by Eric Red
Culhane dismounted, rubbing his crotch, and unzipped. Just before he whipped it out and pissed on the rocks, the marshal averted her eyes, blushing. He urinated a good long time and took just as long shaking himself. Finishing with a satisfied groan, winking at the other cutthroats, Culhane saddled up and took a swig of a bottle of whiskey. The others cleaned their guns.
Butler watched everyone with a steady gaze that missed nothing.
Bess felt uncomfortable suddenly. Sharpless had said that Butler said they would be riding for a while, and she was going to experience considerably more discomfort soon. It was now or never.
Swallowing, she dismounted without a word to the others and walked far out into the trees and undergrowth, looking back to be sure she wasn’t observed. Bess went a good hundred yards, looked back, could still see the men through the branches, and figured that meant they could see her. Three minutes and another two hundred yards later, she was out of eyeshot and earshot of the gang of bounty killers. Unbuckling her jeans, she squatted in the bushes.
Making it quick, the marshal walked back into the clearing.
She stopped dead in her tracks.
The clearing was empty.
The posse was gone.
For a pack of ranch animals in men’s clothing, they could move with skillful and quiet stealth if of a mind to.
“Sonofabitch.” The young woman rarely swore unless she had cause to but now she did. Squinting into the horizon, Bess peered left and right.
No movement on the prairie or in the trees in the distance.
She leapt on her horse.
Galloped out of there.
Where were they?
Marshal Sugarland’s mind swam with doubt, uncertainty, and the fear she had messed up letting herself get left behind but she kept her head screwed on straight. It helped that while Bess didn’t get out here a lot, she had grown up in this territory so had a pretty good idea of the terrain from the times she had been here over the years. She hitched herself forward in the saddle and rode hard, north for now, because the trail was better. Her eyes flicked right and left, looking for sign. She didn’t like these men, but was gaining a grudging respect that they were good—able to vanish like ghosts. Think, she told herself. Where would they have headed? Think like Butler does: Where would Noose most likely have headed? The bounty killer gang could have gone in any number of directions but Bess logically guessed they were heading forward and north, not backtracking south. East lay the steadfast waterway of the Snake River and the gang wasn’t likely to cross that without good reason. West was a possibility: big, wide-open country reducing their possible route in her mind to two directions—of those two options she made a mental coin toss and decided to keep riding north on the hunch the manhunters were following the path of the Snake River because they figured that was the direction Noose was heading. Bess spurred her horse again, galloping over a ridge, and once she cleared it saw she had guessed correctly.
A mile away on the open plain, the bounty killers were riding at a fast clip.
Bess caught up.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” she yelled.
Butler didn’t look at her, slapping his horse with his reins. “Not my job.”
“I told you I was coming along.”
“We got a killer to catch.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Then keep up. We don’t work for you.”
“Hey, wait a second.” The young lawman recognized the familiar landscape. “Why this direction?”
“He’s heading to Jackson Hole.”
Frank Butler signaled his men to slow down to a moderate canter—they had been riding their horses full gallop and had to pace the animals. The terrain was becoming ruggedly uneven, the trail now erratic as the river dropped below a rise of canyon the eight mounted men and one woman had to scale and now rode carefully up. Hooves dislodged rocks that rolled over the edge of the cliff . . . with each successive few yards, it took longer and longer to hear the distant splash below.
“Why the hell would Noose do that?” Bess argued, riding up beside the leader. “He’s wanted there. The marshal’s waiting, armed to the teeth.”
The gang boss rolled and lit a cigarette and did it with one gloved hand, no mean feat on a moving horse. “I savvy he got backup there. Extra guns to help him out.”
“You mean partners?” Bess shot him a dubious glance.
“Yeah, mebbe. Heard he rides with Danny Dunbar and William Bob Robinson. Notorious shootists both, neither ever far from where Noose is. And they’re in Jackson Hole as we speak. Last I heard they showed up last Thursday, was it not?” Butler glanced at his nearest man.
“Indeed.” Trumbull nodded. “They was seen by several souls.”
Garrity and Wingo nodded after Trumbull shot them a glance for confirmation, but Bess thought neither looked certain about seeing the men or even what they were supposed to be agreeing with.
Bess was suspicious. “You know this how?”
“They bought me a drink,” Butler lied.
“Never heard of them. But good to know, I guess,” murmured the skeptical woman.
“Don’t worry there, Deputy. We’ll nail this guy for you and make you look good.” Butler’s tone was patronizing.
“Marshal,” Bess corrected him.
Butler looked at her testily, taking her measure again in the deliberate manner of a doctor routinely checking the pulse of a patient, but Butler seemed displeased that her pulse seemed to be getting stronger by the minute. The female lawman held his gaze bravely. “Since my fath—since the marshal’s dead, until his replacement is decided, as his deputy I’m the interim marshal acting in his stead. That’s the law around here and you damn well know it, Mr. Butler.” She shot a bold glance at all the men in the posse. “You boys got that?”
Butler shrugged, jaw tightening, suppressing a yawn. “A badge is a badge.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Culhane suddenly pointed. “There he is!”
Butler snapped to attention. His gaze swung.
Sure enough, half a mile off, Noose’s lone figure was on his horse, riding north atop a bluff over the bend in the mighty river.
“Get him!” the leader screamed.
The posse instantly charged after their quarry at full clip. The air was filled with a thunder of pounding horses’ hooves.
Bess’s blood was up. She dug in her spurs, regretful about the cinch of pain she felt in her horse’s side but not regretful for the surge of speed her boots urged from her stallion.
There the blackhearted murdering son of a bitch was, not a half mile away, all but in her gunsights. She wanted him dead so bad she could taste it. Her eyes teared from emotion and the wind as she rose and fell in the saddle with the movement of her horse, keeping up with the posse and then some.
She loved her father, and this damn bastard was going to pay with blood for what he did!
CHAPTER 14
Noose whirled in his saddle at the sound of gunshots, bent in pain on his horse. To his rear, less than a mile off, he saw the wall of dust of the many riders tearing toward him out of the distance. He cussed. The bastards were onto him and they were moving like stink. “Yee-ah!” The big cowboy spurred his horse and galloped away as fast as his bronze stallion would ride across the bluffs.
On the horizon of the vast Wyoming vista, there was the tiny figure of the fleeing cowboy on the right, the cluster of pursuing gang on the left—two trails of dust, a small one and a big one, with space closing between them.
Clinging tight to the reins and saddle with his strong muscular arms and legs, Noose kept his eyes trained on the narrow, treacherous trail ahead. His horse was doing a good job negotiating the ragged switchback at the speed it was going. Damned if the steed didn’t seem to be enjoying the chase. Copper was a stroke of luck in his favor as long as the gutsy damn stallion didn’t get shot out from under him. The bullets coming in steady pop
ping fusillades were wasted, not reaching him yet because his distance was too far from the shooters. Noose didn’t need to look back to know space was closing and wouldn’t look until the rounds were whistling past his ears. Noose figured that a man like Butler ought to know better than to waste ammo, so that had to mean he was trying to put on a big show, but for whom? As the cowboy leaned tighter into the charging horse, he swung his head left and right to check his options and quickly saw there were none: no place anywhere nearby to seek cover and dig in and pick a few of his pursuers off—just sheer ninety-degree granite face to his left, and to his right, a straight-down drop off the crevasse into the turbulent stretch of the Snake River, an unseen distance below. The cowboy drove his horse hard and rode for his life across the narrow, craggy canyon ridge. Noose charged relentlessly forward on Copper’s broad back with the full knowledge they were in plain view of the Butler Gang, but for the moment there was no direction to go but straight.
Right up until they ran out of trail.
Suddenly the ground just dropped away.
“Whoa!” Noose vigorously pulled back on the reins of his horse just in time to stop its skidding hooves from plummeting over the edge of a dizzying hundred-foot ravine into the raging fork of the river.
Man and horse reeled on the stallion’s dancing legs before a brink of canyon wall where the trail abruptly ended with the cessation of any solid ground. On any other occasion this majestic scenic view of a grand expanse of the great river rolling below might have been cause for admiration but now Noose stared around him in denuded desperation—nothing but the edge of the cliff lay ahead while directly behind the mushroom cloud of dust the advancing bounty killers made was now visible on the trail to the rear. The marauders were on him less than a quarter mile off and barely a minute away.
There was no choice.
Peering fiercely over the edge of the cliff, Noose eyed a perilous drop straight down into the boiling white water of the Snake River fork. With the blinding sunlight glinting off the sprays of surging froth, he had no way of telling how deep that water was at this junction or how close to the surface the big rocks surely beneath were. Reckon I’m gonna find out right this damn second, the cowboy thought.
“Sometimes a man’s got to do what a man ought absolutely not never do,” Joe Noose hollered. “Let’s go swimming, boy! Go!”
He spurred Copper.
The horse was not stupid.
It did not budge.
“Go!” Noose spurred it again, hard. Copper reared and shied. Noose swung a look back over his shoulder, trying to wrangle the recalcitrant if sensible stallion. Now Noose could clearly make out the figures—nine, by his count—of the bounty killers. A thought came and went through his mind . . . Nine? Hadn’t he killed four of them? Muzzle flashes bloomed in the oncoming cloud of billowing dust. Explosive ricochets rebounded and caromed off the granite of the rock ridge, showering his face with stone chips. Bullets whined past his ears. The air grew hazy and rank with the tang of cordite and gun smoke.
“Go!”
He took out his pistol and fired it near the horse’s ear.
That did the trick.
The horse leapt.
Copper jumped off the cliff. Noose hugged the saddle as the huge animal dropped through dead air, legs bicycling, head whipping to and fro, eyes wide with terror. Wind flapped the cowboy’s clothes. His view was a spinning blur of sunlight and blue water. As the plummeting stallion’s center of gravity began to shift, Noose felt the horse beginning to turn over during the plunge, meaning he would likely land beneath it—the cowboy prayed all the way down the water was deep and not shallow rocks whose impact would crush him beneath Copper’s dead weight, for the stallion would die in the fall, too. Man and horse fell for what seemed forever until at last the river rushed up to meet them.
The impact came wet and cold but soft.
Noose and Copper hit deep water with a colossal splash, showering spray fifteen feet into the air. The cowboy was still astride the horse as both of them sank. The velocity of their dive and mass of their combined weight dragged them down under the river. His shoulder bullet hole screamed in searing white agony from the impact before the ice-cold water blessedly numbed it some. The cowboy was wrenched off his saddle. They sunk deep below the surface into the frigid current’s propellant grip and got carried along with it. Noose managed to seize the reins as he and Copper were brutally swept downstream in the raging white-water rapids.
Still fully submerged beneath the fast-moving river, Noose saw he and the horse were moving in slow motion below the glassy roof of the water’s surface glinting above with crenulated shards of sunlight slashing through the brackish murk. Copper’s powerful legs ran uselessly in place, air bubbles from its nostrils joining Noose’s in a column of cavitation rising up. Noose began to feel his lungs strain for want of air and felt sure the horse needed to breathe soon. The panic and disorientation in Copper’s eyes was plainly visible.
It was good to stay down as long as they could, Noose knew—the cowboy could feel the mighty Snake carrying them swiftly away from their pursuers and putting distance between the men above on the cliff probably already taking aim on the river in anticipation of when Noose resurfaced. Stay down. Stay down. The cowboy gripped the reins and the saddle, hugging his body to the writhing, pawing horse as they traveled along with the river. They were safe below, but couldn’t stay down much longer. It had already been a ten count and they were out of air. Looking over to Copper’s face wreathed in the kelplike curtain of its own wet withers, Noose saw the stallion’s glazed bulging eyes and knew it was drowning.
Time to go up and just hope to God they were out of range of the Butler Gang’s guns.
Joe Noose started kicking his legs upward and tugging up on Copper’s saddle, guiding the stallion toward the surface, ascending with it through brightening water until at last they broke into the open air in twin splashes of water, both man and horse gasping desperately for breath and filling their lungs with the glorious Wyoming high-altitude oxygen that had never felt or smelled so damn good.
As he looked up through the frigid water slapping his face, Noose saw the tiny stick figures of the posse appear at the high cliff edge, swiftly shrinking in size as they fell away behind.
Then he was just hanging on to his saddle horn for dear life, trying not to drown.
CHAPTER 15
Frank Butler halted his men at the edge of the cliffs. He took out his rifle, socked it to his shoulder, and fired round after round at the tiny figure of Noose as the man and his horse were swept around a bend in the river and disappeared from sight.
Lowering his gun, the fearsomely glowering leader spat bitterly. “Son of a bitch is outta range. We just missed ’im.” A trace of spittle hung from his black handlebar mustache.
Bess felt a flash of panic and disappointment that the man she wanted dead got away again. But though she didn’t admit it to herself, she secretly admired his sheer guts and the raw nerve it took to jump his horse off the cliff in a Hail Mary. Wind blew a gust of the foul body odor and unwashed stench of the possemen surrounding her that made her gag and nearly keel over. It was a smell of decaying meat and excrement. She put her hand over her mouth and nose.
The leader saddle-holstered his rifle and shot his gang a fierce hooded glance. “We’re goin’ after him.”
“How?” Trumbull sputtered. “There ain’t no trail!”
“We do what he done. We jump.”
Lawson turned pale. “It’s a hundred feet down. We’ll be smashed to pieces.”
“He warn’t,” Butler retorted, angrier by the minute.
“He was lucky, is what he was!” Weed whined.
Butler became livid and the veins bulged in his neck as spittle frothed his lips. “He’s gettin’ away! The money’s that way, you gutless cowards!”
Bess felt her stomach clench, knowing what was coming even if the men, who knew their boss better than she did, did not. Getting a peek ove
r the edge of the cliff, the female marshal began to make some quick mental calculations. Her hips squared in her saddle to get good balance and making sure her boots were secure in the stirrups, she took off her hat and clutched it tightly in her fist, gripping the reins so she didn’t lose it in what was about to transpire.
“My ass ain’t worth no hundred thousand dollars,” Culhane shouted, shaking his head like a wet dog.
Frank Butler thought a moment. He rode his horse back a few yards, putting the other seven bounty killers between him and the cliff.
He grinned savagely and said, “You got that right.”
Quick-drawing both Colt Dragoon pistols, Butler fired straight up into the air over the heads of his gangs’ horses: Boom! Boom! The startled bounty killers were so rattled at being shot at they rode around in circles but there was no room on the narrow switchback to do that. The panicked horses collided and reared. They had nowhere to go but off the edge of the cliff into the Snake River.
And over they went.
One by one, some at the same time, eight horses leapt or tripped or fell from the precipice. Some of the terrified bounty killers stayed in the saddles while others came off and somersaulted through the dead air, arms and legs grabbing and snatching at empty space. The first eight horses and riders plunged together in pell-mell, topsy-turvy formation until at last they struck the water with an explosive splash that sent a great fountain of spray fifty yards in all directions.
Bess went along with them, thinking the whole time down how thankful she was the dirty sons of bitches were going to get a bath.
As the female marshal plummeted, already securely planted in the saddle and stirrups, having anticipated the jump seconds before, she happened to look up.
Up on the cliff, Butler dug his spurs into his big onyx horse so hard they drew blood.
The stallion jumped over the cliff.
Above Bess, the huge figure of Frank Butler’s black horse blotted out the sun in the overhead sky like a fearsome shadow of a monstrous vulture as it leapt off the edge—the leader was the last to jump but he did not hesitate nor did his ferocious horse.