The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  Every wrangler in the outfit was acting like they had never seen Noose before, even if a few believed he wasn’t who he said he was. But one of the rovers was lying and had seen him before. That meant there was every probability that the man on this cattle drive who knew who the bounty hunter was, what he did for a living, and why he was here, was the killer himself.

  That put Joe Noose at a disadvantage.

  * * *

  Three and a half miles on, the chuck wagon’s wheels got stuck in the mud and the team couldn’t pull it free. It was the heaviest rig on the drive, so if any of them would get stuck, it would be the cook’s. Kettlebone was cursing and whipping the horses when Noose swung a look over his shoulder and saw the stalled chuck wagon. Looking ahead, Joe saw the filthy, sodden train of livestock begin to slow as the wranglers prepared to halt, so he raised his arm and waved the rovers on, gesturing for the outfit to go on without him.

  “I’ll help Cook get the chuck wagon loose!” he yelled. “Keep moving the herd, we’ll catch up!”

  Far ahead, past the sea of horns, Joe saw the flash of gold of Laura’s hair as she removed her hat and waved back from her wagon, leading her drivers and livestock on.

  The bounty hunter rode back toward the mired chuck wagon, grabbing his opportunity to have a few words alone with Cook, who if he was like most trail cooks in Joe’s experience, knew everything that went on in his outfit and all the gossip among the crew.

  The heavyset cowboy with the spectacles wasn’t in the mood for any conversation or any verbiage other than a string of profanity as purple as his enraged face. He kept uselessly lashing his helpless team.

  “Stop whipping the horses, mister. Ain’t gonna help you or them.” Noose pulled Copper right alongside the chuck wagon and swung the horse around, looking the rig over. “We got to lever the wheel outta the mud. You got a four-foot two-by-four and a log on that wagon?”

  His glasses fogged with condensation, Kettlebone cracked the whip against the horses’ backs even harder until Noose jumped out the saddle onto the transom and fiercely grabbed the whip from him, snarling, “I’m gonna whip you with this if you hit those horses one more time.”

  The bounty hunter glared and the cook backed down, throwing a glance ahead to see the men, horses, and steers were far in the distance and he was alone with the tough, dangerous stranger who had just joined the outfit, who nobody knew anything about and who was ready to use Kettlebone’s own whip on him. “We need a heavy board and something to lever it with, get down under that wheel with the board and use it to lift the wheel out.”

  “I got nothing like that on the chuck wagon, goddammit!”

  Jumping off the chuck wagon, Joe was already ankle-deep in mud, giving the stalled rig the once-over. “Sure you do.” Noose pointed at the heavy barrels on the rear of the carriage. “Gimmie that barrel. Push it down.”

  “It’s full of sugar, friend!”

  “Good, means it’s heavy. Give it here.” When Kettlebone equivocated, Noose reached up and tipped the keg off the wagon, dropping it into the mud as the cook screamed curses at him. The barrel was heavy and wrapped with iron, seventy-five solid pounds, and Joe used his boot to wedge it behind the stuck rear wagon wheel, deep in the muck.

  “The board.”

  “I got no boards,” the cook mocked, “less you wanna pull a piece off the wagon.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “Wait!”

  Unsheathing his gleaming bowie knife, the bounty hunter drove the blade into the edge of one of the four-inch-thick planks on the side of the chuck wagon, prying out the nails with a few jerks of his wrist and tearing a heavy six-foot board, suitable for his purposes, off the side of the rig.

  Opening his mouth to say something unwise, Kettlebone was silenced by a mean glance from Noose, who bared his teeth. “Get your fat ass down here and give me a hand now!” Leaping off the platform, the cook grabbed the other end of the board and helped the bounty hunter wedge it under the rear axle, balancing it on the overturned barrel, cramming the end of the plank beneath the wheel. “Push!” Noose barked. “Cram it in there!”

  It took a combined effort of the two strong men to get the board under the wheel, and step-by-step, working side by side, wedge it in there. Noose looked over at Kettlebone and flashed a crooked grin. “Now we got this time to spend together, how ’bout you tell me why the drivers in the outfit are getting murdered and who is doing the killing?”

  “You get right to the point, doncha, mister?”

  “Saves time. By the body count, I’d say time is something you boys and that lady are running out of right quick.”

  “I don’t know who the killer is.”

  “Is it you?” Noose asked quietly. The cook met the bounty hunter’s piercing pale gaze and returned his unblinking stare, both men nose to nose. Suddenly it got very quiet, just the fall of the rain. “You the killer, boy?” Joe’s eyes looked right through Fred.

  “No,” the cook replied, his eyes never wavering.

  “Prove it.”

  “Because none of them was poisoned. I’m the cook. How else you think I’d do it if it had been me? It’d be easy enough to poison the food and nobody would even know they’d been murdered.”

  The bounty hunter cocked an eyebrow. “One of the murdered men said he did have stomach complaint. Push!”

  Both men leaned their full weight onto the board, levering on the barrel, and the back of the wagon lifted. “Yee-ahh!” Kettlebone yelled to the horses in front of the wagon, and they leaned into their bridles and harnesses to pull the rig, but the wagon wheel, stuck deep, barely moved.

  “It’s gonna work,” insisted Noose. “Help me wedge the board in tighter. Get it in there!” Breathing hard, Noose gasped, “So saying it ain’t you, who do you think it is?”

  “I have ideas.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  The cook stubbornly shook his head slowly back and forth. “I ain’t no snitch.”

  “Fair enough.” Joe put his back into hoisting the plank cantilevered on the barrel, Kettlebone beside him straining and grimacing, using all his considerable weight, and together, the two men lifted the wheel out of the mud.

  “Yee-ahh!” Kettlebone screamed at the team of horses, and the four quarter horses pulled the rig with all their might, the chuck wagon getting unstuck and starting to roll. The cook scrambled onto the rear transom as it began to move, gesturing to the bounty hunter falling behind the departing rig.

  “Gimme that damn sugar barrel before we lose it!” Joe picked up the seventy-five-pound sugar barrel and tossed it to Kettlebone, who got knocked on his ass when he caught it, and then the wagon chassis plank Noose launched at him. The cook dropped the loose board on the rain-slick transom as he scrambled into the driver’s seat and picked up the reins.

  In the wake of the departing chuck wagon, the bounty hunter raced on foot to his horse and swung up into the saddle, taking off at a gallop until he rode alongside the cook on the rig. To be heard above the noisy racket of the splattering hooves and clanking wagon suspension, Joe Noose had to shout. “You don’t want to give me the who, how about the why?”

  Fred Kettlebone yelled back, “You want answers, mister, the hooligan wagon where the drivers keep their belongings, that’s where you’ll find answers! Look in the hooligan wagon! Every man has a war sack with his name on it, with all their belongings inside! Even the dead men have their war sacks with all their stuff... their stuff and . . . !”

  “And what?”

  “I’ve said all I’m gonna say!” Kettlebone’s lips tightened as he stared straight ahead at the team pulling the rig as he shouted to Noose, “Figure it out for yourself. Nose around those war sacks! See what turns up!” The cook swung his head to look the bounty hunter on the galloping horse beside the wagon straight in the eye. “But a word of advice. You go through another man’s property in this outfit, best be sure nobody catches you. Messing with a man’s personal belongings is justification for a
lynching.”

  “Obliged.” The bounty hunter tipped his hat.

  “You’re on your own, Smith!” Fred Kettlebone shook his head. “I don’t know you, and you ’n’ me, we ain’t never had this conversation! Yee-ahh!” Cracking the whip, the cook brought his horses to a full gallop as the chuck wagon rattled and shook as it accelerated over the muddy trail of cattle hooves.

  The stranger who called himself Smith on the great bronze stallion quickly overtook the wagon, charging ahead like a bolt of lightning to catch up with the herd off in the distance.

  Fred Kettlebone was glad John Smith, or whoever he was, was here, it was just too bad he wasn’t going to live very long.

  CHAPTER 9

  The outfit and their herd made only five miles that day, what with the death and burial and weather delay. When they lost the light, they called it quits. A sense of defeat and dread disproportionate to their circumstances hung over the crew as they harbored the cattle, circled the wagons, and hitched the horses under an unbroken black cloud filling the vast sky. Even when the smell of cooked beef and baked beans wafted over the camp from the direction of the chuck wagon, nobody had much of an appetite.

  It was chowtime. Noose leaned against the hooligan wagon across the camp, arms crossed over his massive chest, and watched some of the wranglers huddling around the campfire a few hundred yards across the camp. He closely observed several cowpunchers having a knife-throwing competition on a painted bullseye target set up on a nearby tree. A blade-tossing contest seemed in bad taste to the scowling bounty hunter, tonight of all nights, given today’s deadly events. The licking flames of the roaring logs glimmered on the swift sudden flashes of polished steel from the hurled blades as one rover after another took turns throwing his knife into the tree—thunk, thunk, thunk—closest to the target. The faces of the cowboys looked sinister in the dancing shadows of the campfire, their eyes black as bats.

  The gleam of another kind of metal caught Joe’s eyes: silver coins changing hands. The rovers were gambling and betting on who was the most accurate at tossing a blade.

  Charley Sykes was the hands-down winner; he threw a dead-center bullseye with his bowie knife, burying it to the hilt in the tree during each of his three turns, standing twice as far back as his nearest cowpuncher competition. The surly, hulking, long-haired redneck had a cocky self-confident swagger collecting his money that made it obvious to Noose that when it came to throwing knives, Sykes was the best blade in the outfit, and knew how good he was.

  Good enough to throw a knife into Wylie Jeffries’s back in a raging river of stampeding steers?

  Perhaps.

  As if he suddenly felt Noose’s gaze drilling into the back of his head from across the camp, Sykes turned his face to lock eyes with Joe. In the firelight, the rover’s eyes reflected the dancing flames as his mouth broke into a savage grin; then, incredibly fast, the flash of glinting steel and Sykes’s bowie knife quivered in the tree, thrown so fast Joe didn’t see the toss, hitting dead center in the bullseye. The fun over for now, Sykes turned his back on Noose, retrieved and sheathed his big blade, then rejoined the rest of the drivers sitting around the circle of the campfire, eating chow and swapping jokes.

  Noose took a head count.

  Seven.

  All of the rovers present and accounted for.

  Uncrossing his arms, Joe slipped into the hooligan wagon he had been leaning against. Nobody saw him sneak into the rig. He moved as quiet as a cat. Careful not to make the boards creak, he slowly pulled himself up on the transom and once aboard the rig, flattened himself by the sideboard, listening for any sounds of footsteps or someone moving nearby. The only sound was the hoot of an owl. Peering over the rail, he still counted seven rovers by the campfire. Satisfied he was not being observed, Noose swiftly ducked through the canvas flap into the darkened interior of the covered wagon.

  Inside the air was close, smelling of leather, dirt, soiled clothes, and dust. Closing the canvas flap behind him, Noose crouched down and looked around. The darkened shapes of the war sacks, large feed bags the cowboys kept their belongings in, were set side by side on shelves on opposite sides of the wagon. It was too dark to see, so Joe carefully struck a match, cupping his hands around the flame to provide him just enough light to see by, but shielding the dim illumination from view of anyone outside. Or so he hoped.

  The flame flickered on the cloth sacks, some more filled than others, made of sack material that was worn and ratty, tattered in places with stitched-up holes. Tags were attached to each one bearing the initials of the men that owned the war sacks: C.B., F.L. and the others. Joe sorted through them expeditiously, finding clothes, photographs, dime novels, a few wallets or change purses with little cash.

  As he crawled on his hands and knees, the boards of the wagon creaked noisily. He froze, listening for footsteps, and heard none. The distant drone of muffled conversation broken by occasional laughter continued uninterrupted from the direction of the chuck wagon. The bounty hunter tried to be as quiet as possible as he continued his search.

  His stick match went out. He lit another.

  The five dead wranglers’ war sacks were purposely separated on the back shelf of the rig. Out of respect, he imagined. When Noose searched the belongings in those bags, to his surprise Joe discovered a great deal of valuables: cash, and expensive items that clearly belonged to other drivers—wallets, cigar cases with cigars, silver belt buckles, whiskey flasks, and more; certain of these articles had their names or initials carved or engraved on them, and those initials were clearly not L.M., C.F., J.W., or O.J., the initials of the dead men on the war sacks.

  Why did dead members of the outfit have the property of the living ones? Noose wondered, remembering Fred Kettlebone’s cryptic tip that Joe would find answers to his questions in the hooligan wagon.

  Somebody was coming.

  Snuffing the match, Noose rolled on his back and hid under the bench of the wagon.

  The rig quavered and the sideboard creaked as someone clambered aboard. A silhouette of a rover appeared by the canvas flaps of the opening of the covered wagon, shrouded with darkness. He wasn’t here to discover Noose, Joe realized. Whoever it was had some other agenda, and was being very careful not to be seen or heard. A pair of boots the bounty hunter didn’t recognize trod quietly past his face with a jingle of spurs inches from his nose. One of the wranglers had snuck in and started going through several of the dead men’s war sacks.

  Noose grabbed the man by his arm, surprising him in the act of his theft, enough to sweep his legs out from under him, drag him to the floor, and straddle him without much fuss. Joe clapped his hand over the mouth of Joe Idaho, who stared up at him wide-eyed, shaking his head no as his huge captor pulled back his fist threateningly. Noose confronted him in a forceful hushed whisper. “You’re Idaho. Thief, eh? I’m turning you over to Laura Holdridge directly.”

  The captured rover’s desperate words were muffled by the bounty hunter’s large hand covering the lower half of his face, and he kept shaking his head, breaking a sweat.

  “OK, you want me not to tell your boss you’re a thief?” Joe inquired. Idaho nodded quickly. “Then, mister, you’re going to tell me what you’re hiding, what all the men in this outfit are hiding. Tell me why you all are getting killed. That’s the arrangement. I take my hand off your mouth, you use that tongue of yours for talking; one shout I’ll knock you out, friend.” Noose clenched his poised, pulled-back fist tight enough for his knuckles to crackle.

  Another nod.

  Joe removed his hand.

  “I ain’t no thief,” Idaho gasped in a furtive whisper. “I w-was just getting back my property from men don’t need it no more.”

  “The dead men.”

  Nod.

  “How did they come to have your property?”

  “I lost it to ’em at poker. Clay Fullerton and Luke McGraw were card sharks and they ran a crooked game, and me and a lot of the other men been losing everything we ha
d to ’em. It’s been going on for months, since back at the ranch, before we ever went out on this drive.”

  “I don’t buy it. Those men have been dead a while, what took you so long to reclaim your property? Sounds like bullshit to me,” Noose growled, rolling Idaho on his stomach and twisting his arm painfully behind his back. “Next words out of your mouth better damn well be the truth, or you’re gonna be roping with one arm.”

  “It’s t-true, I swear it! I don’t know why I waited so long,” Idaho moaned in agony. “McGraw and Fullerton joined forces and teamed up to fleece the other men in the outfit. I think Johnson was in on it, too. Wade was cheating. The outfit had us a regular card game where they took everybody’s wages—except Leadbetter, who don’t play cards—or made them loans with ever-increasing interest. They had them a sweet little scam. The rest of us, we didn’t know they was card sharks at first, and when the men found out, they were steamed, all of us was. It’s the truth, I s-swear. Ow! Please, Smith, let me go.”

  “You telling me a lot of the rovers had it out for the dead men?”

  “One or two of us especially, yes.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I ain’t no snitch!”

  “Who are they?” Noose bent back Idaho’s arm until he heard cartilage pop, the shoulder joint close to breaking. The man slapped the floorboards in anguish.

  “You can bust my arm, mister,” Idaho spat between gritted teeth. “But I’d die before I rat out my friends.”

  With a grunt, Joe Noose released Idaho and climbed off him, satisfied what he heard was the truth, and pretty sure this rover was no killer. The cowpuncher sat up and rubbed his arm, looking fearfully at Noose. “Go on, get your property.” Joe cocked his thumb at the war sacks. “You’re right, dead men don’t need it. I got what I needed to know. From what you’ve told me, some of you wranglers are very bad gamblers, heavily in debt to those dead cowboys, and that’s a good motivation for murder.”