Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) by Frederick H. Christian Read Free Book Online Page A

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.