The Bells of El Diablo

by Frank Leslie

  A REBEL YELL

  “Good with a gun—are you, Reb?” he said. “Let’s see how you do against a butcher knife!”

  He bolted forward, and James thrust his own blade up just in time to deflect the Union lieutenant’s ten-inch blade from his own naked belly. The man, snarling and cursing like an outraged mountain lion, drove forward. The move caught James off guard, and he felt himself thrust up against the bridge’s downstream side, the rails pressing against the backs of his legs….

  James felt the bridge rails gouging into his ankles, bending his knees. He was leaning too far back, and a quick glance to one side showed him the dully gleaming creek twenty feet below, opening like a dark glove.

  He was going over!

  Loosing a raucous Rebel yell that seemed to cut the night wide open, he gave one powerful thrust with his knife, ramming half the blade into the Union officer’s upper left chest. Then he and the blue-belly were tumbling over the rails, grunting and snarling as they continued to struggle in midair before the water came up to slap them both like a giant fist.

  PRAISE FOR

  THE BELLS OF EL DIABLO

  “In The Bells of El Diablo, Frank Leslie tells a sprawling, wondrously exciting adventure that stretches from the desperate final days of the Civil War in the Deep South, to the Rocky Mountains in the boisterous West, to the most savage stretches of Old Mexico. Spiced with a colorful cast of characters, raw human emotion, and plenty of gun-blazing action, the torments and challenges faced by James Dunn, as he fights for personal redemption and a way to give the South one last chance if he can bring back a cursed treasure, are truly epic. Leslie’s writing is fast-paced yet so richly detailed that you can smell the gunsmoke and taste the dust. Not to be missed!”

  —Wayne D. Dundee, author of Hard Trail to Socorro

  MORE PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS

  OF FRANK LESLIE

  “Frank Leslie writes with leathery prose honed sharper than a buffalo skinner’s knife, with characters as explosive as forty-rod whiskey and a plot that slams the reader with the impact of a Winchester slug. The Lonely Breed is edgy, raw and simply irresistible.”

  —Johnny D. Boggs, Spur Award–winning author of

  The Killing Shot

  “Snug down your hat and hang on. Frank Leslie kicks his story into a gallop right out of the gate…raw and gritty as the West itself.”

  —Mark Henry, author of The Hell Riders

  “An enormously entertaining burst of stay-up-late, read-into-the-night, fast-moving flurry of page-turning action. Leslie spins a yarn that rivals the very best on western shelves today. Moving at breakneck speed, this novel is filled with crackling good stuff. I couldn’t put it down!”

  —J. Lee Butts, author of And Kill Them All

  “Hooks you instantly with sympathetic characters and sin-soaked villains. Yakima has a heart of gold and an Arkansas toothpick. If you prefer Peckinpah to Ang Lee, this one’s for you.”

  —Mike Baron, creator of Nexus and

  The Badger comic book series

  “Big, burly, brawling, and action-packed….A testosterone-laced winner from the word ‘go,’ and Frank Leslie is an author to watch!”

  —Ellen Recknor, author of

  The Legendary Kid Donovan

  Also Available by Frank Leslie

  The Last Ride of Jed Strange

  Dead River Killer

  Revenge at Hatchet Creek

  Bullet for a Half-Breed

  The Killers of Cimarron

  The Dangerous Dawn

  The Guns of Sapinero

  The Savage Breed

  The Wild Breed

  THE BELLS

  OF EL

  DIABLO

  Frank Leslie

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, July 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Peter Brandvold, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58709-6

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To Wayne Dundee—

  good friend, terrific writer

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  He’d fashioned the bayonet himself back at his family’s Seven Oaks Plantation—ten inches of double-edged steel cut from a plow blade—and it slipped so smoothly through the Union soldier’s dark blue tunic and into his belly that for a second Lieutenant James Allen Dunn thought he’d missed his mark in the misty darkness.

  But then there was a crunch of bone as he lowered the Enfield’s rear stock and drove the bayonet up beneath the federal soldier’s sternum and into
the hot, thudding fist of his heart.

  The Union corporal gasped.

  There was a snick of steel against bone as James pulled the blade out of the soldier’s belly.

  Another gasp. A strangled sigh.

  James stepped out away from the tree he’d been crouched behind. He closed his broad left hand over the corporal’s nose and mouth, and the soldier dropped his Sharps carbine as James drove him back and down, until he was on his back on the spongy ground. The corporal kicked and quivered and flailed his arms, blinking horrifically up at James, who snarled savagely as he applied more pressure to the dying man’s mouth, forcing back a possible scream that would alert his Union ilk skulking about these wooded north Georgia hills and eerie hollows on this hot, chillingly quiet late-summer eve.

  James pressed a knee against the man’s expanding and contracting belly. His knee was bare, as was the rest of him, clad in nothing more than sticky, dark river clay, and he could feel the hot wetness of the man’s blood oozing out of the wound through the torn wool tunic, just above his cartridge belt.

  The soldier heaved a few more times and then gradually fell still.

  James straightened, glanced toward the bridge that crossed Snake Creek Gap before him. The stream was tar black as it slid down the fold between two high hills, glistening like oil under a gauzy dark sky. The bridge crossed to James’s left—a long stretch of oak timbers standing about twenty feet above the creek, the near end thrusting out from the pine-clad mountainside over James’s left shoulder and disappearing into the pines of the ridge on the gap’s other side. Not an oft-used road or bridge, anymore, but one that, according to General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s spies working behind the Union lines in Tennessee, would be used soon by a covert Union cavalry detail shipping guns and ammo to Sherman’s forces now moving on Atlanta.

  James Dunn’s guerilla platoon was known as “Forrest’s Raiders,” prized by the general himself and nearly all the Confederate leaders for its proficiency at covert operations in dangerous terrain—stealthy employments that included ambush and assassination, tying knots in supply lines, blowing up Union rails and ammunition depots, and setting fire to bridges. Leading such exploits had lofted James to legendary status amongst the Confederate troops, and earned him the complimentary monicker of “Forrest’s Rapscallion.” Over the last two bloody years, the raiders had accounted for the deaths of an uncountable number of Union officers and soldiers and had helped invaluably to complicate Lincoln’s efforts at whipping the South into final submission.

  Northern forces were now being led by General Sherman on his brutal march toward Atlanta in a desperate attempt to put the finishing touches on the War of Aggression that the Union had all but won. The young lieutenant knew this to be true but would not, could not admit it to anyone, least of all to himself.

  The South could not be subjugated by the tyrannical rule of Washington. The consequences of such a tragedy were unthinkable—James’s beloved home state of Tennessee and all the Confederacy conquered by a government no less corrupt than that which they’d originally won their freedom from! Sometimes, as he did now, James felt as though he were the last man standing between the Yankees and victory.

  If that were true, he would not appear at first glance as a formidable last foe. He was of average height, flat-bellied, and slender, with a clean-lined, strong-jawed, dimple-chinned face that many a young Southern lady had found dashing. Not intimidating in the least. Cobalt blue eyes gazed serenely out from deep, hard-mantled sockets framed by straight, dark brown hair that hung now to his shoulders. His voice was as soft and subtly lilting as a spring rain in the heart of Dixie.

  No, James Dunn did not stand out as the cool, efficient killing machine he’d proved himself to be on many a Southern battlefield since marching off to war barely before the first shots at Fort Sumter had ceased echoing. But amongst the Union forces that he’d bedeviled in the long months since, he’d earned the reputation of a wily, tough-nut guerilla, and those eerily serene eyes must have confounded many a Yankee soldier staring into them from only inches away as his guts slithered out his gaping belly.

  It was the crafty young Rebel lieutenant’s mission now to blow up the bridge crossing Snake Creek Gap. Not his alone, thank God. Not yet. But that of his and his few loyal, hickory-hard, mostly mountain-bred Confederates who’d been handpicked by General Forrest himself. Seven men were all that remained of James’s platoon, which had been so badly decimated at Chattanooga and again a few weeks ago at Kennesaw Mountain, when they’d tried to stem the howling Yankee hordes’ plundering of Georgia.

  James was glad to see that the information of Bedford’s spies had proven reliable, as it so often had not been, and that this stretch of road and the bridge would, indeed, likely see a Union supply detail soon. Any chance to further complicate the efforts of the federal troops, and to draw more Union blood, quickened the young Confederate officer’s wild heart. The best indications of the supply train’s approach were the picket James had just gutted and the other soldiers prowling atop the bridge itself.

  The young Confederate, long hair tucked behind his ears and dangling to his mud-smeared shoulders, could see the silhouettes of three men milling around atop the bridge, hear the low, desultory mutter of their voices above the creek’s watery chitter. The faint orange glow of a cigarette or cigar shone sporadically in the darkness around a silhouetted head. The peppery fragrance of Union tobacco reached James’s nose, made his mouth water. He hadn’t had a good smoke—or a good meal or a good drink—in months.

  Or a woman—good or bad—in nearly a year, an inner voice silently reminded him.

  Lieutenant Dunn had suspected the bridge might be guarded. That’s why he’d left the rest of his seven-man contingent farther up the ridge behind him before he’d stolen down the slope with two others—Corporals Billy Krieg and Lawrence Coker—clad in nothing more than river mud to keep their pale skin from glistening in the hollow’s steamy darkness.

  The two men sidled up to their slender, rugged leader now—Coker a year older than James and a fellow Tennessean. Billy Krieg was all of seventeen, bucktoothed and golden-haired, but the heart of a barbarian beat in the south Georgian’s chest. He hailed from Cairo, where his father was a wheelwright. Bowielike knives strapped to their naked waists, they, too, looked up at the bridge and then swung their heads slowly from right to left as they stared along the shore of the creek before them and along the creek’s far side, looking for more pickets.

  When James was reasonably sure they were alone here on this side of the bridge, he glanced at his two subordinates, then canted his head to indicate behind him. Krieg and Coker disappeared. When they stepped back up beside him a moment later, they carried a coffinlike rifle crate between them. The crate was covered with a strip of tarred burlap that kept the moisture away from the small bound bundles of dynamite nestling inside, on a bed of dry straw.

  James nodded, then, holding his Enfield. 50-caliber breechloader up high across his chest, stepped into the river that at first felt shockingly cold against his bare feet and ankles. The other men followed, moving soundlessly as stalking Seminoles, and set the rifle crate in the stream, each man holding a hide-handled end as they guided it along between them. The creek bottom was soft and muddy, and James felt the slime close over his ankles and lift tendrils of sodden weeds and roots up to tickle his calves.

  The river climbed higher up his body until he was waist deep and moving into the center of the stream, which moved more quickly here, with slight riffles and eddies, for the rain had been falling in the north Georgia mountains for three long days, filling the creeks and streams and flooding the lowlands. The Snake Creek Gap canyon was deep, however, and the bridge still stood a good thirty feet above the tarry water.

  James moved slowly, lifting each foot in turn from the slime, keeping the Enfield above the water. A single cartridge nestled in the chamber, nippled and capped. It was the only round James had, as he couldn’t carry his cartridge pouch in
to the stream without fouling the ammunition. The other two men were armed only with knives. So between them they had three knives and a single, .50-caliber cartridge…against at least a dozen Union soldiers guarding the bridge and waiting for the supply wagons.

  Hopefully, James and his men wouldn’t need the bullet or the knives. If they did, their mission would likely have failed.

  James looked at the top of the bridge that was a faint line against the gauzy sky. He could see the silhouettes of the guards moving this way and that, and he heard the mutter of occasional voices. He gritted his teeth nervously, not liking how exposed he and his men were. It couldn’t be helped, however. This was their best means of approach, as both ends of the bridge were likely being closely watched by the federals. If any of the guards atop the bridge looked down, they’d likely think that James’s party was merely flotsam churned by the unstable current.

  The reassuring thought had no sooner passed over his brain before something flashed on the creek’s far side. There was a loud, hollow crack! Billy Krieg grunted. His head snapped sharply to one side. Just as the kid began to lift his head, he slipped out of sight beneath the water.

  “Shit!” cried Coker.

  “Got us a pack of muskrats!” came the shout from the shore, from roughly the same place where the rifle had flashed and belched. “Three in the water, fellas! Can’t you see ’em? Who’s awake up there?”

  There was another flash and a crack, and the bullet fired from the picket on the far shore slammed into the rifle crate with a loud whump! Coker cursed again as Billy Krieg’s end of the coffin swung downstream, jerking Coker off his feet, and water splashed as he flailed his other arm, trying to keep his balance.

  “Hold the box, Lawrence!” James ground his feet into the creek’s muddy bottom and lifted the Enfield. He aimed quickly at the murky silhouette and fired, the single-shot carbine leaping and roaring.

  The man on the far shore yelped, and there was the clatter of a rifle falling on rocks.

  Rifles were precious amongst the Southern soldiers, and James hated to turn the Enfield over to the river, but after quickly releasing the bayonet sprocket at the end of the barrel and removing his homemade knife, he let the weapon sink out of sight in the murky stream. He took his knife in his teeth, and, hearing shouts from atop the bridge, helped Coker move the gun crate in amongst the stout log pylons, where they and the box would be out of sight from the top of the bridge.