Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 Read Free Page B

out here to fix that rail, and tell him to
get word to the U.S. marshal in Santa Fe.’
    ‘ You
betcha,’ Pat Seele said. ‘Come on, Moses!’
    ‘ One
other thing,’ Leaven added. ‘Tell him we’re going to try going over
Bonito Lake and then down toward the Ruidoso. He may want to cut
east through Capitan an’ head us off.’
    ‘ I’ll
tell him,’ Seele promised, and something like two and a half hours
later, footsore, weary, and parched, he sat in the blessed, dark
coolness of the sheriff’s office in the Carrizozo Court
House.
    Sheriff George Curtis was a
slat-thin, cadaverous-looking man of about thirty. He wore his gun
like a farmer, high on his belt, and fastened to it with a thong
looped around the spur hammer of the .45. His bucolic appearance
had misled a number of would-be badmen, for Curtis was neither
stupid nor slow; there weren ’t more than a dozen men in the county who could
shoot as well as he could – perhaps only two could shoot better.
George Curtis was also phlegmatically deliberate. He listened very
carefully to what Pat Seele told him, then carefully checked what
Seele had told him with the stoker – with a natural courtesy that
took no regard of the color of Moses’ skin. From there he got a
picture of the three raiders and a fairly concise idea of the two
Pinkerton men as well. Satisfied that the Pinks wouldn’t cause him
more trouble than the fugitives by getting themselves lost in one
of the thousands of box canyons striating the western slopes of the
White Mountains, he went out and got his posse together.
    Sheriff
Curtis ’ posse
wasn’t what you might have expected. There were none of the
swaggering buckskin-clad pistoleros, who had been common in Lincoln County not many
years before. It had no imported toughs from Seven Rivers or the
Texas Panhandle, who could do things with brands that had to be
seen to be believed and who could also, when necessary, turn their
skillful hands to cold-blooded murder, arson, or rape. There were
no hawk-eyed Apache trackers who could follow birds through the air
or fish through the water. A man didn’t need any of that dime-novel
stuff in this part of the country.
    Curtis rousted out old Nicky
Cantilles, seventy years old if he was a day, an old
Spanish-American settler from ‘way on back when the stoutest
building in the county had been the Torreon in Lincoln, or Placka as they’d called it
then. Old Nick was built of whang leather and chewing tobacco, and
he could still fork a mountain mule for longer than most youngsters
could ride in a wagon. He also knew every inch of every draw, every
runoff, and every canyon between White Oaks and the Tularosa and
clear off the way across to South Spring on the Pecos.
    The second member of
Curtis ’ posse
was a half-breed Mescalero named Jim-Bob Panther. And there was a
very sound reason for having Jim-Bob along – he was a kind of
insurance policy. If they ran into any Mescaleros there in the
deeper recesses of the forests that clad the rolling hills of the
reservation, like as not there wouldn’t be any trouble. But if the
Apaches had happened on some money and used that money to buy
liquor at Murphy’s old brewery above the fort or at Dowlin’s,
they’d like as not slit the throat of any white-eye they came
across for the coins in his pocket or the clothes on his back.
Also, Jim-Bob was no mean shakes as a tracker, given half a break.
From what Seele had told him the Pinkerton men said, Sheriff Curtis
didn’t reckon to get many of those.
    Finally, he rousted out his own
deputy, Tony Coyle. Tony was a lazy-looking
farmer ’s son,
long-legged and sleepy-eyed, but he could shoot the eye out of a
quail in flight.
    ‘ Well,
Nick,’ Curtis asked the old man. ‘That’s the picture. What you
reckon?’
    ‘ I
reckon any man’s a damn fool rides all the hellangone across the
White Mountains an’ down to the Pecos to git to Santy Fe,’
Cantilles told him. ‘But I reckon them eastern dudes might