Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) by Frederick H. Christian Page A

It wasn’t as big as its name claimed, and the immense,
and not particularly accurate, painting of the creature from which
the saloon took its name was peeled and faded on the unlovely false
front. Nevertheless, the place was crowded at every hour of the day
and night with incoming or departing travelers, wagon-masters
looking for help, riders looking for work, people wanting to leave
messages or pick them up, people hoping to buy or sell cattle or
horses or mules or oxen or wagons or whatever goods they had
carried this far and wished to carry no further. The place smelled
like a stable. Angel bought himself a beer and moved around,
listening, getting used to the noise and the sharp stink of sweat
and tobacco again. Once or twice he stopped and asked someone a
question, but usually met only a shrug, sometimes a shake of the
head, once in a while a spoken negative. Nobody had seen his men.
He drank another beer, and asked the bartender where the express
office was. On Central, the man said, his face slick with
perspiration; right next to the American Hotel.
    He got on the roan and moved up Latimer
Street toward Central. Denver had grown enormously, he thought,
since it had sprung up from hastily sawed planks ripped from the
flanks of Long’s Peak about a decade ago. He wondered if the men
who had made the first strikes up above Idaho Springs would
recognize this part of the country if they saw it now. There were
shops and stores and bazaars everywhere the eye moved: hardware,
sporting goods, groceries, mining equipment, and dry goods jammed
every which way in the gloomy interiors and spilling out on to the
porched sidewalks beneath a jumbled rabble of signs and advertising
come-ons, which defeated the eye they were supposed to attract. He
saw one or two places that were selling Indian trinkets, Navajo
silver, Ute jewelry. All along the boarded walks the scurrying,
head-down mass of humanity ebbed and flowed like some strangely
colored tide.
    Trappers and hunters, long Hawken rifles or
bundles of pelts slung on their shoulders, mingled with the crowd,
their buckskins greasy and blackened from long seasons of
thoughtless wear; bumping their shoulders were whey-faced
asthmatics and consumptives come to breathe easier in the mile-high
atmosphere of the city or to take what was known as the ‘camp
cure’—living as tough and rough as they could stand it up in the
mountains, with guide and tent and wagon and stove until the fall
closed in, then wintering in some hotel or boarding house until
spring touched the flanks of the mountains once again with tender
green fingers. Soldiers on leave swung by, spurs a’jingle, swirling
their long navy-blue serge capes dramatically. Teamsters moved
their wagons up and down the muddy streets with strings of oaths
like foreign tongues, oaths that would have reddened the ears of
any decent woman had she heard them. Angel saw very few white
women, very few women at all if you didn’t count the Ute squaws
bundled in blankets sitting impassively at the feet of their
stone-faced spouses or trailing along the regulation three paces
behind them. Up toward the center of town he saw dapperly dressed
Fancy Dans, ‘way-up’ gamblers or confidence men, or both, jostled
by burly, bearded ranchers made to look even huger by the massive
buffalo-robe coats and leggings they affected.
    The express office, with its Wells Fargo
sign outside, was packed and he decided to take a rain check on
sending his telegraph message. Another hour wasn’t going to make
that much difference, he thought: the news would be just as bad
after lunch as it was now. He saw the sign of the American Hotel
and decided to get something to eat. He was just crossing the lobby
toward the dining room when he saw George Willowfield coming down
the wide staircase.

Chapter Six
    It was just too damned good to be true.
    Yet there the fat man was, elegantly dressed
in a dark blue suit with a faint pinstripe, a gleaming white shirt,
a cravat