by Frank Leslie
James had just started to move back around the bed, heading for the window, when a closet door on the opposite side of the bed burst open. A naked man bolted out the door with two Remington pistols in his hands, raging like a teased grizzly bear. The man’s pistols roared a half second after James cut loose with the Henry, the .44 slugs plowing through the man’s bony, floury white chest and blowing him back into the closet, where he sat down with a clipped groan and a chuff of expelled air. One of the man’s slugs had plunked through a window, the other hammering the frame beside it.
As the blonde sobbed into her pillow, shoulders shaking, James racked a fresh cartridge and continued around to the other side of the bed. He swept a purple curtain away from the window and poked his head outside. Beyond the shake-shingled awning roof before him, a tall, thin man clad in only a gray Confederate cavalry hat and carrying a bundle of clothes in one hand, with a holstered pistol and cartridge belt looped over his other shoulder, ran awkwardly toward a horse tethered on the opposite side of the street.
The man’s thin, straw yellow hair jostled around his shoulders, and James could hear him grunting and wheezing painfully, unable to put much weight on his left foot.
James raised the Henry. “Turn around or take it between the shoulder blades, Stenck!”
As he reached the cream gelding tied to the hitch rack, Richard Stenck glanced over his shoulder, showing his white teeth beneath his sickly yellow mustache, then turned his head forward and jerked the cream’s reins free. James raised the Henry, but as he drew a bead on the cowardly ex-Confederate’s spine, just beneath his neck, a loud grumbling growl rose from behind him.
James whipped around in time to see the man he’d fed a half pound of lead weakly raising one of his Remingtons in a quivering fist and narrowing one copper-colored eye as a thick gob of blood oozed out of his mouth to paint his spade-bearded chin. James triggered two more rounds into his chest and another through his forehead, throwing him back into the closet for what James hoped would be the last time, then returned his attention to the street.
Stenck was straddling the cream and batting his bare heels against the horse’s flanks as the horse galloped off up the street to James’s right. “Hyahh, you mangy cayuse!” Stenck bellowed.
“Hold it right there, you son of a bitch!” came Crosseye’s voice.
James glanced to his left. His burly partner was running down the middle of the street from the direction of the mercantile. Vienna stood on the loading dock, shading her eyes as she stared toward Stenck’s diminishing figure. James turned back to Stenck and triggered two rounds quickly, but both slugs merely blew up dust several feet behind the cream’s pounding hooves. Horse and rider disappeared around a bend in the street, the thuds of the cream’s hooves dwindling.
James looked down at Crosseye, who was staring after the Confederate cutthroat down the barrel of his aimed Spencer repeater. “That was Stenck!”
Crosseye looked up at him, squinting. “I figured.”
“Well, if you figured, why in hell didn’t you shoot him?”
Crosseye hiked a shoulder, then, lowering the carbine, scowled off along Tucson’s main drag after the now-fled Stenck. “Beats me.” His voice acquired a speculative pitch. “I reckon I just couldn’t shoot a nekkid man, Jimmy.”
Chapter 19
The cat’s head with pricked ears appeared for just a moment between buffeting waves of windblown dust and sand—a black face with two coal chunks for eyes and small, ominously curved white sabers for teeth shown in a feral snarl.
Then another wave of sand obscured the black cat, and when the wave had passed, the notch in the rocks where the cat had been was as empty as the eye sockets of the ancient, bleached skulls that littered this long-forgotten canyon.
Conquistador skulls, James figured. Or maybe Apaches or Yaquis or one of the half dozen other Mexican tribes that had long called this vast, empty, rugged stretch of southern Sonora home and had fought a bloody, pitched battle here in this rocky barranca, leaving their bones to the wildcats and the ages.
Keeping an eye on the notch where he’d seen the head of the strange black feline, James backed the chestnut out of the small box canyon into which he’d ridden after deciding to investigate an angry snarl he’d heard. The horse’s left rear hoof clacked, and James turned to see a skull rolling off away from him to settle against the base of a large, flat-topped boulder. There was a ragged-edged hole in the skull’s forehead, just above its right eye—an arrow wound, possibly.
He stopped the chestnut to look around at the steep, rocky slopes that nearly surrounded him, climbing to ridge crests he couldn’t see for the sandstorm. The wind howled like a thousand maniacs as it funneled through the rocks and was ripped and torn along the edges of the precipitous shelves, pillars, and narrow ledges. He imagined what a battle would have been like in here, and he had to suppress a shudder—he, who’d fought in some of the worst battles and skirmishes of the War of Northern Aggression.
But it was more than the thought of that ancient battle that needled him. It was the black cat, as well. Back in the Appalachians as elsewhere, a black cat was the grimmest of omens. He’d known a slave family who, upon spying a black cat, would boil up several cottonmouths with persimmons and roots, and dribble the broth in a tight circle around their cabin to prevent evil conjured by the cat’s hex from crossing their threshold.
The cat he’d seen had not been of the common barnyard variety. He’d spied several mountain lions on his trek deep into Mexico from Denver City, but he’d seen no black ones. This one, however, had appeared to be the size of the more common rock-colored lion. But, then, there were many things James had yet to learn about the West. And of Mexico, as well.
It had been six weeks since they’d left Tucson after wiping out Stenck’s entire gang except Stenck himself. James, Crosseye, and Vienna had last seen him hightailing it buck-naked out of Tucson, his cartridge belt and pistol flopping from his shoulder, sickly yellow hair blowing out behind him in the wind. Since that time, they’d seen no sign of the Confederate scourge. Without his gang, it wasn’t entirely unlikely that Stenck had given up the hunt for the treasure map and had returned to Denver City. The cowardly captain had never had much stomach for fighting.
For six long weeks, the trio of Tennesseans had dusted the trail down from Tucson, following the rough map that had been sketched by the long-lost half brother of Jefferson Davis who was now going by the name of Apache Jack somewhere in Sonora. It had been no Sunday ride through the laurel thickets, either. They’d fought two small packs of bronco Apaches, narrowly missed losing their “topknots,” as scalps were called in the colorful West, and endured an apocalyptic rainstorm that had turned all near arroyos into seething mountain rivers, for two full days making travel impossible. They’d also had a nasty run-in with a small band of banditos who’d been out for the party’s horses as well as its “bonito chiquita.”
That had been a pitched battle in and of itself, inside an ancient church ruin where James, Crosseye, and Vienna had sought refuge from another though lesser tempest. At the end of the skirmish, when the howling and yelling and gunfire and the clash of knife blades had died, Crosseye had harvested two ears with his Green River knife and added a pronounced strut to his walk.
The old Confederate now wore the ears strung from a rawhide thong around his neck, with the Lefaucheux. He’d thought that the ears, worn with the bear claws that already adorned the thong, would give him a certain cache down here south of the border—similar to a bronco stallion’s battle scars—where such trophies were obviously admired and respected. The bandito who’d belonged to the ears had worn a similar necklace himself, though Vienna had pointed out that Crosseye himself hadn’t respected him for it.
Still, the old potbellied frontiersman had dried and strung the ears in hopes they might provide for him and the others smoother sailing in this alien, mysterious, and savage land, darker than the darkest Appalachian folktale James had ever heard.
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br /> “You see that critter, Jimmy?” Crosseye’s voice had sounded little louder than a whisper beneath the howling wind.
James turned to see the old frontiersman and Vienna sitting their horses on the trail behind him, Crosseye holding his Spencer carbine barrel up against his thigh. James nodded, pitched his voice casually, as there was no point inflicting his superstition-fueled apprehension on the others. “Just a cat like any other,” he said, reining his horse away from the rocky ridge and the canyon mouth, and booting it on up the trail that wound along the base of it.
“Huntin’ durin’ the day?” Crosseye said, sort of yelling it to be heard above the wind.
“Maybe it couldn’t sleep!”
Keeping his head down and squinting against the windblown grit, James put the chestnut up a gradual rise, curving around the side of the mountain. Tumbleweeds and willow leaves blew across the trail, shepherded by the snarling wind.
He’d ridden another mile before spying another steep, rocky sierra rising on his left, like a massive ocean wave that had somehow turned to jagged stone. In the path of the stony wave lay what appeared to be a village of adobe brick, stone, and plank shacks sprawling across the sage and blowing tumbleweeds. The shacks and corrals and barns were nearly the same color as the rocks and sand, making them almost indistinguishable from the desert itself. They sprawled down across the slope under the formidable, stony eye of the formation looming over them.
The trail rose and curved several times as it entered the town, which a wooden signpost along the trail identified as Pueblo de Cordura. James could smell the stock pens and privies and goats, but he could see no one on the curving street except a few goats, a pig, and some chickens that appeared to be fighting the wind for the seeds they were foraging in the gaps between the buildings.
James was looking around for a barn in which to stable their horses when a large wooden door opened on his left, and a little man with long black hair stepped out and whistled, beckoning. The barn was unmarked, but it turned out to be a livery barn, and the little, long-haired liveryman with a face like a prune seemed happy to stable the norteamericanos’ horses for two pesos each in advance, though the Americans learned this mostly through gestures and sign language, as none of the three could speak Spanish and the little liveryman appeared to understand no English.
The other stock in the barn appeared content and comfortable enough that the Americans saw no reason not to trust the man. They paid him, shouldered their saddlebags, rifles, and bedrolls—they’d discovered few Mexican hotels that furnished more than rough grass pallets for beds—and started out the door. James stopped and turned back to the man and inquired of a fellow American going by the name of Apache Jack. If the little man understood, he didn’t show it, but James thought he’d detected a strange apprehension in his dark, red-rimmed eyes as he shrugged and turned away.
James followed the others off in search of food, drink, and lodging. They found such a place off a side street—a typically seedy-looking cantina from the outside and even more typically seedy on the inside. Smoke from a cook fire hung as heavy as the dust outside. It was touched with the additional smoke of marijuana and ground peyote. A barefoot young boy in the white pajamas of a peon sat on a stool near the back, shucking corn and grunting melodramatically with the effort.
There was a small bar of planks spread across two rain barrels, and about five tables, three of which were occupied. Five men sat in a separate area, beyond a broad, arched doorway, with three putas—all looking like the proverbial three sheets to the wind, one hombre passed out on a rickety sofa that was now more wooden bones than the original horsehair it had been covered with.
All that the trio from Tennessee could get to drink, as had been the case for the past two hundred miles, was the native Mexican brew, pulque, an astringent concoction of the fermented sap of the maguey, or century, plant. The thin, milky brew was kept in a stone jug atop the bar and ladled into clay cups.
The first time James had imbibed the liquor, he’d felt as though he’d been smashed in the head by a brute wielding a sledgehammer. He’d drunk too much too quickly, and Crosseye and Vienna had put him to bed.
Now he merely sipped the brew, having grown to respect its potency as well as to enjoy its slightly sour taste and heady effect. But he dug into the roasted goat meat, frijoles, tortillas, and even the slightly crunchy fried ants and peppers, all smothered in sweet syrup, with the untethered vigor of a hungry coal miner.
The bartender was a withered old lady with Indian-dark skin in a red calico basque and gray reboza, her coal black hair piled in a bun. She came over with a pitcher to refill the trio’s glasses, and James said slowly, “Pardon me, ma’am, but have you heard of an Apache Jack hereabouts?”
She set Vienna’s refilled cup down, then picked up Crosseye’s, merely glancing at James skeptically while pursing her incredibly thin, dark pink lips.
“Apache Jack?” he said. “Friend of ours. Amigo. We’re looking for him.”
“If that’s all the Spanish you’ve picked up so far,” Vienna said dryly, lightly kicking James’s shin beneath the table, “let me try.”
Haltingly but impressively, she spoke in Southern-accented Spanish, James only recognizing “Apache Jack.” The old woman merely shrugged impatiently, prattled off some Spanish, then shuffled on back behind the bar.
“Well,” Vienna said, “he’s got to be around here somewhere, in one of these villages. Uncle Ichabod said he’d be waiting for him near the bells, and going by the map, we’re reasonably close to the bells.”
“Hard to judge distance on that map,” Crosseye pointed out. “We might still be a hundred miles from ’em.”
James chewed a chunk of meat and tortilla lathered in syrup and washed it down with the pulque that continued to grow on him. The liquor had a way of mercifully soothing saddle sores and any other kind of discomfort. “If he’s alive and still in Mexico, we might find him in Tres Campanas. According to the map, that’s the last village before the cache.”
Crosseye belched into his fist. “Hard to know how far Tres Campanas is, too, goin’ by that map. Could be twenty miles, could be a hundred, and with our Spanish we’ll never find out!”
“Quit bein’ so damn negative, old man,” James said.
“What he needs is a woman,” Vienna said, giving the old frontiersman a lopsided smile. “It’s been a while.”
Crosseye leaned toward her with a look of mock admonishment. “Now, Miss Vienna, I’m old enough to be your pappy!”
Vienna snickered. James kicked the oldster under the table. “Ow! What’s that for?”
James grinned as he chewed. “Just shinin’ my boot.”
Vienna stared down at her empty plate, thoughtfully turning her clay cup in her hand. “If we can’t find him, we’ve come for nothing. The bells could be no more than a hundred yards from Tres Campanas, but we’ll never be able to find them. The map isn’t that detailed.”
“Don’t worry,” James said. “We’ll find ’em with or without Apache Jack.”
The romance of their adventure, however teeming with danger, had grown on him. The trek reminded him of his solo journeys into deepest Appalachia when he was still a shaver outfitted with only a Kentucky rifle, a powder horn, a knife, and the education in woodsmanship that Crosseye himself had bestowed upon him. He didn’t care how long it took; he’d find that gold. Every man needed a reason for pulling his boots on every morning, and the Bells of El Diablo were currently his.
Part of him hoped they didn’t find the treasure too soon, as he was enjoying the journey.
He forked another portion of roasted goat meat onto his plate, then reached for a tortilla. Just as he’d closed his index finger and thumb around the edge of the tortilla, something whispered in the dark, smoky air of the place. An object streaked toward him, arcing.
And then an obsidian-handled stiletto was suddenly jutting from the table, pinning the tortilla he’d been reaching for to its wooden plate.
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Chapter 20
James followed the arc of the knife back to its starting point—a tall, rangy Mexican in a low-crowned sombrero and a shabby black suit coat over a frayed silk shirt, a red sash around his waist.
Giggling girlishly, the knife thrower rose catlike from his place on the threadbare sofa. The whore who’d been sleeping against his shoulder groaned and blinked her eyes indignantly as the Mexican gained his feet a little unsteadily and, still snickering girlishly beneath his drooping mustache, walked toward the arched doorway. He leaned a shoulder against the wide stone arch support and covered his mouth bashfully as he continued to laugh
James sagged back in his chair, dug a cheroot and a lucifer from his tunic pocket, and glanced at the knife handle that had just stopped quivering where it jutted from the plate in front of him. “Good one, amigo. Very good. Bueno.”
He struck a match to life on his cartridge belt and touched the flame to his cheroot, puffing to work up a good, glowing coal, drawing the peppery Mexican tobacco deep into his lungs. The Mexican stopped giggling and snickering. His heavy brows drew down over his eyes, as though he didn’t like the gringo’s offhand reaction to his display of south-of-the-border machismo. It had been James’s recent experience that if these bean eaters didn’t have you trembling at the first flash of a knife blade, they clouded up and rained like chastised three-year-olds.
The man pushed off the stone arch support and came slowly toward the table. Through the cigar smoke puffing around his head, James glanced at Vienna. She sat with her back to the approaching Mexican, a tight look on her face, her eyes boring into the table before her. Crosseye stared across the table at James, the old frontiersman’s eyes looking dark but ready for the inevitable…if it came to that, as it so often did down here.