The Bells of El Diablo by Frank Leslie

beside the trail. He wiped his fur-covered chin with the heel of his hand. “Who were them polecats, Jimmy?”
    James glanced along their back trail, sensing more trouble galloping toward them. “Later!” He booted the chestnut on past Crosseye, clacking across the rocks of the dry creek bed, then starting up the opposite slope.
    He galloped about a quarter mile back the way he’d come in the wagon, then turned the chestnut off the trail’s south side and into the sagebrush. A low, rocky escarpment humped darkly ahead of him. When he reached it, he swung down from the chestnut’s back.
    Crosseye galloped up behind him, then checked down the roan, the horse’s eyes flashing wildly as it chomped its silver bit. “How bad’s their tails twisted, Jimmy?”
    “You mean do I think they’re comin’? Uh-huh!” James left his cartridge belt and .36’s hanging from his saddle horn and raised the Henry, running an appreciative hand down the long barrel. “Leastways, I’m hopin’ they are.” He looked up at Crosseye as he worked the Henry’s cocking lever, racking a cartridge into the chamber and absently enjoying the smooth, solid sound of the sixteen-shooter’s action. “And when they do, I want one of ’em kept alive.”
    “Just one?”
    “Yeah, one’ll do.”
    James led the chestnut around to the far side of the scarp, tied it to a piñon branch, then climbed the rocks, moving quietly, carefully in the darkness. A cool breeze blew, rasping amongst the brush growing out from between the jutting rocks, and a coyote howled—aneerie sound to a Southern man who’d only recently started hearing such forlorn cries.
    James found a niche at the top of the scarp, from which he had a good view of the trail, and hunkered down, doffing his gray kepi. Wheezing, Crosseye climbed up behind him and settled down beside him. James could smell the familiar, reassuring fragrance of the older man’s sweat, buckskin breeches, and chewing tobacco. Crosseye was breathing hard, but James knew the oldster could keep up with him in a long, hard climb, because he’d seen him do it at Kennesaw Mountain. His potbellied old carcass and broad, fleshy face with its scraggly beard sheathed the heart of a true Southern renegade.
    Neither man said anything for over a minute. Then Crosseye, hearing the loudening thuds of oncoming riders, whispered, “Bushwhack ’em?”
    “Hell, yes.”
    Crosseye gave him a skeptical look.
    “I didn’t ask for this fight,” James bit out.
    They waited. James stared up the trail curving down a grade to the west. Finally, three riders appeared strung out in a shaggy, single-file line dropping down the slope as they hunkered low in their saddles, wary of just what James and his partner were intending. James extended the Henry over the top of the rock and sighted down the barrel.
    The lead rider jerked his horse hard left and angled into the brush up-trail from James and Crosseye’s position, shouting, “Ambush!”
    James cursed and eased the tension on his trigger finger. Starlight must have flashed off his rifle barrel. “These Texans are smarter than they look!”
    The other two riders swerved into the desert, all three swinging wide of the scarp, trying to get around behind James and Crosseye. Lights flashed amidst their jouncing silhouettes as they cut loose with pistols. The bullets plunked into the rocks around James, who opened up with the Henry just as he had that night on the bridge, shooting and levering, shooting and levering, the beautiful piece leaping and roaring in his hands. He watched his targets tumble off their mounts, the horses whinnying and rearing and galloping straight west of the scarp—all three riderless and trailing their reins.
    James glanced to his right at Crosseye. The oldster hadn’t fired a shot. He shrugged and looked at the smoking Henry. “What the hell you need me for when you got that sixteener?”
    “Play your cards right, maybe I’ll steal you one