The Bells of El Diablo (15 page)

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, pointed 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.

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 dropping 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?”