The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  Before he could get up the kid heard the clicks of the hammers being pulled back on three rifles, very close by. He froze. It was a bad sound to hear from a gun when you were on the wrong end of it. They were all surrounded.

  The other boys heard the guns cocking, too, and knew when they were beat, so the four did the smart thing.

  They all put up their hands.

  Crunching of boots on dirt sounded on three sides opposite the cattle stockade. The steps were menacingly slow and deliberate. The people making them were cloaked in darkness, that deep country dark you can’t see anything a foot from your face.

  Exchanging glances, Clay, Billy Joe, and Jack looked very afraid of what would happen next. The kid, acting calm, figuring he would find out soon enough. None of them dared reach for their pistols.

  Out of the darkness, the rancher appeared first. A tall and skeletal figure in a weathered leather duster, with long white hair. Hatred and meanness radiated off him. The old man’s right hand was a mangled stump missing three fingers. It looked like an ax had been taken to it once. One of those digits was on the trigger of an immense double-barreled scatter-gun the left hand braced to his shoulder.

  “Get their weapons.” He spat. “Disarm ’em.”

  The rancher’s sons, two boys the same age as the gang, appeared out of the shadows, holding revolvers. One was older than the other by a few years, it looked. Both boys were young and raw, but meant business. The older of them reached in and yanked the six pistols one by one from the hooligans’ side holsters, handing them off in turn to his young brother. Neither of the rancher’s sons said a word.

  Walking ominously over to a fence post that had coils of rope hung on it, the father unslung four lariats and tossed them on the ground.

  “Tie ’em up,” the old man barked.

  His two boys seemed reluctant to relinquish the grip on the revolvers they held on their captives by picking up the ropes, but their father raised his shotgun to his shoulder and stepped into position over the hooligans, sighting them down the barrel he moved back and forth aiming at their heads. “My boys is gonna tie you up now and any of you punks move a finger, I’ll blow his head off and the head of the punk next to him. Savvy?” The boys on the ground nodded they understood. Finally, the rancher’s sons put their captured revolvers on the ground, snatched up the ropes, and got to work.

  His two sons clearly had experience roping steers and had the four young outlaws bound in just a few minutes. The kid and his friends were hog-tied by their wrists and ankles with their arms and legs behind their backs. The old man’s boys were strong and rough and got their prisoners tied up with ropes quickly. The kid and his three would-be rustler buddies were soon facedown in the dirt, breathing soil. The rancher’s sons had now retrieved the guns they had taken and were pointing them down at the prior owners, fingers on the triggers, looking like they knew how to use them. The boys followed their father’s orders without argument as if he had them trained like animals. The kid thought they looked more scared of the skeletal old man than his friends were of having their own guns pointed at them.

  “Get ’em over to the tree,” the rancher said.

  The kid had never seen anybody hanged before.

  Tonight that changed.

  Everything did.

  The tree was big and dead, but it had a long, thick overhanging branch that made for a sturdy gibbet when the old man threw the first coil of rope up around the branch. Then he tied off the rope with a mean yank; one end of the rope was already secured to the saddle of the first horse—all four horses were stupid and easily retrieved from the neighboring creek they stopped to drink at by the two young sons of the rancher—the other end he knotted into a noose. The kid wondered how the old man could knot a rope with the few fingers of his chicken claw of a mangled hand, but he did. The noose dangled directly above the saddle of the first Appaloosa, who stood chewing a carrot.

  The elderly rancher finished with the first noose and let it hang, approaching the tied-up boys with a Grim Reaper countenance.

  Somebody was about to get hanged.

  The kid preferred it wasn’t him.

  His friends all exchanged terrified glances.

  The rancher’s two sons just looked at their father, keeping the pistols trained on the prisoners.

  Instead of selecting one victim to be hanged, the old man threw some coal oil on a pile of coals in a metal brazier with iron cattle brands resting in it. Tossed a match. A hiss and whomph. The roaring uprush of flames splashed a hellish firelight over the scene. Flame and shadows bloomed on the menacing oak tree with the ropes dangling from the branch, empty nooses swinging over it.

  The old man turned from the captured boys and didn’t take one to be lynched. Not yet.

  Instead, the old man grabbed a second rope. Tied a second noose. Threw the rope over the branch. Then knotted the other end to the saddle of another horse.

  Then he made a third noose and tossed the rope over the branch. He tied that to the saddle of the last horse.

  The kid’s horse was dead, shot out from under him, and he didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing.

  The minutes dragged on into an hour, the aroma of burning charcoal mixing with the rank stench of urine. The kid could see two of his friends had pissed themselves in terror. One of them was crying, snot smeared all over his screwed-up face.

  The thirteen-year-old kid had nothing to say.

  But his friends sure did. They were talking plenty.

  “—Just let us go! Please! You’ll never see us again!”

  “—Take us to jail! Don’t lynch us!”

  “—Please don’t hurt us, mister! We’re sorry.”

  Sorry for what? The kid thinking the only thing he was sorry about was getting caught.

  He knew the rest were wasting their breath anyway. Nothing his friends were going to say was going to get them out of this fix. The kid didn’t care one way or the other. It was what it was. It was going to be over soon—he just wanted to get it over with. The thirteen-year-old felt the heat on his face from the coal brazier, felt the cold night wind on his back facing the dark stockade, but those sensations were all the kid felt.

  “Get ’em up,” growled the old man. He had returned and stood. “That one. That one. And that one.”

  The gaunt skeleton of a man lifted a crooked finger on his mangled hand to point out Clay, Jack, and Billy Joe. “Put ’em in their saddles. Throw ropes around their necks.” The two strong rancher boys took the captives one at a time, both sons hauling the trammeled young outlaws to their feet. In turn, they dragged them to the tree and pulled a noose over each of their necks before pushing them by the ass up into the saddles of a horse. The old man had the huge scatter-gun in the faces of the kid’s friends when the ropes were put around their necks. All the kicking and screaming didn’t save the boys. Two were pistol-whipped to make them compliant and shoved onto their steeds. Moments later, Billy Joe, Jack, and Clay were perched in their saddles with nooses around their necks and all stopped resisting—if they fell off their mounts or their horse bolted, those nooses would break their necks, so none of the boys moved a muscle.

  The two nameless sons turned and walked back to the kid, who could now see they were more scared then he was, especially the smaller of the two. Both lads were shaking with fear and close to tears and the kid wondered why, since it wasn’t them being hanged. Four hands took his arms to pull him up.

  “Not him.” At their father’s sharp barked command the two sons let go of the last boy lying hog-tied on the ground. The kid looked up at the rancher’s towering silhouette framed against the leaping fire and black night sky, the old man’s face one big shadow, a hole in the darkness looking down on the kid, who couldn’t see the eyes he felt drilling into his skull.

  “How old are you, son?” the old man asked.

  “Thirteen,” replied the kid.

  “Just a boy. Too young to hang.”

  With that, the old man
turned his back on the kid and walked over to the tree where the wretched three condemned youths sat like bags of shit on three horses with three ropes around the neck awaiting cruel vigilante execution. His two sons walked with him, one on each side, heads hung and shoulders slumped, like it was a march to their own gallows.

  The kid couldn’t believe his luck.

  He’d slipped the noose.

  His friends were about to swing but all the kid felt was glad it was them, not him.

  The rancher asked the three young outlaws if they had last words.

  All three cried for their mother.

  Seeing his two sons were looking away, the old man struck them both hard on the heads with his fists, forcing their full attention to the hanging. “This is what happens to those who do wrong. Time you boys became men and knew what delivering hard justice means.”

  Pointing the ugly scatter-gun into the sky near the heads of the horses, the old man triggered both barrels, unleashing twin kaboom blasts into the heavens.

  The three startled horses bolted.

  Clay, Jack, and Billy Joe were jerked out of their saddles as the ropes snapped taut on the branch. Their bodies swung suspended in midair, boots kicking off the ground, bumping into each other like sacks of grain, necks stretching grotesquely elongated until they cracked. The fat one, Jack’s head popped clean off and his decapitated body hit the ground with more blood than the kid had ever seen. Billy Joe and Clay got covered with it, eyes bulging and tongues lolling, spinning around and around on the ropes in convulsions until they hung limp on the nooses. The ground below them was stained with their waste as they evacuated. It was ugly. An ugly way to die.

  The old man wasted no time, drawing his knife and slashing the ropes, cutting the bodies down where they landed in a pile.

  His two sons were traumatized. The smaller one buckled over and puked in the dirt, shaking like a leaf. The taller one just stood and wept. His body was heaving in sobs.

  The kid just watched from the ground.

  Walking to his boys, the father put a hand on each of their shoulders. “You’re men now. I’m proud of you.”

  “Can we go home now, Pa?” the older son asked.

  “Once we deal with the other one,” the old man replied, swinging his gaze to the kid. The thirteen-year-old, all brawn and no brains, locked eyes with him defiantly. As the rancher family walked in his direction, he knew he was not going to get off that easy.

  “Hold him down, boys.” Faces smeared with dirt and tears, his two sons grabbed the hog-tied kid by each shoulder and pinned him to the dirt so he couldn’t move. The kid looked up at the old man looming over him glowering down in judgment, his fearsome countenance inflamed by the angry blaze of firelight from the nearby coal brazier. Yet the old man spoke quietly with something like pity in his eyes as he gave the kid a considering look.

  “Where are your parents, boy?”

  “Don’t got none. Never knew ’em if I did.”

  “Poor soul. Nobody ever taught you right from wrong. You’re just a boy but you ain’t ever going to grow up to be a man unless you learn good from bad. A man that doesn’t know right from wrong ain’t nothing but an animal, no better than cattle. And cattle get branded.”

  The old man lifted the fiery Q brand from the brazier. It glowed red-hot. Firelight reflected in his sunken mean eyes made them shine with hellfire. To the kid, he looked to be devil, not man.

  “Open his shirt,” the old man commanded.

  The sons ripped open the kid’s shirt, tearing cloth and popping buttons, exposing his muscular hairless unmarked chest.

  The kid knew what was coming. Now he felt something.

  Fear.

  The fear grew to raw panic and terror with every inch closer the blazing cattle brand came toward his chest, the heat against his bare flesh growing unbearably hotter, until the old man pressed the red-hot brand into his skin. The sizzling hiss of his own roasting flesh filled the kid’s nostrils as the smoke from his cooked skin billowed over his face and choked him. The searing blazing Q brand burned deep into the center of his chest, the old man leaning against the brand with both hands applying pressure.

  As the kid screamed and cried and begged for it to stop, he thought he heard the two sons screaming, too.

  It didn’t stop. The kid felt the red-hot brand burn all the way through the bones of his chest to his heart and brand him to his soul. Then he went into shock.

  Finally the old man lifted the brand off and tossed it on the ground. “Throw water on him.” His two sons were hysterical with tears as they bum-rushed a water keg, lifted it, and poured the frigid liquid contents all over the kid, soaking him from head to foot.

  The kid didn’t move, splayed akimbo in the dirt, a charred and bloody Q scorched into the center of his chest. He was in shock and his lips were frothed and eyes rolled up in their sockets, revealing the whites.

  But somehow the kid heard the old man’s parting words:

  “Every day of your life you will look at that brand and remember a man has a choice to make between right and wrong.”

  Words he would never forget.

  When the kid’s vision began to focus, his gaze had congealed with a cognition birthed in his eyes that was new, like a star born in the swirling cosmos.

  “Put him on a horse.”

  The kid didn’t know where the rancher and his sons found the horse, but somehow they put him on it and sent the mare off into the night with him slumped in the saddle. Then all he knew was pain and darkness until the sun came up and then all he knew was agony.

  Long the pain lasted.

  But that was a very long time ago.

  Now, twenty-one years, three days, and five hours later, Joe Noose, the man the boy had become, was going to get his revenge for what they did to him . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  His retribution came one fateful winter morning in the unlikely guise of a little boy Joe Noose had never laid eyes on before.

  It was December of 1886. The bounty hunter was presently employed as sheriff of Victor, Idaho. A group of badmen led by a very bad woman had killed all the lawmen in Victor. Noose had killed all the villains in turn. The town made him sheriff. Noose took the job only because of his horse. It was a long story.

  Physically, Noose looked intimidating enough for law enforcement. Now thirty-four years old, he had grown to be a very big man who stood six foot three without his boots. He was built of solid muscle. The man’s pale blue eyes had a steely gaze in a hard face with chipped ruggedly handsome features carved on a boulder of a head covered with thick brown hair. His hands were as large as cattle hooves and the biggest pistol seemed puny in his grip. He would have towered over his former self, the helpless youth who had been tortured, but that boy remained locked forever inside Joe Noose within his mighty frame, for his life began that terrible night long ago . . . the branding had burned a moral code into Joe Noose’s soul—a code he’d come to live by.

  Over the twenty-one intervening years, the man of action became a bounty hunter whose reputation across the western territories was bringing his dead-or-alive bounties in alive. Joe Noose had a brute instinctual sense of justice and always tried to do the right thing; his credo was never kill a man he didn’t have to, but that hadn’t stopped him from killing quite a few. He did what he had to do enforcing his own personal code of justice. Sometimes that was complicated. The bounty hunter dabbled in legitimate law enforcement and of late had worked as a Deputy U.S. Marshal and now a sheriff although the badge with the star on his chest was temporary.

  The sheriff job ended the day his best friend, Marshal Bess Sugarland, walked into the Victor sheriff’s office with the little boy and had him open his shirt. Bess had come with another young U.S. Marshal and together she and he had ridden over the Teton Pass with the child in tow. It was a frozen winter morning as the four of them stood in the warmth of the room.

  Shutting the door to the sheriff’s office behind them, Joe Noose showed Bes
s and her two companions to three chairs set in front of the wood-burning stove. The small room was cold and their breath condensed on the air.

  She had still not introduced her fellow travelers to Noose. One, the rugged, brooding U.S. Marshal, the other the quiet, reserved little boy of perhaps nine or ten. Noose guessed Bess would make introductions in her own good time, knowing that they were here for a reason. The child seemed nervous and fearful and stayed close to the woman as she showed him a seat then took one herself and smiled at Joe. “The badge looks good on you.”

  “I’m just the interim sheriff while they find a replacement,” Noose explained. “Bonny Kate’s gang killed the last sheriff and his deputies before I did for them and the town needed someone to wear the badge. Seemed like the right thing to do when they asked me. You heard about all that fuss.” A nod from Bess. “I have a deputy when I need him, which ain’t often because the town’s pretty quiet these days now that hanging business is done with. Best believe I got the situation in hand. But I’ll be moving on soon, I reckon.”

  “Bounty hunter, then marshal, now sheriff. A body has a hard time keeping track of your movements, Joe,” Bess joked.

  Noose was glad to see she hadn’t lost her ornery sense of humor, but was worried about the huge wooden leg brace she wore on the wounded leg—it was bigger than the one he last saw her wear, and he hoped that the bullet Frank Butler had given her to remember him by wasn’t going to mean she would lose that leg. Bess saw him looking at her brace and looked crossly at him. “It ain’t gangrene. I’m not losing the damn leg. Just got it jacked up again thanks to you when my horse fell on me while I was riding up the pass with my deputy, looking for you during the fires.”

  With a sigh of relief, Noose looked over at the lawman who had just sat beside her by the stove. The young man had a hard, angular face, an intense, dark gaze, and was watching Noose closely. “This him, your new deputy?” Noose inquired.