The Bells of El Diablo (7 page)

Construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad had been stymied by the war, so they traveled via horseback along the Platte River to Julesburg and then by way of a well-worn freight and stage road to Denver City, an old trading settlement and boomtown situated at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry
Creek, its mud-brick shacks and false-fronted business establishments scattered willy-nilly amongst the rolling sage coulees. The ragged-topped Front Range of the Rockies loomed about fifteen miles to the west, and both James and Crosseye had trouble taking their astonished gazes off such towering peaks, the highest of which, they learned from a liveryman, was called Mount Rosalie.

Denver City couldn’t seem to make up its mind if it was a ranch-supply town or a prospectors’ camp, as it was as rife with cowpunchers and the wafting odor of cow shit as it teemed with bearded, owl-eyed gents in canvas hats and the hobnailed boots of the miner, who pushed handcarts or rode in heavy-wheeled wagons pulled by braying mules. Whoever the treeless, dusty settlement belonged to, it was hopping, as there seemed to be a whorehouse or watering hole on every street, with more about a mile away in another mining camp called Auraria.

James and Crosseye were taken by the openness and the rollicking free-spiritedness of the region, not to mention the jaw-dropping majesty of the nearby mountains. But James was soon frustrated by his seeming inability to find out anything about the family of his brother’s sweetheart, Vienna McAllister.

He spoke to bankers and business owners of every stripe as well as to several deputy town marshals, but no one claimed to have ever heard of Ichabod McAllister, the uncle whom Vienna had been sent to live with. There were several large, moneyed-looking houses up a side road off the town’s east end, a neighborhood to which the McAllisters likely would have
gravitated. James knocked on several doors only to be met with suspicious frowns and resolute head shakes. He wasn’t sure what had evoked such an evil-eyed reception—his untrimmed beard, his smoke-stained vest and trousers, or all the dust that Denver’s streets coated him with daily.

Probably, he decided, a combination of each.

So he paid an extra nickel for a bath—in used water—at the rat-infested hotel that he and Crosseye were flopping at, and headed out once more, Willie’s gold watch in his pocket. He’d learn the whereabouts of Vienna McAllister if it was the last thing he did. He owed Willie that much. Maybe, once he delivered the watch, he could finally bury Willie for good.

Night had fallen on the third day of his and Crosseye’s stay in Denver. The Front Range was a jagged-topped, black-velvety line against the western horizon. The sky was periwinkle blue over the mountains, velvety black directly over Denver. Piano and guitar music emanated from a half dozen saloons as James made his way to a little, cheap café, where he was to meet Crosseye. As he crossed an alley mouth, boots crunched in the darkness to his right.

James stopped, closed his hand over the wooden grips of the Confederate pistol holstered on his right hip, and turned to see a tall man with an eye patch step out of the alley. He was bearded, wearing a denim jacket and a blue neckerchief, his eyes set close. Working a stove match between his lips, he stopped in front of James and gave a half smile.

“A man’ll be havin’ a word, with you, mate,” he said in a heavy English accent.

James frowned. “Who on God’s green earth could…?”

He let his voice trail off as he heard someone come up behind him. Just as he began to turn his head, something hard smacked into his skull just over his left ear. Both ears shrieked. His knees turned to hot water.

A warm black wave washed over him, and he was out before he hit the ground. His next sensory impression was that of someone hammering a chisel through his skull. Again and again they rapped the chisel with a hammer as though trying to work through the bone to his brain.

“Goddamnit,” he heard himself groan. “Give it a break!”

He opened his eyes and lifted his head. He couldn’t lift it far. His hands were tied behind him. He rolled to one side to ease the pressure on his shoulders.

Tobacco smoke wafted over him. Through the smoke he saw the one-eyed man sitting just beyond him. He looked around. No one was hammering a chisel into his head. He and the one-eyed man were in the back of a buckboard wagon. The banging had been the rough wooden floor of the wagon smacking against his head as they bounced along a rough, rutted trail.

“We’ll stop when we get to where we’re goin’, mate,” the man with the eye patch said, then took another pull off his loosely rolled cigarette. He sat with his back against the tailgate, one knee drawn up, the elbow of the arm he was smoking with resting atop the knee.

Another sharp pain seared James’s head, and he lowered his chin, wincing. When the pain receded, he
glanced behind him and up, where two men were sitting on the wagon’s high seat, their backs to him. The man to the right of the driver was looking at James. It was too dark for James to see much about him except that he had a thick gray beard and a hawk nose, and he appeared to be smiling. He was holding a rifle, and a pistol was holstered on his left side, for the cross draw, the grips angling toward the hawk-nosed gent’s right hand.

No easy reach for James even if his hands had been free. The hawk-nosed man must have been reading his mind, because his beard spread wider and a white line of teeth shone between his lips.

Propped on one arm, James turned to the man with the eye patch reclining against the tailgate. “What’s this all about?”

“Shut up.”

“Naturally, I’d be curious.”

“Shut up,” the man with the eye patch said again, with more menace.

James looked around the wagon. They were out in the country somewhere. The vast velvety line of the mountains loomed large ahead of the wagon, so they were somewhere between Denver City and the Front Range.

A few cabins with stock pens or corrals slouched in the sagebrush. It was rough country—rougher than it had appeared from Denver, where it looked as though a relatively level, dun-colored bench rose toward the base of the mountains. But the young Confederate saw now that it was more rugged than that, with low, rocky bluffs rising here and there. Just now they were
descending a steep grade toward what appeared a brushy creek bottom.

James vaguely wondered if, when reaching the bottom of the creek bed, he could leap out of the wagon and into the brush before these gents could blow his lungs out.

This time it appeared to be the man with the eye patch who was reading his mind. “Don’t do nothin’ stupid, bucko.”

James looked at him. He had a blank expression. The wagon turned, and the angling starlight glittered off a long barrel resting across the man with the eye patch’s thigh. The rifle had a brass receiver and no fore-stock, a loading tube beneath the barrel. A sixteen-shot Henry like the one James had found on the bridge over Snake Creek Gap. Its oiled finish glistened.

Such a weapon would likely be useful out here in the rugged West. But the barrel of this one was aimed at his belly.

“Reckon you’re not out to rob me or you’d have taken more than my guns.” He felt his brother’s watch in the left side pocket of his buckskin vest, and his few coins in a pocket of his pants.

He hadn’t been carrying his Enfield carbine when they’d ambushed him, but his holsters and shell belt, with his twin Griswolds, were looped over the one-eyed man’s left shoulder.

“Shut up,” was the one-eyed man’s only reply.

James decided he was probably a Yankee sympathizer. Only Yankees would pull such a cowardly stunt—smacking a man over the head with a pistol butt from behind, tossing him into a wagon unconscious,
and tying him so he couldn’t defend himself. Raw fury stoked a fire in James’s chest; he pulled hard against the rope binding his wrists to no avail. The rope only cut into his skin.

The wagon rocked and jounced across the creek bottom and climbed the hill beyond it. After another fifteen minutes of pitching and swaying and bouncing over rocks, James saw lights slide up along both sides of the trail. The lights were lit cabin windows. The cabins appeared to be positioned along both sides of a creek that flashed darkly between them in the amazingly clear light of the stars.

The faint strains of a distant fiddle gave James his first pangs of homesickness. It passed quickly as the wagon pulled up to a long, low shack of adobe bricks.

The roof of the shack was shake-shingled. It had a broad front porch, and the porch roof was covered in brush. The place looked old and run-down, bricks crumbling, holes in the roof, a shutter hanging askew from a front window. Smoke unfurled from a broad brick chimney on the shack’s near end.

A bull’s horned skull had been nailed to a front post, and from around the long, massive horns—longhorn horns, James knew, as he’d seen the breed of cow corralled throughout Denver City—hung a sign that read in dry-dripped painted red letters—NO INJUNS OR HALF-BREEDS. NO SPITTIN, NO SHOOTIN, NO CUTTIN ON WHORES.

No sign said as much, but it must have been a saloon. Maybe also a stage relay station, as there were a big barn and several corrals on the far side of the yard. James had been a little surprised by how many such
establishments west of the Mississippi didn’t bother identifying themselves, as though their functions were obvious or widely enough known that painted signs would only be a waste of materials.

The wagon stopped. James heard the wooden brake shoes slide over the left front wheel. The man with the eye patch heaved himself to his feet, the Henry in his left hand generally aimed at James. The man stepped over the tailgate and leaped to the ground with a grunt and a thud of his boots in the well-churned dust of the yard.

When he lowered the tailgate, he said, “Climb on out of there, now. Don’t try nothin’ ill-behaved, all right, friend? Hate to kill a fellow Southern boy.” He gave a half smile as he backed away from the tailgate. He loudly worked the Henry’s cocking lever, ramming a live round in the chamber. “Forrest’s Rapscallion, least of all.”

James stared at him, puzzled. So, despite the English accent, he was from the South. And he knew him.

“Oh, I didn’t recognize you,” the man with the eye patch said. “But someone surely did. Someone, most like, who wore Yankee blue when you were all decked out in the Rebel gray, causin’ all heaps of trouble for them federal boys. Come on out of there, now. A man like you shouldn’t die out here, like this, no reason at all. What a pity that’d be.”

James stared at him, apprehension raking cold fingers up and down his spine.

“Ain’t gonna tell you again, though,” said the man with the eye patch, as the driver and the hawk-nosed man cocked and aimed their own carbines, both maws centered on James. “Let’s go in and see who knows you way out here in the West.”

James rolled onto his belly, got his knees beneath him, and climbed painfully to his feet. He leaped off the end of the wagon and into the yard. The man with the eye patch tossed his head at the cabin. The smoke unfurling from the brick chimney smelled of juniper and piñon. Warm, welcoming smells on a chill Colorado eve.

The cabin itself and the three men around James, holding guns on him, were less welcoming.

James winced again as pain hammered his tender head, then mounted the porch steps. A black cat meowed shrilly as it leaped from atop a barrel left of the batwing doors, hit the floor with a soft thump, and dashed off along the base of the saloon and around the far corner.

A black cat, to boot? Shit, James thought. Was this the end of the trail?

He pushed through the batwings and stopped, both doors propped against him. His feet felt like lead, not from any injury but because something told him that once he crossed the threshold, he’d likely only cross it
again carried feet first. A rifle butt rammed his back, sent him stumbling forward and into the saloon, his boots thudding loudly.

In the periphery of his vision, he saw the hawk-nosed man moving to within a few feet of him, turning his rifle back around. Before he could get the barrel aimed directly at James again, James wheeled, lowered his head, bounded off his boot heels, and rammed his head and shoulders into the hawk-nosed man’s chest. The man tripped his Spencer repeater’s trigger, and the bullet sailed off across the room, evoking a shout from someone inside the main room.

The hawk-nosed man hit the floor with a
bang
on his back, cursing. James had no idea what he was trying to do; it was his instinct to fight honed after three years of bloody war. But the man with the eye patch and the man who’d driven the wagon—a beefy bulldog with a scrunched-up face beneath a green canvas hat—stood before him, the driver extending a Sharps carbine straight out from his right hip. The man with the eye patch had his cocked Henry aimed directly at James’s right eye from two feet away. His own good eye smiled, the corner twitching faintly over the sleek rifle’s cocked hammer.

“Now, what was the goddamn meaning of
that
?” asked a man somewhere behind James. He had a booming, slightly English-accented voice.

Breathing hard, the old fighting fury seething in him despite his previous resolve to live and let live, James turned back around to face the inside of the room. Three more men stood before him, about twenty feet away. Between the two on the right, James could
see a fourth man sitting at a broad, round table with a bottle and a shot glass. One of the three, the one on the far left, near a long bar running down along that side of the room, was holding a gloved hand over his right ear. Blood oozed between his fingers. He scowled, gritting his teeth.

Apparently the spent bullet had found a target.

Two of the three were holding pistols on James. The one holding his ear aimed a sawed-off shotgun at him, straight out from his left shoulder. A leather lanyard hung free beneath the nasty-looking two-bore, both the rabbit-ear hammers of which were drawn back to full-cock.

“Melvin, put the blaster down,” said the man sitting at the table. He canted his head to see through the trio before him. “I didn’t have him brought out here so you could blow a wagon-sized hole in him.” He rolled his gaze to James. “I ask you, Lieutenant—what good did that do you? My men are well trained, and they shoot to kill. Your hands are tied behind your back. How far do you think you could have gotten?” He shook his head in bemused disgust. “Isn’t that just like the South, though? Determined to keep fighting against even the steepest odds.”