Cameron’s horse was cropping contentedly at the sparse dry grass growing in the cool shadows of the rock outcropping, reins trailing, when Hollis and Mike Hythe rode up.
‘Hume?’ Hollis called. He pulled his mount to a stop and piled off, kicking up dust as he scuffed across the open space formed by the half circle of rocks. ‘Where the hell are you, anyways?’
He looked at Hythe, who shrugged. ‘Mebbe he’s takin’ a leak,’ Hythe said, but the words were not properly out before the solid dead silence of the place registered simultaneously on both of them and their faces changed, drastically, as if someone had pulled a plug and their expressions had drained out. Hollis turned toward his partner, lifting a hand and opening his mouth to say something. As he did the first of Frank Angel’s arrows drove like a striking cobra into his body, making a wicked, heavy sound as it burst through him and out of his back, smashing him down to the earth, legs kicking high and a thin scream of shocked agony coming from him like a freed ghost. Hythe started for his gun in the same moment that Hollis moved, but he wasn’t anywhere near fast enough. You had to be damned fast to outdraw a man who knew how to use a bow and arrow, and Hythe didn’t even know where Angel was. A good man could nock and fire off his deadly shafts at least as fast and sometimes even faster than another could thumb back the hammer of a six-gun and fire it.
Angel was a damned good man with every weapon there was.
The Justice Department Armorer had spent a lot of time on the bow and arrows Angel was using. He had made the bow little more than three feet long, two sections that slid into the handgrip, all of it made of laminated steel shafts flattened and joined, strung with a fine-tensioned wire covered with gutta percha. The arrows were of the same lightweight steel tubing and the result was a weapon that could drive the steel shafts through a three-inch block of hardwood at twenty yards. The Armorer had frowned a little over the design Angel had specified for the arrowheads with their wicked barbs, but he’d done it. Mike Hythe looked down at the shaft in his chest as if surprised, reeling back off his horse and going down into the dirt with a flurry that raised dust. He was all the way to the edge of dead, but somehow he floundered to his feet and yanked the ridiculous-looking Barns boot pistol out of his boot, laying it across his blood-soaked forearm. Angel’s third arrow was already in the air, but Hythe yanked on the trigger even as the shaft tore out his throat and spun him thrashing to the ground. The pistol made a noise like a thunderclap, reverberating off the rocks above the killing ground as the .50 caliber bullet whined away into infinity.
‘Damnation!’ Angel gritted silently.
The whole idea of his weapons had been their silence: he had hoped for more advantage. Nix and his riders would have certainly heard the boom of the Barns pistol, and the sound of a shot would mean only one thing to them. Angel ran down from his hiding place in the rocks, not looking at the sprawled dead men. Moving quickly, he laced the reins of their horses to the saddle pommels and slapped the animals on their haunches. They moved off smartly, heading home. Angel didn’t think there was much chance of Nix falling for such an ancient wheeze, but even if one man was detached to check the dust, that was one man less to fight now.
He cast a rapid glance at the edge of the scrubland, and thought he could see a faint plume of dust near the line of trees, heading in his direction. He swung into the saddle and kicked the mustang into a run. He would be cutting it damned fine, but there was still a decent chance that he could make his destination. He leaned forward and talked to the horse, and once again, it responded with more speed.
Then he saw the second cloud of dust.
In the opening stages of the chase, Hercules Nix always took the center line. His usual practice—which his men knew well—was to ride due north with Elliott and Dirs until they reached the far side of the Comanche woods. There, Elliott would swing west toward the river, Dirs to the east and the desert’s edge. Nix would remain in the center.
Thus it was that when they heard the shots, Dirs was the nearest to Angel’s position, Elliott farthest away. Only waiting to ensure that Nix was swinging his horse around, Dirs thundered off southward, heading for the wide opening between the spur of the San Miguels to his left, and the edge of the woods on his right. He did not look back, knowing that Nix and Elliott would be following his dust. He narrowed his eyes to peer into the rush of the wind and saw a lone rider heading at an angle across his path to the right. Some distance further to the right—southwest—he saw two other riders heading at an angle to bisect the arc drawn between the lone rider and himself. It had to be Angel! Dirs’s lips stretched back off his teeth and he grinned like a Death’s head into the wind. The quarry was heading into the thin scree at the edge of the woods, and now Dirs saw that the other two riders pursuing Angel were Ricky Cross and a man known only as The Major, who was reputed to be on the run from the Army. He felt a surge of triumph. They had Angel cold. If he turned north, he’d blunder right into the Comanche camp, and they’d likely kill him on sight. Even if they didn’t, they’d kick seven different kinds of shit out of him before handing him over to Hercules Nix. If Angel turned right around and ran south, he’d be out in the open. In the unlikely event they didn’t run him down out there, he’d come up finally against the impassable barrier of the southern mountains with no place to hide. These thoughts made Bob Dirs grin like a wolf spotting a lamb with a broken leg, and he larruped his horse with the reins.
‘Got you, you sonofabitch!’ he shouted, thinking of five hundred dollars.
Angel got into the trees maybe a quarter of a mile before his pursuers, but it was enough. They couldn’t move among the trees as fast as he, who knew nothing lay ahead of him. They would have to come in slowly, carefully. It was cool and shady under the trees. The horse moved soundlessly on the thick carpet of leaf mold, through great swathes of shadow and between dusty columns of slanting sunshine. Here and there lay great gray moss-covered rocks that looked like sleeping dinosaurs. He moved as fast as he dared, trying to be silent. He had only a little time, and he had to make it pay. By the time Cross and The Major eased through the trees into the clearing he had chosen, Angel was good and ready.
Cross saw him first and gave a yell of triumph.
‘Hold it right there!’ he shouted. ‘Hold it!’
He froze as he saw that Angel had a Winchester leveled at him. The quarry was standing in the center of a small glade, back to a big rock. He looked like he was ready to fight it out, and Cross didn’t want to shoot him down before Nix got on the scene. He turned toward the Major. The Major winked. Cross grinned, and nodded. They knew that Bobbie Dirs had worked around behind the quarry. He’d make a move in a moment, and then the game could begin. Nix didn’t mind what they did to the quarry as long as they didn’t wound him so badly he was no more fun. Meanwhile, they had him. There was no damned hurry at all.
The tableau was like something painted, frozen. Angel there in the glade, back protected by the rock, Winchester leveled at the two dismounted men. He could almost hear the seconds ticking past, and willed the man behind him to make his move.
Almost as if anxious to oblige him, Dirs got himself firmly set in the saddle, and eased his Winchester from the scabbard. He was about fifty feet away from the glade, and when he was ready he gave the high sign to his two comrades and dug his spurs in hard. The horse buck jumped into full gallop, and as he started moving, Dirs reversed the carbine so that the barrel was in his hands, swinging the weapon like a polo stick. He had a savage grin of exultation on his face and there ought to have been no damned chance for Frank Angel in this world.
Then Dirs hit the wire.
It was practically invisible, stretched tightly from tree to tree and forming a square around Angel’s position, at approximately the height of the chest of a man on horseback. It was top quality steel leader, bought at Angel’s request from the New York sporting goods firm of Calhoun and Witherspoon, on Third Avenue. It was normally used by that strange breed who fish the ice-blue waters of the Gulf Stream for marlin, and sailfish, and even shark; and it had a minimum breaking strain of four hundred pounds. The way that Angel had rigged it, stretched twang-tight like a guitar string, it formed a cutting edge as effective as a cheese wire and Dirs’s neck hit the wire while he was at full gallop.
What happened next paralyzed Cross and The Major in horror. Dirs’s Winchester exploded harmlessly at the reflex pull of his dying finger and the slug whined away somewhere, harmless. The two paid guns watched transfixed by the sight of the specter rushing toward them, a headless thing that spurted blood as it reeled out of the saddle while its severed head bounded across the clearing like a rolled rock and disappeared from sight among the trees.
Cross gave a formless shout and yanked out his Starr Army pistols, falling sideways to the ground as he did. The Major was already on the ground, body neatly arranged in the lying-load position, legs askew and feet flattened inside down, firing useless shots at the place where Angel had been.
‘Behind the rock!’ Cross hissed. ‘He must be behind the rock!’
The Major gave an enormous shrug. He was not given to talking much. Besides, Nix and the others would be here in a few minutes. Why take chances? Cross made a furious gesture. Go around that way, it said. Behind him.
The Major’s lip curled and he made a signal of his own, less military but none the less perfunctory. Cross scowled across the yards that separated them, and then wormed off into the undergrowth, his whole posture plain with his message: damn you, I’ll do it myself.
The Major watched him go, impassively. They had all the time in the world. What Cross hoped to prove he could not imagine. Angel had killed Bobbie Dirs but that wasn’t the end of the world. The others must be only a few minutes away at most. He eased his left leg into a more comfortable position, and relaxed.
Ricky Cross was anything but relaxed. He was killing mad. Bobbie Dirs had been a pal of his, and the way this bastard Angel had killed him was, well, butchery. Cross felt even worse because, somehow, he’d stood there and let Angel pull it. He peered through the screening leaves. Nothing moved anywhere, unless you counted the normal chatter of birds, the soft buzz of insects. He eeled further forward. Pretty soon now he would be able to see in back of the big rock behind which Angel had taken shelter. He had one Starr in each hand, using his elbows for forward leverage. Keeping his head low, he advanced silently, every sense tuned, every nerve taut, ready for anything.
Anything except what happened.