Hunt Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #5) Read Online Free PDF

eyes
looked like he’d just ridden through a dust storm.
    ‘ I need a drink,’ he told
Sheridan.
    ‘ Sure,’ Sheridan said, gently. ‘Go
on down the street. Maybe one of the Hugess boys will buy you
one.’
    ‘ A beer would do,’ Howie
said.,
    ‘ Got some inside,’ Sheridan
grinned, putting his deputy out of his agony. ‘While you were
asleep. Figured you’d need something when you came up for air.’ He
turned and opened the door clumsily with his left hand.
    ‘ You boys like to join us?’ he
said to Ridlow and Angel.
    ‘ Try an’ stop us!’ Ridlow cackled.
‘Haw!’
    The jail was simply built. The
square building was divided down its middle by a corridor. On the
street side of the corridor was the marshal’s office, fenced off
from the rest of the room by a low rail with a swinging door in it.
There was a pot-bellied stove in one corner of the room, two rifle
racks with shotguns and carbines chained in them and locked, a
cupboard, and a scarred old desk with a swivel chair behind it that
had seen better days. In the open area was another, equally
decrepit desk and chair for the deputy. Between his desk and
Sheridan’s a door opened into the corridor, on the corral side of
which were three cells. Burt Hugess was in the middle one: the
other two were empty.
    Sheridan went around behind his desk
and reached down into the cool corner of the adobe walls; he came
up with a heavy earthenware jug that had a damp cloth stretched
across its mouth. He pointed with his chin at some tin cups hanging
on nails along the side of the cupboard, and Nathan Ridlow planked
them down one, two, three, four on Sheridan’s desk, licking his
mustache as the cool beer foamed into them. While he and Angel were
saluting the marshal, Howie Cade emptied his cup like a man who’s
lived through a drought. He looked up, sheepishly, when he felt
their eyes on him.
    ‘ I’m all right,’; he said
defensively. ‘Just thirsty.’
    But his eyes pleaded with Sheridan,
who nodded and filled his deputy’s cup again. They tried not to
watch Howie struggling to drink it slowly.
    ‘ Where have you got Hugess?’ Angel
asked, more to fill the silence than anything else.
    ‘ Back there, in the middle cell,’
Sheridan said jerking his head toward the half-open door to the
corridor. ‘Nice and comfortable.’ He raised his voice a couple of
lungfuls. ‘Aren’t you, Burt?’
    ‘ Go to hell Sheridan!’ shouted the
prisoner.
    ‘ Nice fellow,’ Sheridan smiled.
‘Like his brother.’
    ‘ No sign of him turning up
yet?’
    ‘ Nope.’
    ‘ He’ll be here!’ Burt Hugess
shouted from the cell. ‘Bet on that!’
    ‘ You want to know the truth, I
wish he’d get at it,’ Howie Cade muttered. ‘We nailed Burt twelve
hours ago and so far nothing’s happened.’
    ‘ Well, hardly,’ Sheridan said, and
told him about the barricades at the exits from town. Angel watched
the deputy’s face grow tight and pale as the marshal
spoke.
    ‘ We could lock ’em all up,’ Howie
said, not really believing it. Sheridan just looked at him with one
of those you-know-better-than-that looks.
    ‘ Even if you could - an’ you can’t
- Hugess’d just send another passel o’ gunnies in,’ Nathan Ridlow
said. ‘Haw!’
    Angel said nothing, but he
recognized the marshal’s dilemma: damned if he did nothing, damned
equally if he made a move. If Sheridan held on to Burt Hugess, then
Larry Hugess would take him out of jail by force. If he turned Burt
loose, they’d ride him out of town on a rail and he’d never get a
job policing a town anywhere again as long as he lived, even if he
did get so he could one day look himself in the eye again. Some
parlay: a one-handed lawman and a dipso deputy up against the
combined weight of Hugess and his riders. In the back of his mind
he heard the warning voice of the attorney general, imagined
himself again in the big, high-ceilinged room overlooking
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington with its disordered