The Bells of El Diablo (16 page)

“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.

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—interest 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.

One night in the mountains above the Mexican
pueblito
of Tucson, in the Arizona Territory, where they hoped to acquire supplies for their pull into Mexico, Willie came to James in a dream. He saw Willie’s face in that moment just after James had thrust the knife into his brother’s chest and saw that blue eye that was like looking into a mirror. Recognition shone in that lone, pain-racked eye at the same time that James screamed his brother’s name and pulled the knife out as quickly as he’d shoved it in.

“
Willie!
”

He heard the scream echoing around the rocky canyon, as though it had been shouted by someone else from a distant ridge. Only then, a second later, when he opened his eyes and heard his own labored breaths raking in and out of his lungs working like a bellows, did he realize he’d screamed it himself. He was bathed in sweat, his clothes glued to his skin beneath the double wool blankets of his hot roll.

Instantly, Crosseye and Vienna were kneeling beside him, Crosseye wheezing, “Good Lord, Jimmy!” and Vienna calling his name as though trying to summon him back from a great distance. Sitting straight up, back taut, he shifted his gaze from Crosseye’s bearded, cross-eyed face to Vienna’s fine, pale, perfectly feminine one, framed in mussed chocolate hair, and he drew a deep breath as he sagged back onto his elbows.

He blinked slowly as the image of Willie hovering
just behind his retinas sagged slowly back into the misty, black water of Snake Creek, mercifully gone from his sight though the dream’s memory remained, nearly as real as the memory of the actual event.

“He’s gone, James,” Vienna said. “He’s gone, and you didn’t mean to kill him. It was the war. You’re here, and Crosseye and I are here, in the West, and now we’re all that matters.” She smiled weakly but encouragingly, then slid her face to his and pressed her lips to his temple.

He knew she’d meant the kiss to be comforting, but it only aroused a welter of conflicting emotions inside him, and he felt as though he’d somehow stuck that knife into his own lung.

“Thirsty,” he said, throwing his blankets aside, and rising. “Gonna take a walk.”

He stomped into his boots, grabbed the Henry repeater that he went nowhere without, and stumbled off into the brush and the rocks beyond the soft, umber glow of their fire. He walked through some willows, saw the stars arching between toothy black mountain peaks, and drew a deep draught of air into his lungs. He shivered against the mountain chill.

Maybe he hadn’t come as far as he’d thought he had. How far did you have to travel to outrun a memory?

He stood out there for a time, taking deep breaths, then sat on a rock and lit a black cigar he’d bought at a mercantile in a mountain crossroads town and mining camp called Payson. He smoked it halfway down slowly. When he’d smoked half of it, he peeled off the coal, returned the cheroot to the breast pocket of his shirt, then walked back through the brush toward the fire’s low glow.

He passed under a willow branch and stopped suddenly at the edge of the firelight. His heart thudded. He brought the Henry down in both hands, but held it against his chest, the barrel up, as someone shouted incoherently—it sounded like a mixture of grunts and clipped, hard consonants.

Three figures in addition to Vienna and Crosseye were gathered about the low, quiet fire. One stood to the left of it. Another knelt behind Vienna, who sat up on her bedroll, facing James from the other side of the fire. Crosseye sat with his back against a rock to the fire’s right side, holding his thick hands high above his head, one leg extended, the other leg and cavalry boot angled inward.

James could see only the silhouettes of the three stocky figures, and their colorful headbands and red or green sashes. He could also see the knife in the hand of the one crouched behind Vienna, the steel tip of which was pressed taut to the underside of the girl’s chin. The man near Crosseye was aiming an arrow nocked to a bow at Crosseye’s face. The Apache nearest James, on the left side of the fire, was aiming a nocked arrow at James.

Crosseye said while keeping his head turned toward the native nearest him, “Damn, but they were quiet, Jimmy.”

This first man was the one who’d spoken, if you could call it speaking. He cut loose with the grunting and spitting snarls once more and gestured with his bow and arrow. James lowered the Henry in one hand, looking once more at the knife held in the hand of the Apache crouched behind Vienna. She stared straight
over the fire at James. The fire’s dark red glow was reflected in her shadowy eyes.

James set the Henry down against the tree to his right and raised his hands palms out. His heart slowed, his anxiety ebbing like the last waters down a flooded streambed. Funny how a nightmare could drive him to the brink of madness but moments of true terror slowed time down for him, steadied him, lightened his limbs, and honed his vision, preparing him for battle.

The Indian nearest him spoke again loudly, sharply, and gestured with the arrow, making the bow’s drawn-taut sinew creak. James stepped to the left, away from the Henry, for the native who’d spoken was obviously after the rifle. As the man moved toward him, James glanced past him toward the knife held against Vienna’s neck. Too close. If James or Crosseye made any kind of an offensive move at all, he’d lay Vienna’s neck wide open.