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

you. Then stay up there. Don’t come back down here.
Comprende?’
    She
nodded and started up the stairs. The barkeep came warily around
his bar and edged towards the door.
    Angel
let him go, taking the other girl with him. The two teamsters who
had been drinking beer rousted the drunk out of his slumbers and
half-dragged, half-carried him outside. Angel could see them
straining to see through the grimy windows. He waited at the bar,
his eyes fixed on the stairs. He felt empty. Someone he had never
seen in his life was going to come to the top of that staircase and
he was going to kill him — or get killed trying. He supposed he
ought to feel some kind of guilt, or inbred reluctance to consider
taking the life of another man. He felt only the steady throb of
his own determination. This Torelli had been one of the men at the
Gibbons place. What had been done there was enough to merit death.
He loosened the Army Colt in its holster and eased away from the
bar. A fly was buzzing against the window. He could hear the tick
of a clock somewhere. Then the man appeared at the top of the
stairs.

Chapter Ten
    Angus
Wells got lucky in Lincoln.
    He
spent three days talking to the commanding officer at Fort Stanton,
his brother officers, enlisted men, to the post traders Murphy and
Dolan. Murphy, a Satanic-looking, hard-drinking Irishman, had held
officer rank in the Army and was known universally as ‘the
Colonel’.
    He
had served in Carleton’s California Column and remembered Richard
Cravetts. He told Wells that the ex-Captain had settled on a ranch
in the Tularosa Valley in the late sixties, and been raided out by
Mescaleros.
    ‘ Lost
track of him after that,’ he recalled, pouring another liberal
glassful of whiskey out and drinking it greedily. They were sitting
in the rambling building on the edge of the sprawled fort, looking
out at the parade ground, dazzling white in the burning
sun.
    ‘ You
sure you won’t have another, Mr. Wells?’ Murphy asked.
    Wells
shook his head and Murphy poured himself another drink. It seemed
to make no difference to his speech or posture.
    ‘ We’ve been having our own troubles in these
parts,’
    Murphy went on. ‘Lot of rustling, some killings over at
Placita — Lincoln, they call it now — the county seat. Old John
Chisum’s jingle-bob warriors take it hard when someone steals their
boss’s beef.’ He grinned as if it was a huge joke. ‘But I recall
Cravetts had some real trouble over in Lincoln. A shooting affair,
as I recall. You ought to ride over and talk to Ham Mills, the
sheriff. He’ll probably be able to tell you more.’
    Wells
rode across the hills to the little town of Lincoln.
    It
lay athwart a noisy stream called the Bonito, straggling along a
street shaped like a flattened S, adobes and crude y shacks well
spaced on both sides. Ham Mills was a huge man, with a white scar
on his jaw. He scratched his head awhile, then plunged into the
welter of papers and books in his old roll-topped desk. Eventually
he found the document he was looking for.
    ‘ Here
you go,’ he said. ‘Cravetts, Richard. Assault with a deadly weapon,
intent to kill. I remember that now.’ He leaned back in his chair.
‘Early last year, it was. He came up here to sell some horses. Him
and another fellow, young tough with tow hair an’ a Southern
accent. Lee something.’
    ‘ Monsher?’ Wells supplied, and Mills smacked his thigh with a
hand like a hammer. ‘Monsher it was!’ he said. ‘Bad lot, I
reckoned.’
    ‘ What
happened? Wells asked.
    ‘ Forget the details,’ Mills said. ‘But I recall it was in
Patron’s place. Some hombre named Goss, Gross, somethin’ like that,
came to me an’ claimed Cravetts an’ that Monsher feller stole his
horses off his ranch down Alamogordo way, wanted me to get his
money off of them. I told him he’d have to swear out a complaint
afore the justice, “Green” Wilson, but he swore at me an’ said he
didn’t have no time for that kind o’