Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  Fifty feet directly ahead, Noose saw a huge galaxy of orange and yellow evanescence in the dense smoke screen before him then an immense glowing, brightening shadow and saw another burning tree was falling right in his path. A wave of heat washed over him. “Look out! ” Noose yelled to the lady outlaw riding close behind. Yanking on the reins, Noose heaved Copper sideways out of the deadly way of the toppling tree, but he jerked too hard and the ground was too soft and his horse lost his footing and fell sideways as both went down in the dirt just as the fire-engulfed conifer came to earth in a ground-shaking smash. Noose stayed in the saddle, throwing his weight left as Copper scrambled upright to his four legs, the man working the reins, and in one smooth movement, they were at a full gallop again.

  A minute later, once his horse had its feet under it, Joe Noose looked over his shoulder to check Bonny Kate Valance was still behind him.

  The woman was gone.

  So was the posse.

  When he heard the fierce barrages of rifle and pistol shots back down the trail Noose knew the lawmen were shooting at someone and he had a good idea who.

  Unarmed and defenseless, Bonny Kate Valance was easy prey for the Arizona constabulary if the lawmen had caught up with her . . . and it sounded like they had.

  Pulling his horse to a sudden, abrupt halt, Joe Noose wheeled Copper around to face the way they came. Copper didn’t like that at all and looked back at Noose with its wide, moist, brown eyes communicating an unmistakable look that its rider was crazy. Noose patted the stallion on the withers, his eyes fixed on the wall of fire that blocked his return the way he had just come—a dangerous woven tapestry inferno of burning branches crisscrossed on blazing trees . . . it looked like the gate to hell.

  Bullets still sounded in steady ear-shattering volleys ringing through the forest.

  They hadn’t got her, not yet.

  “C’mon, old horse.” Noose stroked Copper’s shivering, muscular neck as they both stood stationary, their eyes locked in fear and awe on the fiery curtain before them that rose a hundred feet into the sky. It was a furnace in there. “It’s up to us. We got to go back. We got to save her.”

  As Joe Noose gave Copper a decisive spur to the flank and the horse lunged into motion, charging straight into a solid wall of flame that would probably burn them to crisped ash, Noose figured he had at least one thing going for him:

  No way that sheriff and those Arizona boys would be expecting him nor any man of sound mind to ride back into the fire . . .

  CHAPTER 25

  They came upon the first body not fifteen minutes out of Jackson.

  Deputy Sweet saw it first—a sprawled body flat on the grass at the beginning of the trail up the Teton Pass. Marshal Bess Sugarland first felt a stab of fear that it was Joe Noose but the closer she rode quickly saw the man was too small, a kid, and the clothes he wore were not those of her friend but instead that of the Arizona posse that she had encountered earlier that day.

  Trotting up to the corpse, she made visual confirmation it was one of that old sheriff’s deputies. Bess did not bother to dismount because she was in a hurry; neither did she need to: the corpse was well lit enough for identification, bathed in the glimmering light of the forest fire miles on, and it looked like he had been shot square in the belly with a single kill shot, judging by that big messy exit wound out his back.

  “Not your friend?” Sweet asked, reading her face.

  “Not him.” She nodded. “But my friend shot this one.”

  “What’s going on, Marshal?”

  Bess looked at Sweet and quickly explained—he needed to be brought up to speed. “This afternoon a posse of lawmen well out of their jurisdiction rode in from Arizona and showed up in my office. This dead kid was one of the deputies, I’m certain of that. The sheriff wanted to know about a female outlaw I deputized my friend this morning to escort over the pass to Victor, where she’s going to be hanged tomorrow. I just now figured out these boys from out of state want to kill her themselves, so they went after my friend. If they tried to stop him from doing his job getting her to Idaho he would have shot those lawmen dead to rights without hesitation. That’s exactly what happened here.”

  “Just so I got this straight,” Sweet answered. “These lawmen are after this friend of yours and that female prisoner somewhere up the trail.”

  “Right.”

  “How many bad guys are there?”

  “Five.”

  “Five against one is bad odds,” Sweet said.

  “For them it is. They need more men.”

  “One against five?” Sweet scratched his head. “I don’t know, Marshal.”

  “You don’t know Joe Noose.”

  Spurring her horse, Marshal Bess quit the idle chatter and galloped onto the trail leading into Teton Pass. Deputy Sweet’s horse was right on her hooves as they charged toward the fires up the road to hell.

  CHAPTER 26

  Waylon Bojack saw the bitch clearly down the notches of his Winchester repeater as his finger tightened on the trigger. She was hiding, cowering behind her bullet-riddled dead horse sprawled on the ground, so far the bulky stallion corpse taking all of his and his deputy’s shots as Bonny Kate Valance crouched behind the saddle and tried to squeeze under the heavyweight of the equine carcass. A few flowers of blood punched out chunks of fur and flesh on the fallen Appaloosa—Bojack’s green deputy couldn’t shoot straight and was wasting bullets, distracted by all the fire around them and wondering how the hell they were going to get out of here alive—but the sheriff paid no attention to the fire and didn’t care whether he got out of here alive because right now, he had one of that female outlaw’s big tits in his crosshairs, the left one, where the heart, if she had one, would be, so he took careful aim because he was going to kill her right now and nothing else would ever matter again.

  Bonny Kate saw Bojack, locked eyes with him, raw fear in her gaze seeing her own death.

  Good.

  Waylon Bojack’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Then suddenly his gun exploded in his hands in a sparking shrapnel of mangled steel and wood that tore through his hand and the right side of his face and his blood was everywhere—the sheriff thought first it was a misfire then he thought better of it when he saw the gigantic silhouette of the huge cowboy on his leaping horse with pistols in both hands blazing as he came flying through the ring of fire.

  It was that son of a bitch marshal!

  Bleeding like a steer, clutching his damaged face with one hand, Bojack staggered back on his boots, screaming in fury that the marshal had shot his rifle out of his hand and ruined his kill shot on that evil outlaw Bonny Kate Valance. The bitch was still alive and kicking, crawling her way across the dirt out from under her horse in a flash of blue cloth and flaming red hair—right toward Joe Noose, who landed on his horse beside her, the stallion coming to a dead halt, the marshal’s clothes partially ablaze as he fired both pistols into the surprised deputy, shooting Fulton Dodge twice in the chest.

  Dodge fell back, spurting bright red blood from his mortal body wounds, the gun flying from his hand, face frozen in shock, reflexively reaching for his other revolver. Noose dealt pure death in the brace of pistols in his hands he fired again and again, his gaze switching in lethal accuracy, blowing pieces off the man as he shot down the deputy in a space of seconds.

  The sheriff stood over the sprawled, bullet-riddled corpse of the last of his fallen deputies. A choked cry of anguish was strangled in his throat. Overcome with grief and remorse for having gotten all his men killed, Sheriff Waylon Bojack’s ragged ruin of a face a punctured bloody red agony of metal and wood shrapnel, he was suddenly a very old man who sagged, knowing the very worst had happened.

  Fumbling agedly for his pistol, knowing he would never get it out of his holster much less a shot off before Noose shot him, he looked up in dread to face the most terrible thing he possibly could have: Bonny Kate Valance escaping his grasp, having taken everything from him and lea
ving him only failure—he failed to avenge his son, he’d gotten his men killed, he’d left his wife a widow. Every ounce of his manhood was now stolen and he would take that to the grave. Right now, he jerked on his pistol with a fumbling hand, watching the unthinkable . . . Bonny Kate Valance being swept off the ground by Joe Noose’s massive arm and slung safely onto the back of his horse.

  Bojack’s eyes met Noose’s, the marshal looking straight down the barrel of a Colt Peacemaker. The meaning of the look in Noose’s mean, hard eyes was clear.

  The look said: I warned you.

  Hammered back from the shot punching him in his chest before he even saw the muzzle flash, Bojack’s legs crumpled and he sank to his knees—as his vision went blurry he saw Bonny Kate Valance and Joe Noose mounted on the bronze horse whose golden coat reflected the fires all around like glorious armor as they turned and galloped away, riding back straight into the fires like Vikings into Valhalla.

  As his eyes slowly shut against the stinging smoke and heat, Arizona Sheriff Waylon Bojack was thinking he never thought it would end like this . . .

  CHAPTER 27

  Finding Joe Noose wasn’t going to be easy, not in the impassable blaze of that immense forest fire up ahead.

  The only hope was he was this side of it.

  Marshal Bess tightened the handkerchief over her face below her Stetson after splashing and wetting the old cloth with water from her canteen. Looking over at the other horse she saw her deputy doing the same. Both pressed wet cloths over their mouths and noses so they could breathe clean air amidst the choking haze of dense, foul-smelling smoke hanging over the Teton Pass trail they rode their horses up.

  The farther the lawmen rode the smokier it got. At the top of the mountain, huge, turbulent mushroom clouds of orange fire and oily black smoke billowed high into an incendiary sky diabolically lit from below by colossal mouths of flames chewing a path of fiery destruction through the forest. Far ahead before them, row after row of dead pine trees engulfed by walls of fire exploded and collapsed in showers of sparks and flaming, falling timber. Bess didn’t know how close they were going to be able to get before they had to turn the horses back. Not much farther, she reckoned.

  Already the two skittish horses Bess and Sweet rode pulled against their bridles and jerked their necks on the reins, both recalcitrant steeds requiring plenty of spurring to advance farther up the trail into danger. The humans riding them weren’t happy about it, either.

  A sudden flurry of flapping wings came at their faces and they ducked just in time as the sky was filled with great flocks of crows flying past them like hundreds of black teeth silhouetted against the flaming sky, some of the birds already on fire and dropping like tiny blazing cinders into the yawning canyon darkness far below.

  In the last few minutes, a stampede of wildlife had rushed past the lawmen down the trail, escaping the spreading firestorm in the mountains above. Bobcats, deer, antelope, wolves, coyotes, and smaller raccoons and squirrels had fled past their horses, the fleeing animals whether predator or prey ignoring each other in a singular desperate flight for survival—the forest animals simply ran away from the fire. Swiveling her gaze upward then downward, Bess saw the shadowy flow of shapes of dashing wildlife in the hills above and plunging precipice below.

  The whole gorge was illuminated with the evil, pulsing incandescence of the forest fire a mile ahead that was coming their way fast, furious roiling flames devouring the dead trees in their path like an incendiary demonic maw. The night canyon was brilliantly and dangerously lit up. Monolithic shadows and glowing pools of infernal radiance bloomed below over the rocks and boulders in the hundred-foot ravine on the edge of the trail . . . and it was within those hellish pools of light that Marshal Bess Sugarland spotted the body.

  The shattered corpse of the man lay twisted at the base of the gorge plunging off the edge of the trail they rode. It looked like a tiny broken toy from this height. The marshal’s sharp eyes spotted the body and instantly her heart leapt into her throat. Pulling up her horse, she signaled with a raised hand for Deputy Sweet to halt. He did. Then she pointed down the cliff toward the mangled figure on the bottom. The body was too far away and cloaked in darkness to identify from where they sat in their saddles but her first fear was that it was Joe Noose. Bess could not tell from the clothes because they were only one color—the dye of the brackish red blood that soaked the garments completely. This man had died badly.

  “Is that him?” Sweet quietly vocalized her worst fear.

  “I don’t know.” Bess choked. “We need to go down and see.”

  “The horses won’t make it down that gorge,” he replied sensibly. “It’s too steep. We’ll have to try on foot.” The marshal appreciated that her deputy voiced no complaint—not that she would have broached any argument—and he simply followed orders and offered his opinion on a solution. She was liking him better every minute.

  Bess’s guts were tied in knots as her gaze kept traveling to the corkscrewed body on the rocks below that had died a very hard death. She was still too high to identify it in the darkness but she had to know, so she dismounted in dread and led her horse to a tall nearby pine tree and tied off the reins. The animal did not like it, being this close to the fire, and snorted and whipped its head against the bridle but she got it tied. Sweet wasn’t having any easier time with his own stallion, she saw—the deputy had already dismounted and was practically dragging the big horse across the trail to where hers was. Both of the horses felt the danger, even though the fires were not yet close enough to be life threatening. Bess patted and tried to calm her steed to little effect, then walked several paces to help Sweet lead his horse beside her own. Her deputy swiftly lashed the reins to the tree and both horses were sorted.

  Having spied a series of descending rock ledges down the edge of the canyon a few minutes earlier from her saddle, the marshal figured she had found a possible passage to the base of the ravine twenty yards back down the pass. She went straight to it with her watchful deputy just behind her. At the brow of the precipice, Bess crouched down and peered over the edge, once again spotting the rugged declination of cliff outcrops, a series of shelves jaggedly dropping a hundred feet down to the rock-strewn base upon which lay the corpse. Her sharp eyes had not deceived her.

  Swinging her glance to Sweet, Bess pointed down at what looked to her like a path. “We can get down that way.”

  He didn’t look too sure.

  “Go back to the horses and get us two coils of rope,” she said. “Together it’s about a hundred and fifty feet of lead and we can use the rope to get down and back up. Tie the first rope to that tree by the horses, then the second rope to the first in a big ’ol triple knot so it’s tight and secure.” He just looked at her. “What are you waiting for?”

  Still crouched, Bess Sugarland watched the new kid snap to it like his legs had springs. Sprinting back to the horses in a few long strides, Nate Sweet hauled the two coils of rope from the saddles, lassoed one around the heavy tree trunk, knotted the two leads together with a swift yank, then rushed back to her side in less than two minutes. The deputy hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  “Give it here,” Bess said, clapping her hands, so Sweet tossed the coils of rope into her waiting open palms.

  “You want me to go first, Marshal?”

  “No, I’ll take point.”

  “You sure about this?”

  Her answer to him was to rise to her feet and chuck the coil of rope over the cliff. They both watched as it unfurled as it fell, landing ten feet from the broken corpse with length to spare. Bess had kept one hand on the line and now wrapped it loosely around her waist and once between her legs. Feeding the rest of the loose lead between her hands over the edge of the canyon, she tugged on it with all her strength, and it went taut against the tree—it would hold her and him, too.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  The marshal nodded, and he held her hand at the lip of the gorge as she swung a leg over the
edge and found purchase on the ridge. She dropped her other leg over and both boots met solid stone. Then she released the deputy’s hand and grabbed hold of the rocks, clinging to the edge of the gorge, thinking if she was wrong about this, it was a long way down. The rope tightened at her waist and crotch under her weight.

  A few steps later she was able to slide safely onto the next table of firelit rock below. The brow of the cliff was now fifteen feet above her, a massif of shadow looming dark against the night sky. She saw Sweet’s lanky silhouette now appear climbing over the edge, the tight length of rope extended from his waist where he had it wrapped around securely. In the light of the flames a mile off, his face looked like forged steel, and his eyes shined metallically as they remained fixed on her from above. Dislodged pebbles spat from his boots and struck her on the arms. Marshal Bess knew they had to keep up the pace, so without wanting to, she looked down.

  The canyon yawned below, a drop into the shadowy abyss, bathed in ominous firelight. More confident in her step and the security of the towline, Bess rappelled down the face of the cliff, her boots finding footing on the crags of rock, letting line out between her gloves with each drop. Shifting her gaze upward, she saw the deputy right above her making steady progress down, then looking below again, she saw the crushed body of the dead man getting closer and closer. Far above, the top of the ridge and the trailhead where their out-of-sight horses were tied seemed now a world away—getting back up would be harder than getting down, for sure. But they were almost there. Jumping from one outcrop down to another rock shelf, Bess could feel the heat closing in from the natural basin of the bottom of the gorge—it was like a furnace down here and her clothes were soaked with sweat and sopping wet.