Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) Read Free Page A

though
considering every aspect of what Wells had just said. ‘Well, then.
I think we may just let them sweat it out.’
    ‘ Sir?’ Wells said, aghast. What was
the stupid bastard up to now?
    ‘ Sergeant,’ Nicolson said, patiently,
using the tone that a grownup uses to explain a concept to a small
child. ‘They want what is in this baggage car. They cannot get it
with us in here.’
    ‘ Sir,’ Wells said, carefully. ‘The
dynamite … ’
    ‘ They’d never set it off,’ Nicolson
said, confidently. ‘Destroying the contents of the express car
would negate the purpose of the holdup.’
    He looked defiantly at the cadets. Not one
of them would meet his eye. He was about to open his mouth again
when Willowfield shouted once more.
    ‘ You have exactly one minute left!’ he
yelled.
    Nicolson heard the words and
broke like a reed. ‘Oh, my God,’ he groaned. ‘Sergeant ... ’ Master-Sergeant
Wells was already wrestling with the bolts of the express car
door.
    By the time Willowfleld came down from the
rim with five heavily armed men to back him up, the cadets were on
the track, their weapons at their feet, hands on their heads.
Willowfield surveyed them with satisfaction, and their officer with
undisguised contempt. Leaving them to stand beneath the cold regard
of his men, he climbed awkwardly into the express car, and surveyed
the contents with a small smile playing on his face. No triumph:
not yet. There was still a very great deal to do. Yet he was
strangely elated. George Willowfield, he thought, you have come a
long way. A long way from the parade ground at Salisbury where they
had drummed him out of the Queen’s Own 17th Lancers, a long way
from the canebreaks of Missouri where he’d ridden on the coat-tails
of Quantrill’s cutthroats. What he had done here today would make
Jesse and Frank James look like the country louts they had always
been. George Willowfield had done the impossible.
    The Freedom Train was his.

Chapter Two
    ‘ You’re sure it’s not a
hoax.’
    It wasn’t really a question, and the
speaker, a gray-haired man in his mid-fifties, didn’t really expect
an answer. Nevertheless, President Ulysses S. Grant gave him
one.
    ‘ It’s not a hoax,’ he said.
    The two of them were sitting on opposite
sides of the president’s rosewood desk in the Oval Office of the
Executive Mansion. Through the window across the porch the rose
garden was still bright with nodding blooms and the scent of late
magnolia blossom came through the open windows. At this time of
year, squirrels would come down from the trees and eat from your
hand in the gardens. Grant looked drawn and tired, as well he
might, the visitor thought. 1876 had been a pretty bad year for the
president. Nobody had actually gone as far as to accuse Grant of
venery, but there’d been enough hinting to sink a battleship. The
Belknap scandal, the destruction of the 7th Cavalry at Little Big
Horn, everything from malfeasance to vote rigging had been laid at
Grant’s door, and there was no question that in the forthcoming
election he would leave the Executive Mansion forever. And if U.S.
(Unconditional Surrender) Grant’s year had been nothing but bad
news so far, the holdup of the Freedom Train was just about the
right weight of straw to break the camel’s back. ‘You’ve read the
letter,’ the president said.
    ‘ I have indeed.’
    ‘ And?’
    ‘ And I think we’d better make
arrangements to get the money together.’
    ‘ You’d pay?’
    ‘ There is no option, Mr. President. We
have to play for time.’
    ‘ Time,’ the president said, rolling
the word around his mouth as if he were tasting it. I could do with
a little of that myself, he thought. He leaned back in the big
brass-studded leather armchair and relit his cigar, waving at the
humidor on his desk by way of invitation.
    ‘ No, thank you,’ the attorney general
said. ‘I’ll smoke my own.’
    He picked up the letter and read it for
perhaps the twentieth time,