The Bells of El Diablo (12 page)

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.

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 to 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.

James slid his rifle into the saddle boot, then quickly tied the croker sack around the horn. The sack was heavy, the coins bulging through the bottom. Vienna stood behind him, staring back toward the roadhouse, where more and more shouts rose on the quiet night. There was the flash of Mangham’s rifle, but the shots were dropping wide; because of the darkness or his own drunkenness, the outlaw leader had lost track of his quarry.

James stepped into the leather and then reached down and took Vienna’s hand and swung her up behind him. “Where we going?” she said, a nervous trill in her voice as James ground his heels into the chestnut’s flanks.

“Denver City!”

“That’s the first place he’ll look!”

“No choice—I left Crosseye there!”

“Crosseye?”

James didn’t answer, for just then there was an especially loud string of shouted epithets that were quickly drowned by the rataplan of rifle fire—several rifles now fired quickly in the general direction of James and Vienna, though only a few shots kicked up dust and gravel anywhere near the fleeing pair. The chestnut was tearing up the ground in the direction of Denver, putting the cutthroats farther and farther behind them.

James turned left at the fork in the trail, and the dark structures of Auraria began appearing around him, cabins and corrals and privies hunching darkly. Then he rode between the taller business structures sheathing the trail from both sides of the wide trail that had become the town’s main street. The chestnut’s hooves clomped over the wooden bridge of Cherry Creek, the narrow stream of oily dark water glistening wanly in the starlight between the brushy banks, and then Denver pushed up around James and Vienna, the only sounds a couple of cattle braying from some distant stock corral.

All the houses and business establishments were dark—all, that is, except for one white frame house sitting along the right side of the town’s broad main drag.
A window was lit in the house’s second story, and from the same window James could hear a man talking drunkenly, slurring his words, while a girl bathed his voice in drunken tittering, as though the man were telling her the funniest story she’d ever heard.

He turned right and followed the north-angling side street for fifty yards. His and Crosseye’s hotel sat on the right side of the trail, near where the side street dwindled off into the buck brush and sage of the prairie. The two-story adobe-brick building was dark. So, too, was the livery barn that sat on the opposite side of the street and nearer to James and Vienna by one block.

James turned the horse toward the barn. He’d stable the chestnut before taking Vienna to the hotel. True, Mangham’s men would eventually look for them there, but James doubted that he and his men would do much searching tonight, when they were all drunker than peach-orchard hogs. They’d wait for morning to turn the town inside out, and by that time James intended to be gone—him, Crosseye, and Vienna. They’d have to find somewhere else to hole up until James could figure out a way to get Vienna back home to Rose Hill.

In front of the barn, James swung his leg over his saddle horn and leaped to the ground. He walked over to the big double doors and slid the left door open two feet before he saw a bulky figure standing before him, just inside the barn. James stepped back with a startled grunt and snaked his right hand across his belly for one of his cross-draw .36s.

He left the Griswold in its holster when he heard a familiar voice rasp, “Ain’t safe here, Jimmy.” Crosseye shoved the left door open wider, and then the starlight
shone on his bulky, big-bellied frame and broad-nosed face under the pinned-up brim of his gray sombrero.

James’s heart thudded. He’d never known a man, even men several inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, more furtive than Crosseye Reeves. “Goddamnit, what are you doin’ sneakin’ around out here, you old miscreant?”

Crosseye grabbed the chestnut’s reins and led the horse, with Vienna on its back, into the barn. James walked in with the horse. Crosseye quickly drew the door closed, then said softly in the darkness relieved by an oil lamp guttering at the far back of the place, silhouetting ceiling posts and stable partitions and hanging tack in front of it—“Stenck’s at the hotel.”