They were waiting for him in Silver City.
Torelli had run like a rabbit, fear forcing him to the limits of his own endurance on the long, punishing run south and west across the mountains. His mind blank with fear, Torelli thought only of catching up with Cravetts. Cravetts would know what to do. Cravetts would know how to handle this cold-eyed nemesis. Cravetts
would tell him who Angel was, why he was on their back-trail, why he wanted to kill them. Still, every jolting racking mile of the way Torelli scoured the dark alleys of his memory for some clue to Angel’s identity. Who was he? What did he want? Why did he want him, Torelli, dead?
It did not take long to find his friends in Silver City.
They had taken rooms at Antrim’s Boarding House on the end of the bridge over the Big Ditch, and were drinking around a table in the Southern Hotel. It took him even less time to tell them what had happened and why he was here.
‘He’ll come after you?’ Cravetts asked.
‘Sure as you’re born,’ Torelli said. ‘He’s a-crazy!’
‘Angel,’ Cravetts mused. ‘Angel. The name doesn’t mean anything to me. Any of you others?’
Lee Monsher shook his head, tow hair falling into his eyes.
‘Hit ain’t the kind o’ name a man’d forget,’ he said. Johnnie?
‘I’m never heard of him,’ Vister replied. His accent still hinted of his Scandinavian origins. He was a burly man with a broken nose that gave him a good-natured, hell-for-leather look.
‘Then who the hell is he?’ Torelli ground out. ‘Why would he come after us like that?’
Cravetts frowned. ‘We’ve got a long back trail, Frank,’ he said gently. ‘Could be something you did, forgot. You say he’s young?’
Torelli nodded. ‘Nineteen, twenty mebbe.’
‘Then he’s not Army, he’s not Pinkerton, and he’s probably - no: he can’t be any kind of law. You said he came in and said he was going to kill you, right?’ Again Torelli nodded. ‘No lawman would ever do that,’ Cravetts said. ‘Which means he’s dogging you for something personal.’
‘But I never done nothin’ — nothin’ that’d make a man track me down like that, Dick! How’d he know where I was? Apart from the boys at the ranch, everyone else thought I was still up in Kansas.’
Cravetts’ eyes narrowed.
‘He could be from up there. He could be from anywhere. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference, Frank.’
‘Yo’re raht,’ Monsher said. ‘Hit don’t make no sense whichever way you look at it.’
‘There’s a key,’ Cravetts said. ‘We just haven’t found it.’
‘Damned if ah figger to set here a-worryin’,’ Monsher said. ‘Ah’d as lief lay for him an’ blow his head off the minnit he shows his face.’
‘Oh, we’ll do that, all right,’ Cravetts said. There was a slow smile on his face. ‘No sweat at all. It would just be nice to know what he’s after.’
‘We’ll ask him,’ Monsher grinned evilly. just afore we put his light out.’
They laughed uproariously and ordered more drinks, and then they sat down to plan exactly how they were going to whipsaw Frank Angel.
Angel got to Silver City late in the afternoon of the day following Torelli’s arrival. Climbing in long loops over the crest of the Black Range, the ten thousand feet of Hillsboro Peak looming up to the north, he dropped down from Emory Pass into the canyons and mountain trails to Santa Rita with its huge opencast copper pit and on into Silver City’s Main Street. The clamor and bustle of the place were enormous. Huge freight wagons with teams of a dozen oxen churned the street dust twenty feet high, coating the one- and two-storey business buildings with an overall cast of grey. Up on Chloride Flats above the town the constant chatter of mining machinery throbbed against the empty desert sky. As he came up the street he passed an express office and saw stacks of numbered bricks of silver on the sidewalk outside, unguarded. He checked off the names of the places he would call in on later: the Red Onion, the Blue Goose, the Southern Hotel, the Bullard House. They were all bursting with people: miners, freighters, teamsters, soldiers from Camp Grant and Fort Union, drifting punchers trying their luck in the mines, even a few surly tame Apaches loitering around the entrances to the drinking halls, hoping for a handout. Angel let his eyes drift easily across the faces on the crowded sidewalks, not looking for anyone particular, hoping always to see a face he knew, or would recognize. There wasn’t much chance Torelli would be here, but he would check it out. He left his horse in a corral at the edge of town and walked back up the street, wrinkling his nose in disgust at his own smell. A bath, a shave, a change of clothing would be a good idea, too, he thought. Loosening the Army Colt in its holster he set out purposefully to scout the saloons and hotels he had checked off earlier in his mind. A burly man with a broken nose got up off a chair in the shade of the porch outside the Star Hotel as Angel went past, falling in step behind him on the crowded sidewalk.
A little further up the street there was a gap between two buildings. Behind it lay a jumble of tipped rubbish and an empty lot stretching back to a pile of tailings looking like a landslide on the bare slope reaching up towards Chloride Flats. Behind Angel the man with the broken nose pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face ostentatiously. Then they let the dog see the rabbit. Torelli came out of the Red Onion saloon and walked towards Angel, timing it so that he reached the gap between the buildings at the same moment that Angel saw him. He let Angel’s eyes meet his and then gave a yelp of fear, turning on his heel and running flat out up the alley, scrambling over the rubbish and off towards a gully that ran down towards San Vicente creek.
There was some scrub and sage down there, but the only cover was a pile of raw timber that had been freighted in and dumped temporarily at the rear of one of the stores.
Torelli ran towards it as Angel came pounding up the alley after him, the Army Colt up and out in his hand. He saw Torelli duck behind the lumber pile and hastily threw a shot at the man. The bullet tore a huge sliver of pine from one of the planks and Torelli pulled his own gun and fired back. His bullet whined off way above Angel’s head and Angel smiled grimly, running crouched low across the space between him and the pile of timber, eyes fixed on the place he had seen Torelli last, oblivious to everything else. He was about four yards from the timber when two men he had never seen before stepped out into the open. One of them was a lanky man with tow hair that flopped into his eyes and the other was older, thickset, his shoulders broad and heavy, the bull neck corded with anticipation. They had guns in their hands and the guns were fully cocked. Angel skidded to a stop, steeling in a wary crouch. He knew who they were.
‘So this is our little Angel,’ the man with the tow hair said. There was a feral grin on his face. ‘Howdy, Angel. You lookin’ for someone?’
Angel said nothing. Looking into those eyes, he knew he was very close to death. There was nothing he could do but the best he could. In another second, another minute he would be dead. It was only a question of whether he could take Cravetts before he went. A flicker of movement to his left caught his eye, and he saw Frank Torelli step out from the other side of the pile of timber, gun ready. Torelli’s face was a mask of hatred.
He felt, rather than heard, the slight sound and let the hammer of the gun go, firing even as Vister, coming up behind him, smashed him to the ground with the barrel of his six-gun.
Angel’s bullet had been meant for Cravetts but it went a long way wide. He was down on his knees, fighting to stay conscious, knowing that they were coming at him.
The gun lay on the ground in front of him. His eyes focused momentarily and he tried to pick the gun up. A boot stomped down on his hand and he felt the raw red flame of pain as the bones went. Then he was yanked to his feet and thrown back against the pile of lumber, jarring the breath from his body.
‘Let me!’ he heard a voice yell. ‘I owe him this!’
‘Wait!’ another voice said. It had a tone of command, a sureness that it would be obeyed. Cravetts, he thought.
‘Hold him,’ the same voice said. Rough hands propped him upright. He tried to will strength into his legs but they would not take his weight. There was a long roaring sound in his head, like the sound a train makes in a tunnel.
‘Who are you, boy?’ Cravetts rasped.
Angel shook his head, wincing at the pain.
‘Why you doggin’ Torelli, heah?’ another voice interjected.
Angel started to shake his head again when Cravetts hit him in the belly. They held him while he retched like a gut-shot dog, faces like stone. There was a terrible mushrooming agony in Angel’s body and he could not breathe.
‘Answer, boy!’ the voice said. It came from a long way away. He tried to shake his head. This time the blow was to the face. He knew it because there was the feeling of an explosion, but his brain was not linked to the feeling and there was no pain, just a dull astonished feeling of knowledge that he must be badly hurt. The four men looked at him. Cravetts was splattered with blood from Angel’s smashed face. He looked at the others.
‘Let me,’ Torelli begged. ‘Let me at the sonofabitch!’
Cravetts shrugged and stepped aside and Torelli came and stood in front of the sagging wreck that was Angel.
He lifted the broken face with a grimy forefinger.
‘Angel,’ he hissed. ‘You hear me?’ When Angel did not reply, Torelli slapped his face as hard as he could, then repeated the question. He kept on doing it for perhaps five minutes, his blows tearing the skin off the defenseless man’s face, his inexorable questions boring into the dark where that tiny flicker of consciousness left to Angel lay hiding. Angel groaned and tried to nod.
‘Who sent you after me, Angel? Torelli screeched.
There was no way Angel could reply. He wanted to tell them. He would have told them anything if only to stop the awful hurt that was happening inside him. He wanted to tell them about the Gibbons ranch and Sharp and Kamins in the darkened street in Las Vegas, he wanted to tell them all of it but the question he could hear like a thin singing somewhere on the far side of his mind had no answer, for nobody had sent him. He tried to say it, tried to tell the man that nobody had sent him but it came out as ‘no’, the only syllable the smashed mouth could form.
The refusal drove Torrelli past the point of no return.
He drew back, then drove his fist with every ounce of strength he had into the sagging Angel’s belly. This time Angel felt something different, something slipping sweet and loose inside him like an oiled bearing, shifting to another place that felt vague and wrong. Blood came out of his gaping mouth and the two men holding him let him go, startled. Angel slumped to the ground and Torelli kicked him and kicked him once more, savagely and punishingly. There were only the faintest flickers of awareness in the cringing thing on the ground now, but it tried to squirm away from the punishment, a ragged wheezing sound coming from it. Angel could only just think now and what he was thinking was that this was dying, that you just went over into the dark without a chance. He did not feel the pain any more, and he did not know when Cravetts finally stopped Torelli.
‘That’s enough,’ the big man said.
‘You — you — ain’t gonna — leave him?’ Torelli panted.
‘He’s finished,’ Cravetts said shortly. ‘Why not?’
Torelli shook his head. ‘No, Dick,’ he said. ‘No. No. Finish him off. I’m going to.’
‘All right,’ Cravetts said. ‘But strip him, clean him out good. Not a thing on him to show who he is, you understand? We don’t want any posse on our tail when we hit out for Lordsburg.’
‘You still aimin’ there, Dick?’ Monsher said.
Cravetts nodded. ‘We pick up Milt and Howie,’ he said. ‘Then we head for California. That was the plan, and I’m sticking to it.’
‘You don’t figger mebbe this one—’ Monsher jerked his head at the terribly still form of Angel ‘— told anyone else about us?’
Cravetts shook his head.
‘A loner,’ he said flatly. ‘Like Torelli said, a crazy. He’d never tell anyone anything.’
Monsher nodded. ‘I’ll buy that,’ he said. ‘Johnnie?’
Vister nodded his own agreement with their assessment.
‘Let’s get away from here,’ Cravetts said harshly. Then he turned to Frank Torelli, who was standing looking down at the broken, bleeding thing on the ground that was Frank Angel.
‘He’s all yours,’ Cravetts said.