by Eric Red
“We understand, Mr. Butler.”
“You damn sure better. You boys disobeyed an order. You know the rules when one of my orders gets broke.” The fearsome leader of the gang reached into his vest and took out a pair of metal pliers he gripped in his glove.
Culhane and Lawson turned pale, their faces clammy with squeamish fear.
“Which hand you shoot with, Culhane?”
“Please, Mr. Butler.”
“Which hand?”
“Right. Right hand.”
“Your left, then.”
“Oh crap.”
“Pick a finger.”
Miserable, Culhane raised a trembling left fist and stuck out his shivering little finger.
Butler used the pliers.
* * *
The sound of the muffled scream thirty yards away in the dark caused Bess Sugarland to look up sharply from the reflection of the stars in the rushing water. She couldn’t see what was happening from where she stood at the river’s edge but a moment later there came another shriek and whimper, muted, like somebody was biting down on a rag. Troubled, the marshal took a few steps back into camp, her hand near her holstered Colt Peacemaker. A few of the bounty killers were hanging around smoking and drinking from a bottle of whiskey and if they heard the screams, they weren’t paying attention or knew something she didn’t.
Bess peered ahead into the country gloom as she saw three men step out of the darkness.
The one in back was Butler, which she could tell from his height and mass. The two in front were the ones she just had the fisticuffs with, Culhane and Lawson. Both were cradling hands covered by a single glove and it looked like there was blood on those gloves. Both men’s faces were screwed up in pain, and as they walked past they studiously avoided her gaze as they slunk back to their tent.
As she stood and watched them retire, Bess was wondering what the hell happened, then Frank Butler passed her and tipped his hat in a courtly manner. “Have a pleasant evening, Marshal,” he said with a gentlemanly tone in his gravelly voice and was on his way.
These boys sure have their own way of doing things, Bess was thinking as she watched Butler swagger past the campfire, emblazoned briefly by its flaming glow until his figure melted into the ubiquitous darkness, where he seemed right at home.
CHAPTER 25
Noose’s eyes blinked open.
His head hurt very badly.
His vision was red and bright.
Blood was in his eyes.
And sunlight.
Something was all over his hands and face.
He heard hooves—very, very close.
The bounty killers were riding past him on the trail.
A steady clop of hooves so close he felt the ground shake with the drop of each horseshoe in the dirt.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t breathe.
Just counted.
One, two, three . . . eight horses.
Why eight?
Why the hell wasn’t he dead?
When were the bullets going to come?
All Noose moved were his eyes. He couldn’t see the horses that were so near him their shadows fell across his face as they trod past. This meant it was dawn, because the sun was low to the east. The sound of the river rushing north was his compass. Every instinct Noose had urged him to look at his enemies to see what he was facing, but to do that he would have to turn his head and he didn’t want to risk that.
The cowboy lay prone in what he knew was the muddy riverbank, wondering about the weight he felt in his hands and arms and legs and boots and face. Rolling an eye to his left hand, keeping his fingers frozen still, the cowboy instantly realized why the nearby bounty killers didn’t see him: mud from the river covered his entire body, caked him from head to foot where he had washed ashore into the eddies. Unless somebody was really looking hard, to the casual glance he would appear to be part of the shoreline.
Sounded like the bounty killers weren’t paying attention.
In fact, it sounded like they were just waking up, still half-asleep in their saddles.
“—the hell did he get to?—” A weaselly high-pitched whine of one of the gang.
“—He’s behind us.” Butler. Unmistakable. “Couldn’t have gotten past us last night.”
“—We turn around, then?—”
“—No, not just yet. He’ll be comin’ this way ’cause that’s the only way he can go. We don’t spot him in the next few hours, we’ll split off a crew to go back and check to see if he died, then gather up the corpse before the vultures get at him and take his face so we can’t identify him for the reward—”
The voices were growing distant to the north now, percussive hooves fading off up the trail. Butler’s voice carried back in the wind.
“—Keep an eye out for vultures, boys. Eyes to the sky. Man in his condition, they’ll be tracking ’im, too. Might be the buzzards’ll point him out for us. Lead us right to him.”
Then the bounty killers were out of earshot.
Noose didn’t move a muscle for the next fifteen minutes except to breathe regardless, taking no chances. That was a narrow escape.
Butler was right about the vultures.
Noose needed to keep moving, because the minute he got lazy and started giving off the stink of death the buzzards would start circling, putting a target in the sky on him for those damn mercenary killers.
After a moment, Noose rose to a sitting position, looking through the weeds to be sure the coast was clear. The men hunting him had ridden on and were out of sight. That meant the Butler Gang had gotten ahead of him again and he would again have to find a way past them to get back out in front. But it might not be that bad this time: it looked from where he sat that the trail they were riding turned east, so he could head straight north on foot and hopefully regain his advantage and position if he got a move on.
His body felt very heavy. The dry mud that covered his head and hair and torso and everything else felt like a heavy blanket of cement. The cowboy saw the water rushing by not three feet away so he just rolled right over into the Snake River with a splash and let the current clean all that dirt and crud right off.
When he stepped out onto dry land again, Joe Noose was soaked head to foot and his wet leather boots squeaked and squirted water with each step he took—but he was good and clean, his wounds clean, too, and when he looked up he smiled, seeing the skies were bright and clear.
No vulture would come near him.
CHAPTER 26
Marshal Jack Mackenzie had never seen Jackson Hole in such a damn uproar.
The capture and incarceration of the notorious outlaw Bonny Kate Valance currently locked in the cell of his U.S. Marshal’s office had ignited the local passions and touched off a powder keg of heated political debate in the town of Jackson. Her celebrity status and intoxicating charisma as a gunslinging libertine lady outlaw were a tonic for the town residents. The tales of Bonny Kate’s wild exploits in both gunfights and the bedroom were the stuff of legend and it was hard to tell what was true and what wasn’t. What was truly indisputable was she was the biggest thing to hit Jackson since the lightning storm of ’87 that blew up the munitions dump. All day long and into the night folks would come to town and surround the marshal’s office just trying to get a glimpse of the female prisoner in the flesh, like she was a circus animal in a cage. Mackenzie and his deputy Swallows had their hands full keeping the crowds back and last night had had to sleep in the office, taking shifts standing guard. Locals were yelling and carrying on. Men were throwing love letters and sending flowers, and women were tossing eggs and notes telling the vixen to burn in hell. The lawmen had remarked to each other many times it was like they had Jesse James himself or Geronimo in the cell. But Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show or Barnum & Bailey’s circus wouldn’t have stirred such a brouhaha; instead it was because this particular outlaw was a female, a hot tempestuous one, and the historical significance that in a month she was going to
be the first woman to be executed and hanged in the United States, Marshal Mackenzie knew.
Jackson Hole was a town where women were a major political force. They ran businesses and were outspoken, their opinions respected. They held political office and had influence in the community. Not that Jackson was a bad place to be a man, but the power was shared. Marshal Mackenzie was just fine with that. He felt men screwed things up all the time and believed women possessed innate common sense about the world so he welcomed their strong stabilizing presence in his town.
But everybody in Jackson had gone crazy with the arrival and lingering presence of this legendary lady outlaw in their midst. Her being here was creating not only hullabaloo but social friction as well. The town was in anarchy.
Clean as the chop of an ax, Bonny Kate Valance had divided Jackson Hole straight down the middle into two divisive factions split along clear gender lines of male and female: if you were a woman you hated Bonny Kate and wanted her hanged, and if you were a man you lusted for Bonny Kate and damn sure didn’t want her executed before you had a chance with her. Mackenzie saw the lady outlaw had such an effect on males some would have done the deed even after she swung at the end of a rope. The local ladies had made their position a political one: with women’s rights came accountability. Therefore, if the law could execute a man for certain crimes it was a woman’s obligation to be executed for the same crimes a man was. The men predictably adopted the gentlemanly if equally hypocritical position that it was not genteel for a civilized society to execute a member of the fair sex. Mackenzie knew this was all posturing and hogwash and actually thought it was funny as hell—the womenfolk hated Bonny Kate because all their husbands and boyfriends wanted to bed her, and the men, well, the women were right . . . the men did want to bed her. The marshal already knew of two divorce petitions filed with the county clerk’s office in the last twenty-four hours and guessed a lot of husbands were going without a home-cooked dinner and sleeping in the barn tonight.
The marshal stood looking out the window at the mob of Jackson Hole women carrying signs and chanting slogans in the street. They had just elected the first city council in the growing town and the entire membership was women. Normally this was a good thing, but now they were all out there on the street giving speeches and shouting the same slogans painted on the signs.
“Hang Bonny Kate! Hang Bonny Kate! Hang Bonny Kate!”
“The right to a vote means the right to swing on a rope!”
Through all this, Bonny Kate Valance just sat in her cell, twirling that flaming red hair of hers around her finger, her blue eyes twinkling, knowing all the fuss she was causing and probably enjoying herself. She was like one of those dogs that riled other dogs just by walking down the street. She had that pheromone. Mackenzie guessed that her whole life Bonny Kate had been stirring up trouble just by having a pulse. Every so often she would catch the old marshal’s eye and he’d feel an electric current run through him as her blue eyes flashed in his. If Bonny Kate was afraid of her upcoming date with the hangman she wasn’t showing it.
It was going to be Marshal Mackenzie and Deputy Swallows’s job next month to put Bonny Kate Valance on a horse and ride with her, giving the outlaw an armed escort over the towering Teton Pass mountain range that bordered Idaho into neighboring Victor, where the gallows had already been set up for her hanging scheduled in thirty days. It was a gigantic pain in the ass, but this hanging was a historical event, with the state senator coming in from Washington, D.C., no less—the politician had run on a hard-liner law-and-order platform promising to lead Idaho and Wyoming into the twentieth century by running the outlaws out. Bonny Kate Valance, the first women in U.S. history to be hanged for murder, was of great symbolic significance to his campaign, and reporters were coming from the big papers all over the country. All this to say, the date of her execution was fixed. But since it would be twice the ride to get marshals from Idaho to come over the pass to Jackson and take her back across to the waiting gallows, political pressure had been applied and the U.S. Marshals’ headquarters in Cody had sent orders to Jackson Hole Marshal Mackenzie that since she was delivered for the reward in Jackson, he was to take her over the pass. Everything about this assignment pissed the hell out of the cantankerous old Jack Mackenzie. It was all politics and horse dung. If they wanted to hang Bonny Kate Valance they could do it in Jackson just as easy as Victor—simple as throwing a rope over a tree, putting that lady outlaw on a horse with the noose around her neck, and smacking her horse on the behind. But because some big politician wanted to exploit the execution to get votes and because Victor had all the money pouring into the hotels and saloons bolstering their local economy, the damn execution was scheduled on this specific date . . . and his office had to drag her shapely butt all the way over the Teton Pass. Marshal Mackenzie had better damn things to do and the more he thought about it the madder he got.
The marshal would be glad to get Bonny Kate out of town and be rid of her, so Jackson could get back to normal.
The murder of his oldest friend, Hoback Marshal Nate Sugarland, weighed heavily on Mackenzie. He knew a capable posse of manhunters were chasing the villain responsible and would bring him in dead or alive for the reward but they were doing his job for him. Jack Mackenzie was the U.S. Marshal here and a fellow marshal had been gunned down and Mackenzie’s job and his sworn duty was to catch the man responsible and deal with that individual directly.
His job was not to babysit some sexy female over the Teton Pass just so some Washington politician could look good and neither was it his damn deputy’s job, not when his best friend and fellow marshal’s killer was in the area and there was a chance they could help catch him.
Mackenzie looked at his watch and did some mental time estimation and calculations. He had twelve daylight hours at least that he and Swallows could arm themselves up and ride out toward Hoback and possibly intercept Nate Sugarland’s killer, because last he heard the bounty hunters and the man they were tracking were heading this way.
And if it took them more than a day, that was tough. Bonny Kate wasn’t going anywhere and that peacock of a senator could kiss his behind. The Cody U.S. Marshals’ headquarters were going to be mad as hell and Mackenzie was going to hear it from them, but screw them, too. It was time for him to retire anyway.
What they should do is thank him because if he caught the Hoback marshal’s killer he would be doing more than his job.
He would be saving them the reward.
The great thing about getting old, Jack Mackenzie believed more and more, was you did what you wanted and you didn’t give a damn, and the only thing he gave two bits about right now was riding his way.
“It don’t feel right just sitting here twiddling our thumbs doing nothing,” the marshal said irritably. Mackenzie stood restlessly by the window, staring out across the plain at the distant looming mountain range of Hoback wreathed in a low cloud bank of the lowering sky . . . Somewhere out there in the thirty miles between Jackson and Hoback were the man with the price on his head and the bounty hunters on his tail. From his vantage at the window, the lawman could not see anything but trees and mountains and big sky, but they were out there somewhere.
Seated at his desk, Deputy Swallows was busy filing reports and doing paperwork. He seemed preoccupied with his duties and didn’t respond. A pot of coffee bubbled comfortably on the small stove in the corner.
“They’re coming our way,” Mackenzie added, still looking out the window.
“We don’t know that, sir,” Swallows replied, putting down his pen on the pile of papers and looking up. “We don’t know which way Noose went, do we? He mighta headed east toward Alpine.”
“Maybe. The Snake River limits his options, though. Hard to cross it just on a horse. Easiest escape route is toward Jackson, maybe try to get over the pass.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I guess I just don’t know. You never know what a desperate man might do.”
&n
bsp; Swallows could see his boss was perturbed and tried to reassure him. The young man was of an agreeable, helpful nature. He said, “They’ll catch him before long, these bounty killers. That kind of reward is a big incentive. They’ll catch him, all right.”
The marshal grunted, rubbing a hand through his thinning gray hair. “What if they don’t?”
“Somebody will. Reward like that.”
“I feel like we oughta get out in it. Do some tracking and hunting ourselves. It’s our job, after all. Brother officer shot down like that. We might get lucky.”
“Sure would piss them bounty hunters off if we catch Noose our own selves. Make ’em miss out on that reward money. I’d like to see their faces then.”
“Would myself.”
Walking to a map on the wall, Marshal Mackenzie studied it for a few moments. Swallows got up from behind his desk and walked up beside him. The lead lawman put his finger on the area marked HOBACK. “This is where Sugarland was shot yesterday,” he said as he then traced his finger north, down on the map, to where the black wending line marked SNAKE RIVER bent east across mountain and valley topography cut by the river toward the marking for JACKSON HOLE. Mackenzie nodded to himself. “I say this is the way that killer is coming and those men after him is coming, too. Somewhere roughly along this route, anyway. We’re here.” The marshal tapped his finger on their town. Then he drew it along the map west in the other direction toward Hoback. “I say if we ride out now, good chance we’ll intercept him.”
“I follow you, sir.”
The marshal grabbed his hat and his gun belt and swung his pale-eyed gaze to his deputy. The even-keel young man looked up, awaiting orders, and got one delivered with a toothy smile.
“Swallows. Grab your guns and saddle your horse. We’re riding to Hoback.”