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

severed carotid artery. He crashed from
the back of the horse, legs kicking high, still plucking at the
weapon in his throat. Finally he got it out and when he did an arc
of blood leaped six feet from the wound, while Cameron’s body
spasmed in the uncaring dust. He was dead in moments, and Frank
Angel looked down at the blood already disappearing in the greedy
sand, his face without expression. He was not ashamed of the way
he’d taken Cameron. He had no qualms about using every dirty trick
in the book, and a few that weren’t—as long as they
worked.
    He quickly cleaned himself off
and dressed. Picking up Cameron ’s flat-crowned sombrero, he swung aboard his
horse. The animal was still jumpy, shying from the smell of blood,
but it quieted as soon as Angel clamped his legs around it. Horses
sense very quickly if the rider knows how to control them or not;
only inadequate riders get thrown. Now Angel kicked the horse into
a walk across the burning land, heading in the direction Cameron
had been following before he had taken him off the horse. The two
riders who had separated and gone on the northerly tack were almost
out of sight, away over toward the line of trees that sheltered the
Comanche camp. The one who had headed to Cameron’s southern side
was up ahead and to Angel’s right, turning his horse further
southward. He had to be going to meet the fourth rider, Angel
decided, the one who’d gone into the blind canyon. He scanned the
land ahead. At the foot of the San Miguels lay a long finger of
rock that poked out on to the flat plain, forming a halfway point
between the edge of the burned scrubland and the shaley beginnings
of the desert. Here, the effects of Nix’s controlled irrigation
petered out, thinned too much to aid growth so that the land became
worthless almost immediately. He aimed the horse at the finger of
rock. Just move on, he told himself, and see what happens. His
guess was that the two riders to his south would move up along the
wall of the San Miguels and bisect his path. That way all the land
in the arc would have been checked. Mentally, he acknowledged Nix’s
methods, the planning behind them. It was only because he had been
prepared for the man’s cunning that he still had a chance of
survival.
    He was not one of Hercules
Nix ’s
rabbits.
    The quarry Nix had hunted in his
valley had been like men in a poker game who don ’t know that the tin-horn has
marked the cards. Prepared by Welsh Al for the surveillance and the
counterchecks, Angel came better prepared, better informed. Knowing
he was watched, he had given Nix something to find. He’d buried in
the cache that Nix had found a ‘survival kit’ of a Winchester ’73,
a Peacemaker with a 4½-inch barrel, ammunition, rough, penciled
maps which he had carefully made inaccurate enough. A water bottle
and some strips of jerky. A compass, a knife, a loop of rawhide
rope. Hercules Nix had located the cache without trouble, of
course, it was for that reason that Angel had performed his
pantomime at the scene, hoping—feeling pretty certain,
actually—that Nix was watching and gloating. That might make Nix a
little less careful, and any advantage was one Angel could use. He
waited for night before he moved back to the blind canyon through
which he had descended into the valley. Here, behind high shoulders
of rock screened from the sight of the hacienda, he had left his real survival kit.
There was a second set of the black leather pants, a woolen shirt,
his own mule-ear boots with the socks stuffed inside them. Belt,
holster, ammunition, his own seven-inch barreled Peacemaker, the
one he’d bought for seventeen dollars direct from the Colt factory
at Paterson, New Jersey. Also in the little trench were one or two
other items he had asked the Armorer at the Justice Department to
put together for him. That dour individual had scanned Angel’s
handwritten list without any expression, sucking at the stem of a
battered old briar for a while