by Frank Leslie
Chapter 15
Three or four pistols popped at once. The din sounded like a barrel being rapped with an axe handle. James gritted his teeth against the noise and squeezed his Henry in his hands.
“Hold your fire!” shouted the man with the tumbleweed head of gray hair. “Hold your damn fire—you’re shootin’ my stew meat all to hell!”
The four men—Stenck’s men, or so Crosseye figured—stood in a semicircle around their table, the whore cowering on the floor between the black-bearded gent and the bloody snake. The guns stopped roaring. A heavy cloud of powder smoke filtered toward the low rafters. The shortest of the four men, wearing a paint hide vest and a funnel-brimmed black hat, waved a hand in front of his face and glowered at the gray-headed barman. “You poison-stupid old cuss. What was the meanin’ of that? Are you plumb loco?”
“Ah, fer chrissakes—I was just funnin’ with ya!” the gray-headed man said as he slouched out from behind his bar and walked over to the snake that was still writhing but in four or five separate pieces. “Can’t you fellas take a damn joke? Oh, look what ya done!”
He got down on his hands and knees and began scooping the carnage up off the floor and setting it delicately atop the bar. “Oh, well,” he said, chuckling, “I reckon it saves me from havin’ to chop it up, eh?” He laughed at that and then turned as James and Crosseye sauntered toward the bar.
The four cardplayers regarded them suspiciously, sizing them up. Grunting owlishly and holstering their pistols, they sagged back down in their chairs. The black-bearded man crouched over the bare-breasted whore and drew her back onto his lap, cooing to her as one would a bereaved child. She wore a flour-sack skirt that had a long slit in it, showing a long brown leg. The black-bearded man began to chuckle again as he resumed bouncing the whore up and down on his knee, though she berated him with “You threw me on the floor, bastardo! That’s no way to treat a girl!”
She slammed both fists against his shoulders, but he only laughed harder and bounced her up and down on his knee with more vigor.
As the others resumed their game, James bellied up to the bar, setting the Henry across the planks and keeping the four in the periphery of his vision. They continued to glance at him and Crosseye suspiciously. Meanwhile, the sounds of lovemaking in the second story had died, but he could hear the whore speaking in soft tones. The barman had walked around behind the counter, and now set the pile of ragged snake flesh on the bar top, wiping his hands on his apron.
“What can I set you gents up with? Name your poison.” The barman laughed.
James glanced at the wooden washtub behind the man. The tub was about three-quarters full with what James assumed was the man’s own particular brand of forty-rod. The venom-spiced apple was likely lolling around at the bottom, flavoring the whiskey—that and probably half a pound of gunpowder and only God and the barman knew what else.
“I hear the ale’s good,” he told the barman. “Set me up a mug of it, will ya?”
“Me, too,” said Crosseye.
The barman set up two frothy beer mugs, tossed James’s proffered coins into a wooden box, and began transferring the shredded snake into a cast-iron skillet sputtering on the range behind him, beside the whiskey tub. James drank down half of his beer in three swallows, then set the mug down on the bar and turned to face the four men who’d resumed their poker game though the black-bearded gent was paying more attention to the whore. He turned her around so that her back was against him, and he was nuzzling her neck while she closed her eyes and reached an arm up and back to tug at his ear, groaning with mock pleasure.
James stared at the other three. The man in the funnel-brimmed black hat glanced at him, dropped his eyes to his cards, then snapped his gaze back up to James.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” he wanted to know, nostrils flaring.
The others looked at James then, too. The black-bearded man lifted his face from the whore’s neck and regarded James with marble black eyes. The whore opened her own eyes and shunted her puzzled, wary gaze between the men around her and the tall, brown-haired hombre facing her, his back pressed against the bar, his thumbs hooked behind the wide brown belt and the shell belt encircling his waist.
Crosseye tipped his head back, finishing his beer. Then he set the glass down on the table with a sigh, turned toward the room, and ran the back of his fat left hand across his beard. He’d removed the Lefaucheux revolver from the cord around his neck and stuffed it behind one of his bandoliers.
James said softly, letting his Southern brogue roll like warm water off his tongue, “You fellas been trailin’ us. Here we are. Now, I don’t see no reason why we can’t keep things polite and you go on back to Stenck and tell him you didn’t cut our trail.”
The stalkers tensed, sitting up straight in their chairs. The man farthest to James’s right opened his hands and let his cards fall onto the table near the Colt Navy before him, though he kept his hands where they’d been before he dropped the cards. A muscle twitched in the right one. The eyes of all the other men flicked to their own guns on the table, and the black-bearded gent raised his right leg slightly, as though to make the bowie knife sheathed there more accessible.
Silence hung heavy over the room. Over the entire relay station. Outside, a bird squawked. The stalkers held James’s mellow gaze with hard, angry stares of their own.
“Hell, that wouldn’t even be a lie,” Crosseye said reasonably. “Not really. You didn’t cut our trail, we cut yourn.” His red cheeks above his gray-streaked red beard rose as he smiled, eyes glinting affably.
The cutthroat in the black, funnel-brimmed hat said tightly, “James?”
“That’s right.”
The man with the black hat nodded slowly. His gaze flicked toward the man on the left side of the table, then returned to James, the corners of his dark eyes narrowing slightly, bemusedly.
“I reckon you know we can’t do that,” he said.
“I reckon I do.”
All four men reached for their guns at once, the black-bearded gent again throwing the girl to the floor, where she gave another indignant yelp and then rolled and wrapped her arms around her head. James and Crosseye ripped their own pistols from their holsters and from behind their belts, and ratcheted back the hammers a sixteenth of a second before they leveled the guns.
The killer in the black hat leaped to his feet, eyes cold but his jaws working as he shouted, “Die, you dogs!” But before he could get his own twin Smith & Wessons leveled, one of James’s .36 balls ripped through the dead center of his chest, punching him straight backward. The man in the black hat drilled the man who’d been sitting on the opposite side of the table from him, nearest James, through the back of his neck, causing that man’s own two triggered slugs to sail wide, punching into the bar to James’s right.
James and Crosseye’s own pistol work was so well coordinated after a dozen years of shooting both men and game together that five seconds hadn’t passed between their first and last shots, and all four men were lying in bloody groaning piles around the table or, in the case of one, on top of it, arms dangling toward the floor, his own blood dripping off the table and onto the floor just inches from his extended fingertips.
The black-bearded man, lying on his belly near the still-cowering whore, reached for a blood-splattered pistol beneath an overturned chair. Crosseye’s Lefaucheux spoke loudly, like the clap of two large hands, and the top of the black-bearded man’s black-haired head virtually vaporized, blood and bone painting a seven-foot streak beyond him.
James heard a wooden squawk to his right and whipped around quickly, crouching, as a thin young man with sandy blond hair and a bowler hat triggered a pistol from the middle of the stairs that rose to the second story. The slug passed so closely to James’s head that he could hear the bullet’s wicked whisper in his left ear. He dropped the hammer of the Colt in his right hand, and the kid spun around on the stairs with a scream, ran two steps back up toward the second story before dr
opping to his knees. He screamed again, twisted around, the gun in his extended right hand making a heavy, awkward arc back toward James and Crosseye.
The two ex-Confederates fired at the same time. The kid howled loudly, like one of the coyotes James had been hearing, and slammed back against the steps, dropping his pistol. He tumbled down the steps, head and boots thudding loudly on the wooden risers, and piled up on his belly at the bottom. He howled again, coyotelike, and tried to gain his hands and knees before flopping back down to the floor with a groan.
James looked at Stenck’s other men. None were moving, only bleeding. The whore sat on her butt, leaning back on her hands, looking around, shocked and dazed. James holstered one of his pistols and strode over to the kid lying on his belly at the bottom of the stairs, and kicked him onto his back. The kid’s blue eyes glared up at him. His spindly chest rose and fell sharply, blood oozing from the three holes in his chest and belly, matting his pin-striped shirt.
“Bastard,” the kid raked out, wincing, showing a mouthful of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. “Ye kilt me…so go to hell….”
“First things first.” James squatted beside the kid, who had a demonlike, pale face with a long, hooked nose and close-set, soulless eyes. All he was missing was horns. “Where’s Stenck?”
The kid seemed to think that was funny. His lips stretched a grin. “Who?”
“Is Stenck near here, or is he still in Denver City?”
The kid tried to spit at James, but he couldn’t get the saliva past his lips. It was red with bubbly blood from his lungs.
James pressed the round barrel of his Griswold .36 into one of the kid’s bloody wounds. The kid tipped his head back and screamed.
James pulled the pistol out of the wound. “I can make it hurt worse than that, junior.”
“He’s in Sand Creek!” the kid said, bawling. “He’s there…waitin’ on us.”
“How many does he have ridin’ with him?”
“Eleven, er…” The kid shifted his gaze to the rafters, blinked as he refigured, subtracting himself and his dead partners from the tally. “Six, I reckon.”
He sighed raspily, his chest deflating like a balloon. His head smacked down on the floor, and his eyes rolled back in his head. James stood and turned to Crosseye standing at the bar behind him, deftly reloading his pistols with fresh caps, balls, nipples, and powder. “Five, huh?” the older man said. “Well, hell, that ain’t too many.”
James looked at the gray-headed barman, who stood well back behind the bar, looking worried, holding his hands high above his head.
“We mean no harm to you, sir. Just them.”
The barman lowered his arms with a sigh.
“How far to Sand Creek?” James asked him.
The barman bunched his grizzled brows, thoughtful. “Twenty-five, thirty miles.” He narrowed a fateful eye. “Is the Stenck you mention the same Stenck from up Denver City way?”
“One and the same,” James said, wiping his bloody pistol off on the dead kid’s wool vest.
“Had a feelin’,” the barman said, sounding none too happy.
James holstered his Griswold and narrowed an eye at the barman, who was looking around the bloody, smoky room and shaking his head. “If you help us get these hombres on their horses, you can have whatever you find in their pockets and keep all the hardware they got on ’em, too. How’d that be?”
Crosseye looked at him curiously.
“Why not send Stenck a message?” James said with a shrug. “Maybe if he sees he’s lost half his men, he’ll turn tail just like he did back home and run on back to Denver where he belongs.”
Why spill more blood when there was a chance you wouldn’t have to? He’d seen enough of the stuff.
“Hell,” Crosseye said, shoving his pistols butt-forward into the holsters on his broad hips, “worth a try.”
His tone gave the lie to his words.
Just the same, he, James, and the barman dragged the dead men outside and tied them belly-down over their saddles. The barman had gone through their pockets and taken all their weapons, so they were considerably lighter than they’d been when they’d ridden into the station yard hoping merely to have a poke and to down some cheap whiskey, cutting the trail dust before heading out after their quarry again in the morning.
James slapped the horses back in the direction from which they’d come. Stenck would likely find them the next day. What he’d do with the grisly message was up to him.
James and Crosseye pinched hat brims to the barman, and gigged their horses on back to their camp.
Chapter 16
The country the three Tennesseans rode through as they made their way toward Mexico was like that from some child’s book of fables. It inspired fantasy and wild, boyish conjurings in the former Confederate, James Dunn.
James was accustomed to low mountains thick with trees and brush, shrubs, and berry brambles of a thousand different varieties, and of foggy hollows and mossy canyons as colorful as God’s own garden, jeweled with lazy waterfalls. In the south, the sky was often obscured by a low, hazy cloud-cover, but it made the grass and leaves a rich tropical green, the air as soft and damp as wash freshly hung on a line.
But in the arid west, the sky was mostly cobalt blue stretching from horizon to horizon like the lid on all the cosmos—earth, moon, sun, and stars. The sunlight here was a rich copper or brassy color, the air as clear as a lens. Not as much grew out here, but what did grow owned its own spare, sometimes severe beauty.
James’s party rode through sandy, rocky deserts on which little grew but small tufts of wiry brush and dangerously spiked cactus plants. When they climbed slightly higher in elevation the sparse grass and cactus gave way to cedars, fragrant junipers, and piñon pines. The trees were not very tall and not crowded together the way they were in the South, but spread out so a man could see through them and sometimes beyond them, almost as though they’d been arranged for this very purpose.
The ex-Confederates and Vienna McAllister crossed shoulders of pine-clad mountains and traversed several deep canyons through which muddy streams meandered through wiry brush and stirrup-high, dun-colored grass, the stream banks scored by the tracks of many Western beasts, including coyotes, porcupines, and mountain lions. In the vast distances that opened nearly as wide as all the universe were breathtaking vistas of steep, sloping mesas supported by coppery, crenellated sandstone walls.
There were also what appeared to be old volcanoes surrounded by black lava rock and gravel, and sudden escarpments rising like the spines of long-dead, partially buried dinosaurs. The broken, rocky terrain climbed to high plateaus. But even these formations were dwarfed by massive sierras looming beyond them, often in all directions. The bottoms of these ranges were hidden in a light blue mist, causing them to appear like islands hanging from the sky, with many thrusting peaks shaped like the teeth on a saw blade, some of these teeth so white they looked as if they’d been dipped in paraffin.
It was good, being out here. The air was thinner, so thin it sometimes made James feel that he couldn’t catch his breath, and he sometimes felt his head suddenly throbbing. But the air spiced with sage and cedar was clean, and there were few people, and all was refreshingly new and exotic. James felt the bloody war slipping farther and farther behind him, making him begin to imagine starting a new life for himself here on the western side of the Mississippi.
A life with Vienna?
He found himself vaguely considering the possibility in a wishful, speculative sort of way. Her earthy beauty was intoxicating, and having a woman for company in this strikingly vast and lonely land would be a rarified comfort for any man. Listening to her voice, watching her move, admiring the way the light of a crackling fire played in her hair made James feel undeniable male stirrings that he tried hard to ignore, even going so far as trying to keep his eyes off her for long stretches of whatever trail they were following.
For even if Vienna had showed any interest in him at all—intere
st beyond that of a mere trail partner and treasure-seeker—which she hadn’t, James knew it wasn’t in the cards. They’d always have Willie and the war between them.
One night a troubling thing happened. Unable to sleep, he rose from his blanket roll and walked down to the river that they’d camped beside and which lay beyond a short stretch of willows and knee-high grass. As he did, he heard slow, languid splashing sounds. He knew right away that it was her, but he couldn’t stop himself.
He took several more steps, slid a branch aside. She stood naked in the stream, the light of the nearly full moon glistening like liquid gold on the dark, rippling water and on the lush ivory curves of her naked body.
She had her hair pinned to the top of her head, but several strands dangled toward the water. The strands danced as she suddenly turned toward him. He released the branch and stumbled back to the camp with the back of his neck on fire.
They continued south and west, not relying so much on maps—for the few maps they could consult were in land and assay offices or frustratingly unreliable stage relay stations—but on directions from passing strangers and from ranchers and cowpunchers.
The land was almost startlingly empty, with most of the able-bodied men off fighting the war in the East. Outside of towns and small ranches, they saw few white men, but they saw several bands of roving, dark-skinned riders on small, rangy mustang ponies often trimmed with tribal designs and colors.
These men, who James and Crosseye assumed were the native Apache or Navajo of one band or another, wore colorful calico bandannas and shirts and deerskin breeches, with bows and arrow quivers hanging down their backs. Some wore strange hats of what appeared to be woven bird feathers and capes of animal hide. Pistols and knives jutted from sashes. While James’s group saw several small packs of these distinctly wild natives—every bit as feral as the wolves, panthers, and grizzlies they’d spotted in the deserts and mountains they’d traversed—they kept their distance, wily as coyotes. James had the uneasy feeling that he and his two trail partners hadn’t seen a third of the natives who’d been watching them, maybe even trailing them from a cautious, curious distance.
