Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (6 page)

The flat, damp sound of a small explosion
echoed off the rocks behind the crest where Chris and Gil had
disappeared, and a fat puff of black-gray smoke ballooned upward,
thinning as it rose, disappearing in the morning breeze. Then the
big man, Chris, came over the shaley crest swinging one of the gray
canvas satchels, which contained, as Angel knew only too well, half
of the $250,000 ransom. Behind Chris was Gil, lugging the second
satchel. They scrambled down the slope and across the littered
gully to where Willowfield sat waiting.

‘
Well done, boys,’ the fat man said, a
gloat in his voice. ‘Well done.’ He pulled one of the satchels
open, his eyes flaring at the sight of the money inside.

‘
We goin’ to share it out here,
Colonel?’ Chris asked.

‘
Oh, no,’ Willowfield said. ‘Not
here.’

‘
We oughta get clear o’ here pretty
sharp, Colonel,’ Texas said. ‘No tellin’ who mighta heard that
train blow.’

‘
You underestimate me, my dear chap,’
Willowfield said. ‘I selected this place because there isn’t so
much as a sod-roofed dugout within ten miles of it. We shall move
on, but not because we have to.’ He turned to Chris. ‘Did you, ah,
check to make sure that nobody … ?’

He left it unsaid. Chris knew what he
meant.

‘
We found four dead men and the
one—the last one,’ he said. ‘I guess that was the crew. Engineer,
fireman, brakeman, and two guards. Just like you said,
Colonel.’

Willowfield nodded, as though mildly
flattered at Chris’s acknowledgment of the accuracy of his
estimate. He took one last long, lingering look at the destruction
he had caused, the havoc of twisted steel and broken rock, of trees
torn out by their roots, and the great slicing gouged black scar
down the side of the gully where the engine had plunged to its
doom.

‘
Very well,’ he said.

He kicked his horse into a walk, and the
others fell into line astern.

In ten minutes they were out of sight, and
the only thing moving in the gully was Frank Angel. He picked his
way carefully through the wreckage, trying to find the things he
would need to stay alive. He did not allow himself the luxury of
anger at the death of Little, or bitterness because he had been
unable to prevent the callous, casual murder of Patrick O’Connor.
His first task was to survive.

It took him three hours to find what he
needed: some money, a sixgun, a canteen full of sweet water. By
high noon he was following the tracks of Willowfield’s party. He
had names for all of them now, and that was enough. He was a long
way behind them, and afoot, but he had one advantage: they didn’t
know he was on their back trail.

He walked almost a full day.

The tracks he was dogging led off in a long
curve that first had him thinking they must be heading for
Cheyenne, but then he realized that they were keeping to roughly
the same trace as the old Fort Morgan road that would eventually
lead them up into the mountains of Colorado and to the city of
Denver.

It was hard going on foot. The land which
looked so flat and drab from the windows of a speeding train was
anything but flat, anything but featureless. It was crissed and
crossed by washes and gullies, narrow hogbacks and long rising
slopes, folding up and down like the surface of the sea. Even this
late in the year the sun was hot and unfriendly, and it made the
walking hard work. Head down, not thinking about distances or
speed, Angel stumbled on, antlike in the empty wilderness, hour
after endless hour until he came to the crest of a long descending
slope, and at the foot of it saw Kitchen’s ranch.

Henny Kitchen was a pernickety old loner
with the permanently bowed legs and muscular arms of a man who has
spent his life on horseback; his skin was the color and texture of
saddle leather and his scraggy beard was a salt-and-pepper mixture
of colors: gray and brown and white.

He watched Angel come down the long slope,
his shrewd pale eyes narrowed, keeping the stumbling figure covered
with the cocked Henry rifle he had gone ostentatiously into the
cabin to fetch. When Angel got near enough for him to see the
walking man’s condition, Kitchen laid down the rifle with an
exasperated grunt and hurried to help the approaching man.

Within an hour, Angel was sitting in a big
old horsehair-stuffed chair with his feet propped up. Kitchen had
bathed him, slapped some strong-smelling salve on his burns,
spooned a steaming bowlful of what tasted like deer stew into his
unprotesting mouth, and topped that up with two mugs of
treacle-thick coffee and as many slugs of snakehead whiskey.

‘
B’Gawd an’ Moses,’ Kitchen said
finally, sitting back on his haunches and squinting at his patient.
‘Do b’lieve you’ll live, boyo.’ Angel managed a grin.

‘
Anyone who can survive two slugs of
whatever was in that bottle isn’t all that easy to kill off,’ he
said. ‘What the hell was it?’

‘
He-he,’ Kitchen snickered. ‘Make ’er
m’self. Pooty good stuff, hey?’ He took a solid slug of the liquor
himself, as if Angel had reminded him of its existence.

‘
Pooty good,’ Angel grinned. He tried
to sit up, and long slow pains pulsed through his body. ‘Aaah,’ he
said, softly.

‘
You may be in a hurry, boyo,’ Kitchen
said. ‘But you ain’t goin’ anyplace. What the hell was it hit you
anyways, a train?’

Angel shook his head, startled for a moment
by the accuracy of the old loner’s guess. ‘I got to move on, Mr.
Kitchen,’ he said.

‘
Henny,’ Kitchen said. ‘Call me Henny.
Listen, boyo, you got more bruises on you than a feller been
stampeded on. May even have a couple bones bruk for all I know. I
ain’t no medic. But I can tell you one thing—you ain’t about to
move on. No sir Matilda!’

‘
Listen,’ Angel began, weakly. Kitchen
ignored him.

‘
Y’ever hear about that feller in the
Bible?’ Kitchen was saying, as he busied himself scouring out a pan
with a stiff brush. ‘Met Death on his way someplace. “Howdy,” sez
Death, polite as you please. “Jumpin’Jesus!” sez this feller, an’
he takes off down the road like someone set fire to his ass. Death
watches him go a-runnin’, and shakes his head, sad-like. “What in
tarnation’s a-bitin’ him, anyways?” Death sez. “He ain’t got no
reason to be afeared o’ me today. It’s tomorrow I got his
appointment down for”.’

He slapped his thigh, and looked up to see
if Angel was listening. ‘What d’ye think o’that, then?’ he
cackled.

There was no reply. Angel had already fallen
asleep, and Kitchen let him sleep on until he woke naturally,
around dawn, as the old man started clattering about to boil up
some coffee and get the day up and moving.

‘
Well, well, Sleepin’ Beauty awakes,’
Kitchen grinned. ‘How you feelin’?’

Angel sat up. He felt a damned sight better
and he said so. He got up off the chair in which he’d slept, easing
his stiffened legs. He grimaced as his feet touched the floor, and
remembered how swollen they had been. He wasn’t accustomed to that
kind of walking. After he’d hobbled about for a few minutes, he
began to feel halfway normal and asked Kitchen some questions as he
nursed the tin mug of coffee that the old man handed him.

‘
Five o’ them, you say?’ Kitchen
mused.

Angel nodded, and repeated the description
of the fat man.

‘
One o’ them had gray hair alongside
his head, so,’ he told Kitchen, using his hands to describe Falco’s
distinctive hair. ‘Another one was short, tubby-lookin’. Might’ve
been a Texan.’

‘
Naw, boyo,’ Kitchen said. ‘I’d sure
as hell recall seein’ a bunch like that. Mind you, if they was
headin’ for Denver like you say, they’d probably cut over in back
o’ the hills toward Fort Morgan, bed down there a
night.’

‘
They might have swung north,’ Angel
hazarded a guess.

‘
Not damn’ likely,’ Kitchen
contradicted. ‘Nothin’ up there but ten thousand hostiles with
blood in their eye. They’d be double-damn fools if they wuz to head
north.’

Angel nodded. Since the Custer disaster in
June, Wyoming, Montana, and even Idaho were dangerous territories
to traverse. Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, all the Plains tribes were
in an incendiary mood and a small band of men, no matter how
well-armed, would not get far across their lands. They had been
promised their hunting grounds for as long as the grass grew, and
it looked as if they were planning to keep them—any damned way they
could.

More than that, though: there was nowhere up
there for Willowfield and his gang to go. Men with money burning
holes in their jeans would head for a big town where they could
find bright lights, soft beds, willing women. The nearest supply of
those would be in Denver and it was on Denver he decided to bet his
roll.

Kitchen made a living trading horses. He
bought badly used animals from trail-herders at Ogallala or the
Army at Fort Sedgwick, paying a few dollars a head. Then he would
drive the animals to his place and nurse them back to health. Most
of the time he was able to do such a good job that he could sell
them back to the Army at a handsome profit. It gave his contrary
soul pleasure to take money from the same people who had abandoned
the horses as useless. He was happy to sell Angel a big rangy roan
with powerful shoulders and legs that looked sturdy enough to do
farm work. They worked out a deal that included an old McLellan
saddle, a bedroll, and a bridle, but Kitchen wouldn’t take a cent
for his hospitality.

‘
Hell’s teeth, boyo,’ he said.
‘Pleasure to have somebody to yatter at. You sure you’re in shape
to ride?’

‘
No, I’m not,’ Angel said, managing a
grin. ‘But I aim to get at it anyway.’

‘
You must want to ketch up with them
jaspers real bad,’ Kitchen observed. ‘I wish you luck of
it.’

‘
Thanks, Henny,’ Angel said, meaning
it. ‘For everything.’

‘
Aw, go on an’ git!’ Kitchen said. He
slapped the roan across the rump and the animal moved off at a
trot, snorting with surprise. Kitchen stood watching as Angel
lifted the horse’s stride to a canter, and not until all he could
see was the soft plume of dust marking the rider’s passage did he
turn away and return to his chores.

‘
B’Gawd an’ Moses,’ he muttered.
‘Whoever them fellers is, I sure am glad I ain’t one of
’em!’

~*~

He picked up their trail at Two Mile
Creek.

A man who ran a small spread up on the
divide, Dan Callow, remembered the fat man and the boy. He had sold
the riders some grain for their horses, which they had paid for in
good clean American greenbacks. Angel grinned at the thought of
that as he headed the big roan up into the foothills. The trail ran
along the south Platte, which looked about as muddy as usual—too
thick to drink, too thin to plow—and he could see it snaking up
into the mountains ahead like a skein of string left unrolled
behind some meandering wagon. The mountains lay ahead in rolling
pile after soaring pinnacle, slate gray and deep purple, not the
shining mountains of the summer but sullen, heavy, their peaks
already capped with snow. He checked off in his mind the mountain
torrents that raced down to the river whose trace he was now
following: Cache-le-Poudre, Clear Creek, St. Vrain’s Fork, Big
Thompson, and Little Thompson. A man could take trout up there with
his bare hands. The air was sharp, the sky clear. It felt good to
be out in the open again: lately he had been too much in cities,
and had missed the winey taste of the mountain air.

He camped overnight in a clearing that stood
sheltered beneath a frowning stone bluff in the edge of the pine
forest. Two wood pigeons—which advertised their presence by noisily
calling each other in the woods—provided him with supper. He dug
heavy clay from the riverbank, making two heavy balls in which the
whole bird, feathers and all, disappeared. These clay balls he laid
in the glowing red center of his small fire, and waited until the
clay was hard and brittle. Using a stick he rolled the clay balls
out of the fire and let them cool slightly before tapping them,
hard, with the barrel of his sixgun. The clay balls broke open, and
the steaming pigeons, feathers stripped away by the baking, were
ready to eat. He cleaned them swiftly with his knife and devoured
the soft flesh with relish. He wished he had some beer. A glass of
beer would have completed a meal that Delmonico’s couldn’t have
improved. Next morning he pushed the roan harder, and made Denver
halfway through the day. He walked the horse through the unlovely
outskirts of the city, past the freighting corrals and teamster
outfits, the tent shanties and the stockyards, the sawmills and the
builder’s merchants, making for the most famous rendezvous in
Denver. This was a huge corral next to which stood a saloon called
The Mammoth. It wasn’t as big as its name claimed, and the immense,
and not particularly accurate, painting of the creature from which
the saloon took its name was peeled and faded on the unlovely false
front. Nevertheless, the place was crowded at every hour of the day
and night with incoming or departing travelers, wagon-masters
looking for help, riders looking for work, people wanting to leave
messages or pick them up, people hoping to buy or sell cattle or
horses or mules or oxen or wagons or whatever goods they had
carried this far and wished to carry no further. The place smelled
like a stable. Angel bought himself a beer and moved around,
listening, getting used to the noise and the sharp stink of sweat
and tobacco again. Once or twice he stopped and asked someone a
question, but usually met only a shrug, sometimes a shake of the
head, once in a while a spoken negative. Nobody had seen his men.
He drank another beer, and asked the bartender where the express
office was. On Central, the man said, his face slick with
perspiration; right next to the American Hotel.