They could hear her a long time before she came into sight, a long time before she ran up on to the embankment where Gil Curtis had planted the dynamite. Then she came thundering along the right of way, the bright glow from her smokestack projecting an orange glow onto the lowering dawn clouds. The raised embankment ran along the flank of a gully like a shelf, falling away below the train in a precipitous slope that was scarred with rockslides and shale. It ended, forty feet below, where the ground swelled upwards again toward the hills on the far side of the creek that sluiced down the valley. Curtis let the Special get all the way onto the embankment, the caboose rocking as she whammed past his marker. He slammed the plunger into the box. The flat smack of the explosion hit their ears an instant after they saw the brilliant blue-yellow light beneath the engine, and for a fraction of a second, the watchers thought the attempt had failed. Then they saw how the engine was leaning, nosing down, the front bogie completely destroyed, the bright brass reflector lamp crashing, smashing, digging, tearing into the ties with an enormous, deafening roar. Huge chunks of rock and earth and shattered timber flew high into the air over the shoulder of the thundering locomotive and then the whole terrifying juggernaut of metal and wood and flying rock erupted in an astonishing booming burst of fire that lofted great steel plates from the ruptured boiler up into the air like playing cards. The blast whirled across toward the hidden men, making the horses curvet in panic. They felt the long soft insistent pressure on their ears but they could not tear their eyes away from the terrible sight of the train ripping off the tracks and plunging down the side of the rocky gully. They heard the huge noise of the disintegrating engine sounding like the last quivering clangor of the great bell of Hades, the tender and caboose rolling over and over, breaking up as they rolled, and then the locomotive jumping up off the rocky slope and turning over, and over, and then, in a final, searing, stunning explosion of boiling flame, ending its life in the scoured, smoking pit it had dug for itself at the bottom of the gully.
‘Jesus,’ Falco said, into the comparative silence. His voice stirred Willowfield from the hypnotized reverie into which he had sunk. Then the fat man swung up into the saddle. The horse braced itself as his weight settled into the fork, and he pulled its head around to face downhill.
‘Will she blow again?’ he asked Curtis.
‘Naw,’ Curtis said, dancing triumph over what he had just effected still lighting the darkness of his eyes. ‘That war the boiler went, Cunnel. She’s done fer.’
‘Good,’ Willowfield said. ‘Let’s get down there.’ He kicked the horse into a walk and led off across the broken ground toward the wreck. The bright yellow glow of the flames flickering over the hulk of the shattered engine reflected on the receding clouds. Hesitantly, somewhere in the smoking depths, a bird began to sing.
~*~
When Frank Angel opened his eyes he thought he was in Hell. The red glare of the flames, the charred stink of the burned ground, the crackling heat that brittled his skin all struck his senses simultaneously, muddling his mind. Fire? He could not remember anything. His mind was completely disoriented and his memory drowned in dread. Instinct told him to move. He could feel the scorch of fire, realized he was inside something that was burning. A broken wooden crate, his blurring eyes reported, seeing broken slatting, wood, twisted metal. He tried to move, and felt something pinning down his legs. He rolled back, kicking away the piece of timber that lay across them. As he did so, what was left of Bob Little’s tattered body rolled away from him and slid down the canted floor.
It all came back to him then and he lay on the charring floor retching, oblivious. After a few minutes he was able to sit up, and the adrenalin surged through his veins: he knew he had to move. The train had been dynamited, and that meant whoever had dynamited it would be coming to inspect the results. If they found him alive they would kill him. He knew there was nothing he could do for Little, or for anyone else who had been on the train. The way the train had been destroyed was proof that the wreckers neither wanted nor expected survivors. He found his eyes were accustomed to the reddish glare, and looking around discovered that he was in a space between the collapsed wall and the upright-tilted floor of what had been the caboose. The wood was starting to smolder, and he could feel the heat of the flames on the other side of it. He went down on one knee, breathed deeply of the cooler air near the ground, and wormed through the A-shaped space. He came out into flickering red brightness, faced by the monstrous twisted jumble of the wrecked ten-wheeler. It lay on its back, one of the huge drive wheels still turning as it sought rest through gravitational pull. The entire body was torn apart like the throat of a lamb brought down by a pack of hunting wolves. Tongues of flame licked across the spilled oil and on the wood that had been trapped beneath the crushed tender. There was no sign of either the engineer or the fireman, and Angel knew that their chances of having survived both the explosion and the crash were virtually nonexistent. And O’Connor? If the little Irishman had come through the crash, he hoped O’Connor would have enough sense to keep his head down. The sound of horses moving on the shaley slope told him that any thought of going to look for the little man was out of the question. Instead he moved on noiseless feet across the bed of the gully, away from the smoking wreck of the train. He splashed icy water on to his face, welcoming the sudden shock of it, then moved silently up a shelving slope toward a stand of pine thirty or forty feet away. The cool dampness of the ground was a welcome relief to his fire-dried skin, and he stretched his hands in the dew-damp grass. His shirt was full of small burned holes, his pants torn and filthy. His coat, with his wallet and money in it, had been hanging from a peg in the caboose, as had his gunbelt and sixgun. He cursed his own helplessness and eased back into the shadowed trees as he saw Willowfield lead his riders across the little creek and up to where the ruined train had ended its terrible downward plunge.
‘Check around everywhere!’ he heard one of the men shout. ‘Make sure nobody’s alive!’
‘Find the safe first!’ someone else shouted. Angel thought he detected the nasal twang of a British accent in the shouted command. Willowfield, he wondered? He wormed his way through the brambles and thicketed undergrowth until he reached a flattened bluff from which he could see down into the basin below without being seen.
The sun was coming up over the top of the mountains to the west now, sending long fingers of light that shafted through the trees like searchlights, paling the flickering flames that still licked stubbornly at the blackened wreckage, touching the wreathing smoke with pink fingers. Down below in the gully, Angel could see the men moving about. One of them sat on a horse: a gross, ugly man who waved his arms as he shouted commands to the others. Angel caught the timbre of the voice with its nasal twang, and knew that this must be Willowfield. Alongside the fat man was a tow-haired youngster on a fine piebald mare. He wore a pale blue shirt that shone in the sunlight, like silk. His close-fitting fawn pants were tight-tailored at crotch and rump. Angel noted the girlish shoulders, the androgynous hips and the full, pouting mouth almost clinically before turning his attention to a third man who was up on the sloping side of the gully shouting something.
‘One off them alife up here!’ he shouted.
Cropped bullet head, Angel noted, and the rigid upright stance of a soldier. He was standing over a hunched figure that lay on the slope where a break in the grass cover revealed the slate base beneath the thin mountain turf. As he watched, Angel saw the boy sitting next to Willowfield lay a hand on the fat man’s forearm and say something. There was a plea in the way he looked at Willowfield, who nodded.
‘Wait!’ Willowfield shouted.
The man on the skyline nodded and shrugged, watching dispassionately as the boy kneed the piebald into a trot and headed across the foot of the gully until he was below where the bullet-headed one was standing. Then the boy got off the horse and went up the shale slide like a cat, eagerness in every line of his body. As he came up to the crest he slid a thin
-bladed knife from a scabbard at his side, and Angel watched helplessly as the boy used it on the defenseless O’Connor. The Irishman’s dying scream bounced off the rock walls of the gully as Angel bit back his own curse. The fat man had not moved; Angel thought he could see a smile on Willowfield’s face as the boy ran down the slope and vaulted into the handsomely tooled saddle. He brought the piebald back alongside Willowfield and touched the fat man’s pudgy hand, as if thanking him.
Willowfield nodded, a Roman emperor indulging his favorite.
‘Colonel!’
The shout came from high up and off to the left of where the dead body of Pat O’Connor lay in the gullied shale. Angel could see a tall, broad-shouldered man who wore his holster low on the right and whose black hair was winged with gray from ear to crown. The man waved an arm.
‘Colonel, I found the safe!’
‘Get Gil over there, Chris!’ Willowfield shouted back. ‘Let him handle it!’
The man called Chris waved acknowledgment and yelled something. Another man came scrambling up the side of the gully, a canvas tote bag in his left hand.
Gil, Angel thought. He’d be the explosives man, the one who’d blown up the train. Medium height, slim, long black hair, and dark, deep-set eyes. The man wore greasy buckskin pants and a leather jacket. Gun on the left. No knife visible, but that didn’t mean anything. Angel watched Gil go over the crest and out of sight with the one called Chris. As they did, two others came into sight and moved down the hill to where Willowfield sat, smiling slightly like some obscene Buddha, his horse shifting its feet as if to redistribute his weight. One of the men was short and thickset, running slightly toward overweight: thin black hair, slicked back, and a flat crowned Stetson hanging down his back on a leather loop around the neck. High heeled boots—a cattleman, Angel thought—maybe a horsebreaker. The second man was the bullet-headed one with the German accent. He watched the man swing aboard a big bay tethered to a bush near where Willowfield sat. Scarred face, as if the man had been involved in knife fights. An Army holster with the top flap cut away, the Army model Colt held in with a looped leather thong. No cartridges on the belt. A military man, Angel thought: he’d have his cartridges in a pouch from years of habit. The man’s boots shone from polishing, and his saddle was in good shape, soaped and shined. Soldier, Angel dubbed him. He had given them all working names, to remember them by. Willowfield, Chris, the one with the gray hair. Gil the dynamiter. Texas, the one with the high-heeled boots. And the kid. There was a name for him, too, but Angel didn’t use it.
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.
Chapter Five
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 bo
nes 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.
Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) Page 4