Branded

by Eric Red

  “You liked her.”

  “Not at the end. But at the beginning, yeah, she was good company.”

  “Did she—did you—?”

  Noose looked at Bess square in the face, eyebrow lifted in question, a glint of humor in his pale eye.

  She rolled hers. “You know.”

  “Not even a kiss.” He shook his head with a smile.

  “But I bet she tried.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “That was a whole lot of woman. You and her alone on the trail, how did you resist?”

  “I never mix business with pleasure.”

  “Bet you thought about it.”

  “Once or twice.”

  “God, I hated that woman’s guts.”

  “She liked you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bonny Kate told me. Said you and her were a lot alike.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  “Said you were both strong, independent women in a man’s world who stood up for yourselves and such.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said she wasn’t a shadow of the woman you were, and I meant it.”

  Marshal Bess Sugarland dropped Joe Noose’s gaze, he saw her eyes had moistened, and that was the last they spoke of the late Bonny Kate Valence.

  The three riders were the only movement along the rugged trail as they rode steadily upward toward the peak of the pass.

  Emmett spoke up. “If we find The Brander—”

  “Ain’t no if. It’s when,” Noose replied.

  “Good to hear you say that. When we do find him I mean to take him in alive.”

  “There ain’t gonna be no taking him alive, Marshal. He’s a sick animal. You put a sick animal down.”

  Emmett reined his horse abruptly. The other two halted their mounts. The three riders faced one another on the empty, desolate snowbound pass. “You mean to kill him?”

  “Hell yes, I do.”

  “But you have a reputation for bringing dead-or-alive bounties in alive.”

  “This man is the exception.”

  Emmett shook his head firmly. “I’m the marshal and this is my quarry, Noose. I want this individual captured and taken back to Laramie and stood for trial. I want to question him.”

  “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

  “The problem with shooting first and asking questions later is the wrong man getting shot.”

  “I never shoot the wrong man.”

  Noose and Emmett locked eyes and the young lawman held the rugged bounty hunter’s rough gaze. Tension flared between them like a struck match.

  Bess cleared her throat. “Settle down, boys. Correction, Marshal Ford, you’re one of two marshals on this job. Since I’m the marshal of Jackson, my authority supersedes yours in Wyoming and I agree with Joe Noose. We’re after a mad-dog killer. My standing order is to shoot him on sight. And shoot to kill.”

  “I don’t like it.” Emmett scowled. “We’re lawmen, not assassins.”

  “Duly noted.”

  It was two to one. Tensely hunched in his saddle, Emmett Ford didn’t like this one little bit. His face was shadowed under the brim of his hat, but the bright winter sun caught the gleam in his eye of a man biding his time.

  The trio rode on over the peak of the quiet Teton Pass, the trail winding downward now, revealing the sprawling winter landscape of the Jackson Hole basin spreading out below. Out there, the site of the last branding slaying lay ahead twenty-two miles due east. With luck, they’d pick up a few clues and hopefully catch The Brander’s trail.

  It was day one and already they had their differences.

  CHAPTER 3

  The crime scene was a log cabin.

  A black speck on the white landscape visible from a half mile off.

  It was a bad place, Noose could tell, even from a great distance. The vast silence of the wintery Wyoming snowfall normally brought a sense of peaceful stillness to the bounty hunter. But here it was a vacuum, an absence of life, the silence of death, and the still of the tomb. Black crows circled overhead and perched on branches, cawing, contributing to the atmosphere of dread; a murder of crows nestling in the branches.

  Noose, Bess, and Emmett trudged their horses through the steadily falling snow piling up to the steeds’ knees. It was slow going.

  His guns holstered, Noose saw no reason to have his weapons at the ready—he knew there was nothing alive at the cabin.

  Gradually, with each step of their horses, the place came into view.

  The cabin was hand-built, sturdy but threadbare, in dilapidated condition. Part of the roof had caved in under the weight of ten feet of snow. The dangling icicles on the windows looked like frozen tears. The black shuttered windows and shadowed doorway resembled the coal eyes and mouth of a snowman or, the closer they rode, a skull.

  Copper’s muscular flanks shivered between Joe Noose’s legs and not from the cold. The man looked at his horse and saw its ears were pinned back. Copper was spooked. Its big moist brown eyes were wider than normal as it kept a sharp wary lookout on its surroundings. Noose patted his stallion’s huge, tawny neck and stroked its flowing golden withers. “Easy, boy.”

  Emmett dismounted first and strode up to the porch, checking to see if the U.S. Marshals order he had nailed to the front door was intact. It was. He efficiently circled the cabin on patrol, checking to see the windows and door were shut as he had left them. Noose and Bess remained in their saddles until Emmett trundled around the edge of the homestead, up to his waist in snow, then nodded things were to his satisfaction. “I closed the place up and put a ‘No Trespassing by order of the U.S. Marshals Service’ flyer up. Looks like nobody meddled with the place. Not like there was much to steal.”

  “This was where you found the boy.”

  “Yes, the only survivor. Hiding under the dead body of his mother to keep warm. I found them in the food cellar.”

  “Did you bury the victims?” Noose asked.

  Emmett shook his head. “The ground was froze hard as rock. Couldn’t get a shovel in. I left the bodies inside the cabin where they fell. Put ice on ’em figuring the cold would preserve the corpses for transport later. Then I sealed the place up and rode for Jackson to find both of you.”

  Dismounting, Noose and Bess led, then tied, their horses to a tree a hundred yards out. There were closer trees to hitch them, but the bounty hunter and the lady marshal both saw their mounts were nervous being near the house.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Bess said quietly to Noose. “The horses don’t like it.”

  “It’s a place of death,” he muttered.

  “Not looking forward to what we’re about to see in there.”

  “It’ll give us clues.”

  “See you been giving the side-eye to Marshal Ford. You don’t think he knows what he’s doing?”

  “Haven’t spent enough time with him to gauge. So far he seems competent. Pretty much done what I’d have done. Smartest thing he’s done yet is rounding me up.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  Moments later, the friends had hiked back through the snow and stood with the third of their number next to the porch. Emmett waited patiently in the cold, giving a deferential nod to his female counterpart. “Other than the roof caving in on account of the weight of the snow, this place looks pretty much like I left it, Marshal.”

  “You cut sign when you first arrived?” Noose asked.

  “There had been a snow dump. Saw faint horse tracks but couldn’t be sure when they were made.”

  Noose considered that. “Direction?”

  “Northeast.”

  “You rode northwest. To Jackson.”

  Emmett nodded. Noose watched him a long beat, then swung his pale gaze to the foreboding door of the cabin.

  “The bodies. Show me.” Noose nudged his jaw.

  Walking onto the porch, sliding his Remington 1875 revolver out of his side holster, Emmett Ford took position by the front d
oor and shot a warning glance back to his saddle mates. “It ain’t pretty.”

  Noose stepped onto the frozen, creaking boards of the porch, caked with ice. Bess followed. Their spurs jingled. “It never is.”

  A sharp crack. Noose’s hand shot out and grabbed Bess’s elbow just as her boot broke a rotted board and her leg dropped through to the shin. With the strength in his one arm, the huge cowboy lifted her back onto her feet on the porch.

  Emmett kicked in the door with a solid blow of his boot, and it swung wide. A blast of frosty chill air laden with the stench of dead meat rushed out to greet them.

  The three entered the cabin, stepping into the stale, still atmosphere of the place. It was cold as sin. If Hell were known for lower temperatures, this would be the place.

  Wind whistled in a high banshee keening sound with the gusts of snow falling through the hole in the roof.

  The furnishings of the cabin were spare and few. A potbellied stove. A straw mattress. A chair. A table, now overturned. Every surface of the entire single room was covered with a film of frost, half the color of ice, half the dark burgundy color of blood that had frozen.

  “Lordy,” Bess gasped.

  Four bodies lay strewn on the floor and against the walls. One man, three women. They were still covered with the chunks of ice that Emmett Ford had placed over the human remains to preserve them in the cold.

  Emmett kicked a few pieces of ice away from the man, revealing his frigid body had been worked over with an ax, his legs chopped off below the knee, the wounds long cauterized with frost.

  All of the victims had been branded on the forehead. Each bore the scalded, seared Q brand on their foreheads, burned deep into their blackened flesh.

  “How long were they dead?”

  “The blood was fresh.”

  “You cut sign?”

  “Said I did.”

  “You couldn’t have been a day’s ride behind the killer. Why’d you let him get away?”

  “Because the boy needed medical. Had to get him tended to first.”

  “Fair enough.” Cocking an eyebrow, Joe Noose looked out the window at the heavy pristine snowfall glistening with crystallized frost on the landscape outside, any horse tracks long buried under many feet of snow. “The snow probably covered up The Brander’s tracks days before you got here, Marshal Ford. But horses ain’t the only thing that leaves tracks . . .”

  Bess looked up to see Joe Noose was staring down at the floor as he walked in a methodical trek of the room, pacing step by step first up one side, then down the same side, then taking a step to the side and repeating the process. His expelled breath condensed in twin funnels of mist out his nostrils like a snorting bull as he checked the crime scene with great deliberation. “What are you looking for, Joe?” she asked.

  “Bootprints in the blood.”

  “Those bootprints could be mine,” the other marshal pointed out.

  The bounty hunter shook his head, brows furrowed as he walked the floor with a downcast focused gaze. “The blood was froze by the time you got here, you said. The Brander was stepping in fresh blood. Like right here.” Noose crouched down, looking at the large print of a boot in a frozen crimson relief.

  Bess and Emmett crouched down beside Joe and studied the grisly bootprint. Noose traced it with the finger of his glove. “Man’s boot. Size twelve. Chipped heel right here.” Pointing out a visible crack in the heel, he looked at Bess, then Emmett. “We can identify this bootprint when we see it again, and identify its owner from it.” Grabbing his bowie knife from his belt, Noose drove the blade through the weakened old boards, making several hard chops and cutting the foot-and-a-half-square section of the floorboards with the bootprint in the frozen blood free. He rose and handed the section of floor to Bess. “Wrap a blanket around this, pack it secure in your saddlebags. We’re taking it with us.”

  Marshal Bess nodded, took it, and left, heading outside to the horses. Now they were alone, and Noose looked at Marshal Ford. “Who were these people, Marshal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The other people The Brander put his iron to and killed, who were they? What connection do they have?”

  “None.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “No. Just ain’t found a connection between his victims yet.” Emmett shrugged. Noose grunted. “You’ll be the first to know.”

  “Joe!”

  The woman’s voice out on the porch brought the two men swiftly outside. She was crouched down by the floorboards of the porch. The section of floor with the bloody bootprint Noose cut was wrapped in a soft blanket beside her. Bess was digging something out of the porch floorboards with her knife.

  An old broken boot heel.

  Covered with a raspberry-colored frost of frozen blood.

  “Looks like The Brander put his foot through the porch like I did, left a little something behind.”

  “Let me see that,” Noose said. Bess handed the broken heel to him. “It’s size twelve. Got to be from his boot.”

  “Unless he has a spare pair of boots, he’ll be looking to get that repaired next town he comes to,” Bess said. “If we get lucky, we got us a lead.”

  “But which direction did he go?” Emmett worried.

  Noose looked out over the white landscape. “The snow covered any tracks. Which direction The Brander went after he left here is anybody’s guess. It’s a coin toss. But The Brander has been targeting farms and ranches and most of those are within twenty miles of some kind of town so the owners can get supplies. He needs to get that boot fixed. My guess is he’s heading toward one of the towns in the area. Trouble is, there’s a lot of towns around here north, south, east, and west. The Brander could have lit out to any of them . . . We might as well pick one, ride in, ask if anybody seen an old man missing three fingers of his right hand with a Q brand on his saddle, maybe had his boot repaired. First thing we got to do is pick up his trail. It ain’t gonna be easy. We’ll need luck, like Marshal Bess says.”

  The two marshals nodded. Emmett spoke up. “Now, I preserved this crime scene here for you to see, Noose, you seen what you need to see?”

  “Reckon.”

  “Then, Marshal Sugarland, the next sheriff ’s office we pass, I’d like to alert them of the location so they can send some men to collect the bodies and give them a proper burial.”

  “That’s the decent thing to do, and it’s fine with me,” she said, nodding. “Nearest Sheriff is Alpine, twenty-one miles northeast that way.” She pointed. “Joe, okay with you, we ride northeast?”

  The big hunter shrugged. “Until we pick up The Brander’s trail, one direction is as good as any other.”

  The trio of manhunters mounted up.

  The three rode out into the deep snowdrifts, twelve horses’ legs pushing through snow coming up to their knees, burrowing a new trail where none existed.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Q branding iron is cold now.

  The blackened metal tufted with snow.

  The lone rider has it in his saddlebag, next to his Henry rifle and his ax. They are his tools. The brand is his signature.

  It will taste flesh again soon.

  The Brander grips the reins in a gloved mangled hand with three fingers missing. His long white hair falls over his shoulders around a face that is a frozen mask from the chill but he isn’t cold.

  His hate keeps him warm.

  And it isn’t far now.

  CHAPTER 5

  Over the next week, Joe Noose, Bess Sugarland, and Emmett Ford rode south past La Barge to Big Piney, broadening their search.

  They had no luck in La Barge, a small settlement in the plains with a population of less than forty. The sheriff ’s office was closed because the lawman had recently passed away and the position in the remote outpost had yet to be filled. Given the lack of crime in that section of the boondocks it was not a priority, the bootmaker they spoke to told them, although he felt confident they would have a new sheriff
come spring, or definitely by fall. As for the bootmaker, he had no requests for a heel repair by any man in since last winter, three fingers missing on one hand or not. And he had heard of no murders involving a cattle brand. The trio rode on, struggling to pick up The Brander’s trail.

  “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Emmett said.

  “Or a snowflake in a blizzard,” Bess said.

  “Keep riding,” said Noose, not one for idle words like analogies.

  Four days later, in Big Piney the three manhunters stopped at the sheriff’s office and Marshal Bess reported the killings at the cabin thirty miles north. The sheriff was a weathered, stocky, rough-hewn man in his fifties named Bill Armstrong, who took the news with shock and wasted no time rounding up his deputy to ride north and retrieve the bodies. Armstrong told the two marshals and the bounty hunter no other such similar slayings had been reported in his jurisdiction—the Q branding would have been news—but acknowledged that with the harsh winter conditions, many of the local ranches and farms were cut off by the snows this time of year and communications were infrequent and poor. Bess told the sheriff that she and her hunting party were going to be on the trail until they caught the killer, and if he learned any information to relay it by telegraph to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Jackson to the attention of her deputy Nate Sweet, for she would be checking in with him when their location permitted.

  While in Big Piney, Noose, Bess, and Emmett asked questions at the grocery store. No sightings had been reported of an old man missing three fingers on his right hand. At the bootmaker, nobody fitting The Brander’s description had come in to have a heel repaired on his left boot. In fact, the man had no business at all the past two weeks.

  Before leaving town, the manhunters reprovisioned and reshod one of the horses, and then they were off into the ice-cold harsh snows of the Wyoming frontier.

  The third night, they made camp in a canyon and sat around a campfire, trying to keep warm. The roaring flames kept back the chilling temperature as they ate a dinner of salted beef, hot beans, and coffee. Bess saw Noose staring into the fire, lost in thought, his finger under his shirt tracing the brand. She didn’t ask, but the distant look in his eyes was unlike him, and she guessed he was thinking about another fateful fire many years ago and a flaming brand turning red-hot.