The Bells of El Diablo Read online

  He frowned uncertainly, lowered the rifle an inch.

  “Say…ain’t you…ain’t you…?” He paused, then added almost under his breath, “Forrest’s Rapscallion?”

  James stared at him.

  The others shifted uncomfortably, sliding their gazes between James and the old man. They moved up nearer the old man and stood about ten feet off each of James’s knees.

  The stringbean with the buckteeth ran his tongue along his lower lip, sized James up carefully, both eyes twitching, and said, “Well…if it is him…he ain’t nothin’ so much. Hell, I’m bigger’n he is!”

  “Is that who you are?” asked the other young one, blue eyes narrowed beneath an uneven shelf of dirty-blond bangs. “You Forrest’s Rapscallion or is old Kelsey addlepated from all the mash he drunk in Kentucky?”

  “He’s got it right. Walk on.”

  The stringbean looked at James’s sleek stallion—slightly hammerheaded but beefy through the barrel and tapering to sculpted hindquarters, with long, strong legs. “That sure is a fine horse….”

  His eyes returned to James. They turned glassy with nerves, and his lips twitched a wicked smile.

  At the same time, the old man jerked the rifle back up. He was tightening his finger on its trigger but did not get the shot off before James had reached both hands across his flat belly and brought up the twin Griswolds. The old man’s Springfield blasted toward the sky as James’s .36-caliber ball punched through his right cheek just beneath that eye and slammed him violently back and down. James’s other Griswold had punched a hole through the tangle-bearded younker’s chest as the kid had gotten his own Springfield centered, but shot a misfire, which he appeared to realize as he flew back and slammed against the ground beside the jerking old man.

  The kid’s eyes were wide with fleeting shock and frustration.

  Before the echo of his twin killing shots had died, James leaned back slightly in his saddle, snaked his right-hand Griswold across his chest, and fired from beneath his left arm.

  The Griswold went plam!

  The stringbean’s own slug curled the air in front of James’s nose before thudding into a fence post beyond him. James’s .36 ball drilled through the stringbean’s right side, shattering a rib before tearing through his heart and exiting his body from beneath his right arm, blowing his shirt seam out.

  James’s next slug plowed through the underside of the stringbean’s chin as the lanky soldier, screaming shrilly, flew up and back toward the trail’s opposite side. The slug tore through the man’s skull, and exiting the crown of his head as he hit the ground, it streaked the trail beyond him with brains and blood.

  The tangle-bearded kid lay jerking and gurgling.

  James spied movement in the periphery of his vision, and curveted the chestnut rabicano, raising and aiming both smoking Griswolds straight out in front of him. A rifle boomed. James jerked, looking around quickly, half expecting the slug to tear him off the chestnut’s back.

  He heard a gasp and a soft grunt, saw a man in blue uniform pants, suspenders, threadbare undershirt, and dark blue kepi step out from behind a hickory about forty yards off the trail to James’s left. He was short and scar-faced, eyes set close together. His lips were stretched back from his teeth, and he dropped the carbine in his hands as he fell to both knees.

  Blood oozed from between his lips. It pumped from a hole in his chest.

  He rasped, “Shit!” and fell forward on his face in the mud.

  Keeping the Griswolds raised, James looked up the slight, muddy grade toward the farm, where he spied a potbellied, gray-clad figure in a gray sombrero rise to one knee. The man had a round, ruddy, patch-bearded face beneath the sombrero, the front brim of which was pinned to the crown. A big pistol hung by a cord around his neck. He held a Spencer rifle in his hands, cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest.

  James shook his head as Sergeant Crosseye Reeves stood, brushed a fist across his nose, then turned away and sauntered back toward the farm. He walked in his bandy-legged gait around behind what remained of the barn, then came out a minute later, trotting his gray mule down the grade toward James. The banjo he’d always carried behind his cavalry saddle was still there, tied to his blanket roll.

  Crosseye closed his crossed eye and looked from James to the dead oldster lying off the far side of the trail. “Damn Yankee, horse-thievin’ sons o’ bitches.” He looked up at James. “How you, Jimmy?”

  “What’re you doin’ here, you damn fool?”

  “Someone’s gotta back your play.” Crosseye’s face swelled and flushed. “You obviously can’t do it your own self. If I hadn’t trailed you from Seven Oaks, you’d be where he is ’bout now!”

  James frowned, shocked and indignant. “You followed me all the way from home?”

  “Hell, I followed you from the cave—you an’ Willie! Didn’t let on ’cause I know you’d make a fuss. But, shit, Jimmy—the war’s over. And…after Willie…an’ you headin’ off…Bless me, Jimmy, my heart just ain’t in it no more.”

  The big, bandy-legged oldster paused. Shouldering his rifle, he said, “I stopped by Seven Oaks just when you was ridin’ out. Mordecai told me about the watch. You takin’ it to Vienna McAllister out West.”

  Mordecai had been James’s father’s personal attendant for years, and James had been surprised to find the liveried black man still at Seven Oaks, tending the elder Dunn though he was no longer a slave.

  James stared at Crosseye, unable to wrap his mind around the fact that the old hillbilly had followed him as far as he had. But then, hadn’t it been Crosseye who’d taught him, James, everything he knew? Maybe the old mountain man still had more to teach him.

  He said halfheartedly, “You best go on back to your farm, old man.”

  Crosseye looked off, scratching the back of his head. “Well, now, I was thinkin’ I might just stay there. But you see, Jimmy, there’s nothin’ left. Nah, hell, them Yankees burned me out. All I could find of any use was a couple bottles of mash I’d hid in tree hollows, and this nice new Spencer fifty-six some federal soldier left lyin’ atop his smelly carcass.” He chuckled, cast his red-rimmed eyes at James. “I figure I’ll try my luck out West. With you. Figured you’d try to turn me back, so I wasn’t fixin’ to show myself till you was across the Mississippi.”

  James stared at him. Then he looked at the dead man who’d been about to drill him with a Sharps carbine. James sighed, felt a burn of chagrin. “Well, it’s good you showed yourself when you did. Damn, how’d I miss him?”

  “I reckon you got your mind on other things.”

  “I reckon I do.” James looked at Crosseye again. The old man was stout and puffy, and his clothes were dirty and torn. But James would be damned if those old blue eyes didn’t exude the toughness and spirit that had once been his homeland. Despite Crosseye’s having duped him, James was glad he was here.

  James looked at the big, French-made pistol hanging down Crosseye’s stout chest, over his cartridge bandoliers studded with .56-caliber cartridges. “You got ammo for that Lefaucheux?” It fired a pin-fire, twelve-millimeter cartridge that was hard to find.

  “All I’ll need less’n I live to a hundred,” Crosseye said, hooking a thumb at the worn saddlebags draped over his mule’s back. He ran a hand across the Leech & Rigdon revolver he wore for the cross draw on his left hip. “And I got this trusty ole iron for if the La-fachoowey runs out. You figure we’re gonna need a lot of ammo when we get West, do you?”

  “I don’t know. Injuns out there. If the stories are true, owl-hoots of every stripe run wild clear to the Pacific Ocean.”

  Crosseye’s eyes brightened eagerly, and he nodded. “I heard tell.” He poked a worn, mule-eared boot into his saddle stirrup and heaved himself with a grunt onto the mule’s back. “I hear it’s a prime place for a new start, Jimmy. You know my cousin Cooter once said the gold just screams to be plucked out of the creeks!” He swiped a gloved hand across his mouth and scratched his beard. “Maybe a
fter you deliver that watch, we could fill us a couple o’ croker sacks full…?”

  James smiled at his old friend. “Why not?”

  They booted their mounts into spanking trots westward.

  Chapter 6

  As James traveled west across the Mississippi with his old friend and mentor, Crosseye, holing up nights in river or creek bottoms or on the open prairie, James’s last parting view of his father’s swollen, angry face as Alexander Dunn had waved the Confederate sword over the balustrade at him, threatening to eviscerate him with it, haunted his sole surviving son no end.

  The vision didn’t begin to recede until they had left Omaha, Nebraska, and the vast West opened before them like a giant’s open palm stubbled with sage and wiry brown grass and yucca plants. Instantly, James felt lighter. This was a new and different world, one for the most part untouched by the War Between the States. Maybe Crosseye had been right, and this would indeed be a prime place to make a new start.

  Construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad had been stymied by the war, so they traveled via horseback along the Platte River to Julesburg and then by way of a well-worn freight and stage road to Denver City, an old trading settlement and boomtown situated at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, its mud-brick shacks and false-fronted business establishments scattered willy-nilly amongst the rolling sage coulees. The ragged-topped Front Range of the Rockies loomed about fifteen miles to the west, and both James and Crosseye had trouble taking their astonished gazes off such towering peaks, the highest of which, they learned from a liveryman, was called Mount Rosalie.

  Denver City couldn’t seem to make up its mind if it was a ranch-supply town or a prospectors’ camp, as it was as rife with cowpunchers and the wafting odor of cow shit as it teemed with bearded, owl-eyed gents in canvas hats and the hobnailed boots of the miner, who pushed handcarts or rode in heavy-wheeled wagons pulled by braying mules. Whoever the treeless, dusty settlement belonged to, it was hopping, as there seemed to be a whorehouse or watering hole on every street, with more about a mile away in another mining camp called Auraria.

  James and Crosseye were taken by the openness and the rollicking free-spiritedness of the region, not to mention the jaw-dropping majesty of the nearby mountains. But James was soon frustrated by his seeming inability to find out anything about the family of his brother’s sweetheart, Vienna McAllister.

  He spoke to bankers and business owners of every stripe as well as to several deputy town marshals, but no one claimed to have ever heard of Ichabod McAllister, the uncle whom Vienna had been sent to live with. There were several large, moneyed-looking houses up a side road off the town’s east end, a neighborhood to which the McAllisters likely would have gravitated. James knocked on several doors only to be met with suspicious frowns and resolute head shakes. He wasn’t sure what had evoked such an evil-eyed reception—his untrimmed beard, his smoke-stained vest and trousers, or all the dust that Denver’s streets coated him with daily.

  Probably, he decided, a combination of each.

  So he paid an extra nickel for a bath—in used water—at the rat-infested hotel that he and Crosseye were flopping at, and headed out once more, Willie’s gold watch in his pocket. He’d learn the whereabouts of Vienna McAllister if it was the last thing he did. He owed Willie that much. Maybe, once he delivered the watch, he could finally bury Willie for good.

  Night had fallen on the third day of his and Crosseye’s stay in Denver. The Front Range was a jagged-topped, black-velvety line against the western horizon. The sky was periwinkle blue over the mountains, velvety black directly over Denver. Piano and guitar music emanated from a half dozen saloons as James made his way to a little, cheap café, where he was to meet Crosseye. As he crossed an alley mouth, boots crunched in the darkness to his right.

  James stopped, closed his hand over the wooden grips of the Confederate pistol holstered on his right hip, and turned to see a tall man with an eye patch step out of the alley. He was bearded, wearing a denim jacket and a blue neckerchief, his eyes set close. Working a stove match between his lips, he stopped in front of James and gave a half smile.

  “A man’ll be havin’ a word, with you, mate,” he said in a heavy English accent.

  James frowned. “Who on God’s green earth could…?”

  He let his voice trail off as he heard someone come up behind him. Just as he began to turn his head, something hard smacked into his skull just over his left ear. Both ears shrieked. His knees turned to hot water.

  A warm black wave washed over him, and he was out before he hit the ground. His next sensory impression was that of someone hammering a chisel through his skull. Again and again they rapped the chisel with a hammer as though trying to work through the bone to his brain.

  “Goddamnit,” he heard himself groan. “Give it a break!”

  He opened his eyes and lifted his head. He couldn’t lift it far. His hands were tied behind him. He rolled to one side to ease the pressure on his shoulders.

  Tobacco smoke wafted over him. Through the smoke he saw the one-eyed man sitting just beyond him. He looked around. No one was hammering a chisel into his head. He and the one-eyed man were in the back of a buckboard wagon. The banging had been the rough wooden floor of the wagon smacking against his head as they bounced along a rough, rutted trail.

  “We’ll stop when we get to where we’re goin’, mate,” the man with the eye patch said, then took another pull off his loosely rolled cigarette. He sat with his back against the tailgate, one knee drawn up, the elbow of the arm he was smoking with resting atop the knee.

  Another sharp pain seared James’s head, and he lowered his chin, wincing. When the pain receded, he glanced behind him and up, where two men were sitting on the wagon’s high seat, their backs to him. The man to the right of the driver was looking at James. It was too dark for James to see much about him except that he had a thick gray beard and a hawk nose, and he appeared to be smiling. He was holding a rifle, and a pistol was holstered on his left side, for the cross draw, the grips angling toward the hawk-nosed gent’s right hand.

  No easy reach for James even if his hands had been free. The hawk-nosed man must have been reading his mind, because his beard spread wider and a white line of teeth shone between his lips.

  Propped on one arm, James turned to the man with the eye patch reclining against the tailgate. “What’s this all about?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Naturally, I’d be curious.”

  “Shut up,” the man with the eye patch said again, with more menace.

  James looked around the wagon. They were out in the country somewhere. The vast velvety line of the mountains loomed large ahead of the wagon, so they were somewhere between Denver City and the Front Range.

  A few cabins with stock pens or corrals slouched in the sagebrush. It was rough country—rougher than it had appeared from Denver, where it looked as though a relatively level, dun-colored bench rose toward the base of the mountains. But the young Confederate saw now that it was more rugged than that, with low, rocky bluffs rising here and there. Just now they were descending a steep grade toward what appeared a brushy creek bottom.

  James vaguely wondered if, when reaching the bottom of the creek bed, he could leap out of the wagon and into the brush before these gents could blow his lungs out.

  This time it appeared to be the man with the eye patch who was reading his mind. “Don’t do nothin’ stupid, bucko.”

  James looked at him. He had a blank expression. The wagon turned, and the angling starlight glittered off a long barrel resting across the man with the eye patch’s thigh. The rifle had a brass receiver and no fore-stock, a loading tube beneath the barrel. A sixteen-shot Henry like the one James had found on the bridge over Snake Creek Gap. Its oiled finish glistened.

  Such a weapon would likely be useful out here in the rugged West. But the barrel of this one was aimed at his belly.

  “Reckon you’re not out to rob me or
you’d have taken more than my guns.” He felt his brother’s watch in the left side pocket of his buckskin vest, and his few coins in a pocket of his pants.

  He hadn’t been carrying his Enfield carbine when they’d ambushed him, but his holsters and shell belt, with his twin Griswolds, were looped over the one-eyed man’s left shoulder.

  “Shut up,” was the one-eyed man’s only reply.

  James decided he was probably a Yankee sympathizer. Only Yankees would pull such a cowardly stunt—smacking a man over the head with a pistol butt from behind, tossing him into a wagon unconscious, and tying him so he couldn’t defend himself. Raw fury stoked a fire in James’s chest; he pulled hard against the rope binding his wrists to no avail. The rope only cut into his skin.

  The wagon rocked and jounced across the creek bottom and climbed the hill beyond it. After another fifteen minutes of pitching and swaying and bouncing over rocks, James saw lights slide up along both sides of the trail. The lights were lit cabin windows. The cabins appeared to be positioned along both sides of a creek that flashed darkly between them in the amazingly clear light of the stars.

  The faint strains of a distant fiddle gave James his first pangs of homesickness. It passed quickly as the wagon pulled up to a long, low shack of adobe bricks.

  The roof of the shack was shake-shingled. It had a broad front porch, and the porch roof was covered in brush. The place looked old and run-down, bricks crumbling, holes in the roof, a shutter hanging askew from a front window. Smoke unfurled from a broad brick chimney on the shack’s near end.

  A bull’s horned skull had been nailed to a front post, and from around the long, massive horns—longhorn horns, James knew, as he’d seen the breed of cow corralled throughout Denver City—hung a sign that read in dry-dripped painted red letters—NO INJUNS OR HALF-BREEDS. NO SPITTIN, NO SHOOTIN, NO CUTTIN ON WHORES.