Read Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) for Free Online

explosives, and if Falco vouched for
Curtis then that was all right with Willowfield. After all, Falco
accepted his recommendations without question. Falco even tolerated
Buddy McLennon, whom Willowfield had introduced as his traveling
companion. Neither he nor any of the others talked with the boy,
who in turn kept apart from them. He was just there, like one of
the horses. As long as Willowfield paid the freight, they reckoned,
they could turn a blind eye to his private life.
    And Willowfield paid lavishly. He had
learned a long time ago that in life everything had to be paid for.
You paid in money, or blood, or sweat, or time; but you paid. The
easiest way was money. With money you could get anything you needed
out of life. When he needed information, he simply bought it. He
had never encountered a man who could not be bought, one way or
another. Some wanted dollars in their hands; others wanted what the
dollars would buy: baubles, or women, or property. The loot, which
he had salted away during his years of plundering during War, was
more than enough to finance and support his contention, and to pay
the small price needed to ensure the loyalty of such as Falco and
the rest. He needed little himself, and that little was also easily
bought.
    A lifetime study of criminals had convinced
Willowfield that their most besetting fault was a lack of
imagination. They simply did not think big enough. You never made
any sort of a killing if you tried to pinch pennies on the setup.
But if you were prepared to think on a really grand scale, there
was no limit to what you could do. Thus it was that when he had
first heard of the plans for the Freedom Train—a small item in a
newspaper in San Francisco—he had realized, as if it had been
preordained, that here was his opportunity, here the means of
effecting, in one fell swoop, a coup that would provide him with
the kind of money that few people even so much as see during an
entire lifetime—enough money for the rest of his life. He went
about his planning with a diligence and zeal that would have
exhausted a man twenty years his junior. He plotted and planned,
bribed and bought, hired and stole when and as he needed. He
invested all of his time, all of his not-inconsiderable
intelligence, all of his abilities to learning everything there was
to about the Freedom Train: its routes, its history, its
composition, its personnel. Then he set about learning the various
ways in which, given the appropriate stimulus, the Union Pacific
Railroad could, and would, respond to an emergency of the kind he
had in mind.
    Then, knowing what he knew, it became
child’s play to forecast with reasonable assurance the probable
arrival time of the special train which would be used to send the
ransom money to Cheyenne. It was easy to establish that the money
would be in the charge of two men from the Department of Justice,
that one of the engineers from the Freedom Train had been sped east
to join them and—no doubt—to brief them upon the robbery and its
perpetrators. All exactly as he had expected. Officialdom is by
definition stupid, slow moving, since its brain is a collective
one. One man alone, ready to make rapid decisions and to act upon
them immediately, must always be superior to officialdom, can
always outwit it—since he can move faster, think faster and best of
all, disappear faster. Even after he paid each of his men, he would
still have enough to provide him with a good life for the remainder
of his days. New Orleans, perhaps. Even Europe. He smiled his
wounded smile and gave the order to destroy the Special.
    They could hear her a long time before she
came into sight, a long time before she ran up on to the embankment
where Gil Curtis had planted the dynamite. Then she came thundering
along the right of way, the bright glow from her smokestack
projecting an orange glow onto the lowering dawn clouds. The raised
embankment ran along the flank of a gully like a shelf, falling
away below the