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

pebble
arrows, the arrowheads pointing at each other, about a hundred
yards apart. Between them a whitened stick laid casually across
another to make a cross marked the cache, and Angel trotted up to
it eagerly.
    As he got nearer he saw something
white fluttering in the faint breeze. It was a piece of paper in a
cleft stick planted in the ground where the cache had been. The
cache itself was gone, weapons, everything. The cleft stick held a
piece of paper, and on the paper was scrawled a message from
Hercules Nix: DO YOU TAKE ME FOR A FOOL?
    Frank Angel stood in the bright
morning sun, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He looked back across
the bare valley to where the hacienda lay like a dark smudge at the foot of the folded
slopes of the Burros and imagined Nix standing on one of the guard
towers, watching through his telescope, smiling like a fox in a
chicken coop.
    ‘ Bastard!’ Angel shouted. He shook his fist in the direction
of the stockade, kicked angrily at the turned earth which had
concealed his weapons and hidden food. ‘Double-crossing bastard!’
He made a production out of it, his strung-out curses floating away
on the heedless wind. Then, as if coming to a decision, he set off
away from his cache toward the northwest, heading for the stand of
timber in which the Comanche village lay hidden. He walked slowly,
shoulders hunched, his whole bearing that of a man stunned,
dejected, defeated. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Nix watching and
smiling in triumph.
    He sure as hell hoped he was,
anyway.

Chapter
Eight
    Nix led out his men.
    There was a small smile of
anticipation on his face in the faint light of the dawn, the
expression of a man on his way to see good friends, drink good
wine, enjoying good talk. He sat in the silver-mounted California
saddle erect and proud, like a Greek warrior off to the wars. His
mount was the black thoroughbred, a product of the racing stables
of Virginia, and worth more than all the other horses of the men
around Nix. Des Elliott and his men had no such pretensions. They
were a killing crew and they looked it. Most of them had Texas
saddles with the center-fire rig, and their mounts were the
indigenous mesteno breed. Mustangs made more sense in this kind of country.
They could live off the land, whereas Nix’s fiery steed needed corn
to eat, and pampering. Nix’s ten men envied their leader his horse,
while concealing their envy beneath a veil of disdain: that kind of
horse couldn’t take punishment. They were kitted out for
war.
    From Nix ’s armory, each man had drawn an
almost-new Winchester .44-40, one of the new 1873 models. Nix left
the choice of sidearms to the individual, and their choice was as
varied and murderous as they were. Here a Smith & Wesson
American, there a Schofield, a Remington .44. One of Elliott’s
riders sported a clumsy-looking pair of Starr Army double-actions,
but most of them carried the first choice of the paid gun, the
short-barreled Colt Peacemaker, chambered for the ammunition the
Winchesters used. They were ugly but effective guns, although there
were plenty of other weapons to back them if need be. Pocket
pistols, Derringers, knives—one man even had a Barns boot pistol,
stuck into the top of his boot. He boasted that he’d once used it
to stop a train: standing in front of the locomotive and firing the
gun head-on at it.
    There was little
conversation.
    Nix ’s men were already well drilled in the
routine for scouring the valley. Each took a route angled slightly
from the almost due north line that Nix rode, with Des Elliott on
his left and Bob Dirs, a tow-haired killer from the High Hoban
country, on his right. The skull-faced Hisco kicked his mustang
into movement, and Barnfield loped out alongside him. They would
ford the river and scour the western side of the valley. The rest
followed suit, each angling away from the other, fanning across the
width of the valley, and nothing in his mind except locating the
quarry and picking up