Read Online Find Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #1) by Frederick H. Christian - Free Book Online

‘We’re going to play this one a little more
cunningly. You’ll never backtrack that bunch. The trail is two
months old. I want you to try something else.’
    Wells
leaned forward. He liked to see the Chief’ s mind working: his
hunches were legendary.
    ‘ Fort
Stanton, New Mexico,’ the Attorney-General said, almost dreamily.
‘Start there. And work forwards. My hunch is you’ll meet them
coming in instead of chasing them halfway across the
country.’
    ‘ It’s
worth a try,’ Wells said. ‘I’ll get started.’
    ‘ You’ll have to do better than just try, Angus,’ the man in
the chair by the big window said flatly. ‘I want this wrapped up
and I want it wrapped up very soon, and I want it wrapped up by
this Department and not the Army. Do I make myself
clear?’
    Wells
nodded, and went out of the office. The Attorney-General’s
secretary was sitting in the anteroom, copying some reports. She
looked up and smiled.
    Wells
shook his head. ‘Phew!’ he said.
    Miss
Rowe smiled again. She’d never seen one of the Department’s
Investigators come out of that room yet with a smile on his
face.

Chapter Nine
    He
rode in past San Miguel Church.
    Children playing in the dusty streets outside huddled jacals
called to him as he rode by, and the men lounging in the shade of
the plaza’s big cottonwoods eyed him beneath tilted sombreros as he
hitched his horse outside the hotel.
    Frank
Angel had come a long way, and he looked different now to the
youngster who had set out so many weeks ago from Fort Larned. There
was a different air about him. A lot of the boyishness was gone
from the face, to be replaced by a wolf like angling of the jaws
and a cold, wary look in the pale eyes that said, as clearly as if
the word was written on his forehead: hunter.
    The
trail he was on was much warmer now. There were fewer places for
his quarry to be, and where they had passed, people had recalled
los gringos. At Herlow’s Hotel on San Francisco Street in old Santa
Fe, they had purchased new horses. Old Herlow had been happy to
describe them, and their riders, to the cold—eyed inquisitor,
happier still to accept the twenty dollars Angel gave him for his
help. He had brought a new horse himself — a rangy, lineback dun
with plenty of stamina. He had new clothes, bought as had been the
horse with the money he had taken without shame from the men he had
killed in Las Vegas. He did not think much about the rights and
wrongs of the way he had killed them. They were a species of
vermin. Only a fool would release a trapped rat to breed another
generation of rats.
    Socorro was quieter these days than it had been when the
mining boom had been on, but it was still a bustling, lively town.
Big rambling adobes fronted on to the plaza, and the streets were
busy with pack trains heading up into the Magdalenas or moving
carefully south towards the Jornado del Muerto.
    He
went into the cantina next to the hotel.
    ‘ A
beer,’ he said. ‘The coldest one in the place.’
    ‘ Si
senor,’ grinned the bartender. He drew the beer and put it on the
rough bar, the foam slopping over the sides of the glass. After the
hard dry heat of the desert, it was like drinking iced nectar.
Angel drank it down in one long swallow and put the glass down,
motioning the barkeep to fill it up again. He looked around. There
were only a few people in the place, most of them
Mexicans.
    ‘ Have
one yourself,’ Angel said to the man behind the bar, and watched
while the man filled a glass. ‘Where’s the bank here?’
    The
bartender directed him across the plaza and he walked through the
tree-shaded square across to the solid adobe building which housed
the First National Bank of Santa Fe. He pushed inside into the
welcome cool gloom.
    There
was a counter with a grille in front of it, a door to one side. He
asked to see the manager.
    The
man came out of the office. He was a slender man of about forty, a
neatly-trimmed beard and florid face.
    ‘ How
can I help