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

Lieutenant Evans had joined the Regiment, he
had given none of them any pleasure. Old Campaigners like Casey
resented an officer who expected men to ride as if on parade when
all they were doing was wet-nursing a couple of wagons, and to
watch their tongues when the muleskinners driving the teams were
doing their best to invent a day-long dialogue of curses without
repeating themselves once.
    ‘How far to the Fort?’
someone asked.
    ‘Seventy miles, give or
take,’ another replied.
    ‘Shee-hit!’ growled Casey.
‘That’s three, four more days of eating dust and smellin’
muleshit.’
    ‘Take it easy, Frank,’ said
Private Barber, riding alongside him. ‘It sure beats haulin’ wood
back at the Fort.’
    ‘I ain’t so damned sure,’
Casey growled. ‘At least we ain’t expected to be little tin sojer
boys for some fancy-fuckin’ dude shavetail.’
    ‘That’ll be enough of that,
Casey!’ snapped a deeper voice. Cantering alongside the six-man
troop came its Sergeant, Eric Mackenzie.
    Mackenzie was short, and
built as the old Army saying had it, like an adobe latrine. He had
fists like knots in a hawser and a temper that very few of his
troopers having experienced it ever cared to arouse. His face was
scoured a sandstone brown from the years in the saddle indicated by
the row of hashmarks on his uniform sleeve.
    ‘You heard what the
Lieutenant said,’ he growled. ‘Straighten them backs up, now. Try
to look like soldiers instead of bloody pisspot vendors. An’ keep
those bloody idle tongues still or ye’ll all end up policin’ the
parade ground until you’ve got curvature of the spine!’
    ‘Yes, sarge!’ shouted Casey,
snapping upright in the saddle as the other five troopers followed
suit.
    ‘You old bastard,’ he added
softly, but not until Mackenzie was out of earshot. They came on
down the Trail, the road more level now as they left the mountain
pass. There were huge boulders on both sides of the road, and heavy
timber clothed the slopes behind them. The sun slipped a few
thousand miles further down the sky and off to the right they could
hear wild turkeys gobbling.
    It was at that moment that
the raiders hit them.
    They had it all carefully
planned and the troopers never really had a chance. Three men on
each side of the road behind sheltering boulders laid down a
withering crossfire and repeating rifles that emptied three saddles
before Mackenzie could yell out the order that his surviving men
had already anticipated, falling out of their saddles and running
for shelter, any shelter from the scything hail of seeking death.
The ambushers now turned their attention to the wagons, and the
troopers, fumbling with their ammunition pouches and thumbing loads
into the clumsy Springfields saw first one and then two of the
wagon drivers whacked off their board seats as if they had been hit
with invisible clubs. One of them hit the ground in a tight bundle,
his legs driving him around in a circle that pushed up hillocks of
earth, slowing as the ground darkened with his blood until he
kicked twice and then stretched out as if for sleep.
    ‘Holy Mother of God!’
breathed Private Casey, ‘will ye look at that?’
    That was Lieutenant Philip
Evans. After the first stunning shock of the deadly fusillade had
startled his fractious horse, Evans had spent all his energy
controlling the animal. Now he wheeled around and drew the revolver
from his holster, pointing the pistol dead ahead of him over his
horse’s ears, and jammed iron into the animal’s flanks. The horse
erupted into a gallop dead straight towards the rocks where the
ambushers were hidden, and as he swept past where Mackenzie and the
other troopers lay hugging he yelled ‘Follow me, men!’ and bucketed
up the hill away from them.
    ‘Up yours, Charlie!’ said
Casey loyally.
    They watched in awful
anticipation as the young Lieutenant charged madly towards the
hidden ambushers and it seemed to the soldiers that there was a
moment of long