The Bells of El Diablo

by Frank Leslie

  “You feel it, too?”

  James looked at Crosseye, who was hipped around in his saddle and looking behind, as well, squinting. “I feel somethin’,” the older man said.

  “Yeah.” Vienna’s grullo was dancing in the trail as she stared straight back toward Mount Lemmon rising in the north. “I feel it, too. Like something’s about to happen.”

  “Apaches been bad since the war started,” Crosseye said, repeating what they’d heard from a relay station attendant somewhere in western New Mexico. “The federal soldiers are all off fighting us, so the red devils out here is like mice when the cat’s away.”

  “I’ll feel better in town,” Vienna said, reining the grullo around and booting the horse on up the trail.

  James followed suit, and Crosseye fell in behind him with the packhorse. As they followed the trail’s westward curve through the desert, more shanties and stock pens appeared, and James heard the ringing clangs of a blacksmith’s hammer, a mule braying, a dog barking. A stout old Mexican woman stood in a barren yard outside a mud-brick shack, feeding a baby goat with a milk bottle. A dead hog hung from a paloverde tree near a stock pen beyond the shack. The bucket beneath the hog was filled nearly to its rim with dark red blood steaming in the cool, late-autumn air.

  James turned his head forward, then glanced once more at the Mexican woman. She followed him and Vienna and Crosseye with her eyes, her expression for some reason adding to James’s uneasiness.

  They followed the trail past more small houses and stock pens and privies, then turned right onto what appeared the pueblo’s main business street. More shacks here, but also false-fronted business establishments that hunched silver-gray in the harsh sunlight.

  A blocklike sandstone church stood about halfway down the street, with a six-foot adobe wall around it. A short Mexican priest in a brown robe and rope-soled sandals stood on a red-clay walk in the churchyard, watering some spindly flowers from a tin can. As James’s party walked their horses past the church, lifting small dust streamers, the padre turned toward them, straightening his back and following them with his own oblique gaze.

  Espinoza’s Mercantile stood on the left side of the street a block beyond the church. It was a two-story adobe-brick building with what appeared to be a warehouse with broad wooden doors on the first floor. A wide loading dock running the length of the building stood on cottonwood stilts before the main story, with whipsawed plank steps running up from the street. A slender Mexican man with thick, wavy salt-and-pepper hair stood atop the loading dock, holding a broom in his hands. He wasn’t sweeping but watching the trio of riders angle toward his store.

  As James reined the chestnut up near the steps, he pinched his hat brim to the man he figured was Espinoza. “Afternoon.”

  Espinoza just stared at him darkly, his eyes flicking around beyond James and the others before returning once more to the tall, dark-haired stranger sitting the chestnut rabicano before him. “Sí, sí,” he said with an impatient air.

  James pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it up to the man, who reached down to take it. “Can you fill this list?”

  The man looked at the list, then turned away, leaned his broom against the front of the building, behind a barrel bristling with picks, shovels, and rakes, and walked into the store. James dismounted, as did Vienna, and looked at Crosseye.

  “You best wait out here, keep an eye skinned.”

  “Just wish I knew what I was keepin’ an eye skinned for.” Crosseye looked behind, where a small brown dog was crossing the street and regarding them as warily as the human had. “Doubt them ’paches would follow us into town.”

  “I reckon we don’t know the Apache.”

  “Don’t care to get to know them all that well, if you wanna know the truth, Jimmy.”

  James went back to the packhorse and removed four nearly empty supply sacks from its back, draped the sacks over his shoulder, and mounted the loading dock steps behind Vienna, following her into the store. Inside, Espinoza was moving around the stacked shelves of dry goods, glancing occasionally at the list. He scooped coffee beans from a wooden bin into a small burlap pouch and set it on the counter, and then he did the same with sugar and flour.

  He added several boxes of metal cartridges for James’s and Crosseye’s rifles, and caps, balls, nipples, and paper cartridges for their pistols, to the growing pile of goods on the counter. Meanwhile, Vienna walked along a display of bolt cloth, holding her hat down in front of her. Occasionally, she reached out to finger a length of brocade or muslin. How far she’d come from such fineries, James thought. How far they’d both strayed from home and all that was familiar.

  Only, Vienna could eventually go back. He never could. Even after the war, he’d be considered a deserter in most folks’ eyes—including those of his father. He’d be an enemy in his native land.

  “How do I look?”

  He turned to see Vienna holding a powder blue silk dance gown in front of her. There were no sleeves and the neck was cut low, and the red-and-white-stitched ruffles along the hem were in the Mexican style. She smiled over the dress at him, a glow in her cheeks, which had taken the harsh Western sun well, turning from the pink of an initial burn to a dark olive color.

  “Miss Vienna,” James said, letting the Tennessee accent roll gracefully off his tongue, dipping his chin slightly, “you ah a sight foh these soh eyes.”

  She gave a regal bow and partial curtsy. “Why, thank you, suh. Perhaps someday, I’ll have occasion to wear such a frivolous affayah again.”

  “The soonah the bettah.”

  She laughed and returned the dress to its rack. As the mercantiler continued to fill their order, and Vienna continued to browse, James turned to stare out the large front window left of the door.

  Crosseye had dismounted and now stood out near the middle of the street, cradling his repeater in his arms. James caught movement just beyond Crosseye, in the second story of an adobe-brick, brush-roofed building sitting kitty-corner to the mercantile. A man’s hatted head slid slowly out a window over a wrought-iron balcony rail. A rifle followed stealthily, its barrel slowly being angled toward Crosseye, who had his head turned to peer down the street in the direction from which they’d entered Tucson.

  James jerked one of his Griswolds from its holster with his right hand and slapped the window with his other hand, shouting, “Crosseye—mind the other side of the street!”

  Chapter 18

  He hadn’t finished shouting the warning before Crosseye, who must have spied the movement in the periphery of his good eye, stepped straight back and swung around toward the building in which the shooter was now bearing down on him. The rifle flashed and boomed, the slug tearing up dust near Crosseye a quarter second before Crosseye’s cocked and aimed Spencer roared.

  The would-be bushwhacker jerked back against the open shutter behind him, then fell forward out the window, turning a somersault before landing crossways atop a stock trough with an audible cracking of bone and wood. His head, arms, and legs flapped madly; his boot heels struck the street with a wash of tan dust. His rifle landed beside him with a clattering smack.

  The three horses standing around the trough sidestepped wildly, one loosing an angry whinny.

  As Crosseye worked the Spencer’s trigger guard cocking mechanism, seating another metallic cartridge, another rifleman stepped out from an alley mouth on the far side of the two-story building the first cutthroat had fired from. James heard two shots as he bolted out the mercantile’s front door, shouting, “Vienna, get down!” and saw two more men moving quickly toward the mercantile from the right, crouching along the adobe wall fronting the church.

  James crossed the loading dock in two long strides and leaped down the steps as the two men in front of the church opened up with their rifles, one bullet narrowly missing Vienna’s grullo and plunking into a post. Another screeched past James’s left ear.

  As three of the horses whinnied and tore loose of the hitch r
ack to go galloping down the street, James dropped to a knee and fired two quick shots at his attackers, both slugs hammering the wall behind and between them. His chestnut was just now pulling its reins free of the rack, whinnying shrilly as one of the riflemen’s bullets clipped its left rear hock and blew up dust beside it.

  James lunged for the horse, keeping the jostling mount between himself and the shooters, and slipped the Henry from its saddle boot. As the horse galloped away after the others, James racked a round into the Henry. A bullet flung from one of the shooters nipped the side of his chin, then hammered the front of the mercantile. James cursed as he raised the Henry and, cutting loose with a tooth-gnashing Rebel yell, venting his own mad rage and intending to confuse and terrify, opened up with the sixteen-shot repeater.

  He dropped the man on the right, punching him back against the wall with a shriek and tossing his rifle against the wall, as well. Another shot chewed through the knee of the man on the left and the next one plunked through the same hombre’s thigh just above the bloody hole in his knee. Cursing shrilly, he fired his Spencer from his butt until another of James’s Henry rounds plunked through his forehead just above his left eye.

  James had no sooner fired that last, killing round than another head and another rifle peeked out around the side of the opening in the adobe wall. The man’s rifle roared twice. James knew the cutthroat had him dead to rights, so he bolted up off his heels and dove behind a stock trough as two of the shooter’s bullets spat into the dust at his heels and another crunched into the stock trough before yet another zipped into the trough’s straw-flecked water.

  James crabbed to the far end of the stock trough, snaked the Henry around it, and, propped on his right shoulder, triggered three more quick rounds. Two plunked into the wall to the right of the shooter, while the third puffed dust from the man’s bull-hide vest as it hammered his shoulder.

  “Shit!” the man shouted as the bullet drove him straight back away from the opening, partly hidden by the wall.

  James fired two more rounds that merely blew up dust around the man, who was scrambling to his feet and running toward a dry fountain between the wall and the church. As he threw himself behind the fountain—a statue of Mother Mary and the baby Jesus—James squeezed the Henry’s trigger once more.

  The hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

  “Diddle yourself, you bastard!” the shoulder-wounded cutthroat shouted as he bolted out from behind the fountain and ran, limping, toward the church’s stout, steel-banded front door.

  James lowered the Henry’s butt to the street and pulled the rifle’s loading tube out from beneath the barrel. He’d practiced loading the modern piece many times during the trek down from Denver City, and it took less than half a minute to pluck shells from his cartridge belt and thumb them into the tube and then shove the tube back into place beneath the barrel.

  He racked a fresh round into the Henry’s chamber, gained his feet, and looked in both directions along the street. To his left, Crosseye was hunkered down behind a wagon on the far side of the mercantile, swapping lead from a shooter beyond him, on the same side of the street. Not surprisingly, the old mossyhorn was holding his own, so James ran through the opening in the adobe wall and on up the churchyard walk past the dry fountain to the heavy oak door.

  He paused to listen at the door. Hearing nothing on the other side, he grabbed the iron handle and drew the door open only halfway before releasing it and throwing himself to the left behind the church’s outside wall.

  As his instincts had somehow anticipated, guns thundered on the other side of the half-open door, slugs pounding the door and throwing slivers through the opening. The flashes of the guns were reflected on the inside of the door itself.

  The echoes of the shots hadn’t died inside the church before James stepped into the open doorway and fired the Henry from his hip—jacking and firing five times, swinging the rifle from left to right and back again, tracking the jostling shadows. Men screamed and groaned and grunted, and rifles clattered onto the church’s stone floor.

  James pressed his back against the wall, racking another round and staring through the wafting powder smoke and into the church, whose stained glass windows on both sides did little to relieve the heavy shadows. Three men lay twisted and bleeding just in front of the door, one man’s boots shaking as though he’d been lightning-struck.

  Heels clacked and spurs sang as the wounded man in the black bull-hide vest moved down the center aisle between the benches, stumbling and grunting as he ambled toward the altar and wooden cross and the door in the back wall. James raised the Henry and fired. Just then the man stumbled sideways, and the bullet ricocheted off the altar and plunked into the back wall left of the small wooden door.

  James ran a dozen yards down the aisle, stopped, and raised the Henry once more. “Stop or take it in the back, you son of a bitch!” The wounded man’s stooped silhouette ducked through the back door, and was gone.

  Boots thumped outside the church’s front door, and James turned to see Crosseye running toward him in his bandy-legged way, the old man’s bearded face red from exertion. He had a pistol in each hand. The oldster bounded into the church, stepped sideways, and pressed his back to the door, squinting.

  “Jimmy!”

  “Here,” James said, knowing Crosseye couldn’t make him out clearly in the semidarkness. “Check on Vienna!”

  He continued running down the aisle to the front of the church and out the back door and into the gravelly graveyard beyond. Raking his eyes around, he saw the wounded man bolt out an opening in the adobe wall to James’s left.

  James took off running, leaping gravestones and wooden crosses. He crouched behind the wall to the left of the opening and looked through the gap. Seeing no one, he dashed to the other side of the gap and looked through it again.

  Deciding he wasn’t about to have the same reception as he’d gotten from inside the church, he bolted through the opening in time to see the wounded man ambling into an alley mouth on the other side of the trail that ran along the side of the church—between it and the second-story adobe building from which the first shooter had fired on Crosseye.

  James ran across the trail and into the alley mouth. Again, he glimpsed the wounded man as he stepped into the rear of a building abutting the second-story structure on its far side. James ran to the door, but took his time entering, holding the Henry straight up and down before him.

  He found himself in a dark room that owned the molasses odor of good spirits and wine, his back pressed against the wall left of the door. Beyond, another door stood open to show several feet of dark red carpet. James crossed the rear room and darted through the open door to find himself in what appeared to be a parlor room well appointed with fancy furniture and wall hangings, including a Japanese brush painting of two women pleasing a muscular, amazingly well-endowed bald man with a long black queue.

  The room was empty except for a mulatto girl in a sheer black robe curled up on a dark blue settee smoking a brass-bowled pipe, the gray smoke rife with the musky-sweet aroma of burning opium.

  The girl spoke softly, slowly, her black eyes not focusing: “What in…tarnation…is all that…shootin’?”

  A stairway rose on James’s right, and he climbed the carpeted steps slowly but taking two steps at a time. Blood streaked the rail and the varnished pinewood wall to the left of the stairs.

  “Stenck!” a man screamed somewhere above him. “Stenck, the son of a bitch has nine lives, Stenck!”

  James turned to his right on the first landing and stared down a hall lit with two flickering lanterns and a window at the hall’s far end. Frightened women’s voices murmured behind closed doors. Halfway down the hall, the man in the black vest, leaning against the hall’s right wall, turned with a groan toward James. A pistol winked in the lantern light.

  “Stenck!” he screamed, eyes sparking fiercely, as he thumbed his pistol’s hammer back.

  James fired the Henry twice
from the hip. The man in the black vest jerked twice, the back of his head smacking the wall twice before he dropped the pistol and fell in a twitching pile at the base of the wall.

  James walked slowly down the hall, his eyes burning from his own powder smoke. Silence had fallen behind the closed doors. James glanced down at the dead man, whose eyes were open and lips moving though his chest was still. James looked at the purple-painted door beyond the fast-dying hombre. He stopped beside it, near the dying man’s head, and pricked his ears, listening.

  Hearing nothing, he tried the doorknob. Locked. He kicked the door open and stepped into the room before the door could swing back against him. He stood crouched, aiming the cocked Henry from his hip.

  Before him lay a rumpled, brass-framed bed. The sheet was drawn up over a quivering hump. On a small table to the left of the bed stood a bottle and a shot glass. A half-smoked cigar lay smoldering over the tip of a dirty water glass whose bottom was littered with gray ashes. On a matching table to the right of the bed stood another shot glass and another half-smoked cigar, this one hanging over the edge of the bed, also smoldering.

  The air in the room was rife with the smell of sweet perfume, cigar smoke, and sex.

  James heard a whimper. He turned to the quivering lump on the bed, walked slowly around to the bed’s right side, and pulled the sheet down to reveal a plump, naked blonde, her thick hair piled atop her head. Her large, pale, pink-mottled rump faced James. She was curled up and shivering, and as the sheet fell at her feet she gave a yowl and glanced up at James from over her shoulder.

  “Leave me be! I didn’t do nothin’ to nobody, so you leave me be!”

  A breeze stirred the open window on the left side of the bed. From beyond the window, James heard the squawk of straining wood and a grunt, and then the thud of someone landing in the street outside the bordello. There was a pained curse.