Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) (9 page)
Read Kill Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #6) Online
Authors: Frederick H. Christian
Tags: #old west, #outlaws, #piccadilly publishing, #frederick h christian, #sudden, #frank angel, #wild west fiction
Eleven
Night found the fugitive quartet in a box
canyon which Vaughan had seen up to the north-east, a high walled,
narrow crack in the rocky mesa they had been skirting. They eased
the horses up to the sloping wall at the closed end of the canyon,
and made camp.
‘
No
fire,’ Angel said.
Vaughan looked at Gates glumly.
‘
You
bring anything?’ he said.
‘
Uh-hunh,’ Gates
replied.
‘
Great,’ Vaughan said. ‘No coffee, no whiskey. Looks like
bein’ a chilly night.’
‘
You
can dream of buttermilk and honey,’ Angel told him. ‘Break out that
pack an’ we’ll eat. I got some cans o’ beans in there.’
They hunkered down and ate an unappetizing
cold supper. Blantine gestured querulously with his bound
hands.
‘
You
ain’t gonna keep me tied up like this, are you?’ he grumbled. ‘I
ain’t got any feelin’ in my hands anymore.’
‘
Things
are tough all over,’ Angel told him. ‘Do the best you
can.’
‘
Goddamn you, I can’t eat like this,’ fumed
Blantine.
‘
Starve, then,’ Gates said coldly. He wolfed down the cold
beans as if there was a famine coming. Vaughan watched him with
unabashed wonder.
‘
Look
at him,’ he said to nobody in particular. He poked at the cold
beans on his tin plate with thinly concealed disgust.
‘
Don’t
you want them beans?’ Gates said.
‘
I
should’ve stayed in Abilene,’ Vaughan replied, handing over the
plate. When they had finished eating, Angel told them to get some
sleep.
‘
I’ll
take first watch,’ he said. ‘Two hours each. I want to be moving
again before sunup.’
‘
Run
all you like, Angel,’ Blantine nagged. ‘My boys’ll catch up with
you.’
‘
Oh,
shut up,’ snapped Vaughan. He pushed the old man backwards, and
Blantine rolled over, lying down perforce. ‘Go to sleep before I
bend a six-gun over your thick skull.’
Blantine glared at him with undisguised
hatred.
‘
You’ll
pay,’ he hissed. ‘You’ll all pay.’
‘
Yack,
yack, yack,’ Vaughan said, making a quacking gesture with his
fingers.
Blantine spat and rolled over, pulling a
blanket around his shoulders. He lay on the ground, his eyes
unwinking and full of hate. After a long while, the yellow eyes
closed and the old man slept, dreaming of revenge.
Towards dawn, Gates shook
Angel
’s
shoulder. Angel came instantly awake, coming up off the ground with
a six-gun in his hand.
‘
What?’
he said, tensely.
‘
I
ain’t sure,’ Gates whispered. ‘listen.’
The floor of the canyon was in
pitch blackness, and Angel could only faintly see the faint tinges
of grey on the eastern sky which heralded dawn.
Blantine
’s
snores reverberated off the rocky walls.
‘
Listen,’ Gates said again. ‘There.’
Angel heard it then. The call of an elf owl,
the tiny predator which makes its home in the trunk of the saguaro.
Faint, yet clear. The silence was intense again, and both men
crouched as still as statues.
‘
There!’ Gates whispered. They heard it again, but this time
from the other end of the canyon.
‘
Two,’
Angel said.
‘
Wait,’
Gates whispered. He slithered across to Vaughan’s huddled form and
touched the sleeping man’s shoulder. Vaughan’s eyes opened and he
started to sit up quickly. Gates pressed him down.
‘
Easy,’
he hissed. ‘We got visitors.’
The elf owl
oop-pooped
again. Moments later the reply
came. There was a faint increase in the light on the horizon now.
Scrub and bushes began to take on recognizable shapes. A turkey
gobbled somewhere up on the rim of the canyon and Gates’ head came
up quickly. He held up three fingers to Angel, who
nodded.
‘
Hey,’
Vaughan said.
They could hear each other breathing. The
old man snorted in his sleep and Vaughan jumped.
Gates unsheathed a
murderous-looking Bowie knife and held it up so Angel could see it.
Angel nodded vigorously and showed them his own. Vaughan shrugged.
He never carried a knife. His hand strayed to the butt of the gun
at his hip. Gates put a finger to his lips and Vaughan rolled his
eyes as much as to say, what do you think I
’m going to do, scream?
Once more they heard the thin cry of the elf
owl, and its echo. They sounded nearer, somewhere on the floor of
the canyon.
Angel had moved with infinite
care
about
ten yards to one side of the campsite. Gates and Vaughan were
crouched together six or seven yards away from the recumbent form
of Yancey Blantine, who still slept the sleep of the innocent in
the open between them.
Vaughan turned to whisper something to Gates
and in that instant the Apaches came out of the ground, screaming
at the top of their lungs as they launched themselves upon the
camp.
Burke Blantine led his men up
into the foothills of the Santa Eulalia mountains, rendezvousing
with the riders from Olan Crumm
’s ranch an hour before sunup. Olan Crumm was a
huge, massively built man with a chest like a barrel, a belly of
gargantuan proportions. His treble chins wobbled as his horse
fretted in the cool chill of the predawn darkness.
‘
This
is a hell of a thing, Burke,’ he said.
‘
They
can’t have gone far,’ the Blantine son replied tersely. ‘We’ll
catch up on them.’
‘
Ain’t
no tellin’ whichaway they’ll have headed, boy,’ Crumm said in his
rumbling bass voice. ‘They headed for Agua Prieta, they could be
someplace up in the Santa Elizabetas, gettin’ further away every
minnit.’
‘
That’s
bad Apache country up there,’ Gilman said. ‘They get into them
hills, they ain’t likely to git out in one piece.’
‘
Hell,
they’s Injuns all over these mountains,’ Ahern said. He was
impatient to be on the trail of the men who had so humiliated him.
‘My money says they’ll be headin’ for Nogales.’
‘
Across
the badlands?’ Burke queried. ‘That’s hard ridin’.’
‘
They
ain’t likely to use the road, boy,’ Olan Crumm rumbled.
‘
They
do an’ they’re done fer,’ Harry Blantine said. ‘Nobody can go
within ten miles o’ Santa Elizabeta without Dave Hurwitch hearin’
about it.’
‘
You
covered everythin’ pretty good, boy,’ Olan Crumm complimented
Burke. ‘What made you figger they’d try to snatch yore
Daddy?’
‘
Ain’t
sure,’ Burke told the fat man. ‘Just this Angel feller, he didn’t
ring true any whichaway you looked at it. On’y when we fell for it
I realized he might just be decoyin’ us. Too late then, o’ course,
damn him!’
‘
So:
what do we do?’ Ahern asked impatiently.
‘
We
better split up,’ Burke said. ‘Olan, mebbe you an’ some o’ your men
can check the west side o’ the Santa Eulalias. Pete Gilman an’
Ahern can see if they’s any fresh sign on the Santa Elizabeta side
o’ the valley. Me an’ the rest’ll head on into the mountains an’
see if we can cut sign there. Anyone finds anythin’ send a runner
damn fast — I don’t care how many hosses we kill, I want them three
found!’
‘
Well,
they’s enough of us to cover plenty ground,’ Crumm said. ‘Mebbe we
better get started. Be dawn in a little while.’ He jerked his chins
towards the east, where faint streaks of pink were painting the
dark grey underbelly of the sky a lighter shade. They could see the
far peaks of the Santa Eulalias blacker against the darkness than
the darkness itself.
‘
Gilman, Ahern, Johnson, you three others head across the
valley,’ Burke Blantine said, pointing to the west. ‘Harry, stay
with me. Olan, if you’ll let me have three o’ your boys, we’ll
point due north into the — ‘
He stopped. Far off to the north, he heard
something.
His eyes narrowed, and then widened. Olan
Crumm looked at him and nodded.
‘
Gunshots,’ Crumm said. ‘Six-gun, sounded like.’
They listened again but there was no further
sound.
‘
Couldn’t be anyone else,’ Ahern said. ‘Could
it?’
There was a look of wholly
triumphant glee on Burke Blantine
’s face. He raised the quirt and slashed
it down on the rump of his horse. The startled animal leaped into a
gallop and behind Burke Blantine the fifteen riders streamed in
pursuit, heading up into the hills, up to the north, homing in on
the sounds of the gunfire that could have only been made by the men
they were going to kill.
Twelve
The two Apaches came out of the ground so
near to them that Vaughan jumped with surprise, waiting for a
moment to drop one of them, the two bucks sprinting across the
sandy floor of the canyon weaving and dodging like hunted deer,
coming straight at Blantine, who had sat up like a jack-in-the-box
at the first scream from the Indians and was watching them as
helplessly as a bird watches a cobra.
The first Apache came up level
with Angel and launched himself into a flat dive which Angel met
with his boot held rigid in front of him, jarring the Apache aside,
knocking the man down to the ground. Angel drove in after the
fallen Indian but already the warrior was rolling away, incredibly
agile, finding his feet again and whipping a wicked
curving arm back
across his body, the rigidly held knife missing Angel’s stomach by
inches as Angel swerved to avoid it, coming to a ready position in
front of the stinking Apache, the black eyes riveted on him full of
the promise of death, both men holding their knives flat on the
palm, feinting once twice, then driving in at each other, the
Apache howling his courage cry, a cry that turned to an agonized
choking gurgle as Angel let him come in and then half turned so
that the Apache’s knife slid beneath his arm, trapping the
thrusting arm and bringing his own knife up in a terrible, ripping,
pulling slice that opened the writhing Apache’s body from groin to
breastbone. Angel felt the hot warmth of the spurting blood and the
Apache fell back, all of the breath going out of him in one shocked
and enormous gasp, his bulging eyes looking down at the quivering
steaming mess of his own insides sliding over his breechclout.
Angel hefted the knife quickly in his right hand and hurled it with
all his strength. The blade disappeared in the Apache’s neck just
above his left shoulder blade. He turned his head as though to see
it and felt the sharp inner rigidity of the steel slice through
everything inside his neck and then he was dead on the floor, his
blood soaking the greedy sand.
Gates was still rolling on the
floor in desperate combat with the other Apache. Vaughan danced
around the boiling dust they were thrashing upwards in their death
struggle, trying to get a chance to help his friend, unable to do
anything for fear of hitting Gates, who had a vice-like lock with
his left hand upon the wrist of the Apache
’s knife-hand, just as in turn the
Indian’s hand was locked on Gates’ right wrist. They struggled to
their feet, Vaughan still dancing around them as Angel came running
across the canyon and then Gates picked the Indian up and killed
him. It was as awful, as simple, as terrible as that. They saw the
huge muscles across Gates’ back bulge with a Herculean effort as he
swung the Apache around. The Indian gave a screeching cry of panic
as Gates got him up off his feet and then lifted the kicking,
writhing, struggling Apache up over his head and then in one swift
movement brought the man down across his own bent knee. The
terrible dry crack of the man’s spine brought a horrifying scream
of agony simultaneously from the Apache, who was dead even as his
vocal chords made the sound. Gates rolled away from the Apache,
then quickly kicked the knife aside. He stood up, swaying, his
whole body drenched with sweat from what he had done. He looked at
them with blank eyes and they did not move for a moment, and then
Vaughan said ‘Sh-it!’ and started running up towards the end wall
of the box canyon.
Yancey Blantine, while they were
fighting the Apaches, had scuttled off up the canyon and was trying
awkwardly to get at one of the Winchester carbines in the saddle
holsters. He was
tugging at the butt of the gun with his bound hands when
the third Apache came up off the rim of the canyon wall, knife in
hand, launching himself into a perfect trajectory to land on top of
the old man and plunge the knife into Blantine’s unprotected
back.
And in that one terrible moment
Chris Vaughan
’s hand flickered to the gun at his side and it came up in
a movement too fast for the eyes of any of them to follow. The
six-gun blasted once, twice, and the Apache’s falling flight seemed
to alter slightly as all the rigidity went out of the arched body,
and Yancey Blantine threw himself to one side as the body of the
Indian hit the ground beside him with a terrible sound, the meaty
thwack made by a butcher’s axe on a carcass. Vaughan was already by
Blantine’s side, and he kicked the old man out of his way
unceremoniously, his eyes narrowed and the six-gun ready cocked.
But the Apache was dead, and Vaughan straightened slowly, letting
the hammer down on the six-gun and turning to face Angel and Gates,
who came running now up the canyon.
