Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9)

George Willowfield learned a long time ago
that in life everything had to be paid for. You paid in money,
blood, or sweat or time, but you paid.

For George, the easiest way was money. So he
stole a train and asked the US government for $250,000 to get it
back.

That’s when Frank Angel stepped in—to deliver
the ransom and trail the guy who collected it—until he got the
money or the guy. The government doesn’t like to be held up and
Frank was there to see the debt paid—one way or another!

WARN ANGEL!

ANGEL 9

By Frederick H.
Christian

First Published
by Sphere Books in 1975

Reprinted
under the title
Duel at Cheyenne
in 2008

Copyright
©
1975, 2008 by Frederick
Nolan

First
Smashwords Edition: April 2015

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.

All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the author,
except where permitted by law.

This is a
Piccadilly Publishing Book

Series Editor:
Ben Bridges

Text ©
Piccadilly Publishing

Published by
Arrangement with the Author.

As soon as he saw the train, the lookout
gave the signal. She came around the bend past his hiding place and
went into the cut like some great prehistoric beast, roaring,
clanking, her carriages swaying, smoke bellowing as the two
locomotives put their backs into taking her up the gradient of
Sweetwater Cut. She was a big train, and very special, with those
two gaudy UP locos up front. Heading her up was Engine Number 47,
‘Grizzly Bear’—one of Matthias Baldwin’s 4-4-0s—but Number 47,
impressive though she was, couldn’t begin to compare with the huge
ten-wheel ‘White Fox’ behind her. Great gleaming reflector lamps
above her cow-catcher, bright brass-work shining all around the
cabin with its comfortably padded driving seats, ‘White Fox’ was
one of the showpieces of the Union Pacific stable and nobody was
more proud of her than her engineer, Patrick Grady. Inside the
cabin, he gave the Fox a quarter-turn more throttle, then leaned
out of his window and checked back along the length of the
train.

Immediately behind his tender, Grady could
see the 45-foot express car, with the armed guards on the platform
at both ends, riot guns slung from their shoulders on leather
loops. Behind the express car were two ornate Silver Palace Pullman
carriages, each of them a good sixty feet long; and behind these
was a smoking car equally as long. Five ordinary—at least from the
outside—passenger coaches made up the rest of the train’s length.
She took the best part of ten minutes to pass the hiding place of
the lookout on the bluff above the entrance to the Cut. He watched
her go up the slight incline with the furling smoke laid back
across the tops of the carriages like a fur collar. He smiled—not
with pleasure—and gave the second signal.

Engineer Pat Grady nodded as he pulled his
head inside the cabin: all well. He laid his gnarled hand on the
whistle cord and gave it a long, considered pull, grinning as the
sudden screech of the whistle bounced off the rocky face of the cut
alongside the train and startled wood pigeons burst out of the
trees below in a panicking blur of gray and white. He fished his
big gold turnip watch out of a vest pocket—a presentation from the
president of the Union Pacific Railroad himself—and checked the
time: 2:33. On time, he thought with satisfaction. It was a matter
of pride with him, and indeed every engineer on the road, to keep
to the schedule no matter what. Grady was an old sweat. He’d been
with UP since the beginning, starting as a wiper swabbing caked oil
from the engines back in the roundhouse in Kansas City, working his
way up the ladder to the lofty position of engineer, perversely
proud of being half-homeless (a man never knew on Monday where he’d
be sleeping on Wednesday night, they used to say). One of his most
valued possessions was a photograph of the driving of the Golden
Spike at Promontory Point, the day the UP and the CP lines had met
to complete the transcontinental railroad—May 10, 1869—and the
president of the UP, Leland Stanford, there to drive the last
spike. Even if he’d missed the first time, it was a wonderful day.
Grady had found himself a good spot on the side of Engine Number
119 just abaft the smokestack, and he’d stood there in his high
boots, his flat peaked cap at a jaunty angle and his hand on his
hip to keep him steady while the photographer shouted out the long
seconds. Everyone always said what a fine portrait of him it was.
It was such a career that finally brought a man like Grady to where
he was now: being in charge of this Special was the most important
job he’d ever had or was ever likely to have. And he meant to see
that there were no slip-ups, none at all. He slid a sideways glance
at his fireman, Harry Owney, a thick-set, red-faced, long-armed
man, whose very expression proclaimed the nationality that was
evident in his brogue when he spoke.

‘
Right on time,’ Grady shouted above
the engine noise.

Owney nodded.

‘
We’ll be in Cheyenne by four,’ he
observed.

‘
Aye,’ Grady said, nodding as though
pleased—which he was. They would make Cheyenne, Wyoming,
comfortably by four in the afternoon, right on schedule. He was
looking forward to the welcome they would receive, as they had been
welcomed in other towns and cities across the country: after all,
this was no ordinary train. He wondered if they had a brass band in
Cheyenne. Very fond of a bit of brass band music, Grady
was.

‘
I wonder if they’ll have a brass
band, then?’ he shouted to Owney.

‘
Sure and they ought to,’ Owney yelled
back. ‘At the very least.’

Right, Grady thought, they should indeed,
for such a train as the Freedom Train was so out of the ordinary as
to beggar comparisons. She wasn’t just a Special, she was unique,
the Special of Specials, the once-in-a-lifetime train. Every man on
the crew—engineers, firemen, brake-men, and conductor (although
there wasn’t a man aboard with a ticket for him to punch)—had
fought, competed for the honor of being aboard. She was the Freedom
Train and she was worth a hundred million dollars, if there was
such a thing as a price for the cargo she carried.

America had planned two enormous,
spectacular events to mark this year of 1876, the centennial of her
independence. One of the projects was the Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, opened the preceding May by
President Ulysses S. Grant. It was planned to be, and had become,
the largest, most spectacular, most successful exposition ever
staged anywhere in the entire world. It was said that by the time
the exposition closed on November 10, about a month from now,
nearly ten million people would have paid to see it, which wasn’t
too bad for a country whose total population wasn’t much over forty
million.

The second project was the Freedom Train
thundering now through the Sweetwater Cut en route to Cheyenne,
Wyoming. It was one more stop in a whole roster of stops which had
taken the Freedom Train all over the country as part of a tour
often thousand miles and more. It stretched from Seattle and
Portland to San Francisco and Sacramento and from there to Salt
Lake City and Denver and Fort Worth—all across the length and
breadth of these United States. She had set out in April, and now,
as the nights of early October drew in, she was on the homeward run
toward Kansas City and Omaha and St. Louis. The Freedom Train was
an inspired idea, and it had enabled many hundreds of thousands of
people who would otherwise never have had the chance to share in
the celebration of the centennial by seeing an exhibition of the
republic’s most treasured artifacts. Packed carefully in specially
constructed crates in the express car, under the frowning guard of
a dozen handpicked honor cadets from the Military Academy of West
Point, was a complete exhibition of one hundred years of American
history.

At each of the scheduled stops along the
route, the whole train became a walk-through exhibition. The
passenger cars and the Pullman carriages had been gutted and then
refitted especially for this purpose.

The rearmost passenger carriage and the
caboose served as quarters and dormitory for the soldier boys, as
Grady called them (to their infinite disgust). At the end of each
layover, the cadets would lend a hand as the two experts from the
Smithsonian Institution, who were aboard to answer questions from
the public and to care-take the exhibits, dismantled the exhibition
and packed everything carefully into the velvet-lined packing
cases. Then the express car would be locked and shuttered from the
inside and the guards posted on the platforms at both ends. Grady
and Pat O’Connor, the engineer on Number 47, would get up steam and
move her out to her next destination.

The Freedom Train was a
brainchild of the president’s Special Committee for the Celebration
of the Centennial, a clutch of formidable old biddies whose main
qualification for the job was that they were either the wives of
prominent members of the Republican administration or Washington
freeloaders to whom Grant owed a favor. They had had at least four
hundred ideas, but this was the only good one. It had quickly been
recognized as such, and the idea—to send out America’s history for
the people to see—had reached fruition very quickly. Thus it came
about that rocking gently in their special containers in the
express car were the original Declaration of Independence drafted
by Thomas Jefferson; George Washington’s own copy of the
Constitution; a holographic copy of the four-stanza poem by Francis
Scott Key, which had been written following the bombardment of Fort
McHenry,
The
Star Spangled Banner,
a montage of flags that illustrated the
development of the national flag; the glass-cased pillow, stained
with the President’s blood, which had been on the bed in the
Petersen house in Washington where Lincoln had died; the original
manuscript of Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s famous novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin;
Robert E. Lee’s
sword, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse; the bill of
sale for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; the tattered flag from the
Alamo; the first clock made in the United States (Eli Terry, 1800);
and much, much more: early revolvers; Whitney’s drawings for the
cotton gin; Fulton’s 1807 designs for the paddle-steamer
Clermont,
Linus Yale’s
cylinder lock; Gliddon’s typewriting machine; the first Bible
printed in America; a letter in Lincoln’s handwriting to Grace
Bedell dated October 19, 1860. The organizers had done everything
they could to present all the aspects of the country’s history,
while avoiding areas that might arouse contention or dispute. The
estimated value of the contents of the train—estimated because no
insurance company in the world, not even Lloyds of London, would go
so far as to commit itself to an appraisal of the worth of these
priceless, irreplaceable artifacts—was one hundred million dollars.
But money could never substitute for the loss of such treasures.
Not, for a moment, that anyone expected that.

Engineer Grady eased on his brake at the
crest of the gradient, ready to hold the huge train on the downhill
run to Cheyenne. He leaned out of the cabin to flag O’Connor a
signal to do the same thing, and as he did, Willowfield sprung his
trap.