The Bells of El Diablo (25 page)

“Are you all right?” she said, drawing her blouse closed.

James gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then grabbed the key and ran over to Crosseye, who was staring at Apache Jack and the hulking man in the bearskin vest as though not sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. “Been through a lot—you an’ me, Jimmy,” he muttered as James unlocked the big oldster’s left-hand shackle. “But I don’t know quite how to play this one.”

“I reckon it’ll come to us,” James said as the frontiersman’s beefy right fist dropped from the shackle. The younger man crouched, wrapped Crosseye’s right arm around his shoulders, holding him up. “Can you make it?”

“Hell, I can make it.” When James released him,
Crosseye staggered backward as though drunk. Getting his feet under him, he groaned and touched a hand to the back of his head, where the
rurale
had kissed him with his rifle butt.

James looked around. Vienna had just dropped her serape down over her head. Now she slid her hair up out of its neck to let it fall down her back and glanced at a support pole on the far side of the stable. “Our guns!”

James followed her gaze to the post. He was still seeing nearly double from the braining he’d taken. He ran over to the post, stumbling, chickens scurrying out of his way, and saw his and Crosseye’s and Vienna’s gun belts hanging from the same rusty spike, pistols jutting from their holsters.

Crosseye’s Spencer repeater leaned against the near side of the post. James’s Henry rested against the post’s opposite side. The new weapon must have looked so foreign to the
rurales
, more accustomed to the older, cruder muskets they’d been wielding, that none had appropriated it.

James quickly wrapped his Griswolds around his waist, positioned the holsters low on his hips, and grabbed the Henry. Crosseye had draped his bandoliers over his chest, the Lefaucheux around his neck, and was checking the loads in his Leech & Rigdon .36, making sure the caps and nipples were still set and ready to fire.

“Come on, you Rebel devils!” shouted Apache Jack, hooking an arm to beckon them toward the doors. “We ain’t got all night! Pablo’s done brought your hosses!”

The hulking man in the bear vest was backing the
mules away from the barn. The Gatling gun jounced in the box, squawking on its unoiled swivel. As the formidable-looking driver turned the wagon around to head back in the direction from which he and Jack had come, James ran on out of the stable to see little Pablo sitting a beefy mule and holding the reins of the Southerners’ mounts, including those of their packhorse.

“How in the hell did the kid know which horses were ours?” James called, shoving his Henry down in his saddle boot.

“Pablo knows everything there is to know about everyone and every
thing
in Cordura!” Apache Jack replied, laughing.

As though he’d understood, Pablo grinned, showing his large white teeth against his dark face beneath his straw sombrero, and tossed James all four sets of reins.

“Gracias, amigo!” James tossed Crosseye and Vienna the reins to their respective mounts and climbed into his saddle, wincing at the throbbing the maneuver kicked up in his head. Vincente was already sitting a steeldust stallion near Pablo, holding a Maynard carbine barrel up on his thigh and staring cautiously down the dimly lit main street of Cordura.

Apache Jack and the hulking man in the bearskin vest rattled eastward along Cordura’s main street, and Vincent turned the steeldust to ride just off their left rear wheel. Pablo yelled at his mule and batted his sandals against the beast’s ribs, and the animal lunged into a ground-eating gallop with a single bray.

Vienna ground her heels into her own mount’s
flanks, and Crosseye did likewise as James glanced around at the dead
rurales
littering the street and the mostly dark buildings hunched beneath the glittering stars. No one seemed to be out and about, but most likely there were more than a few spectators peering out from dark windows or even darker alley mouths.

Chickens clucked and pecked and one of the goats sniffed a hat of one of the dead men.

Satisfied no one near had taken umbrage with the demise of Salsidio and his contingent of
rurale
policemen, and was about to start flinging lead at his back, James put the chestnut on up the trail. He caught up to the others as they followed a bend around the trail that formed a pale line through the brushy, rocky desert in the darkness, the hooves of the galloping mounts hammering loudly in the quiet night.

The wagon rattled raucously, the Gatling gun bouncing around in the box, and James was worried the cacophony would draw every Apache within fifty miles. He supposed they didn’t have much to worry about, however. The Gatling gun was a formidable weapon, and James wondered where Apache Jack had acquired it.

The big man slowed the wagon’s two-mule hitch after a short time, and they rode at a little more leisurely pace. Vincente continued to ride beside the wagon’s left rear wheel. Pablo followed directly behind the wagon. James, Crosseye, and Vienna rode about fifteen yards behind Pablo.

No one said anything. There were plenty of questions, but they figured they’d get their answers soon enough, when they’d put enough distance between themselves and any further trouble back in Cordura.

When they’d ridden for half an hour, the big man whom Jack had called Chulo pulled the wagon off the trail’s left side and into the mouth of a steep-walled canyon. He stood in the driver’s boot and grunted loudly, bizarrely, as he whipped the reins against the mules’ backs, trying to get them moving on the rougher trail. When the wagon was bouncing along at a regular pace, the stout, iron-shod wheels ringing off rocks, James looked around to see the cliffs on each side of the trail rising darkly, ominously.

They must have been nearly two thousand feet high in places. On the right side of the trail was an arroyo sheathed in boulders and paloverde trees.

The trail rose gradually, and short, wiry pines began to appear. The night air grew cooler. There was a distant, angry screech of a pouncing wildcat.

After another hour of hard riding, the wagon stopped near the base of a towering sierra, the steep slope of which the starlight showed strewn with large boulders. About a hundred yards out from the mountain’s base, a stone hovel crouched, its brush roof touched with the light of a rising sickle moon. A corral flanked the cabin. Lights shone in the shack’s windows—at least the two from which the shutters had been thrown back. Shadows moved behind them.

James walked his horse up to the side of the wagon and stopped just off its right front wheel. Apache Jack and the big driver sat facing the shack, the big man studying it carefully, nostrils expanding and contracting like those of some stalking beast. Jack had turned his head to one side, listening.

“It’s occupied,” he said to the big man, who sat with
his elbows on his knees, holding the reins lightly in his gloved hands.

The big man said nothing. James could hear him breathing. Something told James he couldn’t speak, though he apparently understood English.

“La Croix’s bunch,” Jack said, making a sour expression. “I can hear that striped skunk’s voice from here…goin’ on about his latest woman.” The old desert rat spat a tobacco quid over the side of the wagon; a good bit of it dribbled down the wheel. Turning back to the big man, he said, “I reckon you know what to do, Chulo. But don’t use up too much ammo. We’re gonna need it for the Apaches.”

Chulo nodded, then flicked his reins over the mules’ backs. As the wagon continued forward toward the cabin, Apache Jack turned to James and the others, grinned devilishly, ran a hand across his mouth, and said, “Wait here.”

He repeated the order in Spanish for Vincente’s and Pablo’s benefit.

James sat the chestnut, letting the mount crop grass around the base of a boulder and watching the wagon jounce and rattle slowly into the yard. When it was thirty yards from the hovel, Chulo turned the mules back around to face James and the others, while the Gatling gun faced the cabin. When the wagon had started turning, Jack started shouting in Spanish, and men in the cabin began shouting back at him, their shadows jostling in the windows.

Jack jumped down and stood beside the wagon box, gesturing broadly as a tall man stood crouched in the cabin’s low door. They made several friendly-sounding
exchanges in Spanish, laughing with a little too much exuberance, before the man in the doorway stepped out into the yard, canting his head to one side as he walked slowly, a little apprehensively, toward the wagon.

Three more men came out of the cabin and spread out in front of it, near the door, two holding rifles, one holding a pistol down low along his right leg clad in silver-trimmed leather chaps. They were dressed in various types of serapes and dusty Mexican trail clothes, with pistols and knives hanging off their hips and jutting from the wells of their boots.

None was wearing a hat. They’d settled in for the evening.

When the tall man had come to within twenty feet of the back of the wagon, he stopped suddenly and pointed angrily at the Gatling gun he must have just then picked out of the shadows in the wagon’s rear. He prattled off a handful of curses. The others lurched forward, also cursing, and began bearing down on the wagon with their weapons. Jack threw his head back, laughing, and a half second later the Gatling gun began its ugly song.

Knives of fire careened from its maw.

The men standing between the wagon and the brush-roofed hovel had no chance at all. They did a dance similar to that of the
rurales
, and in less than five seconds three of the four were heaped on the ground, the fourth one having been blown back into the cabin through its open door.

Vincente, sitting his steeldust, cut loose with a short, victorious, coyotelike yowl.

Vienna muttered an exclamation as she drew back on the reins of her startled horse.

Holding his own reins taut, James stared, incredulous, toward the dead men. Smoke wafted above the wagon. He heard the squawk of the Gatling gun’s tripod swivel, saw the nose of the gun rise, as did the man called Chulo, from his position behind it. His boots scraped in the wagon bed.

As James and the others booted their mounts toward the wagon and the cabin, Jack said something to Chulo in Spanish, and the hulking creature, who seemed more beast than man, leaped down off the wagon and walked around, prodding the down men with his boot toes.

Jack turned toward the Southerners and Pablo as James said with a wry chuff, “Friends of yours?”

“Ha!” Jack slapped his thigh, cackling. “
Bandidos
of the worst stripe. The tall fella there, Madrino, and Chulo got along like two bobcats tied to the same plank. Ya see, Madrino made Chulo’s sister heavy with child and left her to fend for herself.” Jack cackled again, wagging his head. “My friends from the Confederate States of America, welcome to Mexico!”

When Jack stopped laughing, he reached under the wagon’s seat for a bottle, pulled the cork, and glanced over at Chulo and Vincente, both of whom were now looting the bodies of the dead, closely inspecting the cadavers’ arsenal of knives, pistols, and rifles. “Ladies and gentlemen from Tennessee,” Jack said, “meet my friends Chulo and Vincente. Chulo and Vincente, these here good folks is Miss Vienna McAllister, Mr. James Dunn, Mr. Crosseye Reeve, and, well, you know Pablo.”

Pablo was busy unhitching the mules from the wagon.

If Chulo and Vincente had heard the introductions, they didn’t acknowledge them. Vincente was pulling the right boot off one of the dead men while Chulo was hefting a revolver in his hand, testing the weight.

Jack wiped the lip of the bottle off on his pants and extended it to Vienna. “Ladies first…if you’ve a mind for a libation, Miss Vienna.”

“After this day, I could drink it all down myself.” Vienna threw back a healthy slug of the tanglefoot, choked down a cough, and extended the bottle to
James, who took it and glanced at Chulo and Vincente. “Where’d they come from, Jack?”

Keeping his voice low, Jack said, “They help out around the mission when they ain’t up to no good, stealing horses and robbin’ banks an’ such. They’ve helped me with my prospectin’ from time to time, though they haven’t never seen the bells.”

“They understand English?” Crosseye asked, throwing back a drink of the tonsil-burning tequila.

“Just Chulo. Don’t speak a lick of nothin’, though.” Jack smiled and passed his index finger across his throat.

James continued watching the big men, Vincente moving awkwardly on his clubfoot. He was a full head shorter than Chulo, but broader and even more powerful-looking through the shoulders. He seemed more interested in the dead men’s knives than their guns; just now he was running his thumb across the blade of a six-inch, wooden-handled skinning knife.

James turned to Jack. “Can we trust ’em?”

Jack threw back another drink and sucked air through his teeth, shaking his head. “Nope. Once we get to the bells and get ’em down out of the mountains and past the Apaches, we’ll have to kill ’em.”

James and Crosseye both just stared at him, James wondering if the man was joking and deciding he wasn’t. Jack jerked a jeering finger at him and Crosseye. “You two don’t know Mexico yet, but you’re about to get to know it real well!”

Vienna said, “I don’t understand, Jack. Salsidio said he’d killed you.”

“He was playin’ a bluff, tryin’ to get you to open up about me an’ my ladies.” Jack chuckled. “Salsidio was
more
bandido
than
rurale
. Like most of ’em are. Oh, he paid me a visit, all right. Seen you leave, I reckon. He’s been after the bells for years himself. Got close but never found ’em. Somehow, months back, he started to figure I had. He musta tracked me once or twice, and got savvy.

“Anyway, when he seen you gringos in Cordura, he figured you were here to help me get the gold out. He came to pump me about it, threatened to kill me, of course, but he never would. Not on holy ground, leastways. Salsidio was many things, and a good, hell-fearin’ Catholic was one of ’em. God rest his soul.” He spat in disgust, chaw dribbling down his gray-bristled chin.