The Bells of El Diablo (10 page)

“Heard of her,” said the barman. “Never seen her. Not too many folks venture over to the Ace of Spades uninvited. It’s on the far end of Auraria—Red Mangham’s place.”

James just looked at the man, as did Crosseye.

“What?” said the barman. “You don’t know Red Mangham?”

The whore looked up from her dice, brown eyes wide between the thick wings of her chocolate curls.

“Red runs the Ace of Spades out on the Comanche Creek Trail. Caters to…a certain breed of hombre, if you get my drift. Few not of this certain breed venture over there unless they want their…” Burleson ran his index finger across his throat.

The whore hissed, clucked her disapproval of the
Ace of Spades, then returned to her game, still shaking her head.

“Outlaw lair,” Crosseye said distastefully. “I’m too damn old for tanglin’ with outlaws. Yankees was one thing.”

“As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been too old,” James reminded him.

“That’s ’cause I’ve been old a long time. Older’n my years, and I’m gettin’ older every day!” Crosseye wagged his head. “Steer around it, Jimmy.”

James rose and looked at Burleson. “How do I get out to this Ace of Spades?”

Crosseye groaned.

Burleson looked at James skeptically. “You ain’t gonna go out there, are ya, son? Most likely you’re bein’ led into a trap.”

“I’m gettin’ used to it.”

Burleson sighed. “Head on over the creek to Auraria, and follow the main trail out of town to a fork. Take the right tine in the fork. Ace of Spades sits along Comanche Creek, a little line of bluffs behind it. Pay up before you go, though, will ya? If you’re goin’ out there, you prob’ly won’t be comin’ back again.”

“Texas mustangs, I tell ya!” Crosseye said, leaning across the table.

James shoved a hand into a pocket of his buckskin vest.

“No point in goin’ tonight, though,” the barman said. “Red’s only open on the weekends.” He added grimly, “He and his pards are otherwise employed most nights durin’ the week, ridin’ the long coulees from here down to New Mexico an’ back.”

The whore clucked her disapproval once more and tossed her dice.

James sighed and slacked back into his chair. He poured himself another shot and threw it back.

“Why don’t you take Estella upstairs?” the barman said. “I’ll let you have her for an hour if you split me some more wood tomorrow. Don’t look like I’m gonna be gettin’ no more business tonight, anyways.”

James had been splitting wood for the man in exchange for a discount on the room he shared with Crosseye, while Crosseye ran sundry other errands. They were low on funds and needed to find a steady supply soon.

James looked at the whore. She looked up at him expectantly. She wasn’t bad looking as whores went out here—he didn’t think she was much over twenty when most of the percentage girls he’d seen looked a hard forty—but his heart wasn’t in it. He looked down at the blood staining his buckskin vest, shirt, and slacks.

“She’ll wash that out for you, too,” the barman said.

Crosseye threw the last of his drink back. “Ah, go ahead,” the oldster said with a quick wave of his arm. “Help clear your head. She’s too skinny fer me. I’d snap her like a stove match!”

James thought it over. The whore continued to stare at him, the corners of her mouth curved upward. She’d let the blanket around her shoulders fall open, revealing her threadbare chemise. Beneath the table, her slender, olive-colored right foot rested atop the other.

“Why not?” James stood, tossed a couple of coins onto the bar, and grabbed the bottle off the table.

“Hey, leave an old man his whiskey, you scalawag!”

“Buy your own,” James raked out, taking the whore by the hand and leading her to the back of the room and up the creaky stairs to the second story.

“I saved your life tonight, ya ungrateful pup!” the oldster yelled behind him.

James put the chestnut up the bank of the creek and drew back on the reins. He stared ahead toward a dark line of hills rising against the starry sky. At the base of the hills, the Ace of Spades Saloon sat amongst widely scattered cottonwoods, its windows lit against the night.

James had heard raucous sounds emanating from the place even before he’d taken the right tine where the trail forked half a mile out of Auraria. It had sounded like a wild Appalachian hoedown primed with corn liquor and stitched with fisticuffs and leg wrestling, and from this distance of a quarter mile, it sounded even wilder.

He touched heels to the chestnut’s flanks and started ahead. He’d ridden only a few yards when he jerked back on the reins again and reached for the rifle in his saddle boot. He left the gun in its sheath.

A figure sat along the trail to his right, leaning back against a tree as though taking a nap. But the man had taken his last nap a long time ago, it appeared. A feather-fletched arrow protruded from his chest—or
what remained of his chest after years of putrefaction. The man was a skeleton clothed in tattered duck trousers and work shirt and badly worn boots. The skeleton wore no hat, and the bleached skull was sickly pale, eye sockets twin pools of deep shadow in the light of a crescent moon. No doubt the poor jake had been found in a cave around here, maybe where he’d gone to die after being chased down by Indians, and someone had hauled him out near the trail, to welcome guests to Red Mangham’s outlaw lair, the Ace of Spades.

The smile on the skeleton’s face coupled with the sounds of raucous revelry emanating from the roadhouse caused snakes of apprehension to slither up James’s long legs. Of course, whoever had left the note could be leading him into a trap, but it didn’t stand to reason. Why lead him into a bushwhacking when they could have taken Stenck’s more direct approach?

Crosseye had volunteered to ride along and watch the younger man’s back, but James thought he had a better chance of riding unharassed into Mangham’s den of curly wolves and finding Mustang Mary if he came alone.

Touching spurs to the chestnut, he continued ahead along the trail that curved gently toward the right. There were several corrals in the brush on both sides of the trail, but they were as bleached as the dead man’s bones, and looked dilapidated. Obviously, Mangham’s place had been a ranch at one time; there were more outbuildings off to the right, including a chicken coop and a large hay barn.

As James continued forward, he saw two more grisly indications that the place was a benign ranching
operation no longer, for two men hung like fresh laundry from a cottonwood off the trail’s left side, where it entered the yard. These weren’t skeletons, for they still had hair on their heads. One had long black hair parted on one side. The other looked far too young to have come to such a grisly, premature end. Both men swung lazily from the ends of their ropes, hands tied behind their backs. The black-haired man had kicked a boot off, showing a pale sock. The holsters on both men’s shell belts were empty.

James couldn’t tell much more about the pair in the darkness, but they appeared to have been hanging there only a day or two, for they didn’t seem swollen.

As the chestnut’s hooves clomped slowly, James looked at the main, tall building growing before him. A large wooden sign over the long front stoop announced in large black letters ACE OF SPADES, with black spades abutting each end. “Red Mangham” had been written above the black letters in red. The building was a three-story, rambling, stone-and-wood affair from which the shouting and yelling grew louder amidst the rowdy strains of what sounded like a three-piece band and a woman singing loudly and vigorously—a woman with a good voice, ever so slightly touched with the rolling vowels and petal-soft consonants of the South.

The beat was being kept by someone banging a kettle, and by the crowd itself stomping their boots or clapping their hands. The windows upstairs and downstairs were all lit, and shadows moved in them. More shadows moved on the broad front porch, several hatted figures sitting atop the cottonwood pole rails. They were all smoking or drinking, the coals of
their cigarettes or cigars glowing faintly in the darkness.

Saddled horses were packed nearly stirrup-to-stirrup against the hitch racks fronting the stoop, and more horses stood in a corral off to the right of the tavern, beyond a windmill whose blades spun slowly, nudged gently back and forth by changes in the breeze.

James walked his horse up to the corral, dismounted, and tied the reins around one of the pole rails, glancing warily toward the porch, a little puzzled that no one had contested his presence. If Burleson was right, and the Ace of Spades was indeed a hotbed of outlaw passions, it seemed doubtful that strangers would be welcome.

James resisted the urge to slide the Henry out of its saddle boot. Deciding that his Griswolds would have to do if he was turned away in a hail of lead, he adjusted the belt and pistols on his lean hips and strolled with feigned ease past the horses and up the squawky wooden steps of the porch.

Several men glanced at him, eyes narrowed with incredulity, but no one tried to stop him as he crossed the porch through a heavy cloud of tobacco smoke and the fetor of man sweat, horses, and leather and strode through the door that was propped open to the cool night air with a rock.

Inside were at least a dozen men sitting or standing in a semicircle around the band at the back of the long, low-ceilinged room lit by flickering oil lamps. Most of the crowd had their backs to James, and most were stomping or clapping to the beat of the band, the woman still singing though she’d moved onto another song. Most of the men were too interested in the comely
young singer to pay much attention to James, though he was aware of several hard, unshaven faces scowling at him through the wafting smoke.

To a man, they were well armed with pistols as well as knives, and there were several rifles leaning against walls or square-hewn ceiling support posts. They likely weren’t accustomed to trouble from outsiders here, as most enemies probably respected the boundaries and legends of such a place, but they were ready for it if it came.

One man stuck out of the crowd. Sitting on the bar planks on the room’s right side, he was a middle-aged gent in a red serape and a broad-brimmed black sombrero trimmed with silver conchos. He was a white man, though he was also dressed in the fancily stitched deerskin slacks of a Mexican vaquero—
charro
slacks, James believed they were called. Over the serape he wore crisscrossed cartridge bandoliers over his chest, and two big pistols jutted from holsters attached to the bandoliers. Two horn-handled Green River knives were sheathed low on his thighs.

He was a hawk-faced man with blue eyes and long copper-red hair dancing against his shoulders as he laughed and whistled and clapped his hands in rhythm to the boisterous music. James felt his attention riveted on this man who emitted an almost palpable raw savagery—a wild brutishness that James had seen in wounded wildcats, but rarely in men even in the deepest Smoky Mountain hollows. That this was the proprietor of the Ace of Spades, and the leader of the cutthroats gathered here, couldn’t have been more obvious had Mangham worn his name on a sign around his neck.

James raked his fascinated gaze away from the red-haired gent to scrutinize the room. He couldn’t see much of the singer, but he could tell through the smoke that she was fine-featured, with coal black hair, in a light, peach-colored frock that left most of her milky torso bare above her breasts, her slight shoulders straight and smooth as delicately chiseled marble. A peach-colored choker, trimmed with an ivory cameo, encircled her neck. She was dancing, lightly stomping her slippered feet as she clapped her hands and sang, her lush raven hair flying around her face and shoulders, holding every male in the room enthralled.

She was singing an old Irish drinking song in a bewitching Southern accent that recalled for the young man from Tennessee balmy nights out on the big veranda at Seven Oaks, a band playing, young men and ladies waltzing and laughing, punch glasses clinking together, the air as intoxicating as blackberry brandy.

There were several other women in the place, James saw—a couple of brunettes, a blonde, and two or three Mexicans, perhaps one with Indian blood. Unable to determine which could be Mustang Mary, he decided to risk inquiring with the man standing to his right.

The man turned toward him, looking slightly annoyed. His dark, drink-bleary eyes raked James up and down, and then he turned his head forward, eyes indicating the singer.

The banjo and the fiddle fell silent as James slid his gaze to the front of the room and found himself gazing into the eyes of the black-haired singer, who was no longer singing but was staring at him across the crowded room. She had gray eyes. James hadn’t seen
her eyes before now, and so abrupt and shocking was his recognition that they were like twin sledgehammers slammed against his chest.

The man sitting on an overturned crate behind her stopped banging a wooden spoon against the bottom of the kettle he was holding, and looked curiously up at the girl, who continued to stare across the room at James.

He felt his lower jaw sag. He was glad he wasn’t holding a drink, because he would have dropped it. His heart picked up its rhythm, and his palms grew hot.

By threes and fours, all the men in the room stopped stomping and clapping and yelling. Puzzled murmurs rose. Then all heads began swiveling toward James, until every man and woman in the room had followed the girl’s gaze to the tall, dark-haired stranger, the men regarding him incredulously, angrily.

The man with the long red hair falling down from the silver-trimmed black sombrero glared at James as well, his hawkish face reddening as he said, “What for the love o’ Christ…?”

In the near silence, James heard himself rasp, “
Mustang Mary?
” He must have said it louder than he thought he had, because all at once, the beautiful young belle he’d known as Vienna McAllister turned away from him as though she’d been slapped across the face. Her ivory cheeks were touched with rose. A staircase climbed along the wall to her right. She made for it, grabbed the newel post at the bottom, then swung back around, her suddenly sorrowful gray eyes again seeking James out of the milling crowd.