Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5)

by Frederick H. Christian

  ‘Come on,’ Angel said, leading the way across the flat ground, quartering in the direction of the plank bridge at the end of Texas Street, and the rear of the corral behind the general store.

  ‘Where the hell we going?’ wheezed Howie Cade.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Angel snapped. ‘Where the hell do you think?’ He moved on at a wolf like lope across the empty ground, his eyes on the bayed wagons in the empty corral ahead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Time to go,’ Larry Hugess told his men.

  He permitted himself a smile at the expression of relief that flooded Johnny Gardner’s face and which the saloonkeeper quickly stifled in fear. Gardner’s reaction was his testing of the town’s temperature: they would always be relieved to hear that he was going, never dare to challenge his desire to stay. Madison was his town again. The knowledge gave him a strong, warm feeling in his belly. The whole thing was over. These sheep wouldn’t give him any trouble.

  He led the way out into the afternoon sunshine, and his brother stepped up into the saddle of the horse that had been brought for him. Larry Hugess grabbed the pommel of his ornate saddle and swung aboard the gray. His six riders followed suit.

  ‘I don’t see Ken Finstatt no place,’ Burt Hugess offered.

  ‘Probably waiting for us up by the warehouse,’ his brother replied. He kneed the horse into movement and led the cavalcade across the T-junction at Front and Texas, the Oriental on their right, their shadows long and black on the hoof-pocked street.

  Howie Cade stepped into the street: he had a carbine canted across his hip and the barrel of it was pointed straight at Larry Hugess. ‘Leavin’ so soon?’ Howie asked.

  The eight men had reined in their horses in astonishment when he appeared. Larry Hugess stared at the deputy as if he truly were a ghost. Before he could speak, a dry cough from behind the group made him swivel his head around. There, in the middle of the street behind them, was Dan Sheridan. He had a six-gun in his left hand It was cocked and pointed at the Flying H men.

  ‘What the hell?’ hissed Burt Hugess.

  ‘I’ll count five,’ Howie Cade was saying. ‘By that time I want all your guns and belts in the dirt. One.’

  Larry Hugess’s mind was as busy as a rat in a maze. He had already considered and rejected half a dozen ploys, asked himself and answered as many questions when Howie counted out the second number.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘Three,’ Howie said. ‘Let it be nice and easy now.’

  ‘All right,’ Larry Hugess said. Then he rolled out of the saddle his hand yanking out the gun in the holster at his side. The gray, suddenly tortured by the wrenching pull on the chileno bit, screamed shrilly and reared up, spooking the other horses into a milling bunch that was galvanized into a flat gallop by the simultaneous explosions of Larry Hugess’s and Howie Cade’s guns. Howie’s shot whacked the rider who’d been immediately behind Larry Hugess out of the saddle in a windmilling pile. At the same time Larry Hugess’s shot hit Howie’s right hand, smashing through it and into his hip, hurling him in a bundle against the solid upright of the hitching rail outside the Oriental.

  Burt Hugess and three of the Flying H riders were already moving hard up the street toward the safety of the Hugess warehouse as behind them Dan Sheridan turned loose with the handgun. His four rapidly fired shots sounded flat and undangerous in the open sunlight but one of them tore Stu Bennick out of his saddle, dead before he even hit the ground, and another bored an ugly hole in the leg of Jim Landy before bursting through the leather fenders of his saddle and gut-shooting the roan mare he was riding, knocking the animal into a slewed heap in the street. It lay kicking and whinnying as Landy rolled off the horse and thumbed a shot at Sheridan, who was out in the middle of the T-junction and running forward, a movement that probably saved the marshal’s life. Landy’s hasty shot tipped the right-hand side of the frontal bulge of Sheridan’s forehead, cutting a searing burn in his skin and knocking the lawman off his feet, momentarily stunned. In that same moment, Larry Hugess tried for him from the porch of the hotel, and his aimed slug whined viciously through the space that moments ago Sheridan had been filling.

  On one knee, Sheridan pawed away a trickle of blood from his right eye and thumbed back the hammer. His placed shot hit Landy just as the Flying H man was getting clear of the thrashing roan, driving Landy down flat into the unheeding dust. Then as Sheridan whirled toward where Larry Hugess lay prone alongside the boardwalk around the front of the hotel, he was knocked off his feet as the whole world went up in the air and came down again.

  Frank Angel had planned hastily but effectively. With Sheridan at the back, Howie in the center, the only direction in which the Flying H boys could break would be toward the depot, and he had anticipated that by running flat out across the open ground behind the saloon and the houses on the eastern edge of Front. Where the pathway down from the church led to Front Street he skidded to a stop. It wasn’t more than ten yards from where old Nate Ridlow had been bushwhacked, and Angel’s lips curled into a grim smile at the savage irony of what he was going to do. He fired the short fuse on the three sticks of dynamite just as Burt Hugess and the three Flying H riders burst into their desperate gallop toward the safety of the Hugess warehouse. In one smooth sweet movement, Angel lobbed the dynamite he’d taken from Ridlow’s wagons beneath the feet of the oncoming riders and went forward on his belly, the carbine cocked, placing his shot squarely through the forehead of Burt Hugess’s horse. In that same moment Ed Barth and Bill Wessel yanked their horses back on their haunches, stabbing hands toward the guns at their side and even getting them out in the long, empty moment when it seemed to Angel that the world was holding its breath awaiting the explosion.

  The dynamite went off with a solid, heavy, flat bang, and a fountain of dirt and dust erupted forty feet into the air in the center of Front Street. The air was full of whickering pieces of gravel and softer, wetter things which splattered against the walls of the houses and the hotel. Every window on the street for twenty-five yards in either direction bulged outward and then smashed inward in flying smithereens a thousandth of a second later, filling the air with the jangling clatter of falling glass. Angel could see a man floundering about on hands and knees in the dirt, blood streaking his face and hands. The dust hung like a pall, drifting slowly eastward across the street, shadowing the sun. As it cleared, Angel could see Burt Hugess off to one side, lying flat on his back not far from the dead body of his horse, which had dropped like a stone on the spot where Angel had shot it. Bill Wessel, blinded by the explosion, was groping around for something familiar to touch not two yards from the flayed corpse of his horse which lay across the tattered remnants of Ed Barth’s body. Of the third man, Jack Coltrane, there was no sign at all.

  As Angel came running across the street, Bill Wessel pawed enough dirt from his eyes to see the moving figure, and cursing mindlessly, tried to scrabble toward the six-gun he had dropped in the dirt. He had almost closed his fingers around the butt when Frank Angel was on him like a tiger, and the savage sideswipe of the carbine barrel stretched Wessel flat in the dirt, his right leg kicking in reflex, a bright new trace of blood across his broken forehead.

  Angel moved fast to where Burt Hugess lay in the dusty street, his hand quickly checking the soft point in the carotid artery. Nodding, he looked around with narrowed eyes for Burt’s brother, but of Larry Hugess he could see no sign.

  The street looked like a battlefield.

  There were two dead men slumped in inhumanly twisted shapes between where Angel crouched alongside the unconscious form of Burt Hugess and the Palace Saloon. Three dead horses. He shook his head: in those few terrible minutes, the proud strength of the Flying H had been broken like a butterfly by an iron wagon wheel. Where the hell was Larry Hugess?

  He saw Sheridan coming up the street on lagging feet, noted the trickle of blood at the marshal’s temple. Sheridan looked exhausted. Angel gave him a wave: OK, it said.
The marshal acknowledged it and instead of coming the rest of the way, veered across toward the steps in front of the entrance to the Oriental, where Howie Cade was now sitting up, holding his belly with hands slick with blood. The last traces of the dust shifted away and the sun was strong again. When Angel looked up, Larry Hugess was there on the porch of the hotel and Sherry Hardin was tight close against him, her right arm jerked up high behind her back, her face twisted in a mixture of pain, fear, and chagrin. Larry Hugess had a six-gun barrel jammed into the soft pad of flesh below the girls chin and the gun was fully cocked.

  ‘Angel!’ Larry Hugess hissed.

  Frank Angel rose, very slowly, very warily. He kept his hands away from the gun at his side. The carbine he had laid on the ground caught a shaft of sunlight and winked at him mockingly.

  ‘Get away from my brother!’ Larry Hugess shouted. ‘Get back away!’

  Angel nodded. Hands up away from his body, he walked backward six or seven paces, then ten. He saw Dan Sheridan start to move toward him from outside the Oriental, and he made a signal with his left hand: stay. Sheridan stood stock still, like a kid playing statues. His eyes moved from Hugess to Angel, back again, weighing the danger, the odds, ready for action.,

  ‘He’s not dead, Hugess,’ Angel said, his voice level and matter-of-fact.

  ‘Not dead?’ Larry Hugess’ face was a study in disbelief.

  ‘Not dead,’ Angel said. ‘He’s out cold.’

  ‘Uh,’ Larry Hugess said, digesting what this meant. Angel smiled coldly.

  ‘That’s right, Hugess,’ he said. ‘He’ll stand trial. There’s no way you can stop it now. You’ve lost. Put down the gun and turn Miss Hardin loose.’

  ‘Ha!’ Hugess said, jerking Sherry back closer against him. ‘You’d like that, Mister Smartass Angel, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m not through yet, not by a long chalk.’

  ‘You’re through, Hugess,’ Angel informed him coldly. ‘It’s only a matter of whether you want to live long enough to be tried and hung or whether you want to die right here now.’

  ‘Yes?’ Hugess said. ‘There’s just one thing.’ He jerked his chin at his prisoner. ‘The girl.’

  ‘What about her?’ Angel said tonelessly.

  ‘We do a deal,’ Hugess said. ‘You let me ride out of here, take Burt. When I’m clear of town, I turn the girl loose.’

  ‘And if I say no?’ Angel said, noting the flicker of movement behind Hugess but not showing that he had done so by even so much as the lift of an eyebrow.

  ‘Then I kill her here in front of you,’ snarled Hugess. ‘I mean it, Angel.’

  ‘Your fight’s with me, Hugess,’ Angel challenged him. ‘Not with the girl. Turn her loose. You’ve got a cocked gun in your hand. Step away from her - or are you too gutless to take me on even when you’ve got the drop?’

  Anger flared in Larry Hugess’s eyes, and for a moment Angel thought he’d do it, but then Hugess shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Burt? Burt!’

  Burt Hugess was shaking his head from side to side. He began to sit up, his face bewildered like the face of a child who awakens in a different bed from the one he went to sleep in. He heard his brother’s voice and turned out of habit toward it.

  ‘Get on your feet!’ Larry Hugess snapped at him. ‘Go and get two horses! Now move, damn your eyes!’

  Burt Hugess had gotten to his feet, and his eyes were wide with the horror of a sleeper wakened from a nightmare to find it real. His eyes flicked from one dead body to another, and then to Angel.

  ‘You?’ he said eventually. ‘You?’

  ‘Goddamn you, Burt—’ Larry Hugess said, but that was as far as he got with whatever he was going to say because at that moment the flicker of movement which Angel had detected in the doorway of the hotel turned into the reality of the little Chinaman, Chen. Chen had a nine-inch butcher knife in his right hand and he slid it with deft certainty and macabre precision between Larry Hugess’s ribs just below the right shoulder blade. Larry Hugess’s eyes bulged out like the eyes of a throttled horse, and he went up on his toes, abandoning his grip on Sherry Hardin, who jerked to one side and away. Larry Hugess went down the two steps from the porch into the street on the very tips of his toes, his mouth working and his eyes looking at something that might have been a million miles distant. He tried to lift the gun and point it at Frank Angel while Angel and Burt Hugess stood and watched his marionette approach. Then the spell broke.

  A gout of black blood boiled from the rancher’s mouth and he pitched forward into the dust. In the same instant, Burt Hugess snatched at the gun in his holster, his burning eyes fixed on the man he desired to destroy with a hatred that was all-consuming: Frank Angel. He was lifting the pistol out of the holster before Angel began to move and the wicked grin of vengeful triumph was already forming on Burt’s mouth. Then somehow, astonishingly, inexplicably, he was staring into the barrel of Angel’s six-gun before he had eared back the hammer of his own. He stood there with the gun in his hand and knew he was a dead man. He waited for the blasting shock of the bullet but it did not come.

  ‘Go ahead, you mother!’ he screeched. ‘Do it!’

  He tried desperately to will himself to ear back the hammer of the gun in his hand: every nerve in his body screamed with the need to kill the man in front of him. But there was no way he could do it. He stood there in the street, paralyzed by his own cowardice, and offered no resistance at all when Angel stepped forward and took the gun out of his hand.

  For perhaps two long minutes, they stood there like a tableau: the girl on the porch of the hotel, leaning slightly forward; the Chinaman cook stock still in almost the exact position he had been in when he thrust the knife into Larry Hugess’s back; Larry Hugess curiously shrunken in the clotted pool of his own blood on the street; and Burt Hugess and Angel posed like figures in some strange ritual dance.

  ‘It’s over,’ Angel said. And it was.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Engine No. 850, the Huntington Carver, was named for a railroad tycoon. She’d been built ten years earlier in the Philadelphia factory of Matthias Baldwin, a ten-wheeler with a huge, inverted funnel of a smokestack. She was what the railroaders called a 4-6-0, meaning she had four wheels on the lead truck, six drivers, and no wheels beneath the cab. She was pulling a tender and three passenger coaches, and she stood now panting like some sleeping monster alongside the depot in Madison.

  Angel went down to say goodbye to Sheridan. Sherry Hardin came, too. She’d left Howie Cade in the care of Mrs. Mahoney, and that fussy old body was giving Howie more tender loving care than he could use. He was going to be all right. The bullet that had torn into his stomach had hit no vital organ, broken no pelvic or spinal bone.

  ‘Clean as a whistle,’ Sheridan had complimented him. ‘You’re a fool for luck.’

  ‘This is luck?’ Howie Cade had said. His face was wan beneath the tan, but the smile was about as good as anyone had any right to expect. He had something to aim for now. Sheridan had told him that when he’d delivered Burt Hugess to the capital, he’d be moving on.

  ‘Where you heading?’ Angel asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Sheridan had replied. ‘Seems to me town-tamin’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘Hard way to make a dollar,’ Angel had agreed.

  ‘Man like me, though,’ Sheridan had mused, ‘there isn’t much he can do. I done some buffalo hunting. That was all right for a while, but comes a time you can’t stand the stink any more, or the slaughter. Reckon I’ll just drift a while. Maybe I’ll find me a place they need a lawman, nice quiet little place with lots of pretty gals.’

  ‘Place like that,’ Angel had grinned, ‘What do they want with a lawman?’

  Now they shook hands gravely and said goodbye without emotion. Burt Hugess was already aboard: safely locked in the caboose and handcuffed to a steel upright. He wasn’t about to try anything, anyway. Since the bloody affray in Madison the preceding day, he had been morose and withdrawn, e
yes hooded as though he were watching again and again a mental picture of his brother coming down the steps of the hotel like some weird puppet, all up on his toes as though trying to soften the awful, biting inner rigidity of the scalpel-sharp butcher knife and then collapsing, legs kicking helplessly, in the ankle-deep dust of Front Street.

  ‘Luck,’ Angel said to the marshal.

  ‘And to you,’ Sheridan replied. ‘You heading out today?’

  ‘I reckon so,’ Angel said. ‘That fellow I’m chasing’s got one hell of a head start now.’

  He noticed Sherry Hardin’s head come round sharply as he said this, but he didn’t say anything. Sheridan saw it, too, and he remained silent.

  ‘Sherry,’ he said. ‘See you in a few days.’

  ‘Dan,’ she acknowledged.

  She stood there with Frank Angel, her shoulder just touching his, as the guard gave his shout, the engineer yelled his acknowledgment, and the beautiful ten-wheeler started to move, wheels spinning shun-shun-shun-shun-shun and then taking their hold on the silver track that stretched to the north-east. The smoke billowed up from the smokestack, laying back over the tops of the carriages as the train picked up speed. Sheridan didn’t look back or wave.

  When the train was a smudge on the land, they walked back down Front Street together. People were out hammering planks over their broken windows. Mahoney’s hadn’t had anything like that quantity of glass in stock and it would be some weeks before windows could be shipped in from Winslow. Johnny Gardner was doing land-office business at the Palace: most of the people in town were coming in to hear his account of what he’d heard, what he’d seen, what had happened, and comparing it with their own.

  ‘You meant that?’ Sherry Hardin asked. ‘About leaving today?’