Find Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #1) (13 page)

‘
I
want you to know how grateful I am to you, Sheriff,’ he said, and
there was sincerity in the words. Whitehill had heard earlier that
Angel had ridden up to the Burros and found Jerry Bigg, taking him
two bottles of whiskey which had caused Jerry to miss two whole
days’ digging.

He
had also, Whitehill learned, given the dance-hall girl Jenny
twenty-five dollars, although Whitehill didn’t know that it was all
the money Angel had.

just
you mind what you told me, son,’ Whitehill said, tapping his teeth
with the pencil. ‘You head on home and leave the lawin’ to the
lawmen.’

Angel
nodded, and after a brief handshake swung up into the saddle and
headed the horse up the street and on to the trail towards Santa
Rita, heading East. Whitehill watched him go and went back into his
office, frowning.

‘
Too
damned tame by a mile,’ he said to nobody in particular, taking a
kick at the leg of his desk. ‘Too damned tame by a
mile!’

His
estimate of Angel’s character was perfect. Up in the mountains,
where the trail forked to the south towards Hurley, Angel swung his
horse’s head around and headed steadily on down along the empty
arroyo of the San Vicente. About fifteen miles south of Silver City
he took a sighting on Burro Peak where it reared above the pine
clad shoulders of the mountains, and let the horse make its own
pace over the fifteen miles that brought him back to the trail
going south and west to Lordsburg. He was there by nightfall, and
by dawn he was on his way again, heading now for Fort Bowie, raging
with impatience at the slow miles rolling past, the sketchy story
of what had happened to Wells in the Lordsburg cantina revolving in
his mind like a litany. The young cavalry lieutenant who had given
him the story in the telegraph office had said that Wells had
almost died of his wounds, loss of blood and shock. Yet he had
found enough strength to make two Mexicans carry him on a cot down
to the telegraph office, where he had arrested the telegraph clerk
after forcing him to send a message to Fort Bowie — effecting this
by calmly threatening to do to the clerk exactly what had been done
to him. A detachment had been sent across from the Fort and Wells
had gone back there in an ambulance, while the patrol went out to
the Cravetts ranch to search it for any clues as to where the
raiders might have gone. What they had found or not found the
soldier did not know. Angel knew Army procedure now. The officers
at Fort Bowie would know. Whether they would tell him was something
else. If Wells was still alive, he might make them. He recalled
what Wells had said to him the last time he had seen the lawman,
and grimaced. It wasn’t likely.

He
moved carefully across the empty land, keeping the twin nipples of
the Dos Cabezas on his left, eyes always wary for dust or pony
sign. Up behind those peaks were the Chiricahua mountains, and
enough Apaches in them, no doubt, to double the population at San
Simon.

Nothing moved in the land of the Apaches that they did not
see. He wanted no trouble with them and the best way to ensure that
was to stay a long way away from them, hoping they wouldn’t
consider it worthwhile running down a lone rider. lf they felt like
doing it, he had about as much chance as a mouse in a cat
basket.

Because he could not travel fast, it took Angel until almost
nightfall to reach Bowie. The fort sprawled ungainly across the
valley, lights in the officers’ quarters sparkling bright, visible
many miles across the desert in the pure night air. He could hear
them sounding retreat as he came over the last high crest and
canted down towards the establishment, and the long twilight was
almost gone as he came up the long graveled street behind the
quartermaster’s building and the post trader’s, a long, low adobe
with a ramada four feet wide, as dark beneath at night as a cellar.
He led his horse to the building a passing soldier told him was the
adjutant’s

office, and inquired there about Wells.

‘
You
a friend of his?’ the thickset sergeant behind the desk
asked.

‘
In a
way,’ Angel said. ‘I met him in Silver City.’

‘
You
know what happened to him?’

‘
Yes,’ Angel said. ‘A Lieutenant Roward in Lordsburg told me.
That’s why I came. Can I see him?’

‘
As
to that, I can’t say,’ the sergeant said heavily. ‘It’s the doctor
you’ll have to be askin’. Corporal!’

The
door opened smartly and a young corporal, the yellow stripes very
bright and fresh on his sleeve, stamped into the room and stood
rigidly at attention.

‘
Take
this young gentleman across to the Hospital,’ the sergeant said.
‘To see Doctor Bowall.’

‘
Sarge!’ the corporal said. ‘This way, sir!’ he invited Angel,
who grinned in the darkness outside.

‘
Follow me, mister,’ the soldier said, and led the way across
the baked earth of the parade ground towards a long low building on
the southern perimeter. It was brightly lit at every window and as
they got closer Angel could see men lying in cots, some reading,
others sleeping. In a small office at the end of the hospital, he
was introduced to the Post Surgeon, Doctor Bowall. ‘Mister Angel,’
Bowall acknowledged. ‘You say you want to see Wells. May I ask
why?’

‘
He …
helped me when I was … hurt. In Silver City,’ Angel said. ‘By the
same men that … did what they did to him.’

‘
Ah,’
the doctor said. ‘And did they tell you what that was?’

‘
I
heard they shot him up real bad.’

‘
That
they did, boy,’ the doctor nodded, scratching a match against the
adobe wall and lighting an evil-looking black stogie. He puffed the
smoke out of the doorway into the stillness of the night, watching
it hang in the lamplight. ‘And more than that.’

‘
More?’

‘
Aye,
lad, more,’ Bowall said flatly. ‘You see, they destroyed his pride.
They took everything that mattered away from him except his life.
And that was more cruel to the man than killing him would have
been.’

‘
I
don’t — ’

‘
Understand? No, why would you?’ the grizzled old doctor said.
His voice was soft and reassuring. He let another stream of smoke
drift off into the starlight.

‘
Medicine’s a very inexact business, laddie,’ he explained.
‘Out here, everything is so — well, primitive. We have no
facilities for dealing with anything other than the physical
aspects of the business. We fix the bullet wounds, patch up the
broken bones, mend the torn flesh. It’s about all we can
do.’

He
sighed, and then patted a chair. ‘Sit down, lad, sit down. You look
all in.’

Angel
sank gratefully into the chair.

‘
What
happened to your friend was this,’ Bowall said. ‘The men who shot
him deliberately crippled him. They shot his leg apart — God knows
if he’ll ever ride a horse again — and then they put a bullet into
his hand so he could never handle a gun. Now you know he’s a
lawman?’

‘
Department of Justice Special Investigator,’ Angel
nodded.

‘
Just
so,’ Bowall said. “Did you know he was their top man? Yes, he’s
been fourteen years with them. His job was his life. And what they
did, you see, was to make it absolutely impossible for him ever to
do his job again.

‘
You
mean the wounds won’t mend?’

‘
Oh,
they’ll mend, lad,’ Bowall said, gesturing with the stogie. ‘But
that’s what I meant about how limited what the doctor can do is.
For them to mend is one thing. For the man to want to try to be a
whole human being again is something else. Your friend Wells simply
does not want to live.’

‘
Why
are you telling me all this?’ Angel said.

‘
So
you’ll help him, help me,’ the doctor said. ‘I want you to try and
get him out of this — this depression. He won’t listen to me
anymore. Or anyone. He is deep in the black depths of thinking he
will never be any use to anyone again.’

‘
But
what — ?’

‘
Can
you do? I don’t know, lad, I don’t know. You see, I know about you
— yes, he told me. Angel. It’s not a name for forgetting easily,
now is it? But you and he have one thing in common. This man
Cravetts. He won’t talk about him to me, not any more. He thinks he
has failed completely, in his job, as a man. You’re the only one I
can think of who might snap him around out of it.’

‘
Hell, doc, I don’t know if I can—’

Bowall laid a hand on Angel’s shoulder.

‘
You
say he helped you. Well, maybe you can help him now.’

Angel
nodded. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.

Bowall stood up, smiling. ‘I hoped you would. I had a feeling
in my bones you might turn up. God knows why — by all accounts,
anyone with a lick of sense would be on his way home, glad to be
alive.’

‘
I’ll
go home one day,’ Angel said. ‘When I’ve finished what I started
out to do.’

There
was an intensity in his words which hung in the air, and the doctor
frowned. In the lamplight the boy looked no older than his own son.
He thought of Laurence, fresh faced and smiling in his cadet’s
uniform at West Point, and compared him mentally with this
youngster with the hard lines of experience already shaping his
face. My God, he thought, this bloody country!

He
opened the door and pointed down the hospital ward. Angel saw Wells
in the bed on the right. Wells was sitting upright, his right arm
in a wadded, bandaged sling, his right leg splinted and held in
traction. He was gazing emptily at the wall opposite his bed and
there was no expression on his face when Angel came up beside the
bed.

‘
Wells,’ he said, tentatively.

Wells’ eyes swung around, widening fractionally as he saw who
his visitor was. Then the fleeting expression fled from the eyes
and they were empty again.

‘
They
… told me what … what happened,’ Angel said.

Nothing.

‘
You
mad because I broke my word?’ Angel asked him.

Again
nothing.

‘
I’m
going on after them, Wells,’ the boy said.

Wells
blinked, blinked again. Angel watched silently in astonishment as
two huge tears formed in the older man’s eyes and trickled down his
unmoving face.

‘
Go
away,’ Wells said. His voice was flat and colorless.

‘
Wells, you’ve got to help me,’ Angel said.

The
lawman’s head swung around and he fixed baleful, swimming eyes on
the boy at his bedside.

‘
Help!’ he said. He made a noise that might have been a
contemptuous laugh bisected by a sob. ‘Help you! What do I use for
a hand? How do I get on a horse? You going to give me one of your
legs, boy?’

Angel
felt a sudden sureness inside him and it welled up and out and
became a laugh, a big laugh that made the soldiers in the other
beds turn their heads in astonishment, craning to see the
extraordinary sight of the beardless boy laughing by Wells’
bed.

‘
Yes,
yes, yes!’ Angel said, letting the laugh die back to a wide grin,
seeing the tears tremble on Wells’ eyelids and slither down his
face as Wells looked at him and then smiled and then smiled
again.

‘
You
can teach me!’ Angel shouted and made no effort to keep the
excitement out of his voice. ‘You can use my hands, Wells! My legs!
Show me, Wells! Teach me!’

Still
Wells said nothing, just looked at Angel with an aching uncertainty
in his eyes. He shook his head but there was no conviction at all
in the gesture.

‘
You
can!’ Angel shouted. ‘We can! Both of us, Wells! We
can!’

The
sound of the raised voices brought the doctor hurrying down the
length of the hospital, but he stopped short when he saw the look
on Wells’ face, the eager eyes of the younger man by his bedside.
Wells looked up and his eyes met those of the doctor.

‘
Can
I?’ he whispered. ‘Could I?’

Bowall smiled.

‘
Angus,’ he said. ‘You know damned well you could.’

By
the time they were ready to move out, the trail was two months old.
They had done some backtracking, of course. The Army had made
extensive inquiries at Lordsburg, and the telegraph office clerk
had been questioned and then questioned again and then again until
they were sure they had wrung every ounce of information the man
could give them out of him. What they had was pretty thin, but all
of it pointed towards California.

Cravetts had enlisted in the California Column at Marysville,
a small town north of Sacramento. The man who had bought Cravetts’
ranch at Lordsburg told them he had given Cravetts a bankers draft
on the Cattleman’s Bank in San Francisco in payment for the place.
The telegraph office clerk, anxious to help now in any way he
could, came up with the information that Cravetts had often spoken
of visiting San Francisco.

‘
Talked like he knowed the place real good,’ he
said.

It
sure as hell wasn’t much, Angel thought. But it would
do.