Read Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) Online

Authors: Frederick H. Christian

Tags: #wild west, #old west, #western adventure, #piccadilly publishing, #frederick h christian, #frank angel, #western pulp fiction, #lawmen outlaws

Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) (17 page)

BOOK: Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5)
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For perhaps two long minutes, they stood there like a
tableau: the girl on the porch of the hotel, leaning slightly
forward; the Chinaman cook stock still in almost the exact position
he had been in when he thrust the knife into Larry Hugess’s back;
Larry Hugess curiously shrunken in the clotted pool of his own
blood on the street; and Burt Hugess and Angel posed like figures
in some strange ritual dance.


It’s over,’ Angel said. And it
was.

Chapter
Sixteen

Engine No. 850, the
Huntington Carver,
was
named for a railroad tycoon. She’d been built ten years earlier in
the Philadelphia factory of Matthias Baldwin, a ten-wheeler with a
huge, inverted funnel of a smokestack. She was what the railroaders
called a 4-6-0, meaning she had four wheels on the lead truck, six
drivers, and no wheels beneath the cab. She was pulling a tender
and three passenger coaches, and she stood now panting like some
sleeping monster alongside the depot in Madison.

Angel went down to say goodbye to
Sheridan. Sherry Hardin came, too. She’d left Howie Cade in the
care of Mrs. Mahoney, and that fussy old body was giving Howie more
tender loving care than he could use. He was going to be all right.
The bullet that had torn into his stomach had hit no vital organ,
broken no pelvic or spinal bone.


Clean as a whistle,’ Sheridan had
complimented him. ‘You’re a fool for luck.’

‘This is luck?’
Howie Cade had said. His face was wan beneath the
tan, but the smile was about as good as anyone had any right to
expect. He had something to aim for now. Sheridan had told him that
when he’d delivered Burt Hugess to the capital, he’d be moving
on.


Where you heading?’ Angel
asked.


I don’t know yet,’ Sheridan had
replied. ‘Seems to me town-tamin’s not all it’s cracked up to
be.’


Hard way to make a dollar,’ Angel
had agreed.


Man like me, though,’ Sheridan had
mused, ‘there isn’t much he can do. I done some buffalo hunting.
That was all right for a while, but comes a time you can’t stand
the stink any more, or the slaughter. Reckon I’ll just drift a
while. Maybe I’ll find me a place they need a lawman, nice quiet
little place with lots of pretty gals.’


Place like that,’ Angel had
grinned, ‘What do they want with a lawman?’

Now they shook hands gravely and said goodbye without
emotion. Burt Hugess was already aboard: safely locked in the
caboose and handcuffed to a steel upright. He wasn’t about to try
anything, anyway. Since the bloody affray in Madison the preceding
day, he had been morose and withdrawn, eyes hooded as though he
were watching again and again a mental picture of his brother
coming down the steps of the hotel like some weird puppet, all up
on his toes as though trying to soften the awful, biting inner
rigidity of the scalpel-sharp butcher knife and then collapsing,
legs kicking helplessly, in the ankle-deep dust of Front
Street.


Luck,’ Angel said to the
marshal.


And to you,’ Sheridan replied.
‘You heading out today?’

‘I reckon so,’ Angel said. ‘That
fellow I’m chasing’s got one hell of a head start now.’

He noticed Sherry Hardin’s head come round sharply as
he said this, but he didn’t say anything. Sheridan saw it, too, and
he remained silent.


Sherry,’ he said. ‘See you in a
few days.’


Dan,’ she acknowledged.

She stood there with Frank Angel,
her shoulder just touching his, as the guard gave his shout, the
engineer yelled his acknowledgment, and the beautiful ten-wheeler
started to move, wheels spinning
shun-shun-shun-shun-shun
and then
taking their hold on the silver track that stretched to the
north-east. The smoke billowed up from the smokestack, laying back
over the tops of the carriages as the train picked up speed.
Sheridan didn’t look back or wave.

When the train was a smudge on the land, they walked
back down Front Street together. People were out hammering planks
over their broken windows. Mahoney’s hadn’t had anything like that
quantity of glass in stock and it would be some weeks before
windows could be shipped in from Winslow. Johnny Gardner was doing
land-office business at the Palace: most of the people in town were
coming in to hear his account of what he’d heard, what he’d seen,
what had happened, and comparing it with their own.


You meant that?’ Sherry Hardin
asked. ‘About leaving today?’


I have to,’ he said. They stopped
in the middle of the street and looked at each other. A woman
walking along the sidewalk frowned as if in disapproval. ‘You know
that’

‘I know it,’ she said. ‘I always
knew it would be like that.’


You could make it easier for me,’
he said.


That’s right,’ Sherry replied.
‘But I don’t think I will.’

‘It’s my job,’ he said to her.
‘It’s what I do.’


I’ll put you up some food,’ she
said. ‘While you go say goodbye to Howie.’

She turned away quickly and went
into the hotel, but he caught the gleam of the tears in her eyes.
He told himself he was being dumb. It wouldn’t matter if he stayed
one more night. No one would ever know.
Not true,
he thought.
I’d know.
And anyway, all
I’d have to do would be to do it over tomorrow, or the day after
tomorrow, or whenever it was. So it might as well be
now.

He still didn’t want to go.

He went over to Mrs. Mahoney’s and
said goodbye to Howie. They shook hands.

‘I figured you’d stay around,’
Howie said.


No,’ Angel replied.

Howie shook his head. ‘Your boss, this attorney
general character you mentioned,’ he said. ‘He must be some hell of
a holy terror, he can booger you into action from that far
away.’

Angel thought of the man in the big high-ceilinged
room in Washington, of what his reaction would have been had he
been able to hear Howie’s assessment of him. He grinned.


You’re about right,’ he said.
‘He’s a kind of hell of a holy terror at that.’

‘I never thanked you,’ Howie said
abruptly.


Good,’ Angel told him. ‘Don’t
start now.’

He went out of there before it got maudlin. You made
friends very fast in the kind of circumstances he had walked into
in Madison. It was hard to just walk away from them, back to his
own lonely life, knowing that in all probability he’d never see
them again. He thought he’d quite like to know whether Howie would
make out. He figured he probably would.

‘I made you beef sandwiches,’
Sherry Hardin said, her face just that shade closer to held set
than too composed. ‘And a canteen of coffee.’


That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks.
Thank Chen for me, too.’


He didn’t make them,’ she
said.


Not for that,’ he replied. ‘I’m
not too good at leaving time.’


Me neither,’ Sherry Hardin said.
There was a silence.


This job,’ she said. ‘How long
will it take?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
‘Honestly don’t know.’


And when it’s over? When you’ve
found this man, Magruder? What then?’


Then,’ he said. ‘I’ll be coming
back.’


Here?’ she said. ‘To Madison?’ Her
eyes were bright, dancing.


Here,’ he agreed. ‘To
Madison.’

‘Oh, Frank Angel!’ she said
softly. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him softly on the lips.
Then she kissed him properly and didn’t let up until they both
wanted to let go. He touched her lower lip with a gentle finger,
looked for a long moment at the bright copper glow of her hair. She
was a very beautiful lady, and the gift of her love was priceless.
How could he do less than fulfill the need that shone from her
eyes? He kissed her again, this time for goodbye.


I’ll be back,’ he told her. ‘You
be ready.’

 

Piccadilly
Publishing

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If you enjoyed this book we recommend others in the
series:

FIND ANGEL!

SEND ANGEL!

TRAP ANGEL!

HANG ANGEL!

 

Also by Frederick H Christian

the Sudden series

SUDDEN STRIKES BACK

SUDDEN AT BAY

SUDDEN – APACHE FIGHTER

About the
Author

Frederick Nolan, a.k.a. 'Frederick H. Christian', was
born in Liverpool, England and was educated there and at Aberaeron
in Wales. He decided early in life to become a writer, but it was
some thirty years before he got around to achieving his ambition.
His first book was
The Life and Death of John Henry
Tunstall
, and it established him as an authority on the history
of the American frontier. Later he founded The English Westerners'
Society. In addition to the much-loved Frank Angel westerns, Fred
also wrote five entries in the popular Sudden series started by
Oliver Strange. Among his numerous non-western novels is the
best-selling
The Oshawa Project
(published as
The
Algonquin Project
in the US) which was later filmed by MGM as
Brass Target
. A leading authority on the outlaws and
gunfighters of the Old West, Fred has scripted and appeared in many
television programs both in England and in the United States, and
authored numerous articles in historical and other academic
publications.

 

BOOK: Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5)
4.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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