He rode in past San Miguel Church.
Children playing in the dusty streets outside huddled jacals called to him as he rode by, and the men lounging in the shade of the plaza’s big cottonwoods eyed him beneath tilted sombreros as he hitched his horse outside the hotel.
Frank Angel had come a long way, and he looked different now to the youngster who had set out so many weeks ago from Fort Larned. There was a different air about him. A lot of the boyishness was gone from the face, to be replaced by a wolf like angling of the jaws and a cold, wary look in the pale eyes that said, as clearly as if the word was written on his forehead: hunter.
The trail he was on was much warmer now. There were fewer places for his quarry to be, and where they had passed, people had recalled los gringos. At Herlow’s Hotel on San Francisco Street in old Santa Fe, they had purchased new horses. Old Herlow had been happy to describe them, and their riders, to the cold—eyed inquisitor, happier still to accept the twenty dollars Angel gave him for his help. He had brought a new horse himself — a rangy, lineback dun with plenty of stamina. He had new clothes, bought as had been the horse with the money he had taken without shame from the men he had killed in Las Vegas. He did not think much about the rights and wrongs of the way he had killed them. They were a species of vermin. Only a fool would release a trapped rat to breed another generation of rats.
Socorro was quieter these days than it had been when the mining boom had been on, but it was still a bustling, lively town. Big rambling adobes fronted on to the plaza, and the streets were busy with pack trains heading up into the Magdalenas or moving carefully south towards the Jornado del Muerto.
He went into the cantina next to the hotel.
‘A beer,’ he said. ‘The coldest one in the place.’
‘Si senor,’ grinned the bartender. He drew the beer and put it on the rough bar, the foam slopping over the sides of the glass. After the hard dry heat of the desert, it was like drinking iced nectar. Angel drank it down in one long swallow and put the glass down, motioning the barkeep to fill it up again. He looked around. There were only a few people in the place, most of them Mexicans.
‘Have one yourself,’ Angel said to the man behind the bar, and watched while the man filled a glass. ‘Where’s the bank here?’
The bartender directed him across the plaza and he walked through the tree-shaded square across to the solid adobe building which housed the First National Bank of Santa Fe. He pushed inside into the welcome cool gloom.
There was a counter with a grille in front of it, a door to one side. He asked to see the manager.
The man came out of the office. He was a slender man of about forty, a neatly-trimmed beard and florid face.
‘How can I help you, sir?’ he said.
‘I’d like to get some coin for this,’ Angel said, handing the man the buckskin bag of gold dust he had taken off Kamins. The manager hefted it in his hand. His eyes flickered over Angel briefly as he set up the scales.
‘Stranger in these parts?’ he asked.
‘Passing through,’ Angel replied. ‘Heading for Mesilla.’
‘So,’ the bank manager said. ‘I make this a shade over four hundred and thirty dollars. You want coin or paper?’
‘Paper will do,’ Angel said. The man nodded, and went through into the open area behind the counter, opening a drawer and counting out some notes. He locked the drawer and came back into his office.
‘You may be able to help me,’ Angel said. ‘I’m looking for a place owned by a man named Torelli. You know it?’
The manager looked at him differently. There was surprise in his eyes and a curl of distaste on his full lips.
‘You know the Torellis? he asked.
‘Never met them,’ Angel said. ‘Friend in Santa Fe told me I should look them up.’
‘Listen, Mister - ah?’ Angel supplied his name. ‘Mr. Angel, if I may speak frankly, I’d recommend you leave your money with us here at the bank if you’re going to the Torelli place.
Angel looked his question.
‘It’s a road ranch, Mr. Angel. One of those — ah, places, you know, they have, ah — girls there, cheap liquor. It — they have a very unsavory reputation, sir. I could not let you go there without at least warning you. It isn’t the kind of place a gentleman would go to. No, not at all. A thoroughly bad lot, the Torellis.’
‘Tell me about them,’ Angel suggested. The manager warmed to the task. He obviously felt strongly about the bad influence people like the Torellis had on the character of the town. He told Angel that there had originally been three brothers, all of Italian origin, who had come west from New York at the time of the mining boom.
They had enough money to buy a rundown old spread about six miles south of town, and it had become a Mecca for the miners down from the Magdalenas with dust in their pockets to spend, for teamsters and outlaws coming in off the Jornado, dry as a bone and looking for fun.
‘They haven’t quite the character to be badmen,’ the manager told him. ‘One of them, Bill Torelli, was hanged right here in town a few years ago. He tried to bust up a poker game he was in and shot a man in the hand. The miners strung him up from one of the beams in the hotel and put a notice on him: “Hanged for being a damned nuisance!” The other two brothers made noises about coming up here and taking revenge on the town, but a bunch of men from the town rode down there and sorted them out. Franco ran for it. He didn’t even have the nerve to stay and face the posse. The third brother, Steve — his real name is Stefano — came to a sort of agreement with the townspeople. He would keep his girls and his friends out of Socorro and Socorro would leave him alone. There were some of us, I should tell you, who thought that was a mistake. We ought to have burned the place down. At any rate, it’s still there, and a filthy dirty dump it is. My advice, Mr. Angel, would be to steer clear of it.’
Angel had listened carefully to the man’s gossip. If Socorro was like other towns in the west, the road ranch would be tolerated because it kept the hookers out of town itself, where they could offend the local people.
Better that than the way it was on Texas Street in Abilene, where the whores jostled the decent women and spat at them.
‘This Franco,’ he asked. ‘He never came back?’
‘Not that I’ve ever heard,’ the bank manager said. ‘I did hear once he was working in the railway yards at Kansas City, but I don’t know whether it was true or not. I never imagined any of them doing an honest day’s work.’
Angel picked up his hat and rose.
‘I’m obliged for your help,’ he told the manager.
‘Maybe I’ll steer clear of the Torelli place after all. One last question: you know a man called Cravetts, Dick Cravetts?’ He described the man. The bank manager pursed his lips, thought awhile, then shook his head ruefully.
‘Afraid not,’ he said. ‘I know most people in Socorro, but the name’s not one I’ve heard before.’
‘No matter,’ Angel said. ‘I’ll find him.’
He went out of the bank, and the bank manager found for some reason that he suddenly felt chilled. He went out into the plaza and stood for a moment in the sunshine, watching as Frank Angel swung aboard the lineback and moved on to the street, heading south.
There was something about the man which he could not quite define, and it bothered him. It was much later that he associated the feeling with the chill he had felt when Angel had said, very quietly, that he would find the man he was looking for.
The road ranch was built in a clump of cottonwoods between the road and the river. It was an unlovely place, and nobody had wasted any money on paint for it. The boards were whitened and bleached by years of merciless sun, the sprawling frame building askew here and there with warped uprights. A hitching rack ran the length of the front and two steps led up on to a shaded ramada.
There was a corral off to the right at the back of the place. There were half a dozen horses switching their tails idly against the persistent flies, heads low. He tied up at the hitching rail and pushed in through the door.
The place was almost empty. At a table in the corner a drunk lay head on table, a glass overturned in front of his folded arms. Two teamsters were arguing friendlily over a beer at the bar. There were two girls in short skirts at another table and they looked up as Angel came in, pasting smiles on their wan faces. He heard them whispering together, and eventually one of them got up and came over to him. She was petite, dark-haired, sloe-eyed. Mixed blood, Angel figured, some Indian, some Mexican, maybe even some Anglo, it was hard to tell. Her skin was that smooth brown that does not give away age. He figured she was about twenty-two, which was in fact four years older than she actually was.
‘Hello mister,’ the girl said. ‘Buy a girl a drink?’
He smiled down at her. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Carmen,’ she said.
‘Frank,’ he replied. He fished out a twenty-dollar piece and spun it on the bar. The bartender, a fishy-eyed man of about fifty, served the two whiskies Angel ordered. It was cheap rotgut and he guessed that what the girl had was cold tea. She touched his thigh boldly.
‘You goin’ to stay awhile?’ she asked.
‘I might,’ Angel told her. ‘Is Torelli here?’
‘\Which one?’ she said, then her hand flew to her mouth. She looked at the bartender but he appeared not to have heard what she said. Her eyes were wide and she looked at Angel, whose face showed nothing.
‘I know he’s here, Carmen,’ he said, softly. ‘No need for you to get involved. It’s Frank I want. Where is he?’
‘Upstairs,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, God, mister, there goin’ to be trouble?
‘Depends entirely on him,’ Angel told her. “You want to go and tell him there’s a man down here called Frank Angel who’s come to kill him?’
The bartender caught that and he started to duck below the level of the bar, but before he had even gotten halfway, he froze. The big bore of the Army Colt stared right back at him. The girl gasped. She had not seen the movement of Angel’s hand.
‘Lissen, mister,’ the bartender said, putting his hands squarely on the rough pine bar. ‘Any shootin’ in here, innocent people is gonna get hurt. You got a beef with someone, you take it outside.’
Angel shook his head. ‘Wrong,’ he told the man. ‘Take yourself outside, and take the girls with you. It’s Frank Torelli I want. No need for anyone else to get hurt.’ He turned to the girl. ‘Go on up and tell him what I told you. Then stay up there. Don’t come back down here. Comprende?’
She nodded and started up the stairs. The barkeep came warily around his bar and edged towards the door.
Angel let him go, taking the other girl with him. The two teamsters who had been drinking beer rousted the drunk out of his slumbers and half-dragged, half-carried him outside. Angel could see them straining to see through the grimy windows. He waited at the bar, his eyes fixed on the stairs. He felt empty. Someone he had never seen in his life was going to come to the top of that staircase and he was going to kill him — or get killed trying. He supposed he ought to feel some kind of guilt, or inbred reluctance to consider taking the life of another man. He felt only the steady throb of his own determination. This Torelli had been one of the men at the Gibbons place. What had been done there was enough to merit death. He loosened the Army Colt in its holster and eased away from the bar. A fly was buzzing against the window. He could hear the tick of a clock somewhere. Then the man appeared at the top of the stairs.