The Bells of El Diablo

by Frank Leslie

  Finally, she collapsed at his feet, drawing her legs beneath her, and rested her forearm across his knee. “That goddamn war! Is it over?”

  James, a little taken aback by the language she’d picked up after heading west, shook his head.

  The skin above the bridge of her nose wrinkled as he studied her. He didn’t want to answer the unspoken question. He laid his hand against her smooth cheek, damp from her crying, and slid his thumb across her rich lips, remembering how he’d kissed her once, a long time ago, before Willie had won her heart with his music and poetry and passion for nearly everything under the sun, including politics.

  James had been the true woodsman—the taciturn loner. Willie had been a lover. Remembering that now, he took his hand away from his brother’s wife’s face, and the question he’d suppressed for a time resurfaced: “What are you doing here, Vienna? Amongst these cutthroats?”

  She lowered her head, cradling the watch in her hands. “That’s a long story, James.”

  “What of your uncle?”

  “He’s dead. So is Aunt Elise and my cousin Kate.” Vienna’s voice hardened. “All killed…by Richard Stenck.”

  “Stenck?” James paused, wrapping his mind around the name. “Stenck?”

  Vienna touched two fingers to her lips, then rose, walked over to the open door, and looked cautiously up and down the hall. Apparently finding no one lingering around her room, she closed the door quietly, then dropped to her knees before James once more and looked up at him from beneath her thin, chocolate-colored brows. Her eyes were hard and angry. “Stenck and my uncle Ichabod were in business together. The business of railroad speculation. But they needed money, so they decided to go down to Mexico and bring back a treasure that my uncle had heard about from a reliable source. Only, Stenck killed Uncle Ichabod for the treasure map.”

  James shook his head, puzzled. “Treasure maps…Mexico…? That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”

  “Stenck knows, or at least figures, I saw the killings in the McAllister House on Sherman Avenue in Denver City.”

  “I was on Sherman Avenue, and no one I talked to owned up to knowing the McAllisters!”

  “That’s because they’re afraid of Stenck…just as they’re afraid of my new benefactor, Red Mangham. The whole town—half of the territory—is afraid of Red and Stenck.” She shook her head, causing her hair to slide across her bare shoulders. “Two outlaw gangs rule Denver City and all of eastern Colorado Territory. Stenck’s…” She glanced cautiously at the closed door, then whispered, “And Red’s. Red’s an uncouth tyrant, born and bred here. Stenck comes from supposedly good breeding, but they’re both equally dangerous…if you get on their wrong side.”

  “And Red is hiding you from Stenck?”

  Vienna nodded.

  “What about”—James looked at the gold watch in Vienna’s small, pale hands—“the boy?”

  A stricken look came to her eyes. She drew a hard breath and placed a hand on James’s knee, gave it an urgent squeeze. “James, can you get me out of here?” She licked her lips and squeezed his knee again, anxiously. “Tonight?”

  James could hear the low, menacing hum of conversation downstairs. There must have been twenty men down there.

  “Tonight?” he said.

  She squeezed his thigh. “James, please!”

  James moved slowly down the stairs, raking his hand along the gray wooden rail. The three-piece band was playing where they’d been playing before, but almost none of the two dozen men in the room appeared to be paying much attention. They were all clumped around in the room haphazardly furnished with all manner of furniture from settees to horsehide sofas, upholstered chairs, and plain hide-bottom chairs arranged around scarred wooden tables such as one would find in any watering hole anywhere in the country. They were playing cards or conversing or roughhousing like boys on a schoolyard, but bleary-eyed and ragged-voiced from drink.

  Red Mangham sat on the end of one of the room’s two sofas, against the far wall. He was smoking a cigar while the man beside him sat with the Indian girl clad in a skimpy hide dress on his knee. Mangham had a tall, black, silver-tipped boot hiked on his own knee, and he looked dubiously toward James descending the stairs.

  As James neared the first floor, Mangham rose from the couch and sauntered toward him, puffing the cigar in one corner of his mouth. The other conversations in the room grew quieter, and men swiveled their heads toward Mangham as he scowled at James and said, “You really Mary’s brother?”

  “That’s right,” James said as he stepped down onto the saloon hall floor.

  He continued on past Mangham, who grabbed his arm as he had before, and said, “Was up there awhile.”

  “We haven’t seen each other for a time. The war an’ all.”

  “What news did you bring?”

  “Ask her.”

  James pulled free of the man’s grip.

  “Hey!” Mangham said.

  “I’m back,” Vienna said, coming down the stairs, looking fresh after she’d composed herself, washed her face, and brushed her hair. She smiled broadly at Mangham, who’d turned his head toward her. “Let’s get this party started again!”

  A roar rose in the room. Men clapped and hollered, and the band member with the kettle beat it with a spoon. The banjo and fiddle lifted a jubilant albeit slightly off-key rhythm. With all attention now firmly focused on Vienna, James strode across the room and out the front door, where there were still four or five men smoking and milling on the stoop. They regarded him owlishly through the wafting smoke. He pinched his hat brim to them as he headed on down the steps, walked over to his horse, and stepped into the saddle.

  He booted the chestnut into a spanking trot as he headed out of the yard, following the trail back in the direction of Auraria. When he’d ridden a hundred yards and was out of view from the Ace of Spades, he swung the chestnut into the brush on the trail’s south side. He stepped down from the saddle, tied the horse to a branch, loosened its belly straps, and slipped its bit from its teeth.

  According to his and Vienna’s plan, he’d be here awhile.

  He sat down opposite the side of the tree on which he’d tied his horse. He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, and tipped his hat brim down over his eyes.

  He could hear the music and Vienna’s rollicking singing beneath the general roar emanating from the outlaw lair. She was a damn good actress. Her heart was broken and she was likely still stunned by the news of Willie’s death, but she wanted so badly to get away from Red Mangham that she was putting on a good show for him and his men, assuaging any suspicions that James’s appearance might have evoked.

  He sat there against the tree, half listening, half dozing, for a long time. He himself was still stunned to have learned that “Mustang Mary” was Willie’s sweetheart, and that she was singing in a roadhouse owned by a notorious desperado. Still, he had more questions so far than answers. Vienna had promised to tell him more, and about hers and Willie’s child, but first James had to get her out of the place without getting them both killed.

  He was wishing now he’d brought Crosseye along. The old frontiersman was probably pie-eyed in some whorehouse, sparking the fattest percentage gal he could find. James smiled at that, enjoying the momentary distraction from all the confusion, then closed his eyes and let himself doze. Occasionally he looked up to see the stars above the pale bluffs, the constellations switching positions, the moon arcing westward over Denver behind him.

  Coyotes called. At one point, something sniffed and snorted in the brush off to James’s right. He tossed a branch and heard the mewling of what he figured to be a bobcat—a creature he’d heard about but had so far not seen.

  The West was a far different place from the Southeast. He had much to learn about the native flora and fauna, as well as its human inhabitants, most of whom seemed to hail from all corners of not only this country but Europe, Mexico, and South America, as well. It was rare to run into so
meone who didn’t speak with a thick foreign brogue.

  He dozed again. When he lifted his chin from his chest and pushed his hat back up on his head, he looked around, listening. The night was darker, the moon having set, and, save for the breeze scratching the cottonwood leaves together, and the hooting of a distant owl, there was only silence.

  Vienna had said that Mangham’s killers didn’t usually turn in on the weekends until after two a.m. It must have been after two now. James got up and moved around, getting his blood flowing. He milled in the trees with his dozing horse for another half an hour, giving Mangham’s men plenty of time to drift off into drunken stupors.

  He slipped the bit back into the chestnut’s mouth, tightened the latigo straps on the horse’s Texas-style saddle, and mounted up. He rode back through the trees, across the trail, and into the brush on the other side of it before swinging right and booting the horse toward the roadhouse.

  Vienna had told him that Mangham rarely posted pickets around the roadhouse, as the law in and around Denver had learned to give the gang a wide berth. Mangham’s natural enemy was his outlaw rival Stenck, but the two cutthroats had what Vienna had learned was an unspoken truce, leaving each outlaw captain’s gang to do as it pleased as long as they didn’t encroach on each other’s territory.

  She’d also told him that not all the men in the saloon belonged to Mangham’s gang. The Ace of Spades opened its doors to several other gangs in the area—gangs with strong allegiances to Mangham, of course. Red made an excellent side living by providing them with liquor and women.

  James felt he hadn’t aroused too much suspicion, but he’d take no chances on being spied from the roadhouse. He kept to the brush wide of the trail, meandering around sage and buck brush clumps, the tang of the weeds rising on the chill air, the horse’s shod hooves thudding softly. When he saw the murky silhouettes of the buildings ahead and on his right, he stopped the chestnut and swung down from the saddle.

  He tied the horse to a gnarled piñon and slid the Henry from its sheath. Quietly, he levered a shell into the chamber, set the hammer to off-cock, and began walking quickly ahead, holding the rifle down low by his side. He moved carefully around the brush, so the stems of the sage shrubs wouldn’t rake across his trouser legs and possibly give him away.

  A low building grew ahead of him. It sat hunched on the north side of the yard, about fifty yards from the roadhouse. He continued around the squat, shake-shingled log structure and crept along its far wall before stopping at the front corner and dropping to one knee. He stared at the Ace of Spades, dark and forbiddingly silent in the deep night. Not even a glimmer of light shone in any of the windows. The horses had been put away for the night.

  James waited there on one knee, pressing his right shoulder against the low building’s rough wood. He heard the rush of blood in his ears. This stealing into enemy territory under cover of darkness reminded him all too much of the war, his several bloody forays behind the federal lines. He’d found himself living for the excitement of those missions, each one of which could have been his last.

  How keen all of his senses had been then. How alive he’d felt.

  Now he just wanted to get Vienna away from here, to somehow get her back safely to her family in Tennessee, if they were still there, that is, and if Rose Hill was still standing.

  He waited, tense.

  Inside the saloon, a girl screamed loudly, shrilly.

  A man bellowed.

  “No!” the girl cried.

  A gun thundered.

  Chapter 12

  James jerked forward with a start, heart leaping in his chest, and began pounding toward the roadhouse.

  He stopped suddenly. Inside, men were yelling, the shouts echoing woodenly. Boots hammered the floor.

  He heard the wooden scrape and hinge squawk of the front door opening, saw a dark figure fly out onto the stoop, mewling and groaning. The figure dropped and then rose weakly, sobbing, and staggered forward, stumbling wildly down the porch steps and into the yard.

  More boots pounded the stoop, and James, stepping back against the low outbuilding he’d been hunkered beside, hoping its shadow concealed him, saw another figure move out of the roadhouse and across the porch. The shadow, taller than the first, stopped at the top of the porch steps. Starlight glinted off steel as the second man extended a gun in front of him.

  “I told you Lil was mine, McSween!” he shouted.

  The other man ran, crouched forward, head hanging, dragging his boot toes, straight across the yard toward the windmill. He shouted something incoherent to James’s ears, and continued running. James could hear breath rasping in and out of the wounded man’s lungs in the night that had otherwise been as quiet as a held breath.

  James jerked when the gun of the man on the porch flashed, a knifelike blade of red flame leaping from the barrel. The gun’s thunder was like a thunderclap echoing off the dilapidated buildings surrounding the yard. Muffled whinnies rose from the horses in the barn.

  For a moment, James thought the shooter had missed his mark. The man in the yard continued running toward the windmill. Only, his stride broke, slowed, but he kept moving until he stood at the edge of the stock tank for a full minute before his knees buckled and he tilted forward. His head and shoulders hit the dark water inside the tank with a muffled splash. The water rippled silvery in the starlight.

  The wounded man remained bent forward over the side of the stock tank, sort of hanging there, the gurgling of the water dying gradually.

  “Goddamnit—what’d I tell you about shootin’ inside the premises?” another man shouted inside the roadhouse. “Was you born in a goddamn barn, Alvin?” Red Mangham’s high-pitched voice owned a nasty, nasally, Yankee twang.

  “Shit, I told McSween to leave Lilly alone twice tonight!” retorted the man on the porch as he lowered his pistol and walked back into the roadhouse, his voice muffled now as he continued with “I done told him if I had to tell him a third time, my smoke wagon would say it fer me!”

  James dropped to a knee, his eyes raking the roadhouse that was filled now with the thudding of a single pair of angry boots. A shadow moved to the rear of the place. Starlight caught on something light and shiny—a straw sombrero. Then James saw the slender figure moving toward him, heard the soft tread of running feet. He couldn’t see much more than the girl’s shadow, but instinct told him it was Vienna.

  He rose, hissed, “This way!” Then stepped back against the hovel once more, hidden by its inky shadow.

  The figure swerved slightly, came toward him. In seconds, she knelt beside him, breathing hard beneath the low-crowned sombrero, the chin thong of which dangled against her chest. Her figure was lithe and curvy beneath a red-and-white-striped serape, which crawled down her sleek legs to her thighs clad in black denim trousers. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Vienna held a croker sack over her shoulder by its neck tied with twine.

  “Been waiting long?” she asked, looking anxiously around her.

  “No, but I figured that shot was meant for you.”

  “Not yet.” She canted her head toward where the dead man hung half in and half out of the stock tank. “That sorta thing happens all the time. I’ve got so it doesn’t even wake me up anymore. But in case you didn’t hear, Red’s up. I heard him clomping up the stairs when I slipped out the back door.”

  “That means he’ll know…” James wasn’t sure how to finish that.

  Vienna wasn’t near as squeamish about it. “He’ll know he’s bunking alone in about fifteen seconds.”

  “Let’s go!”

  James took her hand and ran back along the side of the building and around behind it. He figured Red wouldn’t start to suspect that Vienna had flown the coop for at least five minutes. First, he’d think maybe she’d gone to the privy, or maybe to fetch wood for the stove in their room, as it was a cool night.

  Still, James ran crouching through the sage. He released Vienna’s hand when he saw that she was managing t
o keep up with him. What sounded like coins jingled in the sack—a good many of them. Glancing back at her, he flashed briefly on how he remembered her dressing back at Rose Hill or at dances at Seven Oaks—usually in cream taffeta and lace, her raven hair brushed to shining, trimmed with ribbons and hanging in delicate sausage curls along her peach-colored cheeks.

  Never in anything like what she was wearing now—well-worn trail clothes of a Western cowpuncher. He wondered where she’d gotten the coins.

  James had just spotted his horse about fifty yards ahead when a rifle thundered behind him and Vienna. Vienna gasped, fell, and rolled. The bag dropped, the coins clattering loudly. James wheeled to see the rifle flash once more—red-blue flames lapping toward him. At the same time that the slug tore up a sage shrub two feet to his right, the rifle’s bark reached his ears.

  “You’ll never make it, you double-crossing little whore!” Red Mangham’s voice added its echo to the fading echo of the long gun. Then, shrill with desperation: “Marrrrrryyyyyyyy!”

  James raised the Henry to his shoulder, snapped off three quick shots—Bam! Bam! Bam! The heavy, thudding reports sounded like empty barrels rolling down a rocky hillside. The metal cartridge casings clinked to the sand and gravel over James’s right shoulder. He’d purchased several boxes from a gun shop in Denver. Through his wafting powder smoke, he saw Mangham’s tall shadow run crouching toward the far side of the shack as the spang of the last bullet added its scream to the dwindling echo of the blasts.

  James wheeled toward Vienna, grabbed her arm. “You hit?”

  “No, I just tripped!” She grabbed the croker sack that she’d dropped, and nimbly gained her feet.

  James took the sack, so she could move unencumbered. Holding the sack in one hand, the Henry in the other, he continued running through the brush. “Let’s go!”

  Just then a rifle popped behind him and Vienna once more. A slug blew up dust and gravel well ahead and screeched off a rock. In the heavy silence that followed, James heard Mangham or one of the other cutthroats shout something. The chestnut was dead ahead, prancing and curveting nervously as James and Vienna ran up to it.