By the time they were ready to move out, the trail was two months old. They had done some backtracking, of course. The Army had made extensive inquiries at Lordsburg, and the telegraph office clerk had been questioned and then questioned again and then again until they were sure they had wrung every ounce of information the man could give them out of him. What they had was pretty thin, but all of it pointed towards California.
Cravetts had enlisted in the California Column at Marysville, a small town north of Sacramento. The man who had bought Cravetts’ ranch at Lordsburg told them he had given Cravetts a bankers draft on the Cattleman’s Bank in San Francisco in payment for the place. The telegraph office clerk, anxious to help now in any way he could, came up with the information that Cravetts had often spoken of visiting San Francisco.
‘Talked like he knowed the place real good,’ he said.
It sure as hell wasn’t much, Angel thought. But it would do.
Wells was up and about now, and he spent a lot of time with the Army telegraphers. Messages flew between Bowie and the Department of Justice in Washington.
Reports had to be written, investigations set in hand, checks made. They sweated it out in the barren heat of the Fort waiting for news and while they did, Wells started to unteach Frank Angel.
At first, Angel was skeptical.
‘Listen to me, Frank,’ Wells told him. ‘You’ve been a fool for luck. Your luck ran out real fast when you came up against pros who knew you were coming after them. You’ve got to learn all over again. How to use a gun is one thing. How to use your head is another. So far you’ve been doing only the one. It’s time to learn a few tricks.’
The first thing he did was to throw away the soft leather holster that Angel had bought in Silver City.
‘Dammed dangerous rubbish,’ Wells told him. ‘You could snarl up you gun in a thing like that so bad you’d never even get it into action before they cut you to bits.’
He got an Army holster off one of the officers and went to work on it. First he cut away with a knife the flap all Army holsters had, and then he shaped the outer lip so that when the Army Colt was slid into the holster the trigger guard was completely exposed. Then he worked on the leather with saddle soap and dubbin until it was pliable, molding the holster until it was shaped to the gun. He got a tape measure from the sutler and went to work measuring Angel’s chest and waist and hips. Then he fashioned, clumsily using the clawed and paralyzed right hand and cursing his own uselessness as he did so, a belt rig for the younger man. When he was finished he started in on a shoulder rig which could be used with the same holster. Then every day for a week he took the boy out on the flats at the far side of the Fort and had him practice drawing the gun. He showed him the standard gunfighter’s repertoire: the fast draw from the hip, the shoulder-holster draw, the road-agent’s spin, the border shift. Angel was a good pupil. His naturally fast reflexes adapted quickly to the new things Wells was teaching him and before long he was able to draw the Colt faster than Wells’ primitive timing device; a coin placed on the back of the hand, held forward at arm’s length was dropped to the ground. As the coin was released, the draw was made.
Angel could draw and fire the unloaded six-shooter before the coin hit the ground ten times out of ten, then twenty times out of twenty.
‘So far, so good,’ Wells grunted. That was as close as he
came to praise. ‘Now let’s see about shooting.’
Day after day he ran through the full range of tests that he himself had to pass every six months as part of his Justice Department proficiency tests. He would make Angel ride past on horseback at full gallop, firing at tin cans set along a fence. He would throw the cans into the air, as high as he could, making Angel turn his back.
Then he would rap out the command ‘go!’ and the boy would wheel around and try to hit the cans in flight. He showed him some of the ways to get out from under an already drawn gun, the few he knew.
‘By and large,’ he drawled, grinning, ‘there isn’t any way to beat the drop. A man has a loaded gun pointed at you, all you can do is stand very still. Wait for your moment, hope one comes. If it doesn’t … ’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s hope it never happens,’ he said grimly, gesturing with the shattered right hand and tapping his crooked leg with the cane he had to use.
Then when they had finished, they started all over again. He told Angel about fanning a gun, and why most times it was a damned stupid thing to do. He gave him long lectures about hideaway guns, Derringers and over-and-unders, pepperboxes and belt pistols, boot guns and guns hanging from cords around the neck, tiny guns capable of being hidden in the pockets of a man’s vest and big guns attached to the belt on metal swivels and hooks. He told him about Derringers on elastic cords hanging down sleeves, pocket pistols hidden between the thighs or inside hard hats. And then they moved on to rifles.
Wells gave Angel a complete grounding in them all.
Matchlocks and wheellocks, snaphaunces and Baltic locks, dog locks and flintlocks, breechloaders and revolving cylinders. Between themselves and all the officers they came up with a motley collection of weapons and Wells made Angel use them all. There was a huge old Hawken muzzle loader nearly as long as Angel himself, and there was a Remington Rolling-block that the Commanding Officer used for hunting.
Running flat out and firing as he ran, lying down and carefully sighting, using the guns on horseback or flat on his belly in the scrub until his shoulders were a mass of aching muscles and his ears rang constantly with the flat sound of the explosions, Frank Angel used them all: the Henry and the Spencer and the sweetest of them all, the Winchester ’66. He learned the differences between them, too. The Winchester’s lack of punch and range, the Henry’s limited magazine capacity, the terrible power of the single shot Sharp’s ‘Big Fifty’ — all these he knew and understood, all of them Wells made him field-strip and reassemble, load and fire until he became not merely proficient but as close to perfect shooting as Wells felt he could in the time they had. ‘That’s it with the guns,’ he said, one day. ‘Now you’ve got to learn when not to use them.’
He gave Frank Angel a good and comprehensive understanding of the laws of the United States.
Territorial law, Federal law, Army standing orders, the powers of the District Attorneys, the judges, the law officers. He explained the difference between a town marshal, who was a freelance town-tamer hired by a town to keep the place relatively law-abiding, men like Tom Smith who had run Abilene, or Hickok, whom Angel had once — it seemed like years ago — met, and the United States Marshal whose position was a Federal appointment and who was responsible for the maintenance of Federal law throughout an entire State or Territory. He told Angel about the powers of sheriffs, and their antecedence in old English common law, and the grand juries, whose antecedence was the same. The formation of the police forces of cities and their duties, the enormous number of ways in which civilian lawyers could ensure that a criminal known to be guilty by the officers of the law was never brought to trial. He explained all this and much more in simple, easily understood terms, and when Angel grew restive, impatient at so much talk, so little action, he would then tell him why it was necessary to know all this.
‘You go after Cravetts with a gun in your hand the way you did before,’ he said, ‘and when you get him they’ll hang you.’
‘I’ll give him an even break,’ muttered Angel, ‘which is more than he gave the Gibbonses.’
‘No way,’ Wells told him, shaking his head. ‘You got to have a warrant for the man’s arrest, a reason for trying to take him. He killed someone, then there’s a warrant for his arrest wherever he did it.’
‘Except a Kansas warrant isn’t any damned use at all in California,’ Angel said bitterly. ‘So my way is the only way.’
‘Frank,’ Wells said, ‘you haven’t been listening. Federal law isn’t hampered by State or Territorial borders ... ’
‘I forgot,’ Angel said, ‘you got a warrant on Cravetts for that Army payroll robbery.’
‘Which is a Federal offence,’ Wells nodded.
‘I forgot,’ Angel repeated. ‘I only want him for what happened at the Gibbons place.’
‘I know that,’ Wells said. ‘But we’ve got to do it my way, Frank. You can’t take the law into your own hands.’
‘Can’t I?’ Angel said darkly, and slouched out of the room into the darkness of the ramada outside. Wells let him go. The inaction was plaguing Angel. Dammit, he thought, it isn’t making me any more even-tempered.
What in the name of sweet charity was the Department doing, taking so long getting word to them? Ah, he thought, it takes time. Finding one man in a city who had no reason at all to conceal his presence there was difficult enough. Finding a man who had every reason not to want to be found … he shook his head, knowing what the Department, with its limited resources, was facing.
They would check everything. Hotel registers, boarding houses, laundries, electors’ lists, newspapers, shipping line passenger lists, directory publishers, process servers, anyone who kept records. But it took time, and time was on Cravetts’ side. The longer they took to get a lead on him, the more likely it was that they would never get one.
Two days later word came in: they had run down Lee Monsher in San Francisco.