Picking up the Winchester and checking to see if it was fully loaded, he unhitched the horse and went on down the gorge of the Picketwire, moving as fast as he dared, ever alert for more guards.
It was well after noon when he emerged on a bluff from which he could see far down the long straight track leading back into the wooded declivities below. The Trail was empty except for a slow—moving wagon with a six-ox team toiling its way painfully down the long miles towards Las Animas. Far off, Angel’s keen eyes picked up a trace of smoke on the smudgy edge of a bluff; perhaps ten miles away. He nodded, and then pulled the horse around, swinging aboard the sweating bare back and urging the tired animal down the trail. If there were any of Denniston’s men this far out of the mountains, they would not take any notice of a man going away from the ambush. He had no doubt that any lone rider or wagon team coming down the Pass would be allowed through the cordon. They were only interested in one target.
Ten minutes after Angel was brought to him and showed the President his identification, Grant took command.
Within another ten, a team of three troopers with six extra mounts was thrashing its way back towards Las Animas with special instructions, told to kill the horses if necessary. The encampment itself was on the banks of the Picketwire, where the river, wider here and slower, purled onwards towards its eventual meeting with the Arkansas. They were about ten miles off the main Trail. Grant wasted no time on preliminaries. Leaving his three political companions sitting on the steps of the army ambulance, their faces white as chalk at the thought of the ambush lying ahead of them in the mountains, Grant assembled his staff in a semi—circle around him.
‘Now,’ he said. Angel watched him, amazed at the enthusiasm in the man’s voice. It looked as if the President was really enjoying himself. ‘In thirty-six hours, or —’ he took a fob watch from his waistcoat pocket, — ‘roughly seven o’clock tomorrow evening, Colonel Whitenfield will lead a force of picked men down the pass to attack this renegade Denniston from the rear. At the same time, we — reinforced by the men I have sent for from Las Animas — will go into the, ah, lion’s jaws. Although with one small difference: we shall be ready for him.’
Major Godwin stepped forward. His face was ashen, the stricken Visage of a man who had just been told he has an incurable disease.
‘But Mister President,’ he said, ‘Denniston has a Gatling gun, enormous firepower up there. We’ll be cut to ribbons.’
Grant smiled. ‘I doubt that, Mister,’ he said.
‘I’ve requisitioned explosives from the railroad at Animas. I propose to take that renegade bastard with a variation on the theme of the wooden horse of Troy.’
‘Sir?’ said Godwin.
‘Later, Mister, later. Gentlemen, Mister Angel believes — and I concur — that we are probably being watched. Therefore I propose that we proceed on our way, going perhaps a lot more slowly than we might heretofore have done. We shall camp at the foot of the mountains tonight, and take a very late breakfast. We might even go fishing,’ he grinned, his yellow teeth showing under the bristling beard. ‘But we shall not go into the pass until late afternoon, timing our arrival there for as close to six-thirty as possible. Mister Angel — perhaps you could draw us a rough map of the ambush, and the approaches to it?’
Angel smoothed out the sandy dirt and with a stick traced the major features of the Trail as it curved through the timbered rocks where the ambush was planned. Grant nodded, listening carefully, asking questions occasionally. Godwin watched it all in silence, his eyes ever wary, flickering from Angel to Grant and then out towards the mountains, never still. Grant noticed the young soldier’s nervousness but dismissed it as no more than that. Angel noticed it, too. They went on talking long into the afternoon as Grant made suggestions, Angel adding other ideas, varying them constantly until they came up with the right way to do what Grant had in mind.
Grant’s eyes sparkled with anticipation and Frank Angel found himself warming to the short, blunt—spoken man. Grant might not have held command for many years, but he had forgotten little about soldiering. It was a pleasure to do business with him, and Angel found himself being caught up in the President’s confident enthusiasm.
Later that night they camped in a box canyon at the foot of the mountains, the campfires heaped high with brush and the men encouraged to get a singsong going. In truth, they felt as little like singing as any soldier does who knows the morrow may see him dead, but Grant walked around the encampment, stopping here and there to talk to a trooper, asking questions about their homes, their families.
Later, he sent for Angel, who went to the ambulance in which Grant was to sleep and knocked on the door. He heard the gruff voice bid him enter.
Grant was sitting upon the slatted seat which would later be his bed. He gestured with the whiskey bottle in his hand towards a glass which Frank Angel picked up and held out. Grant poured him a man-sized drink and raised his glass.
‘I haven’t thanked you, Frank,’ he said quietly.
‘No need of that, Mister President,’ Angel said.
‘Probably not,’ Grant huffed. ‘But thank you, anyway. Now tell me about this man Denniston.’
So Angel sat there in the dark ambulance and told the President the story of Denniston’s dismissal from the Army. When he had finished, Grant nodded.
‘I remember it now,’ he said quietly. ‘I was stupid, sentimental. Overrode a recommendation to have the man shot. I had doubts that he had run from the Johnny Rebs the way his officers said. Always felt that it was nearer a mutiny than anything. Denniston was a martinet.
Treated his men like dirt. Always took the position most likely to be under heavy fire. A glory hunter. We’ve got a few in the Army. Trouble, every one of them. I’m foolish about it, I suppose. Hate to see a good soldier ruined by a hasty decision. Cause me more pain before I die, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘What exactly happened, sir?’
‘Denniston, you mean? Can’t remember the details exactly. He took a forward position, tried to carry a redoubt that was impossibly well-defended. Couldn’t be done. Stood there trying to whip his men into the fight with the flat of his saber, and when they ran he was left alone.
Johnny Rebs came out to get him and the man turned tail and ran. Happened before.
Unfortunately for Denniston, he ran smack into the arms of General Thomas, who was advancing with reinforcements to relieve him. Nothing Thomas could do.’
Angel nodded. As Grant had said, it had happened before, and no one the wiser many times. Denniston had suffered an extreme penalty for that one lapse. It was no wonder that the hatred for Grant had rankled all those years, festering until it became a mad ambition, revenge, revenge, revenge the only force in the twisted mind.
He bade the President goodnight and went out into the night. The stars wheeled in their courses over the high terrain. Somewhere a horse whickered. He stood for a long time looking up at the mountains.
Hours later, he slept.
Chapter Fifteen
Late in the afternoon the two ambulances toiled up the long mountain road. It was one of those days you sometimes get in the high country, hot and still, the sky a brazen white without a cloud anywhere and only the soft sigh of the ever-present breeze to cool the sweating bodies of the troopers riding escort. Denniston’s vedettes had signaled the advance of the Presidential caravan, their prearranged Morse signals winking from the high points. If the troopers escorting the ambulances saw them, they gave no sign.
Denniston was waiting as he had waited for almost two days, clamping down upon the burning impatience that consumed him. He knew Grant’s reputation for dawdling, knew the man would feel it a challenge to alter any timetable with which he was presented; the faintest touch of cold unease had once come to Denniston in the bleak cool of the mountain night and he had wondered, wondered. But no. Godwin would have sent word to him if there had been any change of plan, any possibility that the final dénouement was to be denied him.
And none had come. What Denniston could not know was that Frank Angel had, without ever seeming to do so, kept ever close to the young major, always around when Godwin thought, for once, that he might be able to sneak away from the encampment. Godwin had cursed the Justice Department man silently many times, but it was no use his trying to warn Denniston in any way. That was exactly what Angel was waiting for — one man to try to leave the column. He would know then.
And there was something in Angel’s cold eyes that warned Godwin he would never deliver his message if he tried. And so he had remained close to his men, busying himself unnecessarily, always hopeful that the chance which had never come might present itself.
Up the long, winding road the wagons toiled.
The Army mules had their ears laid back, their backs wet with sweat as they lunged against the traces, hauling the ambulances over the rocky road, the vehicles swaying dangerously on the deep ruts scoured into the Trail by generations of heavy-laden Conestogas.
Frank Angel rode in the rear of the procession, a bearded trooper alongside him. The trooper’s eyes constantly moved across the rocky bluffs on either side of the trail, ever alert for some movement, some indication that they were closing in on their destination.
‘Goddammit, Angel,’ the trooper said, ‘why can’t I have a cigar?’
‘Mr. President, you’d be the first cavalryman in the history of the Army who was allowed to smoke while escorting the President of the United States. No go. Sorry.’
‘All right, all right,’ grumbled Grant. ‘Beats me how you can smoke one and I can’t, that’s all.’
Angel grinned. ‘I’m a civilian, remember?
They were on a fairly straight stretch of the trail now, and Angel spurred the horse up alongside the second ambulance, standing in the saddle to see ahead. The troopers in the van, led by Godwin, were just approaching a left-hand bend. Beyond it and above them the road straightened up and then turned almost on itself to the right.
There was a huge mound of rocks and boulders screened by patches of brush where the trail swung, and on the river side, heavy pines screened the roadside.
Angel nodded, falling back alongside Grant.
‘This it?’ Grant asked. His face was set and tight. He shifted impatiently in the McClellan.
‘This is it,’ Angel confirmed.
‘Garry on, Mister Angel,’ Grant said curtly.
‘Good luck.’
‘Thanks,’ Angel said. He put his heels into the horse’s ribs and kicked it to a run, coming up alongside Godwin. He had his Stetson tugged down well over his eyes and hunched his shoulders. If Denniston was up there with field-glasses — and he surely was — Angel didn’t want him recognizing the man he thought long since executed in the compound.
‘Fall back nice and easy, now,’ Angel said quietly to the soldiers flanking him, letting his horse make its own pace. ‘Let the front ambulance come up on you a little. That’s it, that’s fine. Easy, now.’
The driver of the leading ambulance winked at Angel as he came level, his features tight with anticipation. They were twenty, thirty yards from the bend, now, and that was when Angel yelled ‘GO!’
The driver of the ambulance laid the whip across the backs of the astonished mules, which bared their teeth in shock and lunged against the traces, actually starting to run up the steep slope as the troopers on both sides of the ambulance scattered, falling sideways out of their saddles, rifles in hand, scrabbling to find any cover they could. The driver of the ambulance leaped to one side, landing running, then falling, crashing into the trees, his body tumbling down to the edge of the rushing river as the ambulance clattered into the bend, the short fuse to which Angel had touched his cigar sputtering beneath the seat.
The mules charged into the corner with no hope at all of negotiating it, pulling back and making the ambulance swing off to the left hand side of the track, rolling on top of the hidden riflemen in the trees there and then suddenly exploding, detonating with a cracking boom that hurled splinters and tattered things that might have once been parts of men high in a bloody melee.
Up on the rise overlooking the curve Denniston screamed orders to his men, the Gatling gun starting to pump shells down on to the road, the explosions chattering like some enormous beast as the gunner wound the crank handle. Great gouts of earth and rock smashed upwards as the line of shells marched down the road, dropping the lead mules of the second wagon, lifting upwards, shredding the woodwork of the conveyance, tearing great chunks of it that whickered towards the crouching, flinching men.
Now the riflemen on the mound in the centre of the curve opened up, laying down a flat screen of fire that ripped the thin slatted sides of the Army ambulance into smithereens and finally, as Angel had expected, one of them hit the explosives inside and the wagon went up with a roar, a yellow tongue of flame licking twenty feet high as the whirling pieces of timber, wagon bed, canvas, metal, dead mule, filled the sky with heavy rain.
Now the Gatling gun had nothing to shoot at because a dense cloud of black smoke hung over the whole curve, yet still Denniston screamed at his gunner and still the man cranked the handle, pouring an endless hail of shells into the churning mess on the road below. Through the smashing roll of firing, the troopers were getting the distance from their position at the side of the road, their slugs whacking great chunks off the rocks in the central mound. Then Angel, belly-down in the trees between the river and the road, heard the clear, lovely sound of a cavalry bugle and over the top of the rise, guidons flying, came a double rank of United States Cavalry.
Now the troopers under Angel’s position raised a cheer and fired a volley into the air, and up the Trail from their position away behind the President’s caravan came a motley crowd of railroad men; steel men and gandy dancers, track layers, navvies, ferried up the side of the pass in big supply wagons with canvas tops, every one of them armed with repeating rifles, spreading like a swarm of ants behind the men entrenched there and showing no one an ounce of mercy.
The troopers in the trees got to their feet now, racing along behind Major Godwin, who ran flat out ahead of them towards the bluff on which Denniston stood, the Gatling gun still churning out its rain of death on the milling figures below.
It mattered nothing to Denniston whose men the terrible Gatling gun shells killed. No man down there was his friend.
‘Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!’ he screamed monotonously on and on, knowing that he had been tricked, realizing that Grant was not there, that the whole thing had failed. The soldiers below kept on coming and now the troopers coming over the top of the rise were charging into the melee. One detachment veered to the right, led by a young lieutenant with corn yellow hair flying in the wind of his gallop, his arm outstretched, a Colt’s revolver glinting in the sun.
Denniston saw the soldier fire and felt the wind of the bullet on his cheek as he screamed at his men to swing the Gatling gun around to face this new threat. The noise and confusion were too intense: his men did not hear him. And then the cavalrymen were on them. The young lieutenant launched himself from the back of his horse on to the shoulders of the man operating the crank handle of the Gatling, feeling the man beneath his flying weight.
Denniston looked right, left, rapidly seeking an escape route. The road leading towards Trinidad was clear now, the last trooper embroiled in the fighting going on in the road and alongside it.
Shots whistled everywhere. Men were sprawled brokenly on both sides of the road, some of them in the dark blue of the US Army. Denniston edged around two men fighting on the ground, saw a trooper coming at him in the same instant and shot the man in the face. The soldier went down in a welter of spraying blood and brains as Denniston ran hard and fast towards the left hand side of the road where trees came almost to the very roadside itself. Once in the tall timber he would have a chance. All he had to do was get across one high rocky ridge that loomed in front of him and he would be out of sight. He ran towards it with maniacal intensity, his only thou
ght to get over it and away.
He actually had his hands on the rock when a remembered voice cut through the white panic in his brain.
‘Don’t say you’re leaving just when the party’s getting interesting, Colonel?’
He whirled around, pure disbelief on his face.
‘You!’ he choked.
‘Me, indeed,’ said President Grant. ‘And Mr. Angel you also know.’
Denniston took it all in. Below and behind the two men in front of him the firing had stopped.
The soldiers were herding together a half-dozen or so sullen survivors, their hands raised above their heads as the troopers poked them together with rifle barrels none too gently. There were bodies sprawled everywhere in the hot sun, some of them in Army blue, many more not. The last faint wisps of powder smoke drifted away and the hot sun shone down forgivingly, long shadows darkening the bloodstained trail.
It was all over. Denniston frowned. How could it be all over? Then his eyes focused on the two men in front of him and his mind snapped.
There are medical terms to describe that exact occurrence. It can be caused by a shock beyond the powers of the brain to reject. On other occasions it is caused by a rush of rage so intense that inside the delicate frontal lobes small nerve cells break apart, and on still others it is a complete loss of all normal control.
Whatever it was, Denniston felt it go, just as the two men standing in front of him saw the bright glare that flickered to Denniston’s eyes.
Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) Page 10