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

fiddle-faddle. Next I know he
went down Patron’s saloon an’ called those two jaspers out. There
was a shootin’ and Cravetts an’ Monsher lit out, leavin’ Goss three
parts dead.’
    “ Didn’t anyone try to stop them?’
    ‘ Oh,
sure,’ Mills said. ‘We got out a posse an’ chased them clear across
to Three Rivers, but they headed out into the malpais, an’ you
couldn’t track a elephant in the White Sands, mister.’
    Wells
nodded. He knew the vast and featureless expanse that was called
White Sands. Hundreds and hundreds of square miles of glaring white
gypsum sand stretched from Socorro in the north almost as far south
as the San Agustin Pass through the Organ Mountains. Men who did
not want to be caught could find no better refuge from pursuers
than that trackless waste.
    ‘ Have
you any idea where Cravetts and Monsher came from?’ Wells asked.
‘They told me over at the Fort that Cravetts used to have a ranch
in the Tularosa valley.’
    ‘ Afore my time,’ Mills told him. ‘I heerd they was from out
Arizona Territory. Lordsburg was what I heerd.’
    ‘ Lordsburg,’ Wells said. ‘Sounds likely, anyway.’
    ‘ Likelier than they’d stay in Lincoln County anyways,’ Mills
told him.
    ‘ I
still got a warrant out on both them jaspers they ever show their
faces around here again.’ Wells rose to leave.
    ‘ I’m
obliged to you, Sheriff.’
    ‘ No
trouble,’ Mills said. ‘You ketch up with them jaspers, let me know.
We got a quiet little town here an’ I aim to keep it that
way.’
    Wells
headed on out of the sleepy little placita and up the canyon
towards Fort Stanton. It was a long way to Mesilla and well over a
hundred miles to Lordsburg from there. He kicked his horse into a
run.

Chapter Eleven
    The
man on the stairs had his hands above his head.
    ‘ You,
mister!’ he shouted. ‘I ain’t armed. Don’t shoot!’
    He
was short and pudgy, and the light from the grimy windows flickered
on his eyeglasses. Angel could see the man’s tongue nervously
touching thick, rubbery lips.
    ‘ Where’s Torelli?’ he said flatly.
    ‘ He —
I — he’s not here, mister,’ the man said. He started down the
stairs, eyes fixed on Angel, moving carefully, slowly. He kept
talking all the way down as though by talking he could prevent
anything from happening to him.
    ‘ Torelli ain’t here, mister,’ the man droned. ‘He left earlier
this mornin’. Headed for Las Cruces. That stupid Carmen thought she
seen him upstairs but it was me she seen, not Frank.’
    He
kept on coming down the stairs and Angel watched him every inch of
the way. He watched the man’s eyes and when he saw them flicker
towards the window he moved, one swift leap lifting him over the
top of the bar and behind it as the glass from one of the windows
shattered inwards with the booming roar of a gun and Angel heard
the fat smack of the slivered slug hitting the other side of the
bar. He went sideways along the floor, stretching upwards to where
he had earlier seen the bartender reaching, his hand closing on the
stock of a shotgun. He pulled it down, still rolling, as the man on
the staircase ran into the space in front of the bar, a six-gun in
his hand, pumping shots, scrabbling in the blaze of noise to get
around behind the bar and at Angel. Angel eared back the hammers on
the shotgun, whose barrels were sawn off at about the ten inch
mark, and as the man came around the bar, eyes glaring behind the
spectacles, lining the gun down on the squirming Angel, he pulled
both triggers. The awful flat voommmph! sounded like a thunderclap
in the enclosed space and the close-packed shot had spread only
about a foot when it hit the thick-lipped one. It tore a hole in
his upper body the size of a plate and hurled him back against the
wall with a force that shook the building. In the same instant,
guns blasted from the doorway as two men came running crouched into
the room, diving for the shelter of tipped-over tables, laying down
a hail of