Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7

The big man knew that with no
one left who could connect him with the train robbery, he was
almost clear. No one, that is, except Frank Angel, special
investigator for the US Justice Department. And Hainin realized
that there was no stopping the lawman’s pursuit. He might get away
clear with the money, but Angel would never quit looking for
him
… never
forget. It was a pity. But if Hainin was to ever know peace, Angel
had to die!

FRAME
ANGEL
!

ANGEL 7

By Frederick H.
Christian

First Published
by Sphere Books in 1974

Reprinted under the title
Showdown in
Trinidad
in 2007

Copyright
©
1974, 2007 by Frederick
Nolan

Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: October
2014

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional,
and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or
persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This
ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you
would like to share this book with another person, please purchase
an additional copy for each reader.

Series Editor:
Ben Bridges

Text ©
Piccadilly Publishing

Published by
Arrangement with the Author.

For pore ol’ Angus

The train was carrying $250,000, and the
three raiders got away with every cent of it.

Not that it was difficult.

She was a big old hayburner, belching a
cloud of smoke that rose ten feet above the fluted stack and
spitting sparks that smoldered in the thin grass alongside the
tracks. You could hear her coming for ten miles or more in the
slowly rising foothills to the south of Tularosa, her plume of
smoke rolling back behind her like a billowing banner and wisping
off to the west, where the long, yellow-white streak of the White
Sands lay like strange water in the shadows of the San Andres
Mountains.

The engineer braced his feet
firmly on the cleated iron floor of the cab and leaned out on the
right to see the long curve ahead that eased away from the
black, basalt jumble
of the
malpais
toward Carrizozo, which was still hidden in the folding
foothills of the Jicarillas ahead. The rushing wind cooled his skin
heated dry by the blast furnace warmth of the open boiler, into
which his stoker moved cord after cord of bundled wood, his black
skin oiled with sweat, his muscles moving smoothly with the rhythm
of his paced movement. Then the engineer ducked back in, cursing
the stoker for not keeping the pressure – which had dropped
infinitesimally on the huge clock dial in front of the engineer’s
face – up to its required level. The stoker took absolutely no
notice at all of the steady stream of curses that the engineer was
raining upon his unheeding head. His job was to put the wood in the
boiler, and he was puttin’ the wood in the boiler, and all the
cussin’ and yellin’ in the world wasn’t goin’ to get the wood into
the boiler no faster. Anyways, the engineer was like all the
Southern Pacific’s engineers, they cursed if the pressure was up,
and they cursed if the pressure was down; and if it wasn’t up and
it wasn’t down – why, they cursed just as loudly about that. A man
might as well shake his fist at the rain, and Moses Glorification
Washington wasn’t fool enough to do that. So he kept up his steady
rhythm, swinging the wood forward from the tender and onto the
footplate, where it would dry out quickly before the open furnace,
then sweeping it into the roaring hole with the long-handled
shovel.

It was a short train, a special,
just the loco, tender, and a caboose, with the two Pinkerton men
guarding their not particularly special cargo. Not very special
because, although the flimsy slatted box on the floor in the corner
of the caboose contained a quarter of a million dollars, it
didn
’t
somehow seem like real money. It wasn’t gold nor even silver
bullion – not even fresh-minted greenbacks smelling of printing ink
and secret desires. It was ruined money, tattered money, greasy,
dirty, torn money on its way to the main branch of the First
National Bank in Santa Fe to be burned. Standard procedure,
although naturally enough, the banks didn’t make a public relations
exercise out of it. But federal greenbacks just couldn’t take for
very long the kind of treatment they got west of the Mississippi;
They got creased, folded, wadded, and scrawled on – the result of
being kept in the toes of boots rarely taken off and in belts
frequently soaked with muddy river water. They got sewn into long
johns, which could probably have stood by their owners’ beds
unaided, and stuffed into sweatbands of Stetsons worn by men who
spent most of their waking hours under a sun which could fry eggs
on a flat stone. So every six months or so the government told the
banks to call in old currency and replace it over the counter with
new currency. The beaten, tired, limp, worn-out paper was then
shipped to a specified head bank and destroyed under
supervision.

In between, it was treated like
trash, roughly bundled and packed into wooden crates such as
chickens are often shipped in. It was guarded, if that was the
right word, by some deputy marshal who fancied a train ride or, as
in the case of this shipment, by two Pinkerton detectives returning
east who didn
’t mind picking up an extra job and playing some penny-ante
poker en route The slatted box they were guarding was, to them,
worthless paper and would have still been so even if they had known
that the banks had no record of even one serial number from any of
the bundled notes nor any tally of where any of the bills had
originated. They were just bundles of paper.

At least, they were until the raiders hit
the train.

They took her in a gully just
south of Carrizozo, using the time-honored technique invented by
the Reno brothers and perfected by the James boys. A section of
rail was unbolted, a lariat was looped under it, and the rail was
yanked
off
the right-of-way – preferably, as in this case, just around a curve
that would hide the damage until the engineer had only about three
minutes to see the gap and slam on every ounce of brake he
had.

And it worked like a charm.

The big old locomotive came bundling down
the track, snorting like a fussy old buffalo during the mating
season, and as the curve straightened, the engineer saw the missing
rail and grabbed the huge brake lever, hauling it down with all his
strength, hanging on to it and shouting curses at his Negro
helper.

By the time Moses Glorification
Washington knew what was wrong, the engineer, whose name was Pat
Seele and who had been working for the Southern Pacific since he
was twenty-four years old, had brought the train to a shuddering,
screeching, panting halt, the drive wheels red-hot from the
friction of the rails that had sent great showers of sparks leaping
from under
the locomotive. The wide cowcatcher was not more than ten
feet from the place where the rail ran out, and Pat was halfway
down the metal steps, cursing whatever blasted stupidity it was
that had brought about this near-disaster when – as if from nowhere
– a masked man came around the front of the train and stuck a Starr
& Adams .38 under Pat’s nose, his demeanor indicating that this
was a bad day for heroics. Pat Seele took one squinting look at the
pistol and then one at the cold eyes of the man holding it, and his
hands went up as if someone had pulled strings attached to
them.

‘
Who
dat?’ Moses shouted, coming to the side of the cab. ‘Who dat down
dere?’

‘
Shut
your face and keep it shut!’ snapped the man with the
gun.

Moses nodded rapidly three times
and backed up to let Seele climb into the cab. His eyes were wide,
and his mouth hung open, but he made no overt move. The man with
the Starr &
Adams smiled beneath the neckerchief covering his sallow
face.

Almost before the train had come
to a stop., two men had swung aboard the platform at the rear of
the caboose, bursting open the door simply by kicking it hard.
Since it had not been locked, the door smashed back lopsided on its
hinges, and the two Pinkerton detectives, sprawled on the floor in
the wreckage of their makeshift poker table by the sudden jerking
halt of the train, looked up into the threatening muzzles of two
short-barreled Colt revolvers, realized that their own coats
– and pistols – were
hanging on a hook behind the ruined door, and raised their hands as
meekly as had the engineer.

‘
Up, up,
up,’ snapped the bigger of the two intruders. He was dressed in
ordinary work clothes, blue denim pants, and woolen shirt. His hat
was well pulled down to conceal his hair, and a bandanna across his
face concealed everything else. The second man hustled the two
Pinkertons to their feet and pushed them away, nearer to the big
man, as he bent down to examine the slatted crate with the money in
it.

‘
It’s
here,’ he said, his voice muffled by the bandanna like that of his
partner.

‘
Good,’
nodded the first raider, and very quickly, quite ruthlessly, he
knocked down the nearest of the two Pinkerton men with a vicious
blow on the head from the barrel of his revolver. The second
detective shrank back instinctively, making it that much easier for
the second raider to drop him in precisely the same
manner.

‘
Can you
lift it?’ the bigger man asked.

The other tested the weight of
the crate, then swung it up.
‘Just about,’ he answered.

‘
Let me,
then,’ the first man said. ‘Get down outside.’

As his partner swung down to the
ground, he thrust his Colt into its holster and took hold of the
crate with
both hands. Muscles coiled visibly beneath the cheap work
shirt, and he swung the heavy box easily around, walking through
the broken door with it to the platform outside.

‘
Ready?’

‘
Ready.’

The man on the ground took the
weight, and the other swung down beside him. He lifted the crate as
the other man ran swiftly to the brush bordering the track and came
back leading a pack mule. They lashed the crate very efficiently,
very fast, onto the crosstrees on the animal
’s back, and then the shorter one
gave a sharp, fluted whistle.