The Bells of El Diablo (11 page)

“No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. Even from
his position at the front of the room, he could see the shine of the tears in her eyes. “No,” she said. “James, no!”

Red Mangham leaped down off the plank bar and closed his hands around the wooden handles of the pistols holstered low on his chest. He said nothing as he pushed through the crowd toward James. The long, slanted eyes set close against his long, hooked nose were shiny with wrath, lips pursed inside his red goatee and mustache.

Continuing to push toward James, he barked, “Mister, you just bought yourself a stretched neck and a wooden overcoat!” His voice was strangely high-pitched, almost girlish.

“Red, no!” Vienna cried.

She bolted away from the stairs and sidestepped through the crowd, pushing men out of her way—bearded, sun-leathered men who stood broad and sturdy as oaks in contrast to her small, pale, supple form. She approached James and looked at Mangham, placing a hand on his arm.

“No, Red, please,” she said, her voice trembling. She slid her eyes almost reluctantly to James. “This…this is my…my brother. I fear…he’s brought news from home.”

James held her frightened gaze. Of course, she knew why he was here. What else but news of Willie’s death could have brought him to her? But she didn’t know it all, and the dread of telling her was more potent than the threat he felt of all the obvious killers now surrounding him and pummeling him with their dark, belligerent gazes, infuriated by the interruption in their revelry.

Mangham stared suspiciously at James, his nose working like some separate living thing on his face. “Brother? You sure about that, Mary?”

“Don’t look like her brother,” said a short, stocky man in a shabby bowler hat, sneering.

“Shut up!” Mangham shouted. “If Mary says he’s her brother, he’s her brother!”

The short, stocky gent in the bowler hat took one step backward.

“I’d like to speak to my brother in private, Red,” Vienna said softly, gray eyes staring up at James.

Red snorted and scowled skeptically at the stranger, then jerked his head toward the stairs. “All right, I reckon. Since he’s your brother an’ all.” As the girl began leading James through the crowd by his hand, Mangham grabbed James’s other arm. “Don’t be upsettin’ Mary, now, ya hear?”

James glanced at the man without expression, pulled his arm free, and followed Vienna through the crowd, feeling angry looks being hurled at him like razor-edged bowie knives.

As the murmurs of discontent rose behind and below him, he followed the long-legged, high-busted, raven-haired beauty up the stairs, wondering how in hell the beautiful young Southern belle he knew as Vienna McAllister had turned up here, half-naked and singing bawdy songs in this nest of human rattlesnakes, going by the name of Mustang Mary….

James moved up the stairs more slowly than Vienna, aka “Mustang Mary,” for he turned around a couple of times to make sure no bowie or Green River knives were being hurled at him. When he gained the second-story hall, which was lit by a single bracket lamp beside a faded oil painting of a naked woman on a settee, James headed for an open door on the left. He went inside, doffed his kepi, and held it against his chest.

Vienna sat on the small room’s rumpled double bed strewn with clothes of both sexes. A long duster hung from a peg on the wall. A pair of faded denims hung over it from the same hook. A fire glowed in a little monkey stove in the far corner, a stack of dead branches beside it. The room smelled of burning piñon, man sweat, perfume, and talcum. She looked up at him, long ivory legs crossed, one slippered foot hooked behind the other, wringing her hands together. Her gray eyes glinted worriedly. “It’s Willie….”

“Yes.”

She sucked a sharp breath through her nose, pursing
her lips. Her face paled, and she turned her head to one side. “How?”

He sighed. It was mixed with a groan.

She looked at him, eyes widening a little with surprise.

James saw a chair in the corner to his left. He walked over, slacked into it, the dry wood creaking under his weight. His heart thudded heavily with the sorrow that lived in him, but even to his own ears his voice sounded dull, toneless, without any hint of emotion. “It was a dark night. Georgia. My outfit was trying to blow a bridge. Willie was there.”

She stared at him, her lips opening slightly now, eyes skeptical, dreadful.

“I killed him,” James said. “It was me, Vienna.”

Her eyes widened as they bored into his.

“It’s a long story, but I killed my brother in the darkness of Snake Creek Gap. Didn’t know it was Willie until…” James let his voice trail off, drew a long breath. “He lived for half a night, wanted me to give you this.”

He reached into the pocket of his buckskin tunic and extended to her the gold watch with the long chain of gold Confederate coins and the gold-washed fob at the end of it. She reached out and took it, drew it to her, and flipped the lid. Instantly, the tears came, and she sobbed, clutching the watch to her chest. She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and cried quietly for several minutes.

James felt heavy and weak. He sat back in his chair, knees spread, and listened to her. It felt like a penance he was paying, reliving over and over again the look in
Willie’s eye when he’d withdrawn the knife from his brother’s chest, and the blood had come, washing like red oil into the dark creek.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks and looked at him with anguished eyes. “I’m so sorry, James.”

He hadn’t expected such a reaction, and suddenly tears washed over his own eyes, and he leaned forward with a single sob, resting his elbows on his knees and lowering his head as though in prayer. Distantly, through the screeching in his own head, he heard bedsprings squawk, saw her crouch over him, run a hand through his long hair before wrapping that arm around his neck and drawing his head against hers. He let himself go then, and she did, too, both of them sobbing together, convulsing with shared sorrow.

Finally, she collapsed at his feet, drawing her legs beneath her, and rested her forearm across his knee. “That goddamn war! Is it over?”

James, a little taken aback by the language she’d picked up after heading west, shook his head.

The skin above the bridge of her nose wrinkled as he studied her. He didn’t want to answer the unspoken question. He laid his hand against her smooth cheek, damp from her crying, and slid his thumb across her rich lips, remembering how he’d kissed her once, a long time ago, before Willie had won her heart with his music and poetry and passion for nearly everything under the sun, including politics.

James had been the true woodsman—the taciturn loner. Willie had been a lover. Remembering that now, he took his hand away from his brother’s wife’s face,
and the question he’d suppressed for a time resurfaced: “What are you doing here, Vienna? Amongst these cutthroats?”

She lowered her head, cradling the watch in her hands. “That’s a long story, James.”

“What of your uncle?”

“He’s dead. So is Aunt Elise and my cousin Kate.” Vienna’s voice hardened. “All killed…by Richard Stenck.”

“Stenck?” James paused, wrapping his mind around the name. “
Stenck?
”

Vienna touched two fingers to her lips, then rose, walked over to the open door, and looked cautiously up and down the hall. Apparently finding no one lingering around her room, she closed the door quietly, then dropped to her knees before James once more and looked up at him from beneath her thin, chocolate-colored brows. Her eyes were hard and angry. “Stenck and my uncle Ichabod were in business together. The business of railroad speculation. But they needed money, so they decided to go down to Mexico and bring back a treasure that my uncle had heard about from a reliable source. Only, Stenck killed Uncle Ichabod for the treasure map.”

James shook his head, puzzled. “Treasure maps…Mexico…? That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”

“Stenck knows, or at least figures, I saw the killings in the McAllister House on Sherman Avenue in Denver City.”

“I was on Sherman Avenue, and no one I talked to owned up to knowing the McAllisters!”

“That’s because they’re afraid of Stenck…just as they’re afraid of my new
benefactor
, Red Mangham. The whole town—half of the territory—is afraid of Red and Stenck.” She shook her head, causing her hair to slide across her bare shoulders. “Two outlaw gangs rule Denver City and all of eastern Colorado Territory. Stenck’s…” She glanced cautiously at the closed door, then whispered, “And Red’s. Red’s an uncouth tyrant, born and bred here. Stenck comes from supposedly good breeding, but they’re both equally dangerous…if you get on their wrong side.”

“And Red is hiding you from Stenck?”

Vienna nodded.

“What about”—James looked at the gold watch in Vienna’s small, pale hands—“the boy?”

A stricken look came to her eyes. She drew a hard breath and placed a hand on James’s knee, gave it an urgent squeeze. “James, can you get me out of here?” She licked her lips and squeezed his knee again, anxiously. “Tonight?”

James could hear the low, menacing hum of conversation downstairs. There must have been twenty men down there.

“Tonight?” he said.

She squeezed his thigh. “James, please!”

James moved slowly down the stairs, raking his hand along the gray wooden rail. The three-piece band was playing where they’d been playing before, but almost none of the two dozen men
in the room appeared to be paying much attention. They were all clumped around in the room haphazardly furnished with all manner of furniture from settees to horsehide sofas, upholstered chairs, and plain hide-bottom chairs arranged around scarred wooden tables such as one would find in any watering hole anywhere in the country. They were playing cards or conversing or roughhousing like boys on a schoolyard, but bleary-eyed and ragged-voiced from drink.

Red Mangham sat on the end of one of the room’s two sofas, against the far wall. He was smoking a cigar while the man beside him sat with the Indian girl clad in a skimpy hide dress on his knee. Mangham had a tall, black, silver-tipped boot hiked on his own knee, and he looked dubiously toward James descending the stairs.

As James neared the first floor, Mangham rose from the couch and sauntered toward him, puffing the cigar in one corner of his mouth. The other conversations in the room grew quieter, and men swiveled their heads toward Mangham as he scowled at James and said, “You really Mary’s brother?”

“That’s right,” James said as he stepped down onto the saloon hall floor.

He continued on past Mangham, who grabbed his arm as he had before, and said, “Was up there awhile.”

“We haven’t seen each other for a time. The war an’ all.”

“What news did you bring?”

“Ask her.”

James pulled free of the man’s grip.

“Hey!” Mangham said.

“I’m back,” Vienna said, coming down the stairs, looking fresh after she’d composed herself, washed her
face, and brushed her hair. She smiled broadly at Mangham, who’d turned his head toward her. “Let’s get this party started again!”

A roar rose in the room. Men clapped and hollered, and the band member with the kettle beat it with a spoon. The banjo and fiddle lifted a jubilant albeit slightly off-key rhythm. With all attention now firmly focused on Vienna, James strode across the room and out the front door, where there were still four or five men smoking and milling on the stoop. They regarded him owlishly through the wafting smoke. He pinched his hat brim to them as he headed on down the steps, walked over to his horse, and stepped into the saddle.

He booted the chestnut into a spanking trot as he headed out of the yard, following the trail back in the direction of Auraria. When he’d ridden a hundred yards and was out of view from the Ace of Spades, he swung the chestnut into the brush on the trail’s south side. He stepped down from the saddle, tied the horse to a branch, loosened its belly straps, and slipped its bit from its teeth.

According to his and Vienna’s plan, he’d be here awhile.

He sat down opposite the side of the tree on which he’d tied his horse. He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, and tipped his hat brim down over his eyes.

He could hear the music and Vienna’s rollicking singing beneath the general roar emanating from the outlaw lair. She was a damn good actress. Her heart was broken and she was likely still stunned by the news of Willie’s death, but she wanted so badly to get away from Red Mangham that she was putting on a
good show for him and his men, assuaging any suspicions that James’s appearance might have evoked.

He sat there against the tree, half listening, half dozing, for a long time. He himself was still stunned to have learned that “Mustang Mary” was Willie’s sweetheart, and that she was singing in a roadhouse owned by a notorious desperado. Still, he had more questions so far than answers. Vienna had promised to tell him more, and about hers and Willie’s child, but first James had to get her out of the place without getting them both killed.

He was wishing now he’d brought Crosseye along. The old frontiersman was probably pie-eyed in some whorehouse, sparking the fattest percentage gal he could find. James smiled at that, enjoying the momentary distraction from all the confusion, then closed his eyes and let himself doze. Occasionally he looked up to see the stars above the pale bluffs, the constellations switching positions, the moon arcing westward over Denver behind him.

Coyotes called. At one point, something sniffed and snorted in the brush off to James’s right. He tossed a branch and heard the mewling of what he figured to be a bobcat—a creature he’d heard about but had so far not seen.

The West was a far different place from the Southeast. He had much to learn about the native flora and fauna, as well as its human inhabitants, most of whom seemed to hail from all corners of not only this country but Europe, Mexico, and South America, as well. It was rare to run into someone who didn’t speak with a thick foreign brogue.

He dozed again. When he lifted his chin from his
chest and pushed his hat back up on his head, he looked around, listening. The night was darker, the moon having set, and, save for the breeze scratching the cottonwood leaves together, and the hooting of a distant owl, there was only silence.