by Frank Leslie
“So, when Stenck learned Uncle Ichabod wasn’t going to give him the map…”
“And had no intention of going to Mexico with him…”
“Stenck killed him,” James said.
“And he would have found the map if I hadn’t gotten it first.” Vienna shivered as if chilled, gripped her shoulders, staring down at her low-heeled boots. “When I think of that night…”
James waited. Crosseye had come over and sat on the other side of the ravine, smoking his Irish pipe, legs crossed at the ankles. His hat rested on his knee, Spencer rifle leaning against the bank to one side. James could see the old frontiersman’s silhouette as the darkness gradually dissipated, see the glow of the pipe bowl when he drew the smoke into his lungs, the pale smoke then wafting around his bearded face and shaggy head and a tree root curling out of the bank over his left shoulder.
After a time, Vienna continued quietly with “I was upstairs, napping, when I heard the commotion downstairs. Uncle Ichabod and Stenck were arguing. Stenck had several men with him, and they were shouting and stomping around, and my aunt and cousin and the housemaid were screaming. Stenck ordered Uncle Ichabod upstairs and to fetch the map for him. I was in the library, and I hid under a liquor cabinet…and I saw the whole thing. Uncle Ichabod got his hands on a knife and was about to stab Stenck with it, but Stenck was too fast. He grabbed Uncle Ichabod’s hand and rammed the knife through his heart.”
Vienna sobbed. James wrapped his arms around her, felt the tears dampen his shirt.
“I don’t remember what happened after that,” she continued, sniffing. “I must have passed out. When I opened my eyes, the office was a mess. Stenck and his men must have ransacked it. Somehow, they didn’t find me. When I crawled out from under the cabinet, I discovered that my uncle was still alive. Just barely. He told me where the map was, and he also told me to take it and run, not to wait for the city marshals, that I couldn’t trust anyone, because many of the marshals were in league with Stenck. He made me promise to not let the map get into the wrong hands, and I did. His last words, whispered in my ear, were ‘All for nothing. All for nothing.’ And then he died. Heartbroken.”
She sobbed again, quietly, then pulled away from James and sat on a rock, raising her knees and wrapping the bottom of her serape over them.
“How did you end up with Mangham?” James asked her as Crosseye continued to puff on his pipe, saying nothing, obviously as gripped by the story as James was.
“When I found the rest of the family and the housemaid dead downstairs, I took the map and a small bundle of clothes and I ran. I wandered the streets of Denver City for a time, holing up in abandoned miners’ shacks, scrounging for food scraps. While I wandered around like one of the orphans, I learned that Stenck was looking for me. He knew I’d been my uncle’s secretary, and he probably knew that I either knew where the map was or that I had it myself. I had nowhere else to go, no way to support myself, and that’s when Red found me, working in a little watering hole along the east bank of Cherry Creek.”
She looked pointedly at James. “I’d started calling myself Mustang Mary…and I did whatever I could to support myself.” She paused and then said in a small, thin voice: “Strange, isn’t it—our bodies’ command to survive when our minds have long since given up the fight?”
“It is at that,” James said, knowing exactly what she meant.
“All that happened over a year ago now,” she said. “One of Red’s men told me someone in Denver City was looking for me, and he described you, so I sent the note to your hotel. Something told me to take a chance you weren’t one of Stenck’s men.”
“Wish I’d had better news,” James said.
“Oddly, I felt relatively safe with Red…since he was Stenck’s fiercest rival and they’d sort of called a truce of sorts. Red was devoted to me. I feel a little bad about that. But the Ace of Spades was a prison, and I couldn’t wait to get out. I’d written letters home, but they were never returned.” Vienna gave James a hopeful look. “My family…?”
James moodily brushed dust from the knee of his twill trousers. “I don’t know, Vienna. If it’s anything like Seven Oaks, I reckon there’s not much left. I’m sorry.”
“Pa was very ill when I left,” she said thinly, staring off. “I reckon if his weak heart didn’t kill him, the Yankees did. I read in the paper how the federal troops were advancing farther and farther into the Confederacy.” She sucked her upper lip. James saw more tears ooze out of her eyes and trickle down her cheeks. “I’d held out the hope that Willie would eventually come for me.”
He knew she hadn’t intended them to be, but the words were more knives stabbing James’s heart.
No one said anything for a time. The dawn light grew in the east, relieving the shadows and dimming the stars. A coyote yowled mournfully. Birds were beginning to chirp raucously, flitting around the ravine.
“About the boy…,” James said tentatively.
Vienna hesitated, stretched her legs out before her, and folded her hands in her lap. “I gave birth in a shack by the creek. I would have died but for the help of a beautiful old woman, also alone, who called herself Aunt Sally.” Vienna shook her head dully. “Still, little Thomas died. Didn’t live a day, God bless him.”
James doffed his kepi, as did Crosseye. Neither man said anything.
“Would you fellas be of a mind to help a lonely Confederate girl haul three golden bells to Jefferson Davis in Richmond?” she asked after a time, on the heels of a long coyote chorus. She smiled as if realizing how crazy it sounded even to her own ears, but liking the idea just the same. “I’d like to do that for Uncle Ichabod…and the South. I know Willie, even though he died for the other side, wouldn’t mind. In fact, I think he’d right admire the romance of it.”
James looked at Crosseye, whose pipe fell out of his mouth. They stared at each other for a time, and then James smiled and turned his gaze to Vienna, the smile growing broader. He felt a low fire of eagerness. Not for the treasure or for the South, which he knew was a lost cause, but for the hope and the distraction of a destination far, far away.
And for the lovely, raven-haired, gray-eyed beauty before him.
For the adventure.
Besides, they seemed to have worn out their welcome in Denver City.
“Why, sure, Vienna,” he said softly. “Why, sure we will. Why the hell not?”
Crosseye groaned.
Chapter 14
Two weeks later, deep in New Mexico Territory, on a broad stretch of desert surrounded by high divides, James lay near the crest of a low hill, a pair of field glasses in his hands.
He was not looking through the field glasses, however. He was staring back over his shoulder into the small camp that he, Crosseye, and Vienna had set up at the bottom of the hill, in a nest of sun-bleached rocks, cedars, and yucca, also called Spanish bayonet. James preferred the spiky-leafed plants’ second name, as no doubt Willie would have, too. Maybe he and his brother hadn’t been so different, after all.
Crosseye had shot a jackrabbit earlier with a bow and arrow he’d fashioned from the limbs of an ash tree. They were trying to conserve their ammo as well as to move as quietly as possible, in case Stenck or Red Mangham was shadowing them. Vienna was just now skinning the rabbit on a flat rock near a low fire. Blood glistened on the knife and on her hands. Her shoulders jerked as she worked, hair jostling about her cheeks.
James regarded her wonderingly, still amazed by how different she was from the girl that he and Willie had grown up with in the hills of eastern Tennessee. If someone had told him he’d find her skinning rabbits out West in a few years, he’d have thought the speaker fit for the nuthouse. He hadn’t realized it before, but deep down he’d always known she was different from the other plantation girls; she’d displayed a tomboy strength and frankness that she’d managed to keep at least partly hid behind those hoop-skirted barbecue gowns, sausage curls, and well-bred manners.
Or maybe even she herself hadn�
��t known those traits had lurked in her until she’d come west and had endured what she’d endured, not the least of which was being thrown into Red Mangham’s camp.
And becoming Red’s woman.
He couldn’t imagine what that year with Mangham had been like for her, but whatever it was, she’d survived it. And it seemed to have honed in her a steely determination that James had seen in few men, let alone a girl raised as Vienna had been raised, on balls, piano recitals, and coming-out parties, all ensconced in the frills of her high station. He supposed that’s why he’d been in love with her once, in his own shy, awkward way, before Willie had gained her heart with his more direct brand of passion, not to mention his talent for remembering and reciting poetry, and even writing his own for Vienna.
James also supposed that once Vienna had gotten thrown into Red Mangham’s camp, she’d had to learn to survive—which apparently meant skinning rabbits and probably whatever else the men hauled to the roadhouse for supper—or risk being kicked out and potentially falling prey to Mangham’s “business” rival, Richard Stenck. Most girls of her station would have crumpled and died like autumn rose blossoms.
Vienna had not.
James continued to watch as she adeptly peeled the skin off the rabbit’s pale carcass and began cutting the meat into chunks to roast on sharpened willow branches. An uncomfortable feeling gnawed at him, too nebulous to pinpoint. It was the same feeling, a raw tenderness moving slowly around between his belly and shoulders, that he’d been feeling over the past two weeks that they’d been riding down from Denver City.
Fear? Reluctance to go after the treasure? After all, he’d agreed to it—and had even volunteered Crosseye for it—when his veins had still run hot from their run-in with Mangham as well as Stenck. But that wasn’t the source of his discomfort, he knew. He’d never turned his back on an adventure, however crazy and romantic. He’d grown up on them, in fact, and he loved the sound of this one—three gold bells in the fabled Sierra Madre!
But if the trek into such a foreign land wasn’t gnawing at him, what was?
Hoof clomps rose behind him. James turned to peer over the crest of the hill and down the other side. Crosseye was loping toward him atop the speckle-faced roan. He held his Spencer straight up from his right thigh, and his big, gaudy Lefaucheux revolver jostled against his chest. The red, gold, and tan light of the setting sun played across his big frame, winking off his bandoliers, as he put the roan up the hill, meandering around rocks and patches of prickly pear cactus.
Crosseye had ridden out an hour earlier to scout around their camp. Neither had seen any riders on their back trail over the past two weeks, but they’d both been visited by the uneasy sensation that they were being followed. Now Crosseye’s good eye was sharply incredulous as he put the horse over the crest of the ridge and drew up beside James, about ten feet down from it, so the sky couldn’t outline him, and curveted the mount.
Sweat glistened on the oldster’s forehead beneath his upturned hat brim.
“We grew us some shadows, did we?” James said darkly, well able to read after long practice the look in the old frontiersman’s eyes.
“Five men holed up in a tavern about one mile away. I went in and had a drink, heard Stenck’s name mentioned low and soft, like they didn’t want to be overheard. Scouting party, I’d fathom.”
James flicked the field glasses’ leather cord pensively against his thigh, then turned to glance once more at Vienna. She stood beside the fire over which she’d spitted the rabbit, and was staring up the hill toward James and Crosseye, hands on her hips. Her hair glistened like warm molasses.
“Wonder what they want worse.”
James glanced at his older partner. “What’s that?”
“Miss Vienna or the gold.”
“Maybe they figure they can have both.” James looked at Crosseye, his eyes hard. His determination to avoid trouble at all costs had dissipated like smoke on the wind. There was no more avoiding it out here than there had been back East. Out here was just a different kind of war, but at least it wasn’t brother against brother. “What do you say we go let ’em know they can’t have neither?”
Crosseye narrowed his good eye with mock seriousness. “Now, I could have taken ’em all out my own self, but I figured ole Forrest’s Rapscallion would want in on the dance.” He grinned.
Crosseye remained on the side of the hill as James walked down to fetch his horse. Vienna watched him closely, the fire coughing and sputtering, the meat sizzling. “Stenck?” she asked, pitching her voice darkly. “Or Red?”
“Stenck’s men.” James walked past the fire and quickly saddled his horse. “Keep the home fires burnin’, Vienna. We’ll be back.”
He slipped the Henry into its saddle boot and swung into the leather.
“James?” Vienna walked over to him, looked up at him worriedly, squinting her gray eyes against the last rays of the setting sun. “You be careful.”
James looked at her. She flushed a little, taking one step back, and it made his ears warm. They both realized at the same time that she’d just asked the killer of her life’s one true love to be careful. The terrible irony was lost on neither of them.
“Like I said,” he muttered, shamefully reining the chestnut away from her. “We’ll be back.”
As he booted the horse up the hill toward where Crosseye waited, his Spencer’s butt resting atop his thigh, his green neckerchief billowing in the wind, James realized with a chill and a hard thud of his heart what had caused that vexing gnawing inside him:
He was in love with his dead brother’s wife.
Half an hour later, James and Crosseye followed a crease between steep, cedar-stippled hills and checked their mounts down.
A thin stream twisted from left to right before them, the water winking in the last, green light remaining at the top of the sky. The sun had set, and night birds cawed. Smoke issued from the chimney of the long, low, L-shaped log building in front of them—a stage relay station, Crosseye had said, having scouted the place.
A broad, rutted stage trail paralleled the stream. A log barn and a couple of stone corrals sat off to the left. Several horses stood still as statues inside one of the corrals, and five saddles were draped over the top corral slat. Behind the place, a high mesa rose darkly.
A girl’s wild tittering emanated from inside the roadhouse.
James glanced at Crosseye, who said, “Believe the proprietor sells a poke now an’ then. Might have partaken myself, but I knew you were waitin’ on me.”
“Thoughtful,” James snorted and put the chestnut across the stream. He jogged the horse across the yard and reined up at the hitch rack on the right side of the three stone steps rising to a low, falling-down porch.
James swung down from the saddle and slid the Henry from the saddle boot. Quietly, he racked a shell into the chamber, then off-cocked the hammer. Crosseye checked the loads in his Lefaucheux and then in his Leech & Rigdon .36, then slid the .36 back into the holster pushed back a little on his right hip, the butt tipped forward. He left the Spencer in its boot, preferring his pistols for inside work.
James mounted the porch steps slowly, hearing a man now laughing along with the girl, and stepped cautiously inside the place and to one side as Crosseye came in behind him. James looked the place over. It was large for a relay station this remote, so it likely served as a watering hole for area ranches, as well.
This evening, however, the clientele consisted of only four men seated at a square table in nearly the center of the room. They were a shaggy, grubby-looking quartet, bristling with knives and pistols. A couple of pistols sat on the table before them, along with whiskey bottles, shot glasses, and beer mugs. All four were playing cards, but one of the men—a large man, even larger than Crosseye, and with a white streak through his heavy black beard—had a topless, dark-haired girl on his knee.
He and the girl were laughing while he rocked the girl up and down on his knee, causing the girl’s small, poin
ted breasts to jiggle stiffly. He had a long, thin cheroot clamped between his teeth and occasionally the girl plucked it from his mouth, took a drag, then blew the smoke out her mouth and nose on a raucous paroxysm of coughing. James could hear another man grunting somewhere in the second story, and a girl groaning and sighing in rhythm with squawking bedsprings.
A tall, gaunt man with a tumbleweed of gray hair stood behind the bar on the room’s right side. He had a mug of beer before him and a wild look in his eyes. Atop the bar before him, a long rattlesnake was coiling and uncoiling and shaking its rattle while the man held the snake’s flat head in his right fist. James blinked, watching dubiously as the man appeared to be feeding the snake a green apple.
“Come on, now, dang ye!” the tall man intoned, his cheeks sinking into his face and quivering as he appeared to wrestle the snake down on the bar. “Take a good bite, now…a good long bite. There ye go!”
The man separated the snake from the apple, held both up high, the snake coiling and uncoiling frantically, wickedly. The man looked at James and Crosseye, his eyes glowing in the light from a half dozen lanterns situated about the shadowy place.
“Not to worry, friends,” he said, grinning. He held the apple higher, and shuttled his gaze to it. “That’s for the whiskey tub.” He tossed the apple over his shoulder; it dropped down out of sight and made a splash. He looked at the madly coiling and uncoiling snake in his other hand. “That there…”
He held the snake down on the bar, picked up a meat cleaver, rapped it into the bar, then lifted the snake aloft once more. It was still writhing desperately though it no longer had a head. Its head was still on the bar, jaws opening and closing and showing long white, razor-edged fangs. “That there’s for the stew pot!”
He tossed the snake onto the floor on the other side of the bar, near the table where the four men were playing poker while one also entertained the bare-breasted whore. All four men, seeing the snake jouncing around before them, leaped out of their chairs, the whore screaming as she tumbled off the black-bearded gent’s knee, and grabbed their guns.
