual friend again.

  “Jimmy?” came Crosseye’s echoing shout, louder this time. “Where you at, boy?”

  “Here!”

  Panicking at the thought of his brother dying by his own hand, James pushed his brother down flat once more and closed his hands over the two ragged holes in Willie’s upper chest. Willie screamed and kicked a low-heeled cavalry boot. “I’m finished, you bastard! You killed me!”

  Two men came scrambling through the brush, stumbling down the bank and grabbing dogwood and oak branches to break their falls. The first man was stocky and bull-legged, and his battered, broad-brimmed hat hung down his back by a leather thong, exposing the thin, red-gray hair curling close against his domelike head. The second man was younger—Jackie Baker from Kentucky. Both men held long Enfield muskets in their hands, and their canvas haversacks flopped down their sides from leather lanyards. Their uniforms, like those of most of the Confederate soldiers, were nearly rags, and their wash-worn underwear shone through in scores of places.

  Crosseye moved down the slope and stopped fifteen feet away from James and Willie, scowling down at the younger Dunn.

  “Hold on there, Jimmy,” Crosseye said, bringing his rifle up. “One left, eh? Well, not for long, no, sir!”

  James snapped a look at Crosseye Reeves, who’d been a sharecropper back at the Dunns’ Seven Oaks Plantation and a mentor in the art of woodsmanship to both James and Willie—against their mother’s wishes, of course. Softly, James said, “Put it down, old man. It’s Willie.”

  Crosseye lowered the Enfield from his craggy, patch-bearded cheek, narrowing the eye that did not wander. “Huh?”

  “Gotta get him back up to the camp. Get him by a fire.”

  Crosseye moved slowly down the slope, followed by Jackie Baker. The two other surviving members of Dunn’s Raiders were just now running down out of the forest. They were Cletus Moon and Moss Cline. Both men slowed when they saw James crouched over the fallen federal soldier, and came down cautiously, puzzled expressions on their gaunt, haggard faces, both men, like Jackie Baker, not yet twenty but having seen enough killing to last them twenty lifetimes.

  James stood and crouched over his brother. “I’m gonna carry you up to our camp, Willie.”

  Willie’s eye moved up and down his older brother, and he chuckled. “What’s the matter—the Confederacy too poor to clothe its soldiers?”

  James grabbed his brother’s right hand, but Willie pulled it away. “Leave me, brother. I’m a goner.”


  “Ain’t gonna leave you, Willie.”

  He pulled Willie up by one hand, but as he drew his younger brother up over his shoulder, Willie broke out in a coughing fit. James felt the warmth of his brother’s blood dribble over his shoulder and down his back. He eased Willie back down to the ferns, then snaked his arms under the young lieutenant’s arms and knees and lifted him and began to carry him up the slope through the pines.

  Crosseye and the other soldiers followed at some distance, the others conferring quietly. Only once did James glance down at the bridge, the center of which had been blown out by the dynamite. It was a ragged hulk in the darkness. At least, James’s men had accomplished that much.

  James carried his brother up the steep slope a hundred yards before swinging left and walking along a deer path, moving upstream to the point where he and Coker and Krieg had first come down from their redoubt on the ridge.

  Coker, like Krieg, was most certainly dead, as the bullets had come at him from both directions. The man James was now carrying back to their camp could very well be the man who’d killed poor Lawrence, who’d made it through so much only to die here, albeit in an effort to keep Sherman from getting his hands on any more guns. Maybe the Raiders had even delayed Sherman’s receiving any more of those sixteen-shot Henry repeaters that hopelessly outmatched anything the Confederates were wielding.

  “Made a fool out of you tonight, James.” Willie’s voice sounded like sandpaper as he stared up from his brother’s arms, choking back coughs, breathing hard, his muscles tensing as he writhed.

  “I reckon you did, Willie.”

  “Don’t mean just this.”

  “What, then? That shipment of guns and ammo is gonna have to backtrack. Might not get to Sherman before he reaches Atlanta.”

  “Ah, shit, James,” Willie said, mouth twisting in a weird grin between coughs. “Sherman’s done already in Atlanta. Might be on his way east to the ocean by now.”

  James didn’t say anything. He winced when his bare left foot came down on a sharp spur of rock pushing up out of the deep, aromatic forest duff. His brother was likely delirious from blood loss.

  “Yessir, we was just hangin’ back to clean up the little Confederate raidin’ parties the main army done left behind.”

  James frowned down at his brother.

  Willie said, “There wasn’t no supply train, James. McClellan meant for that information to be intercepted by them dunderheaded Reb spies—so we could set up an ambush and clean you dogs out of the henhouse once and for all, so’s you wouldn’t be bedevilin’ General Sherman all the way to the ocean. The general, you see, is the cantankerous sort, and he’s just sick to shit of you yaller-bellies!”

  James thought of his raiders and the several other packs of Confederate guerillas that were also on missions to blow up bridges or railroad lines this very evening. He was more concerned right now with his brother, whom he could feel growing cold in his arms, but the information was hard to swallow, for he’d built up so much hope for turning Sherman back from Atlanta. A faint hope, but a hope just the same.

  Now, if Willie’s Union word could be trusted, he not only hadn’t accomplished that, but he’d murdered his brother in the bargain. He was strong, but he felt his arms and legs growing weak as he climbed the last stretch of the slope toward the rocks showing pale through the dark columns of the pines. They’d set up a redoubt there in the rocks capping the ridge, on the backside of the mountain from where the supply wagons had been supposed to pull through.

  A horse nickered to James’s left. He could see the Raiders’ seven mounts tied to a picket line there, and the stolen cannon just below the ridge. Straight ahead of him, the rocks shone pale in the darkness. He found the hollow beyond which lay the black entrance of a cave, and stumbling painfully over obstacles in the darkness, he found his way into the cave and set Willie down, leaning him back gently against the cave’s wall.

  “I’ll get a fire goin’, Willie.”

  His brother said nothing. James lowered his head to his brother’s, placed his hand on Willie’s forehead. He couldn’t hear him breathing. James’s heart thumped fearfully.

  He pressed his hand more tightly against his brother’s cold, clammy forehead. “Willie?”

  The young soldier rasped, convulsed, then drew a ragged breath. “James?”

  “I’m gonna get a fire goin’, Willie. Gonna get you warm.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, James.”

  “Shut up, Willie.”

  James moved back out of the cave and found where his clothes were piled near where Billy Krieg’s and Lawrence’s were also piled, barely visible in the darkness. The four other Raiders were moving up the slope through the pines.

  “One o’ you fellas wanna get a fire goin’?” James said.

  They all four stopped near him, and he could see their incredulous scowls even in the darkness. They thought he’d gone off his nut. Crosseye said, “With a supply train headed this way, Jimmy? You crazy?”

  James shook his head as he pulled his long-handles up his legs, his body having dried, leaving uncomfortable, crusted patches of mud on his arms, chest, and thighs. It was caked between his toes. “No one’s comin’, Crosseye. It was an ambush.”

  “What?”

  James’s anger exploded like pent-up steam in an overheated locomotive. “One of you get a goddamn fire goin’, goddamnit! Gather wood and build a big one!”

  Three of the men jumped back with a start, wary of James’s temper. Crosseye, somewhere in his forties though he’d never revealed his true age to anyone, even James, whom he’d practically raised back at Seven Oaks, studied the younger man dubiously. He scratched the back of his head under his broad-brimmed hat with its front brim pinned to the crown, then turned to the others. “You heard the lieutenant, ya damn junipers! Gather wood and start a fire!”

  Chapter 4

  When James had stomped into his worn boots, he shrugged into his Confederate-gray tunic—or what was left of it. It virtually hung in ribbons on him. Crosseye stood before him, head turned toward the black hole of the cave. “You sure that’s him, Jimmy?”

  “I’d know my own brother, wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, I’ll be a sober shoat,” Crosseye said, raking a thumbnail down his beard. “Never thought I’d see that boy again. Figured the Union had done swallowed him up. Why’d they spit him out here?”

  “To kill us. It was a trap.”

  “Figure that!” Crosseye’s slightly high-pitched raspy voice sounded sad. “I remember when that boy was no higher than a tit on a mama coon.”

  James walked into the cave, let his eyes adjust to the darkness once more, then walked over to his brother’s vague image slouched against the wall. Willie was breathing softly, raspily. James quickly gathered stones littering the cave’s floor and arranged them into a circle. When Moss and Cletus had each deposited armloads of relatively dry wood in the middle of the cave and coaxed a small fire to life in James’s ring, the Confederate lieutenant fetched his haversack and canteen. The flames danced wan orange light and shadows across the cavern’s uneven stone walls.

  When he had shoved a relatively clean neckerchief into the largest of his brother’s two wounds—the lesser one appeared to have stopped bleeding—James tried to get him to drink, but Willie only turned his head away, coughing. Sweat shone like beads of molten gold on his forehead and cheeks carpeted in a fine, blond beard. He squeezed his lone eye shut, groaning softly. His lips formed a white line beneath his untrimmed, red-blond mustache.

  James lowered the canteen. He turned to see Moss and Cletus hunkered on their haunches on the far side of the fire, regarding James and the wounded Union lieutenant dubiously. Jackie Baker sat on a boulder just outside the cave, his Enfield across his knees, staring cautiously into the night.

  Crosseye stood with his back to Baker, and crouched down, hands on his knees, regarding Willie with a haunted look in his deep-set eyes across which the light of the fledgling flames danced. H
is left eye had wandered since it had nearly been plucked out in a skirmish during the Mexican War. There was a short, faint, white scar above and below it. Crosseye claimed that the Mexican who had so assaulted him had paid for it with a bloody disemboweling, though Crosseye was given to exaggeration and idle boasting, so no one knew how true the story was. He was as tough as a hickory knot, though. And that was a fact few around Seven Oaks would try to contest.

  James looked back at Moss and Cletus, both of whom regarded Willie as though he were a caged bobcat. “You two got somethin’ you wanna say?” James asked them tightly.

  They slid their moody eyes to him.

  Moss said, “Shit, Lieutenant, that’s a Union officer there. Whoever he may have been once, that’s who he is now.”

  James straightened slowly, uncoiling like a rising panther. His mild expression framed by his long, wet dark brown hair belied the fury that burned behind his cobalt eyes. He no longer had his knife, and he was glad he didn’t. He was making a conscious effort to not wrap his right hand around the grips of the Griswold & Gunnison brass-framed pistol wedged behind his cracked leather belt, just over his belly where it was easy to get to. The mud and weather had claimed his leather holster many months ago.

  “Get the hell out of my sight, you son of a bitch.” His voice was like low, distant thunder.

  Moss, still on his haunches beside Cletus, stared up at him darkly. An exasperated sneer etched itself on Moss’s long face framed in bushy muttonchop whiskers, and he gestured toward Willie. “Come on, Lieutenant—look at the uniform…”

  “That’s my brother in that uniform, you son of a bitch!” James’s voice rocketed around inside the cave. “Get the hell out of my sight now, and stay there—you hear? Or so help me, I’ll pop a ball through your ugly head, Moss!”

  The threat was like a slap. Both Moss and Cletus stared up at their lieutenant, hang-jawed, wary as treed coons. They blinked. And then Cletus stumbled back a little as he rose, bracing himself on the cave’s far wall. Then he cursed, wheeled, and stumbled on out of the cave. Cletus regarded the young lieutenant a moment longer, then glanced at Crosseye, who betrayed nothing on his haggard, cross-eyed face, then went the way of Moss.