Anyone else would have been dead.
When Angel saw Gil Curtis step out from behind the sheltering rock, the carbine leveled at his hip, he instinctively changed direction, doing the only thing he was able to do in the instant of time he had before the flame blossomed from the muzzle of the Winchester. There was precious damned hope that Curtis would miss, but that was no reason at all to stand there and let him make a killing shot. Angel went down and forward in the snow and as he did so, he corkscrewed his body to the right, kicking up a flurry of snow with his legs to try to confuse Curtis’s aim.
The bullet smacked him as he rolled, dragging a shout of pain from him as it burned a wicked furrow five inches long across his bunched back muscle. Now, as Curtis levered the action of the Winchester, he had a second, not more, and in that second he had thrown the knife. A long time back, when he had first started working for the Justice Department, Angel had drawn up a set of requirements: he wanted weapons that fitted a particular specification. First, a man should be able to kill with them. Second, they should not be firearms. Third, they should be as difficult for a man looking for weapons to find as possible, and fourth, they should not be heavy. He had spent hours and hours with the Armorer in his workshop below ground on the Tenth Street side of the department building. Among the fruits of their discussions had been a specially made pair of boots of the type called ‘mule-ears’—on account of the pull-on tabs stitched to their sides—whose outer and inner leather was separated slightly on the exterior side. Into the aperture the Armorer had stitched special sheaths. Inside those sheaths nestled twin flat-bladed Solingen steel throwing knives honed to razor sharpness. It was one of these knives that now glinted dully in the graying light and thudded into Curtis’ body, just below the breastbone. Curtis’ eyes bulged outward. His hands abandoned the half-cocked Winchester and moved, hesitantly, toward the thing in his chest. His hands plucked halfheartedly at the quivering rubber-covered shaft of the knife, and his head sank slowly, as if the man was afraid to confront himself with visual confirmation of the weapon, afraid to let the brain receive the message that the rigid sliver of steel had already sliced his heart open.
His eyes came up to look at Frank Angel, and then a dreadful thick gout of blood gushed from his sagging mouth and he went down face first into the snow, as silent as some unseen tree in some undiscovered forest. Angel had scooped up the Winchester and was behind the rock before Curtis had even stopped twitching. He wasted no time on the fallen man: from the moment he had released his hold on the knife, Angel had known that Curtis was a dead man. Eyes narrowed, he tried now to see across the glooming gray space to the rocks on the far side of the trail from which the shot which had killed the bay had come. Falco? McLennon? Which of them was over there? Were both of them over there? And where were the horses?
He took stock of his situation. Curtis’s bullet had cut across his back, and he could feel the sticky warmth of congealing blood, but there was no way he could check how bad the wound was. The fact that he could move both arms without discomfort was an indication that it wasn’t serious, although that was whistling past the graveyard. He had a rifle and a sixgun, and enough ammunition. There was food in the saddlebags of his dead horse. If the weather held, he could probably last out. The sky was still clear, although it was dull now, and there was a soft gray mistiness in the lower valley. He was behind a huge rock, perhaps twenty feet high and nearly twice as many wide. It stood like a sentinel on the right hand side of the almost-invisible trail he had been following. Up the trail, to Angel’s right, and perhaps three hundred yards away, another even larger one loomed. To the left lay the twin buttes guarding the entrance to the pass through which he had come. Behind him, the snow-covered open ground rose sharply to the face of a cliff striated with snow and jagged lines. In front of him was the bare expanse of snow on which the dead bay lay, its body already lightly frosted with windblown snow. Beyond it, about another fifty yards away, was a huddle of huge boulders like the one Angel was using for shelter. Two great chunks of stone were in the center, and three smaller ones were scattered nearby. One of them at least had to be there, he thought; that was where the shot that killed the horse came from. The other? Up the trail, behind the big rock?
‘Falco!’ he yelled. The effort of shouting sent a lightning-flash of pain down the wound in his back. He worked his right arm. No stiffness. Yet, he reminded himself.
‘Falco!’ he shouted again.
His voice bounced around the open space, but neither sound nor movement greeted it. He looked up at the sky. The gray dullness was softening, turning pearly. Visibility was decreasing rapidly. He gauged the distances: the rocks opposite were maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. The big rock up the trail, perhaps twice that. He gave himself a moment, knowing what he had to do now.
To use the time, he slid the knife out of Curtis’ body and methodically cleaned it, not thinking about what he was doing, emptying his mind of reaction or regret. His breathing rate slowed, softened, as he concentrated upon the very center of himself, the chi that Kee Lai had taught him. When he was quite ready, he stepped out into the open, crouched and wary, and moved across the whiteness toward the rocks opposite.
Buddy McLennon saw Angel come out from behind the rock on the far side of the trail and couldn’t believe his eyes. Angel looked like some strange bug against the changing whitenesses, and McLennon cuddled the stock of his carbine to his cheek, taking plenty of time to pick up the target squarely in the notched backsight. Slow, he told himself, easy, watching the little black bug that was Angel. Squeeze, squeeze. The Winchester bucked and the moaning wind whipped away the smoke in a flurry of fine snow. The little black bug was still moving, coming nearer. How the hell could he have missed? McLennon cursed. He lined up the carbine again, wondering why Falco didn’t take a poke at Angel from where he was up the trail, and pulled off another shot at the weaving, dodging figure. Again he missed, and he fired twice more in rapid succession as the icy fingers of panic touched his heart. Was the man unkillable? The flurry of shots had told the dodging Angel what he wanted to know. The one behind the rock was McLennon. Falco would have known after the first shot that the light, which was deteriorating at a very rapid rate, was making him miss. The fact that Falco had not pitched in with a try for the target Angel had made of himself showed that Falco knew only too well that this strange light would foreshorten distance to such an extent that accurate long-range shooting would be difficult for a cool-headed expert, and nearly hopeless for anyone who panicked as easily as the kid. Short range, however, was something else again. He kept moving, and prayed that McLennon didn’t know about that either.
He didn’t.
He just saw Frank Angel coming on through the deep snow and threw another shot at him. When that didn’t have any effect, Buddy McLennon jumped down off his rock and, levering the action of the carbine, stumbled forward through the snow toward Angel, shouting curses as he came.
Sitting duck, Angel thought without pity.
He knelt down in the snow and put three bullets through Buddy McLennon at sixty-five yards. There wasn’t a hand span between them and they tore the life out of the kid in a bursting bloody spray that turned the snow behind his whacked-down body pink within a radius of four feet. Angel wasted no time on the fallen McLennon, but ran as fast as he could through the drag of the snow, heading for the rocks from which the kid had emerged.
No horses. That meant Falco had the horses. It also meant that Angel was in deep trouble. Almost as if Falco had read his mind, Angel heard the soft, snow-muffled thump of hoofs moving on the soft snow and he caught movement up the trail. Falco was moving out, heading up the long valley of the pass toward the no longer visible slopes. They were now hidden behind the misting grayness that had come up from the lower valleys. The sky had turned the color of lead left outdoors, and the wind was making a sound not far from the whine of anguish. Snow, which had moments before touched his face like feathers, now had a cutting edge that whipped red rawness across Angel’s cheekbones. Beneath the heavy blanket coat he felt the soft pull of the drying blood sticking to his shirt. He stood by the huge rocks, the useless carbine in his hanging hand, eyes bleak and empty.
And then the blizzard was upon him.
One minute he was out in the open, the air chilling, the light leaden, the wind sharpening. The next minute there was a roar as if some mighty machine had started turning and the wind came up out of the valley like the exhalation of a dying giant, whipping the snow off the sharp crests of the drifts in a horizontal hail that battered and snatched, slashed and rocked him, taking his breath away with its sudden ferocity. Floundering, blinded, his sense of direction gone completely in the few seconds that it had taken for the blizzard to spring up, and fighting down the chill of panic, Angel cursed himself, cursed his stupidity in not reading the signs fast enough. The gray mist that had been creeping up the slopes like soapy water, the strange light, all had been warnings. He should have read them as clearly as those first dancing flurries of snow, the icy edge of the wind. Now its howling gale force cut through his layered clothing as if it were tissue paper. The long wound on his back ached raw as the icy fingers of the blizzard found it; his bloodstained coat was already frozen stiff. His leg went down to the crotch in deep snow and he could no longer even see the faint traces of the trail he had been standing on.
He dragged himself up out of the clutching snow, fighting off the soft insistent chill of it, laboring up an incline in what he hoped was the direction that Falco had taken. His mouth sagged open and the wind tore his breath out of it as it drove an incessant hail of minuscule ice splinters against his skin, scouring his face to raw pink and then flat white in minutes. It pushed and bullied his staggering body off-balance, and if he had not strapped down the brim of his Stetson with his neckerchief to protect his ears, and a wool scarf around his face, he would have been frostbitten in no time. The wind rattled and flurried and harassed him. The brim of his Stetson beat in a frenzied staccato against his cheeks, making red marks.
He labored on.
A hundred yards, perhaps. More? He was exhausted when the wind stopped as abruptly as it had begun and he saw that, miraculously, he was close to the big rock behind which Falco had hidden. He silently thanked whatever gods were guiding his footsteps in the right directions, and staggered through the silent snow past the big rock and up toward the long crest that sloped away beyond it. He did not bother to look for tracks: the snow and wind would have scoured them away almost as soon as they were made. He broke into a lumbering run, his breath ragged. Although he was already worn down, he knew he had to cover as much ground as he could before the blizzard broke loose again. This was nothing but a momentary respite. He found he was still clutching the Winchester and he threw it away without a second’s hesitation. It landed barrel-down in the snow like a spear, remaining upright, stuck in the empty whiteness as if it were marking a grave.
Angel had covered about a quarter of a mile—during which time he remembered he had not taken any food from the saddlebags on the dead horse—when the wind opened up again. There was nothing he could do but turn his back to it like any other animal, hunching down in misery away from the slashing, seeking, incessant attack of the blizzard, seeing nothing but empty whirling whiteness, hearing nothing but the roaring howl of the wind and the soft sibilant sound of the snow sliding across the icy surface. He stood stoically through endless minutes of mind-emptied waitfulness, not thinking, not hoping, not doing anything until, as if gathering its strength for a final assault, the wind eased, sagged, dropped away. A fitful, watery patch of sunlit blue sky showed for an instant through swirling cloud. By the time it had opened up slightly, Angel was already moving up the hill. He went at it with the desperate strength of a man without much in reserve. The slope faced north and the snow was deep and crisp. It covered the rocks and gullies with a deceptive layer of whipped-cream softness. If Angel put too much weight on his feet, he sank into it to the hip. He had to move fast, yet lightly on his feet, keeping his balance against the playful bluster of the wind. The slope seemed endless, endless. His breath came shallower now in the thin mountain air and his lips were as dry as if he were in some waterless desert. It wasn’t a long slope, perhaps not more than two hundred and fifty yards. He could see the crest, soft and rounded against the sky ahead. It wasn’t physically far away but it took him the best part of thirty minutes to get two-thirds of the way up it and by the time he got there he was almost weeping with fatigue. He looked back downhill at the painfully traced line of boot-holes he had left. They seemed so pathetically few that it was almost impossible to believe they had taken so much out of him. He put his head down and went on. To keep his feet moving he chanted an old work song under his breath. There was nobody to witness his heroism, nobody to cheer. And when he got to the top and saw that beyond this slope lay another, identical one, it almost broke his heart.
He stood on the crest, knee-deep in the sifting snow, his shoulders laboring like some cruelly treated animal. He shook his head. He could not go any further, nor could he retrace his steps. He wanted to sit down, to rest. The wound in his back was on fire, and one small part of his brain was trying to persuade him that it didn’t really matter, anyway, that it wasn’t worth the effort, that there was no place to hide, no place to find shelter. Beyond the next slope would be another and beyond that another. In this gleaming hostile wilderness, what difference did it make which pile of snow you died in?
He made himself get up and walk.
Right. Left. Right foot. Left foot. Keep going, he told himself, just a bit further. Right foot. Left foot. Just a bit further. Then he saw the deep wide trenches in the snow made by the horses and he felt a gush of relief. Not only was he on the right track, but Falco was in as much trouble as he was himself. The horses looked as if they were out of hand, if the tracks were anything to go by. Bucking snow was an art natural only to the native-born mustang. Domesticated animals seldom acquired the art, and were inclined always to lunge at the snow rather than work their way through it. Even the wiry cayuse would sometimes give out after working its way through snow up to its belly for a few hours. Falco’s horses wouldn’t last another hour if the tracks on the snow were anything to go by. Angel grinned grimly beneath the wool scarf and plodded on, moving easier now in the flattened snow of the horses’ passage. The edge of the wind whipped at the skin of his face that was exposed and he prayed for the blizzard to hold off. He got halfway up the long empty slope. It seemed as if he had been walking forever. He had no thought except the thought of putting one foot in front of the other foot, no sense of time, nothing except the single-minded aim to survive.
When he got to the crest of the long second slope he saw the cabin. It lay about a quarter of a mile away, on the flank of another long slope that stretched away downward from where Angel now stood. Falco’s tracks led directly toward it and he nodded as he saw them. The powder snow whipped off the edge of the crest in a knife-edge line that whitened the creases in the icy mush that had formed on his clothing, and Angel drove his wilting body down the slope, below the lee of the crest where he could shelter for a moment from the biting, growing rush of the wind, drawing upon his last reservoirs of strength. I can make it, he told himself. I can make it now. The wind moaned and then screamed and then opened its throat with a banshee wail as it clamped down the blizzard upon the mountains with an awful, intense finality. It blew Angel across the empty face of the slope as if he were a child’s rag doll, bowling him over face down. He straggled, spitting and kicking, out of the drift of snow into which he had been hurled, trying desperately to orient himself in the howling whiteness, not knowing that he was screaming at the wind as if it were some live thing attacking him.
‘Damn you!’ he shouted. ‘Damn you, damn you, goddamn you!’
He found that he was on his knees in the snow, and he had lost his gloves someplace. His hands looked dirty white against the purer whiteness of the snow. The roaring wind surrounded him, swallowed him. He was blinded, engulfed in the whirling surge of the powder snow laced with ice that was torn from the face of the mountain. Somehow he got to his feet and moved. Forward? He felt for the rise of the slope, but he could sense nothing. His feet were like wooden blocks, his face stiff and numb, his hands without feeling. He walked straight into a flat upright rock, caroming off it before he had even seen it properly, gashing his cheekbone against the jagged stone. Sobbing with relief, he worked his way around behind the big rock, into the sheltering lee where he was shielded from the searching wind. Up ahead of him he sensed, rather than truly saw, the hulking dark bulk of the cabin. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to have to walk that far again or go out into the murderous hail of snow and ice but he knew he must. If he stayed here now he would die.
The wind was a familiar enemy now, and seconds after he started moving in it he felt as if he had never stopped. Numb, dumb, weightless, without form, he was an animal hunting a place to cower away from the awesome fury of nature. He had no ambition now except to survive. That alone would be enough.
He remembered nothing more until he walked into the pile of logs behind the cabin. His numb body registered the impact, and he fell to his knees in the soft snow, groping his way around the log pile until he was in the space between it and the cabin. It was dark and warm, compared to the raging cold on the other side. He squirmed around, barking his knuckles on the frozen logs of the cabin wall. It didn’t matter if he made a noise. In this wind nobody would hear a sound. He sat up, chafing his hands, rubbing them hard against each other. Then he rubbed snow on his half-frozen face, punishing the skin. Slowly, very slowly, he felt the blood tingling into the deadened veins, felt the warm pulse of life spread from his belly, felt himself coming back. He just sat there, ice melting into water that mixed with the tears of fatigue from his eyes, dripping from his chin. He looked at his hands. They felt like two bunches of bananas, and something like a grin twisted his frozen features.
He was in great shape for a fight, he thought.