In four weeks Angel was well enough to ride.
Although his wounds were by no means fully healed, he worked hard at the job of blanking out the pain until he could adjust to it, live with it, a constant companion which was always there, an old acquaintance whose foibles he knew well. It was an act of will which astonished the old doctor who had cared for him, and which for some reason he could not altogether pin down made Sheriff Harvey Whitehill nervous. He had long before this extracted from the boy a straight-faced promise that when he was better he would head back East for Kansas, forget all this business of trying to catch Cravetts and his raiders. Angel had nodded and agreed with all of Whitehill’s conditions, He had gotten himself a part-time job waiting table at the Star Hotel, and when he had saved enough money he went to the livery stable and bought himself a horse. He also bought himself a new Colt’s Army model, but he did not tell Whitehill about that, or the soft leather gun belt in which the gun nestled beneath his bed. Finally the day came when he told Whitehill he was heading out.
‘I want you to know how grateful I am to you, Sheriff,’ he said, and there was sincerity in the words. Whitehill had heard earlier that Angel had ridden up to the Burros and found Jerry Bigg, taking him two bottles of whiskey which had caused Jerry to miss two whole days’ digging.
He had also, Whitehill learned, given the dance-hall girl Jenny twenty-five dollars, although Whitehill didn’t know that it was all the money Angel had.
just you mind what you told me, son,’ Whitehill said, tapping his teeth with the pencil. ‘You head on home and leave the lawin’ to the lawmen.’
Angel nodded, and after a brief handshake swung up into the saddle and headed the horse up the street and on to the trail towards Santa Rita, heading East. Whitehill watched him go and went back into his office, frowning.
‘Too damned tame by a mile,’ he said to nobody in particular, taking a kick at the leg of his desk. ‘Too damned tame by a mile!’
His estimate of Angel’s character was perfect. Up in the mountains, where the trail forked to the south towards Hurley, Angel swung his horse’s head around and headed steadily on down along the empty arroyo of the San Vicente. About fifteen miles south of Silver City he took a sighting on Burro Peak where it reared above the pine clad shoulders of the mountains, and let the horse make its own pace over the fifteen miles that brought him back to the trail going south and west to Lordsburg. He was there by nightfall, and by dawn he was on his way again, heading now for Fort Bowie, raging with impatience at the slow miles rolling past, the sketchy story of what had happened to Wells in the Lordsburg cantina revolving in his mind like a litany. The young cavalry lieutenant who had given him the story in the telegraph office had said that Wells had almost died of his wounds, loss of blood and shock. Yet he had found enough strength to make two Mexicans carry him on a cot down to the telegraph office, where he had arrested the telegraph clerk after forcing him to send a message to Fort Bowie — effecting this by calmly threatening to do to the clerk exactly what had been done to him. A detachment had been sent across from the Fort and Wells had gone back there in an ambulance, while the patrol went out to the Cravetts ranch to search it for any clues as to where the raiders might have gone. What they had found or not found the soldier did not know. Angel knew Army procedure now. The officers at Fort Bowie would know. Whether they would tell him was something else. If Wells was still alive, he might make them. He recalled what Wells had said to him the last time he had seen the lawman, and grimaced. It wasn’t likely.
He moved carefully across the empty land, keeping the twin nipples of the Dos Cabezas on his left, eyes always wary for dust or pony sign. Up behind those peaks were the Chiricahua mountains, and enough Apaches in them, no doubt, to double the population at San Simon.
Nothing moved in the land of the Apaches that they did not see. He wanted no trouble with them and the best way to ensure that was to stay a long way away from them, hoping they wouldn’t consider it worthwhile running down a lone rider. lf they felt like doing it, he had about as much chance as a mouse in a cat basket.
Because he could not travel fast, it took Angel until almost nightfall to reach Bowie. The fort sprawled ungainly across the valley, lights in the officers’ quarters sparkling bright, visible many miles across the desert in the pure night air. He could hear them sounding retreat as he came over the last high crest and canted down towards the establishment, and the long twilight was almost gone as he came up the long graveled street behind the quartermaster’s building and the post trader’s, a long, low adobe with a ramada four feet wide, as dark beneath at night as a cellar. He led his horse to the building a passing soldier told him was the adjutant’s
office, and inquired there about Wells.
‘You a friend of his?’ the thickset sergeant behind the desk asked.
‘In a way,’ Angel said. ‘I met him in Silver City.’
‘You know what happened to him?’
‘Yes,’ Angel said. ‘A Lieutenant Roward in Lordsburg told me. That’s why I came. Can I see him?’
‘As to that, I can’t say,’ the sergeant said heavily. ‘It’s the doctor you’ll have to be askin’. Corporal!’
The door opened smartly and a young corporal, the yellow stripes very bright and fresh on his sleeve, stamped into the room and stood rigidly at attention.
‘Take this young gentleman across to the Hospital,’ the sergeant said. ‘To see Doctor Bowall.’
‘Sarge!’ the corporal said. ‘This way, sir!’ he invited Angel, who grinned in the darkness outside.
‘Follow me, mister,’ the soldier said, and led the way across the baked earth of the parade ground towards a long low building on the southern perimeter. It was brightly lit at every window and as they got closer Angel could see men lying in cots, some reading, others sleeping. In a small office at the end of the hospital, he was introduced to the Post Surgeon, Doctor Bowall. ‘Mister Angel,’ Bowall acknowledged. ‘You say you want to see Wells. May I ask why?’
‘He … helped me when I was … hurt. In Silver City,’ Angel said. ‘By the same men that … did what they did to him.’
‘Ah,’ the doctor said. ‘And did they tell you what that was?’
‘I heard they shot him up real bad.’
‘That they did, boy,’ the doctor nodded, scratching a match against the adobe wall and lighting an evil-looking black stogie. He puffed the smoke out of the doorway into the stillness of the night, watching it hang in the lamplight. ‘And more than that.’
‘More?’
‘Aye, lad, more,’ Bowall said flatly. ‘You see, they destroyed his pride. They took everything that mattered away from him except his life. And that was more cruel to the man than killing him would have been.’
‘I don’t — ’
‘Understand? No, why would you?’ the grizzled old doctor said. His voice was soft and reassuring. He let another stream of smoke drift off into the starlight.
‘Medicine’s a very inexact business, laddie,’ he explained. ‘Out here, everything is so — well, primitive. We have no facilities for dealing with anything other than the physical aspects of the business. We fix the bullet wounds, patch up the broken bones, mend the torn flesh. It’s about all we can do.’
He sighed, and then patted a chair. ‘Sit down, lad, sit down. You look all in.’
Angel sank gratefully into the chair.
‘What happened to your friend was this,’ Bowall said. ‘The men who shot him deliberately crippled him. They shot his leg apart — God knows if he’ll ever ride a horse again — and then they put a bullet into his hand so he could never handle a gun. Now you know he’s a lawman?’
‘Department of Justice Special Investigator,’ Angel nodded.
‘Just so,’ Bowall said. “Did you know he was their top man? Yes, he’s been fourteen years with them. His job was his life. And what they did, you see, was to make it absolutely impossible for him ever to do his job again.
‘You mean the wounds won’t mend?’
‘Oh, they’ll mend, lad,’ Bowall said, gesturing with the stogie. ‘But that’s what I meant about how limited what the doctor can do is. For them to mend is one thing. For the man to want to try to be a whole human being again is something else. Your friend Wells simply does not want to live.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Angel said.
‘So you’ll help him, help me,’ the doctor said. ‘I want you to try and get him out of this — this depression. He won’t listen to me anymore. Or anyone. He is deep in the black depths of thinking he will never be any use to anyone again.’
‘But what — ?’
‘Can you do? I don’t know, lad, I don’t know. You see, I know about you — yes, he told me. Angel. It’s not a name for forgetting easily, now is it? But you and he have one thing in common. This man Cravetts. He won’t talk about him to me, not any more. He thinks he has failed completely, in his job, as a man. You’re the only one I can think of who might snap him around out of it.’
‘Hell, doc, I don’t know if I can—’
Bowall laid a hand on Angel’s shoulder.
‘You say he helped you. Well, maybe you can help him now.’
Angel nodded. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
Bowall stood up, smiling. ‘I hoped you would. I had a feeling in my bones you might turn up. God knows why — by all accounts, anyone with a lick of sense would be on his way home, glad to be alive.’
‘I’ll go home one day,’ Angel said. ‘When I’ve finished what I started out to do.’
There was an intensity in his words which hung in the air, and the doctor frowned. In the lamplight the boy looked no older than his own son. He thought of Laurence, fresh faced and smiling in his cadet’s uniform at West Point, and compared him mentally with this youngster with the hard lines of experience already shaping his face. My God, he thought, this bloody country!
He opened the door and pointed down the hospital ward. Angel saw Wells in the bed on the right. Wells was sitting upright, his right arm in a wadded, bandaged sling, his right leg splinted and held in traction. He was gazing emptily at the wall opposite his bed and there was no expression on his face when Angel came up beside the bed.
‘Wells,’ he said, tentatively.
Wells’ eyes swung around, widening fractionally as he saw who his visitor was. Then the fleeting expression fled from the eyes and they were empty again.
‘They … told me what … what happened,’ Angel said.
Nothing.
‘You mad because I broke my word?’ Angel asked him.
Again nothing.
‘I’m going on after them, Wells,’ the boy said.
Wells blinked, blinked again. Angel watched silently in astonishment as two huge tears formed in the older man’s eyes and trickled down his unmoving face.
‘Go away,’ Wells said. His voice was flat and colorless.
‘Wells, you’ve got to help me,’ Angel said.
The lawman’s head swung around and he fixed baleful, swimming eyes on the boy at his bedside.
‘Help!’ he said. He made a noise that might have been a contemptuous laugh bisected by a sob. ‘Help you! What do I use for a hand? How do I get on a horse? You going to give me one of your legs, boy?’
Angel felt a sudden sureness inside him and it welled up and out and became a laugh, a big laugh that made the soldiers in the other beds turn their heads in astonishment, craning to see the extraordinary sight of the beardless boy laughing by Wells’ bed.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Angel said, letting the laugh die back to a wide grin, seeing the tears tremble on Wells’ eyelids and slither down his face as Wells looked at him and then smiled and then smiled again.
‘You can teach me!’ Angel shouted and made no effort to keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘You can use my hands, Wells! My legs! Show me, Wells! Teach me!’
Still Wells said nothing, just looked at Angel with an aching uncertainty in his eyes. He shook his head but there was no conviction at all in the gesture.
‘You can!’ Angel shouted. ‘We can! Both of us, Wells! We can!’
The sound of the raised voices brought the doctor hurrying down the length of the hospital, but he stopped short when he saw the look on Wells’ face, the eager eyes of the younger man by his bedside. Wells looked up and his eyes met those of the doctor.
‘Can I?’ he whispered. ‘Could I?’
Bowall smiled.
‘Angus,’ he said. ‘You know damned well you could.’