The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  Shutting her eyes, Rachel said her prayers using her final breaths.

  When she opened her eyes, the last thing she knew she would ever see was the view through the big picture window, of moonlit Puzzleface Ranch outside. It looked like a classical painting: the moon, the trees, the corral, the creek, the two horses in a perfect still life—except the horses were moving and the riders who dismounted wore U.S. Marshal badges!

  * * *

  Outside the house, Marshal Bess landed in a crouch dismounting the saddle, knees bent, staying low, eyes on the house a hundred yards away. She clenched her cocked and loaded Winchester in both gloved hands, staying still as an Indian, knowing the big oak tree the horses stood under blocked the bright moonlight, hoping it made her deputy and herself invisible to anyone inside the house.

  Staring straight ahead, she saw movement through the south window, a few people, faint voices. Hearing a rustle of grass, she saw Deputy Sweet sideways crabwalk next to her out of the corner of her eye, but kept her gaze focused on the house.

  “His horse is here,” he whispered.

  The marshal shot a quick glance to where Nate was pointing—luckily he saw what she hadn’t—and recognized the butt-ugly nag from the bare patch on its posterior.

  “Means Mose Farmer is in the house. I better go talk to Mose and see if I can get him to give up peaceably. Otherwise we’re going in. Presume he’s armed and dangerous. Shoot to kill. There are four innocent women in there. Try not to kill any of them.” Feeling the weight of his gaze waiting on orders, the marshal swept her even blue gaze to her deputy. “You take the back.”

  Just like that Sweet was gone, and by the time the marshal blinked, her deputy was clear across the yard taking position by the barn in the rear of the house, socking his carbine to his shoulder. Gave a hand gesture. Ready.

  Taking a deep breath, Bess drew air in her lungs, and yelled in her loudest voice in the direction of the house, “Mose Farmer! This is the U.S. Marshal. Give up! We have you completely surrounded! Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands up!”

  Inside the study, Mose Farmer was so startled by Bess’s loud voice that without thinking he instinctively released Rachel and threw himself against the wall beside the window, out of the marshal’s line of fire—letting her go freed his hands so he could hold his Colt Dragoon in a two-hand grip; lucky for Rachel, because one second before, Mose had counted nine.

  “That you, Bess?!” Mose shouted around the curtain.

  “It’s me, Mose! And Deputy Sweet! Anybody killed?”

  “Not yet they ain’t!”

  “Keep it that way. Those women hurt?”

  “Nobody’s hurt, Marshal. But all that can change! In the house with me I got my wife Millie, Vera Laidlaw, and Beulah Best, and Puzzleface’s maid, too, name of Rachel. Ain’t harmed a hair on their pretty heads and ain’t gonna s’long as the marshals give my wife and me safe passage! What do y’say, Marshal?”

  “Let Vera and Beulah go, Mose!”

  “I can’t, Marshal!”

  “Yes you can! Release the wives!”

  “I’m holding Zachary and Levi’s wives for ’em! Their husbands is coming to get ’em! My friends’ll be here any minute and the three of us are taking our wives home!” Just saying it filled Mose with a rush of hope and some of his earlier bravado returned. “Zachary and Levi are on the way, Marshal!”

  “They ain’t coming!” Marshal Bess’s voice yelled back. “Zachary Laidlaw and Levi Best are behind bars! Arrested them right before they rode out here!”

  “Th-they said they was coming . . .”

  “Those friends of yours sitting in jail right now are in a heap of trouble, Mose, but that ain’t nothing compared to the trouble you’re in! Kidnapping! Breaking and entering! Assault! Throw out your guns and come out peaceful, so nobody gets hurt!”

  The fugitive’s brain was swimming, he clawed his greasy hair, all confused, banged his own skull hard against the wall to clear his head, thinking, thinking, remembering why he came out to Puzzleface Ranch in the first place. “Millie! I’m taking my wife! That’s all I want! If I let my hostages go, will you marshals give me the road, my wife and me?”

  “I can’t do that, Mose. You know I can’t.”

  “OK. OK. How about a two-day head start?” Mose was pulling his hair out, his brains felt like scrambled eggs. “What do you think, Marshal?”

  There was a long pause.

  At last: “Let me get this straight, Mose. You’re offering to release all of your hostages except your wife. In exchange, you want my deputy and me to stand aside and let you ride out of here with Millie and give you forty-eight hours before we come after you?” Marshal Bess’s voice sounded different, she was talking not yelling, like she was getting closer.

  “Yeah, that works!”

  “But if I’m going to talk terms with you, Mose, you gotta throw me a bone!”

  “What kinda bone?”

  “Rachel! Let her go! Send her out!”

  Rachel.

  Mose had forgotten all about her! When the fugitive swung his frantic gaze across the room to where he had last seen her, Rachel was nowhere in sight.

  Taking off like a shot, the frantic man scrambled out of the room, down the first hall, down the second hall, and kicked the locked door off its hinges.

  Outside in the darkness, Marshal Sugarland heard the chorus of female screams ring out inside the house and tensed up, trading glances with Deputy Sweet. “What the hell’s going on?” Nate shouted.

  “I don’t know!” she yelled back, edging closer to the door. At least there hadn’t been any gunfire so far. Not yet.

  “I’ll kill ’em, Marshal, you hear me, I’ll kill ’em!” Mose shouted out at Bess from the living room, grabbing Millie by the hair and shoving the cap-and-ball Colt against her skull. “And I’ll start with my wife!”

  Puzzleface stepped into the doorway.

  “It’s me you want.” Rachel wore her mustache, goatee, and sideburns, unrecognizable as a woman in the colorful gambler’s disguise she’d hastily donned.

  “Wha—?” Mose swung his head in the direction of the voice and when he found himself staring into the face he thought was the man who was screwing his wife, he just completely unraveled. “You horny varmint, I’ll kill you!” Mose wailed. Pushing Millie to the floor freed up his gun arm as he swung the barrel of the revolver at the hated figure in the doorway and fired—KA-BOOM! The explosion and smoke and flame filled the small room, but Puzzleface had run off like a jackrabbit before Mose pulled the trigger, and when the smoke cleared the gambler was halfway up the hall.

  Vera, Beulah, and Millie were screaming their heads off, hugging each other in terror.

  “Come back, you no-good wife-screwing little turd!” Mose yelled, taking off up the hall as he fumbled with his heavy revolver, taking aim on the fly at the quicksilver gambler who ducked around the corner.

  Outside in the front of the house, Marshal Bess jumped when she heard the shot, trading taut glances with Deputy Sweet in back of the house. Inside was filled with screaming. “No!” she yelled, sprinting, with her rifle at the ready, to the front wall of the house. She flattened herself against it, by the door, yelling inside.

  “Mose! Stop shooting! Mose, goddammit!” The shots were the same gun, coming from all around the house.

  At least while he is chasing me he can’t shoot them, Rachel thought, trying to outrun the man with the gun. The first thing she had anticipated was Mose would take a wild shot the instant he saw her in Puzzleface guise, so she started running the second she saw the gun come up. Mose Farmer being drunk and his reflexes slow factored into her calculations. The second thing Rachel had anticipated was after Mose missed, if he missed, he’d chase after her with the gun and forget all about Millie, Vera, and Beulah. Hearing the man’s pounding footfalls at her heels, she knew Mose was out of the room with the three women—and this was Millie, Vera, and Beulah’s chance!

  “Run! Run!” Ra
chel screamed at the top of her lungs back into the house as she bounded up the staircase.

  KA-BOOM! A bullet whistled past her ear and punched a fist-sized hole in the banister as she fled down the hallway of the second floor with Mose right behind her.

  “Hurry! Run!” she screamed again.

  Down in the sitting room, the three women stopped screaming long enough to catch a breath, and this time they heard Rachel screaming for them to run and they didn’t need to be asked twice. Vera had a dazed expression hearing Mose’s footsteps down the hall, and when she looked at Beulah, who was so shaken up from screaming her lungs out, it took them both a moment to realize Mose was upstairs and had taken his loaded revolver with him, putting them out of danger. But only when they looked at Millie screaming in their faces “We gotta get out now!” did they somehow get it through their skulls it was time to flee.

  Those three wives started running for whatever door was nearest, so rattled the third muffled gunshot upstairs got them screaming all over again, so they ran right past the front door and because the three hysterical ladies kept bumping into one another in their disorganized flight, they made a wrong turn into the guest bathroom, and had to turn back.

  Somehow they finally reached the back door.

  And made it outside to safety.

  Positioned behind the house, his long rifle lined up on the back door in case Mose made a run for it, Deputy Sweet wasn’t expecting three women to come bursting out the door in a caterwauling knot of arms and legs and heads and hair instead. Nate was off like a shot, throwing his arms protectively around the women, using his body as a shield as he swiftly force-marched the wives to the safety of the empty barn behind the house. When Sweet had the rescued hostages safely stowed behind the hay bales, he ran to the door and called across the yard to Bess, positioned at the front of the house. “The women are safe, Marshal! Three in the barn!”

  “Two still inside! The doctor and the housekeeper!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hell if I know! Next gunshot, we’re going in!” He nodded acknowledgment of her curt hand gesture: She’ll take the front, he’ll take the back.

  Inside on the second floor, Rachel was playing a game of hide-and-seek with Mose Farmer, where if he found her he’d kill her. She could hear him a few rooms away, kicking open doors, hunting for who he thought was Puzzleface. Taking refuge in the laundry room for the moment, she stole a glance out the window and felt a wave of relief seeing Nate getting Millie, Vera, and Beulah into the barn where they’d be safe.

  Herself, she wasn’t so sure about.

  Mose had the gun but she knew the house, her one advantage. She heard another loud crash a few doors away as the drunken husband kicked in what sounded like her closet. “I’m gonna find you and blow your pecker off for screwing my wife!” The violent noises of Mose ransacking the house looking for Puzzleface accompanied a verbal string of death threats that paralyzed Rachel with fear.

  Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the window, Rachel saw the mustached and goateed male visage and breathed it in, drawing strength from the male alter ego, Puzzleface, who could do everything she wanted to and couldn’t.

  Like run!

  Bolting out of the room, Rachel ran straight for the staircase as a shot rang out right behind her, creasing her ear, the terror of being nicked by an actual bullet turning her legs to rubber, and she tumbled down the steps and landed in a heap at the base of the staircase, flat on her back.

  The sound of a pistol cocking.

  Throwing a desperate glance up at the top of the steps, Rachel saw Mose’s approaching shadow on the ceiling, and swinging her gaze to the nearest door, reached out and pulled it open, crawling through the doorway even though she knew where it led.

  The basement.

  And there was no way out.

  Mose Farmer saw Puzzleface wiggle through the door as he came down the stairs cocking his pistol. He reached the door in a single stride and heaved it open to face a short descending row of wooden steps leading to the cellar and knew he had Puzzleface right where he wanted him. “Say goodbye to your pecker, you peckerwood,” he slurred. Keeping his Colt Dragoon leveled at his waist, Mose took his time getting down there because he was drunk and had to duck his head under the low ceiling.

  It surprised him to discover several mattresses laid on the basement floor that looked like they’d been slept in recently. There were pillows and blankets in disarray. It was an odd sight. In his drunken stupor, Mose assumed the worst. “Oh, you filthy animal, my wife wasn’t enough for you, you need to keep extra women in your basement?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  Turning to the sound of the voice, Mose Farmer saw the huddled figure against the wall and figured he had Puzzleface cornered. He raised his pistol. “I got you now, you horny varmint. Say goodbye to your pecker because I’m gonna shoot it off.”

  The figure turned their face to look at him.

  It was Rachel.

  Mose held his fire, confused, because it was just the two of them in the basement, wasn’t it, and he saw Puzzleface come down here, so . . . ?

  But he never completed his train of thought because hearing somebody behind him in the cellar, Mose Farmer whirled around right into the stock of Marshal Bess Sugarland’s rifle as she hit him in the head and knocked him cold.

  * * *

  A few hours later in the U.S. Marshal’s office in Jackson, the three wives were reunited with their husbands, on the other side of the bars. The men sat in jail as Bess took their wives’ statements and Nate wrote down what they said in his report. Rachel, the housekeeper, had asked to give her statement first, and once it had been taken by the lawman she had left. The women were conflicted and uncomfortable having to go on the record about their domestic abuse, but Rachel encouraged them to speak freely, and the hard looks and big guns on the hips of the lawmen kept the men they were married to from acting up.

  Rachel left the marshal’s office saying she was going back home. Bess told her to ask Puzzleface to come in tomorrow so she could ask him a few questions, and the housekeeper promised she would.

  Fifteen minutes later, while getting Millie Farmer’s statement, Marshal Sugarland turned over the questioning to her deputy while she got up to stretch her legs.

  Walking to the open doorway, she got a breath of fresh air, when something caught her attention. Halfway up the block outside the doctor’s office, Dr. Jane Stonehill was deep in quiet conversation with a small man with a goatee, dressed like a riverboat gambler. Their heads were bowed together in a conspiratorial manner. Bess’s brow furrowed and she called to Nate. “Sweet?”

  “Marshal?” He looked up.

  Standing by the doorway, peering out, Bess wagged her finger for him to come over. Excusing himself, Deputy Sweet walked over to the marshal, whose gaze had not left the two people in conversation outside the doctor’s office, and she pointed out the one who looked like a gambler. “That this Puzzleface character I keep hearing about?”

  “That’s him, Marshal.”

  “Wonder what he’s talking to Doctor Stonehill about.” When Bess shifted her gaze to Nate’s face beside her she could swear she saw his eyes cloud as he shrugged, and got the same feeling she’d been having: her deputy knew something about this Puzzleface business that he wasn’t telling her. “That’s all. Go on back and take them reports, then escort those ladies home if they want to go, or to the hotel if they don’t. Their husbands stay in jail tonight until the arraignment tomorrow.”

  “Sure thing, Marshal.” Sweet nodded obediently.

  “And deputy.” He looked at her. “I smelled alcohol on your breath at the bar earlier.”

  Here it comes, the deputy thought. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Reckon if you hadn’t stopped in the saloon for a drink you wouldn’t have seen those men to stop them and we could’ve had a genuine massacre on our hands at that house tonight. So that drink’s on me.”

  “Yes, ma
’am.” He smiled. She smiled back. Deputy Sweet returned to his desk. “Now where were we, Mrs. Farmer?”

  When he looked up, Marshal Sugarland had left.

  * * *

  The moon was bright tonight in the big Wyoming sky, casting long shadows black as ink, but otherwise visibility was good. Bess stepped off the office porch and went the long way around the building to the stable so Dr. Jane and Puzzleface didn’t see her. Then she quietly saddled her mare, careful to avoid a squeak of leather or clink of bridle and got on her horse slowly without a sound of stirrup or spur. Her marshal father had years ago taught her how to do that. Mounted, she trotted quietly to the edge of the corral that offered her a clean view of the street, stopping the mare in the shadows, out of the sight of the two people she was observing. For several minutes, Dr. Jane and Puzzleface’s conversation continued, their figures close and conspiratorial, and the lady lawman watched them the entire time without being seen.

  Presently, the two people shook hands and Puzzleface walked to his horse tethered to the post outside the doctor’s office, as Doctor Stonehill went back inside. Now the gambler’s horse caught her attention when he mounted it and she recognized the burgundy gelding.

  It was Rachel’s horse she had ridden from the ranch to come to Jackson and give her statement earlier.

  What was going on here?

  If Puzzleface had Rachel’s horse, how had the housekeeper ridden back to the house as Bess presumed she had? Perhaps she took one of the wives’ horses.

  Untying the gelding, Puzzleface got situated in the saddle and rode off at a brisk canter on the road heading west of town toward the gambler’s ranch.

  Giving him just enough of a lead so he wouldn’t notice he was being tailed, Marshal Sugarland rode her mare out of the corral and onto the street and followed at a discreet distance.

  The ride back to Puzzleface Ranch took two hours and Bess kept a loose pace several hundred yards to the rear of the other horse and rider ahead of her. The trail wound around tall hills and down into wide valleys and there wasn’t another human being in sight. It was a dark night, and the marshal lost sight of Puzzleface several times before catching up again, but she felt certain he was headed home, and didn’t fret.