The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  The posse horses watched them with equine interest as the five rovers grabbed saddles from the ground where they had been stowed and each man saddled the nearest horse. The string were formidable quarter horse mares and geldings, but the hands of the men tightening their tack and bridles were experienced and confident cowpunchers, so none of the horses gave the slightest resistance as five strangers put boots in stirrups and climbed aboard them.

  In the shadows of the arroyo, Brubaker took point and rode first, Leadbetter, Idaho, Barlow, and Maddox following on their stolen horses in a single-file procession toward the entrance to the ravine a hundred yards away, where they could already see the oceans of longhorns massing in the gloom. The wranglers rode very slowly and quietly for maximum stealth. This brief ride made for their tensest moments because the short trek to the cattle stockade put them right out in the open, in plain view of the tents on the ridge; it was the period of greatest risk and should everything go south it would be now. If even one of the posse men spotted them, the bullets would start flying and the rovers would be sitting ducks.

  Their hooves slowly trod across the basin floor . . . it was just a few yards farther now.

  * * *

  Joe Noose was surprised to see that Laura’s tent appeared to be unguarded; he hoped they hadn’t moved her.

  The bounty hunter had made it onto the ridge without making a sound, with both Colt Peacemaker revolvers drawn, one clenched in each fist. He huddled in the shadows against the rock wall of the canyon, scoping out the distance between him and the tents. The illumination of the oil lamps inside the canvas bathed the seventy-five feet of ground between him and the first tent in plenty of light to see by. Starborough was nowhere in sight, but three posse men walked to and fro with their Winchesters in their hands, between him and what he hoped was still Laura’s tent. He hoped his disguise would work.

  Wrapping the stolen leather duster tightly around him, Joe pulled the bowler hat down over his face and stuck his hands gripping the revolvers under the flaps of his coat. Then he stepped out of the shadows and made a beeline for Laura’s tent. Two posse men approached on either side, engaged in a dialogue, and Joe felt their eyes on him only briefly as he gave the two a small nod of acknowledgment and kept walking like he had a place to go. To his relief, there was no break in the conversation of the two rough voices now behind him as they continued on their way.

  In a few more paces, Joe Noose was a stone’s throw from Laura Holdridge’s tent.

  * * *

  The outfit rode into the herd on the stolen horses under the cover of darkness and carefully dismounted. Quietly, cautiously, the wranglers gently led their horses in single file through leathery multitudes of milling cattle, trying to make no noise to spook the cattle.

  Somebody suddenly jumped up in the rows of cows, someone who had been hiding in the herd.

  Startled, the three rovers jumped back in alarm.

  The shadowy figure drew two pistols.

  The rovers retreated, throwing up their hands.

  “Boys?” Laura Holdridge stepped out of the shadows of the herd into a shaft of moonlight that revealed her flushed, overjoyed face. “Oh my God, am I glad to see you!”

  “Boss!” Brubaker’s and the other men’s faces lit up with relief. Holstering her guns, the cattlewoman threw her arms around her wranglers and they all embraced in a group hug. They all spoke in hushed whispers. “Boss, are you okay!”

  “Yeah, I got away—”

  Brubaker suddenly remembered, and his expression became serious. “What are you doing here, boss?”

  “I was kidnapped! What do you think I’m doing here? You came to rescue me, did’ntcha? Or just the cows?” She cracked a joking grin but Curly wasn’t laughing.

  “You’re supposed to be in the tent.”

  Laura didn’t get it. “How did you—I’m not at the tent. I’m here with the herd. Who cares? Where’s Joe?”

  “See, boss, that’s the thing. He came to rescue you so he went to where he thought you’d be. Joe went to the tent.”

  Now she understood, Laura’s eyes widened as she sucked in her breath and looked up the ridge at the row of tents in the upper darkness now alive with posse movement.

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  * * *

  Noose made it to the tent.

  Peering in, he saw it had to be Laura’s with all the womanly trappings.

  Inside on the cot, someone was moving under a pile of blankets.

  “Laura, it’s Noose. Wake up.” Entering the tent, Joe dropped to one knee by the cot and gently caressed the shifting bedcovers. Under the blankets the figure stirred with groggy movement like someone coming out of a deep sleep. “I’m here to rescue you. Wake up.”

  Joe pulled the blanket away and recoiled in surprise at the ruddy, enraged face of the wild-eyed posse man with the gag in his frothing mouth. Blood dripped down his cheek from a nasty cut on his temple. Discovering one of Starborough’s operatives bound and gagged in Laura’s bed in the tent he expected to find her in was such an unexpected shock for Joe Noose it took him a second to grasp he was staring into the seething eyes of the trammeled thug instead.

  That was all the time it took for Starborough’s man to lunge forward and head butt Noose in the face with skull-cracking force. The impact of the blow catapulted Joe up off his knees then off his feet down onto the floor of the tent, where he landed on his back, wiping blood from his nose with the back of his fist.

  The posse man was instantly off the cot and on his feet, recognizing Noose right away and intending to kill him without further delay. But the man forgot two important things—three things actually—as he grabbed for his trusty revolvers. First he had no revolvers, Laura took them, so his hands came up empty. Two, and also three, his wrists and ankles were tied up with sheets, seriously impairing his movements, making fisticuffs inadvisable. In other words, in his current situation, getting into a fight with a man like Joe Noose fell on the advisability chart somewhere between mortal suicide and the worst idea in the history of bad ideas.

  Joe kicked him in the balls. The goon’s eyes rolled up in his head so far he perhaps saw his brain, then he just collapsed like a felled tree. In a cold fury, Noose jumped on top of the groaning eye-rolling posse man and straddled him, grabbing him by the throat and shaking him. “Where’s Laura?” Joe throttled him. “Where is she?” The thug’s mouth was moving under the gag and he was trying to say something but the words were garbled and incoherent.

  So Joe tore the gag off his mouth.

  “It’s Joe Noose!” the posse man screamed at the top of his lungs. “It’s Noose! He’s here! Help—!”

  A brutal knuckled jab to the jaw by Noose’s fist knocked the man out cold and shut him up too late, for he’d already sounded the alarm; as Joe jumped to his feet and drew the two Colt Peacemaker revolvers, he could hear the sounds of the posse’s movements outside the tent coming from every direction, and as he cocked both pistols, Joe Noose knew he was going to have to shoot his way out of this one.

  He stepped out of the tent.

  This brought him face-to-face with Cole Starborough, whose expression was a mask of surprise, unable to believe his eyes, as he recognized Joe Noose in the duster and hat of one of his own posse. “You!” the gentleman henchman hissed. He stood a few feet from the tent, cradling his Winchester, flanked on either side by two of his gunmen who had their pistols drawn. “Shoot him!” roared Starborough.

  Noose already was firing both pistols, aiming straight ahead, shooting both of the flanking posse men between the eyes, blowing the backs of their heads off before they got off a single round—he shot them first because their pistols were leveled and Cole’s rifle wasn’t yet, but when he turned his arm to Starborough, the enforcer had dropped and rolled as he was triggering and re-cocking and firing his Winchester from the ground, the slugs narrowly missing Joe, who dived for cover. Hitting the dirt, he saw one of the posse gunmen behind him fall, clutching his bleeding t
hroat and gurgling blood, struck by one of Cole’s rounds meant for Noose.

  Figures were running past the tents and there was a lot of yelling and confusion. Cole Starborough was out of sight, changing position. A string of gunshots rang out directly behind Joe, very close. Bullets exploded against the rocks as Noose rolled out of the way onto his back, taking quick aim up at the shooter behind and putting two rounds in his chest, sending him flying back with twin fountains of blood geysering from his shirt, open duster flapping into a tent that collapsed around him like a shroud. As the canvas structure fell, it revealed three more posse men taking position with their carbines, opening fire on the bounty hunter, whose position had also been revealed by the falling tent. Trading fire with the posse men with blazing pistols in each hand, Joe jumped up on his boots and ran through the rows of tents, ducking through the maze of canvas bivouacs and kicking them down as he urgently searched for Laura Holdridge in the darkness already fogged with gun smoke.

  “Laura! Laura!” Noose called out for the cattlewoman at the top of his lungs. He didn’t care he was giving away his position. Now, some of the fallen tents had caught fire as the coal oil lamps inside shattered, igniting the sheets of canvas, and flames were billowing up across the ridge as the air reeked of burning fuel and gunpowder. Enormous exaggerated shadows of armed moving figures loomed up the canyon walls cast in the firelight like a battle of giants, only adding to the sense of chaos.

  * * *

  With still no sign of Laura, Joe began worrying she had been shot in the skirmish. To his right, Noose caught a quick glimpse of a posse gunman leap out, pointing a shotgun at him, so he swiveled at the hip with both his pistols, shooting the thug in the face, both guns turning his head into red soup. All around the bounty hunter, weapons flashed and bullets whizzed past his face as the close quarters combat raged on.

  One of Joe’s pistols was empty—no time to reload—and he holstered it.

  Hearing boots directly behind him, Joe Noose spun to find himself facing Cole Starborough, dashing blond features contorted with fury behind the Winchester repeater socked to his shoulder—he shot the remaining Colt Peacemaker revolver out of Joe’s hand in a flash of sparks, the impact knocking Noose to the ground and nearly breaking his wrist.

  Cole advanced, cocking the rifle and aiming the muzzle between his enemy’s eyes. The henchman had the bounty hunter down, under the gun, a triumphal grin of bloodsport joy on his face as his finger tightened on the trigger. “Goodbye, old man.”

  Three shots suddenly rang out, so deafeningly close and loud Joe thought it had to be his enemy’s gun, but Noose wasn’t hit.

  Cole Starborough stiffened and jerked as he was shot in the back three times, his face twisted in surprise as he spun to return fire, turning his body right into three more shots that hit him in the chest, the first two rounds slamming into his duster, hammering him back, the third blowing him clean off his feet against the side of the canyon, bounced him off the rock wall and the henchman slumped in a crumpled heap. As the gun smoke cleared, Joe saw Laura Holdridge reloading her empty pistol.

  Cole blinked at Laura. “How unladylike to shoot a man in the back.” He collapsed flat on his face and stopped moving.

  The bounty hunter was impressed as the cattlewoman helped him up, staring intensely into his eyes. “You were supposed to be in the tent,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied.

  They looked at Cole Starborough sprawled on the ground, his duster filled with ragged holes. “Normally I take a dim view of shooting a man in the back,” Noose quipped. “But for that son of a bitch, I’ll make an exception.” The bounty hunter pried the Winchester rifle from the henchman’s fingers and took it.

  Holding his hand, Laura pulled Joe across the ridge toward the stockade below where the outfit waited with the cattle.

  * * *

  Behind them, Cole’s eyes popped open and he tore open his duster to reveal the bulletproof vest!

  His fingernails knocked the flattened slugs off the padded metal plate of the harness. He got up, very angry, blood smearing his face, and grabbed his Colt Dragoon pistol from his holster. Grunting in pain, Starborough staggered against the rocks and, spotting the fleeing figures of the bounty hunter and the cattlewoman, cocked his revolver and raised it to his eye, using the rocks as leverage. Cussing a string of ungentlemanly profanity, he opened fire at them.

  Bullets exploded at Joe and Laura’s feet as they scrambled down the ridge into the basin. Looking back, they saw Cole, somehow still alive, blasting furiously away at them, but there was no time to shoot back, only to run. Ricochets flashed on the gravel at their heels as holding hands they ran for their lives for the cattle until they reached the rock outcrop over the ravine, the slugs from Starborough’s wild shots flying past their heads until they were out of range.

  “Jump!” Brubaker’s voice shouted from below up at Joe and Laura. The two dove down into the ravine and landed on the ground, rolling over and over and ending up on their backs, looking up at the friendly faces of the cattle and rovers looking back down at them.

  Noose clambered to his feet and brushed himself off. He looked the outfit in the face. “Get this damn herd ready to move out!”

  “Where you going, Joe?” Laura hollered.

  “I’m going to create a diversion, don’t worry about me!” he yelled over his shoulder as he ducked back into the basin and was swallowed in darkness. “When you hear my two shots, get the herd moving!”

  * * *

  “Get some lamps out here!” Cole Starborough roared on the ridge as the ten surviving men of his posse scrambled for their weapons. “Find those sons of bitches! I can’t see anything out there, we need some light!”

  Calhoun’s men were looking in front of them not in back, so they didn’t see Joe Noose run at a swift crouch through the inky shadows on the ridge. The bounty hunter had spotted the crate of dynamite when he’d scoped out the camp with his binoculars earlier and knew right where to find the explosives beside the tents next to the war wagon. Reaching the open crate, he seized two clusters of dynamite and stuffed them under his armpit, grabbing two belts of .45 cartridges for his Winchester and Colt Peacemakers from the armory wagon, then, sufficiently armed in his view, he scrambled up the side of the ridge to a position that would put him directly across from the Gatling gun on the opposite side of the basin from the herd.

  Joe could not see the machine gun nest because its position was cloaked in darkness on the goat trail, but he knew how to flush it out.

  Up in the machine gun nest, Earl Moore hunkered behind the Gatling gun, swinging the barrel to and fro on the tripod as he scanned the basin below where all the commotion was going on. The huge machine gun with the rotating nine-barrel cylinder was fully engaged and the breech loaded with ammo belts, ready to fire. His hands gripped the handles of the triggering mechanisms. In the scattered fires of the burning tents on the ridge, Moore could barely make out the running figures of the posse, but not much else.

  “You see where that outfit is from up there?” Cole’s voice shouted up at him from somewhere below. Moore could just make out his boss’s dark figure cupping his hands around his mouth by the light of one of the lanterns the gunmen were lighting.

  “No!” Moore yelled back down.

  “You see ’em, shoot ’em!” Starborough shouted back. “Just watch where you’re firing that thing so you don’t hit us!”

  Just as Earl Moore raised his hand in a thumbs-up, two shots in quick succession rang out from the darkness of the sloping wall of the ravine, ricocheting off the ground a few feet from the machine gun nest. Swinging the long arm of the barrel, he rotated the Gatling gun on its axis to take aim in the direction the shot came from, and he let them have it.

  On the ridge, Joe Noose was already diving for cover after taking the blind shots while simultaneously signaling the outfit to move the herd, when over a hundred heavy caliber rounds tore into his side of the canyon. PAPAPAPAPPAPAPAPAPAPAPAPAPOW
! The huge muzzle-flashes of the Gatling gun’s spinning barrels ignited the darkness on the upper goat trail, revealing the machine gun nest’s position.

  Lighting the short fuse of a stick of dynamite he pulled from the cluster, Noose heaved it above him to the top of the hill. Seconds later a gigantic explosion shook the ridge, a rolling ball of fire filling the air as dirt and stones showered down on Joe Noose, who covered his head. A second barrage from the Gatling gun rained hell around the immediate area where the explosives blew up above Joe, who already had another stick of dynamite lit, he tossed with all his strength down the ridge at the posse. “Get that damn herd moving!” he growled to himself.

  Down in the stockade, the rovers and their boss all heard the twin shots, then the reports of the Gatling gun, their signals to move out. Laura shot a let’s go look to Brubaker, who waved at the men to get the livestock moving. Working their horses, the rovers got the cattle in motion, and the sea of longhorns began to flow out of the basin.

  A huge explosion of dynamite shook the ravine with violent force in an immense concussion, a blizzard of debris hurling the blown-up bodies of several posse men sky-high, raining down in bits and pieces like tattered rag dolls.

  High above on the ridge, the Gatling gun thundered away at the opposite side of the ravine, the lighting from its spinning muzzle punctuated by a second then a third blinding explosion of dynamite tossed from that side of the hill into the camp, the ear-splitting detonations drowning out the staccato barrages of the machine gun.

  The cattle had entered onto the goat trail, surrounded by whooping and hollering cowboys on horses waving their lariats, driving the herd through a war zone. The steers needed little encouragement and they wanted out of that place as fast as their hooves could run.

  Astonished by the destruction to his camp, Cole Starborough walked in a daze through the explosions of dynamite, trying to make sense of the chaos as he shouted orders to his men running this way and that in the melee.

  Earl Moore was gritting his teeth, blasting away with the machine gun. He didn’t see or hear the hundreds of charging cattle coming up the trail behind his back, an ocean of horns and thundering hooves of seven hundred thousand pounds of cattle, three hundred and fifty tons of steers in unstoppable forward motion with the force of ten locomotives. Moore was too busy blasting whoever was chucking that damn dynamite across the canyon; because the TNT explosions were deafeningly loud and the machine gun itself very, very noisy, Earl couldn’t hear the rumble of pounding hooves growing ever louder to his rear. With the vibration of the Gatling gun trembling on the chassis as the barrel rotated, spitting heavy caliber rounds, Moore simply didn’t register the ground shaking from the booming cattle hooves.