The Bells of El Diablo by Frank Leslie Page B

stumbled off in the brush, his guts churning. He fell to his knees. His insides contracted, convulsed, and the contents of his stomach erupted into his throat and shot out of his mouth, hot and sour, splattering onto a sage shrub before him.
    Footsteps sounded from the direction of the scarp. He looked up and saw the bulky shadow of Crosseye moving toward him, holding his Spencer repeater across the bandoliers on his chest. The wily old frontiersman’s big, gaudy pistol dangled from its rawhide cord around the man’s bull neck.
    James blinked to clear his vision of Willie gasping for life as James had pulled his knife out of his brother’s chest. He ran a sleeve across his mouth, squeezed his eyes closed.
    Crosseye stopped and looked around. “Thought you wanted one of ’em alive.”
    “I thought you couldn’t see shit out here.”
    Crosseye dropped to a knee before James, put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “All right?”
    James gained his feet, hacked phlegm from his throat, and spat into the brush. His hands were trembling. Cold sweat covered his body beneath the linsey shirt, buckskin vest, and twill trousers. He glanced around at the dead men. Again, he saw Willie, and another wave of revulsion rushed over him, threatening to buckle his knees.
    He fought it off.
    He wiped the blood off his hands on the dead man’s pants, then picked up the Henry, ran a hand down the still-warm barrel, removing the dirt and sand. It was a beautiful weapon, but he would have left it here if he thought he’d no longer need it, if he’d no longer be forced to use it. But it didn’t look as if that was going to be true. He’d left one war only to be thrown into another.
    Part of him wanted to ride back up the trail and see if he could run down Richard Stenck and find out what had happened to Vienna McAllister. But the most desperate part of him, the part that had killed Willie and had run from the war with his tail between his legs, just wanted to get back to town, to wash the blood off his clothes, and get some whiskey in his belly. He’d deal with Stenck later, in the light of day.
    He shouldered the Henry and began walking back toward the scarp and the horses.
    “You gonna tell me what all this is about?” Crosseye said behind him.
    James only threw an arm up, beckoning his oldpartner. He didn’t answer the question until later, after they’d ridden back to town and stabled their horses in the same livery barn in which they’d stabled them before, and headed on back to the seedy hotel they were flopping at. There was a small saloon area in a side shed off the drafty, two-story frame building’s right side.
    Tonight, a weeknight, the saloon was occupied by two weary-looking whiskey drummers in shabby suits playing a desultory game of cards. A young Mexican whore, half-naked but with a frayed red blanket draped over her shoulders, sat near the room’s sheet-iron stove, rolling craps die from a shot glass and muttering to herself as though to some ghostly opponent. The owner of the hotel, whose name was Burleson, was reading a yellowed newspaper atop the bar that ran along the room’s far wall from the entrance, yawning frequently and loudly as though he wanted everyone in town to know how bored he was.
    James and Crosseye sat at a small table near the entrance to the main part of the hotel, a whiskey bottle between them. James threw back the first shot quickly, then refilled his glass while Crosseye looked at him from the other side of the small, round, wobbly table, both his thick hands wrapped around his whiskey glass. His hat was pushed back off his age-spotted forehead, showing a large mole just over his bushy right brow.
    James told his old partner the whole story of Stenck’s interrogation in a few short sentences and then threw the second shot back and splashed out another one. He held the bottle up in front of Crosseye, glanced at thefrontiersman’s untouched glass that looked little larger than a