Free Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) by Frederick H. Christian Page B

Sheridan stopped them with a word. They
looked at Hugess, and Hugess looked at Sheridan.
    ‘ You visiting your brother’s
fine,’ Sheridan said. ‘He’s not their brother.’
    Willie Johns kneed his horse
forward, crowding Sheridan back on the porch. He looked so tense,
so anxious to start something that Howie Cade started to move from
his post across the street where he was keeping the Greener pointed
in the general direction of Hugess’s men.
    ‘ How about I teach yore marshal
some manners, Mr. Hugess?’Johns hissed.
    Hugess ignored the threatening pose, the ugly
words.
    ‘ Go across and wait for me in the
Palace,’ he said to Johnston. ‘Keep out of trouble.’
    Willie Johns looked at Hugess, only
just succeeding in keeping the sneer off his lips. He reined his
horse around angrily, almost knocking Howie Cade over. Johns had
blood in his eye and everyone there knew he was liable to go off
like a stick of dynamite if anyone sparked him, so Howie said
nothing, just stood and watched as the Flying H boys trooped into
the cool depths of the Palace. He stayed on the porch of the jail
as Hugess went into the office with Dan Sheridan. Angel stayed
where he was, too. He looked toward the hotel longingly. Maybe he
could get a cup of coffee later. Sherry Hardin, he thought,
remembering the color of her hair and the look in her
eyes.
    Inside the jail, Dan Sheridan was
opening up the cell and Larry Hugess was covertly checking over the
strength of the building. Solid and squat, it would be a bastard to
take against determined men who were well armed and had plenty of
ammunition and water. A frontal attack was out, then, unless there
was no other way. It might come to that yet.
    ‘ Hey, Larry,’ Burt Hugess was
saying, grinning hugely. ‘I figured it was about time you come to
bail me out. This place’s beginning to stink.’
    It was clear that any thought other
than that his release was immediately imminent had not crossed his
mind. Larry had always bailed him out. Larry would do it now. Larry
could always fix everything. He’d think of something -he always
did.
    Larry Hugess looked at his younger
brother, not understanding why he gave a damn about him and knowing
all the same that he loved him, and needed to protect and care for
him even though Burt was a wastrel, a womanizer, and worse - a
killer whose actions had several times endangered Larry’s own
ambitions and come perilously close to dragging the Hugess name
into the dirt. He loved his brother as he loved no other human
being, and he did not know why, but it was a love tempered by an
anger that made him want now to shake Burt the way a terrier shakes
a rat, to slap him like a wayward child, to chastise him for the
stupidity that had led him to kill - of all people - the harmless
Clell Black, a man who had never willingly hurt a soul in all of
his thirty-odd years of life. He wanted to tell Burt that he,
Larry, had broken his back working for the power and the wealth
that he now had, while Burt had never done a thing. He wanted to
make Burt understand that his deliverance would only be effected at
the cost of stopping all work at the ranch, of hiring expensive -
and unreliable - gunmen, of running up against a man who, to be
truthful, Larry Hugess respected - Dan Sheridan - and the very law
he presented. And all because in a stupid, drunken killing rage,
Burt had lost control. This was the worst thing of all to Larry
Hugess. A strong man never lost control of himself. He was proud
that he had never done so. Never.
    To tell the truth, he thought, he
ought to let his brother rot in jail. If it had been some other
cause, he might even have done so. But for murder Sheridan would
see Burt hanged, and Larry Hugess was not about to stand still
while his brother was hanged at Winslow where the whole damned
territory could see the Hugess name on the front pages of
the Enterprise. So
there was only one thing he could do.
    Sheridan was waiting for him to
speak. Burt was