Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (3 page)

Leaven pursed his lips again.
These are smart boys, he told himself. They knew enough to pick a
train carrying untraceable money
– which might mean inside information.
They knew enough not to talk any more than they had to. They knew
enough to lay a false trail. Maybe they’d know enough to realize
that any Pink worth his pay would expect them to do that and plump
for the most likely route – which was north, ever north, keeping
Gallinas Peak on your right, north past El Cuervo and Lamy, then up
into Santa Fe. You could pick up Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe,
you could hitch up with a wagon train returning empty across the
Raton, you could head west to Arizona, north to Utah or Colorado,
east into Texas, all comfortable distances from the territorial
capital. Yes, Santa Fe was the obvious place for them to go, and
they were smart enough to know that he’d know that.

‘
I’m
betting they headed east,’ he said.

‘
I
don’t—’ Ruzzin began.

‘
Oh,
they’ll swing north for Santa Fe, all right,’ Leaven said. ‘But
they won’t go the way we expect. I’m goin’ to put my money on them
taking a run up into the Mescalero Reservation, across Lincoln
County to the Pecos, follow the Pecos all the way on up to Glorieta
if they like. It’s easy country once you get across the
mountains.’

‘
You
could be right,’ Ruzzin admitted. ‘You could be awful wrong,
too.’

‘
Hell,
we just lost a quarter of a million dollars, Ned!’ Leaven said. ‘We
sure as hell can’t be any wronger than that!’

Ruzzin nodded ruefully.

‘
OK,
Morty,’ he said. ‘Play her as she lays.’

‘
We’ll
head down track,’ Leaven said. ‘See if we can pick up some horses
at Oscuro. Then head up into the mountains. Hey, you,
engineer!’

Pat Seele came over, and Morty Leaven told
him about the conclusions he and his partner had reached and what
they were going to do.

‘
It’s
about ten miles, give or take, down to Oscuro,’ Leaven said. ‘Ought
to take us two, maybe three, hours. I’d say Carrizozo isn’t more
than half that far, so you ought to be there in half the time. When
you get there, find the sheriff. Tell him what we’ve done and why.
Tell him to get some men out here to fix that rail, and tell him to
get word to the U.S. marshal in Santa Fe.’

‘
You
betcha,’ Pat Seele said. ‘Come on, Moses!’

‘
One
other thing,’ Leaven added. ‘Tell him we’re going to try going over
Bonito Lake and then down toward the Ruidoso. He may want to cut
east through Capitan an’ head us off.’

‘
I’ll
tell him,’ Seele promised, and something like two and a half hours
later, footsore, weary, and parched, he sat in the blessed, dark
coolness of the sheriff’s office in the Carrizozo Court
House.

Sheriff George Curtis was a
slat-thin, cadaverous-looking man of about thirty. He wore his gun
like a farmer, high on his belt, and fastened to it with a thong
looped around the spur hammer of the .45. His bucolic appearance
had misled a number of would-be badmen, for Curtis was neither
stupid nor slow; there weren
’t more than a dozen men in the county who could
shoot as well as he could – perhaps only two could shoot better.
George Curtis was also phlegmatically deliberate. He listened very
carefully to what Pat Seele told him, then carefully checked what
Seele had told him with the stoker – with a natural courtesy that
took no regard of the color of Moses’ skin. From there he got a
picture of the three raiders and a fairly concise idea of the two
Pinkerton men as well. Satisfied that the Pinks wouldn’t cause him
more trouble than the fugitives by getting themselves lost in one
of the thousands of box canyons striating the western slopes of the
White Mountains, he went out and got his posse together.

Sheriff
Curtis
’ posse
wasn’t what you might have expected. There were none of the
swaggering buckskin-clad
pistoleros,
who had been common in Lincoln County not many
years before. It had no imported toughs from Seven Rivers or the
Texas Panhandle, who could do things with brands that had to be
seen to be believed and who could also, when necessary, turn their
skillful hands to cold-blooded murder, arson, or rape. There were
no hawk-eyed Apache trackers who could follow birds through the air
or fish through the water. A man didn’t need any of that dime-novel
stuff in this part of the country.

Curtis rousted out old Nicky
Cantilles, seventy years old if he was a day, an old
Spanish-American settler from ‘way on back when the stoutest
building in the county had been the Torreon in Lincoln, or
Placka
as they’d called it
then. Old Nick was built of whang leather and chewing tobacco, and
he could still fork a mountain mule for longer than most youngsters
could ride in a wagon. He also knew every inch of every draw, every
runoff, and every canyon between White Oaks and the Tularosa and
clear off the way across to South Spring on the Pecos.

The second member of
Curtis
’ posse
was a half-breed Mescalero named Jim-Bob Panther. And there was a
very sound reason for having Jim-Bob along – he was a kind of
insurance policy. If they ran into any Mescaleros there in the
deeper recesses of the forests that clad the rolling hills of the
reservation, like as not there wouldn’t be any trouble. But if the
Apaches had happened on some money and used that money to buy
liquor at Murphy’s old brewery above the fort or at Dowlin’s,
they’d like as not slit the throat of any white-eye they came
across for the coins in his pocket or the clothes on his back.
Also, Jim-Bob was no mean shakes as a tracker, given half a break.
From what Seele had told him the Pinkerton men said, Sheriff Curtis
didn’t reckon to get many of those.

Finally, he rousted out his own
deputy, Tony Coyle. Tony was a lazy-looking
farmer
’s son,
long-legged and sleepy-eyed, but he could shoot the eye out of a
quail in flight.

‘
Well,
Nick,’ Curtis asked the old man. ‘That’s the picture. What you
reckon?’

‘
I
reckon any man’s a damn fool rides all the hellangone across the
White Mountains an’ down to the Pecos to git to Santy Fe,’
Cantilles told him. ‘But I reckon them eastern dudes might be
half-right, at that.’

‘
Given
they’ve turned east, not headed up north,’ Curtis said, ‘which way
you reckon they might head?’

‘
Ain’t
all that many options, y’ask me,’ Tony Coyle drawled.

He was right. There
weren
’t. You
could head uphill into the Little Cub Mountains – not mountains at
all, really, but pretty big for hills. There was a pass of sorts
between Nogal Peak and Church Mountain, after which you could pick
up Nogal Canyon and come down alongside the lake and then swing
north toward Capitan. But that was hard going for horses. Mules
could do it. Nick Cantilles discarded as unlikely the trail through
Nogal Canyon.

‘
How
about cutting back off Spring Canyon and down into Turkey Canyon?’
Curtis asked. ‘There’s a trail around Bonito Lake that leads down
to the main trail between Capitan and Ruidoso. Or we could pick up
the old logging road.’

‘
I know
the one,’ Nick Cantilles snapped, as though his professional
reputation had been challenged. ‘Goes up through the hills to Fort
Stanton. I’da thought them old boys was keen to stay away from
anyplace they was soldiers.’

‘
Yeah,
you’re right,’ Curtis admitted.

‘
They
could cut south,’ Tony Coyle said.

‘
South?
South?’ Nick snapped. ‘What d’ye mean, south?’

‘
That
ol’ loggin’ road you’s talkin’ ’bout,’ Coyle answered. ‘Turns south
just a coupla miles short o’ Fort Stanton.’

‘
Right,
b’God!’ wheezed Nick, as though exasperated and pleased at the same
time. ‘Damn near forgot! Goes right on down Eagle Crick an’ brings
you out on the Ruidoso just above San Pat!’

San Patricio was a huddle of
Mexican adobes, most of them owned or part-owned by the Sedillo
family, which stood on the Rio Ruidoso
– the Noisy River – a mile or two
above its confluence with the Bonito, where they both became the
Hondo.

‘
And
from San Pat,’ Curtis mused. ‘Nothin’ but a barbed wire fence
between there and the Arctic Circle!’

‘
Sounds
like a good bet to me – if n your train-robbers know this country,’
Coyle said, getting to his feet.

‘
They
know it,’ Curtis said, with a certainty in his voice he could not
have justified if asked.

He led them out of the room, leaving Pat
Seele and Moses Glorification Washington to their own devices. They
limped to the door to see the sheriff swing into the saddle and
whirl his horse around onto the trail leading due east into the
hills.

‘
Hey!
Sheriff!’ Seele shouted. ‘What about us?’

Curtis frowned, his expression that of a man
reminded of his manners.

‘
Oh,
sorry!’ he shouted. ‘Damn near forgot! Thanks!’

He was gone in a boiling cloud
of dust, with Coyle and the old Mexican on his heels. The sheriff
thundered off up the trail toward Capitan, and Pat Seele took off
his engineer
’s cap and slammed it to the ground with a curse that could
have broken windows.

The three train-robbers knew the
country, all right. They had gotten to know it very well while
they
’d been
riding with the Seven Rivers boys during the ‘troubles’ – what
people were now starting to call the Lincoln County War. A stupid
name, as though those latest troubles were isolated and a once-only
thing. Shee-heet, man, there’d been wars of one kind or another in
Lincoln County since the day it was set up, and it had been men
like Pete Hainin, Dick Briggs, and Jim Lawrence who’d done the
dirtiest fighting in them.

Those had been good days,
well-paid days, days when you could pick up a few dozen of old
Uncle John Chisum
’s steers and haze them over the hills to Lincoln, blotting
their brands along the way. The ‘House’ would always see you right,
either with cash or (more likely) credit at the store. You could
play pool or billiards there with the army officers over from
Stanton, play cards in the Masonic Rooms, or drink in the bar
below. There was
bailes,
Mexican dances, where you could always find a plump little
señorita to swing around and maybe meet in the darkness
later.

But that had all changed after
the big fight up in Lincoln the preceding July.
They
’d burned
out the lawyer and the dregs that were left of the Regulators and
taken everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the Englishman’s
store. But that was the end of the pickings. Most of the ‘boys’ had
taken advantage of the governor’s amnesty, but not these three.
These three were professionals, and they wanted no man’s charity.
So when they’d been approached to pull the holdup of the Southern
Pacific and told there was twenty thousand in it for each of them,
they had needed no second invitation.

Yes, they knew the country, and
they
knew how
to get lost in it.

Yes, they knew how to take orders.

Yes, they knew how to throw dust
in any pursuer
’s eyes.

Three of them.

Hainin, the leader, was a tall, well-built
man in his thirties. Hatless, his long hair curling well below the
open collar of his woolen shirt, his drooping mustache concealed a
mouth that looked like a wound. His faded blue eyes were constantly
on the move, scanning the open country around them as they
rode.

‘
Take it
easy, Pete,’ the man beside him said softly. ‘Relax. You’re wound
up like a trod-on sidewinder.’

Dick Briggs was a head shorter
than Hainin, and everything about him looked blunted
– short arms,
stubby-fingered hands, and a bullet head with a flattened,
fighter’s nose. But his shoulders were sloped and powerful, his
eyes beneath protruding brows not so much shrewd as foxy. He had
tightly curled dark blond hair cut very short, so that pink scalp
showed through on top.

‘
I’ll
relax when we’re spendin’ our winnings,’ Hainin said. ‘You keep
your eyes skinned as well, Dick.’

Briggs nodded, though there
wasn
’t much
to keep your eyes occupied. They’d come up through the White
Mountains just about the way that Sheriff Curtis and old Nick
Cantilles had figured they would, the way men who knew enough about
the country and how steep a hill their horses could climb would
come. They had climbed up the slanting steep track along the
southern slope of the canyon, at the bottom of which the Rio Bonito
– the Pretty River – trickled and died, submerging beneath swathes
of bleaching sand or burrowing beneath huge snow-shifted boulders.
Its cut bank edges were a sharp brown against the dullness of the
surrounding countryside. The Bonito ran off northeast toward
Lincoln, but the three men crossed the divide, moving southeast,
and were edging down onto the logging track – hardly more than
rutted scars torn into the spongy, springy grass by the Mescaleros
who came up there to fell trees for old Dowlin on the Ruidoso or
Blazer up near the Indian agency. It looped between the
sage-stuccoed shoulders of two long low hills that fell away into
shallow canyons north and south. They were riding along a flat
hogback, fairly high up, toward the curve in the logging track that
would lead them down in snaking curves to Eagle Creek, which they
would then follow south toward the Ruidoso Valley.