Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (11 page)
Read Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) Online
Authors: Frederick H. Christian
Tags: #old west, #outlaws, #piccadilly publishing, #frederick h christian, #sudden, #frank angel, #wild west fiction
Fourteen
The sight of their quarry
had
galvanized the pursuers.
Without thought to the condition of the
horses, Burke Blantine led his men at a punishing pace up the
steadily rising slope after Angel and his companions. Young had
fallen back now to join the main body of the riders: there was no
need for tracking the fleeing men since there was only one
direction in which they could now be heading.
‘
Apache
Canyon!’ Blantine had shouted. ‘They’re headin’ for Apache
Canyon!’
He said it like a man who finally knew his
enemies have been delivered into his hands, and now he spurred his
lathered horse mercilessly, flogging the animal into a faltering
run, forcing the rest of them to keep up with his punishing
pace.
Half an hour
’s riding brought them to the
rim on which Angel had walked his horse, and here Olan Crumm called
the cavalcade to a milling halt.
‘
Goddammit, Olan, why you stoppin’ now?’ screeched Blantine.
‘They’re no more’n two, three miles ahead of us!’
‘
Lissen, boy,’ Crumm said, sweating profusely, his voice
thin from the pounding ride. ‘You aimin’ to go after ‘em on foot,
yo’re goin’ the right way about it. These hosses is damn’ near done
for.’
‘
Won’t
hurt none to walk ‘em a spell, Burke,’ put in Ahern. ‘Us
neither.’
Blantine looked at them all, his lips
curling with contempt.
‘
What
is this?’ he scoffed, ‘some kind of animal-lovers’ convention? You
think I give a damn about the horses? That’s my father those
bastards have got with them, in case you’ve all forgot what you
come up here for. You think I give a damn whether — ‘
‘
All
I’m sayin’ is we got to just give the hosses a breather, boy,’
Crumm said, gently, breaking in on Blantine’s wild speech. ‘Now
don’t let’s you an’ me argue ‘bout a li’l ol’ thing like
that.’
Blantine looked at the fat man
and saw the steel beneath the layers of blubber, the killer under
that seemingly bland exterior, and a cool breeze seemed to touch
his body. He had overstepped the mark and Olan Crumm was letting
him down easy. Without Crumm he could not continue the pursuit
successfully. All right, he thought to himself. All right. There
can be a reckoning when we get the Old Man back. Then
we
’ll see who
gives the orders, fat man. But he said:
‘
Olan,
you’re right, an’ I’m a fool. Only let’s keep movin’.’
‘
Why,
sure, boy,’ Crumm said. There was only the faintest gleam of
triumph in his eyes but Burke Blantine saw it and marked it down as
an additional penalty for Crumm to pay when the reckoning was
presented. Fuming inwardly, cursing his own impotence — why hadn’t
he called the fat man out, shot him down like the tub of lard he
was? — Burke Blantine settled back in the saddle, letting his horse
pick its way up the shelving slope and on around the shoulder of
the mountain, seething, plotting, taking his revenge a thousand
times and then a thousand times again on the fat man in his own
imagination.
‘
Apache
Canyon, sure enough,’ Jud Young announced.
Up ahead, they could see the
jutting pile of deformed rock, the curiously leering expression on
the stone
‘face’, the humped figure of the child on the back of the
man etched sharp by the afternoon sun.
‘
They
sure are makin’ it easy for us,’ Crumm said. There was a trace of
suspicion in his voice, a slight unease that Blantine quickly
caught.
‘
It
worry you goin’ into the canyon, Olan?’ he jeered. ‘You reckon they
aim to bushwhack us? Climb up the cliffs, mebbe, an’ shoot down at
us?’ He let a sneering laugh escape his lips.
‘
You
don’t got to tell me they ain’t nowhere in the canyon for them to
hole up on us, boy,’ Crumm said. ‘I ain’t worried none ‘bout
that.’
‘
What’s
botherin’ you, boss?’ Young asked. As usual he totally ignored
Burke Blantine, who might not have been there or even spoken as far
as Young’s recognition of his leadership was concerned. Young
worked for Olan Crumm; he wasn’t about to take any shit from a
layabout kid who wouldn’t know how to follow a train to a station
if you put him on the railroad lines.
‘
Don’t
rightly know, Jud,’ Crumm said. ‘It’s all jest a mite over-easy for
my taste.’
Young nodded.
‘You want I should
go take a look?’
‘
Might
be a wise thing,’ Crumm said. ‘I’m takin’ it you ain’t got no
objections, Burke?’
‘
Not
me,’ grinned Blantine. ‘You go right on ahead, Olan. Take all day.
Take all week if you like. My Daddy ain’t goin’ to fret none that
you’re spendin’ all this time pussyfootin’ around, now is he?’ He
let his grin widen into a sarcastic sneer. ‘He’s a-goin’ to say:
that Olan Crumm, he’s a right keerful man, an’ that’s the kind I
admire. Never takes a chance. Fifteen men chasin’ three, but Olan,
he jest nacherly wants to check everythin’ twice afore he makes a
move.’
‘
All
right, all right,’ Crumm snapped, his florid face flushed now with
anger at Blantine’s jibes. ‘Let it be, Jud. We’ll go on in after
‘em.’
They kicked the horses into
movement, and headed forward into the open ground lying before the
entrance to Apache Canyon. It was cooler here; the rock formations
leaped upwards in twisted, scoured cliffs, angled sharply, shading
the ground. Inside the canyon it was blue dark and there was a
chill dankness in the air, the slow seepage of water touching the
face of one of the cliffs. Now on both sides of the riders the
beetling walls rose starkly towards the burning heavens. The sound
of their horses
’ hoofs echoed back at them from the stark
granite.
Further along, the defile opened up
slightly, and they entered a wider, open space where the seepage
from the cliffs had formed a brackish pool of water. There were
fresh tracks in the soft earth and Young eyed them expertly.
‘
All
four o’ them,’ he said. He pointed on up the canyon and Blantine
nodded, begrudging even the time it took for his horse to drink. He
yanked the animal’s head up away from the slimy pool and led the
way up the canyon, the others pulling their horses into line after
him, heading for the narrowest point of the defile now, their eyes
warier, the very stillness of the place touching the edges of their
nerves. Some of the riders fingered their six-guns nervously. Even
with the assurance that no one could ambush them from these smooth
and plantless cliffs, they still looked at each other and then up
towards the top of the canyon where the brazen sky watched
impassively.
Gene Johnson was riding drag, and it was he
who screamed.
Every man in the gang stiffened
in the saddle for Johnson
’s scream was that of a man in mortal fear, and he
was looking upwards and from where he was looking, from the place
their terrified eyes swiveled to see, they watched the entire wall
of the canyon split away from the cliff with a terrible cracking
boom, and they saw the whole thing lean over in a slow, awful,
booming, rapidly crackling, thunderously tumbling, clattering,
terrorizing, astonishing arc and then there was panic.
Eight men never even got their
horses moving. They disappeared under a thousand tons of boulders,
crashing giant slabs of granite that smashed to earth with impacts
that made the ground shake. Johnson, the one who had screamed, was
on the far side of the fall. His horse simply leaned right
over
backwards in its terror, unreasoning in its attempt to get
away from the awful destruction, and it rolled as it hit the
ground, and Johnson was underneath it. The high pommel,
leather-covered and strengthened with steel, ground right through
the centre of his chest and the terrified horse crushed the life
out of its rider as if he had been a fly. Of the seven men in the
van, only Burke Blantine escaped injury completely. Dave Ahern was
swept out of his saddle by a piece of rock the size of a flat car
and smashed against the canyon wall in a tattered mess of ruined
tissue and bone. A boulder that whined angrily, humming viciously
horizontal at a height of four feet from the ground neatly tore
through Jud Young’s thigh, throwing him screaming in agony from the
saddle, writhing on the ground in the incredible noise and turmoil.
Dust rose fifty feet in the air and the clattering rumble of rock
moving down the new cliff face went on as stones whickered through
the air and huge
rocks bounced around the canyon floor like rubber balls.
One of Crumm’s men rose coughing from the dirt, his right arm
dangling like a broken stick. He reeled towards the fallen body of
the man who had been riding next to him, and who was cursing weakly
and pushing ineffectually at a boulder which had rolled on to his
foot. The scream of a terrified horse pierced the subsiding din and
Burke Blantine lurched through the haze, eyes wild and mad in the
dust-coated face, shouting hoarsely the names of his
companions.
‘
Jesus,
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ Young was yelling. There was a widening pool
of blood around his thigh where he lay on the ground and Burke
Blantine stood there aghast at the terrible sight of the man. He
watched helplessly as Young tried to stanch the pulsing bright red
flow, his hands spattered with his own blood, and could not
move.
After a few moments Young slid
sideways into the pool of his own blood and lay there retching.
Then his eyes
widened and the man screamed, fingers scrabbling at the
dirt. Young managed to get to his feet. The superhuman effort
terrified Burke Blantine, and Young saw him and the half-dead eyes
asked him for help he could not give. Young stood there in the dust
choked canyon, a monstrous vision on one leg, his whole lower body
bathed in blood and dirt. Then, he fell again and before he hit the
ground he was dead.
Now the dust began to settle in the canyon
and Burke Blantine saw Olan Crumm on the ground, lying curiously
twisted beside the still twitching body of his crushed horse.
Blantine ran across to the fat man, whose eyes were wide open,
staring at the sky above.
‘
Dynamite,’ Crumm said. There was no expression in his
voice. He said the word like a man who had known all along what
would happen. ‘God damn you, Burke!’
‘
I — I
never — ‘ Blantine faltered.
‘
Dynamite!’ Crumm repeated. Tears came into his eyes and to
Blantine’s astonishment the fat man began to laugh. The laugh went
up a register and then another and became a maniacal shriek, the
sound of a man who has looked into the very pit of hell. Then it
died away and the fat man began to cry. Blantine helped him to his
feet, grunting under the weight of the staggering, weeping man.
They stood there in the utter desolation of jumbled rock and
shattered stone, surrounded by the carnage wrought upon them. After
a few minutes the two surviving riders stumbled over to join
them.
Somewhere a bird tentatively tried to sing,
then stopped.
And in the canyon there was only
silence.
Fifteen
‘
You’ve
killed my boys!’ screamed Yancey Blantine. ‘you’ve killed them
all!’
‘
God
willing,’ Angel replied callously. ‘They sure as hell needed
killing.’
‘
God
rot your festering soul, Angel!’ the old man raved. ‘I’ll see you
die slow for this. I’ll strip the skin from your bones with my bare
hands! I’ll — ‘
Chris Vaughan unceremoniously
stuck a dirty bandanna into the gaping mouth, cutting off
Blantine
’s
tirade in mid-sentence. Without ado, he tied a piggin’ string
around Blantine’s head to keep the gag in place, and then dusted
his hands in satisfaction.
‘
That
ought to keep him quiet awhile,’ he told the others. ‘Damned if I
know why I didn’t do it ages ago.’
‘
You
think all of them are dead, Frank?’
‘
Hard
to tell,’ Angel replied to Gates’ question. ‘I couldn’t see down
there too clearly once we set the charges off. Let’s put it this
way: we cut them down a few.’
‘
I
couldn’t see anyone moving down there,’ Gates said. There was still
a trace of awe in his voice. Standing with Angel on the rim of the
canyon, watching that terrifying avalanche of granite breaking
loose from the sides of the mountain, the way it had moved so
slowly, so gracefully, then had shattered into a thousand, a
thousand thousand terrible killing weapons, he had visualized
himself beneath it, thought the thoughts of the men who had been
below. They were killers, every one; renegades who rode beneath the
colors of the Blantines, and who had killed innocent men and women
on the old man’s orders. Even so ... a shudder touched Gates’ huge
frame. There were ways a man would choose to die, and that awful
death in Apache Canyon was not one he would want to have had to
face.
‘
It had
to be done,’ Angel told him, as if understanding what was going on
in his companion’s mind. They had clambered down the face of the
cliff on two lariats which they had taken with them when they
climbed up to set the charges. Vaughan had been waiting for them at
the bottom, his face set and pale. It was then that the old man had
burst into his tirade of threats and been so abruptly
quietened.