Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  “You gonna drop rocks on him?”

  “I best believe I will. Bullets cost money. Rocks is free.”

  She threw her head back and laughed heartily. “Joe Noose, you is a funny man. I do say you make me laugh with some of the humorous things that come outta your mouth. My, the way you put stuff.”

  “Pleased I do. You have a nice laugh. It’s good to hear you use it.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Nice smile, too.”

  “Joe Noose, can I help you push some rocks?”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I want to drop me a big damn rock on that Waylon Bojack’s head to knock some sense into him.”

  “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stop calling me Joe Noose. Makes me sound simple. Call me Joe. Or Noose. Or Deputy Marshal if you have to, even.”

  “Got yourself a deal, Joe. On one condition.”

  “With you, of course there is.”

  “Y’all call me Bonny Kate. Stop that Miss Valance stuff. Makes me sound like I got airs.”

  Noose chuckled. “Bonny Kate, my name’s Joe.”

  “Under different circumstances, Joe, I’d say it was a pleasure to meet you.”

  They both laughed as they rode on up the trail that angled suddenly sharper below the jagged ridge overhang above.

  * * *

  “Keep down.”

  Joe Noose whispered to Bonny Kate Valance, huddling beside him just below the crest of the rocks on top of the outcrop above the trail. He said the words with sufficient authority that she didn’t move an inch. They were safely out of sight to anyone approaching below. The two horses had their reins tied to a conifer trunk fifty feet from where the man and woman lay in the dirt, even farther out of sight.

  It was very quiet. The rising and falling wind whispered through the pines in a rustle of dried branches from one end of the Teton Pass to the other on both sides of the lonely gorge. It was kind of restful. The wind was the only sound. Even the birds were quiet, as if waiting, holding their breath for something to happen.

  It was about to.

  Noose’s head was cocked in an attitude of keen listening, keeping his ears open for the sounds of hooves or boot steps or creaking of leather or metallic clink of gun belt and stirrup that would signal the imminent approach of the Arizona posse.

  The only way the rogue lawmen could come that wouldn’t take them hours out of the way was up the makeshift trail that Noose and the lady outlaw had just scaled.

  Joe Noose was ready.

  Both his huge hands were placed against two large boulders he had five minutes ago determined to be loosely positioned on the top of the ridge—one good shove would send both rocks crashing down the craggy slope, dislodging many other heavy, loose stones that would tumble onto the trail and anyone who had the misfortune to be on it.

  All he had to do was wait.

  Looking at the fearful face of the woman beside him, the man puckered his lips together in a silent shushing expression. She nodded, her own hands on a third, smaller boulder. He gave her a wait for me nod.

  The wind picked up, died down, rose, and perished again in death rattle rustles of dead foliage across the sprawling expanse of mountainside. It was almost restful.

  A hummingbird flitted.

  Insects buzzed.

  Hearing the clop of a hoof behind her, Bonny Kate whirled with a startled expression, fearing they had been bushwhacked, but saw it was only her Appaloosa of a mustang restlessly pawing the ground atop the ridge with its fetlock.

  When she looked back with an exhale of relief, Noose caught her gaze and with a shake of his head and a nudge of his lantern jaw communicated wordlessly that the out-of-state lawmen would be coming from the other direction, up the trail down below.

  After that, the lady outlaw caught her breath and composed herself somewhat.

  They didn’t have long to wait.

  First one set of hooves, then another set, then another keeping a slow and steady pace sounded coming up the trail. Noose heard the creak of the saddles of the men astride them, so they weren’t empty horses sent as a trick to lure him out in the open so the posse could take a shot at him. That’s what he would have done in their position, and Noose was now figuring these Arizona boys weren’t all that smart.

  Getting a good grip on the rocks, ready to push, he kept his head down. Saw she was, too.

  The only thing that worried Noose, as it always did, was that one of the horses the lawmen were riding would get hurt in the rockslide—its skull bashed in or its leg lamed—and have to be put down. He hated hurting horses, because they weren’t bad, just the men riding them who were. But this did not worry him much in the situation as Noose knew that horses were smart and had good reflexes and the minute the steeds heard those rocks come down they were going to run the hell out of there like their asses were on fire. In fact, he was counting on it. In all the confusion while the sheriff and his deputies were trying to control their mounts, that’s when Noose would leap up and break cover, shooting down on them with his Winchester like shooting fish in a barrel. The repeater rifle held twenty-five rounds but he figured he was only going to use five to ten cartridges. The bad lawmen had been warned and he would shoot them in the legs.

  He knew he had the legal right as deputy marshal to kill these rogue lawmen, but that wouldn’t be right as long as he could wound them sufficiently to stop them from interfering with his appointed mission and sworn duty.

  The hooves were directly below.

  Noose pushed the rocks, heaving his muscular shoulders into the effort.

  The boulders swayed, then gravity kicked in and over they went, the weight off his hands as he heard the falling rocks smash and tumble with a thunder of impact collision against the side of the ridge as down they rolled. Now there was a bang crash boom of stone on stone in his ears as the boulders began to bounce, picking up speed upon acceleration, the sounds of gravel and stones dislodging to plummet in a rockslide—beneath the deafening clamor, the cries of men and bellowing horses as hooves sounded beneath the din of the falling rocks.

  Shooting a glance over to Bonny Kate, Noose could see her face was flushed with effort while she shoved with both her small, and he now saw, dainty hands against the rock but couldn’t budge it. He slid over on his seat and helped, using both legs in a pile driver kick to knock the boulder loose, and it, too, fell.

  Then he grabbed the woman and held her down, waiting, listening—and there was a lot to listen to as the lawmen on their horses audibly rode for their lives this way and that against all the cascading granite coming down on their heads. They were retreating—Noose heard it.

  Three bullets exploded along the ridge, but they were many yards away—the sheriff and his men were shooting at flies, just firing off blind retaliatory shots with no clear targets and might as well have saved their bullets.

  When he could wait no longer, Noose quickly popped his head over the edge of the ridge, then got an eyeful of the rear ends of four horses riding at full gallop in three directions away from the ridge back to the cover of the tree line. Sheriff Bojack and his deputies had done the wise thing and beat a hasty retreat from the falling rocks. All five of them.

  Wait. Something was wrong. There were just four men down there. Where was the fifth?

  Oh hell ...

  Joe Noose was already whirling around on his back, cocking his pistol under the palm of his left hand as the bullet slammed through his left bicep, punching a ragged hole of flesh and cloth and ricocheting off the rock behind him as the slug passed clean through. By then, he saw the rangy deputy who had stepped out of the trees behind him already firing his next shot but the kid pulled the trigger just as Noose got off his first round and the stopping power of his .45 impacting the lawman’s chest threw his aim as it sent him staggering back, coughing a phlegm of blood from his punctured lung caused by the clean hole in his chest.

  Bonny Kate had covered her
head and was screaming but Noose barely heard it above all the gunfire coming from him as he staggered to his feet, bleeding like a steer, fanning and firing his Colt Peacemaker again and again in raw fury. His shots stitched a pattern of red buttons with black burn marks in a tight, neat grouping across the deputy’s shirt as the bullets hammered him back in a spastic dance toward the edge of the ridge. One bullet left. Joe Noose put it right between the deputy’s eyes. The dead man was blown clean off his feet over the edge of the cliff and disappeared from view as the sound of his broken corpse smacking off the rocks on its way down the hundred-foot gorge grew fainter and fainter until a final splat.

  There was a lot of cursing going on down there below the ridge in Arizona accents. Noose could make out four voices issuing strings of profanity and swearing eternal retribution.

  Dumb sons of bitches, Noose thought. You wear badges. If you hadn’t broken the law you wouldn’t be two men short. Go home while you still can because I’m getting this woman where she needs to be and the law is on my side.

  Then, he wasn’t thinking too straight.

  He’d been shot in the arm and it hurt like hell.

  Noose’s vision was getting wobbly and he felt a little dizzy so he sat down hard on his ass. There would be a few minutes of relative safety, he knew. The sheriff and his deputies were no threat for at least a short while, stuck as they were at the now-impassable trail below the ridge—he and Bonny Kate would be fine for the time being so long as they kept their heads down.

  The next thing Noose knew Bonny Kate was at his side, her beautiful witchy face filling his field of vision, panting an intoxication of sweet breath in his nostrils as she rushed over to help him. The lady outlaw knew enough to keep her head down out of the line of fire of anyone below. Her expression was singularly one of raw concern and worry as she came sympathetically to his aid, in alarm touching his arm with hesitant fingers.

  Noose’s prisoner made no move to either grab his pistol from his holster or bolt to the horses to grab one of the rifles stashed there—Bonny Kate was trying to help him, tenderly touching his shirt and worrying her fragile fingers around his wound. “You been shot!” she groaned in dismay.

  “Bullet went clean through. Flesh wound. I’ll survive,” he grumbled between gritted teeth.

  “Not if we don’t get that bullet hole cleaned and bandaged and looked after. You stay here.”

  Then she was on her feet, hurrying across the ridge over to his horse. Noose wondered just then if this was when Bonny Kate Valance would make her play, grab his Henry rifle from Copper’s saddle holster, and pump a few rounds into him but even as he thought that, somehow he knew she wouldn’t, and was right—the woman went straight for her own horse, yanked her canteen from the saddle, and rushed right back to his side. “I gotta tear a piece off your shirt to get at that wound and make a tourniquet because I know as we didn’t bring no medical supplies.”

  The pain thudded and burned in the bullet hole in his bicep and Noose winced. “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Hell yeah, you bet I do. I’m an outlaw. I patched a lot of bullet wounds in my time, including a few of my own. Now hush.” With that, she tried to tear a strip of clean shirt from the sleeve then stopped, looking at his undershirt beneath his checkered shirt. “Better use that,” she decided. Unbuttoning his shirt, she grabbed a fistful of his sweat-stained undershirt and tore a large piece of it off with a ripping sound.

  Bonny Kate gasped and recoiled, staring speechlessly at his naked chest. “What the hell?”

  She’d seen the old branding-iron scar at the center of his torso, near his heart: ugly, seared, mottled scar tissue in the oval shape of an upside-down Q. It was a sight not for the squeamish. “Somebody branded you like a damn ranch animal!” She choked with an alarmed mix of horror and outrage.

  He nodded wearily and sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m damn well gonna hear it!” she spat. “Tell me now!”

  “Just take care of that bullet hole, okay?”

  “I’m doin’ it. So you can tell me the story about this brand at the same time. It’ll keep your mind off the discomfort.”

  Noose nodded as she started to unscrew her canteen and wet a cloth. Then he began: “The short version is when I was a kid I was rustling some cattle and me and my accomplices got caught. The rancher hanged the others but I was too young, just thirteen, but he figured to teach me a lesson. The son of a bitch branded me to teach me his idea of knowing right from wrong.”

  Squeezing the water out of the rag, Bonny Kate got a murderous look on her face. “Branding a little boy with a cattle iron is wrong for sure. What the hell was that sick old man thinkin’?”

  With a shrug, Noose went on. “He told me that human beings know right from wrong but animals don’t, and a man who doesn’t know right from wrong is no better than a cattle, and cattle get branded. That rancher figured the branding mark would help me remember to make the right choices. And it has.”

  “That mark looks like a noose, just like the one they mean to put around my neck.” Bonny Kate watched Joe with an intense fascination like she was beginning to figure him out just a little.

  “That’s how I got my name.”

  “Now I see.”

  “So how ’bout you fix my arm so we can get the hell out of here? That sheriff and his boys ain’t gonna be waylaid for long and they’ll be coming after us. We need to make tracks before we get sandbagged.”

  “Hold still.” It took her less than a minute to clean the wound with splashes of water from the canteen. It slowed her down some and made him flinch in pain when she tried to tear open the bloody, thick cloth of his shirt around the bullet hole. The cloth wouldn’t rip. She sighed and looked him straight in the eye with her electric blue gaze. “May I borrow your knife?”

  He just watched her without blinking.

  She sighed again. “The one in your belt. I can’t tear this with my hands, Joe. I need a knife. Ain’t gonna stick you with it, I promise.”

  “You kill me, those men kill you worse, remember that.”

  “I do. Trust me. The knife, please.”

  Noose pulled his heavy steel bowie knife out of his belt sheath with his other hand and handed it to her. The blade looked enormous in her small fingers. Bonny Kate immediately set to work cutting the shirt away with the blade and did so with dispatch. Handing the knife right back to him, the woman splashed water from the canteen on the ragged hole on both sides of his arm, her jaw set in concentration, and dabbed the blood and dirt and sweat away from the wound with the torn section of shirt. Last, Bonny Kate ripped the section of torn undershirt in two halves. She gently but securely bandaged the wound with one long torn piece of shirt and made a tourniquet of the other on his upper arm.

  Then the woman stood, offering her hand to help the man to his feet. “That should hold you till we get to Victor.”

  He smiled at her and took her hand with his good one, letting her pull him up. “Let’s get moving,” he said.

  Keeping their heads down to not catch a bullet, Joe Noose and Bonny Kate sprinted to their horses and swung up into the saddles, untying their reins from the tree then riding out of there up the Teton Pass with the big cowboy in the lead.

  No further shots came their way from below the ridge.

  CHAPTER 8

  The shootist sat down on the rock and took a load off.

  He wanted a cigarette and thought to roll one but then thought better of it, considering the deadly fire conditions of the drought-parched dry forest that engulfed him . . . dumb to strike a match in this place.

  Having just now dismounted, his tired horse was tied out of sight behind a copse of trees, enjoying the shade and a bowl of water from the canteen.

  The rider stood and admired the vista that lay below. Before him, the top of the Teton Pass opened up on a sprawling overlook of the valley of Jackson Hole, a vast basin of grasslands and river vanishing into a mountain range on the other side ben
eath the big, blue cloud-jagged expanse of endless sky.

  Pretty scenery, just like he’d been told it would be. But this was not a vacation, no, indeed.

  It had been a long ride from Arizona. A month had passed since he had crossed the Arizona state line and ridden up to Idaho.

  That very morning the shootist had ridden up from Swan Valley into the town of Victor and seen the gallows erected in the town square, the dangling rope ready for a neck that it would never touch—he would make sure of that. One big circus the town was, folks coming from near and far to watch the execution. Popcorn and cotton candy and souvenirs being sold.

  The gunfighter personally found it damn distasteful that the hanging of such a remarkable example of the fair sex should be the cause of such a carnival atmosphere . . . Had circumstances been different the gunfighter would have schooled the whole town in manners, which would be the last lesson any of those people would ever receive. Perhaps he would later, come back and burn the hick town to the ground after business was taken care of, but business came first. The shootist had spoken to some lawman and asked about the lady outlaw’s whereabouts and it didn’t take him long to learn she was being brought on horseback by the Jackson marshals over the Teton Pass to her place of execution. The hanging was tomorrow so the lady and her escorts were on their way.

  Armed with that information and his Sharps long-distance rifle, the dusty man had ridden hard out of Victor directly, straight for the Wyoming border a few miles east and a trail that took him high up into the piney elevations of the Teton Pass. Now several hours later, the shootist had since crossed the summit and descended the winding trail to where he now stood, both man and horse catching some rest before the action started.

  It had been a long, hard trail from Arizona but the shootist had beaten the sheriff here, of that he was certain. It had been no difficult task breaking out of jail with those half-wit inexperienced deputies the old lawman had left behind to mind him and the rest of the gang . . . just a simple matter of reaching through the bars and breaking their necks when those dumb tinhorns came with the morning coffee, then slipping the keys off their belts. It was harder for the shootist to shoot his two old saddle buddies in the back—boy, they sure hadn’t been expecting that—but three’s a crowd and the gunfighter rode faster alone.