Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  “All night?”

  “All night. So I ain’t worried about you going for my gun, and it ain’t you I’m staying up to watch out for anyway.”

  Noose settled back against the tree. He bit the cork out of a bottle of whiskey, took a swig, corked it, and tossed it over to Bonny Kate. She caught the bottle, took a deep swig, and whistled in satisfaction. “That warms a body right up.” The lady outlaw tossed the whiskey back to Noose. “It’s kind of nice without a fire. Just the moonlight. Cold and all, but nice.”

  “And safe.”

  “I feel safe.”

  Noose grunted in agreement. Soon he felt her eyes gleaming in the dark on him. Presently, Bonny Kate said, “So being as we got this time to spend together. . .”

  He raised his gaze to meet hers, watching her evenly.

  Bonny Kate took a deep sip then thought a minute before she recorked the bottle to throw it back over to Noose. She regarded him a moment. “You mind if I could sit next to you, Joe? Seems stupid us tossing this bottle back and forth, us keeping getting drunker because soon we’ll miss and break the bottle and then there won’t be no more whiskey.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “You’re fine where you are.”

  He held her raw, aching gaze. Finally she said, “Fine, you want me to say it, I will: This is my last night on earth. I want to sleep my last night in a man’s arms. What’s so wrong with that?”

  Noose sighed, shifting uncomfortably. “Ain’t a good idea, Bonny Kate.”

  “You think I’m gonna steal your gun and shoot you with it while you’re asleep if you let me get close?”

  “I told you I ain’t sleeping tonight.”

  “Then, what you worried about?”

  The two people sat across from each other in the camp in the middle of the woods, just outlines to each other in the dappled moonlight falling through the boughs. Noose could see her eyes shining in the dark, glittery with tears. “Ain’t worried about nothing,” he said defensively.

  It was quiet for a while then he heard the woman’s soft sobs and in the dim saw the heaving of her shoulders as she wept.

  Noose shifted awkwardly. “C’mon, Bonny Kate. Don’t do that.”

  Louder sobs and sniffles. He couldn’t see her eyes anymore and it took him a few seconds to realize that was because her face was in her hands.

  “Stop crying, will ya? C’mon, I hate to listen to a woman cry.”

  “I-it ain’t you gonna hang tomorrow. I’m scared. I’m scared to die. It’s only gonna be a few hours now. That’s all the time I got left. I never felt so . . . alone. So terrible awful alone.”

  Regarding her bleak and dismal form in the shadows, Noose felt a tug on his heart, because the woman looked like a discarded little girl’s rag doll, utterly bereft and forlorn. Unable to help himself, he set the bottle down and sat up, getting up on his haunches and approaching her in an unthreatening crouch.

  She sat slumped, her hair over her hands pressed against her face, weeping uncontrollably in racking sobs.

  Tentatively, Noose reached out and as gently as he knew how, took one of Bonny Kate’s hands and pulled it toward him. “Come on. Come over here with me. I’m sorry. You can sit over here with me.”

  Her hand was limp in his, as if the strength and will to live had left her body. Noose was shaken up by how spent and fragile the woman appeared to be. Tenderly as he could manage, he pulled again and she didn’t resist but it was like he was dragging an unconscious person. “Easy, lady,” he said. Scooping her up off the ground in both big arms, one under her legs, the other under her shoulders, he rose to his feet, stood up straight, and carried her the fifteen feet across the camp to the big pine tree trunk he had been sitting against. There, Noose set her gently down with her back to the tree, with all the care he could muster. Her head hung limp, her froth of red hair about her shoulders. But as he released her hand she gave his a delicate squeeze, and there were signs of life in her again. Bonny Kate had stopped her crying, drying her wet face with the back of her other hand.

  “Thank you,” she said sweetly.

  Leaning back against the tree, Noose slid to a sitting position beside Bonny Kate. Immediately, she rested her shoulder against his big left arm and laid her head against his chest. She felt warm and alive and her being this close to him was more agreeable than he cared to admit to himself, so he did not move. With his right hand, he picked the bottle of whiskey up off the ground then bit out the cork. It was half-full, and the amber liquid sloshed around inside. They passed it back and forth as they sat together and watched the idyllic moon fingering through the branches of the forest canopy as minutes seemed to turn into hours, feeling the alcohol warm their insides with each swig. The soporific effect of the booze did not make Joe Noose drunk for his tolerance was high, but he felt himself feeling closer to Bonny Kate Valance than he had all day, as she lay against him.

  All of a sudden, her lips were on his. Hot, moist, sweet.

  Noose broke the kiss with Bonny Kate.

  “Please,” she begged.

  “It’s tempting, ma’am. It sorely is. But it ain’t right.”

  She smeared her lips against his and threw her whole hot body behind it, wrapping her arms around his back but gently he pushed her way. The passion in her smoldering flesh radiated raw heat off her and Noose wanted the woman bad. It took all his will to break away. “I couldn’t take advantage of you like that.”

  She grinned saucily. “Take advantage all you want, cowboy. Ain’t like I’m gonna mind this time tomorrow. Girl’s got to get her kicks while she can. Hell, it ain’t like I’m gonna get with child.”

  “Sorry.” He pulled back and watched her stonily. His face was a wall.

  Bonny Kate cooled off, her rapid breathing slowing, at a loss for words. She regarded him incredulously. “Nobody’s ever turned me down before.”

  “Let’s just say you’re not my type.”

  The swift, hard smack she gave him left the side of his face hurting long after Bonny Kate had crawled across to her horse then curled up and fallen asleep but still Noose did not put the cuffs back on so her last night was not spent in discomfort.

  CHAPTER 19

  The 2:13 train to Victor was scheduled to reach the station in less than an hour. That was the end of the line. The big Pacific Northern steam engine had a full head of steam on as it barreled across rural Idaho, nine cars long, pulling six passenger wagons, one horse truck, and the brake van. Its single headlight lanced through the gloom, steam and smoke belching from the locomotive’s high stack. The train hurtled across the lonely landscape through the night, nearing the end of its long journey.

  It was just past midnight. Bill Tuggle snapped his pocket watch shut and settled back on the hard seats of the passenger compartment as the coach rocked and shook around him as it clattered down the rails.

  He looked down at the bag of Idaho potatoes in his lap. Idaho was known for its potatoes and he’d purchased a bag.

  There was not a free seat on the train. The coach was packed, booked to capacity. Folks on this railroad were coming from far and wide for the hanging party. A watchful Tuggle scrutinized the cross section of people on the train, which made for an unlikely if interesting polyglot—farmer families with kids, cowboys with sidearms, reporters with notepads and box cameras and tripods stashed in the overhead compartments, fancy wealthy men in fine coats and top hats with their perfumed, groomed women in lace dresses and silk petticoats rubbing elbows with grubby, saddle-worn wranglers both male and female sitting side by side with them on the wooden seats. Nobody seemed to mind; they were all just waiting to get to the show many had traveled clear across the country to see.

  Tuggle himself was a large, stocky man in his late forties, wearing a leather duster and rough gray felt shirt. His old cowboy boots were weathered and dusty, the spurs rusted, and the heat in the coach was making his feet swell painfully. Beneath a thick beard, the man�
�s scarred, leathery face was tanned from the desert sun, where he spent most time. Thinking he had never been this far west before, the rugged man looked out the window at the passing moonlight forest rolling past. The spectacles he wore for distance were perched on his nose; he adjusted them. Big, handsome country, what he could see of it. His side of the train faced south and somewhat east, and Tuggle realized he was probably looking at this side of the Teton Pass. Down below, out of sight from this vantage, was the valley they called Jackson Hole. Occasionally there was a flash of sparks and cinders through the window as the wheels bit some rough section of track. Coal smoke would curtain off the view now and then only to blow clear and reveal the Idaho vista again, bathed in cold moonlight.

  The muffled percussive timpani of the steel wheels of the steam train on the rails and trestles below was a comforting, even soothing, sound—the steady click-a-clack of the wheels on the tracks combined with the rattle and sway of the wagon made Tuggle want to go to sleep but he couldn’t do that; there was much work to do before dawn, and Bill Tuggle had a job to do.

  It was why he was here. Why they were all here.

  Swinging his gaze across to the six men in the weathered dusters or heavy coats seated beside him and across in the facing seats, Bill Tuggle saw a few of them getting rest. Hats tipped over eyes. A few snored. It had been a long, tedious train ride from Ohio. He wasn’t worried about any of them. Not Jim Gannon, not Zane Flannery, not Horace Comstock, Luke Mesa, nor Mad Cow Hondo—they were professionals and would be ready when the time came.

  Jack Varney, a husky ruddy-faced cowboy, was wide-awake. His dun brown eyes swiveled back and forth behind his perpetual squint, taking in the other passengers, watchful for any signs of trouble. He and Tuggle exchanged glances, both keeping an eye on things. Neither man wanted any surprises. Tuggle looked over the other people on the train again, saw the same mixed, incongruous bunch. Some men and women were very well dressed in the latest eastern fashions, wealthy personages who had boarded the train in Philadelphia, having come from as far as New York. Others were obviously journalists from various newspapers, judging by their cheap suits, bow ties, and the pads of paper and pens in their hands. Then there were the bedraggled-looking cowboys and ranch hands, some perhaps outlaws on the run. Nobody Tuggle recognized. Everybody was coming for the hanging.

  Just like they were.

  There were no lawmen or Pinkerton agents seated in the coaches, nobody who looked to create any trouble for Tuggle and his crew. Not that they couldn’t handle any who did. Tuggle himself had done a perspicacious walk-through of all the passenger wagons each station they had stopped at during the two-day train ride, checking faces and clothes, but had spotted nobody who raised any red flags. He and his men had originally boarded in Hocking Valley, Ohio, and the last stop had been six hours ago in Salt Lake, Utah. The railroad compartments were full to capacity, and everybody was riding to the end of the line in Victor, where history was to be made with the snapping of the neck of the first female to be executed in the territory.

  It amused Bill Tuggle to know he was going to be part of history . . . and they all said he would never amount to anything. For the next hour the man sat back and watched the view, reviewing the plan over and over in his mind, convinced they had covered every detail. Out the windows, in the darkness, the vast massifs of the mountainous Teton Pass rose against the sky.

  Bonny Kate Valance was out there on the pass somewhere—he couldn’t see her but he could feel her. It looked cold out there, through the window, and she must be freezing her damn ass off.

  The train decelerated, its brakes locking as it slowed to pull into the Victor station. A distant steam whistle far off at the front of the train announced their arrival.

  Tuggle looked out the window at the small settlement of the town slowly coming into view out of the wilderness and passing lazily by the slowing coach; the hammered-together, threadbare buildings looked primitive and makeshift in the shadows under the cloudy moonlight. The place was just as he remembered it from the trip he took here two weeks ago. Tuggle had memorized the layout of Victor and scribbled a map on a thumb-worn notebook but there wasn’t much to commit to memory—it was a whistle stop of an outpost, built up around the railroad junction and the road to the Teton Pass that led to Jackson, the biggest town in the area. People came to one on their way to the other. Victor was a place people mostly passed through.

  The man eyeballed the familiar buildings as the train decelerated. There was the feed store. There, the corral. The streets were deserted at this time of night. This was good. Once the passengers on the train got off, he and his men would get the horses, put them in the corral, and get to business directly. He and his men had not booked rooms like the other passengers because they would not be sleeping tonight. It would be in and out, and they would be long gone by sunset, if everything went according to plan.

  No reason it wouldn’t.

  The steam train slowed to a crawl and pulled into the station. There it was.

  The gallows.

  The foreboding structure slowly rolled past the train in the town square, unoccupied at present. The dangling noose swung lazily in the night breeze, a curlicue shape in the darkness.

  It looked like some effort had been expended building it. The fools could have spared themselves the trouble.

  The streets would be empty again in a half hour, once the passengers had checked in to their accommodations, and the streets would be theirs. They had work to do and a plan to execute.

  As the locomotive lurched to a stop there was a hiss of steam and a smoky haze wafted over the windows, obscuring the view of the town outside.

  The door to the passenger coach opened and a conductor stepped in. He addressed the people inside. “Victor. Last stop. Everybody off. Please watch your step.”

  We’re here, Tuggle thought. Time to get ’er done.

  His six associates were all awake now, exchanging alert glances, blending in with the other passengers who rose from their seats and rubbed shoulders, grabbing their luggage. Comstock was helpfully assisting an old woman with her satchel. Tuggle and his crew looked like any other bunch of cowboys come to town to work a local ranch or hire on to wrangle cattle or sheep in Jackson after a ride across the pass. They had no luggage other than the arsenal of Winchester and Henry rifles and belts of ammunition they had concealed under their long coats.

  Plus the bag of potatoes.

  Tuggle took the spuds with him as he rose from his seat. The seven men filed with the others out of the passenger coach. Stepping onto the forward platform, they breathed in the refreshing cold, crisp Idaho night air before disembarking in single file formation, descending the metal gangway behind the tender and locomotive wreathed in hazy clouds of steam expelled from the brakes. Their large, imposing silhouettes were dark shapes in the billowing steam, mysterious figures rim lit by the lunar brilliance of the moon above in the star-spangled skies of the Far West.

  The rest of the passengers waited in a small mob on the platform, milling around, waiting for the porter to bring them their baggage.

  The seven men did not wait.

  Instead they marched to the back of the train, where the horse truck was, five cars down. The doors to the wagon were opened by a trainman and a wooden ramp was dropped, then one by one, seven big warhorses, fully saddled and tacked, were led down to the platform to their waiting owners, who saddled up.

  Without a word exchanged, they rode into town directly.

  CHAPTER 20

  Noose didn’t remember nodding off.

  Only that he was having the nightmare again, the one he so often had he would never be rid of . . .

  Always Noose feels the heat first, hotter and hotter, not like a dream but like reality, as it had been . . . that sizzling red-hot brand getting closer and closer . . . In the dream Joe Noose is just a boy again, underage, branded because he was too young to hang like his friends had been that terrible night . . . the old man’s severe
hooked face and hard pitiless eyes without a trace of mercy . . . his eyes glow in the light of the coal fire with little flames and sparks dancing in the retinas . . . the blazing Q brand ever nearer, glowing like melted metal behind the heat waves . . . the old man’s shot-apart hand with no thumb or forefinger . . . a disfigured chicken claw of a hand clutching the fiery brand over young Noose’s chest, and he can’t escape it because he is tied down with rope . . . “You don’t know right from wrong, good from bad, do you, boy?” . . . The faces of the two frightened small boys standing behind the old man, their father . . . “My sons have me to teach them right from wrong but you never had nobody to show you good from bad, and that puts you at a powerful disadvantage.” Noose remembers those two dark towheaded boys now, the intense fear in their impressionable gaze being forced to watch a boy their age being branded, but the old man makes them watch as he leans over Noose, his eyes reflecting the campfire flames, his evil soul lit by hell from within . . . “You’re too young for me to hang ’cause you ain’t a man yet and it’s wrong to kill a boy. You’re still a boy but you ain’t ever gonna be a man ’less you learn right from wrong, son. A man with no conscience is an animal, no better than cattle, and cattle get branded.” . . . The Q brand smoking and glowing as the old man presses the hot brand hard against young Noose’s chest and holds it there, pressing harder and burning Noose to where he can smell his own skin sizzling like charbroil . . . the searing brand feels like it is roasting its way right through his whole body, setting his heart on fire . . . he is screaming as the old man presses down on the handle of the brand and puts his mark permanent on the boy’s chest with it . . . finally he takes the iron off and throws a bucket of water over the boy and leaves the brand etched in Noose’s chest for all time . . . In his dream the nights he has it, Noose always sees the smoking Q on his chest . . . but not tonight . . . tonight he sees the faces of the old man’s two young sons, his own age, one a bit older than the other, their eyes horror holes forced to watch him get branded . . . and Noose feels sorry for that old man’s sons even more than he does for himself . . .