Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) Read Online Free

Korean’s eyes flickered and he came around.
    ‘Old American proverb,’
Angel grinned.
    ‘There’s more ways of
skinning a cat than one.’
    Kee Lei sat up, rubbing his
jawbone ruefully, something in his eyes that Angel could not
define. It was the nearest he had ever seen Kee Lai to smiling, but
all the little man said was ‘Ha!’ as he got up and went out of the
gymnasium.
    Although he had no more
sessions with the Korean, one day Wells brought in an envelope to
Angel. In it, beautifully scripted on fine rice paper, was
something written in Chinese. They got one of the Embassy people to
translate it for them. It said ‘Confucius says: what you do not
want others to do to you, do not do to others. Old Chinese
proverb.’ It was not signed.
    Frank Angel got up from the
chair and went down the stairs to the street. There was a hash
house on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and he ate a steak and
two eggs with fried potatoes and drank about half a gallon of
coffee. He wondered what Angus Wells was doing.

     

Chapter Four
    It was a long haul from
Trinidad but most of it was downhill. Lieutenant Philip Evans, 9th
United States Cavalry, eased his backside into a more comfortable
spot on the McClellan saddle and turned to watch the wagons moving
down the snakelike trail off the Raton Pass. Ahead of them and
below the country lay like the landscape in your dreams, near
enough to touch but stretching so far into the distance that you
knew you could never traverse it. Off into the far blue distance
the dusty world unrolled, punctuated here and there by the purple
upthrust of flat-topped mesas darkening in the long light of
evening. Away off to the south-east he thought he could see the
sparkle of light touching the Canadian River. He still could not
get used to the idea that he was here, in the uniform of a
Lieutenant of the United States Army, commanding men in the
Territory of New Mexico, guarding wagons lurching dangerously in
the deep ruts of the Santa Fe Trail.
    Evans felt the romance of
the past strongly — and here more than most places, he felt, one
could actually touch it. Across these very stones had rolled the
caravans of Bent and St Vrain and Becknell and Gregg. All the
panoply of history had passed this way: Philip St George Cooke and
Christopher Carson, Zebulon Pike and Kearney, they and thousands of
ordinary people heading for the bright land and the new future
promised at the end of the trail in the city of the Holy Faith of
St Francis. Even the place names had a magical, golden aura. When
he wrote home to his parents in Boston, he would tell them how he
had sat on his horse beside the Trail, commanding the troop that
was escorting the three lumbering wagons down the curving, winding
road and thought of them. He would perhaps embroider it all a
little, excite their staid Eastern imaginations with his word
pictures, and the exotic names of the rivers and mountains, the
Purgatoire and the Canadian and the Pecos — that would get his old
aunts chattering away in the ivy-covered Beacon Hill house. He
breathed in a deep draught of the clear mountains air. New Mexico
Territory. He had been here six weeks. Already he loved
it.
    ‘Straighten up there,
soldier!’ he shouted.
    The wagon had drawn level
with the spot where he sat on his horse but the troopers had failed
to spot him and were slouching along in their saddles, letting the
animals do the work, sensibly relaxing while there was an
opportunity to do so.
    They stiffened their backs
as he touched the spurs to his horse’s Hanks and cantered off to
the head of the column.
    ‘G.D.F.’ muttered Private
Frank Casey. He spat a gobbet of tobacco juice off to leeward,
making his horse shy violently. ‘Whoa, you bitch!’
    ‘What’s G.D.F. mean, Frank?
asked a trooper alongside him.
    ‘God Damned Fool!’ snapped
the older one.
    ‘Which is what that popinjay
is. I bet he never sweated in his life.’
    There was an aggrieved tone
in his voice. Since