Branded

by Eric Red

  Rachel’s whole face lit up. “Good.”

  “Nothing in this world I hate more than a man hitting a woman,” Sweet said. “It’s as personal as it gets.”

  Rachel got off the bed, her mood less despondent. Her bandaged and splinted arm appeared to be hurting her. Going to the bathroom medicine cabinet, she uncorked her bottle of laudanum and took a draft. He watched her through the door as she shut her eyes, waiting for the morphine to kick in. Its effect was immediate, and dreamily Rachel went to her luggage and opened it.

  Sweet sat and watched as Rachel opened the suitcase and unpacked the clothes. It was all men’s clothes, and everything belonged to Puzzleface.

  His silk jacket.

  His satin vest.

  His black velvet trousers.

  His frilled shirt.

  His diamond tiepin.

  Lovingly, carefully, neatly, Rachel hung up Puzzleface’s clothes on wooden hangers in the armoire. Her fingertips felt the electricity touching the fabric of her male disguise, and being physically close again to the garments coursed energy back into her limbs.

  When the clothes were hung, Rachel took out the circus makeup kit that made her Puzzleface and opened it, delicately running her finger over the false mustaches, beards, and eyebrows among the canisters of powder and blush. A small smile of pleasure parted her lips.

  Even though her back was turned to Deputy Sweet, Rachel’s face was reflected in the full-length mirror and while the features were hers, the expression he saw was Puzzleface.

  CHAPTER 19

  Twenty miles out from the Bar Q ranch, Joe Noose felt his insides curdle long before the last place he ever wanted to see again came into view.

  It was the smells of the trees and the soil that brought memories flooding back to him. It was too long ago for the bounty hunter to remember in what season he had been branded, though he knew it was not winter, yet the white birch and pines had an olfactory-sense memory. His jaw was clenched tight as he rode in the lead with Bess on one side and Emmett on the other through a rising gradation of trees and hills pocketed with granite ravines and arroyos blanketed with snow.

  He knew where he was, all right. It had been dusk twenty years ago when he and his ill-fated young friends had staked out the Bar Q ranch, and night when they had raided it only to be captured, tortured, and killed, still night when young Joe was put on his horse. But before the sun went down he had gotten a good look at the surroundings, remembered the position of the mountain peaks to the trees; it had all been burned into his memory by what came after.

  “Place look familiar?” Emmett asked.

  “Yeah, it looks familiar.”

  A new scent assaulted Noose’s nostrils. Burned wood. Char. It reminded him of the smell of the vast forest-fire deforestation when he had ridden over the Teton Pass a few weeks ago—all those burned trees—but this was different; it was a smell of death.

  At last, the trees parted and the three riders trotted into the Bar Q ranch, what was left of it.

  “What the hell?”

  They reined their horses and looked around in naked shock at the grim view. The ranch had been burned to the ground, and pretty recently. Not a structure remained standing. Not a living thing remained. The cattle stockade was empty of livestock. The buck-and-rail fencing was all burned, blackened with char, and collapsed in places from the fire damage. The snow around the grounds of the ranch was no longer white, but stained with char and ash, like a carpet of soot. A bleak carpet of black snow filled the empty floor of the stockade, gusting up in wind funnels like smoke.

  The three riders slowly trotted through the ruins. Marshal Bess shook her head at the ravaged surroundings. “Man-made.”

  “Arson. No doubt,” Noose replied. He slid a glance over to Emmett, whose expression was detached and unaffected by the sight of the burned ranch.

  “What exactly are we hoping to find here?” the other marshal asked.

  “I’ll know when I find it,” the bounty hunter replied curtly, his pale gaze hooded as he surveyed the area below his saddle with keen observation.

  “The Brander ain’t here,” a frustrated Emmett protested. “It’s the last place he’d be. What makes you think this is where he ended up?”

  “It’s not where he ended up, it’s where he started. For that old man, it all began here. And somewhere, in all this burn, there’s clues. We’re going to look around until we find them.”

  “Looks like one day that old man must have branded the wrong man,” Bess said. “That’s what comes from taking justice into your own hands.”

  The three rode around the perimeter of the fence and passed what used to be the barn; the wrecked structure was gutted by flames and in shambles, a rubble of broken burned boards. Noose remembered the corral by the barn was where his horse was shot from under him and he and his friends were captured and hog-tied at gunpoint. It was ashes now. “This was where they captured us, I remember.”

  His fierce gaze rose, following the path on the ground where he remembered the old man and his boys had dragged them to the other side of the stockade, and when Noose looked up, he saw the hanging tree.

  What remained of it.

  Clicking his teeth, the bounty hunter slowly trotted his horse up to the looming fire-blackened husk of a tree crooked against the steely winter sky. He stopped his horse below it, regarding the broken, charred branch where his friends once swung from ropes, the wretched dead tree no longer capable of executing anyone.

  “This is where the old man and his boys hanged my friends. Right here. Twenty years ago. One of my friend’s heads popped off in the noose like a cork in a bottle.”

  Behind him, Bess and Emmett had ridden up and sat on their horses, listening. Both the marshals were silent, respectful, and attentive hearing Noose recount the incident. The bounty hunter swung his horse around and rode past his friends to the edge of the burned corral. A round brick-and-iron fire pit had survived the flames, a blackened hole in the ground that looked like a pit leading to the underworld. Noose gazed at this from the saddle, spat into it, then lifted his gaze to his friends. “And right here, this is where they branded me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bess said.

  “It is what it is,” Noose replied.

  Approaching the Bar Q ranch, the fear that had clenched Joe Noose’s guts like a fist had unclenched now that he was here, his trepidation gone. A weight had been lifted from his soul. The overwhelming emotion he felt now was one of grim, savage satisfaction looking around at the old man’s ranch burned to the ground, reduced to ashes. It gave him a gratifying sense of retribution to know that what went around, came around. What gave him an even greater sense of gladness was knowing that the old man had not been burned along with his ranch and Noose would still have his reckoning with Abraham Quaid, because some justice had to be hand-delivered, and Noose was determined the man who had become The Brander would meet his maker by Joe’s own hand. For the first time since he had met up face-to-face with the old man, his nerves began to settle and he felt like himself again.

  “What the hell happened here?” Bess wondered, looking around.

  Shifting in his saddle, Emmett looked restless. “You two keep looking around. I’ll go ride out to that town Consequence a few miles from here. We saw the sign back at the road. It’ll have a sheriff ’s office. I’ll find the top lawdog and ask him what happened out here at the Bar Q ranch. At least get us some answers. No reason for three of us to be up to our asses in ash. If there’s anything to find here, Joe will be the one to find it.”

  “Suits me, Emmett.” Bess nodded her approval.

  Noose nodded, too.

  “I’ll be back directly.” With a snap of his reins, Emmett Ford urged his pony into a fast gallop and rode hard past the burned corral up the hill where the snow began to whiten again and his shrinking horse disappeared over the rise out of sight.

  It was just Joe Noose and Bess Sugarland now on the ranch, and whatever ghosts remained were whistl
ing in the wind through the trees or shape-shifting in the gusts of sooty ash-black snow whipped up into what seemed like faces that disintegrated again.

  “Emmett took off out of here like his ass was on fire,” the bounty hunter said.

  “My ass is on fire to take off out of here, too, Joe. This place gives me the creeps. I’d think it would you too, more than any of us.”

  “Nothing makes me happier than seeing this damned place burned to ash. I like being here to see it.”

  Then Noose saw something that hit him like a fist in the jaw.

  “What the—?”

  Releasing Copper’s lead, Noose slid out of the saddle and dismounted. Then he slowly, deliberately walked step by step toward what his gaze had fixed on. When at last the bounty hunter stood over what captured his attention, he looked down in disbelief. It was impossible. It couldn’t be.

  A grave.

  A plain, austere granite headstone.

  Two words. Just a name.

  ABRAHAM QUAID

  “No,” he whispered.

  Bess had dismounted and walked up beside him. “That’s the old man, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what it says on the headstone.”

  “If he’s dead then who the hell is The Brander?”

  “Abraham Quaid is The Brander. I seen him. Looked in his eyes. Same eyes.”

  “Then who’s buried in that grave?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “But—”

  “I need a shovel.”

  “You ain’t thinking of... ?”

  Noose’s crazed, obsessed look told Bess that was exactly what he had in mind. She looked at him like he was nuts. “Why don’t you just piss on his grave and be done with it?”

  “I want to piss on his bones.”

  “What’s the hell’s wrong with you, Joe?”

  But he had already grabbed the shovel from his saddlebags and stabbed it into the plot, digging up the grave . . .

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, Emmett Ford rode back over the hill to the Bar Q ranch.

  His pouring sweat freezing to his body, Noose had been digging up the ground over Abraham’s grave, hacking into the frozen soil with a pickax to break it up and using a shovel to clear the rock-hard chunks of dirt. He had dug five feet and was almost at the coffin. He breathed heavily from the exertion. It was not the first grave Joe Noose had dug and would not be the last, but with frozen ground, it was the hardest. The bounty hunter was thinking people had no idea how hard it is to dig a grave.

  Bess spotted Emmett before Noose did, riding hell-for-leather down the long, tall hill like the Devil was snapping at his heels.

  “He’s back,” she said.

  Noose dropped the pickax and wiped sweat from his brow before it turned to ice. The perspiration in his long brown hair had turned to icicles. “Looks like he learned something.”

  Seconds later, Marshal Ford rode up and halted his horse with a jerk on the reins, hastily dismounting and walking up to his two confederates waiting with expectant looks on their faces. “I talked to the sheriff over in Consequence,” he said. “He told me a year ago a gang of marauders hit this ranch. This group of outlaws who had been robbing and rustling raising hell in the territory. They stole the cattle. The rancher was alone when they hit. Sheriff said his name was Abe Quaid.”

  Abraham Quaid. The name to the face behind the brand that burned Noose, a name he would never forget.

  Emmett went on, hardly catching his breath. “There was eight of the rustlers, one of them Quaid got a shot off with a scattergun then there was seven of them, but somebody opened up with his Henry rifle, and then it was seven to none. The gunman shot Abe Quaid dead. Or so they say.”

  “We’re gonna find out soon enough.” Noose grunted, lifting the shovel like a weapon to attack the grave again.

  “Sheriff say anything else about the guy we think is The Brander?” Bess asked.

  Emmett shook his head. “Not much. Said folks in the territory stayed clear of this farm while the old man was alive. Had a fearsome reputation as a dirty miserable son of a bitch recluse who didn’t kindly take to strangers.”

  “You can say that again,” the bounty hunter said, smirking.

  “What happened with the gang who attacked this place?”

  “After shooting Quaid, the outlaws stole the cattle and horses and burned the ranch to the ground. Their mistake was leaving the dead member of their party behind. When the sheriff and his deputies arrived, they identified the outlaw as Luke Dodge, who rode with the gang. Two days later, the Consequence lawmen caught up with the whole gang and ambushed them in a whorehouse, took ’em all into custody.”

  “Then what?” asked Bess.

  “Here’s the part that don’t make sense. The gang went before the district judge on charges of rustling and murder and faced a hanging.” Emmett Ford’s expression darkened as he lost his composure and paused, collecting himself.

  “They didn’t get hanged,” Marshal Bess guessed, with a sharp exhale of breath that condensed in the chill air.

  Her male counterpart shook his head, incredulously. “They walked. The whole gang. The problem was there were no witnesses. And when the outlaws were arrested they didn’t have any cattle or horses. Didn’t have no money, either, so they didn’t sell those steers off. Because there was no evidence, the judge acquitted them and the sheriff released them. But they were warned by the court to leave the territory. It was the last anybody saw of these outlaws. Rumor has it afterward the gang split up, rode off in different directions, and now they’re spread across the states.”

  Noose brooded. “Who buried Abraham Quaid?”

  “No idea. But what are you doing digging up his grave?”

  The huge bounty hunter gritted his teeth as he put his immense back into shoveling the softening earth beneath the frozen crust of soil on the surface. His shoulder muscles clenched as with a final stab of the shovel, it hit wood.

  “It’s against the law and blasphemy against God to dig up a grave, Noose!”

  “Shut up, Emmett.”

  The angry young lawman made a motion to lay a hand on the towering bounty hunter who ignored him but Bess stepped in between them, looking hard in the eyes of her agitated counterpart. Back off.

  “What the hell are you looking for?” Emmett shouted.

  “Answers.”

  Jumping down into the grave, Noose used his cattle hoof–sized bare hands to claw the dirt away from the coffin lid. Gritting his teeth, with a roar of effort, he tore the lid from the wooden casket.

  Bess looked down with a gasp . . .

  Emmett looked down, stunned, swallowing hard . . .

  Noose looked down, unsurprised . . .

  The coffin was empty!

  CHAPTER 20

  The three manhunters saddled up without conversation, for there was nothing to say—they all knew whom they were hunting. They had many questions but were certain when they caught up with Abraham Quaid, aka The Brander, they would get the answers.

  Noose rode Copper in the lead, his majestic bronze horse happy to be riding up the hill away from the place of char and death. Right behind was Marshal Bess, her Appaloosa following in Copper’s trail, in lockstep with the golden horse’s commanding stride. Her male counterpart brought up the rear, tall in the saddle on his palomino, riding behind the other two.

  Emmett Ford was remembering two hours ago when he said he was riding out to see the sheriff he told a lie. Instead Emmett had taken position in the nearby woods, undetected, to quietly spy on the distant figures of Noose and Bess investigating the grounds of the Bar Q ranch. He had tensed when he saw the bounty hunter start digging up the grave but didn’t break cover. After waiting a credible amount of time, Emmett rode back down to the ranch, riding hard to tire his pony so they looked like they had traveled a considerable distance.

  Even though he had not been to see the sheriff, Emmett knew exactly what had transpired at the ranch and could recou
nt the story believably.

  Most of it was true.

  Part of it wasn’t.

  It was not the first time Emmett Ford had been to the Bar Q ranch.

  Marshal Ford had a secret.

  The secret was one of the many things he knew that his two companions didn’t and the one thing he had to make sure they never found out; Noose and Bess wouldn’t like Emmett’s little secret.

  That his real name wasn’t Ford.

  It was Quaid.

  And Abraham Quaid was his father.

  Emmett Quaid alias Marshal Ford’s mission was not what Noose or Bess thought it was. Tracking down a mass murderer called The Brander to bring him to justice while Emmett was employed as a U.S. Marshal was merely his cover. Emmett Quaid was here as a son, his sole purpose finding his missing father, Abraham Quaid, so that when he found his dad, he could return him safely back home. Emmett didn’t know the reason for his father’s bloodthirsty killing spree—his father was a mad-dog killer, this he had to accept—but Abraham Quaid was still his father and nothing The Brander did made Emmett any less his son. Family is family. Blood comes first. Right now, Emmett had to find his dad, Abraham Quaid, before the law caught up with his father, for they’d surely kill him. He had only one father and Emmett couldn’t face losing his dad. He’d already lost his younger brother.

  He’d have nobody left in the world.

  So it was his own kin that Emmett was on the trail of and desperately needed to find, not to arrest, but to bring him home.

  How well Emmett Quaid remembered the night his father Abraham branded Joe Noose . . . it changed him and his little brother, Willard, forever. Made party against their will to the lynching and hanging of three boys their own ages ended Emmett and Willard’s childhood in one savage stroke; their innocence had been shattered forever when the three boys swung and the fourth screamed at the end of a hot branding iron. Even now as a grown adult, Emmett still remembered the raw terror and horror he felt as those terrible events unfolded, and later the deadness he felt inside. Part of his soul was gone. Willard had borne the worst of it. Always a sensitive youth, something broke inside him that night.