The Bells of El Diablo (6 page)

Despite his liberal political views and artistic turn of mind, Willie could be a fierce fighter when aroused, and James and Frank had both worn the wounds to prove it. It had taken a lot to get Willie’s dander up, but once you did, as their father had often said—and as he’d remarked that bitter night that Willie had ridden off to join the Union forces in Washington—“all the saints in heaven couldn’t appease that boy.”

The elder Dunn, watching his youngest ride off down the wide lane through the mossy oaks while their mother had bawled her eyes out in the rose garden, had taken a sip of his bourbon and said just loudly enough for James to hear: “The damn Yankees are getting one hell of a fighter in that one, and before they let this thing go too far, I hope they realize there’s more where he came from but fightin’ on
our
side!”

“Willie,” James whispered again, leaning down and pressing his lips to his brother’s cold forehead.

One month later, after he’d taken his brother home to bury him at what was left of Seven Oaks—which wasn’t much except the manor house with a gaping hole from a cannonball in his father’s library—James was headed west and thinking of the last time he’d seen the old man, when a young man in a ragged uniform stepped out from behind a tree and into the trail before James’s horse.

“Ease down out of that saddle now, mister, and we won’t blow you all to hell,” said the young federal soldier, who held a cocked Starr .44 in his dirty, bare hand.

“But first,” said another, older man, “kindly remove them pistols from them holsters and toss ’em down here. We’ll take them, too. Griswolds, eh?”

James knew that his twin Confederate-made .36s, as well as his gray cavalry kepi, marked him as a Confederate. A Confederate too far north at this point in the war, as he was just now crossing northern Missouri.

He’d long since passed Chattanooga, from which
black smoke had curled unceasingly into the hot, damp air, as well as several other charred Southern cities. When he’d lit out from Seven Oaks, his father screaming at him and waving a sword from the second-story balustrade—the old man could abide James’s killing his Union-turncoat brother, but not deserting the Confederacy—he’d followed mostly secondary wagon roads, including the one he was on now. At night he’d slept in abandoned barns or along lonely creeks, though a couple of nights he’d holed up in whorehouses, the pleasures of the flesh acting as a balm against his memories of death and destruction.

Nearly every day, it had rained. Now the rain had stopped but the road was muddy. There was a farm off to the left, the ground around it scorched, trees blown to black skeletons from canister shot. There was an old tavern and general store on the right. The low-slung, clapboard hovel had a hole in its roof, and a dead man in a tattered Confederate uniform hung from a charred tree to the right of the place, near a wheelless wagon and a dead mule. The man’s neck was stretched to a grisly length, his body so bloated it was bursting through the seams of his clothes.

James looked at the two bearded men in dark blue Union rags before him. He studied them sadly—their tangled, tobacco-stained beards and wild, hungry eyes. The war had been nearly as cruel to the federal soldiers as it had been to the Confederates. James’s horse nickered, and then he heard a slapping thud behind him and saw a third man in what was left of federal blues step out from behind a stock pen sheathed in half-burned shrubs and stop in the trail behind
James. The slapping had been made by the loose sole of his boot. Bare toes stuck out, white as snow.

Deserters, these men. James knew the look in their eyes. He probably had that look himself, though he was somewhat better attired in his navy blue linsey-woolsey shirt under a tanned buckskin vest, and black twill trousers. A red neckerchief was knotted around his neck. He wore a fresh pair of high-topped brown boots that he’d retrieved, like most of the rest of his gear, from Seven Oaks. He wore his two Griswold & Gunnison .36s in soft leather holsters positioned for the cross draw on each hip, and he had a Green River knife sheathed near the pistol on his right side.

He’d found his mount, only a colt when he’d left for the war, running free in the woods around Seven Oaks, somehow overlooked by both federal and Confederate soldiers. It was a chestnut stallion with the rare rabicano markings, as though the ends of the bristles of its chestnut hair were lightly brushed with cream.

James turned back to the two men facing him—a young man and an old man, equally haggard. The deserters were after his horse and his pistols, and he couldn’t blame them. But without the horse, he’d have to find another, and he had damn little scrip and specie in his pockets—all of it Confederate and likely worthless out West.

James’s voice was mild as he said, “You’re pickin’ the wrong carcass, old sons. This one ain’t dead yet.”

“What’s that?” said the old man. He and the young one were each holding Springfields on him. The man behind him—a stringbean with buckteeth—was
aiming a Sharps straight out from his shoulder, the hammer rocked back.

“He said he don’t believe so,” said the young, tangle-bearded boy beside him, speaking loudly, as though the older man were deaf—probably from a cannon blast.

“Oh, he don’t believe so, does he?” The old man’s pale, puffy face clouded up and got ready to rain as he stumbled forward. He stopped and took steady aim at James’s head, narrowing one eye as he stared down the rusty Springfield’s barrel.

He frowned uncertainly, lowered the rifle an inch.

“Say…ain’t you…ain’t you…?” He paused, then added almost under his breath, “Forrest’s Rapscallion?”

James stared at him.

The others shifted uncomfortably, sliding their gazes between James and the old man. They moved up nearer the old man and stood about ten feet off each of James’s knees.

The stringbean with the buckteeth ran his tongue along his lower lip, sized James up carefully, both eyes twitching, and said, “Well…if it is him…he ain’t nothin’ so much. Hell, I’m bigger’n he is!”

“Is that who you are?” asked the other young one, blue eyes narrowed beneath an uneven shelf of dirty-blond bangs. “You Forrest’s Rapscallion or is old Kelsey addlepated from all the mash he drunk in Kentucky?”

“He’s got it right. Walk on.”

The stringbean looked at James’s sleek stallion—slightly hammerheaded but beefy through the barrel and tapering to sculpted hindquarters, with long, strong legs. “That sure is a fine horse….”

His eyes returned to James. They turned glassy with nerves, and his lips twitched a wicked smile.

At the same time, the old man jerked the rifle back up. He was tightening his finger on its trigger but did not get the shot off before James had reached both hands across his flat belly and brought up the twin Griswolds. The old man’s Springfield blasted toward the sky as James’s .36-caliber ball punched through his right cheek just beneath that eye and slammed him violently back and down. James’s other Griswold had punched a hole through the tangle-bearded younker’s chest as the kid had gotten his own Springfield centered, but shot a misfire, which he appeared to realize as he flew back and slammed against the ground beside the jerking old man.

The kid’s eyes were wide with fleeting shock and frustration.

Before the echo of his twin killing shots had died, James leaned back slightly in his saddle, snaked his right-hand Griswold across his chest, and fired from beneath his left arm.

The Griswold went
plam!

The stringbean’s own slug curled the air in front of James’s nose before thudding into a fence post beyond him. James’s .36 ball drilled through the stringbean’s right side, shattering a rib before tearing through his heart and exiting his body from beneath his right arm, blowing his shirt seam out.

James’s next slug plowed through the underside of the stringbean’s chin as the lanky soldier, screaming shrilly, flew up and back toward the trail’s opposite side. The slug tore through the man’s skull, and exiting
the crown of his head as he hit the ground, it streaked the trail beyond him with brains and blood.

The tangle-bearded kid lay jerking and gurgling.

James spied movement in the periphery of his vision, and curveted the chestnut rabicano, raising and aiming both smoking Griswolds straight out in front of him. A rifle boomed. James jerked, looking around quickly, half expecting the slug to tear him off the chestnut’s back.

He heard a gasp and a soft grunt, saw a man in blue uniform pants, suspenders, threadbare undershirt, and dark blue kepi step out from behind a hickory about forty yards off the trail to James’s left. He was short and scar-faced, eyes set close together. His lips were stretched back from his teeth, and he dropped the carbine in his hands as he fell to both knees.

Blood oozed from between his lips. It pumped from a hole in his chest.

He rasped, “Shit!” and fell forward on his face in the mud.

Keeping the Griswolds raised, James looked up the slight, muddy grade toward the farm, where he spied a potbellied, gray-clad figure in a gray sombrero rise to one knee. The man had a round, ruddy, patch-bearded face beneath the sombrero, the front brim of which was pinned to the crown. A big pistol hung by a cord around his neck. He held a Spencer rifle in his hands, cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest.

James shook his head as Sergeant Crosseye Reeves stood, brushed a fist across his nose, then turned away and sauntered back toward the farm. He walked in his bandy-legged gait around behind what remained of the barn, then came out a minute later, trotting his
gray mule down the grade toward James. The banjo he’d always carried behind his cavalry saddle was still there, tied to his blanket roll.

Crosseye closed his crossed eye and looked from James to the dead oldster lying off the far side of the trail. “Damn Yankee, horse-thievin’ sons o’ bitches.” He looked up at James. “How you, Jimmy?”

“What’re you doin’ here, you damn fool?”

“Someone’s gotta back your play.” Crosseye’s face swelled and flushed. “You obviously can’t do it your own self. If I hadn’t trailed you from Seven Oaks, you’d be where he is ’bout now!”

James frowned, shocked and indignant. “You followed me all the way from home?”

“Hell, I followed you from the cave—you an’ Willie! Didn’t let on ’cause I know you’d make a fuss. But, shit, Jimmy—the war’s over. And…after Willie…an’ you headin’ off…Bless me, Jimmy, my heart just ain’t in it no more.”

The big, bandy-legged oldster paused. Shouldering his rifle, he said, “I stopped by Seven Oaks just when you was ridin’ out. Mordecai told me about the watch. You takin’ it to Vienna McAllister out West.”

Mordecai had been James’s father’s personal attendant for years, and James had been surprised to find the liveried black man still at Seven Oaks, tending the elder Dunn though he was no longer a slave.

James stared at Crosseye, unable to wrap his mind around the fact that the old hillbilly had followed him as far as he had. But then, hadn’t it been Crosseye who’d taught him, James, everything he knew? Maybe the old mountain man still had more to teach him.

He said halfheartedly, “You best go on back to your farm, old man.”

Crosseye looked off, scratching the back of his head. “Well, now, I was thinkin’ I might just stay there. But you see, Jimmy, there’s nothin’ left. Nah, hell, them Yankees burned me out. All I could find of any use was a couple bottles of mash I’d hid in tree hollows, and this nice new Spencer fifty-six some federal soldier left lyin’ atop his smelly carcass.” He chuckled, cast his red-rimmed eyes at James. “I figure I’ll try my luck out West. With you. Figured you’d try to turn me back, so I wasn’t fixin’ to show myself till you was across the Mississippi.”

James stared at him. Then he looked at the dead man who’d been about to drill him with a Sharps carbine. James sighed, felt a burn of chagrin. “Well, it’s good you showed yourself when you did. Damn, how’d I miss him?”

“I reckon you got your mind on other things.”

“I reckon I do.” James looked at Crosseye again. The old man was stout and puffy, and his clothes were dirty and torn. But James would be damned if those old blue eyes didn’t exude the toughness and spirit that had once been his homeland. Despite Crosseye’s having duped him, James was glad he was here.

James looked at the big, French-made pistol hanging down Crosseye’s stout chest, over his cartridge bandoliers studded with .56-caliber cartridges. “You got ammo for that Lefaucheux?” It fired a pin-fire, twelve-millimeter cartridge that was hard to find.

“All I’ll need less’n I live to a hundred,” Crosseye said, hooking a thumb at the worn saddlebags draped
over his mule’s back. He ran a hand across the Leech & Rigdon revolver he wore for the cross draw on his left hip. “And I got this trusty ole iron for if the La-fachoowey runs out. You figure we’re gonna need a lot of ammo when we get West, do you?”

“I don’t know. Injuns out there. If the stories are true, owl-hoots of every stripe run wild clear to the Pacific Ocean.”

Crosseye’s eyes brightened eagerly, and he nodded. “I heard tell.” He poked a worn, mule-eared boot into his saddle stirrup and heaved himself with a grunt onto the mule’s back. “I hear it’s a prime place for a new start, Jimmy. You know my cousin Cooter once said the gold just screams to be plucked out of the creeks!” He swiped a gloved hand across his mouth and scratched his beard. “Maybe after you deliver that watch, we could fill us a couple o’ croker sacks full…?”

James smiled at his old friend. “Why not?”

They booted their mounts into spanking trots westward.

As James traveled west across the Mississippi with his old friend and mentor, Crosseye, holing up nights in river or creek bottoms or on the open prairie, James’s last parting view of his father’s swollen, angry face as Alexander Dunn had waved the Confederate sword over the balustrade at him, threatening to eviscerate him with it, haunted his sole surviving son no end.

The vision didn’t begin to recede until they had left Omaha, Nebraska, and the vast West opened before them like a giant’s open palm stubbled with sage and wiry brown grass and yucca plants. Instantly, James felt lighter. This was a new and different world, one for the most part untouched by the War Between the States. Maybe Crosseye had been right, and this would indeed be a prime place to make a new start.