Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  The tall and lean rugged older man with the silverback hair and sheriff’s badge stepped forward with a confident, aggressive stride and extended his long arm to offer his big, weathered hand. He met her gaze squarely with direct twinkling blue eyes the female marshal thought were disarmingly beautiful. Bess shook the man’s hand in a firm, solid grip that matched his own even though his huge fingers enveloped her own big hand. His gravelly voice was mellifluous as he formally introduced himself. “I am Sheriff Waylon Bojack and these here are my deputies.”

  Bess saw Bojack notice her glance at his badge with SHERIFF. PHOENIX, ARIZONA etched on the metal. “We’re from Arizona.”

  She met his eyes again with a clear, unwavering gaze. “Long way from home, aren’t you, Sheriff? Did you get lost?” Bess joked amiably.

  Bojack looked at her, not blinking. His grin was frozen.

  “Make a wrong turn in Nevada?” Bess quipped again.

  The sheriff just held her gaze and kept his plastered grin, but there was no mirth in it.

  “I was just making a joke, Sheriff. Wyoming humor,” she said. “No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” he replied, and the warmth returned to his grin. “I understand you are Marshal Sugarland and you are in charge around here.”

  “On my good days.” Bess smiled but he didn’t smile back so she decided to can the humor with these Arizona boys. “Yes, you understand correctly. How can the Jackson U.S. Marshal’s office help you boys? State your business.”

  Holding her gaze and reaching into his coat pocket, Sheriff Bojack pulled out a folded piece of paper that showed much handling, unfolded it, then presented it to Bess. She took the official document from the Arizona State Judiciary and looked it over. He summarized the contents as she perused it: “This is an extradition warrant for Bonny Kate Valance signed by Judge Warren B. Toller in Arizona ordering the fugitive to be immediately remanded into my personal custody to be returned forthwith to the state of Arizona and there be tried for the crime of homicide.” Marshal Bess read over the official courthouse typeset and while it was more long-winded in its verbose legalese, that was clearly what it said. Sheriff Bojack continued with a steely tone of righteousness. “It is my information that a month ago Bonny Kate Valance was captured by bounty hunters and handed over to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Jackson Hole for the reward and has been in custody here ever since. We have come to collect her.”

  Bess looked up and met his eyes with a conflicted gaze.

  He shot a hard glance at the empty cell then looked back at her just as hard. “Where is she?” Bojack demanded.

  Tapping the extradition order with her hand, Marshal Bess heaved a sigh. “This presents a problem.” Her leg was beginning to smart fiercely, so she turned and took her seat behind her desk, trying not to show the discomfort she was in. There, she leaned forward with her elbows on the desktop, clasping her fists together below her jaw, and stared away from the men at the opposite wall. She had a lot of things on her mind.

  “And that problem is?” Sheriff Bojack loomed over her desk, an edge in his voice now.

  Sitting below him standing over her but in no way intimidated by the disadvantage of her position because she wore the badge and these lawmen had no authority in her jurisdiction, Bess Sugarland did not respond immediately. It was clear to her she was on the spot and had to make smart decisions about what came next. The clock on the wall ticked. She did not look at the men or acknowledge their presence, and to them it looked like she was staring at the wall. But Bess was in fact staring at their reflections in the small mirror on the opposite wall, sizing up the six Arizona peace officers—or so they said—invading her space.

  They could be impersonating these officers, was the first thing she considered. They could be accomplices of Bonny Kate posing as lawmen trying to break her out of jail. Bess had seen phony badges before and knew how easy it was to make them but she rejected that idea because if they were pretending to be lawmen, they would not say they came from a place giving them no jurisdiction in Wyoming unless they were complete fools. Their being the outlaw’s accomplices was possible but unlikely.

  No, these lawmen were the genuine article. Her father was a marshal and she had been his deputy; Bess had been around lawmen all her life before becoming one herself—she knew a real sheriff when she saw one by the way they carried themselves, and this man, Waylon Bojack, was who he appeared to be, she felt certain. His men likely were legitimate peace officers, too, although her hackles were raised by the reflection of the truculent postures they currently held, which betrayed open hostility since they didn’t think she was watching them.

  The clock ticked. Bess’s brain did, too. The Arizona lawmen waited.

  Her gut told her something about these lawmen was wrong, though, and they were not being forthcoming about whatever agenda they were trying to advance coming here for Bonny Kate Valance. Bess was going to have to speak to these men soon so she guessed their true intentions were they were here to kill the outlaw, not take her back to Arizona for trial. Why, Bess hadn’t a clue. The world had a lot of people who had plenty of reasons to kill Bonny Kate Valance. The point was, Sheriff Bojack was not playing straight with her so right there Bess made the decision not to tell him anything—nothing about the impending hanging execution in Idaho, nothing about Joe Noose taking Bonny Kate over the pass. The best thing to do, she decided, was to hold back any information, stall for time, and telegraph the U.S. Marshals headquarters in Cody directly about this supposed extradition order and get the official word.

  It made Bess uncomfortable to be one wounded woman among six armed men she didn’t trust, even if they were lawmen. She wished Noose were here.

  He wasn’t. She was. And she wore the badge.

  At last, Bess turned, leaned back in her wooden chair, and with a trenchant gaze looked up at Bojack. “The problem is, Sheriff, that I don’t know anything about the extradition order and have no way of knowing. I am not authorized to disclose any information regarding a federal prisoner. What I will do is the following: telegraph the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters in Cody, tell them about this extradition order, request instructions, and get my marching orders from them. I’ll do it now. In the meantime, you boys should go get yourself a cup of coffee and come back in an hour.”

  Standing on the other side of the desk, the formidable figure of Sheriff Waylon Bojack seemed to tense like a tightening rope. His eyes darkened and clouded with summer storms of fury, turning the blue of his gaze behind his squint dull and inchoate. Then the storms faded and his eyes calmed but the shine of affable blue did not return. “We’ll wait,” he stated flatly.

  “Suit yourself,” Bess said, taking the extradition order, looking it over again, rolling her chair over to the telegraph, and starting to bang out a long transmission to Cody with a steady tapping.

  She didn’t need to look behind her to know Bojack was hovering. And she could hear his deputies cleaning their pistols and checking the loads impatiently. With her face still pointed at the telegraph, Bess spoke to Bojack a few feet behind her. “You’re staring at me,” she said. “Why is that?”

  She heard a manly chuckle. “I’ve never met a woman marshal before. Never knew they existed. I want to watch you work.”

  “Knock yourself out. But sit your ass down in a chair and stop breathing down my neck, Sheriff,” Bess growled. “I’m the marshal, this is my office, and that’s a damn order.”

  Bess Sugarland smiled as she heard the angry creak of a posterior setting itself in a chair behind her.

  * * *

  Sheriff Waylon Bojack had been grinding his teeth with irritability for thirty minutes sitting in that damn uncomfortable chair waiting for that transmission to come back from Cody, trying to figure out what to do. He knew what the message from the state U.S. Marshal’s office would say: his extradition order had been overturned by the federal court in Idaho and had no legal validity.

  That damn female marshal wasn’t
even looking at him, just bent over her desk reading through her paperwork and occasionally signing something or filing some letters in her drawer. She hadn’t paid him or his men the slightest bit of attention since she sent the wire, and if that female rudeness wasn’t proof positive women didn’t have the temperament to wear the badge of a peace officer he didn’t know what was. Bojack did wonder what she’d done to get her leg all bound up in that wooden brace, though. Maybe a horse kicked her.

  Finally, after another ten minutes had passed and he had no bright ideas how to get the information of Bonny Kate Valance’s whereabouts out of this tight-mouthed Wyoming marshal, the sheriff needed to stand and stretch his stiff legs and wasn’t about to ask permission.

  Avoiding the displeased gaze of his deputies sitting around the office, the old lawman wandered around the room, gazing idly here and there.

  A big map of Wyoming was on the wall, impressive indeed in its detailed topography of the mountain ranges and the helpful pin showing where Jackson Hole was. He studied that for a few moments because he loved maps, then his legs ached him so he walked away.

  Stopping at the cork bulletin board, Bojack saw it almost by accident. How could I have missed it? he thought.

  The official U.S. Marshals Service order from the Cody, Wyoming, headquarters addressed to the Jackson Hole office giving written directives for the escort and delivery of the condemned fugitive, one Bonny Kate Valance, to the town of Victor, Idaho, two days from today’s date.

  His breath caught. He knew where she was. Almost. Switching a sly glance to the woman marshal, he saw her head was still in her paperwork and was purposefully not looking at him like she hadn’t been.

  Good.

  Victor, Idaho. That’s where the hanging would be. That’s where the other Jackson marshals would be taking Valance right now. He had wondered why the office seemed understaffed, and now Bojack understood.

  He just didn’t know where Victor was but figured he could find it on the map.

  Acting like he was just idly killing time, Sheriff Bojack walked back to the map, and his pale blue eyes tracked a line from the pin in Jackson Hole to the border denotation line of Idaho and quickly found Victor. It was right across the Teton Pass, a big mountain range on the map.

  When he shifted his gaze from the map to the window, Bojack saw through the glass about two miles off, the towering forested canyon gorge rearing against an endless, unrelieved sky.

  The pass. That’s where Bonny Kate Valance was. He couldn’t see her but that’s where she would be.

  The sheriff shot his men a steely glance, loaded with purpose.

  He tipped his hat to the lady marshal. “Thank you, Marshal, for your help and your time. Meanwhile, reckon we’ll go get that coffee and be back in a few minutes.”

  Looking up from her desk, the woman saw the six Arizona lawmen were already out the door in a clanging of spur and pistol.

  “I know where she is,” Sheriff Bojack said when the posse were by their horses out of earshot, as he swung up into his saddle while his deputies did, too. He spurred his horse savagely and took off at a full gallop across the plain in the direction of the Teton Pass with his posse right behind him.

  Inside the office, Marshal Bess Sugarland was distracted by the telegraph coming in from Cody, her gaze growing more concerned as she read each word, and when her head shot up to ask some hard questions of the Arizona men they were long gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Not even close,” Joe Noose replied to the insistent female voice behind him. He was riding in the lead now, taking point on the trek the two horses and riders were making up ever-steeper mountainous upgrade. He threw a glance over one shoulder or the other every minute or so to keep an eye on Bonny Kate Valance, but so far his prisoner had not tried to bolt or otherwise cause him any trouble.

  Their horses were at the foot of the Teton Pass and towering mountains of granite and pine trees reared above them. The view was dizzying. It looked impassable. From his vantage, a journey up to and over the top appeared impossible for a human being to undertake on horse or foot—a half mile on, the terrain rose almost straight up.

  But Joe Noose knew a trail had been carved across the Teton Pass a few years before that could be safely traveled, and some folks even did it in the winter. And if they could, he could, Noose reasoned the first time he successfully rode across the Teton Pass two months ago as a bounty hunter on the trail of escaped Victor bank robber Jim Henry Barrow. It had been late spring and the ground had been dry and snowless but he remembered the two-day ride as a nerve-racking steep traverse of narrow trails dropping off sheer sudden cliffs into hundred-foot chasms. He had simply followed the tracks of the bank robber, who knew his way across the pass, and had gotten to the other side in one piece. The horse he had ridden was dead now, shot in a gun battle with the Butler Gang, and he rode its replacement, Copper, now, a stronger, bolder stallion who he felt more confident on in the dangerous ride to come. Still somehow, gazing up now at the monumental gorge scraping the sky before him, crossing the pass seemed a daunting if not hopeless task.

  “We’re going over that?” Bonny Kate gasped. She was looking at it, too, with an equal measure of awe and terror. Her horse had kind of the same expression she did, Noose noted with amusement.

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s the plan.” Noose was busy scanning the base of the mountain for signs of the bottom of the trail where they would ingress. He had forgotten exactly where that was, but it had to be around here somewhere. “There’s a trail. We’re gonna stay on it. It’ll get us across.”

  “How we gonna get up that?”

  “On our horses.”

  “How our horses gonna get up that?”

  “With difficulty, at times.”

  Noose started Copper forward with a flick of his reins and the horses continued on their trek. He looked over his shoulder and the female prisoner kicked her Appaloosa into motion and followed at a steady trot up the rocks and stones and occasional trees. Noose noticed the lady outlaw had lost all the ruddy complexion in her face she possessed earlier, her high color drained to a chalky pale by fear. The woman’s large electric blue eyes seemed to sizzle with anxiety below her flowing mane of frothy red hair, her alarmed gaze alternating between the unsteady ground where her steed was placing its hooves and the gigantic mountain looming above her. The sun was now all the way up and its harsh light lit up the pass, piteously revealing all the cliffs horse and rider could fall off and jagged rocks below they could crash onto. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said nervously.

  “I do. I’ve ridden the pass before.”

  “Good to know. How many times?”

  “Once.” Bonny Kate didn’t look reassured, so Noose tried a joke. “What’s the worst thing that can happen to you? You get killed?”

  “Very funny.” Anger twanged in her melodic voice. “Maybe we should just stop talking.”

  “Suits me.” Noose shrugged. “You’re the one doing the talking.”

  That shut Bonny Kate up for maybe three minutes.

  “So who are you?” she asked three minutes later.

  “I’m the guy taking you to get hanged.”

  “They paying you a lot?” Ahead of the female outlaw in tow, Noose simply shook his head and she saw the brim of his hat swing back and forth.

  “Why are you doing it, then?” He shrugged. “You didn’t tell me who you are,” she persisted.

  “Friend of the marshal,” he replied.

  “She’s a bitch.”

  “She’s a hero.”

  “Says you.”

  “Knows me.”

  Bonny Kate spat in the dirt.

  Noose heard it and rotated his head like a gun turret to target her defiant face. “This is going to be a long ride,” he snarled.

  Ahead, the smaller conifers parted as they approached the trees to reveal a rock-strewn grassy hill that led up to the base of the trail dug into the
mountain. Noose recognized the location from his trip the other way. The sight of it relieved him somewhat because at least he knew where he was going. “There’s the trail,” he said.

  When she didn’t respond, Noose looked back and saw Bonny Kate studying him intensely in a circumspect way, scrutinizing and sizing him up. “You don’t look like a lawman. I’ve known lawmen, that’s a fact, and you don’t look like one.”

  He pointed at his badge on his shirt. “I’m a deputy marshal, says this.”

  “How long you been a deputy marshal?”

  “An hour.”

  “What did you do before that?” she asked.

  “Bounty hunting, mostly.”

  “Figures. You look like you killed men before.”

  “Well, you don’t.”

  “That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell people.”

  “That you’re innocent and such,” he said.

  “Not hardly. But innocent of what they are hanging me for, yeah, I am.”

  “Tryin’ to convince me of that ain’t gonna change a thing.”

  “I know that. Think I don’t know?”

  “Reckon you do.”

  The trail steepened and both Noose and Bonny Kate had to lean a bit forward for balance on the saddles. Leather creaked. Bridles jingled. The horses had been watered and fed and were doing just fine so far. The air was rich with the peaty smells of soil and pine. A vast blue roof of sky stretched overhead, a scud of cloud here and there in an otherwise slate expanse.

  It was an hour and a half maybe two past full sunup and both riders had traveled about six miles from Jackson Hole, riding into the mountains proper now, and the change in topography had come almost without their notice. Noose understood part of the reason was how dry everything was: the usual green blanket of the mountain pines were a sallow carpet of dead browns, from the leaves on the branches to the grass on the ground underfoot. A drought had struck Wyoming for the last few months and the dehydrated vegetation had become parched as kindling from lack of water. Fire conditions.