Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) by Frederick H. Christian Read Free Book Online Page A

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well.’
    ‘ You think we can swing it?’ Angel
said.
    ‘ By God, Angel,’ Sheridan said,
his grin coming up full and warm, ‘you just watch us do
it!’
    ‘ All the luck you need,’ Angel
said as they started to move out.
    ‘ There ain’t that much,’ Howie
said, but he was still grinning, and Angel watched the two men as
they walked across the street, dark against the brightly lit
windows of the Palace Saloon. He could hear the tinny sound of
someone playing a poorly tuned piano inside. He watched Howie brace
himself outside the batwings as Sheridan slid down the side of the
saloon toward the back door.
    ‘ What the hell’s goin’ on out
there?’ shouted Burt Hugess from the cell in back. Angel kicked the
door of the jail building shut and went around Sheridan’s desk,
taking a seat in the swivel chair.
    ‘ Nothing but bad news, Burt,’ he
replied finally. ‘And all for you.’
    The Palace wasn’t anything like as
palatial as the name implied. Johnny Gardner had fancied it up as
best a man could in a building that was essentially a long, narrow
box. The bar ran down the left-hand side and curved in toward the
left-hand wall about three quarters of the way down the building.
In the wide space at the end was a raised dais on which Harry
Andrews, ‘The Professor’, tinkled endlessly with the jangly old
piano. Tables and chairs were grouped in half-circled profusion
between the dais and bar, and on the right-hand side of the
building a wooden stairway led to a first floor balcony that ran
around the place like minstrel gallery. There were rooms on both
sides: some for the girls who worked in the saloon, others kept
free for any of the Flying H boys who might be in town. The
mahogany of the bar was highly shined, and ornately carved fretwork
frames held mirrors behind shelves behind bottles that caught amber
light from the flaring coal-oil lamps that hung in a row down the
center of the building. The floor was pine planking, scuffed and
cut by a thousand sets of spurs; brass rail at the foot of the bar,
brass cuspidors every yard. There was a chuckaluck layout and
another for monte, at which Danny Johnston and a couple of the
Flying H boys were sitting when Howie Cade came in through the
batwings blinking in the bright light.
    Gardner saw him first and his eyes went wide; he
froze, holding the glass he had been polishing to a shine as if he
was expecting someone to shoot it out of his hands. He looked at
Howie Cade, and Howie Cade looked right back at him, and then
through him, quickly counting up the Flying H men in the place.
    Johnston and three others at the
monte table; Johnny Evans and Ken Finstatt at the bar. He couldn’t
see too clearly through the rolling smoke toward the back of the
saloon, and there wasn’t any more time because Johnny Evans had
spotted the saloonkeeper’s rigid stance and followed his eyes. Now
he nudged Finstatt and pointed at Howie with his chin, grinning.
Danny Johnston looked up from his cards, saw Howie, and smiled. His
companions at the table stopped talking. They all
smiled.
    ‘ Well, well, well,’ Johnny Evans
said softly. ‘Look who’s here.’
    The Professor’s background music
petered slowly out. He looked edgily at Johnny Gardner behind the
bar, but Gardner wasn’t moving. His eyes, like all eyes in the
place, were on Howie Cade.
    Howie was standing to one side of
the batwings, his back against the wall. His gun was in its holster
and he didn’t look too well. He let his eyes move across the faces
of all the men in the room, ignoring the contemptuous grins. He was
looking for someone who might be wounded. None of them seemed to
be. Then Sheridan slid in through the back door, almost but not
entirely silently.
    There was a collective sound in the room almost like
the slow exhalation of a giant breath. Sheridan just stood there
with the Greener across his forearm, waiting for Howie to open the
ball. Howie opened it.
    ‘