‘He’s in there somewhere,’ he said. ‘Correct?’ Elliott nodded; it was hardly a revelation.
‘What will he do? Lie low, or cut and run?’
‘He might run for it. Use darkness to make a break.’
‘Not this one,’ Nix said, emphatically. ‘He wants us to go in there and look for him. That way he could take us one at a time. We’d never even see him. Our advantages are numbers, firepower. In there we lose them.’
‘Agreed,’ Elliott said. ‘So how do we take him?’
‘We have to get him out in the open, where he can’t use that incredible bow or crossbow or whatever it is. Where whatever other tricks he has up his sleeve won’t work.’
‘Terrific,’ Elliott said. ‘How do we pull that with a dozen men?’
‘We don’t,’ Nix said dreamily. ‘Have you ever heard how they hunt lion?’
‘Uh? Hunted what?’
‘Lion,’ Nix repeated. ‘In Africa. It’s a very simple system, practically infallible. They get all the people of the village to act as beaters. They take drums and buckets and anything that will make a noise, and they go into the long grass where the lion hides, banging and shouting and whistling, dozens and dozens of them—far too many for Simba to attack, even if he wanted to. He has no choice left. If he lies where he is, one of them will find him, and the hunters will come. He drops back to a new hiding place. But the beaters move on, inexorably. Again, Simba moves, but now he is running out of hiding places. What shall he do? Behind him are the beaters, sounding like all the devils in hell on a holiday. Ahead of him is the empty open plain, with no long grass to shield him.’
‘And then?’
‘He moves out into the open. And the real hunters are waiting to kill him.’
‘I’m beginnin’ to get your drift,’ Elliott grinned. ‘You’re goin’ to use the Injuns as beaters, right?’
‘Right,’ Nix said. ‘We’ll get all the women and kids at the southern side of the woods. At first light, they move in, one long line of them!’
‘And we’ll be waiting,’ Elliott said, showing his teeth in a feline grin.
‘Correct,’ Nix said. The way to combat the war of the flea was to shear the dog. He saw himself sitting on the black stallion at the northern edge of the forest as the Indians worked their way through the woods. He imagined the panicked figure of the hunted man bursting through the tangled undergrowth and then, left with no choice, heading out into the open where the hunters waited. He saw himself riding the man down, white glimpse of face beneath the thundering hoofs, despairing shout of pain. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thought, with a wicked smile of anticipation. They had Mister Angel on a plate.
Chapter Eleven
Night fell like a blanket.
Now, and only now, did Frank Angel rise from his chilly lair to stretch cramped muscles, speed slowed circulation. It was somewhere between unlikely and impossible that Nix would send his men in after the quarry in the dark, but he wasn’t about to take that fact for granted. He tried to put himself in Nix’s place, think what the big man might do next.
When you’re alone and hunted, there is nobody to help.
You can guess what your pursuer may do, hope you are right. It’s not a lot of help, because you only get one chance to be wrong. Your pursuer can make as many errors as he likes, given an endless supply of men and money and time. He can try again and again and again. Not you. One false step, one overlooked factor, and you are dead meat. So Angel made no hasty moves. Ignoring the gnawing pangs of hunger in his belly, he sat beneath a tree and considered his options.
There was no easy way out of the forest. It was big enough to hide in, but it was also small enough to encircle. If he were Nix, he would use his men like a trail boss would use them, treating the forest as the herd. The men would ride around it in pairs, like nightriders, always within earshot of each other. In the night silence, any movement would be quite easy to detect. He had long since abandoned the thought of using the horse, which must still be loose somewhere in the woods. They would hear his approach half a mile away if he tried to break out on horseback. So what to do? He considered some other possibilities, rejecting them as he did. Playing sniper; lying low and waiting to see what Nix would do; even firing the woods and using the flames to conceal his escape. None of them was feasible.
Attack, they said, was the best form of defense.
He got to his feet and moved silently through the trees, careful not to startle any foraging night animal, moving northward until his nostrils were assailed by the stink of the Comanche encampment. Then he paused to take his bearings. A gently sloping declivity lay before him, at the bottom of which lay a lapping pool of water, perhaps thirty feet across and twice as many long. Its shelving banks were trampled clay, denuded of bushes and grass by the endless procession of moccasined feet to the water’s edge. About fifty yards from the edge of the water was a lazily flickering fire, near which several men slept on blankets.
The stink was strong enough to slice.
Comanches had no concept of hygiene, and never washed except during ceremonial purifications. Normally, they simply pulled up their stakes and quit a campsite once it began to smell too badly. This protected haven was too good to quit, but that did not mean they took care not to defoul it. A long line of tee-pees faced the water, and behind that another and then another. Between them was a wide space, like a street. The teepees had a four-pole base, twenty-two poles to a frame. Most of them were about fifteen feet high, and of about the same diameter. They took up a lot of space, and to a degree Angel was surprised to see them. It must be the semi-permanent nature of the camp, he thought. Comanches usually slept outdoors in the summer, on light bedding or in brush arbors. They were a strange, outcast race, unlike any of the other Indian tribes. They cared nothing for the symbols of status and bravery that other Plains tribes prized. Comanch’ wore no eagle feathers, no warbonnets, no beaded buckskin. Breechclout and hip-high painted hunting boots were the standard garb of the Comanche fighting man in summer. His status and deeds were recorded upon his war shield, constructed of layered buffalo hide and capable of deflecting a well-aimed arrow at fifty feet. War shields were painted with magic symbols with special meaning for the warrior who carried them; sometimes the teeth of slain bears, horsetails, or human scalps were added. These also demonstrated prowess. Horse tails advertised the owner’s skill in that most admired of all Comanche arts, stealing horses.
The shields were a great help to the hidden man, for they told him many things. No warrior ever took his war shield into the teepee, where its medicine might be lessened by contact with people—especially unclean people like women. No woman was allowed near a war shield, much less to touch it. Instead warriors stored their shields at the edge of the camp, or in some central spot. In a sloppy, polluted dump like this, they were leaned against the sides of the teepees, and their presence made it easy for Angel to assess the probable strength of the camp. Fourteen fighting men, and these probably the dregs of the band. The others must be out raiding, and those left behind would be the sick, the wounded, the old. Mostly the sick, Angel thought, smiling without humor. Comanch’ were more often out of commission because of their complete ignorance of the most elementary rules of sanitation than because of war wounds. He recalled what one hard-bitten cavalryman he knew had called the complaint: the Comanche Two-Step.
He estimated the total number of teepees at around forty-five, moving around the perimeter under the cover of night, using black pools of deeper shadow, ever wary of sleeping curs. Rouse one of those yapping animals, and the camp would be awake in moments. The women would kill you as readily as the men, but they wouldn’t be as merciful. He reached the northern edge of the camp and found the horse herd without difficulty. There were about twenty ponies in a rope corral that closed in a smaller, but no less trampled clearing. Further evidence that the warriors in this encampment were second class. Some top war leaders of the Comanche owned as many as fifteen hundred ho
rses, for horse-flesh was the ultimate Comanche status symbol. With the real fighting men away, what was left behind was a sorry-looking lot. He tested the faint breeze and kept upwind of the horses for now. He was near enough for the animals to see him if he moved, and he wanted to let them get accustomed to his presence without detecting his alien smell. If they caught his scent, they would react, and that would bring someone running.
He got some of the food out of his backpack and sat in the darkness trying to make believe it was a medium-rare steak with hashed brown potatoes and fried eggs with a side dish of canned tomatoes. Maybe some sourdough-bread and fresh butter. He thought of his landlady, Mrs. Rissick, toiling up the stairs in the house on F Street in Washington, her shopping bag bulging. He thought of ripe Stilton cheese, a good bottle of claret, fresh peaches. He remembered being in the mountains and taking trout from the chattering river, cooking it in a stock of seven parts water, one part vinegar.
He drank some water and stowed away his gear, waiting for the false dawn.
He wondered when the raiding Comanches were due back in the encampment. Full moon was their favorite time for raiding, and the full moon had waned some nights ago. The Comanches did not like the quarter moon period, for they believed it presaged rain, which made mud and held tracks by which a raiding party could be followed.
Soon it was time, and he stretched his limbs with infinite care. The sharp tang of wood smoke told him the women were already up and about in the camp, and he saluted their industry, for the soft sharp smell of their fires would mask his own alien smell among the horses. Very carefully, he slipped beneath the encircling rope of the corral and laid his hand on one of the mustangs. The animal tensed, its hide bunching as Angel walked his hand along it, softly uttering soothing sounds until he was close to its head.
He laid a gentle hand on the horse’s muzzle and put his own head close to that of the animal, blowing gently into its nostrils the way he had once been taught by a Cheyenne horse breaker named Charlie Steelass. The horse nodded, pushing itself against him. Angel let it, knowing that its smell would mask his own. He moved to its right-hand side. Comanches mounted on the right, Spanish style. Everything they did on horseback, they did Spanish style, for it was from the invading Spanish and their descendants that they had learned how to handle horses, watching and watching with those dark unreadable eyes. Until they learned.
Grasping the mustang’s mane, Angel vaulted on to its back. Keeping his hand bunched in its mane, Angel sat immobile as the animal tensed, waiting for him to command it. When he did not, it relaxed, and he let it make its own way to the far side of the corral, milling with the other horses. When it got where he wanted it to be, Angel leaned over and deftly sliced the horsehair rope barring the opening that debauched on the camp. As the strands parted, he rammed his heels into the mustang’s ribs and let-loose the shrillest Rebel yell he could manage.
The milling herd of horses reacted as if someone had fired a cannon in their midst. They exploded out of the corral and thundered in a panicked tide down the ragged open space that served as the camp’s street. In the center of the herd, hanging down the flank of his horse by holding on with right leg and left hand, Comanche style, Angel saw men stumbling out of the teepees, waving and shouting and trying to stop the stampeding herd. Their figures blurred behind the glinting cloud of dust the unshod hoofs had raised, and Angel thought he heard a thin scream as someone went down beneath the slashing feet.
Although he had no great opinion of their intelligence, Angel had put his faith in the memory of the ponies. Horses rarely forgot their training. He had once taken Amabel Rowe riding in a carriage around Central Park in New York. Halfway past the Sheep Meadow, they noticed that the driver was asleep and awakened him, pointing out that nobody was watching the road.
‘Well, now, and don’t be fright,’ said the cabman, whose name was Bernie McGann. ‘Sure the horse knows the way.’
Even these half wild mustangs knew the way in and out of the woods in which the encampment lay, and Angel swung up to lie low along his mount’s back as the herd crashed through the thin, screening bushes bordering the well-trampled pathway leading out to the open plain. They burst out into the open like a tidal wave.
In the growing half-light, Angel saw two riders off to his left racking their startled horses around and kicking them into a run to head off the widening fan of Comanche ponies. A glance to the right revealed two more riders, but further away, probably too far for it to make any real difference. He unshipped the short bow that he’d looped over his right shoulder. There were only two arrows left, a fact of life he accepted without regret. He had not known what his needs would be: six of the steel shafts had seemed enough to carry when he started out. Every one of them had paid its dues so far.
Angel was no Comanche.
He could not, as they could, hit running quail from horseback with bow and arrow; but he was better than good. Between two strides of the galloping pony, he released the first of his shafts, and using the same optimum moment for aim and accuracy, released the last seconds later. Then he put his head down and concentrated on urging the flying Comanche pony to even greater speed, pointing its head north. When he looked back he saw that one of the pursuing horses was trailing to a riderless halt and the second was down in a thrashing pile, legs striking out in spasms of agony. Looked like he had missed the second man and hit his horse instead. Now he saw the man scrambling to his feet, running away from the gut shot horse toward where his comrade had fallen, and Angel nodded in grim satisfaction. If one of the arrows had hit the fallen man, it didn’t make any difference where: he was out of it. The mustang herd was beginning to spread out now, the leaders beginning to mill as they went over the crest of a long bluff that led downward in a long flat slope toward the edge of the scrubland and the beginnings of a stony, brushless stretch of land presaging the desert beyond it. Using hands and heels and voice, Angel urged his own pony on, risking one last look back over his shoulder. The light was much better now, but there were pregnant blue-black clouds low over the mountains and once he thought he saw the flicker of lightning. There were four dark blobs on the darkening land behind him, a couple of miles back. Knowing that Nix had a fine thoroughbred horse, Angel hoped he had a long enough start. Nix’s horse could probably outrun everything in Texas if he put his spurs into it. He felt the soft plop of heavy raindrops on his face, and threw back his head to welcome them. Not even Nix’s stallion could run fast in a Texas rain- , storm. There was more thunder in the sky, awaiting its cue from the lightning. Ahead of him was the long dark line of—the swampy jungle around the muddy lake. Once again Angel grinned his cold wolfs grin. Let them come find him in there.
Chapter Twelve
As he reached the edge of the timberline, the skies opened.
The rain came down in a vertical curtain that blotted out light, killed the growing daylight, flattening everything beneath it. It soaked through Angel’s clothes in moments, and brought steam from the hot flanks of the gallant little Comanche pony that stood with its head down where Angel had dismounted.
Light-footed as an Indian, Angel ran through the dank screen of undergrowth, keeping always to the lighter-colored patches of spongy ground he could see. There were often stretches of what looked like firm, verdant ground beneath the trees, but no bushes grew on them and he knew they were purest treachery, swampy layers of grass floating on a base of thick and glutinous mud. Put your full weight on these patches and down you would go, up to the hips or deeper in stinking filth, easy prey for water moccasin or alligator. The tuftier, lighter-colored grass was usually sprinkled about with small shrubs or shoots from seedlings dropped by the trees above, sure sign that there was enough earth to take a man’s running weight.
He reckoned he had about ten minutes’ start, not more. Four or five minutes for them to cover the distance he’d been ahead, as many again to pile off and decide their next move. They wouldn’t come in blind after him, but they had to come in, an
d they had to come in from the south. If they wanted to get around ahead of him, they would have had to ride all the way back to the dry ford across the river, the only safe way to cross it, then cover the same distance back on the far side to reach the northern edge of the muddy lake. Nix would be too hot to catch him now to split his force. With five men dead and nothing to show for it, he would need some kind of success to show his men. Maybe he would abandon a little of his caution trying to get it.
The rain kept thrashing down against the dense shield of the screening leaves, drowning sound, sensation, everything. Angel changed direction now, moving back toward the east, using every leaf for cover. After a while, he heard the hoarse sound of someone shouting. The rain was easing slightly, and over its steady driving rattle he could hear the eruptive sounds of men slushing through the trees, whacking at the undergrowth with machetes. Peering through the spattering mist of water, Angel saw their dark shapes and the betraying movement of the trees as they passed through. They were in a rough line abreast, twenty or so yards apart, working their way through the undergrowth with the short, wicked machetes in one hand and six-guns in the other. One man was covered in mud, his eyes startling white holes in the running gray mask of filth. He eased backward, heading for the farthest end of the ragged line. He could see no sign of Hercules Nix yet, but in this bad light, in this driving rain, it was hard to identify anyone.
The man at the end of the line was tall and thin, with a hooked nose and a three-day stubble that gave him a wolf like appearance. He sloshed through a sucking trough of seeping muddy water, and threw himself down on a hummock of grass with a disgusted curse, pulling off his boots and draining the gummy water out of them. He still had one of the boots in his right hand when Angel came around the tree behind him.
The man opened his mouth to scream, but he never made it.
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 8
