The Bells of El Diablo Read online

  The whore clucked her disapproval once more and tossed her dice.

  James sighed and slacked back into his chair. He poured himself another shot and threw it back.

  “Why don’t you take Estella upstairs?” the barman said. “I’ll let you have her for an hour if you split me some more wood tomorrow. Don’t look like I’m gonna be gettin’ no more business tonight, anyways.”

  James had been splitting wood for the man in exchange for a discount on the room he shared with Crosseye, while Crosseye ran sundry other errands. They were low on funds and needed to find a steady supply soon.

  James looked at the whore. She looked up at him expectantly. She wasn’t bad looking as whores went out here—he didn’t think she was much over twenty when most of the percentage girls he’d seen looked a hard forty—but his heart wasn’t in it. He looked down at the blood staining his buckskin vest, shirt, and slacks.

  “She’ll wash that out for you, too,” the barman said.

  Crosseye threw the last of his drink back. “Ah, go ahead,” the oldster said with a quick wave of his arm. “Help clear your head. She’s too skinny fer me. I’d snap her like a stove match!”

  James thought it over. The whore continued to stare at him, the corners of her mouth curved upward. She’d let the blanket around her shoulders fall open, revealing her threadbare chemise. Beneath the table, her slender, olive-colored right foot rested atop the other.

  “Why not?” James stood, tossed a couple of coins onto the bar, and grabbed the bottle off the table.

  “Hey, leave an old man his whiskey, you scalawag!”

  “Buy your own,” James raked out, taking the whore by the hand and leading her to the back of the room and up the creaky stairs to the second story.

  “I saved your life tonight, ya ungrateful pup!” the oldster yelled behind him.

  Chapter 10

  James put the chestnut up the bank of the creek and drew back on the reins. He stared ahead toward a dark line of hills rising against the starry sky. At the base of the hills, the Ace of Spades Saloon sat amongst widely scattered cottonwoods, its windows lit against the night.

  James had heard raucous sounds emanating from the place even before he’d taken the right tine where the trail forked half a mile out of Auraria. It had sounded like a wild Appalachian hoedown primed with corn liquor and stitched with fisticuffs and leg wrestling, and from this distance of a quarter mile, it sounded even wilder.

  He touched heels to the chestnut’s flanks and started ahead. He’d ridden only a few yards when he jerked back on the reins again and reached for the rifle in his saddle boot. He left the gun in its sheath.

  A figure sat along the trail to his right, leaning back against a tree as though taking a nap. But the man had taken his last nap a long time ago, it appeared. A feather-fletched arrow protruded from his chest—or what remained of his chest after years of putrefaction. The man was a skeleton clothed in tattered duck trousers and work shirt and badly worn boots. The skeleton wore no hat, and the bleached skull was sickly pale, eye sockets twin pools of deep shadow in the light of a crescent moon. No doubt the poor jake had been found in a cave around here, maybe where he’d gone to die after being chased down by Indians, and someone had hauled him out near the trail, to welcome guests to Red Mangham’s outlaw lair, the Ace of Spades.

  The smile on the skeleton’s face coupled with the sounds of raucous revelry emanating from the roadhouse caused snakes of apprehension to slither up James’s long legs. Of course, whoever had left the note could be leading him into a trap, but it didn’t stand to reason. Why lead him into a bushwhacking when they could have taken Stenck’s more direct approach?

  Crosseye had volunteered to ride along and watch the younger man’s back, but James thought he had a better chance of riding unharassed into Mangham’s den of curly wolves and finding Mustang Mary if he came alone.

  Touching spurs to the chestnut, he continued ahead along the trail that curved gently toward the right. There were several corrals in the brush on both sides of the trail, but they were as bleached as the dead man’s bones, and looked dilapidated. Obviously, Mangham’s place had been a ranch at one time; there were more outbuildings off to the right, including a chicken coop and a large hay barn.

  As James continued forward, he saw two more grisly indications that the place was a benign ranching operation no longer, for two men hung like fresh laundry from a cottonwood off the trail’s left side, where it entered the yard. These weren’t skeletons, for they still had hair on their heads. One had long black hair parted on one side. The other looked far too young to have come to such a grisly, premature end. Both men swung lazily from the ends of their ropes, hands tied behind their backs. The black-haired man had kicked a boot off, showing a pale sock. The holsters on both men’s shell belts were empty.

  James couldn’t tell much more about the pair in the darkness, but they appeared to have been hanging there only a day or two, for they didn’t seem swollen.

  As the chestnut’s hooves clomped slowly, James looked at the main, tall building growing before him. A large wooden sign over the long front stoop announced in large black letters ACE OF SPADES, with black spades abutting each end. “Red Mangham” had been written above the black letters in red. The building was a three-story, rambling, stone-and-wood affair from which the shouting and yelling grew louder amidst the rowdy strains of what sounded like a three-piece band and a woman singing loudly and vigorously—a woman with a good voice, ever so slightly touched with the rolling vowels and petal-soft consonants of the South.

  The beat was being kept by someone banging a kettle, and by the crowd itself stomping their boots or clapping their hands. The windows upstairs and downstairs were all lit, and shadows moved in them. More shadows moved on the broad front porch, several hatted figures sitting atop the cottonwood pole rails. They were all smoking or drinking, the coals of their cigarettes or cigars glowing faintly in the darkness.

  Saddled horses were packed nearly stirrup-to-stirrup against the hitch racks fronting the stoop, and more horses stood in a corral off to the right of the tavern, beyond a windmill whose blades spun slowly, nudged gently back and forth by changes in the breeze.

  James walked his horse up to the corral, dismounted, and tied the reins around one of the pole rails, glancing warily toward the porch, a little puzzled that no one had contested his presence. If Burleson was right, and the Ace of Spades was indeed a hotbed of outlaw passions, it seemed doubtful that strangers would be welcome.

  James resisted the urge to slide the Henry out of its saddle boot. Deciding that his Griswolds would have to do if he was turned away in a hail of lead, he adjusted the belt and pistols on his lean hips and strolled with feigned ease past the horses and up the squawky wooden steps of the porch.

  Several men glanced at him, eyes narrowed with incredulity, but no one tried to stop him as he crossed the porch through a heavy cloud of tobacco smoke and the fetor of man sweat, horses, and leather and strode through the door that was propped open to the cool night air with a rock.

  Inside were at least a dozen men sitting or standing in a semicircle around the band at the back of the long, low-ceilinged room lit by flickering oil lamps. Most of the crowd had their backs to James, and most were stomping or clapping to the beat of the band, the woman still singing though she’d moved onto another song. Most of the men were too interested in the comely young singer to pay much attention to James, though he was aware of several hard, unshaven faces scowling at him through the wafting smoke.

  To a man, they were well armed with pistols as well as knives, and there were several rifles leaning against walls or square-hewn ceiling support posts. They likely weren’t accustomed to trouble from outsiders here, as most enemies probably respected the boundaries and legends of such a place, but they were ready for it if it came.

  One man stuck out of the crowd. Sitting on the bar planks on the room’s right side, he was a middle-aged gent in a red serape and a bro
ad-brimmed black sombrero trimmed with silver conchos. He was a white man, though he was also dressed in the fancily stitched deerskin slacks of a Mexican vaquero—charro slacks, James believed they were called. Over the serape he wore crisscrossed cartridge bandoliers over his chest, and two big pistols jutted from holsters attached to the bandoliers. Two horn-handled Green River knives were sheathed low on his thighs.

  He was a hawk-faced man with blue eyes and long copper-red hair dancing against his shoulders as he laughed and whistled and clapped his hands in rhythm to the boisterous music. James felt his attention riveted on this man who emitted an almost palpable raw savagery—a wild brutishness that James had seen in wounded wildcats, but rarely in men even in the deepest Smoky Mountain hollows. That this was the proprietor of the Ace of Spades, and the leader of the cutthroats gathered here, couldn’t have been more obvious had Mangham worn his name on a sign around his neck.

  James raked his fascinated gaze away from the red-haired gent to scrutinize the room. He couldn’t see much of the singer, but he could tell through the smoke that she was fine-featured, with coal black hair, in a light, peach-colored frock that left most of her milky torso bare above her breasts, her slight shoulders straight and smooth as delicately chiseled marble. A peach-colored choker, trimmed with an ivory cameo, encircled her neck. She was dancing, lightly stomping her slippered feet as she clapped her hands and sang, her lush raven hair flying around her face and shoulders, holding every male in the room enthralled.

  She was singing an old Irish drinking song in a bewitching Southern accent that recalled for the young man from Tennessee balmy nights out on the big veranda at Seven Oaks, a band playing, young men and ladies waltzing and laughing, punch glasses clinking together, the air as intoxicating as blackberry brandy.

  There were several other women in the place, James saw—a couple of brunettes, a blonde, and two or three Mexicans, perhaps one with Indian blood. Unable to determine which could be Mustang Mary, he decided to risk inquiring with the man standing to his right.

  The man turned toward him, looking slightly annoyed. His dark, drink-bleary eyes raked James up and down, and then he turned his head forward, eyes indicating the singer.

  The banjo and the fiddle fell silent as James slid his gaze to the front of the room and found himself gazing into the eyes of the black-haired singer, who was no longer singing but was staring at him across the crowded room. She had gray eyes. James hadn’t seen her eyes before now, and so abrupt and shocking was his recognition that they were like twin sledgehammers slammed against his chest.

  The man sitting on an overturned crate behind her stopped banging a wooden spoon against the bottom of the kettle he was holding, and looked curiously up at the girl, who continued to stare across the room at James.

  He felt his lower jaw sag. He was glad he wasn’t holding a drink, because he would have dropped it. His heart picked up its rhythm, and his palms grew hot.

  By threes and fours, all the men in the room stopped stomping and clapping and yelling. Puzzled murmurs rose. Then all heads began swiveling toward James, until every man and woman in the room had followed the girl’s gaze to the tall, dark-haired stranger, the men regarding him incredulously, angrily.

  The man with the long red hair falling down from the silver-trimmed black sombrero glared at James as well, his hawkish face reddening as he said, “What for the love o’ Christ…?”

  In the near silence, James heard himself rasp, “Mustang Mary?” He must have said it louder than he thought he had, because all at once, the beautiful young belle he’d known as Vienna McAllister turned away from him as though she’d been slapped across the face. Her ivory cheeks were touched with rose. A staircase climbed along the wall to her right. She made for it, grabbed the newel post at the bottom, then swung back around, her suddenly sorrowful gray eyes again seeking James out of the milling crowd.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. Even from his position at the front of the room, he could see the shine of the tears in her eyes. “No,” she said. “James, no!”

  Red Mangham leaped down off the plank bar and closed his hands around the wooden handles of the pistols holstered low on his chest. He said nothing as he pushed through the crowd toward James. The long, slanted eyes set close against his long, hooked nose were shiny with wrath, lips pursed inside his red goatee and mustache.

  Continuing to push toward James, he barked, “Mister, you just bought yourself a stretched neck and a wooden overcoat!” His voice was strangely high-pitched, almost girlish.

  “Red, no!” Vienna cried.

  She bolted away from the stairs and sidestepped through the crowd, pushing men out of her way—bearded, sun-leathered men who stood broad and sturdy as oaks in contrast to her small, pale, supple form. She approached James and looked at Mangham, placing a hand on his arm.

  “No, Red, please,” she said, her voice trembling. She slid her eyes almost reluctantly to James. “This…this is my…my brother. I fear…he’s brought news from home.”

  James held her frightened gaze. Of course, she knew why he was here. What else but news of Willie’s death could have brought him to her? But she didn’t know it all, and the dread of telling her was more potent than the threat he felt of all the obvious killers now surrounding him and pummeling him with their dark, belligerent gazes, infuriated by the interruption in their revelry.

  Mangham stared suspiciously at James, his nose working like some separate living thing on his face. “Brother? You sure about that, Mary?”

  “Don’t look like her brother,” said a short, stocky man in a shabby bowler hat, sneering.

  “Shut up!” Mangham shouted. “If Mary says he’s her brother, he’s her brother!”

  The short, stocky gent in the bowler hat took one step backward.

  “I’d like to speak to my brother in private, Red,” Vienna said softly, gray eyes staring up at James.

  Red snorted and scowled skeptically at the stranger, then jerked his head toward the stairs. “All right, I reckon. Since he’s your brother an’ all.” As the girl began leading James through the crowd by his hand, Mangham grabbed James’s other arm. “Don’t be upsettin’ Mary, now, ya hear?”

  James glanced at the man without expression, pulled his arm free, and followed Vienna through the crowd, feeling angry looks being hurled at him like razor-edged bowie knives.

  As the murmurs of discontent rose behind and below him, he followed the long-legged, high-busted, raven-haired beauty up the stairs, wondering how in hell the beautiful young Southern belle he knew as Vienna McAllister had turned up here, half-naked and singing bawdy songs in this nest of human rattlesnakes, going by the name of Mustang Mary….

  Chapter 11

  James moved up the stairs more slowly than Vienna, aka “Mustang Mary,” for he turned around a couple of times to make sure no bowie or Green River knives were being hurled at him. When he gained the second-story hall, which was lit by a single bracket lamp beside a faded oil painting of a naked woman on a settee, James headed for an open door on the left. He went inside, doffed his kepi, and held it against his chest.

  Vienna sat on the small room’s rumpled double bed strewn with clothes of both sexes. A long duster hung from a peg on the wall. A pair of faded denims hung over it from the same hook. A fire glowed in a little monkey stove in the far corner, a stack of dead branches beside it. The room smelled of burning piñon, man sweat, perfume, and talcum. She looked up at him, long ivory legs crossed, one slippered foot hooked behind the other, wringing her hands together. Her gray eyes glinted worriedly. “It’s Willie….”

  “Yes.”

  She sucked a sharp breath through her nose, pursing her lips. Her face paled, and she turned her head to one side. “How?”

  He sighed. It was mixed with a groan.

  She looked at him, eyes widening a little with surprise.

  James saw a chair in the corner to his left. He walked over, slacked into it, the dry wood creaking under his w
eight. His heart thudded heavily with the sorrow that lived in him, but even to his own ears his voice sounded dull, toneless, without any hint of emotion. “It was a dark night. Georgia. My outfit was trying to blow a bridge. Willie was there.”

  She stared at him, her lips opening slightly now, eyes skeptical, dreadful.

  “I killed him,” James said. “It was me, Vienna.”

  Her eyes widened as they bored into his.

  “It’s a long story, but I killed my brother in the darkness of Snake Creek Gap. Didn’t know it was Willie until…” James let his voice trail off, drew a long breath. “He lived for half a night, wanted me to give you this.”

  He reached into the pocket of his buckskin tunic and extended to her the gold watch with the long chain of gold Confederate coins and the gold-washed fob at the end of it. She reached out and took it, drew it to her, and flipped the lid. Instantly, the tears came, and she sobbed, clutching the watch to her chest. She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and cried quietly for several minutes.

  James felt heavy and weak. He sat back in his chair, knees spread, and listened to her. It felt like a penance he was paying, reliving over and over again the look in Willie’s eye when he’d withdrawn the knife from his brother’s chest, and the blood had come, washing like red oil into the dark creek.

  She wiped the tears from her cheeks and looked at him with anguished eyes. “I’m so sorry, James.”

  He hadn’t expected such a reaction, and suddenly tears washed over his own eyes, and he leaned forward with a single sob, resting his elbows on his knees and lowering his head as though in prayer. Distantly, through the screeching in his own head, he heard bedsprings squawk, saw her crouch over him, run a hand through his long hair before wrapping that arm around his neck and drawing his head against hers. He let himself go then, and she did, too, both of them sobbing together, convulsing with shared sorrow.