‘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.
He got on the roan and moved up Latimer Street toward Central. Denver had grown enormously, he thought, since it had sprung up from hastily sawed planks ripped from the flanks of Long’s Peak about a decade ago. He wondered if the men who had made the first strikes up above Idaho Springs would recognize this part of the country if they saw it now. There were shops and stores and bazaars everywhere the eye moved: hardware, sporting goods, groceries, mining equipment, and dry goods jammed every which way in the gloomy interiors and spilling out on to the porched sidewalks beneath a jumbled rabble of signs and advertising come-ons, which defeated the eye they were supposed to attract. He saw one or two places that were selling Indian trinkets, Navajo silver, Ute jewelry. All along the boarded walks the scurrying, head-down mass of humanity ebbed and flowed like some strangely colored tide.
Trappers and hunters, long Hawken rifles or bundles of pelts slung on their shoulders, mingled with the crowd, their buckskins greasy and blackened from long seasons of thoughtless wear; bumping their shoulders were whey-faced asthmatics and consumptives come to breathe easier in the mile-high atmosphere of the city or to take what was known as the ‘camp cure’—living as tough and rough as they could stand it up in the mountains, with guide and tent and wagon and stove until the fall closed in, then wintering in some hotel or boarding house until spring touched the flanks of the mountains once again with tender green fingers. Soldiers on leave swung by, spurs a’jingle, swirling their long navy-blue serge capes dramatically. Teamsters moved their wagons up and down the muddy streets with strings of oaths like foreign tongues, oaths that would have reddened the ears of any decent woman had she heard them. Angel saw very few white women, very few women at all if you didn’t count the Ute squaws bundled in blankets sitting impassively at the feet of their stone-faced spouses or trailing along the regulation three paces behind them. Up towar
d the center of town he saw dapperly dressed Fancy Dans, ‘way-up’ gamblers or confidence men, or both, jostled by burly, bearded ranchers made to look even huger by the massive buffalo-robe coats and leggings they affected.
The express office, with its Wells Fargo sign outside, was packed and he decided to take a rain check on sending his telegraph message. Another hour wasn’t going to make that much difference, he thought: the news would be just as bad after lunch as it was now. He saw the sign of the American Hotel and decided to get something to eat. He was just crossing the lobby toward the dining room when he saw George Willowfield coming down the wide staircase.
Chapter Six
It was just too damned good to be true.
Yet there the fat man was, elegantly dressed in a dark blue suit with a faint pinstripe, a gleaming white shirt, a cravat that looked like pure silk, and a stickpin that looked like a diamond, coming down the wide curving staircase of the American Hotel like he owned it. Angel turned away from the entrance to the dining room and made his way across the lobby toward the reception desk. There was no danger of Willowfield recognizing him: he’d never seen Angel, didn’t even know he existed. Angel leaned against one of the marbled pillars by the desk and watched the fat man. He scanned the lobby for any sign of Willowfleld’s henchmen, but saw no familiar face. Willowfield made his way across the lobby and subsided into a well-upholstered wing chair set close to the fireplace. He rested his hands on top of his silver-capped cane, and rested his chin on his hands, gazing sightlessly into the fire.
Angel went across to the desk.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Isn’t that Colonel Willowfield over there by the fire?’
The clerk followed Angel’s gaze and smiled.
‘That’s correct, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you know the colonel?’
‘Slightly,’ Angel said. ‘Are his friends still staying with him?’
‘Ah, I, ah, beg your pardon, sir?’ The clerk palmed the five dollars and his face was once more wreathed in smiles. ‘His friends, ah, no, sir. They left yesterday, I believe. Would you like me to—?’
‘Not now,’ Angel said. He was already moving, walking purposefully across the lobby toward where Willowfield was sitting. The fat man’s eyes flickered up to check him over, and then slid away. For a moment Angel could have sworn that there was satisfaction in them, but it wasn’t possible. He took a seat opposite the fat man.
‘Colonel,’ he said.
George Willowfield raised his head slightly. He let his eyes rest on Angel, openly cataloging his travel-stained clothing, scuffed boots, unshaven jaw. He allowed Angel to see the contempt touch his expression and then looked away without speaking.
‘If I was a gambling man,’ Angel said, unperturbed, ‘I’d say you just came into a lot of money, Colonel. Would I be right?’
Willowfield’s head came up, sharply this time. His eyes were narrowed and he looked at Frank Angel warily, tension in his stance.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What? Who are you, sir?’
Angel told him his name and where he was from. Willowfield looked at him for a long, silent moment, and then shook his head sadly.
‘Too late, sir,’ he said. ‘You are too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘Mr. Angel, you see before you a betrayed man,’ Willowfield said.
‘Oh, come on!’ Angel snapped. ‘Not that!’
‘Alas, it’s true,’ Willowfield said. ‘They took it all, Mr. Angel. Every penny of it.’
‘It had better be good, Willowfield,’ Angel told him. ‘Very, very good.’
‘The truth, sir,’ the fat man said heavily, ‘is unassailable.’
‘Try me,’ Angel said, leaning back in the chair. ‘Who was it—the boy?’
The fat man’s face went a pasty white, and for a moment Willowfield’s shock showed clearly on his face.
‘What … what do you know about the boy?’ he croaked.
‘I know about the boy,’ Angel said. ‘And Chris and the German. I know it all, Willowfield.’
‘You … you were on the train?’ the fat man whispered. Then, with growing conviction, ‘You were on the train.’
Angel nodded. The man’s reactions were hardly what he had been expecting; Willowfield sounded almost relieved to hear what he had just told him.
‘That’s how you got here so fast,’ Willowfield said. He said it like a man who has just had a conjuring trick explained to him.
‘You want to tell me about it?’ Angel prompted, harshly.
‘Yes, of course,’ Willowfield said. ‘Of course. I planned it all so well. So perfectly. It was a perfect plan.’
‘It was pretty good,’ Angel agreed.
‘Everything went like clockwork.’
‘Until you got to Denver. Then your boys decided to change the scenario.’
‘Change the scenario,’ Willowfield nodded. ‘Yes. They shamed me.’
‘Go on.’
‘We came up here two nights ago. We got in at night.’
‘You all came here, to the American?’
‘Yes. We were going to share out the money, then have a farewell dinner at the Alhambra or the Palace. Then … ’
‘You started to share out the money?’
Willowfield nodded, as though unable to continue for a moment.
‘Where was this?’ Angel asked.
‘Upstairs. In my suite. I’d promised them ten thousand each.’
‘But when they saw you had a quarter of a million they decided to double-cross you.’
‘Falco,’ Willowfield said. ‘It was Falco.’
Angel said nothing. He wasn’t about to let Willowfield know how little he really knew about them.
‘We were talking, laughing,’ Willowfield said. ‘I had the money ready. Ten thousand for each of them. Then Buddy. Buddy … he … oh, my God.’
His head fell and the mountainous shoulders heaved with remembered grief. Angel watched impassively as Willowfield got control of himself, blowing his nose on a huge white linen handkerchief. Several men in the lobby looked across at them curiously, but their gaze slid away when Angel stared at them.
‘He had a knife,’ Willowfield whispered. ‘Buddy had a knife. He likes to use a knife.’
‘Like he did when he killed the man after the wreck?’ Angel guessed.
‘Yes,’ Willowfield said, confirming Angel’s guess that Buddy was the name of the kid. ‘He shamed me. In front of all of them. He made me beg for my life. He stripped me, mocked me, jeered at me. Then he made me beg. Beg!’
His voice trailed to a maudlin stop and his shoulders began to heave again. Then without warning the sniveling stopped and the big head came up. Willowfield’s eyes were blazing with a malevolence so intense that Angel could almost smell the sulfur.
‘They shamed me!’ the fat man hissed. ‘They robbed me, and reduced me to a groveling animal. They will pay for that. I will see each of them dead!’
‘You may read about it someplace,’ Angel said. ‘But that’s all.’
‘No!’ Willowfield snarled. ‘I want them all dead. Especially the boy. Especially the boy!’
‘Ask the judge,’ Angel said.
Willowfield looked at him, and there was cunning and wariness mixed with the light of hatred behind his eyes, and something else, something Angel could not quite identify. Satisfaction? What had the fat man to gloat over? Angel watched as Willowfield drew in a long, slow breath and then leaned back in his chair, admiring the way the fat man got control of himself.
‘Well, now,’ Willowfield said. ‘Let us examine the matter.’
‘Let us,’ Angel said. ‘By all means.’
‘You, Mr. Angel, represent the Department of Justice, you said?’
‘That’s right’
‘It is, I imagine, your allotted task to retrieve the stolen money and to bring the malefactors to the bar of justice.’
‘Something like that’
‘You were very quick,’ Willowfield
said. ‘Much quicker than I expected. If you had been a few days longer, I would not have been here. I would have been on the trail of those … those scum, myself.’
‘Instead of which,’ Angel pointed out, ‘You have other commitments.’
Willowfield steepled his fingers and touched them to his thin lips, and allowed a small smile to touch his face. He nodded, as though coming to a decision.
‘So be it,’ he said. ‘You prevent me from pursuing Falco and the others. I would have remained behind them until either they or I were dead. Now I think I will let you do it for me.’
‘How’s that?’ Angel said.
‘My dear sir,’ Willowfield said. ‘If I tell you where they are heading, you will pursue them, will you not?’
‘I will,’ Angel said. ‘And you know it.’
Willowfield nodded, standing up and putting his weight on the silver-topped cane. ‘And myself, sir?’
‘I’ll hand you over to the United States marshal,’ Angel told him. ‘He can keep you on ice until you’re shipped back east for trial.’
‘Ah,’ said Willowfield. ‘You’re efficient, Mr. Angel. I can see that. A man after my own heart.’
‘Yeah,’ said Angel, getting up from his chair. ‘Shall we walk across to the marshal’s office, Colonel?’
‘Oh, not yet, Mr. Angel,’ Willowfield said. ‘Allow me to buy you lunch, sir. If you are to be the instrument of my revenge, I want to help you in every way I can. I will tell you all, Mr. Angel, but pray let us talk in a civilized manner. Afterward, when we’ve eaten, we can walk across the street to the marshal and conclude this dreary matter. What do you say, sir?’
Angel looked at the fat man, and Willowfield met his gaze with an expectant, open smile.
‘No tricks?’ Angel said.
‘My dear sir,’ Willowfield smiled. ‘Of course not. Come, let us go into the dining room. They do a very fine steak here. Unless you prefer trout, of course. The truite au bleu is memorable, sir, quite memorable.’
You had to hand it to the old renegade, Angel thought: he had style.
Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) Page 5
