When the weather turns bad in the mountains, it does so very fast.
The horse blew great gusts of wind through its nostrils, which were caked with a rim of frost despite the muffler that Angel had wrapped around the animal’s head. They moved steadily upward into the rocky wilderness, heading for Trout Creek Pass. It was quite low—only nine and a half thousand feet as compared to some of the others. Up above Idaho Springs way there were passes well over two miles high, and the wind that cut through them blew from the Arctic to the Antarctic with nothing to stop it but one or two mountain peaks.
The preceding night a wind of hurricane force had sprung up. The night had been alive with the sound of shutters banging, corrugated tin roofs blowing off and banging away down the canyon, whirled up and down the heedless rocks by the whipping wind. Later, the wind showed its teeth, and lashed the canyon of the Arkansas with hailstones the size of prairie oysters, smacking against the thin wooden walls of the shacks down the street of Buena Vista like Gatling gunfire. The muddy street quickly turned to a gloppy morass, which froze like iron as the night advanced, and the temperature dropped like a stone. A moon glared like a baleful eye through the heaving clouds, and beneath it the mountains emerged, shining ghost-white with their mantling of fresh snow, only to be eclipsed by another sudden storm. Angel had sat by the window of the Lucky Strike, where Hedley had fixed for him to rent a room. It was too noisy to sleep, and he watched the incredible struggle of the elements, thinking of the men he was pursuing up there somewhere in the wilderness. Once in the night he heard the long wail of a wolf, driven down from the heights by the cold. For some reason, the sound reminded him of a time he had been in the mountains just before snow, when a lake had glowed an unearthly orange in the strange twilight, yet reflected the mountains above it deep blue. Somewhere around the middle of the night the storm broke, and he slept. He dreamed formless dreams and rose before dawn, still weary.
Up ahead of him now the mountains glittered and waited. The sun was sharp and bright, and the wind was bitingly, bone-achingly cold. The air was brittle and tasted dry, but he wasn’t tempted to take the woolen kerchief away from his face. He’d bought it and a heavy plaid blanket coat, together with a pair of seal-skin pants the preceding night. They just about kept the wind off. At this altitude, it could take off a layer of your flesh with less effort than a good skinner with a cutthroat razor.
The road, the vegetation, the trees on back away from the trail all lay under a glittering mantle of fresh powder snow that sparkled like the enchanted garden in a fairy tale, as if someone had sprinkled finely ground diamonds on the snow. There was no real trail visible, but it was easy enough to keep where the trail should be by following the innumerable tiny tracks of gophers and small birds that marched downhill toward the warmer places in the canyon. After an hour, Angel had to dismount and lead the horse, because the snow had balled so badly in its feet that the animal could hardly walk. Using his hunting knife and a heavy stone, he was able to chip most of it away, but he walked the bay for about another half hour before he got on him again.
Imperceptibly, the light changed, became somehow flat. It created a strange phenomenon: the ground ahead and behind seemed to become completely featureless, the rolls and crests and bumps ironed out to a flat and unbroken expanse wherever he looked by the strange bright mountain light. Nothing moved in the entire empty wasteland: no bird, no beast, no man other than himself. The sky above the looming peaks off to the north was turning a dirty fish belly gray-white, and he felt the wind freshening. The smell of snow was in the air and the bay shivered, as if he could already feel it.
Up ahead was the pass: a narrow aperture between two red stone buttes towering four hundred feet or more on either side. The impenetrable carpet of pine trees lying on both sides of the pass looked like frosted buffalo fur. Here and there on the floor of the pass lay enormous shattered lumps of stone, some sixty or seventy feet high, others immense, with bright striations of color dulled by the strange flat light that threw no shadows. The wind keened across this vast amphitheater like a dirge. Snow flurries stung his eyes, and he thought it looked like the last place God made. He saw the bay’s ears come up too late.
McLennon had had plenty of time to line up the shot and even in this strange, bright light, there was no way he could have blown it. Fired from no more than forty yards, the .44/40 carbine slug smashed Angel’s bay down sideward in a kicking welter of dying reflexes, spilling the rider out of the saddle to hit the icy ground with enough force to knock the wind out of him. He automatically kicked his feet out of the stirrups and rolled clear of the horse. The animal was thrashing in its death throes, its bright blood staining the virgin whiteness of the snow. Angel kept rolling, and then came up on one knee, hearing the whisper of slugs as the flat hard smack of the guns opened up, the dull pock as they smashed into the snow, his eyes searching for cover, any cover. There wasn’t any: they’d picked a spot where the nearest boulder was fifty yards away, where he was out in a wide open space of flat clean snow, as easy to see as a spider on a whitewashed wall. Through the keening wind, be heard the flat blat of a carbine, felt the slow tug of a bullet that ripped through his heavy blanket coat as if it were paper, turning him slightly off balance for a moment. Again and again the carbines banged, and he was moving, rolling, weaving, ducking, running, covered in snow, breath already ragged as the seeking slugs whipped gouts of powder snow glinting into the air. It sifted down on him as he slid to a heaving stop, orienting himself for the last nothing-to-lose dash. He knew that it was a miracle he hadn’t already been cut down, that only the strange flat light was saving him. He came up off his knees and ran now, not dodging anymore, dismissing from his mind any fear of being hit, forgetting everything except his one single, supreme effort to reach the big boulder perhaps a hundred feet away. He had no thought of anything except his intention and his destination. He ran like the wind and he was ten yards from safety when Curtis stepped out from behind the rock toward which he was running and levered the action of the Winchester, smiling a smile that would have made Satan envious.
‘Hello, sucker,’ he said, and pulled the trigger.
~*~
On the night of October 12, the night that Frank Angel watched the storm from his window in Buena Vista, George Willowfield broke jail. In doing so he not only killed John Henderson’s deputy Steve Jackman, not only stole a wagon and team worth—according to its aggrieved owner—a good thousand dollars, but also changed the scenario that he had given Falco out of all recognition.
Willowfield was many things, not all of them either nice or acceptable in decent society, but one of the things he was not was a fool. While he had languished in jail, he had considered and reconsidered every aspect of the triple cross he had so carefully planned. The holdup of the Freedom Train had been simple and uncomplicated. The robbery of the Special carrying the ransom equally straight forward. The setting of the hound upon the hares, and the security of knowing whichever killed which, it would make not one thin dime’s worth of difference to George Montefiore Willowfield.
The planned ambush of himself and his escort somewhere above Fort Morgan would not take place, even if Falco and the others made it there on schedule, for one very simple reason: Willowfield would not be going under escort back to Julesburg. To repeat: he was not a fool. He knew exactly what kind of man Chris Falco was, and had no intention of delivering himself like a lamb to Falco’s slaughter. By the time Falco discovered he had been duped—if he ever discovered it—Willowfield would have recovered the ransom money and disappeared to New Orleans—perhaps even Europe. He had always wanted to visit the Uffizi in Florence. He allowed himself the faintest, the very faintest touch of regret over Buddy, who had been a most winning young man, but he shrugged it away. The world was full of winning young men like Buddy and they were all drawn ineluctably by the sweet green smell of money. He smiled fatly in the silence of his cell.
He’d been a model prisoner. Henderson and his men had thoroughly enjoyed the fat man’s eye-openers about the places he had been, the souks of the Middle East, the Casbah in Algiers, the steamy Marseille waterfront, the jeweled waters of Positano, the gilded mansions of the rich back East—even if they weren’t true, they made a damned pleasant change from talk of horses, crops, and weather. Nobody enjoyed them more than Deputy Steve Jackman, who had asked for and gotten permission to play chess with the fat man. There was no danger of Willowfield making a break: even Henderson realized the truth of that. Why, the man couldn’t get four blocks before he’d fall down, winded, beached like some great soft whale. Willowfield was no damned trouble at all, not even complaining about the rotten food, and Henderson knew just how lousy it was. What he didn’t know was how persuasive the fat man’s honeyed tongue could be, and what he simply couldn’t know was exactly how coldblooded Willowfield actually was. One day they’d joked about the date the escort was due to arrive: October thirteenth.
‘Not your lucky day, Colonel,’ Henderson had said. Everyone called the fat man ‘Colonel.’ It seemed suitable, somehow.
‘Well, sir,’ Willowfield had breathed. ‘There are those, you know, who would tell you that luck, or chance, or whatever you care to call it, is worth about what a cat can lick off its backside. It is the man who relies on himself, and not on luck, who makes his mark on the world. Don’t you agree, sir?’
Henderson had laughingly agreed, and he was to recall that remark much later, and remember too that the fat man had not been laughing. He put it out of his mind and went about his chores. At eight, Jackman took over the night swing, and Henderson walked down Larimer Street to the Denver Queen for a couple of drinks before he turned in for the night.
Nobody ever found out where Willowfield had gotten the knife. It was surmised that he must have had it on him someplace all the time, although Marshal Henderson, whose efficiency and reputation were at stake, stoutly refused to accept that Willowfield could have concealed a knife from his search. Not that it made any damned odds at all: Steve Jackman was just as dead. From the way they found the place, they figured that what must have happened was that Jackman had set up the chessboard—the pieces were scattered all over the floor—and that somehow, incredibly, Willowfield had persuaded Steve to open up the cell door. As soon as he did, Willowfield had slid about nine inches of steel between Jackman’s ribs as callously and professionally as a paid ladrone.
Old Enoch Gordon’s wagon and team were hitched outside a store next to the ‘Floradora’ about six blocks down and two across from the jail. Enoch was inside cutting the dust, and when he came out and found his transportation missing, the manure hit the fan. Someone said later that he’d seen a hell of a fat guy climbing into the wagon. He remembered it especially because of the way the springs had squeezed down almost flat with the man’s weight, and how the horses had thrown themselves against their collars to get rolling. The man said he had stood and watched as Willowfield tooled the rig north along Larimer, heading—he supposed—for the Fort Collins road, and due north toward Cheyenne. It had never occurred to him that Willowfield was not only a fugitive, but also a thief, and by the time Enoch Gordon came out of the saloon and raised a yell, Willowfield had the kind of start that no posse was going to make up. Henderson went through the motions, but his heart wasn’t in it. Willowfield might have headed anywhere, north, south, east, west or any point of the compass in between. There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of catching him. The fat man was free as a bird.