Read Online Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) by Frederick H. Christian - Free Book Online Page A

words when
she lowered her voice and bent close to him. She smelled of some
fragrant perfume.
    ‘ For
God’s sake!’ she hissed in an agonized whisper. ‘For God’s sake,
Mister Angel—get me out of this place!’

Chapter
Seven
    They turned him loose at dawn.
    It was a strange, almost ghostly
scene. Hercules Nix stood like some graven idol, his men bayed
behind him in a half-circle, watching with almost sardonic
amusement as one of them ripped off Angel ’s clothes. When they were done, he
nodded.
    ‘ You
have a whole day, Angel,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it.’
    No trace of his urbanity of the
previous night remained. He was cold and remorseless, and Angel
clamped his teeth together so that the chill of the dawn
wouldn ’t make
him shiver. The huge wooden gates were thrown back. On the gullied
sides of the burros, light touched the rocks enough to make some of
the darker shadows contrast with others.
    ‘ Git
movin’, Angel,’ Des Elliott said with a leering grin. ‘Flap your
wings!’
    Angel shook his head ruefully,
and spat into the dirt at Nix ’s feet.
    ‘ You’re
as crazy as a bug in a box,’ he said flatly. Without waiting to see
Nix’s reaction, he turned and loped away from the stockade, his
mind already intent on survival. He had no illusions about dying
bravely, with a quip on his lips as they did in those stiff-upper
lip stories for British boys. If there was any dying to do, he sure
as hell didn’t intend it to be him who did it. He headed north
along the edge of the river. After a while he looked back, but they
were already gone, the gates of the stockade shut. He moved on,
steadily. The gray land beneath the pinking dawn sky was as empty
as the land of Nod before God sent Cain there.
    After a while, Angel veered
eastward, keeping up a steady jogtrot that he varied every fifteen
minutes or so by walking for the same length of time. He had spent much of
the night working out his movements, and until he reached his first
destination, he could let his mind rove over the things he had
learned during his stay in the Nix hacienda.
    The most stunning, the most
unexpected surprise had been the agonized appeal for help from
Victoria Nix. What was behind it, Angel could only guess, but it
reinforced his impression that there was something hugely wrong
with the relationship between the woman and her husband. There had
been no sign of her when Yat Sen had brought him down to the big
living room in the pre-dawn darkness. He imagined she was kept away
from the less savory of Nix ’s activities on purpose. She had certainly given
no indication that she knew what her husband planned for their
guest. Either way, there had been nothing he could do. He could not
even get a message to her, and did not see her again. Her
terror-drowned eyes stayed in his mind all through the night. Now
as he jogged across country he saw them again, and shook his head.
His first priority was his own survival. From what he had been told
by Nix, he would need all his craft and cunning.
    ‘ Tyrrell, Tyrrell?’ Nix had said. ‘Oh, the Englishman. Yes,
he came up here. Angry as hell. Claimed I’d sold guns to the
Comanches and they’d killed some of his people. I said there was
absolutely no proof that what he said was true. He damned my eyes
and said he aimed to get some proof and stick it up my
nose!’
    ‘ What
happened then?’ Angel asked, feeling quite certain that Nix was
lying, lying because it was a more interesting way of telling the
story rather than for any gain. From other hints in the man’s
conversation, Angel was fairly sure Tyrrell had been given the same
treatment that was awaiting him. But Nix went on with his
embroidered yarn.
    ‘ He said
he was damned if he wasn’t going to ride over to the Comanche camp
and talk to Koh-eet-senko himself. I warned him of the folly of
such an action, but he was beyond listening to advice. He went out
of here like a bat out of hell, and I never saw him
again.’
    ‘